skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been very impressed by the progress of web browsers. However, they simply don't replace an operating system until they start acting like the keepers of an entire ecosystem of applications. Browsers are still way too careless.

For example, why should a modern browser allow me to immediately close a window with a web app running (the equivalent of an OS' "shut down without warning")?

Why do browsers even show a page's "reset" buttons (also known as "destroy everything with no Undo")?

And the Browser Operating System can still do the equivalent of "kernel panic" by taking out 14 windows (which aren't really windows, but web applications) when it dies.

The closest I've come to "nice" is OmniWeb on my Mac, where they have excellent per-site preferences. This at least gives me some control over each web application, as if the browser were an OS. It isn't enough, but it's a good start.
And what if you're applying to Morgan Stanley or something? Do you wear a tux? A Pope outfit?
YUI grids has a fluid width layout, and three fixed width layouts.
I think your son is on to something; can he think of a neat example? e.g. there are over a quadrupillion ads on the internet.
get a decent handful of blogs together. the point would be to get the definition to show up in google's define, here:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=define%3AQuadrupillion

i think you could make a case to insert it into wikipedia if you can get on that page, and it probably isn't that hard to do if you set your mind to it :)
Great article. Yes, I do believe the language you think in and speak affects the way your thought progresses.

I had an interesting discussion following this article at work and a colleague of mine who is a non-native speaker of English told me that when he thinks programming/ engineering English seems to work quicker in thought progression compared to his native east Indian language.
I think that's where FOO and BAR come from.
I'm an extreme Wikipedia inclusionist, but unfortunately that is not the rule on Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
It's not a very useful number. The name is very misleading because it uses the wrong prefix, and why is having a word for this particular number valuable? Just say a googolplex+100 instead on the very rare occasions you want to refer to this particular number.
Yeah, hard disk space is cheap. excluding stuff is dumb. if you want visitors to find high quality articles then make the search box work well. google doesn't exclude webpages for lack of notability. their bar is low and they make up for it by knowing which things are more or less notable.
Ask HN: Hiring an overseas freelance programmer?
Two cofounders and I are about 2/3 of the way through a version 1.0 of a web application. All three of us have full time jobs, so we have been coding the site in our spare time.

Right now, the site is entirely in Flash 9 because our main programmer was most familiar with it (compared to Ajax) and we were looking to get a working demo up as quickly as possible. Flash allowed us to build in a lot of features pretty easily, but obviously has drawbacks.

At this stage, we are looking to port the site to a wider audience by rebuilding it in AJAX-ified HTML. The lead programmer does not know his way around Ajax and javascript nearly s well as Flash.

The question is: in your experience, would it be better to hire someone overseas to recreate the site from the Flash template, or would it save hassle to just have our main programmer figure out the necessary code himself? At this point, we would prefer to have someone else do the porting, since we all have limited time and there is more important coding to do. However, we do have some experience with outsourcing portions of the code, and know that it sometimes just leads to more headaches since the quality of the programmer and the reusability of the code can be suspect.

What are your experiences?
megagaltastic: http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/10/101906.html
This statistic is misleading. All those xp developers could be making vista-compatible programs without specifically making vista the primary target OS.
Although I can't say for sure (never hired anyone), I think the notes above about "Relevant experience" really hits it on the nail. Resume's have a lot of info on them, and are often short on details. You should explain to them what you've done that makes you ideal for that specific role. Don't talk about your life dreams, just keep it simple and direct.

On what to wear: Dress smart. If it seems like a fun place, dress a bit fun. In NYC, a nice pair of jeans, with a sharp shirt and jacket would probably be a really appropriate attire. I don't think i'd ever show up for an interview with just a t-shirt on, but i guess it depends.
Right now the iPhone platform just looks a lot simpler than Android. One hardware, well known frameworks, centralized distribution. Development costs are lower. Android offers more freedom, but also more complexity.

In any case, both platforms are here to stay for quite some time.
That's a direct quote from a customer, not their own copy. I think the problem isn't that they want their job applicants to be crazy about details but the fact their company name isn't very easy to spell. They chose unconventional spelling presumably because it looked nice, but people who recall the name are only going to remember the name, not the spelling.
The most significant difference IMO is the distribution model. An iPhone user will have one place to look for new apps: the Apps Store. Whatever app s/he is looking for, it will be there or not be at all. That's a huge advantage for a software developer. An advantage the Palm didn't have.

