skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's probably true that starting a startup is the only thing that can prepare you for starting a startup. But consulting is still a lot better for experience than a typical full-time jobs. What FT job will teach you about provisioning equipment or anything about accounting?

I believe it was Joel Spolsky that said the success of a software company was based on how well it turned developer hours into money. What better place to do this than somewhere where you trade your own hours into your own money?

It's obviously not a seamless transition from consultant to startup founder, as the author has indicated. But in general you'll learn a lot more about running a business as a consultant than you otherwise would as an FTE anywhere.
Tribute to a Real Man, Ron Swanson.
Guys, I must get a mac!
Just because you didn't find them compelling doesn't mean they are somehow flawed. There are whole schools of philosophy that are mutually exclusive and yet are subscribed to each by many very intelligent people who are unable to decisively prove each other wrong. Having studied so much philosophy, you of all people should understand that there is a huge difference between a rational, consistent argument and a proof.

EDIT: Proving or disproving the existence of God is, in general, a fool's game. One could probably prove that certain types of deities are impossible, but it's impossible to prove that no form of deity is possible. On the other hand, proving the existence of God would almost certainly require a well-documented divine intervention, and even then many people would (rightfully) remain skeptical.

Also, my previous post didn't say anything about proving the existence of God: I said that they made "arguments in favor of religion," which is not the same thing. First, not all religions involve deities. Even if you restrict the discussion to religions involving deities, it is possible to argue that it is desireable or advantageous to believe in God without first proving that God exists. Furthermore, even some atheists argue that religion in general or some religions in particular have had a net positive impact on humanity.
And joining a startup with crazy hours and low pay isn't an issue with your family?
Have you tried GitX? What you described seems a bit more like GitX than what GitHub is trying to do here.

When I first fired this up, I made a tarball of one of the repos I'm currently working in (it has uncommitted changes) and started clicking around. I'd do something in the GitHub app, then go back to my bash prompt to see what happened. I was pretty confused when I switched branches and all my changes were gone. Then I went back and read the blog post. It auto-stashes when you switch branches. I also wondered what the heck the "Synchronize" button does, so once again, I referred to the blog post. It performs what they call a "smarter version of pull --rebase && push that reduces merge commits but doesn't rewrite your merges". Oh, really?

At that point I realized that GitHub has done the hard thing. They haven't re-created the git CLI tool in a GUI, they've created something different. They've created a tool that makes Git more accessible. Little things like auto-stashing when you switch branches will confuse git veterans, but it will make Git much easier to grok for newcomers because of the assumptions it makes about your git workflow.

I see great things in this app's future. It's probably not for everyone. If you're a proficient git cli user, and you like it that way, then you're probably best off sticking with what you've got. Maybe explore some of the more traditional Git GUI clients like GitK or GitX, but keep in mind, that's not what this is.
Sadly, like all computer programs must expand to include email, all banks that don't suck must eventually get bought by those that do.
I'm sorry, but in the world of awesomely-licensed Qt and other cross-platform toolkits, why would you go out of your way to build a native app on Mac libraries and only release it for a single platform?

I can understand that OS X probably has the biggest share of GitHub visitors, but git is fully open source, GitHub seem to very much like open source, and in the spirit of that I'd expect a native app that works on as many platforms as possible.
My customers accept to work remotely, including for requirement gathering, and I asked precisely because I have a 3yo (I do agile, ruby, rails, etl, .net): I went on-site only 11 days since the beginning of the year.

I guess it's a matter of picking the right customers maybe; not everyone will work this way.
What about the update experience do you find so bad/discouraging?
Note that fountain codes are very, very patent-protected by Luby et al. Five years ago I came across literature on rateless codes, which are digital fountain codes that allow practically infinite encoding, or a practically infinite stream of data from which the original could be reconstructed. One really promising type of rateless code was online codes, which required O(1) time to generate a single block and O(n) time to decode a message of length n, which was much better than the LT rateless codes that came before it. (The paper can be found at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.12....)

