skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I decided to see what it would take for me to create a very simple "tag" that I could use to direct visitors to my personal website. Note I didn't adequately document my steps before writing this post, so it is from memory.

1. Go to the Microsoft tag website: http://tag.microsoft.com/
2. Click the tag manager
3. Log in with your live id
4. Consent to a bunch of terms
5. Click create
6. Follow the steps to create
7. Click render
8. Accept more stuff: http://tag.microsoft.com/resources/implementationguide.aspx
9. Get a PDF of your new tag

The URL for managing your tags is called "ManageAds.aspx".

Then looking at the implementation guide we find this little gem:

"Because the idea of scanning bar codes with a mobile phone camera is fairly new to most people, Microsoft requires you to provide basic instructions near each Tag that explain to users how to download and use the Microsoft Tag Reader application. [...]"

Instead with QR codes I go to http://zxing.appspot.com/generator/ generate a tag, and place it where ever I want. None of my visitors first get redirected through a Microsoft website/URL which looks like this:

http://rs.tag.microsoft.com/U5SS544JBBGQWZDY5SO3SJJIX346OUSE.aspx?Level=1&VID=5%2B0%2B0&afid=0&TH=_exokqW8DE19hOgWheA%24&CS=U8&PL=qqEVoS0iWnsgtvRRahUwDpOP3lT4xjm1ZQhbA1v%2B33Y_XTYDgevcIqCcZPkuEjELB_S2dmR7FAfr_dAU7ZpsqHgSe3FE77BcYAwWfau1zELNpxfdJk1Vein5v3cjXUd7%2BOHZPti%2BEtwgRV8TLufSDUotLWae4rA4wq5i1EErTH1B89lyMg%24%24

If I want to provide redirect features I can use a QR code that points to example.net/qr-code-poster and have it redirect anywhere in the world. I am still unsure as to why I would ever want to use Microsofts tagging stuff when clearly the user experience with QR codes is much simpler, AND I have more control over the content of the tag, and I can't just have a tag shutdown at the whim of a corporation if that is what it came down to.
You've got a pretty narrow definition of professional. Where're all the elementary school teachers? And if you think that teaching is not highly-skilled, professional work, I'd like to see you keep a class of 5th graders from destroying the place.
Always thought Firewire was a pretty good name.
And, in case anyone still hasn't read "Gödel, Escher, Bach," let this be a reminder to do so.
Pretty much any environment where you care about performance of your code, actually. A lot of the simple-looking jquery stuff is implemented with tons of indirection, branching, etc.

Just compare the work a browser has to do for something like:

document.getElementById("foo").setAttribute("bar", "baz");

to the work needed for the jquery equivalent...

Now the good thing is that most consumers of jquery don't care about performance of their code (in that they're doing small enough amounts of stuff it doesn't matter much).
Does Bing have a problem with over-ranking content farms?
Security concern: clicking "log in" (without a username or password) logged me in as a user called "Zyfon".
I like to think so.

I don't want to give the impression than I'm down on anyone earning (or aspiring to earn) large amounts of money. At one time I aspired to break the $100k/yr mark by age 30 (certainly not too ambitious, but it seemed doable at the time).

Obviously I had a change of heart in the intervening years, and so far I'm quite pleased with things. To each their own.
Here are where I see the use cases for the different sizes of MB Pros:

13": you do work on the laptop, but you also do a fair amount of travelling. In this particular case, the MB Air is also quite good.

15": you do quite a bit of work on the laptop, including connecting it to an external monitor, but would still like the laptop screen as a second monitor. This is definitely the best all around option, especially if you do some travelling/commuting but not all the time.

17": you need the extra screen real estate for something like video editing/graphics editing while on the move. Other than that, it's a bit bigger and heavier than most people find comfortable.
"why did startups raise so much VC at the end of the 1990s"

VCs pushed them hard to get users at any cost and ipo, since you could do so easily without profits.
So true.

