skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The effort to convince the EFF to put up a bitcoin donation address is a culmination of writing and revising a letter over and over again, collecting donation as well picking escrow, and a whole lot of patience. Just about when everybody in the bitcoin community is going to give up, the EFF suddenly put a link to a bitcoin address for anybody who wishes to donate.

http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=804.0

What is bitcoin? It's a Neal Stephenson plot device! http://bitcoin.org
I wonder what the split between apps using the free instance and the rest of their products is? Are 90K of the apps just free accounts? I bet 5K are just people who went through RailsTutorial.org...

Still though - Heroku has a great service, and deserve their props.
Its been just about a year since I joined Facebook and started using it a lot. I have to say I'm kind of over it. I'm not closing my account or anything. I just think my usage is going to drop a bit precipitously.

I don't really trust Facebook anymore. I don't think they're evil, I just think at some point they're going to have to make some tough choices to live up to their valuation and the only real value they have (outside of ad eyeballs) is their user and graph information. Its going to end up in 3rd parties hands and I'm not very comfortable with that.

Anyway, not sure thats on point but it was something I've kind of been thinking about the last few days and this just drove a few points home.
This can only mean one thing, people... THE NEW BUBBLE IS ON!

LETS PARTY LIKE IT'S 1999!
I came across very interesting blog check out

"indian software giants misleading talent in india"

http://www.dkoustubha.com/indian-software-giants-misleading-...
The life of a telecommuter
Ah complex numbers... brings me back to undergrad...

Heres a great complex analysis joke (i hope someone besides me thinks this is funny)

Whats the value of the contour integral around Western Europe?

....Zero! All the Poles are in Eastern Europe!
Engadget quoted $300 for the 10" but it seems to have come out a more expensive - The 8gb is on the shelves in singapore for S$499 which is about $390, and the 16gb for S$599. Other commenters should note that these devices are in retail (though they are just arriving).

I'm not trying to convince anyone to buy an archos tablet - I'm sure not in the market for one. I just don't get how it doesn't contradict "even putting quality aside, competitors can’t match Apple’s prices".

http://www.techgoondu.com/2010/11/09/hands-on-archos-70-and-...
Again, Facebook exports a unique identifier for each friend already, and has been doing so for years. This is the entire point of Facebook Connect.
Lots of people already run MySQL so this would make sense, no need to install another data store.
I think your first bullet point is especially significant, and I wrote about a similar issue here: http://jseliger.com/2010/09/30/computers-and-network-effects... . If your primary uses for a computer these days are e-mail, browsing the web, using office software, playing DVDs, and listening to music... pretty much any computer in the last five to ten years will do just fine. You won't get massive increases in speed and ease like you did in the 90s.
Any recommended links on where one could read more on the NY Subway systems you mention? I'm fascinated by pre-electronic computing, and this sounds like a particularly interesting example.
> "Debt is only an insecurity if your income is insecure."

For the vast majority of the population, income is insecure. I think that's part of what the author is getting at: by adding debt insecurity, one disproportionately seeks to make their income more secure.

i.e., Taking less risks, doing less things, and generally trying desperately not to rock the boat, and being less happy as a result.

> "A renter with a long term lease holds just as much obligation as a home owner as far as that goes."

I'm not aware of any rentals with 25-year leases. Most leases I've ever signed have been 12-18 months. Also, the mortgage payment on an equivalent place is, in my experience, >2x the rent. I can lose my job right now and pay off the rest of my lease without breaking a sweat. Heck, if you're really paranoid about it you can insure yourself against it.

On the same income, all other expenses be equal, etc etc, a renter has a lot more free cash flow than a guy paying a mortgage. Not only that, he can pivot much more easily, since his obligations are dramatically much more short-term. It's both easier to build the rainy day fund to pay the rest of his lease off and he's able to cut down his costs much more quickly than, say, trying to sell off your house that you can no longer afford.

This translates into real-life in major ways. People who are mobile, have few obligations have much more firepower at any negotiation table. When you can walk away to a better gig in another city and have your bags packed in 3 days, you can extract much better results.

