skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't know what you mean by hackability. The iPhone is good because with the amount of attention it has received, you can get a huge number of cracked applications, something you won't find on the BB. If you were planning on actually buying apps, this won't be a problem.

That is not what we mean by hacking around here, or it shouldn't be.
I see some warning signs here.

The first two sentences could have just been, "We need a programmer to help build a startup that we think will make money."

You don't mention any specific talents -- should the programmer by a Python hacker, a Ruby hacker, a PHP monkey (don't hate me, I use PHP too), or...? Are they working on an interface, or a backend?

You also didn't mention what industry this might be in, or whether the programmer would get reimbursed with shares or a regular paycheck or really cool gadgets.

There's nothing in your request that's exciting. There's no "draw". And there's a little too much buzzwordspeak.
Why doesn't he include links to the products? I don't understand. Isn't that un-usable? And screenshots of how each app uses the said components would've been nice. I don't want to create accounts on each just to see whether or not they use the ribbon, lightbox, etc.
Twitter: Invented in 1935
An incredible machine from 1935 which essentially is Twitter “avant la lettre”. Including photo!
Depending on who your audience is, I might include a category along the lines of "usefulness", and include Erlang in your comparison. It's not quite as pure as Haskell (but then again, neither is Scheme), but it has some very apparent practical applications that make it a great choice for people like me who learn by doing. I'm a bit of a "language guy" myself, but not quite enough of one any more to play with a language with little or no practical application where it really outshines the competition.

Ocaml might be of interest too, because it's fast, and that's always a nice feature.
GE Invests $141M Into Acciona’s Dakotan Wind Farm
7 Lessons Olympians Can Teach Internet Entrepreneurs
In my area, the BlackBerry plan is also $20. On HowardForums, people used the BlackBerry plans when the data plan got bumped up to $30.

Unless you're grandfathered into the ancient $5.99 T-Zones plan, I don't think you will find a cheaper option.

Also, I think a BlackBerry without the BlackBerry plan will be heavily neutered. I'm guessing email won't work because it depends on the BIS backend. BIS is used for "personal" email things like your school's Exchange server, your Gmail account, and your IMAP/POP account. BES is used for hooking up with corporate Exchange setups running BlackBerry's Enterprise backends.
7 Powerful Ways to Get the Most Out of Any Situation
Yeah, it's funny, I mean say McDonalds their whole business hinges on how quickly they can cook burgers, but no-one there would ever consider under-cooking as a way to speed things up. So the average software project manager is not even as smart as the average burger flipper.
I would advise against a PalmOS based device if you plan on doing development. The OS is outdated, and on its last legs.

The iPhone OS, Windows Mobile, and the BlackBerry OS are all more modern and have better tools. Can't comment on Symbian.
Nokia addressed most of the N95 issues you describe with the N95-3, also called the N95 8Gb.

'Tethering' (bluetooth) is trivial so long as you know the APN. Works great on the train for me.

Browser is webkit based and works very nicely, except in their wisdom they've made tabs difficult.
I actually replied over there (with a couple of my co-workers). I think that the post is exaggerated; agencies can be the wrong way to go, but if the founders are non-technical I think it's probably safer to at least start with outside help. VCs should know which companies are best able to help a fledgling company get going, and there's an increasing tendency for companies like ours (Viget Labs) to build in a transition period to an internal team once they're hired. Heck, we even help vet and train the internal team candidates at times, as it's in our best interests to make sure that competent people take over the applications that we built.
No mention of bcrypt, so tptacek won't like it. :-)

(I wish this link [http://www.matasano.com/log/958/enough-with-the-rainbow-tabl...] was in his user profile.)
For Windows Mobile, you might be able to get away with the old free Embedded Visual C++ (eVC++) and Embedded Visual Basic (eVB) tools. I don't know how well they will work, and you probably won't be able to take advantage of the latest features.

You could potentially do development with the C# command line tools. But that is probably extremely difficult

Otherwise you will need Visual Studio.
I run Tiger inside VMWare on my Dell.
So basically the whole thing is a scam?
Putting our Hot Heads Together
"He is one turker, however, who is plotting how to move up the food chain. Currently, Cranston and a friend are working to launch a Web-based business altering photographs, called Image Den, using, naturally, Mechanical Turkers to treat the images."

It seems his site has shut down in the last 2 years since this article was written
Reliable Security Systems
Provides cctv systems, security camera, remote video surveillance equipments, security monitors, cables, connectors and wireless equipment for all applications.
What Will the Large Hadron Collider Find?
That must be some error in their number-of-pages estimator. Google does not control ~70% of content out there.
I dunno about the rest of you but I've been called once by my boss when he was at home.

