skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have another method that is even easier, in case you can't make facebook pages. It's all about arbitrage. Find a person who needs a service (web design, coding, etc) and then pay someone else less to do it. I do this all the time with freelancer.com and odesk for large projects, netting thousands of dollars in the middle, just for overseeing a project.

I recommend you keep it simple and small though, at least at first. There is a website, fiverr.com that has people who list jobs they will do for $5. I have resold some of these jobs for well over $100.

I don't really want to give away my best methods on here and the best gigs, but msg me if you really need some help. I would recommended combining the sales process in my post above with the outsourcing method of this one.

Good luck.
On an unprofessional note, Canvas is basically 4chan for hipsters.

But Poole's growth of this startup is incredible. I do enjoy the product occasionally, but it's definitely a game changer for messageboards.
I was help a friend work out whether it made sense to start paying for Amazon EC2 to mint bitcoins. I can tell you that yes, thin bids and poor liquidity was exactly what I found.
I just got down voted for pointing out the article is factually wrong and suggesting that it not be up voted for that reason. Believe what you want to believe internets!
I believe most, if not all, of MSDN now supports user-contributed content alongside the API refs.

Thus, it would serve your fellow developers if you were to annotate the lacking documentation with (1) example code or (2) pointers to the blog postings that you found.
A minor nit, I know, but a bell curve is symmetrical. So the graph shows some sort of fat-tailed distribution, and we cannot "see a textbook example of a bell distribution curve".
> it is not part of the mission of the Library to maintain a physical copy of every book ever written

I read once that the only things the Library is legally required to keep copies of are original author holographs; I don't know if that is true.
I've talked to the AWS folks and they do have plans for OAuth. I hope I can convince them that with a product like this the value proposition of selling their cloud services directly to end users is huge!

Same goes for Rackspace.

As far as Dropbox goes --- we'll see. That's a valid point.
Yes, indeed - real men build up character by punching themselves in the genitals, and then relaxing to a nice Nails-On-Chalkboard quartet for 15 minutes.
The tank is powered though... if it were COASTING at me, that'd be closer... ;-)
What this restaurant didn't seem to understand is the fact that groupon is like any other promotion. It's a loss leader that brings in new business. Perhaps the groupon customers wouldn't have been so bratty if the deal had been worded better, but who knows. The thing is that places like restaurants rely on repeat business and word of mouth as their primary sources of customers, and that's what groupon is designed to bring. I think the fault here is not in groupon's hands but the restauranteur.
I'm sorry, but justifying a $15 Billion (with a B) valuation on a business that Groupon isn't even in yet is pointless. It smacks of Enron, to be honest.
Oh, I'm not. I live on a horse farm surrounded by corn/soybean/etc farmers :-)

I just wanted to avoid having to qualify my answer too much to a group of people who are (probably) mostly urban. I agree with everything you say.
If you're into that sort of thing take a look at how I handle SaaS billing in my GeeTasksLite iPhone app. Try to cheat your way around, too. :) If you need to get in touch with me, just contact GeeTasks support.
I think you are over thinking it since everyone knows: Old Guys Rule
It reminds me of the old joke: Microsoft knows about cross platform code, as some of their stuff runs on WinXP and Vista
You can't distribute an iOS app outside of the App Store (outside of the enterprise). So Apple's 30% fee is essentially a tax on iOS apps--there's not a way around it.

Apple can destroy your business by changing a rule that makes your app ineligible for the App Store (or at least unprofitable, most recently seen in the whole in-app fiasco). There's not a way to distribute outside of Apple, so if Apple doesn't want to distribute your app then you have no business.
Good to see at least one article about this in the mainstream media. Have there been any others?
Even the Agile Manifesto itself explicitly says that its signatories value comprehensive documentation. They just value working software even more.
MySpace - Java(Coldfusion) After 2007 C#,C

Yahoo - PHP, Java

Disqus - Python

LinkedIn - Java

Netflix - C, C++ C#

Baidu - PHP

QQ - PHP
Re: collaborate with other founder: Not exactly. I'm pretty sure if I wasn't in YC, I wouldn't have been able to get a meeting with Justin, Emmett, Garry, or Sama (JEGS) so easily.

