skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This kind of makes me want to fight fire with fire and return any such question with an exhaustive (and exhausting) list of probes for edge conditions: "How big is the database? What OS are you running? Do you have shell access? How is the database encoded? Are you backing up to the local filesystem or to another database? If another database, is it local or remote? Do you have physical access to the machine? If not, is it a dedicated server or VPS? How close to Daylight Savings Time are you? What is the current phase of the moon? Is the machine currently on fire? Are you grass or rock type pokemon?"
"Adwords is not dying yet and is actually still trending upwards, but we think Google thinks it might some time in the future."
I found the article disparaged young CEO's by calling them "ridiculously young". BTW I'm 40.
Business critique:

My advice would be to concentrate on the SME market, to sell into the enterprise market requires sales people and a much higher price.

You could target your enterprise product to freelance recruiters though.

Also if you're going for small companies it might also be worth offering pricing on a per-job rather than time basis.

Also my gut feeling is that the pricing is wrong, talk to your customers and find out how much they save by using your product and use that as the basis of your pricing.

Website critique:

The features list looks a bit of a mess, rather than talking about features (of your product) talk about the benefits (to your users). Accepting CVs in JPG format might be a feature for you product, it's not a benefit to your end user though.

The features list should describe how you fix the pain-points the user is currently experiencing.
Making My Artists [iPhone App] free yesterday is helping sales today
It's overrepresented in the startup/emerging company job market.
> Maybe I'm focusing on the literal words in your post too much and you're meaning it in a broader sense, more as in how much exposure to books the children get and how much they see their parents read. I guess from that point of view I can understand and agree.

Yes, that's right.

"Reading" to our infant consisted of her lolling in our laps and attempting to lick the board-book pages, while we maybe got to read a page or two. Later on, she'd bat at the pages, trying to imitate our page-turning. The only difference between a book and a chew-toy was that we'd compliment her on reading and point out when we were reading too.

If you don't think you'd want to make a big deal about reading to your child, then don't fake it. It sounds like she won't lack for opportunity or encouragement in your household.

P.S. The best parenting advice I ever got was to ignore parenting advice I don't agree with, but to respond to all parenting advice with "Thanks, we'll try that". People want to help, it's just that they're often wrong (for you and your child).

UPDATE> On a tangent: it's amazing how significant what we choose to remark on is for little kids. We would point out colours of shapes, and praise our daughter when she got the colour right. Now colours are extremely significant. I.e. every object must be described as (colour, name). I wonder what the result would have been if we'd started with some other property.

She also has to have us roll up her pants when wearing boots, because once we mentioned that she should roll up her pants so she wouldn't trip. Now it's dogma -- roll up pants or else meltdown. It's neat to see her little world-model forming: you don't trip because of a physical obstruction to your toe. No, you trip because your pants aren't rolled up.
Rethinking Galactic Architecture: Dark Matter Optional
Sorry, this is what too little sleep does to a person.
Better to come to NYC and work on one of the many exciting tech startups desperately looking for tech talent, but I may be biased :).

Seriously though, ping me and I'll help make sure you find a great job in NYC.
I mean, arc hasn't really 'come out,' has it? It's still being worked upon... the front page of that site specifically says the only reason there have been releases is to improve the language.
This is a really clever move from Google and I think many people will read this and stop giving there data to Facebook.
I have a dump feeling about giving all of my data to Facebook cause they have sure enough.
Otherwise: it's free and they are making money with your data right?
Apart from being a happy Android user with a Galaxy S based phone, I don't follow the mobile OS market very closely. I'm aware of the competition between Apple iOS and Android. I know RIM is being Blackberry phones. But when reading this article I realized I had no idea what "Symbian" was.

Apparently Symbian is the OS on Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones.
This always seemed like a sensible approach - so I tried it. I'll let you know if it works...

http://www.appidio.com/apps/scrybe/

(To save you the click through, it's a project of mine that combines Google Scribe with an Android keyboard. It's definitely alpha quality, but the concept is there.)
J (http://www.jsoftware.com/) is a modern and free (though not open source) APL dialect. It has some of the best documentation I've seen for any language, ever.

Q (http://kx.com/ , previously known as K) is also pretty amazing, but unfortunately isn't free.
But most of this design was done 20 years ago and so used assumptions about CPU performance are mostly wrong for both modern CPUs and modern operating systems. For example overhead of calling virtual and non-virtual method across library boundary on ELF based system on reasonably modern CPU is essentially same.
As luck would have it, I picked today to set up a Facebook profile for me girlfriend. I'm now really angry with Google.

It used to be a 30 second task to sift through your address book and check off people to send friend requests to. Now, thanks to Google behaving like children, I need to figure out how to export her contacts as a text file so that I can upload it to Facebook.

Google, please stop.

You are pissing off your customers.

