skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really nice idea! Should save me trawling through amazon reviews to see if the particular book I'm after is suitable for newcomers.

heads up: http://bestintrobook.com/books/iphone+programming gives me an error, although http://bestintrobook.com/books/iphone+development works fine.
Not pushing down DOM or obfuscating the navigation is not a hard design to make.
Given Twitter's history with Open Source, I'm guessing we'll still see Storm.
You would need to be very careful how you define what a page is, or any other unit of work that you intend to charge for.

People will try a great many things to stretch what they think should be included in one unit.

I can see it now: It'll all be AJAX! It won't need more than one web page that updates itself!
$1000 to $2000 seems reasonable for a moderately complex project (not just an HTML text page, but decent design with some complex PHP/Javascript functionality). I'm in the market for something like that.

That said, I would spec it out completely. Others may not, and so that might not be worth your time and energy. For a well spec-ed project with reasonable and agreed upon complexity, a few thousand seems reasonable.
That's not good enough. Not in my UX book at least.
Correlation causation?
The problem with using cycles as the primary unit of angle is that the wonderful trigonometric derivative symmetry only occurs when the functions are calibrated for radians.

I've never understood the particular argument of "single intermediary constant (tau) rather than two (2,pi)". 2pi is one constant that contains multiple glyphs, just as 1/2 is one constant, just as tau/2 would be one constant. That it is derived logically from other constants does not make it two separate constants. Even multi-digit numbers are derived logically from their component glyphs (12 = 10+2).
I made this.

It runs on Google App Engine and uses the new HNSearch API to get the comments.

The goal is to present people with things from the internet that they liked in the past. I think that sending people their HN comments is a good way to test the idea.
Hey, I'm the iBuildMvps guy. Most of the inquiries are people who have done no customer development - I usually send them away to talk to customers - very few come back after that.

I don't do fixed charges, hourly rates seems to avoid problems.

We're not trying to build the ground floor of a successful product, we're trying to get something minimally viable to prove a concept. This seems to help non tech guys find their "technical cofounder" by proving people are interested in what they're doing.

Very few projects come out of iBuildMvps, but a lot of startup, customer development and marketing discussions. I think I'm doing good just by saving a few people hours/weeks/months/years of their lives chasing something that will never amount to anything.
I stopped reading early, when he's claiming pi is better for the area of a circle, because that revealed that the author hasn't really thought about this very much.

If you look at the equations for the volumes of spheres in n dimensions (with 2D being just one of them), tau shows a clean pattern. pi leaves you with a mess.
> The area of the traditional unit circle is π

The area of the unit circle is 3.14(etc) units squared. The result is a number; it's how you get there that's important. You get there by integrating. The "right" equation for area is not πr^2 or τr^2/2; it's the integral that leads to either of those equations. The 1/2 in the τ version is meaningful because it is an artifact of the integration. The lack of the 1/2 in the π version shows why it's "wrong"—it's not as meaningful.

> try setting the area of the unit circle to 2π

This is a nonsensical statement. As is "traditional unit circle," but I let that one slide already.

> the reason that radians of common fractions of the unit circle are expressed in terms of π

The reason they're expressed in terms of π is because a circle constant is needed, and π was chosen. And it was chosen hastily.

Your arguments are unsound!
This can be partially mitigated: http://stereopsis.com/flux/
Care to elaborate? I think the RIRs are doing a reasonable job, though if you don't like the needs-based approach to allocating addresses I could see the RIRs as disappointing.
Overall, a good start, with a few rough edges. Searching on python resulted in "Dive Into Python" and "Learn Python the Hard Way", which are very good recommendations in my opinion. However, searching on "public speaking" referred me to a book on public radio, and searching on "programming" resulted in "Internal Server Error".
I would be offended if my friends started giving out my personal details to random businesses using a pen and paper, too.

I don't personally use Facebook, having abandoned it almost immediately precisely because my friends were collectively volunteering all kinds of information that I considered private. Today, my friends know this is my view and it's not a problem, nor am I the only one of my group who takes this view. Obviously it took a while before my views became known, though.

In any case, this whole black-and-white idea that if you volunteer any personal information to friends on one service with privacy controls you might trust then that information is fair game for anyone to give to anyone else is just silly. If it weren't, Facebook themselves wouldn't have been pressured repeatedly into creating and maintaining all those privacy controls even though it's not really in their interests to do so and they've tried to reduce them again and failed on several occasions.
Navy Federal Credit Union -- if you're eligible, they're amazingly good to their customers. The main draw for me initially was their extended work hours, but aside from that, all the general credit union benefits apply, and their online services are pretty complete.
This kind of sucks, actually.
Why do you refer to the area? Why not the diameter or the circumference? If you care about the area, why not use the unit circle with area 1?

