skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say the tasteful kind of SEO often aligns well with having good usability, site navigation being one of its aspects.
I am shocked at the market cap loss YHOO is experiencing right now due to this story.. I've seen breaking news drive stock price fluctuations but this is pretty extreme.
Consumer fuel cells | In search of forever
I don't like apple that much. They have some good ideas, but the general attitude of the company makes me suspicious. The iPhone is pretty good, but i don't like the way apple sells it. I wont be able to put my hands on one of those, because at least for now apple is not selling iPhones in Bulgaria. I like the macs too. I messed around for an hour or two with a friend of mines macbook. I like MacOS X but its not that better than Ubuntu(i prefer kubuntu though) Buuuut its too expensive. Its pricey to begin with, and when a few companies redistribute it from the US to Spain, and then to central Europe and then to Bulgaria it gets really expensive for me. MacOS x is not that good to make me buy a really expensive laptop. A Dell with ubuntu is pretty decent and i might get one in the fall(or maybe an eeepc) Anyway the iPhone is going to have some tough competition in many of the countries its going to ship. Especially with that activation thing. People in Romania are not going to be that patient, and if it had shipped in Bulgaria patience was going to be even a bigger problem. And the price for us is high, what's left for Nigeria. I admire the hackers at apple. There geniuses, but the marketing guys annoy me, maybe its just my Balkan scepticism and distrust. If you try to make a Bulgarian pay too much for something and make him wait until you make sure he does what you want him to do you are going to get your self a middle finger before you see $199 so its smart that they don't sell them here :D As for Google, I haven't read enough blogs about it's phone yet.
Firstly, congrats!

Try the gigs board on 37 signals: http://gigs.37signals.com/gigs
I did contract work for 5 years before founding a product company. Most of our work came from two sources: reputation and relationships. Reputation took several years to build, so it isn't 6-month solution.

Relationships, on the other hand, can be built quickly. The best relationships for us were relationships with other developers. We've gotten dozens of good leads this way, and have passed out dozens to other developers. What technologies are you going to use? Local user groups for those technologies can be a great place to start. Figure out where the local momentum is (Ruby? Python? User Experience? Startups?) and meet people.
This has me worried. I had a guy from Israel add me as a friend with a message that read, "I found you on X network and love your blog. I'll share more when you get in touch." I was curious so I did, and he's since sent me more info, including an invitation to join him in a celebration for his daughter's wedding. He even challenged me on Jetman.

...and all this within 24 hours.

It's bizarre because it's so personal. I haven't followed up -- I'm not going to -- but it has me wondering if I'm caught up in one of these schemes to develop a friend base and sell it off. Although that's a rosier thought than that of being stalked.
Should be titled "How not to write error messages"...
My current business was started with a co-founder that was nearly as far away as it is possible to be while remaining on the same planet (I was in Texas, he was in Australia...which some folks think is bigger than Texas, for some reason). I wouldn't have chosen a distant co-founder if I were "hiring" someone from a pool of roughly unknown choices, it just happened that I'd known him for about eight years and had worked with him numerous times (with him as a contractor working for my previous company).

There are circumstances where it can work fine, and my situation just happened to be one of those circumstances. I think the following has to be true for it to work extremely well:

1. Very clear boundary between your job and your co-founders job. If you need to touch the same files in your codebase more than once or twice a week, you're probably working on stuff that is too closely related. In my case, the software was my co-founders job, and everything else (including some UI work, but mainly the website to sell the product, the business-related paperwork and banking/taxes minutiae, marketing, documentation, etc.) was mine.

2. A good working relationship, where you both understand the others goals and understand what aspects of the task are to be done by each of you. Some sort of task management tool--we've used a bug tracker heavily from the very earliest days of the company--helps here.

3. Equal dedication to the goal. Since you aren't in the same room very often, it can be hard to be sure that everybody is doing their part. And if everyone isn't "firing on all cylinders" for the good of the company, it will fail.

