skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Google is as responsible for this as a phonebook company would be for giving you a bad phone number.

Generally, I agree, except that there is an important distinction to be made - the phonebook generally doesn't rank businesses into any order other than alphabetical. Yes, the phonebook has 'paid listings' in addition, which are bigger and more prominent, but google has these too, and like the phonebook these are labelled as such.

But the general google listings are sorted into a form of meaningful order, people expect (rightly or wrongly) that the higher up in the general listings a result is, the better it is likely to be because more people use it.

I'm not sure what the best solution to the issue is, perhaps just to accept that google isn't the best resource for finding reputable businesses, and try and educate people on the alternatives.
A Geek Of 1909
Programming Languages at MailChimp
I'm especially interested in the statistic that great performers rarely spend more than 4.5 hours/day on their craft. I believe it, but I wonder where he pulls that number from.

Any ideas?

It's the sort of thing that seems especially important to my goal of doing great science without neglecting my family and other interests (http://wayofthescholar.com).

The real question, though, is how do you use that 4.5 hours?
I just tried the demo problem, site's great, hopefully I can use it next time we're hiring.
How will Skills be different from http://www.brainbench.com/?
10 CSS3 Properties you Need to be Familiar with
Just happened to read Forbes write up on Reed Hastings (Netflix) as their CEO of the year. Turns out he has an M.S. C.S. from Stanford.

Jobs did some programming and soldering logic boards. Gates wrote a BASIC interpreter with Paul Allen. Zuckerberg was in Harvard C.S., I believe, and wrote the first implementation of Facebook himself. Bezos has a B.S. in C.S. and Electrical Engineering. Larry, Sergey, Jerry Yang all Stanford C.S. grad school drop outs.

So, I am having a hard time coming up with a spectacularly successful software company where the founders "just needed a programmer."
Sure, except the surface area for a man in the middle attack has expanded from, roughly, someone on the same network as you to anyone anywhere on the Internet.
I blame Steve Jobs; I honestly do.

EDIT: I believe Steve Jobs is largely responsible for popularising the idea of HTML5 as a Flash replacement. He's also popularised the idea that HTML5 is technology that can be used now, when the situation is actually a lot more complicated. I think that without Steve's input, HTML5 wouldn't have reached the wider public's consciousness in the way it has - and there'd be far less misuse as a result.
Amazon bowing to political pressure is not speculative:

"Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, was among the congressmen who pressured Amazon to stop hosting Wikileaks. He told AFP this morning that he plans to question Amazon about its relationship with Wikileaks."

http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/12/wikileaks-kicke...
5 ImageMagick command line examples
In the marginal case where you only care about one iteration, then TDD is a little bit worse. However, I am confident that without TDD, your second iteration will be slower - you'll get less done, and your bug rate will still be higher.
You have that. It's called the Android market. "Well, just let the market decide" is a naive/overly simplistic approach. There is an issue of people being able to find the apps their looking for and it's not easy to solve. The more rubbish apps you have the harder it is for people to find things they like. Eventually your app store gets the reputation of being filled with crap.

The market does come into play though. For the app stores. Last I heard, your Android app making 50% of what your Apple one does is a realistic expectation.
Gowalla 3 is out, watch out Foursquare
KnightNews Challenge Troll Entry
To be fair, you said "serious business" not "profitable business."

Lots of serious businesses are not currently profitable and lots of unserious businesses are (the Cheezburger network of sites pulls in something like 7 figures).
20 Tips you need to learn to become a better PHP Programmer
Let the customers know in advance if you're going to need something weird. Publish a list somewhere.

For example, if a customer wants a loan, publish a list of exactly what ID is accepted. Make sure the list is accurate otherwise it will be useless. Does a driving license count? Sometimes? Always? Never? Be specific.
Julian Assange Fired From IT Job At Pentagon
Nicely put. here are my 2 cents, if you choose Java
1. Don't try to do too much (JSF, Spring, JMS, Hibernate etc) its easy to get lost in the jungle there. Take small steps.
2. Try to contribute to some open source project like Lucene or Play!
3. Java jobs are aplenty in Pune region, so best luck!
"the best example you can set for your kids ... is to pursue your dreams, not an income"

My father did this, in several ways, and failed massively at all of them, and yet for reasons I can't really articulate I 100% agree with this.
When Canvas doesn't cut it: Raphael.js
This is a good post. I'd take it one step farther. To say the idea is nothing without the execution still (kind of) suggests that they are different things. I think that where it comes to software, the execution is the idea.

I wouldn't quite claim that ideas aren't worth much. I know a few academics, and they are rightly careful about sharing their ideas before they get far enough with the implementation (lab work, publications) to ensure that they will be credited. If I'm going to agree that "idea stealing" is a problem, then I'm committed to agreeing that raw ideas do have some value.