A quarter arc of a circle is π/2 radians, regardless of area.
My definition for "best" is the book that most experts in the field would recommend to their non-expert friends.
Uh. Java has a foreach operator. Has had it for almost a decade now. Almost the same as the C# operator. You might want to consider dialing down your self-assuredness if you don't know the basic commands in the language being discussed.

And macros are vastly different from hunting through framework documentation, that's not the same ballpark or even the same sport. If you want macro-like behavior in Java, you can always break out AspectJ, which I strongly recommend against doing due to my biases against code that changes in between me typing it and it running.
> The napkin crowd believe they have specs. They do not have specs; they have napkins.

Ah, like my boss you mean. Only he uses flip-charts or white-boards instead of napkins.
No, but it is wrong for them to start plugging that number into some database of telesales people they feel like working with.

(Edit: To those downvoting, do you not like the analogy, or do you not agree with the ethical principle?)
I consider myself to have intellectual curiosity but don't see this discussion to be particularly compelling. I don't think there is anything about intellectual curiosity which requires one to consider every question that's raised no matter what. There simply isn't enough time to consider everything, so prioritization is always necessary.
I don't get it. Are startups now just a new resume? How are BackType users supposed to react to this? How are users supposed to trust other API startups if they can just get the rug pulled out from them like this?

I'm happy for the team, but is there not any way they could have transitioned the project to other developers and still joined twitter fulltime?
Relocation: from Chicago To San Francisco, Summer 2011
There is a 75 yo congressman who actually understands what it's about and is against it. Take a guess :)
Verizon confirms it will ditch unlimited smartphone data plans starting July 7
I have read this essay a few times, and I think that steve is missing an insight into modularity. We should be writing libraries for ourselves, not just piling code on top of other code. As an argument, I first offer a few propositions.

Any code upon which your project relies can be considered "part of the code base". As an example from Rails, it has become a somewhat common/accepted practice to notice a deficiency in a gem, fork it on github, fix it for your needs, and use it. This is especially common if your project depends on abandoned gems that you still need to use, for whatever reason. Even if this isn't a problem, I often need to look into internals to figure out where something is breaking.

Then, if code that your code depends on is considered part of the project, if steve was correct, then it would be very hard to use anything more advanced.

However, practical wisdom shows that higher level such as Ruby are more productive than lower level languages, such as C. Thus, the original premise is shown false.

If the original premise is false, then what is it that steve is noticing? I think it is about leaky abstractions. If you write libraries for yourself, with good, clean interfaces, you do not need to "notice" the lines of code from other parts of the project.

tl;dr It's about creating abstractions for yourself, not pure LOC count.
Crossing the Creative Divide: Three Intrinsic Attributes of Creativity
There is a job in "boston ma." mistakenly placed on the map at Macon, Ga.
Journalists are like anyone else: They wake up in the morning wanting to do their job well and write about stories that will be interesting to their audience. If you do your research and pitch them a story that's interesting and up their alley they'll appreciate it. If you spam them they'll ignore it.

Find reporters who cover your beat using http://muckrack.com (full disclosure: my company made that site), follow them on Twitter, see what they like to write about, and start building a relationship by tweets or email based on what they're interested in.

There's no standard for the email to journalists, but just keep them short and immediately say why your web app would be interesting to their readers.
Nits:

1. When one drinks one's tea from a cup and saucer, one extends one's little finger. I believe the colonists call this one's pinky. Not to do is unconscionable.

2. One does not say "Sorry, chap", but "Sorry, old chap".

3. As to the long coat without tails together with a topper, I am speechless.

Joshing aside, old bean, great idea.
> If you exclude options, people or opinions it's selection bias.

"I'm sick of the hype already and I can't be bothered to try it."

That actually excludes more options than it adds. It is an explanation with unnecessary complexity. Applying Occam's razor would turn the option into "I have not tried it," which is indeed a missing poll option.
My 4th July project: TideArt.com (SQLite-based CMS, comments, etc done in a day)
According to the official breakdown of Android devices by OS version only 0.6% of devices are on 3.0 or later. http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...

And even devices with the same version of Android will have differences.
It has no place in the poll, however.
Wordpress 3.2 has been Released: A Lighter and Faster WordPress
Clearly you've got the technical chops, there are many other considerations that go into a hiring decisions.

Who is doing the hiring at the places you have interviewed? Is it a CTO (or similar) who may view you as a threat to their position? Is it an HR manager who wonders if you're more of a lone-wolf rather than a team player?

You say you haven't been able to get a straight answer from anyone, but what is the question you've been asking?

