skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Holy moley this blog has some good reading material. I'll be printing it out to finish reading it tonight before I go to sleep, along with the articles linked at the bottom (related posts).

This is especially interesting to me because I was recently pointed in the direction of this PDF: http://www.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/upl...

The PDF is a good read so far. I'm about a 1/3 of the way through it. My mentality has always been of a "build it and they will come" type, and reading about customer development has made me take pause and try to really think about my approach to developing a product and reaching customers.
Cool. Can you suggest where the right places are? My past searches for decent software developers have been long, arduous and time-consuming, and I'd love to know where all the good developers are hiding.

Out of interest, how many developers have you employed? I'm sure it's not entirely relevant, but I'd be interested to know how you found them.
Searching for Gucci Wallets and Belts?
If you want to look different among your friends and relatives, Then why not to prefer gucci accessories like gucci clothes and gucci shoes for men.
It can't be insider trading if you don't have any information from "inside" the company.
Not trying to be pedantic but the gem has nothing to do with ror - it just extends the string class and adds to_x methods for each language.
No point in updating the iOS app unless there's going to be hardware support.
Myself and my girlfriend had to evacuate this morning. When we left the was water was lapping our diveway about half way up the car's tyres. We came back about 2 hrs later to see what else we could save, by which time the whole house was about waist deep. Managed to save the majority of our clothes, some books and DVDs, iPad, computer etc, but all the big furniture and whitegoods are destroyed. The worst part is that the river is yet to peak (currently 4.5m)... Should be closer to 5.5m by 4.00am tomorrow. We are very lucky to have saved as much as we did, and that we are fully insured for the rest. 12 people in outer areas are dead, and 70 more missing. I am thankful that everyone I know of is safe and we have had many offers of help.
If you can't see the difference between the examples you posted and the ps3, you shouldn't be posting on hn.
There are lots of people who just went to college for four years and then got jobs writing code. I didn't keep a track of many of them but none of the ones I know of turned out to be good at it.
One of the writers for Pixar gave a talk where he confessed that /all/ of the stories for their movies started out terrible and took tons of rework to get right. Originally, Woody was a serious jerk. It took a long time for them to realize they didn't like their own main character and even longer to evolve him into the great guy everyone loves today.
Useful, and a neat trick to auto-size based on the browser being used (I assume by detecting the user agent).

However, why is it free?
Yes. But if you want to continue "support" or receive official updates then you're subject to the whims of the manufacturer/provider. And don't expect them to make it easy for you to do what you will.
I think people believe that once you buy hardware you should be able to do whatever you want with it.
Well, in practice you only get prosecuted if you publish your results on the internet. This guy could have figured out how his stuff works all he wants, and even shown his friends, with impugnity.
I'm an older developer. I was eating lunch at a restaurant near my new workplace. Sitting at the table next to mine, a college senior (at Colorado School of Mines - which is a pretty decent engineering school) was talking with her father about her boyfriend interviewing for a job as a software developer. The BF had a 4 hour long programming test as part of the interview.

Something is very wrong with our industry. Most of the time that articles come out like this, industry executives are trying to get more kids to go into programming in order to lower the cost of employees: they want protection from the free market.

The last company I worked for (for 5 years, and it was a Fortune 100 company) was complaining publicly that they were unable to find developers - yet people who quit over the past 2 years were never replaced, nor were we allowed to interview candidates.
> Why does this feel like an open plea to price fix?

Because it is. In Australia this blogger might have faced a complaint under the Trade Practices Act[1] for price signalling. A stupid law, but a law nonetheless.

[1] Of course, I am not a lawyer, seek professional legal advice before believing advice you find on the internet.
I'm sure many here wish you all the best - our thoughts are with you. Here's hoping the recovery program is effective and prompt.
I am gradually coming to the opinion that many 10X developers really do end up being compensated fairly, but it rarely happens while they are still in the "developer" box.

It doesn't necessarily just happen from taking on extra risk, either, though starting your own company is one way to do it. Personal anecdote (I'm not a 10X developer but I know a few things about a few things): I previously built CRUD apps and made $X, and I turned down a few offers this year to build CRUD apps for [6 * $X, 10 * $X]. The big thing that changed? Improvement in marketing myself and better selection of CRUD app genre. (A/B testing isn't any harder technically than building university registration systems... it is just worth orders of magnitude more revenue.)

There is a really good post on Quora about this, incidentally: http://www.quora.com/10X-Engineers/Why-are-the-best-programm...
It's not just "many geeks" that don't believe intellectual property should be protected. The software engineering community in general concludes that treating software like property is illogical and perhaps harmful. At least around where I'm from, software engineers and computer scientists are explicitly taught in their ethics seminars that the entire analogy of "intellectual property" has serious logical and ethical problems inherent in it.
I don't have time for this - I need to trust more ...
Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be any ability to donate via credit card which I think stinks. How could anyone that isn't Australian donate.