I remember telling my boss that some project would take two weeks... back in November. It's now March and I'm still not done.

It always surprises me how long things take, especially when I consider the amount of useful code I've written over the weekend or between talks at conferences...
There is plenty of ILP for VLIW in many real-world cases -- but the most common case is that where all the instructions in the VLIW are identical. This of course reduces to SIMD, which makes the VLIW unnecessary.
The developer that worries about this is probably not really into open source to start with.
Here you are:

http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=%22senior+software+engineer%...

http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=%22senior+system+administrat...

http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=dba&l1=san+francisco%2C+...
When you guys are talking about stocks tanking (or conversely doing very well), do any of you actually short the stock?

I'm asking because I'm a college student and don't have much money, but an opportunity like this looks good.

Buuut I also don't know enough about the market to feel comfortable making a bet like this. My main concern is if people who trade stock often can set their shorts and sell extremely early (maybe minutes after the market opens) leaving the average trader only able to buy shares once the price has fallen too far for a short to be a good strategy.

I poked around on Google but it would also be great to hear what people here think.
$100k isn't successful, it's the bare minimum as a professional. If you're an engineer, all that's required to earn that much is show up on time and be good at your job. The cold, hard truth is if you don't earn at least that much, you either suck at your job or suck at negotiating.

This appears to be true of the Americans I know but this level of salary is.. uncommon amongst the Europeans (particularly the British) I know. I know you weren't speaking for other countries, but salaries are a lot 'flatter' over here.

Contractors will be earning at that level without too much difficulty but for a typical full-time employee to be earning $100K in London, say, they'd need to be an experienced manager or be into the 15+ year point of their career in my experience. It's night and day from the US experience.

This is part of the reason I work for myself. If I were in the US, I could earn $100K full-time pretty easily with my skillset. In the UK, it would be really hard work getting a similar position. Self employment wins for that here since I can just have American customers used to American prices anyway ;-)
Sounds like a great project for someone: realcostofliving.com
It's much, much more than 10 times cheaper now.

In 1998, you pretty much had to use commercial software if your site had any kind of traffic. That usually meant an Oracle database, and Oracle would only really scale vertically, so you had to spend even more up front on hardware that was powerful enough to scale.

Implementing Oracle on Sun wasn't something that most people (even good programmers) could do themselves, so they hired consulting companies, which cost even more.

Now, you might pay $5-10K to outsource an iPhone app. Then, you'd easily pay $100K just to get your database implemented, and easily that again for licence fees for your web software (Vignette anyone?).

Now, you pay $20/month for a basic EC2 setup, knowing you can scale it out horizontally. Back then you'd pay $50K up front for Sun hardware that would support the traffic you might get.

I don't know anything about the example given (DealPilot.com), but I do know that now days something that could run on shared hosting in 1997 could be hosted for close to free [1] now. That's still more than 10x less that $100/month.

I would also point out that developing an app for the iPhone costs $99 if you do it yourself (which appears to be how they built DealPilot.com), so that is still more than 10x less than $100/month over a year.

Lets compare costs for a year:

1997: $100/month = $1200, plus $3000 for server = $4200 (I assume there were hosting costs for the server, but I'll assume they were similar to the $100/month for shared hosting)

2011: $20/month for EC2 hosting (being conservative here - EC2 would let the company start off a lot cheaper than this and scale expenses as revenue grew) + $99 Apple fee = $339

[1] Free hosting examples include: Google AppEngine up to its free tier, Amazon's free EC2 offer. There are numerous examples of < $5/month virtual servers available, too.
Doesn't USB rely on the CPU and FireWire offloads processing to a dedicated chip?

Does anyone know if Thunderbolt is similar to FireWire in this way?
But as jwz notes, nobody actually wants checking a checkbox to be approved by multiple committees. It sounds like a good idea when you're writing the spec (what if a dumb employee checks a checkbox he shouldn't!!!!111!!!), but no real person fantasizes about having this sort of feature available in software.