I just pickup and immediately hang up.
Some Web Firms Say They Track Behavior Without Explicit Consent
If your language is strongly typed and purely functional, a whole lot of stuff that is taken for granted these days (e.g. design patterns, unit testing) become a lot less prominent. People forget the Old Ways at their peril! :-)
Have idea, need coder (comic)
Startup, Inc - What You Need to Know Before Starting a Company
Today's hard disks will probably become tomorrow's blunt instruments.
Those aren't phones.
I agree with the author of this article, but I have to wonder if there are very many programmers who don't do this?
Web analytics faux pas
I will definitely check out your links. Out indexing Google or Microsoft live search is definitely out of the question for me just because of the amount of data among others. Social search with like Yahoo BOSS might work. I will look into fact-based search using social search and conventional search or some kind of combo.
Ask HN: how much of the stuff you own do you really need?
With the prospect of a move, I feel more weighed down by all the stuff I own than ever. The inconvenience of moving is one depressing though, another is the thought of leaving a lot of useless junk behind when I one day kick the bucket. Somehow that thought bothers me.

So I wonder about tricks for reducing the required stuff?

My main "weight" are books - hopefully one day they will be replaced by an ebook reader, but the tech is not ready yet. I am planning a startup to reduce that problem, too. Another thing I would wish for is shelves that could double as transporting boxes, to make the books seem less immobile.

Then there are clothes and worse, heavy wardrobes to accommodate them. Maybe a suitcase would be sufficient instead? Or would it just be exchanging one inconvenience (too many clothes) against another (too few clothes)?

Another heavy thing is the bed - perhaps switching to a hammock would be a solution, or getting used to sleeping on the ground?

Desks - would be superfluous if I would stick to working in cafes and libraries. However, the desk is not so bad, it is comparatively lightweight.
FYI, the site this is on (OurDoings, implemented by me) is not only awesome, it's also implemented with Kawa Scheme.

Edit: Its awesomeness is due largely to feedback, advice and stories from news.yc. Thanks everyone!
Business Requirements are Bullshit
LifeLock Identity Theft Protection - Savior or Fraud?
Commentary about Lifelock
The reason there aren't more science submissions is probably just that there isn't very much good science writing on the web. Most of the science articles being written today are basically just poorly summarized press releases covering cleantech, medicine, space, and the physical sciences.

Help me understand: Are you suggesting that there is a lot more good programming writing than good science writing? Or a lot more good valley gossip writing than good science writing? Sturgeon's revelation suggests that there is a lot of crap writing about everything, but the question here is why HN seems to now prefer crap on other subjects to anything about science, good or bad.
Just a quick warning about this, it uses canvas tags to display the sparklines so won't work in IE or any browsers unable to display the canvas tag.
It's a totally different site than it was a year ago.

It used to be five or six votes could keep you on the front page for a while. Now you submit the same kind of article and it dies with only a vote or two, and other people coming in with the same link count as some of those votes.

Sadly, I'm left to conclude that it is not the quality of the article, but the personal relationships between the posters that lead to upvoting or downvoting. That is, the same article submitted by two different people would get highly different scores based on the track record of the people involved, not the community's feeling about the content of the article.

Speculation only, but it explains the answer to your question. We ARE seeing just as many science stories -- probably more. It's just the wrong people are submitting them. (on average)
That's funny, I just did this on Friday! I used Harvard Business Services, URL delawareinc.com, which is not on your list. After reading about a dozen of these sites, they seemed really credible and I liked their tone and demeanor. Bonus: their registered agent pricing is the lowest I'd seen at $50/yr.
Not directly pertinent to your original question, but since you're interested in science articles, I'd recommend tracking the Ars Technica "Nobel Intent" science news feed:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/
I paid for EIN because I'd rather have my teeth pulled than sit on hold with the IRS. It was only $100 extra.
this (http://kerneltrap.org/node/5725) is soo much better.
The type of people who need to read this the most are going to be the ones who don't even understand why it matters.
Digital Objects as Passwords
Digital Camera Powered By a Fuel Cell
I have seen tons of people like this, but they also come with a NDA and somehow strongly believe idea is so much stronger than the team working on it.

I think this is what happens when mainstream media puts Kevin Rose on front of its cover.
Every 100ms of latency costs Amazon 1% of profit
Hi there. In my post I was referring to my direct tweets to people who don't already follow me.
Scheme has more books freely available on the Internet: “How To Design Programs” for people new to programming, Scheme and/or functional programming or the grand classic “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” for the more serious and advanced students. “Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days” is somewhere in between. All books are of great quality and great value.