In addition, they've seen a lot in the past years, through pivots, raising, building a team, and through their ups and downs. They've been quite forthright in sharing their own experiences, and are valuable in their own ways that pg, harj, and pb would not necessarily be able to impart. As great as the senior partners are, and as much as they have seen, they have limited experience. Having the JEGS for office hours adds additional color and perspective.
Is that periodic table of data visualizations brilliant trolling? I truly hope so.
Here's the money quote:

> If Groupon matches these payment terms, they’ll need cash faster and need to grow faster. (Google Offers accelerates the rate at which Groupon’s scheme has to draw in new suckers.) If Groupon doesn’t match, it gives Google a key differentiator to win deals. If those businesses go with Google’s more generous terms, that too will starve Groupon of the cash it needs to pay earlier merchants.

I found myself laughing villainously as I read that. Google offers to by Groupon. Groupon demurs. Google destroys Groupon by forcing the Ponzi scheme into overdrive. Oh, it feels so good! Google, I forgive you everything!

By the way, didn't we all flip the scam bit on Groupon months ago when this article showed up here on Hacker News:

Groupon in Retrospect (posiescafe.com)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1698833
I don't want to sound like a hater, but $25k for this?

I can spin up a Rails app, add devise, scaffold an image model and add Paperclip with S3 support in less than 1 hour (probably closer to 30 mins). Yes, I get that there's more to it but still ...

Also, this project seems to imply that people "own" files on their S3 or DropBox accounts more than they "own" files on Flickr or SmugMug. I don't get that. Maybe S3 makes it easier to download/transfer files to your local machine, but you're still relying on a 3rd party service provider in every instance. And, since DropBox and SmugMug both rely on S3, it makes even less sense.

SmugMug especially has a great API and tons of 3rd party tools (including download ones [1])–so why won't the photo sharing service support that? Why won't it support images stored on the hard drive hooked up to my home router?

Sorry, but coming from someone who works in the photo space, this project doesn't seem very thought out from a "here's a problem that needs solving" point of view.

[1] http://wiki.smugmug.net/display/SmugMug/Hacks+and+Apps
I've always thought that gem's a bit silly. It makes sense to think in terms of state machines, but to code them explicitly?
It could be though that a 45-year-old has better perspective on what's important and what's not and therefore has better time management skills.

I know when I was first starting out as a developer I spent a lot of long days and weekends working but not really getting a whole lot accomplished. As I've matured, I've gotten better at picking out what's really important and am now much more productive while working less hours. I anticipate this trend to continue as I gain more experience.
Facebook Preparing for $100 Billion IPO in Early 2012
I worked in retail and higher-education for a number of years. I saw sensor lights used well and poorly. If tuned correctly and used correctly, they work very well.

Good: sensor lights in walk-in coolers and bathrooms at grocery stores seemed to work very well.

Bad: sensor lights in some classrooms led to some really frustrated profs and a whole class spontaneously, and simultaneously, waving their arms.

I've been contemplating trying them out for my kids' rooms.
Almost starting to feel bad for Groupon... then I read their S-1.
Why would you say that? Teachers have an incredibly high attrition rate. Barely half of the new teacher classes make it 5 years.

The vast majority of the highly-regarded teachers I know are ones who have been doing it for 25 years or more.
The Apple's Appstore has coupons for free installation (up to 50 coupons per release).

