skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> you could easily hire less people, and have less reliability.

If your business has to be up and running 100% of the time, those are the minimal numbers needed to run the operation I've described. I cite a real word example, with real people and real money, the afterwards part if you will, which I'm currently working on to replace, not an hr exercise. And yes, it doesn't scale and it's very costly to replace, and one of the main reasons it was built in such a manner is because the original architect never thought it would have to scale and there are licensing considerations, something rarely mentioned around these parts. Licensing can really fuck things up.
Why do cloud providers calculate per hour? Who turns off their servers anyway?
This has been going on since windows NT launched (as in, that's when people first found out). They just outsource a lot of their website load to external hosts who run Linux.
Tower-Defence: Villagers Tower Defense - Free Online Games
Wait, do you mean D1 or D2? That's the problem with D.
How long before this is converted into css3 ?
This is the robot they plan on using:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjo4AsTVh0s

http://www.abb.com/cawp/abbzh254/8657F5E05EDE6AC5C1257861002...

http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/13/frida-concept-robot-will-...
Heh, I think it's actually incredibly telling that this question has 20 upvotes and has been around for an hour, yet no one has anything to say.
As a person buying a house right now, I'm pissed off there is a stupidly good chance I'll only be able to afford 7/8-2/3rds what I can now depending on interest rate changes caused by this crap.
Michael Arrington · Top Commenter · Founder at TechCrunch

"He said they would not reimburse her for damages, then talked about how they're just a service. Then we talked about something else for a bit. Then I read him what I wrote about what he said. then he said ok, but maybe we are doing something for her. I asked him if he wanted to me to write that they have no liability for damages at all, that they are just a service, that they are only helping her and the police find the suspect, and then say that the spokesperson changed his mind and said that maybe they were helping her but he wasn't sure and he had to check with customer service and get back to me? I suggested he figure it out and email me any corrections, which he did. It was one of the more amateurish moments I've seen, and if I had quoted the poor guy directly he would have looked like a fool."
He should start the article with the last paragraph.
This might get voted up, but other than that I don't see the purpose of this Tell HN at this point.

I doubt you know enough about the different sides of the fairly complex story to come up with definitive lessons learned at this point.
This opened my eyes a bit. I am a walking, talking git anti-pattern today. I'm mostly on a two-man team, so I can get away with it. I'm definitely going to start thinking more about a clean history on master.

What are some other best-practice git workflows that HN readers use?
I've used both ORCSWeb and Rackspace Cloud. I'm very happy with Rackspace Cloud so far (I've been there almost a year).
Foxconn is an interesting mega-beast. It has a campus that houses 500k people and employees 1 million.

Just think about that... when was the last time you heard of a company employing more than like 200k people world wide and this company employees 1 million at it's production facility in China.

Apparently living and working conditions aren't great, we all read the followups to the original suicides. From what I gathered they were extremely barren, but better than the alternative of sleeping on the street in that city. They made it sound like if you try and get by in the city on your own, and you are low-income, it is incredibly vicious (mugging, etc.)

What I find interesting is that as these people fight for better conditions and increased wages, Foxconn's reply is "Whatevs, we are getting robots to replace you".

In the next 3 years they are looking at rolling out 1 million robots to replace workers, I imagine slowly firing 50-70% of their workforce. The only way I see these people not getting fired is the Chinese govt, in an attempt to stem riots[1], requires Foxconn to keep most of them employed.

This is an interesting twist of the future... I suppose some part of me assumed that by 2020+ machines would be making most of what I use, but when I look at the scale of jobless people as a result of it, it really makes me scratch my head to figure out where we fit in the future.

Our only salvation seems, at least for now, to expand ourselves in creative professions that cannot be performed by machines (yet).

When AI finally becomes mature enough to model a human (I don't really expect that to be very far off. Our compute power is getting ridiculous) I imagine that won't be off-limits for robots either and our job as humans will be just to exist and experience... nothing more.

tl;dr - assume robots and AI get sufficiently advanced to do most everything physical and most things that are deemed creative... what IS our purpose here then?

