skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's good to see lots of script loaders. It's interesting that CommonJS modules aren't more widely supported in that list of loaders. Here are some more CommonJS loaders:

http://wiki.commonjs.org/wiki/CommonJS#Implementations

ECMAScript modules can't come soon enough.

http://brendaneich.com/2011/01/harmony-of-my-dreams/#modules
Anything new on Waka?
Why not charge him for the consulting? You are providing him a service solving these problems (or proposing solutions to them). Make it fair to you and him. If he's not satisfied, you can both walk away. If the project continues, you'll be starting from a pretty good position.
I'm surprised at how loved perforce is. Whenever I have to do anything on a perforce repository I think, "Oh no, not this again!"
you forgot to mention that the turing machine runs in a browser that runs in another turing machine which is inside a huge machine called the universe.
Post-PC means Wifi/OTA system updates work without tethering. Android, Nokia S60: check. iOS: fail. I have gone for months without an iOS update because my Mac was broken.

Also, I wish to get out of the music sysadmin business and will cut iTunes loose at the earliest opportunity.
Statictype, to be fair this isnt intended to post every conversation with your spouse/family/whatever online for every one to see...unless you happen to do those things on forums and product-review sections of online retailers.

This incorporation by Facebook, to my understanding, is just a way of legitimizing these mediums of communication. It will help keep spammers at bay and maybe discourage people from reviewing a product as "a stupid piece of shit" and instead contribute something of value.

I agree that the vision of Facebook becoming a worldwide identity database is unsettling, but this particular development makes some sense. Remember that not ALL conversations need to occur online and we can still use the phone or even gasp speak face to face. On what grounds should a person posting to a public space not be held accountable for what they are saying? Besides, in this case the only comments your boss would gain access to are ones like "The Toast-Matic is a fantastic toaster, and I like it for the following reasons: blah blah...". If my boss really wants to waste time sorting through that crap, party on.
I am guessing that HipChat is a startup?

Because as an employee any pager I had would be left at work.
The Double Irish - How Companies Bypass the US High Income-Tax Rat
BC, Canada has an even lower tax rate and special tax breaks for tech companies.
Speedier, simpler and safer: Chrome’s basics get even better
Angry Birds now coming to Facebook
It is possible he is using you to learn. Dealing with that is very common in consulting.

There are a few things you can do.

- Find out who will be making the decision. Insist that you will provide more information as you meet the decision makers.
- Find out what alternatives they are considering. Use this knowledge to better position yourself.
- Explain that are many important details still to be considering that will be addressed as you continue the project.

I am very rusty. But read about Solution Selling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solution_selling
Not to nitpick, but the "Most Used Operating System Professionally" portion misrepresents the data. The area should be proportional to the values, not the radius. Notice that the Windows XP circle is over 4X as big as the Mac OS one, even though it's only twice the value.
Real cost of C++ exception vs error-code checking
> the solution is to expand MobileMe so that it syncs my music to the cloud

Is this something MobileMe is currently capable of, or are you saying that it's up to Apple to implement that solution?
IMO, Laptops. Supporting XP on recent laptops is an exercise in frustration due to drivers, and in my situation is compounded by the lack of standardization on a small number of models.
Excellent advice. But from the description of the OP I doubt this will ever go anywhere.

Is this a company or an individual? If it's an individual I would suggest to run. If it's a company then maybe there's a little more hope...?
> Post-PC Device : Build me a computer - No Local Filesystems Allowed.

I'm not sure I would agree with the post. It is difficult to argue with the success of the tablets, but I am not sure if diskless systems could really qualify as a ". Post-PC computing system" unless they replace the PCs.

Harddiskless computers have been around for quite a while now, but i'm not sure a standard workstation could be replaced by one anytime soon. Even though most data is stored remotely, local work copies are at the foundation of most of the tools we use.

These tools would have to be rewritten either to no longer make local copies or to hide their locality from the user. Both of the solutions are nontrivial and their benefits are non-obvious.