I wrote up a Java implementation in my free time, and it worked well and was quite fast. I pinged the authors of the paper, asking if I could open-source it, because I came across a web site with their names on it that seemed like they were going to commercialize the idea. They replied that they had abandoned the idea of online codes because, even though their approach was faster than all other coding schemes, it still violated patents held by Luby and his company Digital Fountain, which has since been acquired by Qualcomm. That was a bummer, because I thought the online codes paper was very elegant, and the implementation was quite simple.
The small bug in your code actually makes a good case for using the more concise syntax of coffeescript to help avoid those kinds of errors, while generating code that's just as efficient.
Thanks for this. I've heard lots of good things about MongoDB (and auto-sharding makes me drool), but I've heard rumours of problems with it too. Always cool to read something from the other side of the fence.

Too bad that there's no other product out there that makes automatically sharding large amounts of data quite so easy...
Remembering Bob Pease the Writer
Where are you setting `item` here?
"Few programmers will die shipping a breakthrough product,"

Not right away, but abusing your health takes its toll.
URL-encode nested javascript objects (node/browser)
Show HN: GitStatus (can't compete with GitHub for Mac, but eh...)
Hey there,

I was looking for something like this but was shocked to find nothing like it actually existed yet - all the ones I could find just listed a user's repositories.

GitStatus is a widget that lists out the recent commits for a given (public) repository. Fully open source and on GitHub/etc - however, I released it right as GitHub for Mac came out, so I don't expect it to get any attention.

Really just throwing it out there to get it in front of any interested devs, since I doubt I'm the only one who wanted this. If nobody finds it interesting I'm sure the polls will show it! ;D

https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/gitstatus/blob/master/js/gitstatus.js
Computers take medical histories better than doctors.
Before we can start doing all the cool stuff, we need a solid foundation. Clojure isn't quite in the position where it can match Ruby on Rails, at least not yet.

However, in my rather biased opinion, many of the core Clojure web development libraries already exceed those built for Ruby, and certainly vastly exceed those that existed when RoR was first released.

For me, the most interesting part of libraries like Noir is how much they use existing libraries. It indicates we're doing something very right with regard to modularity.
I use vim ;)
Please do anyway.
By the way, the url looks like spam. Not everyone knows who Arvind Gupta is (I didn't). It might be a good idea to change the submission title, I'd suggest something like 'Toys made from everyday trash'.

If I could I'd upvote this a thousand times!
Picture a hamster wheel vs. a flywheel. In the first you have to keep running to keep it spinning, though it's easy to start. In the second, it takes a while to get going, but you don't have to attend to it as much, so you get things like lots of free time, or at least flex time.
all we need is C# 4.0 running on JVM. And instead of no generics, substitute generics implemented as they are on the CLR.
Done! no incoherent Scala to learn. I have no complaints about C# except that it exists on MS island, instead of running on JVM in the Java ecosystem. As language, I cannot complain about C#. I have found clojure to be very easy to learn and use recently, but I must honestly admit that if it didn't exist I would never have noticed if C# were on the JVM.
I see no need to convert my js to coffee just so I can compile it back to js.
Oh, sure. Sometimes types disappear at compile-time and aren't needed during program execution: the theorem is already proven so why should the runtime system carry around the baggage? Unless we're talking past one another, the Scala problem is rather worse: start passing around Seq[Seq[Int]]'s through your code and the compiler will be unable to ensure that it's always a Seq[Int] stuffed in there; the compiler comes with warning flags, but it's rather a bother and decidedly more dynamic.

You are quite correct, almost all strongly typed languages perform some type erasure for efficiency purposes. The problem, as I see it with Scala, is rooted in defect in the JVM; the system looses type information and cannot verify at compile-time that all your types will be correct.

Please correct me if I'm wrong or have misunderstood you.
Glutation y problemas cardiovsculares | Blog Oficial de Salud y Calidad
That's cool and all, but a Windows client would make a lot more business sense. There are already a couple of nice git clients for Mac. There aren't for Windows.

