skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It unnecessarily adds another step before the application starts for the first time. Simplicity wins.
Well,IMO while its really unsafe to have everything developed outside, certain tasks not related to core functionality of your product, maintenance work, etc is best delegated.
However, I'd rather find freelancers to outsource to, than whole companies.
As everyone points out, web hosting in general is very crowded. That being said I've seen plenty of hosts thrive in the reseller market.

One suggestion is don't compete on price. You'll never win. Find something else like quality or customer service.

I personally use a reseller account because I like not having to worry about server security. Plus I can host multiple websites and friends/family at little to no cost.
Hosting reselling is an old form of marketing. Welcome to the Internet!

As for is it worthwhile? Well, how many friends do you know? If you have a big social network and can convince them then yeah, you can make some money off of it. A buddy of mine started reselling hosting packages from a tier 2 service provider and slowly graduated into buying his own racks and providing better products. It's enough to get him a house and a comfortable living but it also took him 5 years of hustling and bustling and a friends and moderators of a tech-oriented web forum to continuously market for him.

If you scour the forums, it's typical that you'll find ads for them as well. And as for the guy that said you'll be fielding the tech questions: that's really true. Some service providers will be doing that for you, it depends on who you pick to partner with.

Should you get into it? Only if you do a bit more research than just pitching a question on Hacker News.

Suggestions on where to start:

http://www.webhostingsearch.com/reseller-web-hosting.php

http://www.devshed.com/reseller-web-hosting

http://www.thehostingnews.com/
I think OpenID may be a good choice, especially as more sites begin to support it. Take a look at ClickPass, it seems promising, though I suppose you should offer a normal sign up too.
Oh, hey, yet another fluffy rant. Thanks.
This is Not Hacker News.
It works when you have the money to buy up better talent.

Zoho is the best example of this. They're based entirely on outsourced development.
WTF? Why doesn't the new repr(1L) return "1L"? I thought the whole point of the repr custom was to output something that would regenerate the same object.

Because there's no such thing as 1L anymore. There is one unified (unbounded) integer, and I believe the C implementation will use int to represent small values and long when necessary (and list of long beyond that?).

Are they going to abandon the 'Format %d:%s" % (n, s)' or just add PEP 3101? The % syntax is down-and-dirty practical good. PEP 3101 is neat, but printf() syntax is tough to beat.

I'm a little worried about this as well. I just wrote a ctemplate module that leverages % syntax a lot, so it would be quite unfortunate to see it disappear.

In other words, you could write code like:

char * months[%(len(pyvar_months))d];

My module uses string interpolation on this file, but it defines a special class with a __getitem__ method that instead of simply returning the associated string (as a dict would), it evaluates an arbitrary Python expression. And it works! It's pretty cool to be able to mix C and Python in this way to more easily write C code.

That may seem minor, but I've used the same framework to be able to say:

%(array; char *; months; ['"%s"' % (mo,) for mo in pyvar_months])s

Assuming that pyvar_months is

["January", "February", "March", ..., "December"]

(in Python), the automatically-generated C result will be:

/* header file */
extern char * months[12];

/* C file */
char * months[12] = {
"January",
"February",
"March",
...,
"December"
};

Okay, sorry to go so off topic, but I really wanted to show that it's possible to use the current string interpolation functionality to do really cool stuff, and it would be a shame to see that change.
JSqueak - Smalltalk interpreter written in Java
Social Media Strategy - Aligning Goals and Measurements
Actually, yes. I used to work on games for Sony. So, I add people on XBox Live and PlayStation Network.

And Twitter is actually valuable based on the people that you follow. A ton of my friends work in the mobile space and push location info to Twitter.
5000 hours just to get the thing in the air - kind of ruins the whole thing from a purely cost advantage perspective. Just imagine what you could build in 5000 hours...

Not to take any credit from this guy at all. He deserves mad props (heh heh) for this project. Truly a hacker in every sense of the word.
Poll: What are you doing full-time?
Founding a startup
Working at a startup
Working at an established company
Hey! That's what I was about to say. Actually, my exact comment was about to be, "This isn't hacker news no matter how you look at it, but it's pretty interesting nonetheless."

Somehow we'll need to find a balance between what is interesting but isn't hacker news - sometimes, non-hacker news is interesting enough to deserve a place here, although most of the time it isn't. Or maybe we can just say, for the sake of safety, that anything non-hacker related is inappropriate? Not sure about that.
Where In The World Is Jerry Yang?
Yup, I'm still studenting, and have a long way to go. I wonder if all these start-up opportunities and communities will still be around when I finish college...
Last I checked, hostgator's own host is The Planet. Go directly to them, if you're going to go that route.