What is the exact gain of doing a checkout to a remote disk instead of that of my workstation? That i can ligitimately slack off at the coffee machine when the network goes down?

But maybe it is just that im not open-minded enough to allow my PC to need anything other than power for me to be productive.
Don't consider it a legitimate interface? Really? It's the interface git was designed for.
"No filesystem" is only a leaky abstraction when people rooted in the 1980s write filesystem software and try to wrap it in a filesystem-less interface.

Files and directories are what you--and people like you--like and want to use. The rest of us don't give a damn about them, especially the way you build them for us.

Now I will return to your snarky quip. Your contention is that if something failed in the 1990s, it will necessarily fail in 201x? This makes no sense to me whatsoever. Almost everything that succeeds today failed in some form in the past, it's just that times have changed and things previously impossible or impractical are suddenly reasonable.

The whole point of $500 thingummies is that they exist in a very different world than $2,500 whatchamacallits.
The title has nothing to do with a post that sort of starts off somewhere and ends up going absolutely nowhere.

What I thought you were going to write about was if some nation dropped an H-bomb and we all went to war, everyone would be recruited out of their current lives and startup-centric mind frames. No more entrepreneurship when everyone's trying to survive a war (Unless you're Milo Minderbiner in a Hellerian universe).
Interview: Facebook and open source
Not going to trust no website for my bookmarks, thank you: Import/Download your Delicious Bookmarks to Firefox 4 without loosing Tags using Slurp Add-on, http://wp.me/pkvq6-w4
No, absolutely not.

1) Unless the client has already signed a contract (and I hope you require a down payment) don't give away the farm. Meaning, don't give him planning, architecture, design, etc. things that hey should be paying for before you are in a contractual relationship that requires him to pay you. You have to protect yourself.

2) Don't work on spec (speculation), ever. That means that if the client wants to see a design before deciding to work with you, walk away and don't look back. No exceptions. This is a giant blinking red signal telling you that this client will not and does not respect the skill that goes into your work, and will be a pain in the ass for you. These people are almost never worth your time or what they are paying you - if they pay you at all.

Respectfully tell this client that your policy doesn’t permit spec work. Check out http://no-spec.com for resources and details on how to explain this to your client.
For some time, when Apple had its goofy NDA on the iPhone SDK when it was first released, Stackoverflow was probably the best site to get CocoaTouch related help. It's still a pretty decent resource for iPhone development.
The mailing list post is slightly more in-depth about what's changed:

https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/group/apps-devel...
Well, really, it's what happen when you make an impression at Hack and Tell (http://hackandtell.org)! This was perhaps the highlight of last night's Meetup.
Interview: And Now The Enchanting Mr Kawasaki [podcast]
Somewhat off-topic, but...

"He says it's like riding a bike. When you start falling on one side, your natural instinct is to turn in the other direction."

No it isn't. Not at all. My natural instinct is to steer in the direction of the fall. I can't imagine this even being remotely true for anyone else, either.
RiderOfGiraffes is absolutely correct. I often do quite a bit of documentation upfront to make sure the client knows exactly what they are going to get. From wireframes to technical summaries, each is a step in the overall project process (and completely billable). Don't be afraid to shoot down something you think is considered "spec" work such as a bit of UI demonstration or data modeling. They either see your previous experience and trust you or not. Otherwise run away - could be a shitty client.

In answer to your specific case - explain to him that the first deliverable is a "project brief" which summarizes the project and proposed "high-level" solutions. Again - totally billable.
So, since you say you decided to change your monetization strategy, what will it be?
>I'm pretty sure humanity has access to a finite amount of state

There is at least one man out there who isn't:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_point_(Tipler)#The_Omega_...

