skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you spend time to contribute to the Rails community, you can easily find consulting jobs and get to keep 100% of your work (without the middleman). I'm not sure I understand the story here.

I think the idea here is that the company is taking on the risk of finding actual work for him. If you are freelancing, sure, you have 100% of your time to do whatever you want. But you also need to eat, and that means you waste time hunting down jobs, taking specs, communicating with clients, etc. If you work for a company, someone else does that and you just do the work as it's assigned. The rest of your time is for open source stuff.

I am in a situation like this. Sure, my time is billed at $175 an hour, and I only see a small porition of that. But usually I have about 90% of my time to work on open source projects, and I get the same paycheck (and insurance benefits) every month.
Mockups is infinitely less powerful at generating code than an IDE.

Its goal is to help you think about your UI (i.e. your innovations) without getting in your way.

It is designed both for developers who want to iterate on their ideas before firing up their IDE and also for people who might know about usability and software requirements but who might not know what an IDE is (product managers, UX designers).
U.K. scientists demo graphic passwords
Hi. I updated the site to add more "buy" links. Hopefully it will help some.
The beginning of the end for the ubiquitous mouse.
Fair enough. I guess I would like a lower-level environment so I can make my own choices. Having the low level available means I don't have to live with someone else's choices; I can just write (or find) my own language and have a reasonable chance of it performing well.

Sure, there are things like parenscript that abstract away JavaScript now. But SBCL or Chicken Scheme is faster than JavaScript in most cases, and have more language features. So if I could just make one of those emit LLVM code, I'd have all my favorite language features in the browser with no speed compromises.

As an engineer, I know I have to make compromises... but if I don't have to compromise, I'm not going to complain about it ;)
A tax on buggy software
Giles Bowkett had a post a month or so ago pointing out the same thing. PG's response was basically that admin policing should cut off people trying to game the system with irrelevant content:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196751

Presumably, he's hoping that by limiting the scope of the content, he can limit the number of interested participants and therefore the scale of the site.
>There’s a reason that Apple has always been the choice of artists and musicians. The machine itself is artful. Yeah, it’s expensive, and it crashes, but it’s artful. And that counts for a whole lot.

What? Apples crash?! Unpossible--Apples are the greatest computers evar!
I think the author is talking about the average person, not about you. The Internet makes it very, very easy to tune into something trashy.

I'm not sure it's productive to claim that a culture of ignorance is less important than other problems. If you don't fix that, everything else gets worse. If people start to believe that it's important to do an actual job well, not to vote in a giant election or a TV show or a social news site, many problems will disappear.
Good points. Regarding HN, I think the basic concept of submitting links by community members works. What HN needs to fight is mainstreamisation and spamming. So far, HN fares satisfactory.

What remains to be seen is, if the relatively high quality of front page can be maintained for the long time by using technology and algorithms alone, and if not, what kind of editorial control would be suitable.

p.s: Why every article about community tech sites have to bash slashdot? Slashdot is alive and well, outliving both reddit and digg.
Since this could apply to your life being run on a different substrate, with no actual effect on your perception, I don't see how this is a useful question.
How to Say Nothing in 500 Words
Ha, never thought of it that way but a lot of times you are sitting in class and think up something on your desk so I guess so
> "I thought to myself: this could increase productivity so much. Even with my huge Apple monitor, I'm always needing to move things around when I’m deep in a project."

No really, he doesn't know about Spaces.

Overall, I agree with the article doesn't go anywhere. He likes some things that exist on Mac too, he doesn't like other things (command line) that are on Mac too. He doesn't seem to know enough about what he's talking about to give any interesting insights on his test.
Print friendly versions are usually reader friendly too. http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=prin...

Though this one has got some advertising on the print friendly version now.
Unfortunately the page itself links to lots of internal pages which are broken but clearly designed to trick the search engines (if the PHP scripts worked properly).
What do you guys do to manage your servers? Have you scaled to a point where you automatically scale and downsize servers?
Just wait until the tech crunch crowd realizes that this is the place that folks like Fred Wilson gets his leads and you'll start to see folks gaming the system. I mean Fred already has said he gets news from here, i'm sure other VC's do too. Once the techcrunch biz dev types realize that, then you'll see the attacks on the system.
the author hits the nail on the head. isolate, isolate, isolate all the moving parts of your system. as every talking head pundit has pointed out since they were slapped in the face by amazon and their massive 800 pound cloud, the cloud is where computing will be done in the future.

even today in my it group we use a citrix cloud to provide remote access services for our users. the cloud concept isnt new but it is being used in new and interesting ways. now... where is the hp/ibm/microsoft/sun cloud? where is the emc storage cloud and the vmware compute cloud?
Cut and paste one line of code to make any website editable
This list is mis-titled. It should be called "Most Costly Adwords Clicks" because it doesn't account for search volume.

