skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the part where the US tried to pawn off their Guantanamo Bay prisoners in such a way that they can not challenge their YEARS of illegal detention was one of the more damning bits.

That's one set of crimes (and the rendition flights) that is going to take a long long time to wash away.
How do you measure "more ad hoc"? The only software that's not ad hoc are huge enterprise projects that fail most of the time.

If I had to guess I'd say that both MySpace and Facebook were completely ad hoc, but the difference was probably that Facebook kept their technical debt down so that they never accumulated an area of code that was too hairy to refactor or replace. MySpace on the other hand probably got complacent in their success and didn't worry too much as their architecture calcified into an unmaintainable mess. By the time they saw Facebook nipping at their heels their code base was past the point of no return, and the company culture made it impossible to hire the level of technical talent they would have needed to right the ship.

Of course I'm completely talking out my ass here, but that's the impression given by the respective product histories.
Don't be ashamed or afraid to nag.
Fire fast and early.
Understand that the project you're working on is only one of likely many they are working on.
Give early deadlines but plan them to be weeks/months before you need it.
Contractors saying 2-4weeks likely mean 2-4months.
You want to see dedication and accomplishments. If you see none of that then fire them.
Have someone local to check the code.
Get code updates often (should be uploading to a trac).
Know your contractors. Are they managers farming out the work or are they doing the work themselves? Does the team keep changing or are they stable? Do they badger you for payouts when their performance has been poor or are they delivering quality work?

Beware of contractors: Many (not all) of them are scam artists who can easily take advantage of those new to the system. They will not be solely focused on your project and by bouncing between projects it means it takes time for them to laser in and be sharp when they do sit down to do your task. Don't hire anyone who doesn't have stellar reviews. Their resumes mean little (ie, they stretch the truth a lot). If your reasonable concerns are not addressed promptly and to your satisfaction: fire them.
There's always a trade off for just how agnostic you can be, so there's no way to support every possibility. But if you look at the different federated social web projects, there are clear similarities between them (ie, identity is in a username@domain format), so you can easily build around those similarities.

For instance, building around events ("posting a status update", "sending a friend request", "verifying an identity") and abstracting out those events into hooks is how Appleseed does it.

I have no misconceptions that this will hold up to every possible social protocol, past, present and future, but thinking about the protocol as an abstraction, and building the platform out from there, has already shown itself to be very useful.
This is just trolling. The two examples show this: "look at the liberals funding soccer and hollywood research!". Congress can slash overall NSF budget but is it really going to get involved in the NSF granting process? No.
The IBM System/360 Revolution. A Lecture on the computer that changed the world
the cornell sound simulation project has some cool videos online
I went back and tried to recap this discussion -- which I thought was excellent, by the way, into a new blog entry. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1979866
I want something that is also a platform. Maybe that's what you meant, but I want a decentralized alternative to Facebook Connect. I want to clone Google Apps and beat them at "+1" with an open data platform that anyone can build an app on top of. But then again, I have my own grand plans in my head. And on paper. And scrawled on a desk.
I guess this is the example why you should guard your own home-baked HTTP server behind nginx or lighttpd.
Since my server is down for the count right now, here's the text of the post:

---

I think there might be value to those dumb interview puzzles after all. Let me explain.

Last week there was a Hacker News link to a post about a 140 interview questions Google supposedly asks. I read over some of them and was quickly drawn in. Not because I expect to be interviewing for a job, but because a puzzle like that is like a virus that infects my mind. It spreads until it’s my top idea, and then holds up residence until I solve it.

After figuring out a few of them and being frustrated by how long they took me, I wondered if there were general strategies I could use to solve them.

One pattern quickly jumped out at me: Almost all of these puzzles exploit blind spots in our thinking. Their answers frequently lie in assumptions we don’t even know we’re making.

Have you heard the one about the four travelers who each walk at different speeds and have to cross a bridge in 17 minutes?

It’s easy as soon as you realize you don’t have to send the same person back right after he crosses, and that you don’t just want to optimize for the return-trip time.

Or what about the one where you have to find which of eight balls is heavier than the others, using a balance exactly twice? It’s straightforward as soon as you stop assuming you should use a divide-and-conquer approach and weigh all the balls in your first weighing.

Naval Ravikant and Andrew Parker both blogged about how many popular web services have sprung from challenging assumptions about privacy. This is a specific instance of what I’m talking about. We make certain assumptions about privacy without always examining why we’ve made them.