I doubt I'll be drinking that koolaid to be honest.
'Sharding' and 'a rest interface' are not really business requirements. Sharding is only a solution to handling certain types of high load, and REST is but one solution for IPC.
Not really, I think it's still the most popular. At least from my personal experience. It's mostly due to age I think. Reddit is slowly gaining I think but I know many people who've never heard of Reddit. Digg well I don't know if they still have fans anymore. HN hopefully will never outrank Slashdot.

This is from an unscientific survey of my friends and coworkers.
If someone's too air-headed to understand the utility of backups, why would they pay $100/yr to do it?

And that $100 would only get you 20GB, so you'd be limited to a total of around 2.5 of those 1080p movies you're apparently throwing around (assuming a conservative 8GB each). And it'd take approximately a million years to sync them on any typical home broadband connection. And you'd better not be doing that over 3G, oh boy.

No, moving to THE CLOUD just gives you a different set of problems.
Cisco Building APIs for Cloud Infrastructure Automation
It's probably worth $119 to demonstrate to potential hires the pride they take in their code. Unless a site is post-processing their code like Google does, I would expect it to be beautiful.
Univ student hacker fixed grades for cash
steal karma

Seriously, what the fuck? This is just too much exaggerated.
What's the cost after gzip encoding?
Sports Endorsements: No Engagement, No Touchdown
What makes you think that a hierarchy is the right way to represent shared data? I don't use a hierarchy to organize my documents, I use search. The problem with a hierarchy is that it appeals to ontologists, people who like to organize things in one and exactly one way, and they like to do it up front.

Search, and its cousin Query, are the other way of looking at things: Put everything somewhere and give me a way to get what I want. I predict that if and when Apple provides something along the lines of shared data, it will look more like Microsoft's original vision for WinFS than the Finder.

Or maybe... just maybe... it will look like Newton's soup ;-)

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/WinFS
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Soup_(Apple_N...
that very well maybe true!
Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media
1 is Bad
5 is Great

I've clarified it now.
Git support on Windows was really poor for some time (I gather it has improved though), whereas Mercurial pretty much always treated Windows as a first-class citizen. That may have something to do with it.

On the other hand, I do find it hard to believe that hg users love their tools more. Generally my impression has been that git attracts a lot of people who are, shall we say, passionate about their particular version control system.
Make the "Hottest Companies in San Francisco" List
The Baltimore region actually is a hub for gaming companies: MicroProse, Firaxis, Big Huge Games, etc. I'm not overly familiar with the video game industry, but Baltimore/Maryland is no slouch. Zynga has an office in Timonium now (suburbs of Baltimore) where they are hiring.
Are People Nicer In Cities?
We have had some interest from businesses and academic organisations - they want their own bespoke version of Favilous. So currently we are working on this so that we give these organisations the ability to have their own bespoke version of Favilous - for a fee.
I believe it'd be an interesting addition.

However, before you do, ask yourself: would you have the same opinion if you were gay and 15 years old in a fundamentalist family? In a middle eastern country? If you were transgendered but only in the beginning stages of transitioning? If you were polygamous in a community that disapproved?

How about if you were conservative in a liberal university?

How about talking about how you had an abortion? That's an important view, with policy implications, but you never know who would fire you if they knew.

Should everyone with non-normative views be forced into silence?
sorry eli, this was just too cool not to share.
I believe this test proves little useful across different browsers on different OS/hardware because setInterval and setTimeout cannot fire faster than 8-10ms on most browsers and every browser handles a "1ms" request differently.

http://dbaron.org/log/20100309-faster-timeouts

However the postMessage trick is near realtime:

http://dbaron.org/mozilla/zero-timeout
I believe if this feature takes of, the result will be a lot of sock puppet accounts on Facebook.
So far, there are rumours suggesting that Apple will implement music syncing via MobileMe, but right now it only syncs "productivity" data like contacts, bookmarks, and email accounts.
China's Top 15 Social Networks [Infographic]
Kid Crazy: Why We Exaggerate the Joys of Parenthood
"I spent about a month ... not reading TechCrunch"

Wait, and this was a bad thing?
Every major American city has its share of violent, drug- or gang-based crime. That's not to diminish it, but unless you are actively involved in those trades or unfortunate enough to be caught up in it by proximity, it likely will never visit you. It's a shame because there are risks everywhere (suburbanites think nothing of climbing in their cars everyday to hop on the highways where 30,000 people die every year) but we're so bad in general at evaluating them.