Edit: subsititure Users for Customers in the previous sentence if it helps you to parse it. The end result is still the same: The people who use Google's service are being punished by Google for the actions of a 3rd party.
Time online limited to a function of how much you've purchased. $5 at a coffee shop may buy you 30min wireless -- spend more, get your time allotment bumped up. Spend less, get booted off the wifi.
Maybe google is trying to get facebook to open up now, so it'll be in time for everyone to be able to use it to migrate to Google Me.
You know, you're right. Probably a sign of spending more time on HN and peeking around my local community of devs that reflection of a larger trend.

A quick look around found that Java, C++, C#, javascript, and perl (?) are big in job listing at Dice.com right now. http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/programming-language-jo...

And the always friendly tiobe index at http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... is useful when thinking about current programming language trends.
YMMV, of course. Local prints shops vary. Here in Montreal, they are a dime a dozen, and having a wife in the industry, she has connections and knows what to look for.

However, I still think it's worth the time and effort finding a good local print shop and developing a good relationship with them.
There is another similar project under development using the Go language, but with a similar goal of creating a framework in which you can create applications that are compiled directly into a light-weight OS that can run directly on a Hypervisor. The escapes name me now.

This is a very interesting concept that could change the landscape for dev and deployment of applications.
You can export your friends' email addresses from Facebook to sites that they have a deal with - e.g. Yahoo Mail.

You can then export from there as CSV etc., and pull them into other services. I set up a one-time Ymail account just to try this out, and it worked just fine.

So any claims by Facebook that they can't do this due to users' privacy etc are completely bogus. It's just that Google won't give them money to do it.
And it's probably not the first or last word. And if it precedes a ',' then it's probably more likely to be it. There are many ways to increase the hit-rate.
And Google won't be keeping a copy of anything you export or "move" out, right?

I'm not terribly interested in a chance to "get out" my data from services that will keep my data anyway.

They also did give Facebook my GMail contacts, which I thought was scuzzy, but hey that's alright as long as I can export stuff out from various Google services!
It's amusing that Eric Schmidt is the challenger on http://www.longbets.org/4 in light of Google's autonomous cars.
Yes, but on this users' (or at least my) interests and Google's coincide.
No, because the deal was that open source VMs get a free license but commercial VMs have to pay. Basically if you can afford to pay you have to pay.
First five pages, http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&biw=1920&bih=938&...

(google must be the referral for the links to work)
Customers? How much money have you paid Google for services this year?
The Pipeline #30: Interview with Notch, creator of Minecraft
Can't you just click "proceed" when you get to this page?
Obviously I must have phrased my position wrong, based on the reaction.

Yes, they are taking that stance, since they are imposing conditions on exporting data from gmail. If I owned and could do anything I wanted with my data on gmail, then Google could not impose restrictions. They just did (in their API restrictions). That's what I'm very concerned about.
I'm totally for getting rid of them. I just don't think they need to go through all this effort for the sake of people who don't care about their own, or anyone elses privacy. Just Ebay the machines.
Maybe the solution is to obscure the text somehow, so that a spammer can't read the text to grab a token . . . .
I had a similar situation. Got a break from programming for several years and now I like programming even more :)

During my break i tried to manage other programmers to program my ideas, but it didn't work very well (only one project, that paid my expenses, was launched).
Wasn't one of the major reasons for the giant Rails 3 switchover to allow datamapper or other ORM's to be used in place of activerecord?
As opposed to Facebook simply not allowing you to export your contacts?

What if you would have picked today (or rather any other day) to set up a new gmail account for your girlfriend and needed her facebook contacts?
> Syntax doesn't really matter in terms of performance - what matters is compiler optimizations.

Yes and no. Slight semantic differences can close off optimizations. There was a great discussion on LtU that pulled in a lot of JIT developers. Mike Pall (LuaJIT) tossed out some optimizations the Tracemonkey developers could exploit, but Brendan Eich pointed out that js can't use them:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3851#comment-57767
Actually, it is like they stop you from exporting. Here's the message I get when I try to import my contacts into Faceboook:

Google did not return any of your contacts. You can still find your friends on Facebook by uploading a file of your Gmail contacts below.

... followed by instructions on how to download my gmail contacts to a file and re-upload them.

So it seems that Google's implementation of their "whining at you about their problems while you're just trying to get on with your life" page is broken.

The end result is that you cannot export your contacts from Gmail at the present.
Payment Card Industry Pursues Profits Over Security
With credit and debit card fraud as prevalent as it is, why would card brands push a product that is responsible for ten times more fraud than another? The answer is quite simple: The riskier the transaction, the higher the fees charged to the merchant - and ultimately to the consumer...
The Tera-Scale Effect
I can't spot the contradiction. Pretty sure the northern hemisphere is implied.
In a way, I think it's better for open source projects that need money to go the AGPL route. The way I see it with pledging is that you'd be getting companies that are already donating/contributing back to open source projects. Whether this will be more or less than what they're already contributing remains to be seen.
Sure. I know my calculation was very rough, but my point is, if I'm not at least 2 orders of magnitude out, then the captcha system is very very bad.
I had similar feelings a couple of years ago. I was a .net programmer for 10 years and seriously considered going to dental school.