Frequently it’s the case that the assumption was valid when we first made it, but technological or social change has rendered it invalid. We still have lots of those floating around our culture. How could we not? It’s not like all of society is a giant decision-making machine that reevaluates every statement we hold to be true the second a new technology pops up. As a whole, society goes through this process gradually, as someone inevitably notices the contradiction or error in our thinking and a new order begins to spread. Jobs did this with the assumption that computers weren’t for personal use. Gates did this with the assumption that the money was to be made in the hardware rather than the OS business.

If you want to build a company that changes the world, look for these assumptions. They’re in our collective blind spots. Places we don’t want to look or places we look past every day. They’re buried treasures, because the first person to identify one gets first mover advantage and a window of time in which others haven’t realized what they previously held to be true isn’t.
By "mainstream" I mean normal, non-crackpot outlets who are/were main distribution channels for information to people. In old business, major national newspapers, weeklies, monthly magazines, regional/city papers were fairly good at attribution. Of course plagiarism, stealing and other forms of non-ethical behavior were not unheard of, but not anywhere on par with new media.

Nowadays mainstream sources of information are supposedly replaced by swarms of bloggers and citizen journalists. This one is perfect example. Such a thing as non-attribution is now par for the course. You don't notice how common is it because you are not paying attention.
Thanks. I'll take a look at this.
Advice on seeking a CTO/Co-Founder/Tech Lead for a new fashion/style Q&A site
Hi, I’m a non-tech founder in New York City who needs help figuring out which route to take in my search for a CTO/Co-Founder or lead developer with a strong Ruby on Rails background, and to some degree my product launch.

Late last year I spent a lot of time trying to find someone to work with me on my idea and after coming up with few results I went the route of raising friends and family money to outsource development in order to build a prototype which could attract users, financing, and a technical lead/team. While the launch has been severely delayed due to a number of reasons, it’s slated to launch in stealth soon while we work out a couple kinks and then soon after we plan on doing a private beta and then finally a full fledged launch early next year after we’ve refined the product somewhat and built a bit of a user base.

I know I already have several things which need to be remedied with the site as soon as we get it out there, but many of the people from my original outsourced team are moving on to work on their own projects and I need to find someone as into the ideas I am, and if not, at least someone competent to work on helping me make changes to the site while I go through the search process for a tech lead.

Any ideas, suggestions, recommendations for how to go about a search given my situation? I’ve already tapped into my network and can’t find anyone that can help.

Also, please feel free to reach out for more details.

Thanks a bunch and looking forward to hearing your advice!
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Chromium OS is the open source version and is available for download in source form right now. You'll have to compile it yourself, I think. I'm pretty sure things will stay that way.

Chrome OS is the closed-source version that is sent to vendors to be installed on computers. I'm pretty sure Google won't make Chrome OS available for download, since there will be no single "Chrome OS" image; it'll be customized for each hardware option.

(I think.)
The problem for Google is that they want iOS to use Google's stuff or else Apple might be prone to pick someone else and that could cascade into not having Google as default for anything on the phone / devices. Google makes its money on advertising not the OS.
Actually, only one justice said that. Eight other justices said eight other things.
Why are you against GM? I always find it fascinating that most people are for using technology for everything but food.
"the theory that high risk, high finance real estate couldn't be more nerve wracking than that. Obviously, he made scads of money"

I wonder how he's doing now.
You put the word "stolen" in quotes. Whom are you quoting? The post to which you replied did not say that Google had stolen the ideas, it said that Google had copied the ideas.
FTA: "...build this on XMPP."

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ehhbz/i_made_a_...
How far is materials technology from being able to keep people warm there?
The military funds a huge amount of basic research.

For example, a huge amount of computational E&M is funded by the military. Most of it is published in non-classified (though paywalled) journals and is directly useful to anyone building E&M communication or sensor devices. (I cite computational E&M specifically because I used to work in that field.)
I don't feel like he explains this well enough. The water bottle metaphor wasn't really extended to the point where it actually illustrated his points - "Imagine what would happen if more stuff was added to it. Pretty soon it wouldn't be functional. The physics would push back." That's like saying, "What would happen? It wouldn't work. Something bad would happen." It's too vague - you need to show in what ways a water bottle could get bloated, and then how that applies to software.

For example, if water bottles were filled with ads, you wouldn't be able to tell if the water was clean inside. Likewise, if your site is filled with ads, people have a hard time finding the content they want to "drink".
"Apart from crazy people like..."

Hmm, I didn't realize Newt Gingrich was crazy. I wonder if your list of crazy people includes virtually everyone not in your preferred political party.