Which isn't to say renting/avoidance of long-term obligations is always a good idea, but IMHO it's a very good idea while young. Your income curve will be steeper due to your ability to negotiate, and you will have much more freedom to find the life you're looking for.
I wish I had a cat at work sometimes.
I have seen it in use at one company I did consulting work for. They used SecureID hard tokens in conjunction with a regular password.
I've just noticed that Facebook suddenly looks shitty in Chrome (padding on the left up and went). Coincidence?
If he writes C like he numbers his bullet points he'll get a whole lot of seg faults...
It's great that the community is giving advice on what steps to take for getting a programming job, but I would like to add that finding a job is a short term fix. If one is only trying to work out how to get a job for the sake of getting a job, it will only be a matter of time before one is bored. But then again, you'll probably only realise this only having gone through the process. Try to find something that interests you, which may or may not be programming.
It doesn't contradict "even putting quality aside, competitors can’t match Apple’s prices" because competing on price means offering something that is essentially the same for a lower price. The iPad isn't comparable to either the Archos 7" or 10" tablets.
Yes. Don't be a jerk. Even knowing that it isn't technically difficult, it can be socially difficult, and this is a useful guide. Knowing the social protocol of how to get started in the community lowers the mental barrier substantially.
has affiliate code in url, flagged
How Real-Time Analytics Can Help Small Businesses Thrive
One other downside for the Touch: no IPS display.
They're stuck in a continuous defect!
oh, crap, I copy/pasted it from a page of tim ferriss site:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/04/13/stoicism-101...
Indeed. I know the difference between µ and m, but I missed it here.

/hides
I"d guess it's to get around the follow limit.
Going to repost without affiliate code in url (that anyway wasn't mine but from tim ferriss site, i just didn't notice)
Those who have already died from alcohol related causes can not be included into the study, which would much reduce the longevity among alcohol users?
Or if you really don't know what your passion is -- and many don't -- try some things! Particularly if you're young and single; now is the time in life you should be experimenting, unless you're one of the relative few who already know what they want to do.
What does "skip to 3/4" mean? 3/4 of the way down the page?
In Australia we have an additional problem. We have a strong, English speaking education system but unfortunately the CS schools here aren't as prestigious as MIT/Stanford/CMU etc, and Australia isn't seen as good a destination as the US for Indian emigrants.

That means we get Indians who can't get into US colleges and/or can't get US jobs: ie, the second rate developers. Unfortunately that means that any good Indians here will have to work twice as hard to overcome that reputation.

Interestingly, for some reason we seem to get a lot of really good Chinese students and immigrants, so they don't have the reputation problems to overcome.

Throwaway account for the first time on HN :(
The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss
Did you just compare the Nook to the iPad? How is that at all comparable to the feature set of the iPad? Go on.

You're also somehow assuming that other phones are not subsidized??? This has been going on before the iPhone existed so don't be surprised if the Android is too. So no, what AT&T pays doesn't count.

One of the main things I've never heard enough about in comparing Macs and PCs is the service. The ease of service with defects and breakage with Apple is world class. That's surely something that Apple factors into the price and Apple thinks it's worth it. Software etc as well. So I don't know why Gruber thinks he can really compare those things.
it's very good article,vote up
You're not taking into account Mac OS X and iLife (among other things), which are major pluses. Especially when you're responsible for other's tech support.
Anyone here using MVC with F#?
Cope's earlier work with EMI is also pretty awesome; the idea of using as a training set a composer's body of work in order to produce new music in that same style is very cool.

http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/mp3page.htm
Ok, thanks. I notice this doesn't really rise to the level of an APA "boycott", though.
The sales pitch to developers ...
Last night I attended the local Linux Group meeting with a presentation on a MS Access/OO.Base to Drupal presentation described as:

“Most people think of drupal as a website framework system. However, it can also serve effectively as a replacement to the forms/reports/tables system utilized by access and base. (as well as many other things, but we won't discuss that formally tonight) No prior knowledge of Drupal is required, and for those who do understand drupal, we will go through using cck and views, as well as a few other modules to develop a replacement for a small access database.”

Since this is a Windows Blog, it appears to be off target – however since it’s a emotionally-detached example to illustrate what is also seen with Windows stuff. As a FYI, I grew up on CP/M and ran Mark Williams Unix (Coherent) in the mid 1980’s, we have three Linux boxes in the house.
They're likely to fall foul of the Twitter TOS rule that you will have your accounts deleted...

"If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates;"

Which if they're doing an RSS>Twitter spool then this would be the case.

I'm guessing rather than just banning all their accounts, Twitter will probably reach out to them and do a biz dev deal or something... If there is a value to Quora in having these setup then there is a value they're prepared to pay Twitter for.
I imagine the really cheap mp3 players would sell pretty well outside the US. I was quite surprised he couldn't find digital audio players much cheaper than an iPod. I've seen mp3 players for well under half the price of an iPod shuffle in Australia, and I imagine in China there would be an even bigger difference.
I suppose it depends on the way you're framing it. If it gets to 7% as desired, it is 40% more!
A man walks into a bar and asks “does anyone here work at a startup?”
I am refactoring my application to use Backbone.js right now and just wanted to thank Jeremy for this great piece of code (as well as underscore.js). There is still some friction in certain places, but overall the experience has been great and my app has been seriously despaghettized.