In reality, people check things that affect them even if there is no explicit approval flow. "Why did you order that extra monitor" at budget time is a lot less work that having 6 bosses sign a form every time someone needs a pencil. Not on paper, but in real life.
I believe the trick involves preventing a revolving-door turnstile from turning:

http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local&id=...
Okay...this site is completely mooching off of MSNBC. Completely wrong link to submit.

The actual article (once you toss all the ad-encumbered frames added by "jorbit.com") is here:

http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/02/24/6123303-mac-...
Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN?
As a recent recruit (and a happy contributor/beneficiary) of HN, I've been busy getting a feel of things here.

One issue that has been puzzling me so far is: With so much going on here, so many new threads, so many posts and what have you, how to keep up with everything in general?

I did find the creative use of title prefix conventions like Ask HN, Show HN, Tell HN etc. and the 'New' section to be somewhat useful from this perspective, but that's not really near enough to keep up with everything that happening here.

I'm still trying to figure things out for myself but please share your method/s and ideas.
SEOMoz CEO Rand Fishkin suggested a few weeks ago that many SEOs were doing this (I didn't, I've yet to delve into the stock game) - and it made perfect sense to do.

https://twitter.com/#!/randfish/status/31119943495843840
Google Takes on Content Farms
This "jorbit.com" is just wrapping an LATimes article in ads.

Completely the wrong link to submit. Go here:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/02/apple-ipa...
Watch Project TV
This sounds almost identical to the recent svn -> git transition in ffmpeg, in which the ffmpeg and libswscale repositories had to be merged while simultaneously continuing development.
I've published my python solutions for reference, kibitzing, critique, etc. on github: https://github.com/sblom/hyperpublic-challenge

Anyone else published solutions? I'd love to see one in Clojure.
This "jorbit.com" is just wrapping an MSNBC article in ads.

Completely the wrong link to submit. Go here:

http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/02/23/6118906-moto...
Ok, been looking at some other searches and finding some interesting things, at least in the shopping vertical.

I present another example "HP 2310m"
Before: http://www.google.com/webhp?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&#...
After: http://www.google.com/webhp?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&#...

Major differences are that other than the CNET review the new listings are completely dominated by retailers. All the way to page 3. Compare that with the old listings where you see a mix of retailers and other product-centric sites (review sites and forums specifically).

The other major difference is the presence of a Google Products "One Box" in the new listing. I saw this in other examples as well where the Google Products section shows up a lot more often. And product centric sites are being dinged.

I'm seeing us (ProductWiki) and sites in the same space (Retrevo and TestFreaks) have been dinged. The difference between us and those other two sites is that we have unique original content from our community. Traditionally this has served us well by getting better rankings usually (we follow the make a good site and Google will reward you philosophy), but it seems like we're being lumped in with those guys now.

From an optics standpoint this really doesn't look good. Shut out the product listing sites and start promoting Google's own product listings a lot more aggressively.
This "jorbit.com" is just wrapping a Wall Street Journal article in ads.

Completely the wrong link to submit. Go here:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870377570457616...
Technically true, but everyone knows this already. The GNU GPL 2.0 (1991) advises employees get their boss to sign-off on contributions:

You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names:

Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright
interest in the program `Gnomovision'
(which makes passes at compilers) written
by James Hacker.

signature of Ty Coon, 1 April 1989

Ty Coon, President of Vice

Note, I'm hoping this extract of the GNU GPL is "fair use", otherwise I'd have to quote it verbatim.
The * often states it;s without wifi on and at 50% screen brightness, so that's pretty much the same thing.
The End of the Copyright Trolls' Business Model?
Using Google Ngrams to figure out Gaddafi's correct spelling.
Things shift significantly when you start looking outside the 10 most populous cities in America. I'd even bet that if you exclude SF/The Valley, Seattle, and New York, you'll find a pretty decent cliff.
Why Brand Consistency Is Important
Yes, the change is live (rolling out slowly through the day). A ton of large sites have already been affected. It's a pretty big change.
Bleh. Ridiculous. The article also doesn't actually site a single example of OSS contributions actually leading to the scary scenarios it leads with.
UX Epic fail.
Stupid javascript urls. Seriously don't break basic web concepts.
My advice is to just be ok with the fact that you might not see EVERY submission. Watch the home page to see what's hot, look through the New section and see if something interests you. Just enjoy it.
This is a crock. Sure, if you have signed an article waiving all your rights and IF that is persued and IF a court rules that shit you did in your own time, on your own initiative, for your own reasons belongs to your employer, then yeah, you might get in trouble, or even fired.

