skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I second to you. In Vancouver, I've seen many companies who have probably live as long as 3-5 years before they crashed and closed down permanently.

Most of the issues are related to their inability to innovate and their use of old technology (and methodology).

I don't mean to be rude but sometime I viewed Canadian technology companies as the western-but-India-in-the-past kind of company.

Many companies in Vancouver is looking for 7-10 years experienced (enterprise) Java developers. Gone is the need of fresh-grad/junior developers position.

Guess what the fresh-grads do?

1) Go back to Asia (most immigrants came from Asia)

2) Go south of the border to Google, Microsoft, or Amazon.

The cycle breaks down there. Tough really.

I've been here for almost 10 years since college and I'm starting to plan my move to south of the border or to Asia.
How about a worldvirtualhackathon so I can participate from Toronto!

Also, a list of hackathons that you could probably add to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackathon
What about licensing? do u need to get a new licence for each vm?
we're trying really hard here to get people to come out and build who haven't attended any of the more "social" startup events in DC and Baltimore. All are welcome!
The sheer eccentricity of the British never ceases to amaze me…
One thing I didn't see covered in the "User Initiated Method" section is detecting mobile browsers, and prompting the user to choose between the full site and the mobile site. I like this method, since most of the time, the detection will probably work, and thus users will be made aware that there is a mobile version, whereas they might miss a small link in the header or footer (even moreso on a small mobile screen). Additionally, it still allows choosing for those mobile users who wish to view the full site (or desktop users who wish to view the mobile site), and you can still have the "view mobile site" link on the full site for the users who were somehow missed by the browser detection method. IMO, this is the best combination of automagically changing things and allowing the user to choose. ESPN.com is a good example of using this method.
GitHub moves to SSL, but remains Firesheepable
So funny enough, at my last two interviews, both of my interviewers were ex-Boy Scouts. It's a job I can talk a lot about and since I did it for four years, really affected the kind of worker I am.
I've always really enjoyed "The Soul of a New Machine" Amazon, non-affiliate: http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/03164...

It's the story of a team of engineers building a new minicomputer, back in the late 70s. I couldn't put it down. He manages to make the politics interesting and the technical details simple.
Very packageable, actually. Here it is on Github: https://github.com/irskep/steveasleep

It reads the sidebar from content/site.yaml. Sidebar items can point either to external links or refer to Markdown files also in content/ which are converted to HTML at request time. The only other remaining customization is to change the theme in content/templates/.

I like this instead of the feed-me-URLs setup because you can edit the Markdown and just hit Deploy in App Engine Launcher. Also, if I ever decide to move to App Engine, I have almost no barrier because I use the data store only for caching Posterous and Github information.
Why Rails Controllers Need a Double Render
I think it's safe to say that Greenspun isn't working as a junior pilot for the money since not too many people making $18k/year have their own plane, helicopter and Acura NSX.
This does look pretty interesting. I'd be interested in seeing someone do a writeup of various parser toolkits for .NET. I feel like I'm out of date with what people are doing given I hadn't heard of this one before.
You could argue that ubiquitous information makes real life more bland, not just stories
Are you serious?

> The internet is older than the Apple II.

Depends on what you mean by "the internet". The core protocols are older than the Apple II, but e.g. the linkup between ARPANET and NSFNet wasn't until the 1980s.

> CDs are notoriously unreliable data storage mechanism which are already obsolete

CDs were revolutionary because they were the first widely used digital music format. And they may be "notoriously unreliable", but my CDs are holding up better in terms of sound quality than a similarly-aged collection of LPs would without heroic measures. Sure, they're certainly obsolescent now, if not actually obsolete, but so is the Apple II.

> laser printers haven't done much other than enable people to waste more paper

Laser printers made it possible for anyone to produce near-publishable-quality documents. This is a Big Deal, even if for whatever reason you don't like it.

> digital cameras are just dense CCDs, nothing great or new about that.

