skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only interesting question is if it really is the case that if you are a have-not, you never have a chance of starting a successful business.

Of course we know that it is possible to start out with little (YC is the living proof of that), but that might only be exceptions to the rule. I am not yet sure that our society really is not skewed. Or at least there might not be a universal law protecting the chances for the "small people". It seems possible that in a few years time, Apple Facebook and Google control the internet and again the options of the small people will be reduced to low-margin sharecropping.

Atm I am leaning to the belief that chances are good enough. If that is the case, the only sensible estimate for the fair price of work seems to be market value. I have yet to see another definition of fair that works. So if the employers can get away with paying their employees little money, it must be because the market does not afford more. There might be millions of jobless waiting to take over their jobs, for example - what would the jobless think about the fair price for a job?

Then again, politics define at least some of the rules of the market (as an extreme example, government could decree a maximum wage) . But if the author thinks the market is broken, he should say so, and state in what way it is broken and how it could possibly be fixed. Just calling somebody a thief doesn't accomplish anything.
$42.15 and a lot of generosity. There actually is a good point here though: ingenuity and kindness can be a great catalyst for success.
That's nice to see, even if you have no interest in the iPad.
I'm always skeptical about predictions of a coming food shortage. It's been predicated for the last 200 (Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population was published in 1800), and it hasn't happened yet.
So, the new 404 page isn't really useful. They could maybe add some links to help people find what they were looking for.

Maybe someone at Google should take a look at these very helpful tips on what to include on a 404 page:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?&...
See my comments throughout the rest of the thread.
But they sure are trying their hardest to encourage people to ... ;)

EDIT: Sorry for the spelling mistake, downvoter - it's now corrected :)
Ever wonder if discounts work for SAAS apps?
do you like chatroulette??
Yeah, that was an attempt at sarcasm. Clearly it didn't work.

I was tying to imply that FSF types want all web apps to be accessible via the command line. <sarcasm>Because who needs a fancy tabbed browser when you've got lynx?</sarcasm>

Just for the record, I am well aware of what Unix pipes are and how to use them :)
A union has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with collective bargaining. When parties negotiate as a group, they can get a better deal. The drawback is that you must dilute your own interests with those of everyone else. But when all members have roughly the same interests, it's worthwhile.

All this site has to say is that the new curated app platforms are creating a huge power imbalance, and the way to even the field is to unionize. All the ideology just muddies the water and leads to endless bickering.
Apple doesn't have to do much to appeal to the mass market of people that purchase their products. The iPad 2 could have only added a camera, and it would sell by the millions this year.

Apple has very good PR. It's allowed them to create a nice ecosystem of brand loyalty where people will always come out to buy their "next great thing" year after year. They've made a good profit from it, so it must be working.

When you go beyond the people that buy Apple products because they're Apple products, to people that actually make a conscious and informed decision about what they buy, there are definitely several valid concerns and reasons not to buy into it. Pointing to large sales numbers as a counter-argument to criticism is just plain silly.
As Hollywood wanes, indie filmmakers rise. Don't forget that a decade ago, a HD-quality camera was out of reach for anyone but Hollywood directors. Today, you can get one for $1,000.

Bad times for Hollywood film? Yup.

Good times for the art of filmmaking? It's never been better.
> say "no you can't have my login?"

Of course I would. I don't think that takes big anything. That's an incredibly inappropriate request.
Better AWS Access Control with IAM and Fog
The Death of Adventure Games
"Our service is almost back to normal. Some sites may experience slow loading or errors with your comment count. This however does not affect the posting of comments. The following is our post mortem report. At around 9:30am PDT, Disqus identified a big increase in response times for traffic hitting non-VIP and API servers. The problem was tied to a significant increase in volume of requests to disqus.com, which overwhelmed our load balancer capacity. The immediate problem has been resolved by doubling load balancer capacity, and we are looking at options to improve capacity and availability of the API and the rest of the Disqus platform based on the lessons learned from today's issues. We sincerely apologize for the interruptions this morning, -Giannii"

So it was related to a spike in traffic volume. :)
I'm guessing it's not much of an issue when it's sent compressed over the wire.
Where are you located? Is remote a possibility?
| not BSD Sockets.
Robert Scoble - blogger, technical evangelist, author and MRI machine ...
Tell HN: Friend builds cool app, Runkeeper says Not So Fast
Show HN: my weekend project, The Furnishr
"There are also non-co-op companies where employees all have a say in business decisions, and they have done well and have great employee satisfaction and retention."

I have a feeling that all of these ideas that you and many others want to try have already been tried. It's resulted in the type of company structures we have today.