Software can be like this, but in general, I think most software "ideas" are more similar to an idea for a novel, painting, or screenplay than a blockbuster pharmaceutical drug. Give two programmers the same "idea", and you'll end up with two different products - maybe almost as different as two different novels. Hell, give two writers or programmers the same detailed outline, and you'll probably end up with two different outcomes.

When I was in college, "business types" walked through shopping malls and appended "dot com" to what they saw, and thought they had a valuable idea. Now, people tend to prepend "social networking for" or "wireless". "Social networking - for surfers! for moms!"

Now one warning - however much I may feel this way, the law isn't necessarily on my side. IANAL and everything, but some IP lawyers came to talk to a startup I worked at once to tell us about how important it is to shut the fuck up, and evidently simply being "the programmer" doesn't mean you have to be included on a patent. So to that extent, the law does recognize a separation between idea and implementation.
Lightweight Open Source Multiple Desktops works for Windows 7
Thanks for feedback! We are planning to implement site themes feature so users can choose the one they like.
It's funny that I can never remember exactly which options to use when I use ImageMagick (or GraphicsMagick), but in about 5 seconds, I can Alt-tab to the browser window that's open, google search for the switches I need, then alt-tab back the CL, and finally run my command. All in less time than it takes for Gimp to open.
Heh, some ISOs need to be updated. 1976 initially published and 2004 it was updated. Makes you wonder what other standards are out there, and are ridiculously out of date.
It's interesting to me: This talk was much broader than any talk I've heard from him before. I can imagine watching this and thinking "this is all pointless fluff", if I were in a certain mindset. But having worked on a project for a while and encountered this exact problem, I think this talk is genius. (Because the non-fluff, the concrete examples are coming from my own experiences.)
It's a great idea, I use hacks to get around this problem from time to time. However, I've never bothered using a service to solve this problem because I can't be bothered to sign up. You made it easy enough I think I'll finally give it a try.
Although a good article, this is mostly from being a amateur PHP programmer (less then a year) to a middle weight.
There are many comments here that he won because of his programming/thinking skills versus using the Lisp language, and I think this true in comparison to the other contestants. However, one thing he mentions that is an interesting piece of the puzzle -- and a common theme in language competitions that include Lisp -- is:

Lisp doesn’t get in my way as much as other languages. After getting hooked I learned to value the interactive development environment, the object system, etc.. What’s good about Lisp is rapid development and speedy execution.

This might be a small effect, and you can have good programmers in every language, but if he was just as familiar with Java as he was with Lisp, could he have accomplished the same results in the same time with Java? How would the code look?
Probably best to make the default on the homepage somewhat more readable though.

Who's your target market for this product? The styling on the homepage is pretty tech/minimal, but if you're going after the home user maybe something more light-hearted would be appropriate? I can see people using the videos to create custom Christmas or Birthday messages, but style-wise that market probably respond better to something more like: http://www.moonpig.com/uk/
Clickable: http://notefeeder.heroku.com
do we own the app after ? or should we share royalties with Gamesalad? someone knows?
I hate to say me too, but definitely me too. I'm convinced that I procrastinate more because of being told how smart I was as a kid, as opposed to being petrified of not working hard enough.
awesome, thanks. Let me know how it goes if you have a second.
spam - flagged
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I am a marketer. I am also fairly technical and think that I have a firm understanding of how things work but lack the capabilities/aptitude to properly code them. I managed to cobble together a functional prototype of some analytics software we needed. It was fine until it became quickly apparent that my coding skills suck despite a more or less understanding of it all. We had to hire a coder to write it all from scratch to be able to handle hundreds of thousands clicks per day. It has been bumpy but it was still the right decision in order to allow our business to grow.

My point is, even if you want something bad enough that you will sit there for a couple of weeks straight to cobble your vision together, nothing beats having it done by a professional that understands what they are doing.

I wish still we had a full time developer and ui designer available to us to make my much grander/awesome/profitable vision a reality. In time we will...
And, they have their own TechCrunch: I believe most writers for ReadWriteWeb are Portland-ers.
The trouble with thinking "I have magic beans, I just need water!" is that you don't understand water. You don't know good water from bad. You don't really know how much water to use and when. You can't watch the beans grow and adjust your watering schedule because you think it's all about the beans. You don't get water.

That's my problem with "I just need a programmer" entrepreneurs. I can work out how to get paid, but I can't work out how to make them understand software well enough to make good business decisions about a software company.

(The same thing is true of "I just need a salesperson," of course.)
Savvy businessmen know the difference between discounted nonrefundable tickets and full-fare refundable tickets.