BTW, if you're a Suncorp Bank customer and you have forgotten your external transfer password or never had one you can still donate via Internet banking to the Suncorp account number: 002780003
With opinions like yours it's a miracle we have libraries.
The Earnings Equation
The PS3 is now viable as a new host platform for XMBC (XBox Media Center).

>Then Sony's console business would go bankrupt?

The Music and Movie industries continue to stay in business even in the face of piracy. Wake me up when PS3 pirating comes close to the level of Napster. I'm not justifying piracy, just saying that Sony should be more worried about their real competitors.
I'm jealous of anyone who can just "come home from work" and turn off their brain about coding and do it as a regular job.

I'm constantly thinking of better ways to do something and find myself rewriting code from years ago. I have at least one "regular job" experience that taught me such behavior/attitude doesn't work well in a 9-5 business environment.
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Kudos to doing and citing the research. You are right, every exchange has to conform to NBBO. But some of dark pools don't necessarily keep quotebooks to be coy, they instead keep a book of "IOI" (indications of interests). So in an event where a regular trader get a better price at dark pool versus say BATS/INET, their order wouldn't get redirected to dark pool for execution at NBBO. But if a trade does happen between the participants in a dark pool, if a third-party exchange can offer better price then the pool is obligated to redirect to that market to fill at that price.

Your second point of RegNMS requiring exchanges to print all their trades. Dark pool report their trades in their own idiosyncratic way. Suppose a large block order went down, I and my counterparty could agree on a VWAP price and just slowly complete our trade over the course of the day or even several days to obscure the order from the market. So reporting might be done, but it might be done as slow and as obscured as possible.

And talking about Credit Suisse, CSFB and other banks used to have a suite of VWAP algo's for their customers but they have curiously not updated the algo in the past 4 years. Why not? CSFB's internal trade desk probably is probably constantly developing better algo's but because they want to keep their own customers from having better market obfuscation and be able to front-run; they don't release these tools to their customers.
http://telethon.smartservice.qld.gov.au/

Accepting Visa, MasterCard and Amex. I think it should accept international cards with Visa/MC etc doing the currency conversion to AUD.
Any hint on the topic?
Weather and Notes are pretty awesome.

I wouldn't use Amazon mp3 nor facebook, so, meh.
I think the secret is that part of good programming is an art, and not only something that can be taught, like accounting, with just logical rules and regulations (apologies to skilled accountants who feel there is an art to their work).

That is probably why big business can't fulfill their desire for a large pool of cheap but good developers. You can't just pour people into the college machinery and churn out developers. At least I hope not.
You do realize you're basically arguing FUD.

Let me throw some FUD your way... equally likely (or unlikely). WebM does violate a patent in the MPEG-LA pool. At that point Google needs to rev every instance of WebM, from browser to every video encoded with WebM. MPEG-LA could go after anyone who encoded a video with WebM. And given MPEG-LA's patent pool size (which includes H264, VC-1, MPEG-2, etc...).

In contrast for H264 to violate it patent it would have to violate something not in the patent pool, and something not held by a licensor, e.g., WMV or Quicktime (as these would in good faith be in the patent pool). That list is LOT smaller. Most people think that they likely own al

And note, Google does NOT offer indemnification. If they did, and they should, that would change the equation on this FUD a fair bit.
WP7 | Charting on Fire with Visifire Charting Library
Remind him that a verbal contract is as valid as something you have written down.
Great idea, can't praise it enough.

I'm wondering if you would actually make more money by only having free accounts.

You already stand to make a ton of money from affiliate commissions AND heavy cash on hand.

The value of a customer is way over $7/month just based on these two income sources alone.

Free accounts might help getting the on the fencers to sign up, while you still capture the users that would have signed up for $7/month.

Something else to think about -- If you decide to definitely go freemium, consider having a third option. There is a ton of research showing people are most likely to take the second best option given a menu of choices. Three plans makes the second best option still one that gets you paid each month.
This is not spamming but announcement of new features. Many companies (including many YC ones) launch new features on HN. Why do you consider it spam?
As someone who uses Lift (in addition to other frameworks) I'm a bit surprised by this decision. Lift is at the state where it is just getting the features and docs to be useful to a wider audience. Scala adoption is rising. It seems David Pollak is going for the corporate market and I don't think this is the right focus at this stage of Lift's development.
Did anybody happen to download the mp3 of the speech before the 4shared host got swamped? I would be in your debt if you were to throw up a mirror of it.
DROAM - Dreaming about Cheap Data Roaming
Really? You must be much, much luckier than I. I just headed over to YouTube, disabled the (excellent) YouTube5 Safari extension, and tried 20 random videos. Only two worked (but fullscreen is still broken).
Do you really want to not care about the work you do? It's nice to be able to come home from work and not worry about work, but I wouldn't want to work on something that I wasn't interested in.
Don't switch. Period.

