skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
According to the IRS (I am a tax attorney/accountant) any officer of a corporation is a "statutory" employee. Anything of value that the corporation gives to that person is construed as wages -- subject to SS tax, medicare tax, federal unemployment, and all the rest of the employee/employer law. (which varies by jurisdiction, but is almost always expensive and onerous). In fact, anything of value that goes to a person related to that officer is wages to the officer. Stock, par or no par, usually has some value. Those are wages.

Just as note to add dark humor to the subject -- note that in the law the employer/employee relationship is called "Master-Servant."
Satoru Iwata gave a keynote at GDC in which he explained Nintendo's current philosophy and strategy around "garage developers".

It basically comes down to this: Nintendo wants to protect the traditional videogame market because it views it as a market of craftsmanship. By that they mean that when you invest in the development of a game, you price it accordingly, and that has led to the current market, which to some extent is healthy (certainly on Nintendo platforms).

Compare that to the App Store market where prices are low and, on other mobile platforms like Android, sometimes free, developers have less incentive to invest much as the expected return on investment is less stable. Sure, there are huge hits, but the long tail of the market is full of low-cost, low-investment stuff. Or as you called it, "shovelware".

I for one see Iwata's point of view and although it differs substantially from Apple's, I think both companies serve different markets, with different goals and ideals, and both can exist. That's why Reggie says they're not currently interested in serving that market. It's a different market.
True, but that said I don't recall ever seeing any shitty shovelware games with the seal on it. It was a nice way to easily find the cream of the crop.
I agree, it will never happen. What are they giving away to it's competitors though? Webkit it open source. They would still have IE.
Very interesting.. I've built something almost exactly the same as Lendle in my spare time, but I haven't opened it up to a wider audience just yet.

I'm starting to wonder if it might be best to just keep it invite-only for now.
Same here, they gave me a free student account so I have the private repo I need now, but rest assured it wont be long before I start paying them!
I dig Crate, but we don't really do the same thing. letscrate.com is an really awesomely designed and implemented cloud storage provider. Sendoid.com is an in browser file transfer method. I wouldn't consider us competitors (at most very indirectly) and think more than anything we complement products like Crate or DropBox.
Hobbyist developers to Nintendo: "We don't care, we're going to develop for your platforms whether you want us to or not."

"Also, in doing so, you're going to force us to completely reverse-engineer your protections and enable trivial piracy."

(Granted, this would almost certainly happen whether hobbyists were welcomed or not -- but by shunning them, they give the actual people with skills reasons to look for weaknesses. Nintendo consoles are all trivially piratable, even the latest and greatest games, and were almost instantly after each console's release. The only one that has stayed intact is the DSi (probably because there's no worthwhile DSi-exclusive software))
I saw Amazon pull this stunt a few days ago. No respect for software developers? I think that's it!
> ... is now illegal.

In a certain country, you may want to add.

Some people are arguing whether the country in question is more of a representative republic or of a democracy ((guess that's enough of snarkiness for one short post)).
This cheat sheet would be even better if there were indications of what was new in 1.3
When you need to have charts like this for almost every single html5 feature then the current state of web development is a DISASTER.
sendoid avoids storage/bandwidth overhead ... from now on letscrate is "old school"
Well, if anyone had any doubts:

https://twitter.com/#!/freenyt
Apple did the "App Store".

It reminds me of the Crayon story. Seems simple: wax drawing tool. But wooo! Crayola had to give up the name.

Personally, it's a tough call. They are all Crayons, they are all App Stores. Not sure what the solution is.
OS X is more pleasant to spend time in, since the Linux desktop environments and applications mostly have poor look and feel.
VirtualBox is a better Development Environment
what are you using as the server? it's my understanding that RTMFP was only recently reverse-engineered.
SparkRelief Crowd Sourcing Disaster Relief
How can I make sure that I'm not underselling my web application? -> one easy way that I know of: say no to an offer. If they come back with an higher offer, you were underselling.
Yeah, we dig that part of it too.
Some people like to base their identity on the intrinsic elements of their genetics or demographics. Other people prefer to base their identities on their actions, interests and achievements.