And the Apple II was just a slightly better personal computer. Digital cameras have made traditional film cameras obsolete. They have completely changed the way in which people take pictures by drastically shortening the feedback loop from initial capture to inspection, and by making it essentially free to take large numbers of pictures. They have greatly increased the role of photography in most people's lives. (Still more as they have become commonly integrated into mobile phones.)

Now, if you wish to define "revolutionary" very strictly, then of course you can say that none of these things is really revolutionary -- but then the Apple II will come out also not being revolutionary. Kasparov is wrong either way.
Windows Phone 7 Seeing Supply Shortages Internationally
I'm not sure this is entirely fair. If they have a half-understanding of what is happening in the background of dreamweaver but are using it as a short-cut and a tool to learn how websites work, then it's a little different from granny pressing the bold button in an email.
I don't think most researchers ever expect anybody to read their code. Woe to the graduate student who years later actually needs to use the code.
Well, there are two things.

One is that my first look at the (new) HTML of the page I needed to scrape came only a couple hours before polls closed, thus adding a bit of urgency.

The other is that, stylistically, I'm a fan of anaphora and similar tricks.
+1 Dune is very intellectually stimulating.
How NOT to build a mobile website:

When I click a direct link to an article on my phone, just redirect me (without prompting) to your mobile home page because you are too lazy to remember the article I wanted to read.

Bonus points if your mobile site is actually hosted on another domain (and, presumably handled by a 3rd party).

I guess you just don't want my mobile traffic then?
MC Hammer Disses Jay-Z, Boosts NYC Startup GroupMe In New Video
Works fine on the same version on Mac. Of course, ctrl-n normally goes down a line on a Mac.
Ed this was the ugliest post I've seen on HN -- that I was extremely happy to upvote.

Really guys. Enough with the drama. Get a therapist, join a yoga club. Anything but the continuous gossipy spam that keeps flooding the boards. We're out here struggling day-to-day: take your spectacle/drama-of-the-week onto Oprah or Dr. Phil or something. But please not here.

You know, the 1-of drama posts are fine: "My cofounder left me for IBM". I can handle those every now and then. But this shit has gotten into a business where hackers just waste their time speculating on it. It's like soap operas for hackers. What a tremendous waste of time and productivity such postings create.
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I would expand on that and say that it's best to avoid markets where the customer cannot easily tell the difference between expensive work and cheap work in general. If you're the high-end provider in a space where the average customer wouldn't know high-end from low-end from a hole in the ground, you're in for a bumpy ride.

Innovation -- on a scale untouchable by cheaper, younger, hungrier competitors -- is one way to differentiate. Another is to find a niche that cares about (and will pay for) the best of the best. But those niches shrink every year as the Great Unwashed move up the learning curve.
I have a 3 year old and a 7 year old and I've been seriously struggling with this recently. I have put the eldest into a private school, which is great and he has come on tremendously, but I still am left with wondering if the classic way of educating ultimately isn't great for him. I have read about home schooling etc, but I just don't have the time to do this. I myself have never worked for a traditional company since I left university (I'm 40 years old now) and so have worked from home, had offices and generally a much more 'loose' working environment than most people so I'm more flexible. Just wish there was something else I could do - I need to look for something else for them to get life experience. Thanks for your comment - it's just sparked me thinking about it again
This is exciting -- I recently moved to Baltimore from Chicago, where there is a thriving startup and hacker culture (see ORD Camp, for example). Good to see that with this and events like Ignite and Node there is a lot going on for geeks in Charm City.

Are any Baltimore Pythonistas interested in starting a Python users group in the city? I know there is one in the suburbs but I for one would rather have one where I live.
Why SEO/SEM consultants are redundant if you hire good web developers
You need to offer an importer/uploader. If I had to pay more for a service that offered an uploader, I would. You have a few barriers you need to eliminate.

Trust/Reputation -- How can you get them to trust you after they've just be in an "abusive" relationship with drop.io?