I have also designed my own billing system, which has server-backed "free trial", time-limited purchases, and of course "we want to thank you this much" free orders. You can see it in action in my GeeTasksLite iPhone app. I'm thinking about selling this billing system as a library and a service (the server side).
I would love to see the breakage figures on Groupon. I haven't looked at the S1, but do they account for them in revenue?
I prefer smaller commits to larger ones because it isolates things (both improvements and breakage). I use git bisect when needed. You can always squash small commits into larger ones if really necessary, but teasing apart large commits into small, logical steps or components is much harder. Smaller commits are more "mobile" in that they can be cherry picked (in or out).
I just looked and Apple hires iOS reviewers as full-time US employees with a CS degree. No salary listed, but I would guess that's around $100/hr cost to Apple. So one hour spent on reviewing a free app and now Apple is losing money.
Oops. Fixed.

There is a fair bit of theory about static verification/analysis of programs, a lot of which is applied in optimizing compilers as well. I'm not familiar with it, but I imagine that in this case it just fails on anything less than positive proof, and is comfortable with the strict standard that imposes.

It talks more about constraints here: http://whiley.org/guide/constraints/ .
IOS developer survey: 47% are on Android too, only 7% on Mac
How Not To Multitask
Thanks for the feedback Peter!
I do understand that these are a lot of features to begin with and a lot of people have mentioned this to me. I am currently working on streamlining the feature list.

Since the product will function on user generated music playlists, keeping the user motivated to come back and use the product is of extreme importance. And I do believe that one of the main motives for users these days (I call them User 2.0) is game mechanics. My objective with using game mechanics is not only to make the user "happy", but to keep them motivated/addicted
It's hard for anything dealing with age to be a true symmetrical bell curve - it usually winds up being cut short by old age & death, or foreshortened by, well, not existing. Notice that the ages start at 16. You'd have to be pretty precocious to give high quality answers at age 10 or 5.
Inventors & Vendors movie trailer
Approximating Influence with the Citation Graph
But an ally asked for something that's rather trivial (for us)... I don't see why we shouldn't comply.

Because it violates US citizens' first amendment rights?
What is factually wrong about the article? It seems to me that what it is reporting is the dramatic drop on Friday.

Whether or not the price later regained what it lost on Friday does not really impact the main point of the article - the existence of such a drop, no matter how temporary it was.
I think it's an open question how to measure developer productivity objectively. I don't think we really have a good way to answer this question right now, but definitely lines of code checked in is one of the worst. Checking in a 1k line class file with lots of dependencies that easily breaks when other code is changed, using a slow algorithm, with lots of difficult to follow code, would not be more productive than a 10 line method that performs the same functionality.

But I see where you are going there.

I mean come on, if you are comparing a fresh out-of-school graduate with someone with 10 years experience I think most people will agree that the older guy in this case will be more productive. There are things you need to know about working with a large code base that can't be taught by school but can only be learnt with experience.

When I say "older" developer, I mean the 40-50 year old who probably was a really good developer 10 years ago, got a steady, cushy job, with a salary that he/she is more than happy with, and stopped learning because he didn't need to anymore.

I know a lot of exceptions to the rule. The older programmer who got into it because he loves to code, who stayed in it because he loves to code, he keeps up with the times and continues to be relevant. The older programmer who just wants to make a buck and go home to his family? He fell behind a long time ago and doesn't want to catch up.
I'm not sure, but the thought only just occurred to me.
Still looking for a summer internship? Come intern with Zannee
Hi Hacker Newsers!

With summer here already and your friends off interning at Google or Twitter, some of you may be worried and frustrated about not having an internship of your own.

Perhaps none of your summer plans materialized. Or you didn't decide that you wanted an internship until it was too late, and now you're stuck.

Well, here at Zannee, we've still got open internship opportunities for this summer! If you are reading this, then you may be an ideal candidate!

By interning with Zannee from now to the end of August, you can:

- Gain real-world experience helping to develop products for a successful B2B software company.

- See Lean Startup principles applied first-hand.

- Get to build your sales and marketing mindset as you learn from Dane Maxwell (founder of Zannee).

- Possibly get university credit for the internship (depends on the university, but we'll help in any way we can).

Please note that the internships are unpaid.