It's merely my hunch that most HN users are in the latter group and are perhaps turned off by the idea of identifying people primarily by demographic or genetic factors. This does not invalidate the discussion but is my hunch as to why many people may have flagged it nonetheless.

Someone in that thread argued that it's naïve "if you don't believe that people naturally discriminate for people who look like them." People might, but I'd hope that the smart, usually rational and mostly intellectual crowd that HN attracts isn't the average joe on the street. Female, male, fat, thin, black, white, gay, straight and in-between.. I want to work and socialize with the best people and while I am not blind to the genetic hand you were dealt, it doesn't figure into my heuristics.
Starting-Up in America: The StartupVisa documentary
IT'S CALLED AN APPLICATION STORE, NOT AN APP STORE.
This is great. I made a combined image, suitable for wallpaper on widescreen desktop monitors:

http://imgur.com/tsAuv
http://iapps.in offers a solution to this problem.
GitHub Reflog v1.3.21
Yeah, but if most of the world is doing this wouldn't we be losing a vital ability to "protect and insure interests" of country? In the real honest way and not patriot act bs.

Maybe you guys are just clueless about us having real enemies out there or something. No fucking way is FBI or local law enforcement going to be granted anything from NSA for shit. Because it's unlawful.
Crate is really great, and I definitely like their UI a lot more, but Sendoid really knocks it out of the park in terms of speed and security.
Window stickers is the best solution for every need 
Idsketch.com offers you a large collection of beautifully designed and perfectly printed window stickers. We offer every windows sticker to our valued customers after thoroughly testing it against tough quality standards
Excellent idea. Is it me or does the diff for 2_transparentPixels.png look incorrect? Seems to ignore the shadow.
Because Windows 7 is great and Visual Studio doesn't run there.
Fair point.

But we cannot just wish away real life issues.
What does it mean to be superhuman?

We always think of superman or spiderman, people with the strength and powers of minor deities. But really, somebody who is a mere 1% faster at something than every other human on the planet is "superhuman".

Imagine a person who was 5% smarter, stronger, faster, etc. than any other human on the planet...would they not be a kind of "superman"?

My day job has very little to do with development, it's much more a regular old office type job (one of the reasons I'm so into working on my startup with my wife, a chance to dust off and regularly use long dormant skills). What's funny is on occasion I'll pull out a nerd tool, perhaps write a little Perl script to automate some mind-numbing task, and for that moment my co-workers think I'm a superhuman. What's even better is when I can teach them something that punches up their abilities a bit.

Really simple things, like navigating Excel better, or teaching them simple regular expressions. I taught a colleague some regex and he has payed it forward by single handedly rewriting the process model where he works, turning a grueling multi-week process of copy-and-paste (by hand) into a 30 minute regex exercise. He freed up 30 people to do other stuff because now that excruciating part of their business process has simply poof gone away and now they deliver 3-4 weeks earlier.

(I asked him why they didn't just use a technical solution earlier. He said his management listened to the complaints from the staff about the problem and brought in a bunch of consultants who recommended a very expensive IT effort, complete with 230 page slide deck. He fixed it with a $27 TextPad license and a day going over regex with me. Now he passes along this little sliver of golden knowledge, infecting everyone he can with it. But alas, most of his co-workers mere accept that he's made it faster, and think they couldn't possible do that themselves.)

It's not something intrinsic in developers that makes us superhuman, it's merely a willingness to learn and sweat through all the mental work. A person can improve 5% from where they are simply by a bit of effort, 5% isn't all that much -- does that not make them superhuman with respect to themselves? Can superhumanity be earned?
Not to argue too deeply with you on this one—I think that the term wasn't in general use until Apple called it's store that; I certainly don't remember calling Handango or PalmGear "app stores".