And I assume github is targeting SMB with its paid offerings. Unless you're a design shop or a hip startup, odds are you're not running OS X. Based on my unscientific data, most companies have the devs working on Windows (or occasionally Linux).
None of the models on magazine covers are real, either. They're just based on real people.

This was a great video showing how far from reality Photoshop can take a picture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U

We're now to the point where supermodels feel bad about themselves when they look at photos of themselves. That is seriously messed up.

This fictional Japanese video star is just the next nutty step.
Nobody would be a better CEO than "Shpigler the shark": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=650U4-9CPew
Kickstarter: Shorter project durations lead to higher funding rates
It looks really nice, but I don't see myself switching from command-line Git (except for maybe when viewing logs and/or diffs). This will definitely be awesome for working with designers though.
A Windows client doesn't make sense when most (all?) Github employees are on Macs. Mac is higher priority than Windows.
Unfortunately, this isn't how finance works, so I can't hire you as CEO.

Yahoo has $1.5Bn in cash. Companies usually get bought for cash and stock that the company owns, or they can issue more stock if it's a merger that gets broad approval. YHOO doesn't have $20Bn to buy companies with, and if they did, they still couldn't make the investments you're talking about. Twitter alone is worth $8.5Bn on the secondary market... It would sell for more than $10Bn. And buying the New York Times for $1.5Bn would incur another bil in debt.
If you see these, it means it might be time to change something. Do the right thing and find someone to replace you.
I don't think it does that actually - as a consultant taking longer isn't a downside. It's a downside for your client - but in the end if it takes you 40 hours or 10 hours it doesn't really matter to you other than that you get to bill more.
It's self-reinforcing, isn't it? I'm never going to have that conversation on HN, so all HN sees are the radically underpriced offerings and the hapless few people who stumble into quoting real prices here and getting slammed for it, which chases more people away from talking about what things cost, and on and on.

Just noted because it's interesting to me.
Is there a vim theme for that?
It takes days/weeks for Apple to approve updates and then users have to consciously open the Mac App Store app and download them.
Knight News Challenge Winners Announced: Overview, PANDA, DocumentCloud...
I get that dogfooding is important, but github employees aren't the target market.
Sure, but my point is that most of Github's potential customers are not on Macs.
Fixed-point sucks, why not use 128bit integers for numerical calculations?
agree. I've never really considered anything about Javascript's syntax to be cumbersome. I've written server-side Ruby and appreciate the syntax...

But two points:

1) The syntax wasn't the only thing that drew me to Ruby.
2) I just don't see an any real need morph my JS code into a similar syntax. Writing JS is pretty easy.
Do they have a linux client?
I think the idea is that, with consulting it will always be like that (vis-a-vis the travel issue), whereas a startup - if successful - will eventually result in a scenario where you can cash out, and kick back and relax. Or, if not "cash out" at least ease off on the crazy hours and what-not, and gradually transition into a "normal" business.
Smalltalk, one of the seminal, dynamic languages has a compilation step. It happens inline everytime you save a method.

Lisp can both be dynamic and compiled.

Many dynamic languages---Python, Ruby, et all--on JVM or CLR have a compilation step. They compile to byte code that the VM then runs.
Nailed it. Surprised he didn't add, "I'd go back in time 10 years and buy google for $1mm". Might as well have added that in to his pitch.
Yeah. I'm sticking with vim.
Two ways to pivot with this that I can think of:

1) Flash sale deals - short term sales at businesses.
2) Better monitoring of demand so that prices can be intelligently adjusted. More like market research for businesses trying to figure out what the best price point is.
I've seen pretty convincing studies showing opposite results:
http://www.econ.upf.edu/~iriberri/Personal_Web/Loreal_24_Feb...

TLDR: Using data from business competitions (L'oreal, undergrad and MBAs), they studied the performance of groups of three students, controlling for a lot of things. Groups of 3 women were by far the worst performers, while the best were 2 men and 1 women.