Instead I bought a MacBook last thanksgiving and built an iPhone app that Apple featured and subsequently sold very well. The Mac world was a completely new area as well as mobile (was doing enterprise software). It has made programming fun because I also run a small business with it. In addition, running a small business I'm using open source software to build my new website and learning python on django has been a pleasure.

At least for me programming is fun again, but also because it's helping towards my goal starting a company.
You don't get that page. You just get their standard oauth page, followed by an empty list when you get back to Facebook.
Is Google really behaving like a child, or warning its users against childish actions? Facebook is not a dreamworld, so I'm quite happy when some people are reminded that they're submitting their friends addresses to a service that will never forget about them.
NYC has backyards, if you consider that NYC consists of 5 boroughs. Most of the backyards (and houses) just are not in Manhattan.
You wouldn't because it's not a brand. Nokia prefer to promote to consumers their 'series' of devices.

Symbian is the OS on the Nokia N, E, C (and iirc X) series of phones, though the traditional N series of devices from Nokia is typically considered the flagship product line and rumor has it that Nokia's Meego OS will take over there.

Nokia's legacy Series 40 OS accounts for the other product lines and the majority of their 400+ million phone shipments.

Sony Ericcson have a very limited line of Symbian devices, mostly on their legacy OS (EMP) but also Windows mobile and laterly Android.
It is not too difficult to generate small binaries from C++ code; modern C++ toolchains have link-time optimization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-time_optimization) and can optimize for size (-Os). Code size is rarely an issue in the C++ projects I work on (numerical and discrete event simulations).
He's UK-based according to his personal pages.
have u considered living abroad? I spent 3 years in silicon valley and got burnt out. So i just moved to vietnam, opened a bookstore and outsourced most of the work. Then I just went out a lot and traveled a lot since Vietnam is close to everything (thailand,singapore,indo, hongkong,etc). Best years of my life by far:)
Your point is that this captcha system may prevent smart-alec pedants from commenting? Man, that's a feature not a bug.
One-page version:
http://www.businessinsider.com/mac-app-store-2010-11?slop=1#...
Good attempt. What I would add, if you are really into landing a job, is add a byline that says "I'm a recent graduate" (rather than say I'm jobless), and make sure the product name you are targeting is in the title. This way, you maximize your chance that someone who works on that products eventually finds your page, and your bio will automatically make them think: "hum, why doesn't he work for us?"
now this is an interesting site!
This seems like a voluntary version of the "software tax" RMS wrote about way back in the day in the GNU manifesto (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html, see “Programmers need to make a living somehow.”)

I guess it never caught on then, but perhaps now that most software companies benefit in some way from FOSS, it makes more sense. At any rate, you deserve much props for making this pledge.
Le sigh.

I think Google has lost sight of something very simple in this fracas:

With Google Contacts, the user directly manages his contacts' email addresses.

With Facebook, the user delegates management of email address to his contacts.

These are not the same thing. The Google contacts team seems to think that Facebook is an address book just like them. They are not. And to me, that failure to understand the differences is the root source of all this tomfoolery.

--

Edit after some very welcome discussion downstream:

On GMail, my contacts' email addresses are MY data.

On Facebook, my contacts' email addresses are NOT my data. The FACT that I am connected to my contacts is my data, but any information about those contacts does not belong to me.

This is why Facebook is not an address book, and pretending it as an address book where "your data gets stuck" is bound to lead to frustration for everyone.
No, quite the opposite. Apps are not going away for some time. Apps have:
- carrier / store billing - devs make and collect $$ easier
- more functionality, better experience with apps
- easier for most users, the icon is right there on the desktop
- there is a significant investment by all parties in the app ecosystem that is not going away or showing signs of abating.

I sure don't prefer the mobile web. Apps are way easier for a user.

What percentage do you guys use apps vs mobile web. I would say apps 85% mob web 15% for me.
Protip: Use Safari Reader to Send Multi-Page Articles to Instapaper
I also noticed that certain questions aren't necessarily 'easy'.

> The 1st number from 25, eight, 6, six and 27 is?

So is the answer 25 or 6?

I've come to the realization that CAPTCHAs aren't the solution, or at least can't be a standalone solution. Make the CAPTCHA easy enough for a human to not be blocked (pick the cat from these 3 photos) and the bot still wins 33% of the time. Make it hard enough that the user has to invest energy to 'solve' the problem in front of them and you alienate users by treating them like criminals.
I'm really into the whole "code as craft" idea, though a lot of my thoughts on the subject aren't fully baked.

