skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What do we, Indian remote workers, have to do?
I'm getting towards the end of my university (CS degree), and I've done a bunch of freelance work (for many of you here even), as well as open source work. But recently, as I've started looking for more long term work, I find people looking to under-pay (the 'indian' tag).

But even that's OK, living here costs less, I can hang. What bothers me most however, is when people hint (or even bluntly say) they're skeptical about hiring remote Indian workers. I have a portfolio, a handful of connections, I've worked hard to prove myself honest, skilled, and hardworking.

So, is the mindset on HN the same as well? I can understand people who've had bad experiences with either Indian, or remote workers, but it's still so frustrating. I'm not interested in the corporate grind - I want to work with a startup where I can actually have a meaningful impact.

So what, my fellow HN'ers, would it take for YOU (you specifically) to hire me? I'm specifically interested in those of you who are in a position to hire, or have experience hiring. What do I have to show? What do I have to say? Hell, at this point, I'm wondering what I have to wear.

And when I say 'me', I mean any young Indian worker who's passionate about what they do but are getting shot down because of external factors.

Thank you for your advice HN!
TL;DR: Fixed and happy again.

Our sluggified SEO friendly job posting URLs choked on a more interesting job post.
"The infamous party scene is already well addressed by an abundance of other startups."

- Is there a list of these apps?
I'll give both a try in my labs. Thanks!
Did some filter-branching and rebasing to get tav's work on top of current master: https://github.com/traviscline/fabric/tree/tav
Given his "Stock 2.2" comment, best guess would be the Nexus One with AT&T bands. Since it wasn't sold by AT&T, it doesn't have the APK installation locked down.
Would love to learn more about that
Less Annoying Activity Emails: Clustered Notifications Using Resque
Thanks for the tip -- will do!
Combining the two points: If you can't come up with a subject line, it's probably best to do in person.
The new iPad will probably be awesome. I have the original, but don't use it as much after getting an 11" Macbook Air. I'll probably sit this one out.
Ask HN: Website font's getting smaller overtime?
I've had this totally unscientific feeling lately that website are using smaller font size. I've been asking around and a few people told they had that feeling too.

Not really where to start looking I though about you, dear HNers.

Could it be a side effect of spreading use of reset stylesheets ? Or is that a trend to accommodate iphone users ? Or am I just dreaming ?

Thanks.
It would make sense if you had to write LISP to run on 30 different LISP implementations, all of which had weird quirks that you had to memorize and work around.
Maybe it'll work if you send the appropriate `Content-type`?
Inventables: Find new materials
Where talented people go to share their most important links.

It's fairly vague, but I think if done the correct way, vague excites people to check something out.
There is an interesting subtext in this article, which is to suggest that you take more risks as you get closer to the asymptote of salary growth, because it's the way to avoid diminishing returns for the additional skills you've learned between hitting the level of "experienced" and now.

It's the opposite advice that makes up common wisdom, which is to take risks when you are young, inexperienced and without responsibilities, and then settle into the comfortable long-term job with small raises once you get past that phase. I'm not surprised by this; if technical skills compound at all, it would seem that a developer's value would trend exponential and not logarithmic. That is, so long as they don't weary and stagnate.

But then, there is also value for the inexperienced in a startup, in that you'll learn a ton, and be given a lot of responsibility and autonomy. It might be that common wisdom is only half-broken.

Granted, there are opportunity costs involved. You might be in a position where you have to trade capitalistic striving for a paycheck, as a ribbonfarm article posted here a while back put it. It's as much being aware of those opportunity costs, though, as it is knowing whether or not you are in a position to need to accept them.
Square Ups The Ante, Drops Transaction Fee For Businesses
Luigi is a FreeBSD committer and works in the FreeBSD tree. That's where you'll find the most up-to-date dummynet code.
Data GM - Freeing Greater Manchester's Public Data
I used GWT for a while in 2009-2010, and didn't like it at all. I kept running into things that weren't implemented in its subset of Java. Debugging was a pain. Compilation was excruciatingly slow because of all the variations of the code that always had to be compiled for different browsers (something like 40 seconds for a fairly small project) and development speed in general was slow. Also, IIRC you could only run your project from Eclipse in some sort of an IE6 based container. All in all, it wasn't a pleasant experience at all, and I'm not sure what the benefits are. Writing a web app in Java doesn't count as a benefit for me, especially with so many constraints around it.
No, but I can give some suggestions. It would help to know what you want to do.

First of all, you need to decide if you want a language reference, or an application guide, as R books fall into those two categories.

If you have a specific type of work in mind (bio-informatics, data mining, data visualization, ...) I'd say to find a book that focuses on that topic. I haven't looked in a while, but I haven't seen a general R book that I like, anything I suggest there would be guessing on my part.