Name Rec. -- How do you get them to know you exist. This tied to PR.

Time -- Reduce time needed to join your website vs others.

Money -- Sounds like you're cheaper.

So with an importer you have improved time and trust. You're already cheaper, so you need to do the PR side of it.

The only thing that might kill you is feature set depending on what users need/want. One advantage is that refugees know what features they actually use, not "Oh, I might need that some day so I'll go with this service"
I would find interesting something related. Creating a platform for defining the next stage of an idea and how to code it in software. A collaborative remote project.
added to "browser extensions" section at http://hnresources.com/apps/
"What is the What" is one of the most beautifully written books of the last decade. I wholeheartedly endorse this.
Any citation for that statement about impairment? Does it impair less than texting to talking on the phone? There was a stunt article in the LA Times that is short on detail but indicates that marijuana may impair in different ways from alcohol:

http://articles.latimes.com/print/2010/oct/20/local/la-me-10...
You'll hear, "Because otherwise it's too hard." While there's some truth to that, it's hardly the real reason. The real reason is the reason that there is a lucrative industry for poetry contests: author's bias. Everyone thinks their poetry is good. Ask any startup founder to rate their idea, and they'll rank it in the top 10% of ideas. Which means 90% of us are delusional. (We'd have to be, to do what we do.)

A cofounder doesn't have to have equity or work on the project. They are the person you know who will be brutally honest with you. They have to have the ability to say, "This feature you love is stupid," and have you spend time deeply considering it. They take "you" and your author's bias (as much as possible) out of the startup.

And that's key, because if it works for you is irrelevant. It has to work for your market. No one, ESPECIALLY YOU, can say if that will be so. The best is where you can have the market itself give you feedback, but they are mostly incapable of enunciating what they truly want. So you have to guess. And when you do that, you need someone to help you winnow the chaff of what you like from the grain of what your market wants and needs.
Is it legal? Was my first question. Around where I lived you had to be at least 16 (maybe 14?) and there were restrictions on hours and the like (so you had enough time for school).

But then hiring a kid to mow your lawn was never anything anybody got riled up about, so I don't see why this would, either. Around that age I fixed the computer of some family friends and they gave me one of theirs that they said was broken and wouldn't boot... turned out everything save the motherboard and power supply were good to go... cheapest upgrade I ever got. (From my point of view, anyway).

Back in the 90's in high school stories abounded about this sort of thing - so and so got 100 bucks an hour for a day of work, etc. That's absolutely the exception, though, regardless of how smart you are.
Thunderstorms and lightning don't care who's driving the plane.
Python + Django FTW.
Extraordinarily glad to see this in Baltimore since I was worried I'd never run into this community around town. Sadly, also really busy that weekend.
I'm a Python programmer near Baltimore. Where is the user group in the suburbs? I might join a Baltimore user group especially if it met on weekends. Weeknights are tough for me.
"Write once, run anywhere" is a phrase that historically has referred to multiple platforms by multiple vendors--that is, platforms other than ones maintained by a single company. That is, not just Macs and iOS. Even if they do unify their development interface for all of their platforms, that still will be far from WORA, since I don't see them coming up with an easy way to port their apps to Android or Windows or Ubuntu anytime soon.

While you didn't use that phrase yourself, the implication that it could be applied to Apple's offerings reeks of co-option to me--I think Gruber's right about that, since Apple appears to focus on providing the best experience for each individual device (and devices from other vendors aren't even an issue for them--why should they be?). That said, however, I think you're right in that it would certainly be sensible from their perspective to make it easier for developers of one of their platforms to pick up development for their other ones.
I find that the hckrnews extension: http://hckrnews.com/about.html works well for me for doing this.
You might not expect it, but Baltimore has an awesome tech scene – lots of cool people interested in making stuff happen.
Will people get matched up with groups when they show up? I have two problems: I don't know anyone going, and I don't have any ideas for a project ...
PHP for android
PHP for Android project (PFA) aims to make PHP development in Android not only possible but also feasible providing tools and documentation.
Check out EPD: http://www.enthought.com/products/, particularly the ETS framework. It contains almost all the popular scientific/numeric libraries in python and is free for academic use (and much of it is open-source).