But, you should keep in mind that the vast majority of Open Source projects are built and run by people who meet maybe once or twice per year. I worked for years on the Squid project and only ever met two of them in person (there are about 5 long-time core developers on the project) and spoke to a couple of others on the phone a few times. It doesn't stop them from getting great things done. MySQL AB was a famously distributed company--they had developers all over the world. If being acquired for $500M isn't a great success story, I don't know what is.

Though, I should also fess up to the fact that my co-founder and I now both live in the valley, a ten minute drive away, and we get together once a week for status meetings. We're still pretty distributed though...most of our peers that I've met out here work in the same office or in the same apartment. I don't know that I'd be more productive in such a circumstance, or that we'd be further along in our plans...but maybe.
Check this out: http://del.icio.us/popular/gis and http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/
My Co-Founder and I worked together at a consulting firm, we were in the same city. But when we decided to start working on our idea, we were in two different locations.

For the first 6 months we worked remotely, and for the last 3 weeks we've been in the same location. And honestly, the amount of productivity that exists being in the same place at this early stage is not achievable remotely.

1 week same location = 4 weeks remotely (In my opinion)
Heh, the corporate world still has its perks, that's sure, but being your own boss? Priceless. REALLY priceless, non just in the trivial Mastercard ad sense.
I tried to start taking notes, but im pretty chaotic and didn't seem to like it that much. And my handwriting is so horrible that i couldn't read some of them. I take notes from time to time in Knotes on my pc, but rarely and only when i find some idea that i think i might start working on sometime in the future(0.1% of those started, and only half finished). I just checked and i saw that i was supposed to by myself some beer last week :D
If the iPhone had a better built-in camera, I could totally see this happening with iPhoto. I guess the credit card thing is pretty easy to do if your bank allows statement export as XML or CSV (mine does).
Android will NOT take down the iPhone. It won't happen.

What I think will happen is that Android will offer a compelling alternative in a way that Apple's iPhone and iPod line have never seen before. While the iPhone will still be popular, we'll have a duopoly rather than the iPod's monopoly. Just my prediction, but maybe I'm just sick of the winner-take-all markets that technology has become.
Ask YC: Pros and Cons of building with Groovy 
Does anyone have experience with building a site in Groovy (Java based)? Would you recommend / not recommend it? Thanks.
I think I saw this exact same error when trying to buy the Business Edition of Google Custom Search. It took an email to customer support to get it fixed (I emailed Friday, and it was fixed on Monday, so not a terrible turnaround on solving the problem)...though I never knew what was wrong, because the error was absolutely devoid of meaning.
A tutorial probably wouldn't help, because most of us already know how to set that up. It's taking the time to do that which is the hard part.
Static Typing Breath Mints
Check out meetups, web 2.0 parties, and ppl you know within your hacking community.
Well, as I said - the guy I started it with is my best friend. I didn't just "work with him" - I lived with him for 2 years 10 years ago and have been in close contact ever since. We also used all the latest technology to break down that distance barrier... iChat (almost daily), regular trips up to Leicester (where he lives), etc. We still had major issues (who doesn't), but we pulled through and built a successful business that made money.
What's the fun in that product? Half the fun is having the vacation and then the other half is telling the stories later and arguing with your friends/family over how it really happened.

I do like the GPS camera idea, I could imagine that as an integrated Flip-like product.
Isn't it a bit presumptuous of Michael Arrington to suggest that this story is directly causing the stock price to fluctuate? I mean, seriously, it's TechCrunch.
That's probably overdoing it (especially the semi-automatic sending of gifts) but I genuinely think that a "help you select gifts" application would be a nice idea.

The way I see it working is that you start off by telling it basic data about your recipient (e.g. 55 year old male), and it makes suggestions one at a time, which you can rank from "not bad" to "terrible" depending on whether you think they'd like it. Every ten suggestions it gives you a list of "the best so far", and hopefully you'll eventually be sent off to Amazon or whatever to buy one.