It seems to me that we're at a place with software where we were with, say, civil engineering in roughly 2000 BC or something. This date is horribly wrong, but what I mean is that we're building basic structures, and we're okay at it, but when we try to do anything larger, we're failing.

At some point, we'll be able to make larger buildings, bridges, and roads... but we're not there yet. It seems like the best path forward is to follow is to do exactly what early engineers did: an apprenticeship model. Yes, software is based in math, but so are bridges. We've got a better grip on the math now, and it does help us build modern bridges, but at first, we had to schlep along.

I'm starting to ramble slightly, so I'll cut this off. And as I said, this is only a half-baked thought... but I think this 'apprentice -> journeyman -> master' path is an intriguing way to move forward with software.
A few grand, give or take. Why does that change anything?

Edit: Google charges for things like AdWords, of which I am a heavy user. So yes, people do in fact pay them money for things.
http://www.dropjobs.com/frontpage should be at http://www.dropjobs.com . This is probably a technical limitation, but you're hurting your SEO something fierce.

Title tag of front page should probably be "DropJobs | Keywords Go Here" rather than "DropJobs | Tagline"

Search for the word "features". Features do not sell software. Benefits sell software. You mention benefits, but only briefly, and they're given short shrift.

Similar to Google Analytics, simply copy and paste the DropJobs widget code into your company's existing website and we do the rest.

People with hiring authority typically don't use Google Analytics, and "easy installation" is not what pushes the PHB's buttons about this feature: it is that it looks like their software, on their website, with their branding. Many of them also think this actually means the data is on their Googles instead of on your Googles, and what they don't know won't hurt them.

Screenshots of software -- particularly software which is not visually inspiring -- do not push the reward receptors in the brains of people who do not make software for a living. Show a representation of the hiring manager achieving success instead. Your software will make him the hero, get him the promotion, get her home to her kids faster, clean up this effing mess in the inbox, whatever the value proposition is.
Farewell to Disks
US special forces using Android apps for communication during missions
I don't think this is the best advice for everyone:

"How would I become a VC? By being one: pull some of my own money, invest it in startups, and build my track record. That’s how. I can’t imagine any other way."

I can definitely imagine another way - the way I suppose the people that went to the event being discussed ("how to become a VC.") might have in mind: learn the ropes from someone experienced, learn what's needed (lots of legal, economical and technical stuff I didn't even know existed before reading stuff like the A VC blog http://www.avc.com/ ), learn from their mistakes and successes (and no, I don't think the Internet is a good enough substitute for the actual experience).
David Peterson nailed it in the comments in 2003:

NetFlix claims to have more than 13,500 titles and more
than one million members. You order the movie on the
Internet, you just can't watch it until all of the bits
of the movie arrive. They just happen to be delivered
to your mailbox and you have to put the bits into your
computer or dvd player.

-- Posted by David B. Peterson on May 16, 02003 at 12:32AM PDT
Technically do-able, but:

It could have easily been derailed the studios wanting to try and run the business themselves, ISPs who are also cable companies throttling it, national broadcasters lobbying to block it legally.

It also said profitable - I thought even Amazon wasn't profitable yet?
The idea of allowing HR to post job vacancies without having to involve IT for every update is good.

However, this isn't a problem the IT department are likely to search for, and this isn't the type of thing TechCrunch is going to be buzzing about.

I'm guessing your business model is predicated on a self service solution where people click on your Google ads and sign up. I don't think this will work well for you.

I'd increase your pricing to $xxx/mo upwards, and make cold calls all day to HR departments pitching them a cheap and easy solution that will help them post ads without involving IT to constantly push new HTML to their website for each job.

You won't be selling the HR department in isolation. On your sales call, you need to convince them it's a good idea and to arrange a follow-up call to get the person that manages their website into that call. Only if both HR and IT are convinced will you achieve a sale.

If this model works, hire more sales staff to pump up sales volume.
Dear Apache Fundation - why not move to mono (www.go-mono.org) ?
Android Marketplace Inconsistencies
well, they could add categorization/labels for one.

Or more concretly: the ability to receive messages from people you don't already have as contacts.
I'm pretty sure that post is describing the genereal gate area. I meant the space where the screening is actually done.
The benefit to a local print shop isn't in the initial price of the cards. It's in the follow through and printing needs after business cards. Most print shops don't make money off business cards. The cards barely pay for the cost of the material and time involved. It's a cut throat business.

However, you get your business cards, and when you have additional printing needs, returning to them gets you better results (especially if you paid on time). The printers I know (several of them, in fact) all cherish customers who pay on time and will bend over backwards for them.

It also becomes easier going back to them. They have material already, and can usually get what you need faster.