Why may that be? no clue..
Two days ago I gave SmartGit a try and don't really see a reason to look back: http://www.syntevo.com/smartgit/
The article doesn't touch on this aspect, but I was expecting it to say something about a mixed gender team doing better because members of one sex will try harder to impress members of the other sex. In other words, some form of evolutionary competition would kick in.
The alignment problem and downstream work is at least as hard as sequencing. I worked on a sequencer / aligner software package.
The huge jump from $0/mo to $100/mo makes this a non-starter for me, and I suspect I'm not the only one. I think these pricing points are a mistake; as someone very interested in this market it'll be interested to see if I'm right or not.

I'll try to explain:

I'm a reasonably skilled ops guy, so for big stuff I'm still going to want the control that running my own stack gets me. I suspect most larger customers will be the same: the advantage of a hosted platform over one I design and build isn't proven yet.

But I also have a bunch of tiny one-offs that need homes, so a PaaS offering is super-attractive. I can pretty easily deploy a couple-three of those things on a EC2 or Rackspace instance, so once you factor in my time I'm probably looking at $5-10/mo per app being an attractive price point. So it's damned hard to argument with free!

But — and here's the big thing that'll keep me off Dotcloud — if those small apps get a bit bigger, then what? Well, on my hand-rolled VPS my cost'll double or maybe triple, so I'm looking at say $30/mo. On Dotcloud? I'd jump right to $100/mo.

I suspect this "jump" — and the unknown and likely huge jump that follows when I go from "pro" to "enterprise" — will keep most casual, smallish hobbyest or lifestyle businesses away.

So if large projects stay away, and small projects stay away... what's left?

My guess is over time we'll discover that utility-based billing is going to be the model that makes the most sense for PaaS and that artificial tiers will go the way of the dodo.

[Edit: the following "PS" was a bit hasty; I misread the pricing detail page. Leaving it here because otherwise the discussion below doesn't make sense, but I'M WRONG and THE FOLLOWING DOESN'T APPLY TO DOTCLOUD.]

PS: Oh yeah, one other thing:

Given all we know about web security, having SSL as a value-add makes you look irresponsible at best, and manipulative, opportunistic, unethical, and idiotic at worst. SSL isn't optional, people, and I won't give my patronage to anyone who doesn't get that.
Java needs to die.

That said, Google App Engine has been offering Java for a long time.
The 2011 Linux Distro Scorecard
Could you maybe talk a little more about what the company is doing, either here for via my email?

Thanks
clickable: https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/gitstatus/blob/master/js/gits...
Nothing in your reply addresses my points, so I'm not sure what to answer. Yes, I tried GitX, and I'm not looking for (or using) Git GUI tools. This doesn't make GitHub for Mac less visually cluttered.

I'm mostly discussing GUI trends (as a Mac developer who cares about this stuff), using GitHub as an example (which, as you say, gets job done great, but I say that it can be improved).
If you're interested, here are the decent (looking, not used) alternatives - Brother's Gitx fork http://brotherbard.com/blog/2010/03/experimental-gitx-fork/ Gitbox http://gitboxapp.com/ and Gitx http://gitx.frim.nl/
I feel like he's missing the point of an ecosystem.

It's fine that he only uses a few apps on his phone, and that most other people probably do the same.