This is actually a really good idea. It's not too impersonal, it's useful to a lot of people (much better than just browsing the shops looking for inspiration), it has a clear revenue stream, and people could be prompted to use it several times a year.
Re: question 2, a lot of people in these countries aren't even aware of the existence of brown rice.
This is also being reported on the front page of Reuters, fyi.
Did Steve Jobs demo a Flash-enabled iPhone 3G?
Would you pay $50-65 a month for Clearwire WiMax? Will 30 million people?
I can second this. I have two remote cofounders (~2 hours away), both are decade-long friends. So far working out well, but we've had instances where one of us needs to come up and stay with the other for a business week or two to get through some of the tougher collaboration pieces. If you already have a good, trusting relationship and high work-ethic then this can work pretty well via IM and email.

I've also worked a few years telecommuting myself, so I've learned a lot of the tricks to maximize the efficiency of that sort of situation. Using things like Jing, GoToMeeting, daily phone status meetings, and, lately, Chatterous, have helped us keep the communication efficiency high for our startup.

Definitely not for everyone, but it can work pretty well if you try hard.
My advice: Attend networking events, meetups etc.

Tell people you are looking for work, most of my work has come through friends (which you have seem to done)

Charge what your worth beginning day one, maybe cut your personal friends a discount, but doing work for next to nothing to build your portfolio is great, but trying to raise your price afterwards is very very hard.

To answer your original question: check dice.com and craigslist, but dice.com will be true contract jobs that don't want companies that consult, but contractor (most of the time) and craiglist will be full of build digg for 10$/hr types of people(maybe they'd hire you on for what your worth but I doubt it).
For free, provided you already own a Mac, I'm guessing.
Please don't. This site isn't about economics, or politics for that matter. If you want to discuss extremist economics (or any economics not strictly related to startups, for that matter), reddit would work out better, between the "Austrian" types (of which there are none here in Austria, but plenty there), and the far-left types.
Whenever I worry about working at a startup during an economic downturn, I remember reading about HP, which was founded during the depression.
"The GPS from your camera would provide the approximate location"

I thought GPS had great accuracy?
Most people who would worry about the privacy of their home's location would worry about a 100m diameter approximation of their home's location.
Other things you can get for that $500 include two nights at the Venetian in Las Vegas, a 1992 Buick Regal in need of serious engine work, or a couple of hundred gallons of milk.

You're comparing prices of two rather different devices.
I was going to post something similar, but then I wondered: If building something like the AppStore in Google's core competency, and the AppStore is similar to iTunes, why isn't Google already doing something like iTunes? Is it simply lack of a locked-in hardware platform like what Apple has?
Low latency is great, but I would take your concerns with a grain of salt. 80ms isn't bad.

boucher$ ping google.com
PING google.com (64.233.187.99): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 64.233.187.99: icmp_seq=0 ttl=241 time=83.783 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.187.99: icmp_seq=1 ttl=241 time=83.536 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.187.99: icmp_seq=2 ttl=241 time=81.096 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.187.99: icmp_seq=3 ttl=241 time=87.137 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.187.99: icmp_seq=4 ttl=241 time=84.813 ms
Looming Canadian DMCA - Worse than American Version.
Study: viewing a natural scene out a window reduces stress; a natural scene on a plasma tv does not
Paul, you should read some Stafford Beer - Brain of the Firm would be a good start. He replaces your sentiment:

"each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the size of the entire tree"

With a theorem that states that the amount of freedom of each person is in principle a computable function of the purpose of the organization.

Beer describes how organizations could be run using a model called the Viable System Model, which he hypothesises is not only sufficient but also necessary.

Large organizations do in fact seem to inhibit freedom to their own detriment, but in Beer's view this is not an inevitable outcome of large organizations, it is simply a failure to properly design them.