Isn't the case of "aspirin" a bit different, though? It's still a valid trademark in Canada and the UK. My understanding is at the US government vacated the "aspirin" trademark in 1918 or so because Bayer is a German company.
Displaying accurate measurements is not that hard?
> I'd rate my abilities in C and Java as probably a 7/10.

To go off on a tangent here, this is something that's been bothering me for a while. These one-to-ten scales are seductive, but they do a very poor job of representing people's actual skills.

The problem, for me, is the 10. Where is 10? If you're at 7/10, you're 70% of the way to whatever 10 is. But how do you know what 10 is? If you're a novice C programmer, you really have no idea. You know about some things you can't do, but you don't really know what you don't know.

Skill differences are really hard to measure. If you compare me with, I don't know, Rob Pike, Fabrice Bellard, Ian Lance Taylor, Landon Curt Noll, P.J. Plauger, Peter Deutsch, or Dan J. Bernstein, or somebody like that — well, if we're working on a project that I can reasonably do myself, they might get it done in ⅔ of the time it would take me. Or maybe ½. So maybe I'm a 7/10? Or 5/10?

But suppose the project at hand was something of the difficulty of otcc or gold or mawk? Those are probably things I could write, given enough time. But those guys could probably do it ten times as fast as I could. Does that mean I'm at 1/10? (Also, their version would work better than mine.)

The trouble with rating my skills at 1/10 is that it suggests that my C skills are close to the minimum. But I'm probably as much better than your average C-speaking CS undergrad as Peter Deutsch is better than me.

We really want some kind of exponential scale, like the Richter scale for earthquakes (or its modern replacement, the moment magnitude scale), or dBa for sound pressure levels. There's no actual ceiling on dBa or earthquake magnitude, but in practice, the numbers stay within a usable range, because of physical limits.

So maybe on this exponential scale, the CS undergrad guy is a 10, and I'm a 12, and Peter Deutsch is a 14. Or maybe a 16. And this comes to the other problem: how do you judge people above you? You can't, really. If they complain about your variable name choice when you send them a patch, and you can't tell that their suggestion is a real improvement, well, is that because something is really obvious to them that I'm missing? Or is it just an idiosyncrasy? I can't tell until I'm at their level.

To some extent, though, I can judge objective achievements. GhostScript has held its own against a much better-funded competitor, managed by adept programmers, for decades. Yahoo Groups still runs on qmail, as do thousands of other mail sites, and still nobody's found a practically exploitable bug in qmail. ffmpeg and tcc are impressive achievements. And so on.

But how can I quantify whether the skill required to create GhostScript or to create ffmpeg was greater? Both are probably beyond my own ability. So I can't even tell whether Deutsch beats Bellard or vice versa. There's no batting average to put on our Genius Hacker Trading Cards. So I can't tell whether Deutsch is at 14, or 16, or 18 — whether he's a hundred, or ten thousand, or a million times better than I am.

But if he's at 10/10, I'm sure as fuck not 70% of the way there.
Well, the iPad's pricing is relatively simple to figure out: $499, plus $100 for every storage increase after that. If you want 3G, that's $130 extra.

The New York Times, on the other hand, seems less logical. The website+smartphone app is $15/4 weeks, the website+tablet app is $20, all three is $35, so the website is worth... nothing? Or, you could go with the home delivery option, which would cost you $455 (all digital access) -$304.20 (daily delivery in NY) = $150.80 less per year, even though they have to print all that paper.
It really did take quite a while. I selected the text and pasted it into TextEdit to start reading it.
For a console maker it's a good policy. Not only will it keep "fart apps" away it also is a good incentive for game publishers to invest in a game rather than turn it out asap at the lowest cost possible.
What do you mean, "a stronger case" for a GSM monopoly? There will now be one (1) GSM provider in the US. Near as I can tell, the "mono" in "monopoly" refers to "one", as well.

1=1.