So, thanks!
Ask HN: Good Twitters to follow? 
I seek a bunch of good twitters to follow, and I guess many others do as well. So, do you have any good recommendations?
Yahoo's Informal Offer To Buy Groupon: $3 Billion To $4 Billion
"Work for me for a year w/o salary and I'll help you get a job." /jk

There are better routes for new programmers IMHO.

Start at http://rubyonrails.org/ and build a website you find useful.

Learn SharePoint or BizTalk, those are boring but in very high demand now.

Even more boring, sing up for a cheap 6 month Cobol course in India.
I approve. That is, not understanding what there is to approve. But I totally do.
Haha, maybe true. But we posted this blog from inside the 63rd largest newspaper in the country which is launching our services tomorrow. I suspect that they choose our company precisely because we're not afraid to try new things.
Ex Ask.com engineer here, left around a year ago. The big focus on Q&A and the (partial) outsourcing of general web search had been going on since early 2009, if not even earlier. And yes, it's Google.

Oh well, it's been a good run, I've been expecting something like this to go down for quite some time now. I'm actually surprised Diller hasn't pulled the plug yet for good.
If this article is targeted at people with no experience (ie it mentions learning how to use IRC), is recommending that they fix bugs in C++ code really the right answer?

Why not start with a Python project or something more realistic?
My guess is that you only have to compile the build target that your code change was part of... you can build just Chrome, or just unit tests, or whatever else is part of the package...

Also a common way to speed up build times is to build in release mode.
Word 2010: For all of your Revolutionary Ideas
Might not be an easy path though, personally when I tried to compile Chromium, it took my PC 8 hours compiling before coming up with a fatal error.

Welcome to software development. :-) Seriously, I probably spend at least 10% of my time dealing with broken libraries, badly documented build processes, and other depressing obstacles.

If you can get past these kinds of problems—and more importantly, if you submit fixes to spare the next person the pain—then you'll make a great developer.
South Korea building the largest ever offshore wind farm
Full disclosure: I work on the Word team. It was nice seeing a fun video showcasing our product :)
"1) How often did you read to your child at age 0-3 months"

Is there any documented benefit to this? I'll be a father in about 3.5 months so I still have a little time to prepare :)
Kudos for your common courtesy.

I remember a few years ago when I looking..., there was a well-known startup which requested not just a resume but a fairly detailed answer concerning a problem they had. I sent them an answer out partly because the topic were quite interesting. Despite this, I still felt considerable resentment when I got no response whatsoever.

... On another application where I sent a detailed cover letter with research, I had one nibble 3 months after I'd sent out my original essay. The hiring manager was like "wow, this is really interesting, I really want to get you in to talk about this" - I was doing something else by then, of course.

I don't know whether responding to each applicant is a good strategy for finding people. I do think it's a good strategy for not being hated. I suppose so portion of the population doesn't care about that, though.
Well, you know. The C64 had a bigger problem: Commodore.
This isn't just a facet of the tech scene but jobs all over. I left my restaurant job for this very reason. I gave my managers ample opportunity to tell me where I needed improvement and give constructive criticism. Yet they continued to mess with my hours and not give reason, hiring more people instead of giving the hours to people who needed them. My managers would rather stay non-confrontational, not recognizing that confrontation isn't necessarily a bad thing but a way to improve relationships between coworkers and employees as well as improving quality across the board. It was this lack of communication that drove me away.

It was a tough decision for me, because I not only left the job but a steady paycheck. While the check may have been smaller than I'd have liked (or needed) there's something to be said for reliability. Being a contract dev has given me much more freedom and the ability to write my own paycheck, but it's definitely not easy. Some days I'd much rather be working for someone... but finding management that are willing to put themselves out there and communicate on the level needed to keep me happy is tough. I demand a very high level of communication because that's the way I've found to be able to do the best job I can. Make no mistake, I may be tough to get along with but I always strive to do the best job I can. I suppose the only one that really understands that and can deliver on those demands is me.
The problem is FBIDs are not independent of your social network provider, in this case, Facebook.

If I want to take my social data from Provider A, I want it in an independent format, so that I can do whatever I want with it. So that I can back it up, and later import it to some other Provider. If there were some social networking standard for friends list independent of any provider, then great, use that, and skip the private email addresses. For now, email addresses are the best online standard for identifying my friends, independent of social network Provider. Names, or FBIDs are not.
Bad idea. NodeJS is too young to take a hardcopy picture of the APIs. It'll be outdated before its release.

Edit: oh! good points below me!
Excellent suggestion! And to extend that logic yet further, if you like using the Internet but don't want to pay for unwanted services bundled on top of Internet access (voice, etc.), you can simply dig your own trench from your home or business to the nearest neutral data center, drop a fiber pair in, light it on both ends, buy some routers, negotiate an arrangement with the data center and interconnection agreements with the other networks onsite, and then run the whole thing yourself forever! Hey, you might miss a few generations of programming and media formats completely, but that's the price of freedom! And there's always better to come... no need to weep if you end up missing HDTV or 3D altogether, because in the long run fully immersive holographic TV will be so much better anyway!