Anyway, I highly recommend his stuff. Brain of the Firm describes his main theory, while Decision and Control is a fantastic voyage through his work in cybernetics in the 50s and 60s. It's all highly thought-provoking stuff. I tend to re-read his work every 3-4 years and always achieve new insight from it.
I don't get a great feeling from Groovy. It seems to inhabit something of a no-man's land between Java versions of popular languages like Python and Ruby, Scala and other more experimental languages, and plain old Java. That's just a vague sensation though, based on reading things over the years.
Listen to yourself. You could be speaking Chinese right now with a similar effect. If my dog could understand (and speak) your language, he could have explained why licking his own balls isn't disgusting. He's cool with it.
One iPhone To Rule Them All
A friend of mine tried Groovy for real work a while back and he didn't seem very impressed with it from a robustness/polish and performance point of view. It has to be said that he's a heavily IDE-pampered Java head, so he might have higher standards of polish than you (or I) do.

German c't magazine recently did a feature on it and they seemed to like it.

Personally, it's a bit too close to Java for my tastes; there are plenty of decent JVM languages out there if that's a strong criterion for you. Clojure's my favourite, but it's absolutely not the way to go if you're not into functional programming.
More Top Yahoos Heading for the Exits
Nutbag Yahoos Still in Dreamland ?
My advice is if your question is 'should I pass on xx cofounder?' the question is yes. You need to be SURE with any cofounder.

If it is somebody you have worked with and know well, it may not matter if they are in a different time zone, but if you have to ask: it probably will.
I love the humility:

> Yahoo Stock is down sharply based on this story and a follow up by Reuters.

It was the "follow up" by one of the most widely read and respected news sources. Once it hit Reuters and WSJ it was up on Drudge, CNN, etc. That caused the stock to dive, not a mention on TC inbetween Twitter rants.
Oh, duh. That makes much more sense now. :)

Good idea to include that!
Why? This would be outsourcing Yahoo's heart and soul. It's a major game changer and has dramatic long term effects in terms of growth and probability.
More like Lada giving its employees Toyotas to drive.
I think GPS receivers (order-of-magnitude: $50?) are still quite a bit more expensive than, say, Bluetooth ($5?) or even Wifi ($10?).

It'd be easier to convince people to get a camera with BT/Wifi, and then have it silently ask your phone's GPS where you are. You could sell it as a fairly cheap way to offload photos without a cable.
Yahoo is not dead. Yahoo Sports gets more hits than ESPN. They have plenty of money making services to offer besides search and are still one of the most visited sites in the world. The days of 80 P/E ratios are over, but that doesn't mean they are dead. Yahoo will be fine.
Having used RoR and Spring fairly extensively, I was convinced that Groovy, and more specifically Grails, would be great to work with. Fun? Check. New? Check. Bleeding edge unstable? Check. Extremely difficult to figure out how to do things you already knew how to do with Spring or RoR? Check.

I just wasn't able to ever get efficient with the platform and ended up having to figure out how to expose Spring internals to do the stuff I wanted to do.

I would recommend building something with Grails if it's a personal project but not for anything commercial or production.
Qik Supporting The iPhone Next Week, Live Video Streaming from iPhone
China denies hacking congressional computers
Yahoo and Microsoft No Longer Speaking.  Google Deal May Be The Only Option Left
How do you know what you're worth?

I've read "post your salary" threads and other things that show up on yc or programming.reddit, but I still can't really tell.
Basic thermodynamics (Joules needed to pop a corn kernel) says no. Just think about popping popcorn with a microwave: at least 600W do it in a few dozen seconds at least. How the hell could 8 Watts (4 phones * 2W per phone PEAK power per the GSM standard) do it in a few seconds? Answer: it did not, the vids are faked. The phones simply do not have enough power even to heat the seeds, lest to pop them.
Yahoo! Announces Microsoft Talks Have Concluded
You didn't say what sort of contract work.

