skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an accountant and tax lawyer who works 100% remotely with clients, I'd like to chime in. I definitely think that there is a place for a service that can help people find accountants and lawyers. The average person has no way of knowing how to choose -- what makes a good preparer/counselor? How much should they cost? How available should they be? This is the obvious part of what could make Sanetax very helpful.

The less obvious part to folks who aren't in the "industry" is that accountants and lawyers really struggle with technology issues. Technology is not their primary skill and yet tax preparation has become very tech intensive. Add to this all the issues around privacy. There aren't any good solutions that have been widely adopted in these communities for handling confidential material online--i.e. your social security number.

Speaking for myself, I use Magic Vortex where I can for file transfer, but have only recently transitioned to using encrypted pdf's in emails and have had considerable problems with client confusion with the files. I cannot imagine the extra technical support that I might have to provide while trying to use encrypted email, even though it's totally warranted. Perhaps Sanetax can help with these issues.

I would also like to strongly agree fully with fourply's post. The entire industry is not as simple as it might appear from the outside. Like most things we live with these days, regulations are multiplying even as we speak, and they vary widely from state to state. Accountants and lawyers have to meet restrictive federal and state regulations, including around how we get clients in the first place. Hopefully Sanetax will find ways to work with all these rules.
Great attitude brother!
At my current university all postdocs in my department carry the official title of Visiting Assistant Professor. They are listed under the tab 'Visiting Faculty' on the departmental website. At least in name they are faculty, and they are professors.
Actually, I understood. I used to listen to Desert Island Disks 15 or 20 years ago--a local NPR affiliate's version.

One programming language? As I recall DI Disks let one pick 10 pieces of music, and threw in the Bible, all of Shakespeare, and a luxury of your choosing. But I suppose that if one were not distracted by King James, King Lear, or a luxury, the sensible thing would be to follow in steps of Wall, Ousterhout, Van Rossum, and Matz: use C and create an extensible scripting language.

(edit: spelling)
For dual pane file management goodness, I use MuCommander[1]. It's less Finder-like, but has the Norton Commander nature which has cropped up in many a file manager since then.

[1] - http://www.mucommander.com/
Jwz: This has been a banner day for computing
Android has more market share than iOS, which would seem to suggest it's moved far beyond the "technical, geeky" crowd.

My hunch is that we're starting to see a Windows/Mac differentiation here, with Android emerging as the clear winner of mobile and iOS being reserved for the trendy/artistic/quality crowd. That carries over into the apps themselves, with Android apps (like their windows counterparts) being clean and utilitarian, whereas iOS developers are devoting more time to making sure their app looks good.

Edit: The "quality" comment was not intended to suggest that Android lacks it, but rather that those who buy based upon perceived quality would be more likely to be drawn to the iPhone.
This project appears to be a Ruby DSL with aspirations to be its own language someday

Well, we actually started with our own language a few years ago (a Datalog variant), and have been exploring embeddings into traditional languages as a way to make our ideas more appealing to mainstream programmers.

while it's a Ruby DSL it's not going to be a great language for performance exploration

Absolutely: we've been focusing on pleasant syntax, sensible semantics, tools, and analysis techniques. Performance has definitely not been a goal, but certainly it will be important in the future. Bloom rules can be compiled into a dataflow graph (think: DB query plan, albeit recursive), and executing dataflow graphs efficiently is not difficult -- e.g., we can certainly envision generating query plans from Bloom rule sets and then running those query plans with a C runtime.