(disclaimer - i work for Enthought).
Paul, there's a TON of awesome stuff happening here. Email me if you want more info (mike@subelsky.com) -- also check out http://startupbaltimore.org
You're getting all worked up over two drama queens. You say "those of you" and "you all" like there's a huge group of Jason and Mikes out there, but I don't see it. It's always these same two guys going at it, so I'm not sure why you care enough to even write this, let alone get as bothered as you are. Jason and Mike are two of the biggest egos out there. Why don't you just ignore them?
Stranger In A Strange Land is probably my favorite book. Vonnegut is my favorite author. By the way, if I had the money I would love to buy one of the screen prints here http://www.vonnegut.com/art.asp
I prefer Ruby generally, but honestly Ruby and Python are sufficiently similar that I'd rather smart programmers put their time to good use doing something other than reimplementing Python's science libs.

I think that making some tools available in a totally different language (maybe something functional) would be much more useful, because it would allow for a very different approach to the problem if needed.

In a perfect world, we could also have the option of using light wrappers around OpenCL matrix libraries, and push the linear algebra to GPUs that eat matrices for breakfast.
Can't wait until they have that for .ck
Did not read article. Afraid of seeing naughty words.
I don't know about Baltimore Pythonistas, but there are plenty in DC. We have a meetup the first Tuesday of every month. It's a little far from Baltimore, but we have some speakers that, IMO, is worth the trip.

http://meetup.zpugdc.org/
Wensing is one of the guys behind StormPulse.
Thank You, HN
Yesterday, I submitted a post regarding the loss of Luke Bucklin and his sons in a plane crash last week. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1861964). The show of support for the Bucklin family and crew at The Nerdery is absolutely amazing.

To all of you in the HN community, thank you.
yes! That's the main point of this. At opening ceremonies we will work to help people form teams. You don't even have to have an idea yet.
30 of Inspirational Typography
Develop your abilities and skills in the typography designs by watching the creative designs, in this post I present 30 of the most beautiful Inspirational Typography.
People fail at obvious all the time. Examples:
Belief in god,
Smoking,
Voting conservative,
Racism,
Drinking and driving,
Eating junk food,
etc, etc
Not really a C++ dev, but why are there so many std:: prefixes? why not just use namespace?
Speaking of mobile design. Anyone here experienced with converting static websites to mobile-friendly sites? I have a few paid projects to do this and it's been hard finding a good contracter in this space. If interested, please email me. My email's in my profile.
It's probably right - Symbian users don't browse the web nearly as much folks with newer mobile OSes.
Click2Flash is a 3rd party extension. I just realized the "allow small Flash objects" thing is in the preferences:

[ ] Allow Flash if size is at most _______

On my machine which hasn't been changed from defaults, it says "1x1" but is not checked. So, unless Yaggo has changed their settings, my hypothesis of why they're still seeing Flash is incorrect.
We're adding ideas to this page: http://baltimorehackathon.pbworks.com/w/page/Heres-my-idea
Oh sorry, before my time. The general thrust of my point stands. You could always look back at the first breakthrough and call it revolutionary and every subsequent innovation derivative. Even when the "breakthrough" device was mostly useless in comparison. Evaluating innovation in this manner will always make the large advances appear to be in the past.