Turning the tables may seem like a creative way to solve the problem, and I always like taking the opposing view, but in this case, it seems like you're being overly aggressive and pointed (common for us programmer types), and that may be coming across in an interview.

Drop me an email (address in my profile), and I can see about setting you up with an interview in the LA area for a recently funded start-up that I believe is still hiring.
Why companies must incubate
We need more of this kind of breakdown from our economic and financial media.
How does copyright fall under either immigration or customs?

Think bootleg DVDs. According to the linked Guardian article, most of the domains ICE has seized were selling counterfeit physical goods.
I don't think that's really a legitimate question.

If you tell a friend e.g. your email address, you willingly give up the control you had over that piece of information, and accept that he now knows your email address. What you're expecting is that you can control when your friend forgets the information you voluntarily gave him. I doubt that's a legitimate expectation.
Last year I went to visit a friend who has spent the last 2 years living on a Pacific island. I had the feeling that there was not a lot of programming opportunities on this said island but there was a market for IT generalists. There was a case of a person from Switzerland who moved to the island and purchased a shipping container and turned that into his office and workshop. Like most places there will always be need for IT support(business and home), so that was his core income. I believe he also did work on websites for businesses, resorts and small programming tasks on existing in-house applications. While remote work is certainly a possibility, you must be weary of the internet links that these islands have, some are very very slow and not very cheap.
The poll isn't asking whether you'll switch, only which you prefer.
The Sandpit emerges as startup sales accelerator
I need to learn to be more explicit in what I say. My comment about 70 year-old senators, did not mean that I believe old people can't make proper laws - that would be ridiculous. However, it is true that the majority of 70 year-olds are not as tech savvy as the majority of 30 year-olds. This isn't opinion. Modern technology is by definition new, and people always learn faster when they're younger.

To add to the problem, senators are not picked based on their technological competence. I would assume they're selected because they can contribute some form of sagacity to the majority of issues. Take Buffet for example (although this is a business tangent). He's great at what he does, and stays away from technology, presumably because he realizes his own limitations.
Hey, if they can get a few billion dollars of China's cash at the current inflated valuation for non-voting stock who are we to criticize?

They would need to somehow purchase very large blocs of voting stock to gain enough board seats to matter and that's not going to happen anytime soon.

I think this is much ado about nothing.
If this "read mail" thing is a problem for you why don't you just patch the software? Yes, a .tar.bz dl link in GMail would probably be nice, but sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands. If the maintainer doesn't want the patch, patch it yourself and host it on Github/Bitbucket/Google Code/etc.
Erik Demaine's lectures are plenty dense, and you don't have to pay $30K to watch them. Khan breaks things up into short pieces in a way that is not practical for a university lecturer, because you couldn't ask everyone to show up for 10 minutes at a time.
I think they may be shooting themselves in the foot with all this litigation against copy infringers. Once it becomes impractical to share files using bit torrent, people will probably just switch to mildly less convenient but more secure methods, like free net.
I might not use it, but I'm sure someone would... especially all those people who can't find technical cofounders, and want to start something really badly. I haven't really thought that hard about market viability, so you may be right.
It's amazing how much faster dynamic languages can run with some engineering effort. It's also frustrating, because it contrasts starkly with my PHP code's performance. I wish the PHP team had the resources to do this kind of work, because at this point it's the slowest subcomponent in my stack.
Hmmm... I don't want to go against the grain too much and I kinda agree with the blog post, but the guiding principle strikes me as vague. Companies of more than a few people are going to have mismatched personalities and some egoists. There are going to be struggles, there are going to be painful bits and happy bits. Rather than saying they won't exist or that we'll try to keep them from happening (neither of which seems practical), I'd prefer to give a foundation upon which to base the company's thinking. Also, we have a keg-erator in the office and I'm not sure how "no egos" guides that thinking.

This actually is a concern for me: I'm a partner in a web marketing/dev firm and we've had discussions about how to define and build our culture. After writing this comment, I think I'll suggest along the following lines:

1) Take care of each other and of our clients.
2) Enjoy (1)
I searched for "cooking", and it returned the exact book I'm reading right now.
Asking for money, rather than equity, strikes me as a large red flag. If he doesn't believe in you enough to sign on for equity, how will he do a good job networking and putting together deals?

Investors like to see excitement. His connections are going to know that he doesn't believe in you long term (he's making a cash grab). How is that going to look?
Fastest Broadband Internet Worldwide – Jun 20, 2011
Two thoughts:

Quantcast/Compete is almost no relationship to reality when you are talking about b2b startups or startups with sub-10M/month uniques. They are wrong in magnitude and growth trends as often as they are right, in my experience.