BTW, nothing about Bloom is Ruby-specific: we picked Ruby because it let us prototype our ideas quickly. Any language with decent support for collections would be suitable; for example, Scala would be a good candidate for a subsequent version of the language.
Fast Dial
Nope, we are doing a weekend coding session to get some of our backend developed.
Fixing Your Blog for People Behind the GFW of China
As a blogger who writes about learning Chinese, a good deal of my traffic comes from people in China (21%). Blogging for people in China is more complicated than it should be. Adding a simple Facebook “like” button can cripple your site for people visiting from China. After trying different methods, I’ve finally come up with a way to use widgets blocked by the GFW of China on my blog that don’t penalize visitors from China (who can’t view the widgets).
It seems like it makes sense, and they probably expect you to be shopping around to other VCs (why put all eggs in one basket). But as far as "is it dick to shop around once you have an offer?" I'm not sure, as I've never raised capital before. I'm curious how long a VC would give you before you've got to say yes to an offer. Like, can you take a month to "think about it" while going around and pitching other people? Will they know that's what you're doing?
I don't think that's quite true. Android does provide you with a way of dealing with the varying resolutions, but I don't think it solves the problem perfectly.

I think it takes a little longer to create cross-compatible assets than it would on iOS. If it's not an easily repeatable or stretchable asset, you have to think about how it will scale on different resolutions.

I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it costs more in time and money. Some companies won't be willing to accept that cost and will just cut corners.
Thanks, this is great feedback. I must work on the newuser process.

The chief problem is that there are only a few dozen "published" profiles in the system right now, so you're probably seeing all of the candidates that match to your likes. The sliders just aren't going to be much fun until there are at least a few hundred users.

I suspect that the chicken-and-egg problem is the biggest issue with online dating startups, but it's one that (I think) will go away after a thousand or so users sign up.
That "upstart" is IBM -- Lotus Symphony (the current product carrying that name) is an OpenOffice fork.
Ask HN: What are the most successful YC companies?
Since I've seen a lot of talk behind not being accepted for an interview screening at YC, I'm interested in knowing what companies are successful or funded since its inception.
"A user driven embed-able music polling platform / app". <-- ?!?!?
"FTC disclosure, Apple?"

Paranoid, much? Even if you believe Apple has any need to do something like this, I think we can agree it would probably be done in a more subtle and effective manner than sponsoring an "Android gripes" blog that essentially nobody reads.
Thirteen23 is still making some beautifully designed programs, but oddly enough, most of them can't be downloaded from their site. If they really wanted to, they could definately take the PC world by storm with innovative apps. Not sure why they aren't...

http://thirteen23.com/index.html
U.S. Eyes New Stock Rules
There are some nice gems in the comments like Divvy.
Android is Settings->Applications->Manage Applications. Clicking an app icon reveals permissions. Pandora has no entry for 'Your location', fine or coarse.
Creating Engaged and Passionate Users
> The support in Xcode is far behind the state-of-the-art, those features alone should pay to have this around.

Assuming AppCode's refactoring support ends up being even as good as Xcode 3's hit-or-miss heuristics, which remains to be seen.

"AppCode is from JetBrains and ReSharper/IntelliJ IDEA have great refactoring, so AppCode will too" isn't a valid line of reasoning, because the limiting factor here isn't the author of the tool, it's how much a priori reasoning you can actually do about the target language in question. C# and Java are both, by design, highly amenable to the kinds of static analysis that make refactoring support simple. Objective-C, by design, is not.

Xcode 3 and below did a lot of pattern matching to try to make a decent go of autocompletion and refactoring, and it fell down a lot of the time. With Xcode 4, Apple has turned the new compiler, LLVM, into a shared library and hooked into it for refactoring and autocompletion, so they're working with the same parse trees the compiler is, and they have as much information to reason with at compile time as can be hoped for in an extremely late binding, weakly typed language like Objective-C.

How is AppCode going to get any better than that? Either they're going to go the heuristics route, like Xcode 3 and below, and have all kinds of cases where they fail miserably, or they're going to hook into LLVM, and have no real insights into the code that Xcode 4 wouldn't.

In short, I'm extremely skeptical of the claim that AppCode is going to be leaps and bounds better at statically analyzing Objective-C than Xcode 4, given the constraints of the target language.
Mass arrests of Palestinian women by Israel - Middle East - Al Jazeera English
Do you still have medical bills? Why can't you live on the cheap for a year, save one year worth of living expenses and then leave your job?