And that's career suicide... how? Most good development shops aren't going to look down on you, they're going to look down on your former employer. Because that's a dick move.

If by "Career" you mean "Lifetime working for petty, greedy corporate douchbags with no respect for you, your profession or your independent existence" then yeah, you might have a problem. But really, who on this board wants that?
Blogger and WordPress Templates
I'm kind of ashamed that people even have to ask this question.

I live a block from my library. Parents take dozens of books home to read to their kids. They don't have to buy them. It would be VERY expensive to buy hundreds of kids books per year. A well informed society benefits everyone.

If you already pay for internet, have a computer, have a college degree, buy books on amazon, live in a big city around well-educated individuals, you might not need a library, but you didn't get any of that for free. It cost a lot of money to get you to that point. Not everyone has that.

The costs of self-educating without a library would be very high for someone without means. If you just factor cost of computer, internet fees and time it would to search for and acquire low cost/free materials (books are cheaper to carry, require no electricity) it's easy to see that it's not a close comparison.

Our problem is that many people can't visualize the benefits of a library until they are in economic turmoil (library use increased during the recession). We don't need fewer libraries, we need more people reading.
Ehh, let's be real. Republicans spend just as much domestically as Democrats, they just favor different industries and utilize different accounting scams.

We effectively have a one-party system in the US.
I try to always mention that I have personal projects that may or may not be related to work that I'll work on in my off time, and that I've contributed to open source in the past and plan to do so in the future. The examples I tend to give are bug fixes and minor features.

If there's weird wording about this in your contract, it's probably a sign of control freaks being in charge, in which case you should run as quickly as possible.
Fotoblog X
I used to associate professional and one's education or income until I realized that often the most professional people I've encountered don't make much money. Professional to me means excellence at a service for which someone is paid to perform. Improving the human condition or chasing money both attract professionals of a completely different definition.
Does it have a discrete GPU, or one that shares the system's memory?

Can you upgrade the GPU?

Can you add extra hard drives?

Obviously not everyone needs those features, but some people do. And not everyone wants to pay for workstation parts (like the Pro).
I thought the standard for software engineering projects was to take the estimate, bump up a unit and multiply by 2:

1 hour --> 2 days
1 week --> 2 months
. . .

so 10 years would have been 20 decades :)
I got a C&D from a former employer once for anything I wrote and had on my web site during the five years I worked there.

On my attorney's advice, I wrote them back and asked them to be more specific about which things I had on my site that they were claiming rights to so I could honor their IP rights and take it down immediately. Didn't hear from them again.
this is awesome. thank you for spending time on the wysiwyg problem and double thank you for keeping it open source.

do you have a couch replication endpoint exposed through your api?
I think people often forget the value inherent in shared hosting. I host a lot of stuff with Dreamhost. I'm probably paying on the order of 25-50 cents a month per domain. I can setup a new domain and wordpress in about 5 minutes with a few clicks. Now that dreamhost supports rails3 it's an absolute dream. (no pun intended). mod_pagespeed? one click. They optimize everything and I pay a low monthly fee (<$10/month). I'd estimate about $140/month for comparable performance on EC2. Dreamhost's MySQL systems blow the doors off anything I've seen on EC2, and backups are free. (I haven't explored EC2's super high end packages)

If something takes off I'll buy a dedicated server for it, but if you're starting a company, get a Dreamhost account for $10/month and they throw the domain in for free. You can buy yourself two years of hosting runway for $200. If you max your dreamhost account you're well on your way.