Alas,if only we could have always had the courage of your convictions! Back in the mid-1970s when the private corporation AT&T was the only national-scale provider of any kind of communications service in the US, a bunch of short-sighted whiners argued that forcing AT&T to unbundle was necessary to improve existing (voice) services, drive down extortionate pricing, and give the universe of non-AT&T employees a shot of their own at at innovating. But anyone who remembers those days knows that the complaints were LIES: everyone had access to a wide variety of alternatives, ranging from CB radios to postcards to tin cans interconnected with string! So what if that whining ultimately made it possible for the Internet grow beyond the confines of a few university campuses, and for the US to become the world leader and hub of Internet development? Now all of that growth and wealth and innovation will forevermore be tainted by by poisoned circumstances of its illegitimate origin. Ahh, if only we could turn back the clock so that we might do it right from the beginning.... Four decades later we might still look a bit like those countries in landlocked Africa or Central America that are still waiting for widespread consumer access the the Internet and other services, but at least our virtue would still be intact!

Given the fact that any Internet-based response would be inherently self-contradictory, please don't sully yourself any further by replying!
A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums.

Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends.

Not really, exporting your address book is the exact same thing as exporting a list of your friends' email addresses.

He had good points against Google, though.
Your experience is a little more typical of the job market for most people without relevant hard skills like programming; the hiring environment is an extremely frustrating black hole.

In fact, until I looked for a development job through a contractor, I only had 10 responses to around 250 job applications.

While the development side isn't a perfect fit, it is a novel feeling to be able to turn down a job.
In the original essay I used the word "basic" there which is probably closer to what I meant. Simple, but not simplistic.
I'm trying to find a way to figure out how this line of reasoning wouldn't also apply to arguing that facebook shouldn't exist at all, and I'm not having much luck.
South Korea might be the next clean energy giant. while we put a lot of attention on China and Europe, South Korea is making some huge steps forward...
When I purchased my Apple machines I also took into account the cost of the tools I would be using the operating system.

Macbook Pro + Xcode + Mac OS X

vs

Lenovo or Dell upper end model + Visual Studio + Windows 7

Visual Studio adds a considerable amount to the final cost, but I'm also willing to put down a fair amount more for having Mac OS X.
That's a terribly dismissive thing to say about people who are just one generation away from not being able to vote because they were born darker than others.
That's just not correct. What language you learn on does have an influence on what languages come easier to you as a second or third language. Also some languages make programming concepts and paradigms easier to learn than others. Any way, giving an introductory high-school class in Python, Ruby, or Lisp is IMO counter productive because of the whitespace requirement, the flexibility in syntax, and the amount of parenthesis on their respective languages.

I said two things:

1) I think Python is not a good language for high school because of it's syntax which is not directly translatable to the bulk of other programming languages (and I say the same thing about Lisp now that I'm on it). At this point I made a comment that I would find Ruby a little tiny bit better (but not suitable either) because of it's forgiving syntax, not because of the flexibility aspect of it's syntax (as omitting parenthesis and comas would probably lead to confusion). Python is not forgiving in it's whitespace requirements, while Ruby can make use of blocks and curly brackets in a way that translates better to other programming languages.

2) That I learned C at an early age and it had a big impact in the way I developed as a programmer, to which you responded that you learned Java a year earlier than I did C without making a point out of it. What is this a competition now to see who learned to program earlier?

What language you learned on makes no difference 5 years later, but it does have a big impact on the first, maybe second year. As such, it should be a language where the knowledge and workflow is easily transfered to other languages. VB.net (which I actually dislike anyways) is a pretty straightforward language from which you can move to a plethora of other languages easily. Neither Ruby or Python are suitable for this.
There isn't a reason that the military can't test weaponry, they just usually do it in quarantined areas or with notice to the public.
As much of a horrible, tragic joke as the KWP and its Dear Leader are, I tend to assume a lot of the highest-ranking officials there know their limits, and, despite the daily charade each of them lives, the smarter ones wouldn't actually allow such an act to occur.

Of course, I could be wrong.
Java (the platform) becomes a legacy tool when there's a clear and open alternative to the JVM, and no, Mono doesn't cut it.
I find it interesting to watch the telecommuting life style emerge and how people cope with the feelings of isolation and the unusual schedule. For instance: some of the telecommuters I know end up spending more time at bars and stuff like that to get that social interaction they're missing back in their life and use up their excess energy. As things evolve I'm curious to see where this leads.