Personally, I've been involved in enough groups and organizations to know that not everyone should have a say in business decisions. Lots of people have ridiculous ideas and it would result in the downfall of the group/company (I've seen it happen). Other people just aren't interested. They want to collect their paycheck and go home.

"The current (big) business climate dictates that the sole purpose of a company is to maximize shareholder value at all times, at all costs. I suggest that the purpose of a company is to provide value to all stakeholders, and find a healthy balance."

You can start a company right now that does this. Why not try your theories out? That's the beauty of our current free system (at least in the US). You can try out ideas that may or may not work without having to force everyone to abide by your rules.

"I suggest that the purpose of a company is to provide value to all stakeholders, and find a healthy balance."

This should be up to the person that owns the company. I don't like the idea of forcing others to my ideals.
HPC is a rather specific subset of the programming world. My experience is that a lot of pure HPC code is researchy/research lab driven.

If you have an undergrad degree (of any type) already, you could look around for a MS program with an advisor who is doing HPC research. You have a shot at getting into a program which will probably require you to take or place out of undergrad coursework (SICP and CLR are probably going to make that workout just fine for you).

If you want to go all self-schooled, maybe you could pick up one of the new CUDA books and do some decent re-implementations of hard HPC stuff for that environment. Side projects like that would make me look at a resume twice if I had a need for a HPC hacker . . .
True - but don't you think the negativity surrounding this would have been a lot less, had Lutz himself decided to make it a commercial product?
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وفالنسيا
well Gruber said they're releasing another one in fall ;)
What does this mean? If you found your own company at 20, then 20 years later are you are 40 year old founder? If you are a serial entrepreneur, some companies will be started when you are young and others will be started when you are old.

If you can do it earlier, why wait?
And what I'm thinking - find a local dev in your area that is willing to take you under their wing. See how they work, learn the tricks of the trade, and the skills necessary to go from hacker to professional.
> Is this what FSF has become?

What do you mean? This is what FSF has always been like.

They're shockingly zealots in defending absolute gpl-style freedom over all your digital goods.

In all honesty I don't think a decentralized and "Free" facebook would work. The centralization is a feature that most people want; it's part of why it "just work" without you having to become a system (or a network) administrator.

Imagine:

Mom: How come I'm not receiving updates from your aunt anymore?

You: Well, you have to wait for $INSERT_TECHNICAL_TERM to propagate or something.

Mom: Do I have to enter her hash-thing again?

or worse:

Mom: I'm getting a lot of spam

You: You have to install morton anti-spam social-edition

Mom: It won't install.

You: sigh here I come.

It's like email, but much worse because it has way more features, and more ways for things to go wrong.

Plus, I think Mark Zuckerberg actually donated money to the Diaspora project.
Another image: http://i.imgur.com/haspR.jpg

Looks like its in Poland,
"zwolnij" == slow down,
tablica == table

hilarious imo
Quite so. The project manager comes to you with an underoptimized set of step-by-step instructions; you help him to give you a minimal set of defensible business goals instead.

Next step: meet those goals in the most effective way you know how.
I assume you think that the bailouts of the financial system were earned, and that school is optional for kids who don't like following silly or time-wasting instructions.
Device hardware doesn't matter if the device is hard to use. Smart Covers could solve the iPad's ergonomic problems, and that's far more important to users than two cameras or HDMI out.
But that was not because the iPod had no wireless, neither because it had less space than Nomad. I hope we can all agree, with the benefit of hindsight, that the reason for the slow uptake of the iPod was a combination of it being Firewire only, it being Mac only, Apple not being the brand they are now, and the fact that people were not really familiar with and didn't quite understand the concept of digital music.
Ya know, the auto-refresh is nice and all... but could they please remember my scroll position? It's not that hard...
Why wouldn't they be doing tracking? It seems like a big portion of the benefit to them in doing connect/like/etc. They do make their money selling ads, and they are seemingly hot to collect as much information as possible.
1M/1M: VCs, Angels, Incubators, Accelerators – What WE Do With Your Rejects
The difference between my site and Formspring is that, YOU set the questions. It's role reversal, you get to see how well people know you and vice versa. They don't ask you questions.
A friend of mine built this app to sync RunKeeper runs with DailyMile. DailyMile has an API, tweeted about it (they've since deleted that tweet), and was generally cool about it. RunKeeper on the other hand didn't like it and asked him to take it down and wait for an official API.
FYI: If you are thinking about trading up from the iPad 1, gazelle.com is offering $320 for the 16GB WiFi version. This price won't stay for long since the iPad 1 16GB WiFi is going for $399 on apple.com. Also you can use the code "TWiT" for 10% more.
Already been done: http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2010/06/04/worlds-first-ip...
"Again - you don't know what his internal process was for picking these jobs. You can't mind read and impute motivations for his selections."