There's no sense in having your customers have to wait through a chain of three companies (counting yours) before their support tickets get resolved.
If you use Django, I recently posted an example here: http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/815/
He suggests his plane gets better gas mileage than his car.

People keep asking, "Where's the flying car?" Well, we have it. It's called an airplane.
From my experience interviewing Software Engineer candidates at Google (most of them for positions at Google Zurich actually)

1. It is not true that you will be hired for a junior position no matter what your previous experience. It is true that you should expect to be hired at a slightly lower position than you would at another company with the same level of experience. On the other hand, promotions are based entirely on merit, not on tenure. I know people who were promoted very high very fast, because they were very good.

2. It is not true that you will only be asked algorithmic questions. It may happen every now and then, depending on the preferences of the people interviewing you, but in general you should also expect design questions, questions about testing, about engineering practices etc.

3. I don't know if Microsoft is better organized and managed than Google. I suspect it is more organized and managed than Google. At Google process is something that is actively avoided by design, and the managers tend to interfere as little as possible. Whether you like it or not depends on your personal preferences. I have friends who came from Microsoft and Yahoo and they like it better at Google, but the sample is obviously biased.
Based on the direction markets and firms are heading (lower startup costs, computers becoming commoditized, smaller firms being able to compete easier with large firms), there will be even more opportunities.
You don't need to imagine - I'll tell you what you could build: you could build an airplane!

that's actually pretty cool, and IMO definitely worth the time. I mean, how many people can say they've build planes?
That's encouraging. :)

Of course, I wouldn't want to speculate about then, because who knows what could happen in 7 years... It's humbling to think that the Internet has only been around about double that.
"I can potentially see some confusion for users"...."for launch we are only going to spend time on one"

I think you've answered your own question here. I'd go for option A - it's something users will be more familiar with from their experience using other sites and it stops you losing users who don't want to create a google account if they don't already have one.

Your users are what is most important and the deciding factor in decisions such as this should always be to do whatever makes things easiest for them.

Also, why do you need to link a user to an email address to handle payments?
Hmmm, this makes me want to go pick up a share in a 152 and do some more flying.

That does look like fun.
That's a great functionality you'll see on some sites with the lost password function. You can register without an email and use all functionality except the "lost password" function — if you want to use it, you need to specify it in your account settings.

I think HN and del.icio.us do this.

Is there some other functionality on your site that doesn't require payment?
If you founded a startup and are working on that startup, what option should you choose? :)
"Hacker" is pretty broad in the context of this site so I think it's safe to say that any non-hacker content is worth actively avoiding. Dilution is the biggest challenge facing the site right now.
Tinkerer’s Toy: A tech device that, theoretically, becomes more useful the longer you own it.
I'm afraid I must agree with the commenters on Om's site - what a fluff article! Honestly, if it weren't Om, I would say it was written by someone who named a startup for the first time and is overly-excited about his role in it... No substance, conflicting points (re: twitter) and bad conclusions (ArchWeb? names should flow).
I'm willing to bet Zoho is at a competitive disadvantage long-term because of outsourcing their development. I can see the advantages of hiring some great outsourced developers quickly up-front when the money is there but I don't see how it truly pays for itself long-term (especially when what you sell is the software product built by 100% outsourced teams).
Since this board is populated in large part by entrepreneurial software developers, you're bound to get a biased, emotional answer to the question of whether offshored developers are cost-effective.
It's irresponsible to expect your users to care about their privacy, just as it's irresponsible for a doctor to expect his patients to care about their health as much as he does.

Your duty, as a provider of web services, is to be far MORE concerned with your users' privacy than they are themselves. You know about these things; they don't. They're trusting you.

So do the right thing. Don't add to the problem. Don't add to the list of sites that subtly enforce the very false notion that it's safe to share your email credentials.

It's a bad idea even if you do trust the site to be careful. Every site that has my email credentials, even for a moment, is another potential failure point of the worst kind. Steal my twitter login, fine. You post some garbage, and I have to clean up a mess. Steal my email, and I'm left broke and fighting with credit bureaus to clean up my reputation for 7 years.

Most users don't care about these things. But the fact that about 100% of savvy web professionals are very concerned by this should give you pause before asking for email credentials on your site. Even if you're 100% careful with the info, you're helping the next guy make the case that it's ok ("everyone does it"), and he might not be so careful.
Might want to add consulting / contracting as an option...
It's hard to blame a startup if something goes wrong with Google logins. It's real, real easy to blame them if they went with something as obscure as ClickPass.
The name Architext is definitely already used!

Permapage makes me think of perma frost, but I could just be in a weird mood.

ArchWeb is ok, but doesn't flow as nicely as the other two.