The highest paying search terms are the ones that generate the greatest revenues. Daily Revenue = (# clicks/day)(cost per click).
User Experience Talk
Or thesixtyone.com, which (over)uses an almost identical growl clone.
You've established yourself here as valuable community member. But this sounds to me like the textbook definition of "kneejerk reaction."

You could make a (calm!) argument that the author has chosen a poor coping method, but this? No, this comment of yours says a lot more about you than it does about the article.
That's not a refutation. Find something specific I said about painting that he has shown to be false, not merely also true of some other field.

For example, pick one of the list of statements I made about painting that he quotes in that list in the middle, and explain how you feel he has refuted it. Or any other statement about painting he quotes.
Not sure why michigan personal injury lawyers are near the top of the list
Are you joking? I just went there and made a cool 187.2 million! Now, all I have to do is complete a few offers and then get a few of my friends to do the same...
Time.com Has a Shitty Grasp of Economics
Probably the most significant thing in this article: I wholeheartedly agree that for everyone else, it should ship with one desktop interface...

I don't know if this has changed recently, but when I installed Ubuntu, it did not ask me to choose -- it defaulted to Gnome. If you later wanted KDE, you had to install it separately (or you could have installed the KDE-only Kubuntu in the first place). It makes me suspect that the friend that set up the Ubuntu box went through the additional trouble of installing both environments, so that the author was not playing with a vanilla install:

http://www.watchingthenet.com/switch-between-gnome-and-kde-d...
Great article. All hackers need more traffic.
I'll tell you what I told the last recruiter who tried to use that as a reason to convince me to leave:

Yahoo has way too many managers. We need more of them to leave. Yahoo is in way too many products. We need to cut a lot of those. Yahoo has bought a lot of startups, and former CEOs rarely make happy long-term employees. On the whole, the resignations are a good thing, from where I'm sitting.

Yahoo's a VERY big company, and it's structured as this strange conglomerate of smaller teams. Not all orgs are created equal, unfortunately. Some managers are better than others. I've worked in 4 different teams here, and been involved in 1 other product. I've had 6 different direct managers. My experience with each has been different. After one of those experiences, I was about to walk out the door, but they made me an offer I couldn't refuse. On the whole, it's been the best job I've ever had, financially, artistically, and educationally.

If you're willing to speak up and pursue what you want to work on, Yahoo's a great place to be. The ceiling is very high for engineers, especially if you're really into PHP or C++ or Javascript.
On ESR's continual changing of the Jargon File..
I actually tried to submit this with the more precise title -- 'Differences in the “Portrait of J. Random Hacker” between the 1996 joint GLS-ESR “New Hacker’s Dictionary” edition and the current ESR-curated “Jargon File verson 4.4.7″', only to be met with the 90-character limit. I can see where that comes from, though, looking at reddit and news.ycombinator.
If you define alcoholics as the set of people who, for whatever reason* , tend to drink to excess, that is, who as a rule do not drink moderately, then these health benefits are irrelevant to them. For example, if they try to drink moderately, but only succeed half the time and otherwise seriously overdo it, then the net effect on health is likely to be very negative.

* The debate whether alcoholism is a disease, a personality trait, or something else entirely is irrelevant here.

The health benefits of alcohol are an unusual case, also -- many of its benefits are related to other chemicals that frequently accompany it, such as polyphenols in red wine. This does not apply to "LSD/Cocaine/Heroine" (sic), though there are comparable benefits for coffee and tea (particularly green tea), mostly antioxidants.

Many doctors are reluctant to recommend moderate drinking for its health benefits because it is also addictive and impairs judgment, and in cases where people drink excessively, the health costs are severe. This doesn't apply to most things recommended for health (exercise, eating fruits and vegetables, getting enough sleep, nethack, green tea, pomegranate juice (or whatever the health craze of the moment is, ac,ai berries? peach fuzz?)), because most of those are less likely to be taken to excess, and would probably be several orders of magnitude less harmful even if they were.
This reminds me of the commenting system that I think all the Gawker blogs use. There is a live preview directly above the comment field that shows exactly how the post is going to display on the page. A lot of forums do the same type of thing, but not live.

My brother has the same problem though, he can read and re-read right through his mistakes and never catch them unless they are pointed out to him. He's not dumb or illiterate, but I've always thought that he's mildly dyslexic.
Is it just me or is it odd that there are "Figures" which are blocks of text? See page 2.
Embedding sparklines inline into web pages with "data" URLs (and a little PHP)
SQL injection attacks have nothing to do with whether they are on a shared box or running in a locked down cage. If they have any hope of fixing this mess, they need to start from advice that helps, not voodoo.
You could throw together a greasemonkey script to do this in minutes.

