skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see a lot of "just learn to program" around here, and I think it's all a bit glib and far from reality.

Firstly, programming is hard. It's not the sort of thing you pick up in a few weeks. Hell, there are people who manage to make it through a CS degree and several years in industry without actually knowing what they're doing. What makes you think it's a valuable use of your time to do something mediocre that other people have spent much of their lives learning to do well?

Secondly, good programming doesn't make a good business. It's as important (I would even say more important) to have a solid revenue model. Who are your customers? Why are they buying? How can you get more? These are questions many programmers wouldn't want to touch with a barge pole. Don't waste that symbiosis.

To me, the real message is that ideas aren't worth shit. Implementation is king. It seems like a lot of people (angry ex-startup programmers?) confuse real business people (who can contribute a lot to a team in sales & biz dev) with useless "ideas guys". If you're one of those then, y'know, stop it. You should go learn an actual skill (programming or otherwise) that will allow you to contribute to the idea's realisation.

(I should clarify, though, that I think anyone working in software should learn about programming. But encouraging business guys to write their own code is like encouraging programmers to draw their own art.)
I don't see a problem; increasing the availability of knowledge is what Wikipedia is for. But I hope they are giving a nice, fat donation.
These are the 23 sites that YouPorn is checking for:

pornhub.com

redtube.com

adultfriendfinder.com

xvideos.com

tube8.com

xnxx.com

megaporn.com

megarotic.com

xhamster.com

awempire.com

realitykings.com

brazzers.com

xtube.com

bangbros1.com

fling.com

freeones.com

myfreepaysite.com

debonairblog.com

payserve.com

maxporn.com

videosz.com

aebn.net

pornorama.com
Hey! Go to http://corkboard.me instead of the link set by ycombinator. corkboard.me automatically gives each person their own personal corkboard, but it does this through a 302 redirect. I should probably change this in the future, but for now go directly to http://corkboard.me for your own. (Admins, if you could change the link I'd appreciate it. Thanks!) -- Tim
I think TDD is useful, but practitioners should not be dogmatic about it.

As I discussed in my talk "Testing is Overrated", programmer testing finds a different class of bugs than manual testing or code reviews.

One of the problems is that programmers are not very good at writing tests. They are much more likely to test "happy path" scenarios. Steve McConnell reports in Code Complete that mature testing organizations have 5 times more dirty tests than clean tests, while immature testing organizations write 5 clean tests for every dirty test.

Another big problem is that unit tests are never going to show you that your software blows. Only user testing can find that.

If you want to ship good software, I think you need to do a combination of code reviews, unit tests, system tests, user studies, and manual testing. Different organizations will find a balance that works for them.

That last is a key point. I like writing tests, but I hate the dogmatism that if you're not writing tests you're doing it wrong. Obviously, good software has been written without tests, and buggy crap has been fully TDD'ed. In the end, the team matters more than the methodology.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8585284/Testing-is-Overrated-Hando...
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8585444/Testing-is-Overrated
I'm so close! I should have something up by next week. Got a ton done, though. You know, that whole last 90% thing. I'm totally pumped, though.
Yes, it is definitely interesting... this is only converting Facebook services into some kind of Internet "fabric" that is needed in every web app - woot!
The Self Adhesiveness of Your Print Labels
There is no doubt about that labels are your self adhesive products. That is why online label printing company offers you full color packaging label printing solutions within bearable price rates.
http://ontwik.com/ has some pretty decent ones and it's updated pretty regularly
The same thing is true on smaller scales as well, for example: 1 day versus 10.
TDD turns a 20 month (1 2/3 year) project into a 23 to 26 month project. Which is how I got 3 - 6 months behind.

And if your product does not ship for 6 months, then your first few itterations even if faster will also be behind.

PS: (3 to 6) * (1.15 to 1.3) = (3 * 1.15 to 6 * 1.35) = (3.45 to 8.1).