There are plenty of good references on the web. I'd start by looking at the material available from the R web site:

R's core manuals [1] are typically correct and reasonable to use. The "Introduction to R" guide will get you up to speed fairly well if you already know another programming language. There is also the contributed documentation [2]. I haven't gone through these, so I can't say much about them, or promise that they are up-to-date. I suspect not, as R develops rapidly. The one reference I can recommend highly is "The R Inferno" by Patrick Burns [3]. This is not a starter guide, but something you read after one. It gives excellent advice on avoiding common pitfalls in R.

[1] http://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html

[2] http://cran.r-project.org/other-docs.html

[3] http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
I wonder how many apps in the app store that use multithreading will suddenly break a lot more frequently because of the second core.[1] Rare, freak crashes and glitches could suddenly become unusably frequent. Maybe all apps submitted with SDK < 4.4 (or whatever) will be pinned to one CPU?

[1] most race conditions will only trigger on a uniprocessor system if preempted, which is fairly unlikely if the racy data accesses are close together.
"Lastly, do not worry about competitors. Even if someone copied your idea completely, there are three areas competitors can never copy: 1) your team; 2) speed of product innovation of your team; 3) community of passionate users."

To stomach this startup mentality this quote drives home to me the most. I just came to the realization that there is a new product out that does what I want to do but not exactly. I put myself in a small panic/"is is worth it" kind of mentality but knowing that if something like this stops me from trying to accomplish my dream, then I dont have what it takes to start a startup. I won't be able to live with myself if I stop now and always have "what if's" floating around in my head. After reading this excerpt im fired up, im not going to let this speed bump stand in my way.
Anyone have a sense of how true this is at big places like Google and Microsoft?
Maybe. He's competing with headhunters, often at $30k+ per developer found.

His charges look pretty modest if he has even a minimal success rate.
No H1-Bs?
It could just be the further ease of implementation, and spread of information about, good typography implementation. When the Ruby-esque templates were first taking hold, I would've argued that fonts were getting bigger, or at least the headlines, but downloadable type on the web also offers different weights, which I think is perhaps the biggest change. Weights make a lot of sense in print, but I wonder if one the web we were somewhat better off, readability wise, with at least consistent weighting.
Two weeks ago, I planned on it. However, subscription services like Mog are too important for me. I'll wait.
That's usually not good enough since the Boxee Box handles flash website different than the version that you download and install yourself. For instance, many sites on the DL version start in full screen but with the Boxee Box they don't. I think this was done to satisfy content owners but it significantly hampers my experience with the Box.

They do try to do two clever things with the box to make this better: Hit menu and sometimes there is a full screen button, sometimes not. Also, they try to place the mouse cursor over the "Fullscreen Button" in the Flash player, but this is wonky at best.
I am absolutely amazed to have read this yesterday, then heard about it again this morning on a local radio station (I'm from the Midwest). Wow. How's it holding up?
Scvngr Surpasses 1 Million Users
NanoVM - Java for the AVR
This is rather concerning the presentation of the text: Did anyone else find the black font of this size on green background disturbing for the eyes? Selecting the text helps, though...
This has created a pretty serious issue at my current job. My experience is increasing in value faster than policy lets my salary appreciate.

Policy is forcing me to find a job elsewhere. I cannot rationalize continually taking a relative pay cut to stay where I am.
I just completed running one full scenario (destination South America) and everything (including the results) went perfectly for me.

Now, some observations/suggestions, mainly related to SEO (Based on the current site, I'm nearly sure you already know this, but just in case):

1) Missing Title and meta tags

2) Consider rewriting

http://www.tripzard.com/results

to

http://www.tripzard.com/results/south_america (or whatever)

and

http://www.tripzard.com/places/91

to

http://www.tripzard.com/places/south_america/argentina/bueno...

Let me know if you need me to volunteer any work on this - will be happy to do what I can.
The tools to make Gmail and Asana existed when Basecamp was launched.

Specifically, the fallacies of distributed computing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput...) and approaches to address them existed when Basecamp was launched.

That they are now starting to be addressed more and more by applications like Gmail and Asana are not a function of revolutionary advances in our tools, but of an evolution in the collective understanding of our tools.

It is not so much about keeping up with the pace of technology, as it is about understanding technology, and the advances already made.
Here's a table of speeding laws, for anyone else who's wondering about their state: http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/laws.html
Seven Maxims That Have Led to Startup Success
any chance you'd release the raw data? my email is in my profile, i'd be happy to share the results.
Strong disagree. It seems like everyone else (Kayak, Expedia, etc) can't do a simple flight search without 10 inputs and 5 pop-up windows.