I think he should leave this in his blog since it's very helpful information for prospective vendors and customers. They should know that he doesn't read contracts when he makes a purchase and simply assumes that the contract favors him. When the vendor does not honor the contract he imagined, he'll create a scene at the vendor's business demanding that their customer service agents honor the imaginary contract. When they don't do so he'll publish a screed in his company blog saying that it's all the vendors fault and their customer service reps are just so rude.

I'd say this is valuable information for anyone who's thinking of doing business with this guy.
Stirling engines are wonderful, especially the Low Temperature Differential (LTD) ones such as these.

You can make your own from a can, balloon, cardboard, some wood, string and wire, that can be powered by a candle or ice cubes.

Wonderful toys.
ClickyTouch for Clicky arrives for iPad
Bit by bit... monit restarts the server a defined number of times per second. Then it stops if the service fails to start. If the service is not running, nagios dispatches the snmp traps, sms-es, ims and all the rest.
I used to be one of those people before I learned how to program. Best investment I've made in the last 10 years.
It might be worth having a chat with these guys: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959041

They have some iPhone apps that they're looking for someone to take over but aren't sure whether or not they'd be able to hire someone for their budget. You might be able to help.
"They are impressive pieces of collaborative work. I do not judge people buying music from iTunes, nor do I judge people that "pirate" music. Each to his/her own."

I do. Because the people pirating music have pretty much destroyed the music industry. The same is happening to any industry that can be digitized.
Should Amazon duplicate Wikipedia contents?
I don't really like the use of CC contents by amazon with this experiment. How about a greasemonkey script or similar from the to add that feature to the actual wikipedia and let their users decide if they want it or not.

I found out about this in RWW http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/i_cant_believe_readwriteweb_hasnt_written_about_th.php.
Excellent interview.
There seems to be a partial fix in the 4.0 codebase:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147777#c259
> where it comes to software, the execution is the idea.

I strongly disagree with that. Although ideas and execution (i.e. software) are both "nothing more" than information, they don't have much in common. Also, ideas are refined as well as changed during execution - that is, our perception of the big picture changes as we get more information about the details.

> Give two programmers the same "idea", and you'll end up with two different products

I fully agree with that. BTW, this somewhat contradicts the first statement.
There is no next. I don't want to argue.
Source: http://books.google.com/books?id=ow7OAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA53...
> When you tell someone "this is a O(logn) operation" they do expect log performance.

If you look in the appendix of your algorithms textbook that explains big-O notation, you will see this is not the actual definition. I'm sorry if my usage confused you, but I was using it in the formal sense of "there exists an N such that there exists a c such that for all m > N, f(m) <= c*g(m)". In your log example, we can choose N = 2 and c = 1.

> We can just as happily declare most functions double-exponential in complexity, but what use is that? It would be one of those formally correct but practically useless definitions.

For saying "f is doubly-exponential", use Theta. For saying "f is doubly-exponential or smaller", use big-O.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation#Family_of_Bachma...
I believe it used to be the case that a very large amount of processing was done when the bank wasn't "open". This was done after 3pm, but before 5pm, so the employees could go home. Any customer transactions done after 3pm were queued to be dealt with the following day.

Banks used to close their doors at 3pm - I remember this distinctly when I had my first job. Yes, things are different now, and the processing done is less batch-like, but there are still large amounts of regulation that need to be adhered to, and sometimes not taking transactions is the most efficient way to do that.

It's only sometimes the fault of the bank.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6273202.stm

Larger lung capacity, larger heart, lower lactic acid levels, higher Vo2 max.

Also: "Spaniard Miguel Indurain, who took five successive [Tour de France] titles, had lungs so big they displaced his stomach, leading to his trademark paunch. Indurain's lung capacity was eight litres, compared to an average of six litres."
I am so proud to proclaim that I was there at that talk in person, and I watched Rich inspire a whole generation of programmers with that talk.
Wow, I'm really impressed how quickly this page loads!

Or, maybe I'm just too used to the masses of those annoyingly slowly loading blogs.
Auto Transport Loveland, Colorado
Everything except exceptions and RTTI.

STL/boost are debatable.
Thanks for the comment! Just tried it and yep, it doesn't really work huh ;) We will take it into one of our future releases. Thanks!
"I don't know about you but I've not been so excited about a bacteria since my STD tests came back clean."

Professional journalism at its finest, and a rewording of the existing speculation.
http://vipidme.com
In case anyone's not familiar with Javascript/HTML/CSS and is curious how this works, it's actually pretty simple and elegant.

Ben is just an image positioned in the centre of the screen using a CSS property called "position: fixed", which means he doesn't move even when the content scrolls.