Frankly, it doesn't bother me that Baltimore's reputation is somewhat tarnished, because that just makes it all the more appealing to live here and know that there is great art, great music, a vibrant technology and hacking scene, lots of smart young people, and friendly neighbors to enjoy. Now if we could just get more bike lanes and some better frickin' public transit ...
Instant Previews now available on mobile
Graduate schools are usually designed to make money from tuition. You will find MBA programs labeled as entrepreneurial, but these schools won't fund you.
Solr/lucene (they're on a joint release schedule now) give you more config options than any other fulltext engine. Some alternatives are sphinx (blazing fast indexing), IndexTank, and Riak Search (I haven't tried the last 2).
Why surprising? I find SVN still dominates but of those who have made the change to a DVCS the distance from SVN to Mercurial is less than SVN to Git.
> ... from the description of the OP
> I doubt this will ever go anywhere.

I agree entirely. In some ways this is a strategy to appear (and in fact be) professional, while at the same time avoiding the death-spiral. The point is that you don't want this kind of client - you want clients who will

* specify clearly

* let you do the work

* pay promptly

There is always some give-and-take when you first start out, but this kind of client sounds like a complete pain, and a waste of time. You need to train him, or lose him.

From your description they will never pay, regardless. Remain resolute - you are saving your time and there is no money to be lost, because they would never pay anyway.

Unless they do, in which case you've established a new relationship.
Come on, we're coders/hackers I think it's important to have something neat and beautiful hidden in plain sight like that.

This sort of 'cool thing' should be encouraged. How boring would life be without some people out there having a little fun?
TED 2011: Swedish Company Creates Flyovers in 3D
Never do spec work. Never.

Show him your portfolio and examples of solutions you have solved that are similar. Unless a contract is signed, don't do anything more than a nice proposal.
I just run Facebook in a separate browser (Opera) to isolate the session. Yes, I'm that crazy.

I tried Multifox ( http://br.mozdev.org/multifox/ ), but for some reason I concluded it wasn't a good solution. Can't remember why though.
Again, playing devil's advocate...

The argument is valid, but doesn't apply in this case.

> Would you want every conversation you have with your spouse/child/parent to be available to every single other person you know?

No, of course not. However, this is forcing private stuff public. Nothing is being forced here. Certain sites will require you to log in with your Facebook identity. You choose to interact with them in this manner, or you choose not to. If you comment in Facebook comments, you are doing so in a public forum.

> The fact is, people have private interactions with other people all the time and they expect it to be private and society accepts that it's perfectly alright and natural for this to happen.

This doesn't change anything. The proposal isn't to share your private life. Simply to make public comments just that, public. If you want things to remain private, keep them private.

Basically, you're arguing for something that isn't a problem.
Check out Sphinx and the amazing ThinkingSphinx gem. Having used both extensively, I greatly prefer Sphinx over Solr.

http://sphinxsearch.com/

http://freelancing-god.github.com/ts/en/

CollectiveIdea also maintains a good fork of delayed_job for those who are interested in that.
Normally, I would agree with you. However, there is an exception I make for hegemony. When a private entity becomes powerful enough, I think there are similar arguments to be made about as there would be for governments. Maybe "censorship" and "free speech" aren't accurate terms, but that doesn't negate the discussion itself.
Who Wants a Pre-Owned Space Shuttle? Everyone.
ViewSonic's dual-booting Android / Windows 7 ViewPad 10 tablet now shipping
I Don't Do Coffee
I understand what you're saying. My point was that the comment made by Mark Zuckerberg are clearly false (unless they were lifted out of context). There clearly are many situations where you do want to maintain different identities.