We are looking for interns with skills in two main categories of web development:

- Frontend design and development. (Relevant skills: HTML/CSS, Javascript/jQuery, Photoshop/sketching/mockups, a good design sense).

- Backend architecture and development. (Relevant skills: Python, Django, Amazon Web Services, some familiarity with Linux).

It's fine if you currently only have experience with some of these; we'll give you opportunities both to reinforce your existing skills, and to learn new ones.

Even you are interested but aren't a technical person, still contact us - we'll discuss your skills and interests and see if there are other ways you could contribute and learn.

Interested? Please contact the intern coordinator (a.k.a me, Chris), at chrishaum@gmail.com.
It's probably the former. Older people--developers included--can enter a phase of "generativity" wherein they seek to give something back to the world in which they've prospered by helping following generations.

See "Generativity vs. Stagnation" in this list of Erickon's Psychosocial Stages of Development:

http://www.psychpage.com/learning/library/person/erikson.htm...
Sega and the repeated negative news on the Dreamcast. It was a great system, and ahead of it's time (compared to the PS1).
"36 hours old and the numbers cited off by a factor of 4"

Just what I want in my currency . . .
http://i.imgur.com/NDKrT.jpg is how it looks from here. Really not trying to be a dick, but that's illegible.

edit: Disregard, your background image http://blogblog.com/1kt/travel/bg_black_70.png is blocked by firewall @ work.
> Twitter, text messages and facebook have trained our minds to work differently. Have you been keeping up?

Have you?

> In a much-cited 2009 paper* in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, Stanford's Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D. Wagner show that heavy media multitaskers demonstrate significantly less cognitive control than light multitaskers. The heavy multitaskers "have greater difficulty filtering out irrelevant stimuli from their environment" and are also less able to suppress irrelevant memories from intruding on their work. The heavy multitaskers were actually less efficient at switching between tasks - in other words, they were worse at multitasking.

* http://memorylab.stanford.edu/Publications/papers/OPH_PNAS09...
Groupon does instruct customers to tip on the full price. It's probably part of the picture they draw when they're pitching to businesses — so when people skimp on the tip, it's a rude awakening.
It's a dojo.

The most senior students teach you all the basic stances/punches/kicks/throws. The sensei helps you put it all together into a coherent fighting style.
Since I was born in 1982, i didn't get the reference to F1000 ;-)

As far as I'm concerned, the only relevant thing in the HN community is producing successful or interesting businesses.

an MBA in my personal world-view is for relevance OUTSIDE HN community. i've been an entrepreneur since i was 12, so not looking to "ladder climb". anyway, not getting into an argument about this, thanks for clarifying your answer.
Sometimes it's good to be a late bloomer.
This is just 'the sky is falling' thinking.

If groupon defaults, the businesses will just not honor the groupon coupons. After all, they haven't been paid for.

The entire hypothesis of this article is that Groupon amounts to a marketing firm where you pay most of the cost in kind much later, instead of paying up front for a big marketing campaign. The 'in kind and later' part makes your scenario absurd.

However, I this article basically misses the point. Lots of businesses have excess capacity that costs them nothing to utilize. For example, a hair salon which employs 4 stylists will have several hours per week, and perhaps many more, where a stylist is idle. Giving someone a very cheap haircut when otherwise idle is a chance to win a future paying customer, and has basically no cost. It's a win for the customer and a win for the stylist, and of course groupon is getting a fee for that.

The same is true of items, like designer clothing and food, that have absurd markups. Selling it for closer to cost will cannibalize some future purchases, but overall isn't really that harmful, and may generate recurring income from newly converted customers. It is certainly MUCH lower risk than an advertising campaign, in that all the cost is baked in to people who actually show up in your store, instead of spread to the wind in the hopes of hitting the right people.