This isn't a debate about how "strong" my case is. It's a monopoly in the GSM space, by definition.
Bag of hurt
Also, we are aware certain rare network configurations break things. Network technology is a finicky beast. In particular, symmetric NAT seems to wreck the setup for the direct connection. Definitely working on solutions for getting around these problems (I've got a couple ideas I'm hoping will work). If anyone hits connection issues I'd love details on your network/OS/browser so I can document things more completely and try to get solutions out there. You can harass us directly at feedback (atsign) sendoid.com.
There are a lot of javascript libraries and plugins for form validation, but are there any for simply providing validation and filtering functionality for the browsers that don't support all the HTML5 form features? Something that detected whether a feature worked and, if not, set up a fallback would be very useful.
Try this, the in-progress release notes: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.3/
"You didn't spend ten minutes debating between buying the 4ft or 6ft USB cables and finding the best price online because you didn't need to buy USB cables."

I do specifically remember running around for hours looking for the catalog of office supplies from my local office supply company then spending at least an hour finding the right kind of hanging folders to order (then waiting 6 weeks for delivery).

Repeat that exercise for pretty much everything from power cables to underwear and we're definitely in a better place.
How would a phone use an OTP? Would you send the key by carrier pidgeon to the guy every time you wanted to make a phone call?

There's absolutely no way to get security without some sort of verification by the user. At the very least, you need someone to verify that the keys are correct "can you read me your phone's security serial?". It shouldn't be too hard to create affordable, usable phones based on PKC. The problem is that nobody cares who listens to their conversations, because it's all "where are we meeting tonight/that movie was shit/i can't believe X did Y".
I like how the flowchart passive-aggressively puts you into a loop if (for instance) you don't have a hacker founder and don't think you need one.
The "Rationalization" variant: "I have a professional obligation to stay up-to-date / Wouldn't want to embarrass my friends / Need to support my favorite designer.
Very nice! I wonder what your revenue model is going to be, if it's OK to ask that early in the game?
Apple: NO to political caricature, YES to curing homosexuality
50% off all O'Reilly Ebooks & Videos (Tues, March 22)
When has not not been, by that standard?

Things are better than they were ten years ago, at least.
Ask HN: Usage billing options, e.g. Amazon DevPay
Amazon's DevPay would be an ideal solution for a problem I have if it didn't require a US bank account. What other options are there for providing infrastructure for customers and measuring their usage?

I am asking about the technical implementation here rather than the billing side of things.

Thanks!
It's crazy as a strategy. A good metaphor is that Nintendo use to target Games more towards kids even though aging gamers who were loyal for decades were pissed about that direction. But it seemed like a smart strategy because are the next batch of hardcore games.

Nintendo is effectively saying fuck you to 'kids' Indie devs, and only dealing with 'hardcores' Mature gaming shops. It's dumb because all the up and comers are going to cut their teeth on Android/iOS and not switch because of their invested time in developing their skills.

Le sigh, Nintendo, le sigh.
But game publishers don't do this, and haven't for years. What they do is precisely to "turn it out asap at the lowest cost possible".
Just my personal observation, but I think Google would lose a large fraction of their engineers if they used a patent in any way other than a defensive countersuit. (Someone correct me if there's a previous case I'm missing.)
"${Partner} said no" is also more acceptable then "Decided I shouldn't have bought it, don't judge me".
MySQL Minutiae & InnoDB Internals
on the rejected caricature app:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2009/11/12/apples-rejection-i...
That is quite unusual, but not for geek relationships, for MANY relationships. There seem to be a non-insignificant amount of people who accept their partner making decisions for them, regardless of their wishes.
Now that the iPad 2 is being heralded as the successor to consoles, Gruber's going after them in addition to his regular Android sniping? ;)
That's probably the fastest instance of Godwin's Law at work.