Good current example would be sequencing the human genome. As of right now its mostly useless, but 30 years from now it may be seen as that revolutionary spark. Then some other critic will talk about how nothing big has happened since.
That must change. Science must be reproducible. Other researchers should be able to dive into each others code quickly to understand the impact of implementation details.
I found this bit to be the best: http://cl.ly/8892d1205d53681bea61

(Context: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU)
It seems to me that the simplest explanation is that Lord James of Blackheath is barking mad. One commenter at Stross's blog remarks that he's had a stroke, which may or may not be relevant.
David Hauser, Co-Founder of Grasshopper Group, Shares his Startup Story
I don't know why the author thinks that there aren't any other parser/interpreters for .NET; I'll grant that there aren't many, but ANTLR still supports C#, and I've been using fslex/fsyacc recently (found in the F# PowerPack). There's also FParsec if you prefer a parser-combinator approach.
I'd love to come but I'll be attending an open source sprint on that Saturday: http://meetup.zpugdc.org/calendar/15036971/

But I'd definitely come to the next one. I hope it's a huge success so there will be more in the future.
The House of Lords is to eccentricity as Silicon Valley is to software.
It seems that most recomendations fall in the sci-fi genre. I'll add my personal favourite: Stanisław Lem (the author of Solaris). The Star Diaries and Cyberiad are a lot of fun mixed with really interesting ideas.

But if you want to read a very actual story, including an anticipation of the Internet, take a look at this 1961 story:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_from_the_Stars
But emacs and vim don't.
I believe people will be matched up with groups if they desire, and present their ideas at the start.

Also there's an ideas wiki at http://baltimorehackathon.pbworks.com/w/page/Heres-my-idea ... it's pretty sparse right now but maybe people will throw some ideas up there.
Libertarians will also make rational arguments about how blood alcohol limit laws should be repealed. After all, there's no science to indicate that 10 different people will be impaired to the same extent by the same blood alcohol level. You can argue about any of these issues. But do you really think driving stoned is a winning political issue? And while tens of thousands of people are imprisoned over marijuana, isn't it relevant that it's a losing argument?
It's called the BACON-PIG http://pangalactic.us/bacon-pig/ It's in Greenbelt.
a.ck
Internet entrepreneurs workshop - London
You wouldn't believe it does only happen in India, would you?
Yeah, despite losing over 1 GHz of processor power compared to my old machine, my 11" MBA is easily the fastest feeling computer I've ever owned, no comparison. Most things that most people do are seriously I/O constrained. And if the Photoshop filter takes 6 seconds to apply instead of 4, it's not a big deal. Serious games and video rendering, of course, are some big exceptions.
Ask HN: Open source possible product?
Currently, I have a product (Mac, stand alone) that is about 75-80% done. I personally lost interest in it. It is not something I want to follow through (after some research, it would probably return about 25k-30k a year) because I have a day job, and if I'm going to work on something at home it may as well be something I love (games).

My question to HN is, should I keep it quiet? Try and finish it, even if I'm not really happy doing it? Or just open source it? And if open source it (which is what I'm thinking of doing) what license? I don't want people to just pick the code, add a couple things and sell it, but at the same time I don't want to limit it so much that folks can't really use it (I dislike GPL for this).
the biggest, loudest, and most profitable software consulting firm in the world

At its apex aD had 200 employees and 20m in funding and maybe 10m in invoices. However, I'm going to update my resume with your version.
Uh, exhortations to "believe the hype", phrased in exactly those words, are usually a sign of late-stage evolution of the hype, shortly before the collapse of the hype. I remember them from the dot-com bubble, I remember them from the housing bubble...

(I believe that India and China have a relatively bright future. I do not believe in the narrative whereby the United States faces problems, because we live here and can see them, but China and India must inevitably be on a smooth trajectory upwards with no bumps, because we don't live there to see the bumps and in China's case we are probably having the bumps deliberately and systematically hidden from us. Just as Japan's inevitable triumph over the entire world turned out not to be bump-free either. In fact, doesn't anyone learn from history...?)
One of the most frequent experiences I have with potential employers is writing my resume in HTML or LaTeX, only to have their HR accept only .doc documents.

How do you guys get around this?
ooh thanks, will add to that