The literature is one of the biggest reasons I got into Lisp/Scheme. SICP and Practical Common Lisp are great freely available assets.
Google's Top Disappointments
Some of his comparisons are true -- Haskell is relatively hard to comprehend for programmers who are used to imperative languages, but Haskell is imo the best language for learning functional programming techniques. The core of the language is beautiful and pretty simple. Intermediate concepts like monads are more difficult because you can look at them in more than one way and they take some time to really understand. While learning those concepts it also becomes clear why other language designers have made different choices. And that is imo the best part of learning Haskell. After that learning mixed languages like F# and Scala is easy.
Twitter Limits to 2000 Follows. Could This Result in Stability and Monetization?
Hi. I was not referring to my general tweets, just direct tweets to people who don't follow me already.
Regarding #2, it's for that very reason I am considering naming my next startup, "Making Our Mothers Proud."
7 Months Into My 2nd Stint as a Startup CEO
Richard Stallman in Auckland: On the ethics of free software
Hackers crack PIN encoding: print own debit cards from stolen data
I think that Mr. Yegge missed the real question - but the rant was worth it. I particularly liked "The easiest way to build a product that kicks ass is to start with someone else's great idea (camcorders, for instance), and take stuff away."

I suspect what the "business correspondent" wanted to know was something more like:

"My customer wants me to build him a new billing system. Their top managers have some defined strategic objectives but no-one I have met seems to actually know what this system should do in any detail. However, they can all detail the bad things that would happen if it did not do (whatever it is) perfectly from day one. Now how do I find out what to build them?"

Now that question is the one that development teams face every day.
Layer 7 Switching + Load Balancing = Layer 7 Load Balancing
Installing And Using OpenVZ On Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server
Early on, time was the limiting factor. The builder has been rewritten now to be standalone, so we will soon be testing the difference between current conversion rates of having to create an account and the rates that come as a result of playing with the builder first without an account. If we find anything interesting, we'll make note on Particletree.
I am getting ready to move abroad so this issue is even more important for me. Here is what I am doing right now in preparation and likely will be doing while abroad (I will have an apartment to keep my stuff at but I will be traveling a lot.)

Books are a big problem for me as well, until I see that I really don't read any of the books that I have. Space is one problem with books, time to read them is quite another. I decided I will give all my books away (tech books are almost all available in E-format anyways.)

As for the bed, go Japanese style. No need to kill your back and quality of sleep with a hammock. You could get a latex mattress about 4 - 6 inches thick and throw it on a wooden platform. Latex matresses last forever but they are kind of expensive.

Clothes are kind of hard to get around but rather than putting them in a space wasting dresser I keep them all in plastic bins in the closet.

This is kind of silly but my work desk is a laptop sitting on a T.V. tray and a folding metal chair. I would love to get a much nicer chair though. The T.V. tray is fine but it wouldn't work with a better chair. I could probably find a similarly small desk though. I think you shouldn't scrimp on possible productivity gains of having multiple monitors.

Some things you just can't get around, like the bed, clothes and good working environment.

I feel the same as you though. I feel weighed down by my stuff. Even worse is attaching my identity to some of it.
I'm going through this exact thing right now, after moving my things out of the old apartment I'm downsizing to a studio apartment on the barebones. Less stuff = less clutter = less distraction = more productivity.
Plus they have stellar customer service. We were talking to Kevin Hale last night (he's visiting Boston to advise the new startups), and he said that during the day their average response time to support emails is about 5 minutes.
Empirical evidence?
UI Guru Jakob Nielson's Site Is Unreadable
We feel your pain, and we're sorry
Actually, it does work on IE, because it uses the excanvas library from Google. Most canvas operations can be emulated this way, only failing when a high level of performance is necessary (i.e. I made a tower defense game in the canvas and it played very poorly in IE, although it did play).
A Q&A with David Scott Lewis, the mystery hacker who inspired the film "War Games"
I'm with Hank here. It's always been quixotically humorous that Jakob preaches on UI, but has a site that really has nothing remarkable or memorable about it.

Doesn't though, mean I disagree with his messages.
Its full lineage is that it's an authorized republishing of my article at http://lethain.com/entry/2008/jun/26/sparklines-in-javascrip... although the reposter reworded the title.

That said, it does mostly just take examples from the documentation, but the documentation is mine as well. ;)
Speaking as someone who really likes OCaml, I think the best parts about are the type system (very similar to Haskell's), the module system, and its explicit focus on being a pragmatic multiparadigm language. It has some gotchas* and tradeoffs, like every real language, but it's quite worth learning. It's particularly well-suited for projects that involve complex data structures (e.g. compilers, see: http://flint.cs.yale.edu/cs421/case-for-ml.html) or heavy high-level numeric computation. It would probably be quite good for game programming. Also, it does both bytecode and (Fast!) native compilation, so it's pretty portable.