Regarding the article however, I'd agree with Bill, though I can see both of their points. The problem with kids/teens is that most are lazy by default. I was relatively lazy too, but only because I was lacking some sort of motivation and until I got to university (this last september), and until I came down to the Valley, for an internship, I figured how much I could have done instead of wasting my time. So I think it all boils down to motivating kids. You motivate them, and they'll do well either by themselves or on tests and whatever other else standard teaching entails, but until you motivate them, and get the ball rolling, as soon as you let them off the hook, they'll go back to their old habits.
Yup. The homebrew scene is often the one that does all the hard work and the pirates reap the rewards of the broken security systems (Notice how the security system of the PS3 wasn't broken until well after the Other OS feature was removed and the community wanted it back).
I'm sure it will all work really well in about fifteen years when everyone is talking about HTML6 or whatever - and there will be twice as many browsers to worry about.
That shits me SO much, because of how any similar "Women are incompetent" jokes are vilified. Is it blanket OK or blanket not OK? You can't argue that it's OK for one sex to insult another, but not the reverse, it just doesn't work that way.
Big government has more chance for corruption because the system ends up growing ever-more complex. Parts the of the system that are useless never get culled, they just keep finding ways to retain minimal amounts of relevance, while attempting to maintain or increase their funding levels.

It's harder to have 'good government' when there are more ways for it to fail.
See, that's the first thing that occurred to me. Why can't you use an emulator OR an older iPad for development for a couple of weeks?
Nice work. Met you guys before your YC interview. Congrats on the launch!
I wasn't trying to give you a hard time. I've been hiring for years and it's really hard.
Apple has been very inconsistent on their use of it though. Originally you just searched for apps in iTunes Store. Then I believe it changed to iTunes App Store. And now they have a Mac App Store. the other point is that apple refers to them as 'apps' in a generic sense and not something like 'App Store applications'
If we were in a court of law then I would agree with you but since we are not in a court of law I will hold to a different definition of hypocritical: applying a criticism to others that one does not apply to oneself.
Your company isn't going to be worth much if it fails to execute and falls behind your competitors.

If using Java makes you 10% slower, but your code is more maintainable by Yahoo - Yahoo will buy your competitor who won market share with their superior features and quick response to customers.

NB: Choose Java because it is "enterprisy"
I see a fairly natural superpower line with welding and mechanical engineering (alongside machining or some rapid prototyping ability)

For some reason that reminded me of this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uQz_V0sbI

Watching the complex and beautiful movements of the various parts of the engine, the raw power, the drama, it took superhumans to figure this out, to contain tons of iron and steel, and water, and fire and turn it into something so exquisite and powerful.
World in 2000 as Predicted in 1910
> As for the GIL, the author didn't even consider multiple processes ...
I really hate this argument for its disingenuity. Some things (including message passing) are naturally fastest with shared memory. Multiple processes are not an equivalent substitute.

This isn't a disingenuous answer at all, since it goes on to point out that A Web app is one giant workload where this model makes sense: multiprocessing is the approach you should be taking with a Web application.

As someone with a strong Java background, I have to continually force myself to be aware of my bias against concurrency-via-multiple-processes.

If you have a stateless application (and if at all possible, statelessness is a good thing [1]), then multiple processes scale vertically reasonably well (on the same machine), but having a multiple-process architecture makes scaling horizontally (across machines) natural and easy.

It's true that shared access to higher-level constructs in a multiple process environment isn't solved, but (a) shared access to data is an anti-pattern [2], and (b) Memcache plus some kind of serialization works pretty well when you do need shared data.

[1] Yes, applications exist where statelessness doesn't make sense. In this case, though the author was originally developing on AppEngine, so I doubt there is much state in the app.

[2] I'm not saying you should never have shared data. I am saying you should avoid it as much as possible.
Neat technology, but I'm a bit worried about having to leave the browser window open before/during the transfer. I accidentally close tabs all the time, I wouldn't want to do that in the middle of a long transfer.

I'm going to give the service a shot for a few weeks though, maybe that will turn out to be a non-issue in practice.