For instance:

1) If you live in a big city, live in a very small apartment. Use public transportation and sell your car if you have one. (Yeah, I know this is hard to do in many parts of US).

2) Cut unnecessary recurrent expenses like cable, netflix, gym, etc. You can still buy movies once in a while. If you wanna exercise, just run outside, play sports at public courts, etc.

3) Don't buy the latest gadgets. Unless you're making software for it, you don't need the latest iPhone/android.

And so on. This is essentially how a junior Japanese salaryman lives. They must, because they earn only around $25~30$k. So if you can earn more than that and still keep a low living cost, you could save quite a bit.
"A system governed by sensible rules that rewards smart action, punishes bad actors and forgives errors is better."

Good luck writing that RFP. Especially the "smart action" part.

The best government, in the end, is one that's transparent and, ultimately, replaceable. Whoever is in power is always going to seek to retain power; you want that to be dependent on them making decisions that benefit everyone else.

Even if you had a "perfect" government, but it lacked transparency, you'd have a problem as that lack of transparency would make it difficult for everyone outside the government to make long-term decisions about investment, etc.
http://pow.cx/docs/

This is very nice documentation. Is it generated using a freely available tool?
> Its interesting to me that one of the most successful absolute monarchies, Great Britain

Was Britain ever an absolute monarchy? Possibly under its first king, James I, but none of the succeeding monarchs ever had absolute power.
> worse than whatever offense Sony committed

This gives the impression that you're making a claim about something you don't have much specific knowledge of. Or that you're absolutely sure that Sony is incapable of offenses larger than a certain magnitude.
Come up a bit farther north to Baltimore -- it really IS happening here. Check out Startup City. DC is a stone's throw. Join the fun, help us make Mid-Atlantic happen.
Easiest example: You can do "instanceof T" with generic T in C#. You can't in Java.
just for reference, here's what it looks like: http://cl.ly/5rbn

doesn't look ugly to me. Looks clean actually...
>Implying that AAPL could only operate a single astroturf site, instead of legions.
More on the JWST overrun:

http://www.spacenews.com/civil/101112-jwst-cost-imperils-pri...
I know you're being sarcastic, but actually you are completely correct.
Perhaps not for certain definitions of OSX. Have you shopped for a car recently? Look how many different automobiles have dock connectors these days...

Those Fords with Windows in the dash are the same ones with ipod cables in the glove box.
Pandora requires gender during registration.
Although the blog makes legitimate individual points (apart from the flamebait closer), I think you're 100% right that the overall motivation is a thinly disguised fanboi polemic.

* a 99% chance of being corporate sponsored astroturfing*

This is an interesting possibility, but at the same time have you ever read the comments on gizmodo?

Apple doesn't need to astroturf when there are fanbois just -dying- to tell everyone how good their platform is and how poor the competition does. This blog could just easily be the product of such a fanboi, just with a bit more promotion, money, time & writing ability than the average gizmodo commenter.
I'd rather they just got guns and mugged people in alleys like honest criminals.
When I got really in to LaTeX some time back, I manually typeset a 220 page programming book from an HTML edition available for free on the web.

It took me about 100 hours to do. SICP is about twice as long, so I'd guess manually typesetting it should take about 200 hours.
Anne Hathaway More Likable Than James Franco at Oscars
> If you don't cannibalize your products what is almost certain is eventual failure

What I see happening is smartphones and tablets taking over much of the territory where people now use laptops and desktop PCs. Which is why Microsoft's failure in those two markets is so damning.
Most of the great IDEs are java. Jetbrains makes their money in the java market, so seems reasonable to leverage their existing code base. Also, java gives you cross platform. Not an issue for AppCode, but it's a biggie for all their other languages (ruby, python, php, java)
if they could pull it off it would put a huge crimp in any supercomputer type system