I think rule number one of finding a good name is for it to be easy to say and catchy. Two or even three part names often do this, but it's definitely not the only way. Most people realize this. Probably the main reason people resort to weird words like vidoop or squidoo or whatever is because they are trying to find a domain name that isn't taken.
You want option (a). It works, it's proven, it's what everyone else does, it's less annoying than it sounds like, and you're unlikely to screw it up.
Won't use it.
Ask YC: Best computer science degree in Europe?
A friend wants to get a computer science degree in Europe starting next year. What we're not sure about is the best university to apply to. The European education landscape is difficult to navigate and we were wondering whether YC had any good suggestion: outstanding courses, stellar professors, great international student body?

Grateful for pointers of any kind.
Yahoo has lots of documentation organized in a single library. That's what the "developer.yahoo.com" bit is.

Yahoo's is just better organized.
this is the coolest thing a hacker could actually make
I would assume the distinction is founding a startup versus being employed by people who founded a startup. That's how I read it.
We originally outsourced development of one of our products to some Russian guys who had been doing work for us for a year or so. They did a great job and the software started selling - and still does now. What I did though was after paying them and after seeing what a good niche business I had... I made them (2 guys) partners - and they were over-joyed by it. They were brought into the core team and have supported and improved the product over the years. In terms of income, its not fantastic (around $100,000 per year) but its nearly all profit. Hope this helps
I thought it was interesting. Practically none of this was included in the cleaned up version of US history I got taught in school.
Consulting or contracting
So these web-archiving startup founders hire this "startup consultant" character to help them rename their company. What do they get for their money? He writes a blog post criticizing their current name, calling them Google-wannabes, and saying "it's a good thing" that they hired him. He then posts his three new name suggestions (one of which has a well-known history as another company), publicly taking any potential credit for the names away from his own clients.

Alternate title suggestion: How Not To Be A Consultant.
PETA Targets Computer Programmers With String of Bizarre Protests
Another two-part rule for naming your startup: (1) pick a name, (2) move on quickly to something that matters.
Replace the whole page so that the top-level URL in the address bar says "yahoo" or "google" when they're signing in.

Otherwise you're just another phisher.

"Normal" users don't care. But they'll learn and eventually expect the conventions that we establish. So let's establish conventions that are valuable.
So does China
At the end of the day you have to find resources at a rate you can afford. I simply could not find local resources. Or put another way, I could not afford the going rate of the local scarce resources. So I went offshore and have not looked back. The people I am working with a good guys and I consider them to be friends.

And the good ones are not dummies. They know they going rate for development work and charge a healthy sum for their services. So it is not always about the lowest cost provider.

Long way of saying that if you have to, don't be afraid to offshore/outsource.
Why is this being down-voted? It's always been my understanding that Digg was originally written by contract programmers. Have I been lied to?
MySpace was mostly written by contract developers, in the early days, though I guess they have staff developers now.
The Business of XKCD
non advertising income
Working at a Startup
Personally I like to find a balance...I upvoted this because it's hilarious, and I haven't seen any humor on HN for a while. If there was a joke site like this posted every few day I wouldn't upvote any of them.
I found it interesting for a few reasons

- makes money on merchandising rather than ads

- generates a lot of traffic (80 million pages views/mo)

- he thinks only a couple of dozen web comic authors actually make a living off of it.

- believes this sort of niche comic is only successful because of the internet. in that he never could have gotten published traditionally. (that being said "tech/geek" isn't really a small niche for internet audiences)
You mean, aside from the landing fees, the weather, the fact that General Aviation accounts for most air fatalities, the fact that flying at 10k ft puts you right in the worst of the weather, the fact that you need to be instrument rated to reliably use a light airplane as transportation, and the fact that if you screw up any of the mechanics, you die?

Awesome hobby. Mad respect. My wife was taking private pilot lessons in A2 a few years ago; I wish I could have found the time, and I keep prodding her. But this is not a reasonable mode of transportation for normal people.
Now you know why Haig is called "The Butcher of the Somme." IIRC, the fool( a Field Marshall at that) ordered thousands to their death at the hands of just 2 German machine guns. 20,000 British soldiers died that day, a record for he Brits. Poor bastards...
>He said they sell thousands of T-shirts a month

Not bad at all...
What if you work at a startup, founded a startup and go to school? :)
> Is there some other functionality on your site that doesn't require payment?

I'm not sure if this question is for the original poster, but I forgot to mention that providing an email address is actually required at my sites. Only after validating the email address are members able to post, vote, etc.

One advantage to this is that I'm able to keep track of who hasn't validated their email and therefore become full-fledged members of whatever site they joined. I can start a conversation with them and learn from them what I overlooked about the site -- or point things out to them that they may have missed.
My brain's frazzled. Are you using US gallons or Imperial gallons in those calculations?