Well, it's obviously not working for the guy. He has clearly voiced his dissatisfaction with his life, which includes the jobs that he has taken. Someone that is doing what they love, even if it isn't making that much money, will be happy.
I think a good internship is the usual course of action here, although the concept is quite similar. By good, I don't necessarily mean with a successful, famous company. Rather, I mean an internship where you're sure to get some attention from engineers around you. You want someone to bounce ideas off of, someone who will review your code, someone who will force you to use keyboard shortcuts instead of the mouse. Basically, you want someone who will invest time in developing you and not someone who views you as a source of cheap(er) labor.

How you find that, though, isn't clear. I lucked out with my internship, and have always made it a personal point to seek out opportunities to train interns wherever I work because of that past experience. Generally, people are astounded that I volunteer for something their other engineers hate, so I'm not sure how good your odds are.

You can drop a line if you want and I'll help you as best as I can. I don't do much work in web-development and most of your technical knowledge seems geared towards that, but I would be glad to offer general advice as well as answer any other ?'s you might have.
The iPod got wireless and more storage than a Nomad in the 3rd generation?
I don't think couchsurfing and dumpster diving would scale to the masses.
I don't entirely understand why you would spend your time trying to imply something about the FSF that is completely unrelated to what the FSF cares about. Could you fill me in, perhaps?
Now we just need to turn 27 year old hackers into learning a bit of the business side (like myself).
So what if they are tracking? It's a separate issue to whether or not Facebook is controlling data / privacy too much. The same tracking issues with the Like button exist with any technology that is included on a huge number of websites, including advertising networks and Google Analytics (which expressly exists purely to track users!)

It is not inherently evil to track users. What you do with that information decides the morality of the situation. It seems to me that rolling this non-issue into the arguments against Facebook is actually harmful to the FSFs cause - why would they bother telling us about something trivial if they had real concerns to air?†

† I am not saying that there aren't real concerns, or that the FSF isn't airing them - just that airing a non-issue looks bad
> Is this what FSF has become?

You mean there was a time when FSF didn't launch ideological arguments to demand that people use software from the GNU Project?

I'm not picking a side, just pointing out that this is par for the course. If it isn't GPL, it's evil.
If the people who have wants aren't the same people who have money, it doesn't matter whether their wants are endless or not.
It's also a nice trump card to pull out if a nice shiny new tablet looks like it will begin eating into Apple's marketshare. If they think the iPad 2 can already comfortably take on the Xoom (etc), why would they try to add too much now?
IPad 3 will come out this year?
"Just because capitalism works some of the time for a few of the people, doesn't mean that it's above criticism, and has no problems."

Capitalism works for more than "just a few people" "some of the time". No system is perfect.

"Since the majority of folks on HN have benefited from capitalism, it's not surprising that they are not as open to hearing criticisms of it."

and why have they benefited from it? Because they were all born rich? Capitalism benefits people that want to put the time and effort into it.

All of your responses so far have been you, crapping on capitalism. Where is your alternative?
But that ISN'T balance. Eventually your health will degrade from (presumably) chronic lack of sleep. There just are not enough hours in a day :(
"I highly doubt is doing any tracking."

On what evidence do you have this doubt?

facebook has a long history (the entirety of their existence) of being extremely greedy about personal data. Whenever outsiders have had the chance to see inside their thought process on collecting data, it has always been clear they'll collect anything and everything they can. What they're doing with it might not be nefarious; but they love personal data like no company ever before, and go to great lengths to own it.

I'd be surprised if they aren't tracking every request that passes through their servers and gathering usage patterns of everyone on the Internet, regardless of whether someone is logged into facebook or not, and regardless of whether the request originated on a facebook property. That's just the kind of thing facebook does, as far as I can tell. If they aren't doing it already, it's just a matter of time.
Yes, he did.

http://mashable.com/2010/05/28/zuckerberg-diaspora/
Someone get this cat a dictionary so he can look up "decimate", a better word for what happened than removing "a handful" of staff.
Did anyone else think it was going to be a single programmable gift card that could be used at any store?
The Year of the Tablets. Should Apple be scared? [Infographic]
This is exactly what I was thinking. I wasn't realistically expecting anymore than what was presented, but I got sucked into the hype machine last minute.

As a result, the case truly stood out to me. Apple improved on ideas that have been implemented by some other standout companies before. Any hardcore BlackBerry user knows the magnets in the BlackBerrys and their holster makes the holster/phone combo an integral part of the BlackBerry experience. Then, you get the folding stand which was most notably (to me) done by InCase.

I'm truly impressed at the SmartCover. Very well executed, both on the marketing side and the (technical) design side.
I upvoted, and you're not the first to suggest this either. But I must argue that to have 3 or 4 well-ranked apps with a solid income is easier said than done, especially for a single developer.