- On DOM ready, add a preview div under the textarea.
- Bind to the textarea's change event, and have it update the preview div with the contents of the textarea.
- Add a [Random!] button next to [add comment]
- Bind to the [Random!] button to randomize the font, size, and colour of the preview div.

And with jQuery, that's probably 4 lines of code.
My view is that you probably won't see the HP/IBM/... companies enter this market as it's already commoditised (even though there's only really one player): they prefer to focus on high value, high margin products and services.

Sun is the only one in the space: http://www.sun.com/service/sungrid/index.jsp - they're currently task-centric grid computing rather than machine-centric cloud computing.

In many ways, running applications on a grid rather than machines in a cloud is a more pleasing idea, and fits better with the point I make in the post, but pragmatism wins out: the edge cases and dynamic requirements mean running virtual machines is often much more convenient.
Actually, it's been a while since I had been on Ubuntu--I can't remember for sure! I was going by what he said.
In hindsight you're classifying these individuals as Geeks, Nerds, Dorks, but to an average high schooler these terms are synonymous unless you actually belonged to one of these groups and felt the need to create a hierarchy :)
Help WebMynd (YC Winter '08) reach Google-scale and transform Mobile Search
I notice that he mentions that his database is remote. I would really like to try this so that I can establish scale with EC2 without moving my database.

Has anyone done this? Do you establish a tunnel between the two locations? How does this kind of latency affect an application? Any other pros and cons?
It's unfortunate, too, since many of the small guys that will use EC2 to scale will eventually need enterprise-level help in the future.
Well the thing about befriending people your own age is that they're much more likely to be at the same stage of life as you.

To some extent this is a self-fulfilling expectation. If you only ever interact with your age-cohort, you'll be artificially kept 'in sync', and diversity of experience and personal growth may suffer.
I've only heard that for dating, not friendship. And a friend recently said the rule's origin is in some Jewish teachings about a proper mate... though Wikipedia doesn't mention that.
Great question, I might well write another post about this because it's a really interesting problem.

The software and services that we looked at to address this problem all left us pretty lukewarm. We needed distributed configuration and resource management, logging and alerting at a minimum.

To cut a long story short, we've written our own system, which draws on ideas from things like rush, capistrano, munin and nagios and tailors it for our needs.

At the moment, we have a system which gives us the information we need to make decisions on commissioning new servers etc, and wakes us up in the middle of the night when something goes wrong. I expect the capabilities to grow to include auto-scaling, auto-healing and some other bits and pieces as I get the time and our needs mature.
I'm noticing a good amount of DWI and DUI there too.
Louis Gray must find YC really creepy -- 40ish-plus principals working closely with twentysomethings! What could they possibly have in common?
Your argument was that painting has an interesting connection to hacking.

"No it doesn't," your critic argues, "because in fact you can make the same argument about many other professions --- for an absurd example, take pastry chefs".

Unless we're secretly on Usenet, he's refuted your argument. He used evidence to deny the premise of your essay.

Draw his argument out further, and you can make the same statements about law, insurance, and surgery. For instance, "because constitutional lawyers leave a trail of work behind them, you can watch them learn by doing." Or, "a lot of the great innovations in corporate reinsurance are the work of multiple hands, though there may only be only a few names in the list of partners at the firm".

Also: it took time to re-read your essay, read his essay, jog my memory about your book, and write that response. I'm not sure I feel like your response to me dignified that work. Can you respond this time without redefining the word "refute" to suit your argument?
Google: Net-throttling is against the law - in Canada.
.88 oz lasts about 3 weeks, depending on the quality.

I know, cause, um, a friend told me.
Based on recent experiences, I suspect he's more likely to spend 50% of his time getting a production deployment environment set up.
Presumably there were two or more Michigan personal injury law firms who got involved in a bidding war at some stage.

Something similar must be going on for mesothelioma (which I had to look up, but is the kind of lung cancer you get from asbestos. The adwords are, of course, all for personal injury lawyers, though many of them disguise this fact. I clicked on a few of 'em just to deprive them of some money).
I've used both to a limited degree. The only thing I can say is that RSpec felt more "natural". I suppose it's up to you whether feeling natural is compelling or not.
There are quite a lot, ranging from code to autokill spam submissions to graphic tweaks to prevent mob downvoting.

In fact, most of the time I've spent hacking news.yc recently I've spent working on this class of features.
Dieu et mon droit

I was a cadet in high school, and the Warrant Officer Class 1 wears the Royal Coat of Arms...
Flickr Release History
It certainly does seem to suggest that there might be a worthwhile business opportunity (at least for those with loose morals) in connecting people with personal injury lawyers.