I don't even bother paying for github, just throw git on my dreamhost account. (They have dedicated SVN services as well)

Also, I just got about a dozen notifications today that dreamhost had upgraded all my wordpress sites to 3.0.4. I don't do anything they take care of it. Someone breached an account? I get an email.

The only time I've ever run into trouble with dreamhost is an old old e-commerce site that needed MySQL4. I could get the ancient version of PHP it used working but couldn't get MySQL4.
For me:
Advertised Speeds Above 3 Mbps
Data as of: 6/30/10
Comcast Corporation 100 Mbps - 1 Gbps

Advertised Speeds Above 768 Kbps and Below 3 Mbps
Data as of: 6/30/10
AT&T Inc. 1.5 - 3 Mbps

Firstly, I don't think Comcast will give Gbps speeds anytime soon. Secondly: I get close to 6Mbps from ATT. Thirdly: data is from 6/30/10 ? Did somebody like physically walk the data over from SF to DC ?
Just wait until the Square API comes out.
Startup Weekend's first events in India
So roughly the same as the US population as a whole, where ~16% make > 100K. (Note that this percentage is of all workers, including part time workers. Part time workers are under represented in the federal government workforce compared to the broader workforce)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
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Yes it's cheaper, but I'm a bit surprised at the comments. I was doing PHP in 1997 using msql and a bit later mysql (98?). Shared hosting wasn't as robust as it is today, and it wasn't as cheap - usually $20-$25 for something decent.

I 99 I started leasing a dedicated server - 200mhz with 128 megs for $100/month with decent bandwidth and transfer for my needs (10 gig/month to start with). I was able to put together quite a lot of projects and host them for that $99/month.

So, yes, undoubtedly things got cheaper, but not everyone was having to shell out $50k just to get any website up. I actually did a number of projects that would sometimes get sustained traffic (from usatoday, yahoo finance, etc) and had little problem on hardware that was costing perhaps $500/month.

Yes, it was the era of large VC funds pouring money in to lots of hardware/licensing - of course some people paid because it wasn't their money in the first place.

During the same period, I was also working at a company that had several multi-million dollar sites in development - massive budgets, hardware, project teams, etc. Heady times for sure. I got to see both sides of the fence at roughly the same time. Clients that had the millions would go to the agencies or hire top talent. Clients that didn't would still get their stuff done - it wasn't as 'all or nothing' as people like to remember.
I manage Dropbox and Box.net together, thanks Joukuu
Web was a capital intensive business then. Now you can do a web startup for less cost than a hotdog stand. Seriously, one year of hosting costs on the order of a business license. By 2000 costs had dropped dramatically.
My immediate thought is, "I would prefer not to be employed by a place who is actively in the business of suing their own employees for contributing to open source."

Then I tried to see it from the employer's perspective... And I came to the same conclusion. It's an absolutely ridiculous stance to try to harshly punish employees for spending spare time writing code for an open source project. It's akin to firing and suing a carpenter because he used skills he developed on the job to build a nice rocking chair for the local community center.

If the project is a direct competitor to software that the employee is working on at the office, then politely sit the employee down and discuss the matter. Jumping to termination or even litigation does nothing for you:

a) You garner bad reputation and bad will in the open source community

b) You lose the respect of a former employee who is now likely to badmouth you to anyone within earshot

c) You lose an employee who was so passionate for his craft that he contributed his spare time to an open source project (it will surely be difficult to replace him/her)

d) Litigation is likely to only bring back an amount of money that is probably trivial to your company but devastating to most developers and engineers (see points a and b about generating bad will)

I can go on. As someone else said, most developers who are contributing to open source will not be deterred by such a threat. But the vast majority of developers will likely avoid any company who is known to take part in this practice.

What does the company stand to gain?
You — Not Your Competitors — Define Your Destiny