Android is a huge step up from Blackberry or Windows Mobile, but it is a big step down from iOS. Android lacks basic usability touches; the manufacturer customizations don't make things any better. Battery life is dismal. Additionally the system pauses all the time when performing basic tasks.

Some of these problems, I think, are fundamental to using a virtual machine for everything. The performance overhead is exacerbated by the less powerful mobile hardware. The garbage collection causes noticeable pauses. And more battery is used to accomplish less.

The other problems are rooted in design. Whoever was doing the UI for Google did not understand good UI. Sorry. Impressive looking UI elements waste space, get in the way, and actually slowed me down for no reason. Little iOS UI touches like the elastic scrolling that let you know you're at the end of a list are absent, making you wonder if you're at the bottom of the list or if the device is just taking a break to collect some garbage. I usually scroll repeatedly just to make sure whereas on iOS I see the bounce and I know I'm done immediately.

You're on AT&T. As long as you're happy with the service stay there and stick with an iPhone for now. Personally, I would not even consider another Android device until after 3.0 fixes some of the UI problems. And even then I have serious reservations about Android's technical fitness due to the VM.

I realize lots of people have all kinds of confidence in Android's technical fitness. People far more accomplished than myself. But whatever. The emperor has no clothes. It might be a good design for a portable OS, but it's not a good design for a mobile OS.
Thanks. It did seem rather odd. Regardless, the sentiment is true. :-)
Fast Pitch Competition by the Tech Coast Angels - FAST PITCH - LOS ANGELES 2011
Affordable Engagement Rings
This bit in particular disturbs me:

>> First, the PS3 System consists of a “protected computer” because it is used in interstate commerce (e.g., the Internet.) Second, without SCEA’s authorization, Defendants intentionally accessed certain levels of the PS3 Systems by circumventing SCEA’s TPMs in the PS3 Systems. Defendants’ access to such levels in the PS3 Systems is not authorized; to the contrary, the PlayStation Network Terms of Service and User Agreement (“PSN User Agreement”) prohibits the circumvention of security features in the PS3 System.

It looks like there is a legal definition of a "protected computer" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_computer), but I can't imagine it was ever intended to apply to one's own computer. Furthermore, how is the PlayStation Network user agreement relevant here? You don't have to agree to anything to buy a PS3, only to use the optional PSN service.
There are plenty of people here on hn who complaint about how hard it is to get people willing to hire them remote. You could start there.
It's not out of the blue; it's a very, very, very old formula in the Catholic liturgy (funeral and requiem Masses and vigils), translated from the Latin "requiem aeternam dona eis". The usual response is "And perpetual light shine upon him" ("et lux perpetua luceat eis").

It seemed appropriate.
Sadly, any random piece of software is somewhat vulnerable.

Any random piece of software is vulnerable.

Look, if Google's serious about the threat software patents pose to openness, there's an obvious thing they should be doing, and it isn't "switch the video codec we use in our web browser". Until I see them doing some serious (i.e., big-money) lobbying to abolish software patents, I'm going to assume the whole openness thing is just marketing bullshit designed to play into geeks' stereotypes of them and Apple.
I Don't Like Google Mobile
Ask HN: Trademark it yourself?
Has anyone gone through the process of obtaining a trademark without a lawyer?

My project is in an early stage where it's just three of us building the product and not spending any money on things like IP lawyers.

We have a domain name that is very good, though, and it's important to trademark our name so that we don't face any legal challenges to the URL from someone holding a similar trademark.

What do you think? Is this something we can do on our own?
> There are a lot of implied or assumed promises in corporate full-time jobs

There is a lack of unions and labor laws.

bye karma.
Subscribe to news sources with your Kindle&iPad - doggy style
I would like to pick your brain and offer a hopefully useful service at the same time.

On http://readbeam.com/ I have cobbled together basically a hosted version of calibre.
This allows you to either request news sources manually or have them sent to you on a schedule e.g: Get me the New York Times every morning at 6 and mail it automagically to my Kindle - like having your dog fetch the paper automatically.

The site is currently neither beautiful nor comfortable. Please give it a spin and let me know what you think. Please be gentle when requesting many sources on a frequent schedule, this is quite computing intensive and may bog down or crash the system. If the site is down please check back a few hours later. I have upgraded the instance but I know the HackerNews effect can be brutal sometimes.

I chose to compile all the recipes on github.com (https://github.com/readbeam/recipes), for all git users out there, this may be helpful.