Edit: No wait it's 15-35% longer so (3.45 to 8.1) months.
I got to a working prototype on my phone.. now all that's left is getting an app icon, splash screen, adding some graphics to the UI. But the app itself already works
Cargo cultism is applicable to one person
Everything that is wrong with mocking, bdd, and rspec
Kafka: a high-throughput distributed messaging system
HTML5 allows almost any value for the id attribute
It seems to have been updated to the direct link now. Neat simple site.
Ok, so you're saying that you wouldn't have any problem manipulating some complicated photos (changing backgrounds, masking out certain elements, changing color levels, creating alpha mask, adding drop shadows to text, touching up a person's face, blending several layers together so that the layer below comes through to the layer above, etc, etc) in Microsoft Paint instead of using Photoshop?

After all, they're both just "text editors" as per your example.
Also, by restoring an entire system you cannot be sure you have a dormient virus/rootkit/malware hidden in it.

I backup my basic system (as a txt list of linux packages, in fact) and my data separately also because not all data are worth the same.
I don't think you understand the term "cargo cultism"

That the language is Lisp isn't important. The important consideration is that he ascribed the success of the entry to the language without any evidence linking the two.
Launched CoderStack:

http://www.coderstack.co.uk/
Is it that coders confused the good business guys with the charlatans, or is it that it's difficult to tell them apart?

Much like business guys can't tell good coders from bad without knowing about programming (100% agreement there), it's just as important for programmers to know about business (sales cycles, product dev, customer service, etc.)
1) I am stating facts. I said it's different.
2) Europe is not NYC and a 40k salary for a software engineer seems to be fair. Your comment makes no sense at all. They are not funding companies in the States, and are adjusting the salaries based on eu countries.
3) That's quite a mindset you have. And the answer is no. Because if I go alone I get 70% and they still fund me, if I go with another founder I get 35% and if I go with two cofounders I get 23%. Plus would you go through all the hassle you just imagined for 50k more and then let everyone see what kind of person you are?
Bah.
I am still working on mine. It'll take a few more weeks before the MVP ready to be launched. I have my landing page up at http://www.serverfabu.com/

The inspiration for this project came from the feedback I've received for my ASK HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1815344
How Did the Deaths of Four People Cost the U.S. Government $6.5 Billion?
For those wondering wtf (like I did for a couple of minutes after clicking through), from http://bitlynews.com/about.html:

It works by automatically discovering bit.ly links on Twitter in real-time, then posting stories with high click activity on bit.ly. Each story's score is periodically updated with recent stats from bit.ly, so the most clicked-on stories bubble to the top.
I launched fake iphone text - http://www.fakeiphonetext.com/
Successfully converted Palm and Palm Pre Pre Plus CDMA to GSM (translate)
What is the source of their information? The article comes off as guesswork, since they provide no qoutes or press releases from NASA.
How Lieberman Got Amazon To Drop Wikileaks
Twitter Powered TV Remote Makes Channel Surfing Social
I disagree.
If you want to interact with carpenters, learning about carpentry, trying out carpentry (while not pretending to be an expert) helps a lot.

Put another way - its like speaking a language in a foreign country - the effort and practice is quite meaningful to those who live there.

It seems that to avoid becoming a single founder we have to have the ability to reach out and speak the language of those we want to join us.

Cheerio yohs.
People still use ftp. The farther you get from the startup world, the more people use it. They lock it down with firewalls, put it behind NAT, and encrypt it with ssl. And sometimes try to do all three to both ends at the same time. There's one big headache for you.

I've been trying my hardest to kill ftp with all the people I have to deal with, but it's entrenched. We'll still be dealing with it when we have mind/computer interfaces, and it'll still be a pain in the ass. (that's probably the data connection, the control connection will some in somewhere else)
I like the site. Well done.
Aviary Phoenix is pretty good as a Photoshop web app: http://www.aviary.com/tools/image-editor
http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/feeds/pgessays.rss
Great hands-on discussion. Too bad Raphael had problems with IE:

it turns there was a bug in IE’s implementation of VML related to radial gradient fills in arbitrary paths...
In the end, this was a show-stopper for rendering our pie chart using Raphael
Loving the simplicity. Can't wait to see where you take it!
I launched one. See all of the groupon deals in your town and others in one simple interface: http://www.groupongroupie.com/
I'm still working on a few kinks in the daily email list.
The daily inspirational emails from 21times really helped.
I launched the beta of my app in mid-November, although I must admit I did start mid-October so I'm hoping I still qualify!