You are doing a "startup" yet getting into contract work is also a "startup." They are both businesses and any business takes time to build up to a point where you can make a living from that business. It also takes time. There will likely be times when you are freelancing where you don't have enough time or energy left over at the end of the day to work on your other projects.

Networking is definitely important for freelancing. You have to let people know what you know and that you are available. Finding someone to work on a project can be hard and you need to be on the top of the short lists of candidates when people are looking for help.

Another way to start freelancing is by establishing yourself as a known expert in niche communities. This takes time and effort but when you get to that point and people are looking for dev help in that niche then your name will come up.
I'm Done With Private Beta
not if your browser caches pages...
I've found small contract jobs through Dice and jobs.perl.org.

http://www.dice.com/
http://jobs.perl.org/
If you have cash in reserve until the end of the year, why not get serious and launch your own product based startup?

With some emphasis in marketing, you could quite easily bank $5k-10k from the product and be in a good position to show off your project (that is already making moola!) for winter YC.
Not that I know of. In the US/UK you need to be a member of the bar/law-society to practice as a lawyer/solicitor (i.e. represent clients) but there is no reason why the actual work itself cannot be outsourced.

In fact most of the menial work in many law firms are done by juniors (new graduates) or legal-executives ("executives" being people who have little or no law qualification but are able to do the work).

In my old firm (http://www.lawdit.co.uk), which I setup years ago with my friends, this was and still is the case in many ways.

I have seen the internals of many other leading firms (Allen & Overy, Ashurst, etc.) that also do this.

Hence, regardless of how powerful the legal lobby against an uptake of such outsource practice, I dare say, the bottom-line and almighty dollar will win in many cases.

After all, if you are getting the same/better quality at a lower cost and faster turn-around (3 people working on a task instead of 1) what would you do?

The precedents have already been set in other fields/industries so I expect it will not cause as much furore as one might imagine and will probably start with the thin end of the wedge i.e. no-win-no-fee farms.

Time will tell :)
Disappearing car doors
funny, I was just thinking that. I'd love to work on twitter, not so much because I care about the service, but because it's fundamentally hard, and that's cool. Personally I wonder why someone hasn't already transitioned Twitter to a publish-subscribe architecture internally, and used a bunch of queues to buffer the impact of load spikes ( a slow tweet is not the same as a dropped tweet! ). But who knows if MySQL is really the best backbone for that anyways.

I will be interested to see where Zawodny does go. His tools have been worth a lot to me over the years, and he communicates well, so he ought to provide a ton of value to whatever his next gig may be.

Too bad for Yahoo. This and other high-profile departures may be coincidental, but rule #1 of a successful career is that you don't burn your bridges. So the kind words on exit don't really mean anything to me. I've pulled this sort of stunt before myself, as I swam away from a sinking ship whispering sweet nothings to the crew.
The Uncomfortable story to the Background of Facebook
Because I went broke at a previous startup and am paranoid about having cash in the bank.
I don't have an iPhone right now. I'm paying the "new" iPhone rates on my Blackberry as it is, so it is cheaper.
What's Next for Microsoft and Yahoo!
I'm not sure the SDK runs w/ XCode which is free but I believe OS X only - the language is Objective-C so it could be built on a PC but I'm not sure how you'd emulate.
I think when he says "the story" he means "the widespread reports of this news", not "this particular post on TechCrunch".
And notice a flaw in all "what I am billing threads": they are positing a 40-hour week average, whole year round. Maybe in a hyperactive market it is possible to do that, but I think it would be fair to posit at most 2/3 uptime (out of about 250 work days per year). Why so low? You will spend considerable periods in downtime, looking for gigs.
Learning by doing is often the best way to learn and get up to speed.

I am very happy to hear the opportunities afforded to those of poorer backgrounds in India by this scheme too.
actually it would be done with '5>>', which is a lot faster, or a command such as '>iB' (indent right inner block)

i've written many times why Vim is uber, but the short of it is that Vim is a high level editor
Qik Announces iPhone Support
I think blogger took some license for alliterative niftiness.