The problem is that those "few apps" that most other people use aren't the same "few apps" that he uses.
You have the chance of millions and millions. It's a classic low risk vs. high risk.
PJM (ISO)
PJM operates in most part of the USA and is considered one of the leaders in independent system operators (ISO). The company operates in wholesale electricity market as a true leader. More than 54 million people rely on the high-voltage grid operated by PJM. For POWER-tek, the opportunity to work with a customer that has such a wonderful long-term regional planning process, was a great experience.
I find it hard to believe that the keys to Yahoo's turnaround are a better experience in photos, news, branding, and PR. Mobile and social, maybe.
SE Asia is about half as cheap (depending). So that helps.
Me too, but that's probably because of all those regular expressions like 'aa* b*' I had to read at uni :)
MacHg - Bitbucket for Mac
Mac client for Bitbucket or any Mercurial repo client.
I'm working with a group of teenagers right now on a long-term technical project and my observations are that the boys are fantastic for giving immediate, interesting ideas but aren't interested in documenting their work. The only volunteers to maintain the project documentation were girls, who are also willing to spend their own time outside of the class on this. This is just an observation, mind, and I may be biased as I'm a woman but I consistently have found in the workplace that women are happier to do documentation/project management than men. Where the opposite is true, the men are often exceedingly good at the task. Would it be positing to tentatively suggest that men don't generally like to do things that they don't think they are good at, whereas women innately like to see a project successfully managed and will do what work is needed for the common goal? I would certainly place myself in this case, where I step in to make sure things are done regardless of my 'position' in the group.
> Unless you're a design shop or a hip startup

They are the latter. Welcome to the San Francisco bubble, where you think everyone uses iPhones and Macs, because in your world everyone does. It's the same reason Twitter has a Mac app but not a Windows app. They build these things for themselves (and arguably they should).
+1
CLI = command-line interface
And how many people running Scala are actually using those other JVMs? How many of them even compare to the Sun/Oracle JVM? I mean, honestly? And given Oracle's new penchant for suing people and their spat with Google/Apache, do you really want to keep your eggs in that basket?

People keep trying to sell new languages to Java developers using the JVM. The problem isn't the language, though, it's the JVM itself and the licensing problems, too.
Mac: Tower, GitX, GitBox, GitHub, Sprout, Gitti, SourceTree ...

Windows: TortoiseGit?
clickable http://witsbits.com
I don't understand some of this passive hate against consulting. Consulting could also be your startup. I started consulting a year and a half back. And i've teamed up with half a dozen other devs, got a person to help me manage stuff, and over a dozen running projects at any time. It's hectic since i'm touching each project right now in some way, but i'm scaling back and starting to learn how to delegate better.

The advantages are, that i was profitable from day 1. Although i've always wanted to do a product startup, but the point is i don't have to. Now i have sufficient lee-way on time/savings to do my own product startups. But one caveat is that you're more likely to favour money in hand(i.e. more clients consulting) rather than "hope money"(i.e. a successful product). So you have to be prepared to step out of the circle and do what you started out to do i.e. if a product was your aim.

So let's see how this pans out in a year from now for me.
That study is exclusively with smaller groups: 3 people. The social dynamics of a 3-person group are very different than a 10-person group as in this study. This probably has much to do with the different results.
Are you ready?
Are you ready to install local proxy server for your friends usage and get a small fee for this?
From the article:

"Our ongoing research suggests that teams need a moderate level of cognitive diversity for effectiveness. Extremely homogeneous or extremely diverse groups aren’t as intelligent."
Thanks; for some reason I still completely forget how to do that on HackerNews. >_<;

Much appreciated.
I think I had Nick as a server at the Olive Garden, once. I'm pretty sure he's a better engineer than a waiter. I did get a free Sprite off of him though.
Does anybody know the ext4 behaviour?
Online advertising: types of targeting
It is hard to go from solo consultant to software business.

That's why people don't do that. They build a solid pipeline of consulting work, then they hire people.

It is straightforward to build a software business with 1-3 people paid near-market wages by another 1-2 people doing hardcore consulting.

I could go on and on and on and on about how much better this model is than the "eat ramen and hope for VC" model, but the nut of the rebuttal to this particular post is so simple that I'll spare you.
You're forgetting they already have WP7 on tablets. It's called Windows 8
Am I justified in being disappointed this doesn't support OS X 10.4 (Tiger)?
Of course, you could equally well just sow doubt with a few precise surgical strikes. If random customers lose all their money often enough, the rest of the customers will withdraw theirs to have it in physical assets.

Which is enough to cause tremendous damage. And a way more likely scenario.