I decided to build a revenue generating URL shortener. This was one of the first full projects where I basically did everything myself - research, design, development etc, which was a bit frustrating a times. It's ridiculous how unproductive my design days were compared to my development days, but I guess I'm just going against the grain there (I'd be interested to know how many people have 'mastered' both design & development.) That said, I learned quite a lot about the whole process, so definitely a good result.

I decided to launch before a lot of the esential functionality was complete (conversions, payments etc) just to get a feel for what people wanted, and most importantly if it was worth persuing the idea further. I'd probably do the same again next time, although I must admit I felt a bit helpless in the first week of launch when bugs were being uncovered/features were being requested and I was still working on the core.

I'm now onto marketing my app with my business partner. The market we're trying to is obviously insanely saturated, so it's a little frustrating at times, but I'm super motivated to get this out so lets hope we get some traction sometime soon :)

The URL of the app is http://shrtn.co
Great points, totally agree. Given the hype of HTML5 and canvas, we wanted to make sure to spread the word that it is not the tool that surpasses everything else.
Great site, fun summary of popular links.
One Small Step for Flash, One Decently-Sized Leap for Chrome
Chrome has been making strides over the past few months to increase its footprint on Windows computers across the world. Adobe Flash has been heading in the opposite direction as increasing pressure from tech giants such as Apple and Google have put them on the losing end of “what not to put on your website if you want it to work well now and in the future.”
What's great is that by design, the Raphael library was able to "teach" us this bug. It made the solution a tad harder ;) IE, when will you die?
Eel powered Christmas tree
Agreed. Looks like it has potential. Nice work!
Hey, thanks for the cool app! In the latest version, you changed search, links and social media to use the visitors ISP name instead of the search engine/link url/social media site, which is now only available when clicking each hit individually. Why did you change that? I'm not interested in seeing ISP names, but I do want a quick overview of which social media sites I'm being linked from.
Bullshit, possessions allow you to have more liberty, because they allow you to do more in shorter time than you would otherwise be able to.

What ends us costing you your liberty is being stuff you can't afford with no plan to be able to buy it later. "because I am worth it" cost you your freedom
I don't have a problem with the scanners. I have a problem with:

• Inconclusive reporting about the health effects.
• Conflict of interest with Deepak Chopra.
• Inconsistent attitude and treatment by TSA officials
• Firm statements that the machines do not store images,
and then stories about images being saved.
• Policies such as banning TSA employees from wearing
radiation measurement badges.
• Threats of $10k "civil lawsuit"
• Pat-downs for children.
• etc, etc.

The scanners are not the problem. The problem is the TSA.
I think the point was that you accrue "hiring debt" as you stop reading details in the resume so you can get through them faster (the benefit), then stop being as detailed in the screens, again so you can get through them faster. Each step, you are increasing the debt, because it moves on to the development team to pay that debt by taking more time out for interviews.

Of course, in this case, all the benefit goes to the manager and all the pain goes to the developers.
I don't have a real robotics background, but I do work in automation, so I have a pretty decent grasp on machines that do things. I'd put this at a 9 on the impossibility scale. I base this mostly on the fact that robotics and automated machinery is usually very specific to a certain task. However, if you change your thinking from "a robot that cleans for me" to "machines that clean different surfaces" then the problem becomes much easier, probably around a 5 on your scale. Think a Roomba for the floor, an automatic shower cleaner for the shower, etc. It's a lot easier to make machines that do one very specific, repeatable task rather than a general purpose robot (which is probably why they aren't very common). Microcontrollers are dirt cheap and easily programmable, so I see your best route to getting a cleaner bathroom to break up the specific tasks to dedicated machines. That also has the benefit of breaking the development into smaller and more easily managed chunks.
But it's top because of the design of this "Coming Soon" page - not because of what the product does.
If something is faster, but starts later it does not necessarily win. 15% to 35% longer initial release cycles is fine for a 1 month web app, but if it’s a game that takes 2 years to release, your starting from a deep hole.