Hipmunk is simple. It has tabs. Its not covered in shit. I can't see myself using anything else.
Hi,

I understand your pain. Things you could (not must) do:

- have many recommendations on your LinkedIn profile from previous startups CEO you worked for (a portfolio is great, but I also want proof that things went smootly)

- show me that you are a long term contributor to an open source project (I know that many startups are afraid that you are gonna close skype and never "show up" again, I think that could reassure them)

- show me that you have a reputation online (twitter/stackoverflow/HN) if you are an authority I will not be skeptical

- dont be (too) cheap. cheap = low quality

That's my PoV, and again it's things you could do not must do. You shouldnt need to prove anything more than a US remote worker (in a perfect world).
What I find stunning is that Apple is about to launch the iPad 2 and we are still waiting for the first credible Android-based tablet, aside from the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Note that the first iPad launched almost a year ago in April of 2010.

Apple’s time-to-market in tablets has generated at least five key advantages for the company:

1. Apple has locked up the market for critical components, including 60% of the global supply of 10” touch capacitive screens.

2. The company is much further along the learning curve in tablets, with refined hardware and software as well as more efficient production through its partnership with Foxconn.

3. Apple has achieved significant economies of scale to drive down per unit costs, having already shipped and sold 15m+ iPads.

4. The company has developed a sizable collection of complements in the form of apps and content (via iTunes) and physical accessories.

5. Apple has generated strong brand awareness around the iPad, given the limited competition for consumer mind share in this market.

These aforementioned advantages build upon Apple’s already significant, corporate advantages in the areas of technology, distribution (e.g., retail stores), customer service, and overall brand recognition.

Credible Android-based tablets will arrive soon. For instance, the Motorola Xoom is due to hit stores this Thursday. However, it may take some time (measured in years) for competitors to catch up to Apple in this market.
I totally disagree.

If they don't see who's posting and what's being posted, how can they know if they're doing a good job. How can they spot the opportunity and pivot?

I know you don't mean it this way, but in a way you are saying hide from the customers and carry on coding.

Manually checking every post could be an excellent way of figuring out who's using the site and what the common frustrations are.

If they were getting 100 listings a day it would be a different matter, but I doubt they will be getting that many.
>You can still collect payment outside of the app on your website as well.

You're right, but you know what? They wouldn't allow a link to the App publishers website, where the end user could pay for services etc.
Good to hear Quixote is still going. It was my favourite framework in the pre-WSGI Django/Pylons days.
b/c the market demands it.
Show HN: Our startup just launched on Kickstarter
Speculation: maybe the proxy server blocked it because the domain name includes the word "hire", and the company is trying to keep people from finding a new place to work.
Well, garden collapse was one factor among many. It could be argued that Atari had to rush their shoddy Pac-man to market lest a competitor jump in with a clone first. Another factor was the appearance of pornographic games (Rule 34 applied even then) which hurt the field's reputation.

But there were plenty of other management and business causes of the crash too. Atari reportedly produced more ET cartridges than existed 2600 systems, hubristically deciding that ET would drive a wave of system buying. That sort of financial wizardry won't be saved by any amount of ecosystem walls.

I'd say that the openness of the system caused the failure of Atari itself more so than it caused the industrywide crash. Atari couldn't maintain premium game prices and volume against the flood of competition. (If better games weren't available, ET would have sold more in the vacuum.) A similar story played out in the PC market over the next decade: IBM created an open system, then got marginalized out of their own industry in a race to the bottom. But the whole PC industry always thrived.

I also think the crash itself is overblown in latter-day coverage. I was a kid and didn't notice anything at the time; Toys R Us still had shelves full of Atari games right up until the NES caught on. The bankruptcy of invincible titan Atari itself was a big event, but Coleco didn't fold until 1988 and Mattel and Magnavox trucked right on in other fields of business.

So tying all this back to the topic, remember that Apple's interest is Apple's own survivability and profitability. Apple's responsibility is not to maximize the adoption and utility of the mobile phone app market in general. Apple's goal is to capture the biggest slice of the pie for itself, and it perceives that it has the clout to do that by dictating terms. Whether they will go the way of the NES to market domination or the way of IBM's Micro Channel to obscurity is up to the market.
Show HN: I built a webapp to park my few domains. I liked it, so opening it up.
can you explain how the ipad increased your productivity?
That is the thing that worries me with all these meta search sites. No one is announcing who they don't search. So when someone like Kayak gets in a fight with AA, and they disappear from the listing, you better hope you notice it and do your search somewhere else that has AA. Or all this fancy technology is for naught.
Picking on Python for not having simpler built-in ways to do domain-specific statistical operations seems rather silly to me.