* Many of which are due to the small community, e.g. somewhat poor documentation in many third-party libraries, few books in English (though the English translation of the French O'Reilly book is online as a free PDF, and quite good IMHO: http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/). Also, it doesn't have operator/function overloading (outside of its OO framework), which can be annoying, though this seems to gain it near-instantaneous compilation, even with its remarkably thorough compile-time error checking.
When should we consider the long-term ramifications of technological developments?
Inspired by Popcorn
I've been nomadic for about three years. Books stored at a friends place. All belonging in my backpack. Never looked back. Working all over the world, wherever and whenever, as long as there is a decent internet connection. I highly recommend this to anyone that feels weighted down with their things. Freedom in a certain sense.
More succinct, yes, interesting too, but I'd disagree with "better." It's like saying an apple is better than an orange.
People should go easy on them. I mean, hey, GMail's still in beta, right?
Not to mention the SICP videos-- I use them as my standard "Intro to Functional Programming" recommendation.
AJAX or DHTML powered application?
Glad someone else has noted the karma inflation. It used to be that to cross the 20 point threshold for a comment it had to be insightful. Now the first snide reply to a rhetorical question an article poses gets 30+ easily.
He raises many good points in the course of the rant, but I think that "only build for yourself" goes a bit too far than most of us are willing to go. I'd suggest, in the spirit of compromise, that "gathering (and understanding) business problems" is a better practice than gathering requirements, as user-proposed solutions (and the requirements which make them up) are often doomed to failure.
I have read Steve's articles before with a certain amount of respect, but this time he addresses an area very near and dear to me, and all I can say about this one is:

I call bullshit.

This article was so full of it, the more I read, the more I had to change into higher waders.

As I normally do when responding to a post, I started pulling out the statements I wanted to respond to, highlighting them, and putting my response below. After 10 minutes, I had the Magna Carta. This is simply too much wrong with this article to respond in the usual way.

So instead, I'll just say this...

Get this and get this good, fellow hackers: When anyone says "analysis" or "requirements gathering" is bullshit, there can only be one reason why: they don't know how to do it.

Sure, there are antecdotes and case studies of people building great software without talking to users first, but they are in the extreme minority, and anyone proposing doing this all the time is doing a disservice to his readers.

In order to find out what people need from software, you don't "grill" them, "interview" them, or "role play" (whatever that means). You get with them and "live their lives" and suffer with them, understanding what they must accomplish, how they must do it, and what's stopping them now. How do you do this? Any way you can. Change uniforms and shovel shit with them. Do their job for a day. Put them together in a room, feed them, give them beer (optional), and get them to bitch about it. Identify every single data element related to their tasks. Connect tasks and data to objectives (You may find that half of what they already do is a waste of time.)

In short, do whatever it takes to find out what you need to know to develop your software. This is hard work. Hardly anyone does it now, and relatively few have ever done it. Steve Yegge certainly hasn't. If he had, the data in this rant would have been very different.

Sorry, Steve, I normally enjoy your columns. Do us all a favor and don't say something can't be done because you've never done it. Next time, write about something you've already done. Then we can all resume learning from you again.
The Stock Bubble
Interesting point in contrasting how stocks were used to feed a number of worthless companies versus "old-fashioned" approaches to raising capital.
Why Media and Corporations Should Allow Content to be Embeddable
Thank-you YC and Anyvite for a very cool event!
Wall Street Grids: The Cloud or the Data Center?
I'll second that call.

Formula for blog entry:

1) Pick an area that most newbies don't get (ie, requirements)
2) Blather on for a while about all the ways they are done wrong
3) Miss the point of the topic. In requirements, you list what you do, then do it. Instead confuse key terms, like "user" and "customer", or "grill" with "be immersed in"
4) Try to be funny
5) Make sweeping conclusions that are obviously incomplete in the real world "Code only for yourself" -- so everybody with a need now has to have a programmer with the same exact need? Wow.
6) Throw in some generally accepted wisdom ("find something good and take stuff out") as a way of tossing the crowd a bone
7) Profit!

As a general rule of thumb, if somebody comes to you with a common phrase from software engineering and makes a sweeping statement (a friend just blogged "reviews are worthless!") then they are either pulling your leg a little bit or don't know what the heck they are talking about. The usual method of attack is to describe how something is commonly done and then disparage the concept by way of association.
I still have hope. As long as people aren't posting game screenshots and cheat codes, there is hope.
Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation is also good and free online. (http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/200...)
It is as if, while he is handing out the Oscars, he is wearing a plaid polyester suit.

lol, nice visual

I have actually turned down vendors selling CRM software because they didn't follow up with me properly. Kinda ironic, huh?

The same thing applies here. The old adage is, "If you don't do the easy stuff well, why should I even listen to you when it comes to the hard stuff?"