PS: I suspect, TDD ends up being something of a premature optimization on larger projects, you write tests before you know which direction you want to take the project in. Don't get me wrong Tests are great from a process improvement standpoint, but every major shift ends up breaking way to many tests that you either don’t do it, or you just wasted all that time writing tests.
[Video] Sony revealed the PlayStation Phone, Android 2.3
Did you read the playboy interview that was posted recently? (http://www.playboy.co.uk/print/print-article/item77251/) Obviously we're going on Steve Jobs' word here, but he comes across as not nearly as hardcore as Woz but definitely technically competent.
>"We note that the Galaxy Tab is not available in a Wi-Fi only model, which would compare to the Wi-Fi only iPad at $499,"

It might be soon, though, and at $499:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/23/wifi-only-galaxy-tab-hits...
> where it comes to software, the execution is the idea.

I think that is nearly true from the customer's perspective. They (most likely) don't have any information about the idea and only know what they interact with in the form of the execution.
Your math doesn't seem to work.

For that to be true, more than a quarter would have to be in the bottom 25th percentile. (In fact, it still points to lisp being better than average).

Anyway,
The bottom 25th percentile of the competition is relegated to submissions that didn't run.

There was a bug (still is, I believe) in the lisp 'starter pack,' which caused the client to crash (It sent garbage to the server or something). So even the default Java starter submission would beat it.

Given the number of people who submitted once and walked away, I wouldn't read too much into it anyway.
Hey - there is a new settings section in the Settings.app where you can change this :)
PGs essay is great. To better understand how companies got good at selling us stuff I recommend watching the BBC special "the century of self." It goes over the how and the (amazingly recent) when of developed consumerization. It's available on google video :)
Kinect Hacking 101: Hack a Powershot A540 for Infrared Sensitivity.
Are you, by any chance, an expert in fluid dynamics?
BS. MS cared very, very much about what software you ran. Remember Netscape? Borland? Microsoft J++? They put pressure on OEMs not to ship Netscape that make anything Apple's done with iOS pale in comparison.

It may be hard to appreciate today, but in the 90's you couldn't start a software company without a ready answer for how you were going to survive if MS decided they had to kill your product to protect the Windows monopoly.
I launched http://imendi.com

It is basically some web app to learn other languages (Spanish, Portuguese and Czech right now, few will follow soon). Principle is very simple: you assign foreign words to its english equivalent.

I build this because I am learning Portuguese right now and it is hard to learn grammar without knowledge of basic words. There are around 300 most common words in the app right now.
Let's Make a JavaScript Framework: Free eBook
In that case: My setting was Referrer Url but the app showed Hostname. Fixed now after re-selecting it.
Thanks for the link, I've been missing multiple desktops (coming from Linux for the past few years) on my Windows 7 work machine.
As someone who has spent most of his career at a consultancy, people like this put food on my table.

The ones who end up being successful understand that they need to learn just as much about the process of software development and usability as we need to learn about their vertical. They understand that a good product is a result of give and take with your developers and analysts.

The ones who fail are the type A alpha dogs who just want you to do whatever they say because they are paying you a crap load of money per hour. They generally have the right mindset for an entrepreneur, they are trying to solve a problem they have. A couple of common problems are:

1) Everyone in their vertical may have this problem, but they assume everyone does business the same way that they do and follows the same process. They weigh down their system with too many requirements and business rules. As a result, they bury the one or two useful nuggets and end up with a product that is only suited to them.