I'd suggest they go a step further though. The first thing I do when looking for a new car is convert the mpg figures into pence per mile.
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=199967
I quit my job six weeks ago. I've had an idea for a web site sitting in the back of my brain for several years now. Amazingly, no one else has done it. I put up an ad on craigslist asking for someone to pair-program with me. We've been pairing 4-5 days a week.

We expect to go live next week.

I'm scheduled to start a Ph.D. in another six weeks. I could delay. It's a tough choice. Getting my first toe in the entrepreneurial water has been exciting and fulfilling. I'm getting to do things "the way I always wanted to".
Foot.in.Mouth.
I have no problems coming up with clever names. It's the clever businesses that I have trouble with.
Burnout?
Blogger arrests hit record high
And the rest of the civilized world.

(Sorry, I just like the SI system of units.)
I hate the new print(x) changes in Python. Dammit! I loved typing print x.
thats ridiculous ha ha!!
Just to be clear, I've got no problem with porn on the internet but Hacker News is not the place. The article was just a list of links to sites, no information of interest.
Fortunately News.YC's clever poll software allows you to choose multiple options.
I wanted to stop reading when he talked about how famous he was in Bulgaria, but I finally lost interest in his opinion when he said that Microsoft has better products than Google.

Hope he gets his axe sharpened soon...the grinding noise is really overwhelming.
Rather linkbaitish title. Presumably each year has been a record high.

Anyone know who the arrested Americans were?
Is the internet evolving us?
Vice Guide to North Korea (You won't see this on CNN)
> you are not supposed to do this, says Python to you, because it's a bad practice and can lead to errors.

Isn't that one of the main themes of Python? That you can expect another programmer to have solved the same problem almost the same way..? I figure this is how that happens.
The bubbles represent the size and importance of the field. This is an accurate depiction of what science is like today.

Science and Nature are filled with articles about medicine and biology and chemistry and physics and so on. These are what scientists think of as science. Rarely does a math or computer science paper slip in, except in the case of groundbreaking new work. And yet most CS professors would give anything to have a paper of theirs published in Science. So you can see how the rest of science values our contributions: every once in a while we contribute something interesting, but for the most part we are not noteworthy. And this is the way it should be. Bipartite graph algorithms and topological manifolds are not as important as Gardasil and alternative energy.

A substantial number of doctors doing useful research these days are, surprise, Medical Doctors. If you want an eye opening experience, take a trip over to the nearest medical library and spend some time going through the journals. It will radically change your opinion of what science is and how your field fits into it. Discrete Math is a pretty cool journal, but it's kind of embarrassing to hold it up to The New England Journal of Medicine. Even Annals of Math is, well, pretty irrelevant.

There's a long tradition of specialists taking myopic views of the world. Computer Scientists think the world is one big computer (http://focus.aps.org/story/v9/st27), chemists think life is one big chemical reaction, stone-cutters think everything can be explained in terms of stone-cutting (The Stone Diaries). Rarely is that the whole truth. You have to be careful to step back and take your own bias into account.
Lonely Planet releases API
It's a Joke.
Awesome. I always wanted a pilot's license, but I've only logged 30mins in the cockpit alongside an instructor.
Ex-Yahoo Sr VP to lead Russian search firm’s new lab, opening in Palo Alto
Curiously, this approach is usually welcomed in corporate environments. Java and C# are on the same shelf in this regard. It limits creativity by leaving no doors for new ways of doing things. Certain class of programmers just can't bear when they are told what's right and what's wrong in programming.
this is a very interesting poll. I have always wanted to know what the hacker news community constitutes.
It's important to make the distinction between outsourced developers and remote developers.

The key is to have people that are very bright and passionately ommitted to the startup's cause.
Here's a fix for etch, since the security team hasn't released an advisory yet:

http://dfranke.us/rubyfix.txt
But you can do that in both python 3 and 2.5...
Also notice that he's a real VW man with that classic Scirocco 16V. What's up with hackers and VWs?
From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html --

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
The poster is referencing hostgator.com as an example I believe. But agreed, three levels of people would be ridiculous.
Had to click three things.
Are they as cool as Genghis Tron?

http://www.genghistron.com
Seeing software exlusively in functional terms also overlooks affordances
That's the life of a technology writer. I'm usually working several different stories at the same time. It's a mess, but it works better for me than trying to retrieve bookmarks. I keep meaning to check out one of the new research tools to manage it, but never seem to make the time.
Why is there a menu show delay, anyway?
Wow, these are great. I highly recommend getting the piclens firefox extension for viewing these, great for browsing large quantities of photos.
this is true - but I took the title directly from the article without much thought about that...