Also: sure, in 8 years the iPhone may be dead and Apple bankrupt, but (1) do you really think so? and (2) do you really need to plan that far in advance?
Paul Sowden from Meebo gave a talk about client side storage at the second SF JS meetup: http://www.slideshare.net/idontsmoke/client-side-storage/

Interesting takeaways: more clients have some form of client side storage enabled than have cookies enabled. Also, nobody uses google gears.
This is how one spoils a playful idea, and how imaginations fade.
Researchers Develop Darkest Man-Made Material Using Carbon Nanotubes
Loan the money in, it's easier to get it back out (the corporation repays the loan) and you can recognize a loss more easily. Setting a term, a reasonable interest rate, and specifying that you will get a single balloon payment at the end of the term is an easy way to go. Put this into the minutes of a board meeting and get a signed document from all board members (if only yourself). You should only put money in that you need for operations, any early salary to yourself is better paid directly out of savings (value is recognized in the "sweat equity" you have from the startup and avoids taxes on roundtrip into and out of the Sub-S as wages/dividends). Happy to chat, my contact info is in my profile; I am not a lawyer or a CPA (both of whom you should already have if you are incorporated) but we've helped a number of early stage software firms with formation strategy issues like these.
Telling children the truth helps them learn to have genuinely good ideas. Lying to them to avoid hurting their feelings implies there is some reason they should feel bad or discouraged about making a mistake like this. There isn't.
No there aren't.
One things operating systems do that I wish browsers would emulate is per-process memory management. Even with the excellent work on memory management in Firefox 3, long-running javascript apps can fragment the browser's heap such that memory can't be reclaimed after the page (but not the browser) is closed.
Then again, reflexive praise regardless of the merits of a child's idea can be harmful, too...

"How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The inverse power of praise"

http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/
I agree with the article's points.

I tend to wonder if the state of GUIs isn't as simple as "too many developers use Windows and don't look elsewhere". Windows ships with a lousy shell and not many decent commands to build with. If most developers follow that example and don't try to learn anything else, they'll be "comfortable" even in inefficient programming environments.

The Mac's an anomaly...the current OS has great command support, and while the older Mac OS didn't, its developers had access to the excellent MPW Shell. MPW Shell had features that Unix-like systems still can't match, such as the ability to assign significance to many more characters. (When the system makes it easy to enter "weird" symbols, the idea of turning them into shell metacharacters is pretty cool!)

A good book on the way developers think (on Unix-like systems), is ESR's "The Art of UNIX Programming". It has great examples of how many of us would approach system and application design, that don't seem prevalent on other systems.
> Sometimes part of the public interface of an object is as simple as a property that can be read or written.

I agree. In fact, I'm having trouble envisioning a program without any of these (or clunky workarounds to avoid them).
A proposal to the Associated Press: A link ethic
Overseas? Overseas is not very descriptive of what you are looking for. I am an American working as an overseas developer to people in Europe and it works great. They are not outsourcing things to me though because I am a part of their team. We all work together.

If you are talking about outsourcing to save money then this likely will not live up to your expectations. Outsourcing can be to save money or it can be to farm out work to people who have skills you cannot find elsewhere. A good pro will charge what he/she is worth (probably not much different than what an American/European counterpart will charge) and will likely give you a better experience because an experienced pro is more likely to smell disaster before it strikes.

A "warm body" who is filling a chair for you at much cheaper rates than you can get anywhere else will be a mixed bag. Outsourcing is not fire and forget. If you simply shove your work to someone and expect great results then you will likely be wasting your time and money. Outsourced help needs to be managed just as well as the rest of the team. Certain things (data entry) might work well, but dev projects not so much.

Or you might get lucky. Again, mixed bag. YMMV.
Doesn't this qualify as blog spam?
From guidelines:
"Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter. "
Nice, I dont think it will solve some problem for most of the users. Better to think of it as a new tool for online research. Lacking advanced features, but I'm sure they will come.
The $25,000,000,000 Eigenvector: The Linear Algebra Behind Google [pdf]
I think you can impart reason and judgment without killing imagination.
A Semantic List-Based CSS Calendar
This Week in Ruby (June 16, 2008)
A while ago I tried out various facebook applications to list books, but none of them make it possible to organize reading lists and subsets of your collection, and so on. If you plan on making a bookhuddle Facebook app, I think that would be really useful to a lot of people.