Well, I wouldn't go that far. There are many different types of problems to be solved. Some of 'em need a thousand-node super-uber-bandwidth supercomputer if you're going to get them done in a reasonable amount of time, while others can be done just as well on a million noninteracting nodes. Certainly there are some folks with problems of the second type out there, and I'm sure they'll make great use of google's resources here. But there are other folks who really need to invert a 100,000 by 100,000 matrix, and there ain't no magic way to embarrassingly-parallelize that.
I think he meant to type "negotiation" rather than "negation", which makes little sense even if he was trying to convey the point you just made. So I was making a little fun of that. I agree with you.
An absolute ruler who is competent can get a lot done. An absolute ruler who is incompetent or bad for his people, OTOH, is hard to remove.
I just signed up and looked around the site. But I don't quite understand the platform. Is the Nook an eReader that happens to also be an android tablet? What does the Nook SDK provide? I didn't see any docs on the site.
If people wanted to work on social why wouldn't they just go work for Facebook?
Twitter homepage designs, 2006 - 2011: A compilation
"Hacker News has its own karma based system, which gives high karma users a power to create destinies of stories and also users."

HN karma gives high karma users a power to change the color of the top bar when they're logged in.
Why are JetBrains doing it? So they can reuse code.

At least I hope that's why. If that team isn't sad about not being able to provide a proper Mac GUI then they're out of touch with what's good about the platform.
> Corporate executives don't scare easily

Hm, I deal/have dealt regularly with a number of HNWI in executive roles and I reckon they'd scare easily enough. Acting all tough in the conference room is one thing, getting phone calls at home is quite another. One is "the game", one is real life, completely different. They're not the spetsnaz.

Speaking hypothetically and nonjudgementally - phone calls to the wife is an excellent tactic which would get you to the top of the mental agenda instantly in 99% of cases.
Oasis in the Urban Desert
While many things that can be said about the user interfaces of the three iOS apps shown in the original article, "consistent" definitely isn't one of them.
If I send an email to j.o.e.non.e@gmail.com, you'll get it.

The dots are superficial -- you can add them or remove them as you want. The login form for gmail even respects this, as I can add or subtract dots however I want.

My email address is barry.melton -- I can send and receive email as barrymelton as well, or b.a.r.rymelton, or barry.melt.on or whatever.
Symbian: Not Open Source, just Open for Business
YC s11 Rejected Applicants: This is the real test.
I almost didn't get my Eagle Scout rank when I was in Boy Scouts. It wasn't a matter of it being too hard, I just thought it was easier to walk away from all of the years of work I had put into it and do other things. What was the point? It's just a stupid badge, right? Then I ran across an article from Mike Rowe, the creator of the show "Dirty Jobs", new face of Ford, etc. He's an Eagle Scout. When asked what he would say to Scouts about becoming Eagle, he said this:

http://meritbadge.org/wiki/images/3/30/Mike_Rowe-Dirty_Jobs_Eagle_Letter.pdf

tl;dr Becoming an Eagle Scout is proof that you aren't a quitter. You get shit done and are a relentless pioneer.

If this bump in the road rattles you enough to close shop, you shouldn't be an entrepreneur. The most successful entrepreneurs have failed more times than they can count. Each "failure" teaches you something...how to build an unbelievably great company.

Want to be a great entrepreneur? Get shit done and be a relentless pioneer. That is the real test of entrepreneurship.

PS - I got my Eagle Scout rank.
My opinion is that applying for funding should merely be something to bring 'excitement' to an otherwise tough' monotonous' life of an entrepreneur.

Whether you get funded does not only depend on the ingenuity of your idea but a match between you and the funder.

You should continue working because you believe in your idea (to some extent but over-believing is unhealthy) and simply because what else would you do with your spare time =)
I am working on an expense tracking system, pretty far along.

Available here if anyone wants to try it out.
http://nets.neosavvy.com:8080/nets/expense/

Anyone who wants to be a beta tester or get some help using it drop me an email aparrish@neosavvy.com

http://blog.neosavvy.com/wordpress/?p=254
I agree, if I put rm -rf / in that script you would be rightfully disappointed. Why would anyone trust someone to do this? When I download a script, I always read the code first.
Happy to see a mention of New Brunswick, Canada in there. UNB has a very underrated Computer Science faculty that graduates a lot of great programmers, but they don't have a recognizable name outside of Canada. Companies that get well-known that remain in Atlantic Canada will help change this.
While I can't speak for Android, I think the simple answer is that Apple provides sample code and applications that are examples in great UI design on iOS.