The walking animations are created using a technique called CSS sprites, where instead of having multiple images, you just create one and move it within the frame so that only one image is visible at a time - sort of like a film strip. The CSS property to do that is called "background-position" - and you can see an original image here: http://benthebodyguard.com/images/bensprite.png

The whole thing is driven by a function called "scrollEventHandler", which is registered with the javascript "onscroll" event, so it's triggered every time you scroll. It updates the animations for Ben, the thief, train, textboxes etc based on how far you've scrolled in the document. Source here: http://benthebodyguard.com/js/speechBubbles.js

The other animations (flickering lights and such) are all animated gifs, and the background is just a really long image: http://benthebodyguard.com/images/city-background.jpg
Asking what tool was used to make an image is, often, like asking which text editor was used to write a program. Unless whatever tool they used had some unique capabilities to make it easy to create images in the same style, it's irrelevant (because someone skilled enough to do it with one tool could do it with another).
Relevance has openings for Ruby/Rails and Clojure developers and project managers with experience in agile. Our headquarters are in Durham, NC, but we are open to hiring remote developers (full-time and contractors) that are on the east coast.

For details see: http://thinkrelevance.com/jobs and http://howwework.thinkrelevance.com/

No agencies please.
Ask HN: How did everyone do with Launch an App Month?
I know there were a lot of people working on launching an app by the end of November.

Well, it's December 2, so I figure it's time for some show and tell.

How did everyone do?
bit.ly announces API hackathon winners
If you don't normally wear them, remember to keep the emergency suit (although in a weird sort of way you could call that seasonal).
Aptana Studio (http://aptana.com)
Too bad this release is only for the iPhone... Android users will have to wait until early 2011 - can't wait!
that was me 2 years ago. I considered elance (couldn't afford it), recruited 1 cs buddy I went to high school with (he was busy doing his own things), so I figured I had no choice but to learn to program. I found HN, which introduced me to Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial, and I just launched my first app: http://www.fanscription.com
Oh, and I'm an Econ/Business Major.

"Just Do It" -Nike
Qatar To Host The FIFA World Cup 2022
Video: Best Kinect hacks
Nice! How about some keyboard shortcuts to navigate articles without clicking?
More like regular beans and magic water.
daemontools is a beautiful thing, personally I think its a much better idea to have a general purpose tool for this kind of thing. I'm not sure why everyone feels the need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to managing background services.
I don't know much about Clojure (I wrote my last Java/Lisp code years ago) however I strongly recommend this talk to every developer. As good as it is at clarifying the development process, I also enjoyed it a lot too because it was thought provoking and funny at times.
I developed ClickyTouch, and would love some user feedback from anyone (a)using Clicky Analytics, and (b) their experience with ClickyTouch and what gaps are missing. Really keen to improve
JetBrains WebStorm. Basically a stripped down version of IntelliJ IDEA for javascript. Moved to it from Aptana and have never looked back.
Err. what's wrong with comparing iOS and Android?
http://jonbeebe.tumblr.com/post/1119939987/corona-sdk-review
Or if you just want to see what it's all about without registering: http://vipidme.com/select/
Well, sort of. TDD defines bugs as "things the unit tests catch". And the unit tests are very narrow.

So yes, you record fewer bugs, fix those narrow cases quickly and pretend you're done.

Then it gets to the field, and whatever you didn't catch becomes a 3-alarm fire.

I vastly prefer shakedown tests of the sort where you launch a 'bot army' on cloud servers to thrash the app. Especially if there is Any network/client/server component.
I've actually found Numpy/SciPy to have a lot of trouble in basic maximization routines as compared with Matlab.
I wonder if this is the same Lynn Marsh? http://www.google.com/patents?id=3QxXAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&...
Durham NC
- Remote developers working on east coast.

Relevance has openings for Ruby/Rails and Clojure developers and project managers with experience in agile. Our headquarters are in Durham, NC, but we are open to hiring remote developers (full-time and contractors) that are on the east coast.

For details see: http://thinkrelevance.com/jobs and http://howwework.thinkrelevance.com/

No agencies please.
Hype.la: the Starving Artist's Ad Network
IPhone clones (translation)
Best iPhone Apps To Assist You During Pregnancy | Technorox
Facebook probably counts somewhat. The Winklevii needed "just a programmer". Too bad the programmer didn't want to be "just a programmer".
Use Upstart.
Have been thinking of switching to Clicky for my analytics - this could just push me over the edge. Looks a nice app.
Doing beats talking every day of the week. Which is what a lot of these callers mentioned probably do wrong.
Redux the Future Comcast
Good point. Before concluding that things have permanently changed, maybe we should wait for some large leaks for which the leaker does not get caught.
TDD defines bugs as "things the unit tests catch". And the unit tests are very narrow.

I think that if you read the article linked, you'd find that the study didn't work that way. Any study that measures different things between experiment and control groups is not going to be sound.

Then it gets to the field, and whatever you didn't catch becomes a 3-alarm fire.

I've worked on TDD projects, and those are definitely are counted as bugs. Severity 1.