I am especially interested on your views about all the copyright or other legal issues I may face here. My current understanding is - basically - that the manual fetch should be ok, because one person is manually requesting a copy of a site - like when you request a site with your browser and maybe have an adblocker installed.

I hope the subscription service is legal as well, because not I am serving the recipes, but the user is. So my line of thought is: I am just offering a hosting platform with an API, you are programming it and doing something 'bad' (accessing e.g. the economist.com site, that is). So it's again you doing the scraping...

But I don't know if this holds water, please let me know what you think.

Thanks for your time,

Tom

P.S. For now it's mobi only, if there is enough demand, I will add epub support later.
Kudos to the developer for such a fantastic job.
A related question:

What is the current hourly rate that a jr software engineer can expect?

I might be starting to work remotely for a company in the Boston area but have no idea what the current salary situation for freelancers in the US is like
i'd love to see some precedence in court of joe doe vs big corp CEO over a motivational speech being a verbal contract.

really.
No idea, sorry ...
Those are not carrier specific apps.
The reason why they are there because there were no installable apps at that time. I do not need to sign in to any services or accounts to use those apps.

Amazon MP3, Facebook apps are tied to some services that requires user accounts.

One pre-installed app on iOS that fit the category is YouTube App.
very nice, very simple, good luck, congrats on quitting full time!

some hopefully constructive criticism, i think the name is a bit tongue in cheek and could offend some people, not that big an issue, perhaps it has value to help you remember the brand.

the yellow banner doesn't stand out enough on the front page, perhaps find a larger font that doesn't blend into the page so well, this is your focus point for describing the service, make sure it stands out.
Since PostgreSQL is already a well known (relational) product, I don't think that PostSQL is viable terminology.
Actually, AIUI a lot of the concepts in modern codecs have been tossed around academia for quite a long time.

See this highly informative and empowering video:
http://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml
There are plenty of software development jobs where remote working simply isn't possible. Just as a single, simple example, there are very few neighborhoods that would tolerate an 18 foot high-speed radar antenna on a roof, and even fewer that would then have suitable objects to watch.
How can the company get people to see their movies if they are not know for making good ones? Politicians can lie because you are not the target, cinemas have you as a target.
But Google can support Flash and work towards openness

Here's the thing, though. Mozilla and Google, over the past year, have basically used the video-codecs thing as a publicity stunt. LOOK AT ME I'M SO PURE AND OPEN AND NOT LIKE THOSE VICIOUS CLOSED EVIL APPLE NAZIS (except please please please don't ask us about all that proprietary stuff we still do, please). It's hard not to see this as hypocritical.

So it's perfectly reasonable to, for example, call Google out on that. If they're really serious about openness, but need to make some compromises to deal with legacy proprietary stuff, why was this the specific compromise? Why not, say, keep H264 support in the <video> element while encouraging people to re-encode, and cut Flash? That at least gets you progress toward an open standard -- HTML5 -- if not a completely ideologically pure platform.

And especially given the fact that H264 has already literally won -- in the mobile market, in the broadcast market, in the home-entertainment market -- while Flash players which spool out H264-encoded video are essentially interchangeable with HTML5 <video> elements which spool out H264-encoded video, it's hard to see this as a genuine move in support of "openness".

It should be obvious that Google's hope is anyone using HTML5 video will eventually move to WebM exclusively.

This is the real point, I think. Google, I'm pretty sure, doesn't actually give a shit about openness; they care about getting people to use platforms they can control. See the requirements you have to meet to get the actual Android platform (you know, the one with the useful Google apps). See their ongoing spats with sites like Facebook, which are rooted more in Google not getting access to/control over data than any noble attempt to serve privacy. And see WebM, the codec Google owns, and which they're going to ram down everyone's throat via every channel they can use.
Well, that would be an option, but they probably wouldn't make much money, they wouldn't get the marketing support, and they wouldn't get the prestige of having published.

But that's a good point. The hideous Apps in the App Store are like the terrible self-published things that shows up in the Kindle store.
Yes, It is the right time to upgrade the look and feel to keep up with the times
No, I like it clean and simple
I hope the author of this 'email from a reader' gets a cut of the ad revenue from its publication in whole, or they'll have two reasons to feel bitter.

TC--
Ironically that page fucks the margins when I try to zoom in to read it on my Android.
If I buy physical goods, I have an expectation that I completely own it and can do with it whatever I want, and can share my experience completely with others.

What Sony is trying to say is that when you buy a PS3 you are sort of renting it, and they still own what you can and can't do with it. Perhaps because they are selling it at a loss so they can make money when you buy games. I think that in this case they should NOT sell the device to consumers but lease/rent it, because that is the agreement they are really looking for.
Really glad you didn't make any generalizations about designers there to prove a point.
Google purchased the patents on WebM/VP8 when it acquired On2, and licensed them in an open-source-friendly, royalty-free way.