On the other hand, I agree with the sentiment that comments should have a public identifiable handle attached to it for the reasons you've said.
Yeah, by "primitive", I meant "low level". (The strxxx functions aren't part of the language, after all. Like you say, one could write a better, more "object oriented" string library for C.)
As technology progresses, the specs matter less
The MacBook Air Succeeds as Apple’s Post-PC PC
RoboRoach, remote control system to left and right turning cockroaches
Ex-Halo Developers Announce Fallen Frontier
Actually, if you have thousands or tens or thousands of desktops and hundreds of applications something as simple as upgrading Windows (or even Office) becomes quite a serious undertaking - so unless there is a really good reason for doing so it's understandable that organization don't upgrade just for the sake of the latest shiny bit of tech.
Just keep yourself logged-off when not using Facebook, or use Facebook when not using any other website.
How is it possible for you to become "incapable" of working? Aside from debilitating injury, of course.

If the only thing standing in your way is attitude and motivation, it's fairly trivial to get over it, sack up, and get back to work.
I agree. Maybe I should have added that whenever I get back to C++ from Python, I also swear about the string handling... ;-)
Not sure if this will help, but this is how we operate at the web design company I manage:

1) Prospect gets in touch with us via email or phone.

2) We send them a "Project Planner". This is a questionnaire with key questions (i.e. "What's the goal of your project?") that we've put together.

3) We quickly review the project and send the prospect an estimate of how much it will cost to develop and an estimated timeline. We make sure to make the prospect know the quote and timeline is based on the ideal that it doesn't includes revisions. Something like: Each revision will extend the delivery date by XX days.

5) If the prospect accepts we send them a contract and ask for a 50% payment before we do any work. If they are not comfortable with that, or the project is too big, we ask for 25% and then setup several payment deadlines as the project moves forward.

6) After the retainer has been paid, we send the (now) client a new questionnaire, called "Client Worksheet". Here we get specific to get to know the client better.

6) Once we receive payment, we make some research on the project and provide some wireframes along with simple explanations on how we think the goal can be achieved.

7) After the client is happy with the final wireframe and signs it off, we proceed to design the mockups. We already know what he likes so usually a couple of revisions is good enough to get final approval.

8) Once the design has been approved we start coding. Most of the "how will it work" has been already discussed through the wireframes, so it's pretty easy at this point.

9) Testing, final payment and launch :-)

Hope this helps!
The page is 5 KB compressed and 26 KB uncompressed. So the real cost is around $22/month assuming all clients use gzip.
substituting programmer jargon for accounting jargon is the answer?
Warner Bros. Starts Streaming Movies Through Facebook
Rackspace Cloud Builders help Businesses to be Cloud-ready
Is it not possible to write a C compiler that outputs Brainfuck code that can be executed inside a Brainfuck interpreter?
Man I hate it when people downvote my comment instead of replying. What an affed up system this is here at HN.
The title is parody - he's commenting on the general amount of gibberish that gets written about startups.
This shit is really fascinating.

One crazy example i have seen is this site which allows you to buy a video recorded from your favorite celebrity. So for instance pay $1000 and get a Justin Bieber autograph and a video of him signing happy birthday to you - that you can play at your 8th grade bday party.

And x% goes to charity. Really cool stuff. People are getting innovative and celebrities will always be influential.
The real epiphany comes when you realize you don't want these types of exchanges to go anywhere. If your intent is to be paid for your work then you have to develop strategies to separate paying and non-paying clients very early in the relationship.
We're getting OT, but I love Lode Runner. The wonky AI really gave it personality.
We simply do not have enough information on the nature of reality to decide who is right here.

If space-time does turn out the be physically discrete at the planck length, and the limits of our measurements are actually reflecting the universe's true discontinuous nature, then this would imply that there would be a limit to how much state you could push into an atom.

Any real physicists please feel free to shoot me down in flames here. This is just my (plainly) limited understanding of the situation.