Also, you may have added this already but RSS feeds for users' lists or for all activity from a user, would be a great addition to this site.
That's in the plan. In the meantime, on Bookhuddle you can organize your books in lists such as read, reading, to read, favorite, and own, or create any number of lists to help you organize your books.

Thanks for the feedback.
A language's common vocabulary ("dog", "bicicleta", "Handschuh") probably has little effect on thought in a language. Idioms have great influence on expression, however. They are crystallizations of the culture that has shaped a language, and are often difficult to translate without this implicit context.

For example, the Swedish word Lagom. Or, in programming, Common Lisp macros, monads in Haskell, the act of defining a word in Forth, etc. (It's easier for me to list idioms in a language other than English, because I'm immersed in English most of the time.)

While trying to implement algorithm X in a language without garbage collection (for example) is possible, the expression may become so burdened by otherwise superfluous detail that the original meaning is obscured like a "needle in a haystack".
Isaac Asimov has written quite a bit on large numbers. He writes about T-numbers in "Adding a dimension". Where T-1 is a trilion, and T-2 is a trilion trilion. For instance, T-2 nucleons are a few grams of mass, and T-5 nucleons are a thousand solar systems. Big numbers indeed.

In Skewered he describes a different large-number system (http://www.scribd.com/doc/275741/Isaac-Asimov-Skewered).

Asimov's facination with big numbers lasted a lifetime.
I find it difficult to take your position on this. When it comes to how a company's name or product is spelled, there is a right way and there is a wrong way. "37signals" is right. "37 Signals" is wrong. "Flickr" is right. "Flicker" is wrong.

If you get it wrong - on your resume or cover letter no less, those most holy of holies, the most polished job-related documents you own - it shows you to be sloppy. Or not passionate enough to get it right. Or both. Or worse.

When a company is small like this, they want not only the best, but they want the most motivated and most committed to the company. As someone else said, it SHOULD be a mutually benefical relationship, and as they consider that 37signals provides substantial benefit, they are looking for someone who will provide substantial return.

I feel a little like the old guy on the front porch yelling "Get off my lawn!" just now, but any of you decrying this practice clearly don't "get it" and are in no danger of being in a position to be hired by folk like those at 37signals any time soon anyway.
Ive also tried the MVC framework. It is a huge improvement over WebForms as it neatly addresses complaint #1, but it completely fails to address complaint #2. It is also beta software under heavy development and rapid change.

That said, Linq to Sql ROCKS MY WORLD. Maybe a more mature MVC framework and better Visual Studio support will join forces with Linq to swing me back to ASP.NET

I'm confused about the "crazy fast" comment. I'm a big believer in C#'s great performance, but ASP.net is super slow for me on every machine I have ever tried. Hell, every Microsoft site I can think of feels slow on round trips. Something is very very wrong...
Too much text on the home page.. most users will read only a few words if they don't know what the site is they'll leave.

p.s this niche has been done a few times I suggest letting users know right away why yours is better.
I hope, targeting some django products for then... muahahaha
If the job were public relations or something, this would be understandable to me. But I've known many people who were extremely competent in a field, but didn't really care about things that didn't interest them (such as job applications). You should look at these people's portfolios, not dismiss them over some assumption about how their trivial spelling errors speak to their inner character.

If these job applicants have a responsibility to be professional in their presentation of their skills, why don't you have a responsibility to be professional in your appraisal of their applications? These are completely petty reasons to drop a resume, akin to "they showed up at the interview without a tie."
Anyone got this to work? When I wtop nothing happens, it just waits. Access log location is properly configured, upgraded to latest Python. Same with logrep!
Tell him that's a good start.

Then encourage him to go deeper than just new names for the same kinds of numbers we already know and come up with a whole new kind of number. E.g. http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~uno/sn.html

That could get the discussion going on what a number really is and what sorts of things could be numbers if only the rules were a little different.
Hmm, I'm not buying all their arguments. From the article: "However, the extent of the problem is not funny...Almost half of the women have been asked out. "

On college campuses, probably 80-90% of women have been asked out. Does that prevent women from going to college?
I had a stupid bug in 0.5.1

0.5.2 is up. Sorry, folks.

http://wtop.googlecode.com/files/wtop-0.5.2.tar.gz
(oops! I mean "37Signals")

I'm pretty sure you mean "37signals".
I've used Blueprint and YUI grids. Both are ace.