If these guys are willing to pay that much to have people sent their way, there's got to be a way to take advantage of this.
Upped. I've only been using jQuery for about 3 months and it has continually impressed me with its large feature-set and ease of development.
If he could be turned, he would be a powerful ally.
As I said, there are enough real problems with society that we don't need to make up hogwash about how the internet is us stupider.

Real problems, like a broken education system where the intelligent children with a desire to learn are bored to tears, and just stop trying in school, all in the name of bringing up people who can't -- or don't want to -- learn well enough to keep up.

Real problems like a culture of unquestioning consumption of both material and nonmaterial items.

Real problems like people's apathy towards their environment -- the communities that they are part of, the health of the planet they're living on, et al.

I could go on.

If anything, tuning into interactive trash is a step or two above what generations have been doing since the 1960s -- tuning into TV, and turning off their minds.

I see the current inanity of many parts of the internet as a product of this culture of ignorance that you're speaking of, and not the cause.
Interesting Early Artwork for Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10)
BTW, most use of marijuana is not for fun, but for intellectual or sensual stimulation, or religious/spiritual reasons, or for medical reasons. You are unfairly marginalizing and minimizing an experience you don't understand if you write all pot use off as fun. Also, consider the positive effects drugs have had in the lives of people like Carl Sagan, Steve Jobs, and Paul Erdos. If you are weighing the future, you should consider the opportunity costs of denying yourself access to the states of consciousness many visionaries bring their insights back from, as well as the negative.

I'm against letting the blind fear of irrational authorities stop people from meeting their human needs. Getting high is a human drive like sleep or sex. Do you think gay people should not have sex in places where it's illegal?

Would you say Turing shouldn't have had sex? Because he was ruining his future for the sake of some temporary fun that actually represented getting a psychological need met?
You've established yourself here as valuable community member.

Thank you

But this sounds to me like the textbook definition of "kneejerk reaction."

Actually, it was anything but. I thought long and hard about my post and was curious what kind of reaction it would elicit. I guess I found out.

You could make a (calm!) argument that the author has chosen a poor coping method, but this?

I considered that, but obviously didn't. Let me explain...

I love this community. It's my virtual home. That's why I responded like I did.

In order to glean the signal from the noise, we put up with a lot here. Posts like "not hacker news", posts giving advice learned from a book somewhere, submissions about politics and religion, and unnecessary profanity. I have read most of them and usually chuckled and moved on. Not this time.

Lots of people come here, many young and impressionable, looking for all kinds of things. So what is the first thing they saw today? A post from someone who hasn't really accomplished anything important to hackers (as far as I could tell) and who chooses to resort to drugs to get through his day. And then brags about it.

I wanted to make it clear in no uncertain terms that there are people who disagree with him and this post has no business here at hn. I could have said the lame "not hacker news", but that hardly would have gotten my point across.

We are achievers. We work hard and find a way to produce value for other people, often taking the difficult road instead of the easy way out. This guy's post was IMHO the precise opposite of what I believe and what I hope others believe too. Making it through school using drugs is a smack in the face of those of us who work hard in the real world and assemble here to share it.

I simply don't care how anyone wants to live their life. If you want to get high, get drunk, jump out of airplanes, or just sit in front of the TV, go to it.

But if you come into my virtual home, I will respond just like I would in my physical home and say, "Take your drugs and get out."

I wanted to get people's attention. Do you think it worked?

No, this comment of yours says a lot more about you than it does about the article.

What does it say about me that my other 2,873 comments don't?
I think ANDrew, TOny, SETh, and BYron might have problems with that filter.
Ask YC: Normal Options/Equity for Employee Number 1
Not sure if this has been posted before, but I have a few questions.

1. What would be considered fair equity for employee number one, in a startup, considering there is another developer and slightly below market pay (let's say... 25% below market, 75k when market is 100k) with an incomplete product?

2. What is considered a normal/common vesting period for equity?

3. Lastly, what are the downsides of a revenue share only package?
Unexpectedly Quit
Outpost - Manage your Basecamp projects on your iPhone.
ASK HN: Quad monitors - advice? tips? tricks?
Anyone out there using quad monitors? I'm getting ready to buy a new desktop system, and wanted to set it up with quad monitors and have had a hard time finding unbiased (read: non-sales) advice.

Is it better to have two dual-monitor graphics cards or one card that supports four displays? Do both cards have to be the exact same? Are there any cards that work especially well? Any that I should avoid?

I am going to be using Windows XP Professional if that makes a difference. The system is for work, so I'm not especially concerned about graphic performance.

Any four-headed hackers out there have any insight? Thanks in advance for your help!
No one should ever travel to Dubai for any reason. You do not have any recourse if they decide to fuck you.
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