I wish I had the insight to know exactly what 3 or 4 other apps to write so I can have a steady income. But chances are by the time I finish writing 3 good apps a year from now, I'll be lucky if one of them has as much traction as this one.

The other choice would be to take this app that already has traction (from only my part time work) and pour more time an energy into it to see how big it could really get.

Thoughts?
How about coding a complex program by having people writing small functions and then aggregating it?
Cambridge, MA (AO Games)

We’re an online retail/games startup based in Cambridge, MA looking for someone to fill a full-time position as a Lead Developer of web applications.

We compensate very well, paying market rates or above for real talent. You may choose to substitute some equity for salary, but that is not mandatory. A remote working option is available at the start, though in the long term the job is at Cambridge, MA.

We are looking for someone who:

- Has experience building complex web apps (think Facebook).

- Has experience / enjoys the challenge of optimizing complex, time sensitive, applications.

- Has some familiarity with PHP in LAMP (though PHP doesn't need to be your favorite language; I'm looking at you Python/RoR evangelists!)

- System / Database administration familiarity is a plus, since this will be helpful for optimization.

A little about us: we are a small startup that is highly profitable. We bootstrapped our way to profitability by using minimum money and time (8 months). We are expanding to take on larger challenges and need a great programmer to work with us.

Contact me at ao.hiring@gmail.com for more info, or check out our posting here: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/9293/profitable-startu...
The Mobile Linux Roundup: An Overview for Developers
> Apple doesn't have to do much to appeal to the mass market of people that purchase their products.

Of course they do. They're not selling $20 pairs of jeans, here. They're selling expensive stuff that requires a conscious decision to purchase. Apple needs to provide a compelling case to move their product. It's not practical to buy something just because it's from Apple. It has to actually do something for you as a user.

> Apple has very good PR.

This line is exhausting. Apple has very good products. The great marketing and PR is a result of having very good products.

You can't sell 15 million units of a brand new, $500 product in nine months on the strength of TV ads and magazine pieces. It has to actually work well. There may be an initial element of brand trust to grease the skids for launch but sustained sales require something real.

My parents aren't Apple fans. They're not nerds. They spend a lot of time frustrated with technology. They're nuts about their iPad because it works really well. That's it. Adding a USB port isn't going to make them like it better. It's going to make it more complex, which is going to degrade their experience in using it.

"Oh, well, that whole 12 hour battery thing? Doesn't count if you use the USB port. Then it's something else."

"What? Why?"

"USB uses power."

"Why?"

etc.

> Pointing to large sales numbers as a counter-argument to criticism is just plain silly.

You continue to miss the point. The criticism isn't valid. Apple has sold a shitload of iPads on the strength of its simplicity. You're talking about making it less simple. In that case, its success is more than ample refutation of your assertion that adding junk to its spec list is going to somehow improve things.

It's like saying, around 1950 "Hey, turn the automobile into a Rhinoceros – then it'll be able to hit things with its horns."

"But people don't buy cars to do that. Look how well they're selling."

"Sales are not a valid refutation of my criticism that cars have no horns to hit things with!"

etc.

But like I said: Chalking it all up to clever marketing, instead of painstaking investments in software design, hardware fabrication and supply chain optimization is how everyone else keeps dropping the ball while Apple sprints all the way to the bank year after year.
To put it bluntly, this is going to be your biggest problem:

This is a founding role so there’s no salary until year two. You’ll get a healty share of equity and the opportunity to build a solution that doesn’t currently exist

I am not trying to rain on your parade or discourage you but, I don't want to sugar coat the reality of what you are looking for is tough to find either. With no salary you are going to have to look to lower your standards.

The title you are looking for with the job description you provided is a CTO and one with previous experience and 5-10 years under there belt, if successful can command $150-$200k on the open market.

Further, many already have an existing network of people looking to recruit them into their ventures or most importantly they have there own ideas that they would rather pursue for a larger equity stake than you can offer if you are not offering a salary. Essentially what the prospect hears is; come work on my project for free and we will give you 20% if we make it, meanwhile you are competing with the reality that the prospect is thinking well I can work for free on my own idea and keep 100% if I make it.

So the reality is you have to find someone who, really, really likes your idea, and unfortunately you ad says nothing about it, you pretty much have to explain you idea in black and white and hope someone of that caliber really likes it. Just to get them to look your way you are going to tell them who you are, what you are doing, why it matters, and how you plan to make it successful. It is no different than pitching a VC, you are asking this person to invest in your vision with their time. You have to give them a reason to be interested. Take your ad from above and imaging that that was going to be your pitch to get VC, would you use it? If not you are going about getting the person you want all wrong.