In my current project I actually switched from blueprint to YUI, only because I waned a 100% fluid layout - which isn't available in Blueprint.

I was initially concerned by the claims that YUI litters your code with extraneous div tags; I can now say with confidence that these claims are over exaggerated.

The YUI classes can be applied to any block level element, not just divs.

So, both are good - both are easy, give them a try. My vote would be for YUI, but only just.

Also, 960.gs is the new kid on the block.
I do my research at night to. It's weird though. I can only access it when the markets are open. I am in Canada though...
Yes but there are major differences:
- In college you're not interacting only through the Internet
- Even though you might be popular, you're not going to have that many guys asking you out.
- But the main thing is at work, or when practicing your hobby, you're not expecting to be bugged very often by people probing for a relationship...
Maybe you should give him a relevant dictionary and have him teach himself that quadrupillion sounds a lot more like 4 million then googleplex+100 by finding the prefix he used.
The framework is nice, but the two recipes I tried from the site turned out horribly. Willing to accept that I'm an average cook - but the results from similar "standard" recipes were much better.
Get him to read this:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html

Seriously though, what do you expect to gain by posting this here?
Chatting with Blaine Cook (Twitter)
DocSyncer Shuts Down, Google Docs syncing - CEO: "no business model"
Good point. However, many applications monetized on a larger scale are built on advertising models, which don't have to give a cut to Apple. But you're right, traditional, expensive, stand-alone software is going to take a hit.
On the other hand, its not like this will mean developers will lose money, they will just be paying more than they should for the value they get from the App Store. Actually, they're likely to make the same profit as their competitors who will also have to give a cut. Either way, Apple can always change its mind and give discounts for large volume sellers, expensive apps, etc, these rules aren't set in stone. Thats the best part about setting limits. Its easier to relax them than to set limits where none before existed.
This contains a spectacularly good idea. Registration is a huge barrier. If you can suck people into using your more advanced features without requiring registration, or pushing it as far back as possible, thats a thousand times better. Most people will not register even if they would use it otherwise.
At another Hacker News commenter's suggestion, I'm reading "Growing a Business" --- I'm just a couple pages in, but hooked. One of the first points it makes is the competitive advantage the US gets from utilizing the female work force.

Articles like this make me wonder how much of the long-term market we're surrendering to India and China. I've met a lot of Indian female devs.
Still the same behavior with 0.5.2 - can't get it to output anything :( Still trying
I think a culture where people aggressively argue their views is better. But, people need to not identify too much with their ideas. They need to be able to say "switch" and start arguing the other side with the same intensity. But that intensity is going to be the difference between good and great.

And I'm fine with the majority of people disagreeing with me. The majority of people are idiots happy with good enough. :)
Very fun, though there needs to be a way to turn off the sound without quitting out of the game.
Sounds like a truth most web 2.0 businesses that add one or two features have yet to realize.

Way to stay ahead of the curve, DocSyncer!
Sooooo... I develop for windows. And though I'm not writing for vista (who would?), I am using the toolchain. Most of which can easily target XP. It's a very nice improvement over what came before. Should I ever have to run my software on vista, it'll probably work pretty well. I suspect that most windows devs nowadays are in the same boat.
Why don't all the extreme wikipedia inclusionists start their own, more inclusive, wiki? One with a page for every random idea that anybody's six-year-old kid ever has?

I'm serious.
I didn't like the article. It was rather...well, it blamed it all on men, really. Didn't take SEXUAL DIMORPHISM INTO ACCOUNT. Sheesh.
I have a wrong assumption about log archive patterns. One of the difficulties with something like this is that everyone's installation is a little bit different.

You can try 0.5.4, which takes LOG_PATH + LOG_FILE literally. Thanks for the feedback!
1. Explain your product in one 7/8 words sentence or less. Cut that blue text and paragraph below it.

2. Give people an reason to upload photos. At your competitors site, I clicked on the pretty bookworm's pic.

3. Sort the pictures with a female bias (I'm guessing they're the target), rather than by "new members". You'll get more women and men.

4. Sort books by popularity of discussion rather than "newness". Draw people into the discussion.

5. The design doesn't feel friendly. Again, assuming women are your demographic make the site "warmer".

Goodreads is one competitor, how will you distinguish yourself?

Finding this problem was easy, implementing the solution the right way is much harder. Right on, with the FB integration.