Also, if an investor DID block a sale, that fact would come up any time they were competing to fund future YC companies, so it probably wouldn't be worth it for an investor to do that... Yet another value that YC provides.
michael@schonfeld.org
Atlanta, GA

We are looking for a Front-end/Back-end/Product person to take over our hosted Real Estate Search solution.

Presently our solution is PHP/Postgres/Javascript but we would consider changing technologies for the v2 version of the product, so please don't let the PHP scare you away :)

The company is 8 years old, profitable, and we have a plan to get big fast by leveraging one of our other businesses. But we need a strong dev to work on it FT.

See full details at: http://jobs.usethesource.com/item?id=125
Stopping to Smell the Technological Roses
Considering that Groupon is basically burning cash and that (until further evidence) their business model is unsustainable, I don't think that's a good example.

People should really compare Facebook to Google.
Google post-IPO was valued at a "bubbly" 27 billion in 2004. And take note that at that time Google already proved it had a viable business model; but people were still freaking out because Google only had one product, compared to what Microsoft or Yahoo had.

Are you going to tell me that Facebook is worth three times as much as Google did in 2004?
I like it, but I don't know where we'd be without our egos - much good work would never get accomplished. I, for one, would be worthless without ego.

My favorite "guiding principle," when faced with a tough question, however politically incorrect it may be, is:

"Don't be a jackass."

I think the connotation captures a good number of the edge cases in scads of morally ambiguous situations.
You stay classy, FB.
Infovis and Statistical Graphics: Different Goals, Different Look [pdf]
Does your contract have a clause for non or late payment?

I would begin a paper trail of non-payment. Certified letter notifying that payment is late, and assess late payment fees if not paid by a certain date.
Hey, Vancouver's in Waterloo and Waterloo's underwater along the border with the US.

Geocoding problem?
you can also consider adding a technical co-founder and you do the best part yourself. Its important that person get along and work with you to sell or develop your vision.
Keep you search open and not limit to just a non-technical founder.
I am in the same boat. Ping me sometime and we can chat.
A PDF reader written in JavaScript
I see them animate in Chrome but I don't see the stripes at all in Safari on Windows7.
ØMQ: The Theoretical Foundation
I love that quote from Sam. If you learn nothing else from this experience, I hope it is that you need to have everything in writing. Such an important thing that many of us sometimes forget amongst the pressures of everything that is going on.
nothing returned for php and erlang (first tries for me)! Might be nice to have a list of topics references and maybe possibility to recommend some on topics not yet handled?
We're talking orders of magnitude here. J2EE, Spring and other mammoth frameworks that force you to do things in rather convoluted ways are very large (negative) multipliers.

The Java language does lead to unnecessarily verbose code, but not shockingly so. I'd prefer somewhat verbose but idiomatic Java code over similarly idiomatic code-bases in many other languages.

Of course, part of the problem is that there are far too many bad programmers (and designers) in the Java community and the reputation of the language suffers because of these people. Java even started out with some of these horribly bad programmes on the staff of Sun. (Those of you who actually read the source code of the standard libraries can probably guess who I am talking about).

The thing is, though: I don't really see this as a problem. In part because it is possible to write reasonable code in Java itself and in part because there are alternative languages that are interoperable with plain Java such as Scala and Groovy. This means you can benefit from the Java ecosystem, but you have more choice when it comes to how you write code.

(That being said: I am skeptical to introducing some things into Java because I don't think it will lead to better code. For instance I don't want closures because it will tempt inept programmers to over-use these features in contexts where they are not a good fit. Closures can turn relatively linearly readable code into a horribly tangled mess that can be hard to reason about. And as I said earlier: Java has attracted a lot of talent-free programmers)
I agree with the sentiment expressed in your last sentence, but it's hard for me to imagine that one wouldn't give priority to something so fundamental as the circle constant (which touches so much in math, science, engineering, software, etc). That's doubly true considering the time investment for reading about the arguments is rather small, 15 minutes or so. And it's triply true considering that very many other people have vetted the argument for you, enough that mainstream media are writing articles on the topic.

So no, you don't have to consider every question that's raised "no matter what" to be considered intellectually curious, but this is hardly such a trivial, general case as that implies.
Yes. .org is ran within the US too. So are .info, .biz, .edu, .me, .ws, and a bunch more. The problem is most of the ccTLDs are actually operated by one of three companies, all of which are based in the US.
Found it here: https://plus.google.com/107988469357342173268/posts/HrbN4h9Q...
I really like this idea.

I was messing with the hours manually, and realized it would be very cool to have a timeline-toolbar at the top that would allow the user to fly through hours of the front page.

It would allow us to see the comment count changing over time and seeing which stories quickly disappear and which stick around.

/my two cents