The problem with groupon is that it has no moat. http://37signals.com/svn/posts/333-warren-buffett-on-castles... Any competitor can come along and set up an identical business, and there is basically no network effect to speak of to keep customers coming to groupon instead of living social or any other competitor, and no risk for retailers or customers of trying another competing site. This is why there is 1 classified site in the US (craigslist) and 1 auction site (ebay), but innumerable comparison shopping sites all sharing the same retailers (amazon, half, cnet, shopping.com, pricegrabber, etc etc).
The bell curve is a result of the distribution for any population: developers, guitar players, sci-fi readers, etc. In this case, the curve happens to represent SO readers.
Facebook IPO valuation could top $100 billion, possible in Q1 2012
Dublin Web Summit 2011 - Largest tech start-up conference in Ireland & UK
Counting search results as promotion is a stretch.
Valid questions - not hater-ish at all.

Sure, you can spin up an app and server some images from S3 but like you said there's a lot more to that. I'm not pitching a simple photo hosting service like Gallery that stores your photos in S3. Perhaps I can go into more detail on the KS page though.

The fact that SmugMug and Dropbox use S3 is irrelevant because they don't hand you their AWS key and secret. The point of OpenPhoto is to decouple the frontend interface(s) from the actual storage. If you want to write a separate frontend adhering to the OpenPhoto specification then that completely works and you don't have to do any exporting or downloading.

That's where the ownership differences start to become apparent.

Even with great APIs SmugMug is still the gatekeeper.

Support for a hard drive hooked up to your home router is completely doable. Just write an adapter that conforms to the OpenPhoto spec ... it's how S3 support works. It's meant to be completely swappable though.

Also, in addition to S3 is the ownership of tags, comments and metadata. For this to be a truly open system it shouldn't sit in a mysql or mongodb that OpenPhoto runs.

Hope that answers some of your questions.

I'm in the photo space myself. I was surprised that you trivialized building a truly great photo service.
This is a seemingly persuasive argument, but it does not really work. It is an argument that makes us smaller than we are.

It asks us to compare what we have with nothing at all. Of course it is easier to think of what we have -- it is right in front of us. But the alternative is not nothing, it is to create something new. And it is not beyond the wit of humans to do exactly that. (And is not one of the quite orthodox appreciations of capitalism that it spurs innovation?)

When a real physical constraint is lifted -- i.e. everyone can now communicate and copy as much info as they want -- the thing to do is spend effort inventing ways to realise this advantage. You do not spend effort inventing ways to stop using it, as the content corps want to -- it is perverse really, is it not? it is a degenerate economy that does that.
Well, OK, but is my second thought right?
I just found out about turntable.fm
It does some like the same concept. I guess they beat me to the punch.
Do you have any inside contact info for the folks at turntable/stickybits? ;) I tried contacting them on twitter but couldn't find their email addresses
So, your prediction is that the greatest energy advances of this century will specifically come from two people in different countries who meet on the internet? It seems overly specific, yet also general enough to not be surprising. I'll go along with this.
Almost. The site quotes the money that Apple keeps "after paying content owners but before paying for other costs". The 1.3 billion doesn't include paying the record/movie labels, bands, or app developers, but does include everything else.

In other words, "the infrastructure for the store and payments to everyone other than artists and app creators costs $1.3b a year, but Apple's 30 percent cut of everything produces about $1.3b a year in revenue, so it all works out."
I have no problem with low-res only views of sensitive areas. I don't tend to be staunchly idealistic at the expense of security.

So not having high-res satellite imagery of sites in Israel is an affront to your rights, but these aren't?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_map_images_with_missi...
The original topic was: "It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer."

I was answering the posted question "Is there any other career where this would not be accepted as a given?".

So my post was that for teachers it is not accepted as given that they get better and scarcer with age. I did not make a statement whether that was true or not, just that it was not accepted as a given. In support of my view I would offer the numerous recent news stories calling for the end of last-hired, first-fired rule when laying off public school teachers.
First Graphene Integrated Circuit
LulzSec's claim has been discussed on Reddit and the Bitcoin forum. The selloff bitcoins are apparently from very old blocks, and since LulzSec is a recent phenomenon...