I've been involved the last few years with creating better data structures and tools for doing statistics in Python-- with excellent results (http://pandas.sourceforge.net and http://statsmodels.sourceforge.net). So I think the author should take a closer look at some of the libraries and tools out there.
It's not greedy, it's just not a good idea to try and capitalize on a service that isn't running on all cylinders yet. Having said that, definitely a chicken and egg problem. I would worry about getting users before starting to charge for the service. Once a larger number of members has been obtained thinkings of ways to monetize it should be fairly straightforward.
Credible Android-based tablets (e.g., Xoom) should emerge later this

later this... week?

http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/21/visualized-motorola-xoom-...

http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/20/motorola-xoom-up-for-in-s...
Does this count as "mobile", and would Oracle have arguably the same patent objections to a non-Oracle but compatible VM? Reminds me of the promise of JINI, at least with hobbyists. The pros that I know that use microcontrollers want actually less cruft between them an the circuit, and have expressed to me that the lack of good sub-millisecond timing of AVR, and other stuff in the standard image, puts AVR at a disadvantage for efficient embedded devices.
Yep. I planned on buying the iPad 2 but I’m not so sure anymore. I will probably wait another few months and play around with the competitors first. That WebOS tablet also looks great but I don’t know whether I want to wait that long.
They usually don't have to believe what the law is when many citizens will easily bend at the sight of officer intimidation because they don't actually know the law.

Which is a shame.
In addition to charging a retainer it would be wise to not take on fixed scope/price projects.

We always tell our clients that we charge by the hour and we give them as accurate an estimate as possible. Usually there's a provision that we warn them in advance if we're going over an estimate by more than 20%.

On occasion I've found it helps to take on part of the project for a fixed price as a first trial run of your services. But then always be clear that it's a trial run and that you'll automatically fall back to the hourly rate for any work after that.

We bill by the month, regardless of if projects are finished. This helps a lot too since the client can't use the date of the invoice as leverage in a negotiation about scope for example.

This strategy works out great for us, I can enthusiastically recommend it.
Speech technology at Google: teaching your phone to talk and listen
I use google spreadsheets to manage bugs, some pretty cool things can be done with color formatting and rules.
Strange that I forgot that. Fixed.
Added the date to the title. Sorry about that.
Ask HN: How do startups make decisions?
When multiple founders have equal equity stakes, how do you decide "where the buck stops" when there is a disagreement?

Do you agree beforehand that one person is the "CEO" or do you just flip a coin when something comes up?

What have you found to be the best strategies/tactics for making decisions in your ventures?
I disagree. I interpret that phrase as stating that an anecdote is something fundamentally different from a valid data point: the data point came from a carefully designed experiment using properly tested equipment, control groups, rigorous mathematical analysis, perhaps using double-blind, randomized trials where it applies, etc... whereas the anecdote is a story you hear from somebody, as per its definition:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence
>That's why many big tech companies have moved to a "level" system

Although you have to do it right. Netscape had such a system, with levels ranging from T1 to T7. I started at T4. Two years later, I was doing work that, according to the written definitions, should have put me into T5. I asked my manager if I could get promoted; he bumped it up to his director. About four months later, the director answered me: yes, I did meet the written definition, but, no, I couldn't have a promotion, because they didn't actually use the written definitions. They were guidelines, but the real standard for promoting to level N was comparing the person to other people who were already at level N...and there were no T5s in the company.

Basically, it was a firebreak, which provided the appearance of a career path, without providing the reality. (I expect this wasn't on purpose, but that was the effect.) Three months later, I moved to another company, hired as what Netscape would've called a T7.
> Maybe all apps submitted with SDK < 4.4 (or whatever)

SDK < iOS5, likely, if they decide to play it safe (or some kind of attribute in the bundle). I highly doubt Apple is going to fork iOS again for no reason at all, 4.3 has yet to be released and iOS5 is 4-5 months away tops.
If Apple allows you to buy them any more.
31 slides with big images here: http://www.designmadeingermany.de
Very cool idea. I think educational software will greatly benefit from something like this, specifically writing programs.
Thanks! :-) I changed the wording to "Credible Android-based tablets will arrive soon..."
Can you recommend some of these games? I've been itching to try some new ones.
I don't know that much about programming, but OS X has always supported SMP and multi-core CPU's, and Cocoa also supports it fine.
I'm really excited to share with you our labor of love for the past 8-9 months. My partner (mechanical engineer) and I (electrical engineer) have been working on physical gaming buttons for the iPad and iPhone in stealth mode and we're finally ready to show off our hard work.

I know stealth mode isn't the most popular way to run a startup, but when you're the new guy coming up against established competitors it's really hard to act against that worry. But now we're showing the world what we've done and we want to get all the feedback you have to offer.

Positive feedback, negative feedback, whatever. Take the gloves off. Thanks guys.
This Websense category is filtered: Blogs and Personal Sites.
Well, eventually. Just not under Obama. Maybe if they wait a few years?
Apple pretty heavily promotes using their concurrency frameworks (GCD, dispatch queues, etc.) that don't require the direct creation of threads by application code [1]. Do you think many applications ignore that and use threads on iOS anyway?

[1] http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/iPad/#documentation/G...