I'm not seeing the same level of detail or commitment from Google or its partners at this time. It is much easier to copy off of a good design than to create a new one from scratch
Clean, perhaps, but absolutely non-native, which is generally considered an ugly quality on OS X.
> All Sony execs have to do to restore their personal security is back off from attempting to abuse their power.

Bam, that is this, and the wikileaks thing in a nutshell. Gov & Corps are abusing their power at the expense of individuals. Anonymous (The Internet) gives previously weak individuals a way to level the playing field.
While I do agree that many Apple fans are quite eager to score points in favor of their preferred platform (just as many Android fans are as well), I still stand by my theory. Have you read the text of the rest of the articles, gone to the twitter and facebook pages and read the postings? In my opinion both the tone and volume is highly unusual, and to my ears the arguments sound exceedingly carefully framed in a way that is unusual outside of guerilla PR.

Obviously I can't say for sure, readers need to make up their own minds.
yeah, no point in me stopping when the product is 80% built already (of course the last 20% is the toughest). i applied with a social photo search app... it's like greplin for photos and videos. if you want an invite to the beta, sign up at http://www.pilvy.com/
You can buy the lighting yourself, it's from Redwood Systems: http://www.redwoodsystems.com/products
>Maybe it'd be a good idea to make one hundred percent sure that they actually exist (or else that they're definitely below the limits of LIGO) before building another expensive instrument.

Hmm. I'm not too familiar with that research area. Isn't the point of detectors like LIGO is that we don't know how big they are typically?

How do we make one hundred percent sure that gravity waves exist? What do you propose as a way that would convince ourselves that they do (or don't), and how do we estimate their size? Has the research community done this already?
Am I the only one who prefers the Android interface for Meebo (first time seeing it)? I often dread using the iOS version as I feel it's extremely cramped.
The Psychology of Learned Helplessness
Won't be too long until Android runs on a billion computers
Do you really think anyone who isn't going to charge forward is going to post "no, i'm quitting now." in this thread?
There is no bubble
Good point... But we were talking about servers ;)
How to Edit and Convert Videos for iPhone, iPhone 3GS, iPhone4
Just got rejected as well. Amen, brother
We're building a next-generation, distributed social network which gives users control over their data, and helps their social lives in the real world instead of online. Oh yeah, and we already have over 70k active users who downloaded our app in the last 2 months. So I am curious why YC didn't even want to interview us, but then again, their rejection letter doesn't leave many clues :)

http://qbix.com
(Replying to myself here) On the other hand.. maybe it boils down to what the users will put up with. If you come to iOS with a real crappy interface 9 times out of 10 you will be massacred in the user comments and reviews.

Maybe Android users have a lower tolerance for crappy UIs? I ask not trying to pick a fight or start a flamewar, but out of genuine curiosity.

If iOS users are more apt to pay for applications, I suspect for the most part that they have little to no tolerance for substandard UX.

So if it is free no one really cares, but if you are paying for something you now have a vested interest in the product.
How Studying SICP Made Me a Better Programmer
A well articulated explanation of why I'm not so enthused about doing everything through a browser's interface to the internet.
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I have a PS3. If I make modifications to it and talk about those modifications online, is that knowingly putting myself in harms way? Who owns my PS3? And what right does anyone else have to dictate what knowledge I share online about my PS3?
Generated with Docco: http://jashkenas.github.com/docco/
Funny, I haven't thought about UL since I was a kid. Do many consumers look for a UL stamp, or is it used more for legal defense if the device actually does malfunction?

The American Dental Association is another example. I do look for ADA-approved toothpastes.
That's definitely an interesting perspective! Thanks for pointing it out.