"Yet we're to believe that a single private in the military could possibly have judged the impact of what he was handing to Wikileaks"

Err, you take thousands of documents labeled "private" or "secret" and release them to the media and think what? That it is no big deal?
Foxconn shipping new iPads starting late February
This is pretty much textbook conspiracy, where a corrupt government arranges for someone to be locked up.
U.S. to host World Press Freedom Day
Your nick serves you well.
BP inquiry stranded after IT firm refuses access
"Cloud" implies scaling by renting all the hardware I could need. But with a mean of 36 qps allowed at the high end, no documented ACID guarantees or sharding model, and a sample "0 rows affected." message coming out of DDL requests like rebuildIndex (what's the use case?), it's hard to distinguish this from a PHP frontend for a single MySQL instance.
> If my repurposed web skills are good enough to build 80% of the apps people want why would I start from scratch with a completely new and native stack?

Supply and demand.

Doing the easy and/or thing everyone else is doing means there is ton of supply, will the demand support it? Will the demand still be there when it's commoditized and outsourced / offshored.

Doing the hard and/or thing few other people doing means there is limited supply, will the demand be enough to support decent ROI?

That is why learning ObjC / proper mobile development might be worth it. Not saying it is, you'd have to evaluate supply and demand to figure out.
GigaOm: Has WikiLeaks Actually Done Anything Illegal?
It seems to me that some of the issues you mention with web apps would also be apparent with native apps acting as a front-end to online apps. Network transfers and latency can result in pauses and delays that would impact user experience more than choppy transitions, and native apps can't change that.

Is it worth the time and cost to create native front-ends for iOS, Android, BB, W7P? I don't doubt for a minute that the experience would be better for each platform as a native app, but would it be profitable for small/medium size business? I feel like SMBs are the target of web-based mobile frameworks, for the most part. I don't think we'll see Facebook in JQuery Mobile any time soon.
Be VERY specific, I primarily used contracted and outsourced work and found that communications was the main problem. I wrote and communicated one thing and they thought I meant another. So what I learned to do was be very specific and breakdown each deliverable into small chunks so if there is a miss communication, the time lost is minimized.

Also I always contacted 1 or 2 previous customers (depending on the project size) to see how the operated. Specifically finding out whether they were able to deliver what they said. During the interview phase I would often quiz them about how they would design/accomplish a task to understand their thought process, treat it just like a job interview.

Another tip was to use IM, while I found they didn't want to bug you with a phone call. A quick IM from them when they have a question can avoid a lot of hassles.

Never make assumptions, especially when dealing with another culture. After making this mistake twice while outsourcing development to India, I never did again. Even simple terminology such as drag-and-drop can mean completely different things between cultures.
You could say the same thing about driving a car.
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Scott McNealy(Co-Founder of Sun Microsystems)to advise IngBoo.com
+1 for you then. :-)
Right, because nginx and lighttpd aren't easier to exploit. /sarcasm
Look, the world doesn't need to know it took me 13 attempts to get the patch right and passing all its tests. The world really doesn't need to see the childish mistake I made on attempt 5 or the cuss words I was using in the #define on attempt 8. Just take the sausage and skip the tour of the factory.
I had to stop reading when I got to the ridiculous header example. A poorly set up header hierarchy is used to show why the new way is more complicate? The new way is much more flexible when used properly. If it is too technical for some non-technical people, those aren't the people that should be writing HTML.
I enjoyed that feature, but the gesture feels backwards. Seems that a swipe up rather than down would be better for rotating to an oblique angle. Imagine a rotating whiteboard (e.g. http://j.mp/g2KHGc). Standing in front of it, you'd want to push on the top half ("swipe up") to rotate the face upwards.
Doesn't sound like a long way to me. Or is it just one of many problems?
Asking the general public to evaluate the contributions, impact, applicability, etc. of a research project is a pretty good way to get a lot of useful projects shot down. There's a reason we use people who know enough about the fields in question to recognize good, useful research when they see it.
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Working on a 5000+ line file sucks. It's much better to have multiple files and serve a concatenated + minified version to the browser
I think that's one attribute that the U.S will always be at an advantage over other countries - the energy level.

Personally, I think that the attribute of just being energetic, being able to work for long, and being able to just keep thinking all day in different directions is not something that should be underestimated at all. I think it's really important.

Many of the successful people I have met just have that constant energy and seem to be constantly thinking, while the people who settle into a mediocre life seem to be those low energy, dull people.

Even the manic energy of depression seems to beat the steady niceness of some people.

One thing I keep noticing over and over again is what I call "mental laziness". You see people who work long hours, but they do it without really applying energy. They think of small problems, think of small solutions and end the day content. But there is no mental energy being constantly radiated.