2) They want to make some monolithic end to end solution right out the gate. They want to jump straight to being a WalMart sized franchise when they need to start as a mom and pop corner store (aka a MVP).
Something similar was said when Google bought Youtube. That said, the price does seem steep.
You could have written a program in any language. It just needed to accept certain command line options and send results to stdout in the proper format. They only provided "starter kits" for a few languages, but if you were willing to write a little extra code, you could have used anything.
This is very cool. I will be bookmarking.
You mean programmers will actually admit they can't do everything?
Fantasy.
BloggerCon Unconference Format (This is where the idea originated)
Very cool stuff. I really liked Ball Pool from Dec. 1st.
Really neat, but what if I get lost? Maybe some sorta thing to zoom out, not sure. But its really nice!
Don't forget Paul Erdos!
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/

http://vimeo.com/channels/oredev

http://player.microsoftpdc.com/session
Yeah that was a bug - sorry!
I sold my ipad for a galaxy tab and have been significantly happier with it. But I'm a geek and I'm still planning on replacing my parents' laptop with an ipad.

I'd like Android to be as polished as the iOS but with all the cool functionality available for those who are interested in tinkering. I'd also like an unlimited supply of money and universal acclaim...
How is this directly related to node and not servers in general?
I love the idea - the style, the artwork, the way the story progresses...

However I think that clicking on the "scroll" popup should either:

- Cause a slow continuous scroll all the way to the bottom of the page

- or (even better) take you between each speech bubble and reappear so it can be clicked again.

A really unique approach. It was nice to see something genuinely fresh and captivating instead of the usual "Web 2.0" style sign up pages.
I didn't launch but I made huge progress to my webgame

Looking for advice and suggestions to the alpha release version:

http://four2go.gumyum.com

Feel free to login as foxhop, no authentication needed, and try it out with a buddy.

Uses ajax long polling to update the games.
If it is the quickest path to money COBOL or any mainframe development is still top dog. There is virtually no competition in this space from new developers and has a seriously aging population. While the # of jobs in sheer volume is lower the jobs to head count is much higher. Just applying to a COBOL job with no experience but a "I'm willing to learn" will land you the job many times, if you have previous unrelated development experience. COBOL programmers are commanding $40 hr in India which is close to on par with a mid-level Java developer in the states. That said it's not sexy work.
It's just the latest buzzword to mean 'New!'. Couple of years ago everything was 'ajax'.
I am currently one of these guys in transition. Using Gladwell's 10,000 hour as a proxy for mastery. I estimate getting between 100 - 250 hours of programming time is good enough to get a working MVP out.

Does anyone think this is overly optimistic or unrealistic?
Maybe think about building separate robots for each task (tub, etc...) that can be permanently attached to wall or the ceiling near its work spot. Tasks could be accomplished using special arms for each sub-task. A lifting arm, a chemical spraying arm, etc...

It would take the "where am I" "where is the target" out of the robots equation. You could simply hardcode the desired movements into the robot. Then if you wanted to sell them you could build a learning routine into the code so the public could easily use it after bolting it to the walls in their houses.
swap.com is looking for .NET developers. We're in Boston and growing quickly.

No remote, unfortunately. Take a look here: http://www.swap.com/careers/

Please include "Hacker News Job Post" in the subject.
Works nicely in iOS too. Well done.
What does Amazon have to gain from hosting the files? They are not a political organization...they are a business. Businesses make decisions based on business principles. It's not that tough to understand.
Google Earth Engine
TSA setting up checkpoints in bus stations
This is actually a great idea. It is a glorified link sharing service, but the simplicity is nice. Zed is a smart guy, and I applaud his offbeat approaches to things. I have already linked this to a few artist friends so they can use it.
I launched my first Android app, Fanorona, a traditional board game from Madagascar. So far I've made four sales. At 99¢ each, minus Google's 30%, I've made $2.78. But it was fun. (I also listed it with Archos's AppsLib, but I don't expect to see any money there; they don't pay out until you hit $50.)

http://fanorona.thibault.org/android/