When I read articles about such people like Jessicah, I imagine they must have pretty high energy levels to be able to maintain such a schedule constantly.
If a single entity controls the platform for it, a programming language is effectively owned. For all practical purposes, Apple owns the platform for Objective-C. If more apps are developed using a cross-platform standard like HTML5 than a single-platform like iOS, that reduces lock-in, so why would Google or Apple want that? That Google want HTML5 to succeed (despite their own Android platform) is pretty much given. The author, however, is arguing that Apple also wants HTML5 to succeed. Why? To prevent another platform from successfully competing with iOS, so that Apple can continue to offer the best user experience.
> He gives little reason why the features says get broken are more important than the other things. He just states it.

I'm having trouble parsing the above, so I may be responding inappropriately, but it seems to me the OP is saying:

Here are some awesome and dangerous tools A, B, and C that people like to use and recommend. There are pitfalls to be aware of, analogous to lying, when using these tools. Here is where such "lying" gets you into trouble: X, Y, Z, etc. If you use or depend on X, Y, or Z, then be cautious when using A, B, and C.
So how come the minimum budget increase possible was so large under Bush, also fairly large under Reagan, but so small under Clinton?
Say what you will, but the U.S. puts up with a lot more than most countries. Be thankful for the freedoms you have and celebrate the freedom of others.

Edit: Not sure why some went on the defensive. I never said you shouldn't fight to protect your own freedoms. Nor did I condemn anyone or anything. Is this really what we've been reduced to? In our search for freedom of speech we're squelching the voice of those who don't agree with us? Isn't that what you are aiming to fight?
They (nginx, lighttpd) are more difficult to exploit, especially when used to buffer requests to a heavier upstream server like Apache.

EDIT (Clarification):

They (nginx, lighttpd) are more difficult — although not impossible — to exploit, especially when used to buffer requests to a heavier upstream server like Apache.

Specifically, they are typically able to handle many more connections than your application server would be able to (as long as they are properly configured), without the incurring the resource overhead of your application server by bufferring the HTTP request/response.
Some have speculated that recent events have been influenced les by the Us state department than by Assange's mention of an upcoming release concerning a major US bank. Based on an earlier interview, there's widespread consensus that this is probably BofA and the interesting material might relate to to the bank's ongoing loan origination/servicing problems, which are causing many to demand the bank take back the risk it sold to others.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-30/wikileaks-says-it-h...
http://www.cnbc.com/id/40548531
http://www.thestreet.com/story/10939901/1/bank-of-america-mo...

Bizarrely, you can use your Visa/MC to join the Ku Klux Klan: http://www.christianconcepts.net/informat.htm
It looks good. I like how you integrated links that would typically be found on the sidebar on the main page you land on.
Yeah not much reason to look at this with the much larger proven and inexpensive (even free) solutions out there.

For slick packaging around this type of stuff I'd check out database.com's screenshots
Oh, absolutely. That was their beef with Netscape, way back when: Netscape was a platform for delivering apps independent of the OS. NS was very explicit about it, talking about "crossware", applications written in HTML+JS+Java that would work on any OS where Netscape ran. It was premature—NS's one big crossware app, Netcaster, was slow and clunky—but still very scary to anybody that sold OSes.

(Edit: actually, it probably wasn't scary to any OS vendor but MS; the others were all happy to think that users might move to applications that could run on their OSes, too.)
Video here:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/06/motorola-android-tablet-p...
This fellow's argument doesn't seem to be against GM but rather against the predatory practices perpetrated by the purveyors of GM seeds.
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That's an interesting response given that I spent quite a few words talking about how great `git blame`, `git bisect`, `git rerere`, and `git branch --contains` are and why rewriting history breaks them. Was it tl;dr? Or did I not get my point across effectively?
The problem with comparing AWS to SalesForce is that SalesForces' prices are negotiable, often with very deep volume discounts. AWS pricing is completely upfront, which I prefer, but... just sayin'
I find that works pretty well when you need to go on a rural route with poor 3G. I did that on my last cross SD run and basically had a pretty cheap road map. The fun of it is that you can do it with the wi-fi version also.
How hypocritical!

It's not press freedom if you only allow it when it suits your agenda.
Your problem is one of team building. There's you (non-technical) and a "co-founder" (some technical) who aren't really communicating with each other. We've got your side of the story but not the other's. Then there's the lack of a good CTO/technical lead. I know Y-combinator likes to have teams live and work together and that is for a very good rason: it builds the team into a unifying force!

What do you have to do? 1) Build your relationship, first. Go on a retreat together. Get a cabin somewhere, go hiking, escape life, talk, grow, code, design, build, mock, fish, cook, eat, sleep. Do not network, call, email, read news, or communicate with the outside world. Focus on yourselves and your project. Build off that energy and take it to the next level. 2) Either that succeeds or you fall apart. Lesson learned. Move on.
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