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E
Better than email, I've always liked the idea of using URL to my own web site as an identity.

Even if not everyone eventually obtained their own domain name, the idea of using some URI as a (self-chosen) identifier seems to me attractively powerful - as long as one is able to re-select at later time).
I think that implies Windows Phone was a bit of a failure perhaps?

Everyone wants to know how it's done, but maybe no one knows :(
> there shouldn't be any problem for any kind of startup to get you in(legal wise)

Have you spent five minutes to Google this?

* Excepting the premium processing fee, H1B holders can't pay for their own legal costs.

* H1B holders can be "passively" involved in other companies, including founding them, but cannot derive any benefit from them. (Confusing!)

You could work for a startup in the USA simply for wages, but that would be certifiably insane. The usual answer is to assign ownership to the investor(s) or American employees and have some arrangement whereby you'll get the benefits later, but that involves a degree of trust in investors that I don't have, personally.

See http://danashultz.com/blog/2011/05/06/can-i-get-an-h-1b-visa... , http://danashultz.com/blog/2011/01/18/visa-basics-for-foreig... .

There are ways to get around this, which are pretty similar to money laundering (look it up in a dictionary sometime). Some lawyers are willing to do this, others aren't. Be aware that a lawyer specializing in individual immigration cases is not going to jeopardize their relationship with the US Gov't just for you.

Also, even if you conceive of some scheme to get around this, be aware that startups are often very distracted. I tried to join one in the 90s, where a relative of mine was even the CEO, and the relationship was hot/cold for months. One week it was "yes, we're totally doing this!" and the next it was "um, not the right time, wait a month more!"
> but I don't know anyone who serves Markdown files straight up after a conversion...

Exactly. This is why I don't see the use-case for this.
That's only true if they're really out of bounds.

In the EU, they divide the fees along a much more graduated basis every time
中国茶叶网
‪Major Medical Health Insurance
Yeah, definitely a little worrying. I'd love to hear about people's experience as we're considering working on some apps specifically for WP7.
Only the sound of POed cyclists who listened instead of looking
just like you, i enjoy rebase -i, to change history; but I also hear some poeple claim the history should be kept as it is and should not be rewritten. What are your arguments for rebase?
Nepal's Department of Customs keeping laptops donated for children
skip D, try Go-lang
The smaller audience for W7 is a both a negative and a positive. Negative because (obviously) there are less customer out there. But positive because there is less development competition out there- you could probably carve out a decent niche with a good app.
Google plans social games debut
Well this makes sense[1], but will be really inconvenient:

- Don't use cellphones within 1,000 feet of the conferences to avoid phony cell stations.

For anyone going this year you know the conference is at the Rio as well as most of the guests attending.

The one thing I will say is that in his talk, Paget did say that GSM's security is broken, but 3G security is still (hypothetically) intact and much stronger.

So forcing your phone onto the WCDMA network only is probably the way to go while at the conference. (Settings > Wireless > Mobile Networks > Network Mode on Android)

[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/intercepting-cell-p...
i really like it it is that most of the time is spent in debugging and planning!
man! everybody has a right to be here! don't they
I am afraid AI will soon claim creative jobs too. So I am afraid of my designer job.
Well I found some numbers here: http://www.farseergames.com/blog/2011/5/26/krashlander-numbe...
"I suppose some part of me assumed that by 2020+ machines would be making most of what I use, but when I look at the scale of jobless people as a result of it, it really makes me scratch my head to figure out where we fit in the future."

This is a common economic misconception. If, by some lucky twist of fate, machines can make everything we may ever want, it'd be great! We can just all lie around and enjoy utopia.
As I understand it (I'm looking for a job in the US too), if you switch jobs, the new company more or less needs to redo all the paperwork that the old one has done; and yes, being self-employed is not an option.

I also believe - but am not sure - that once you have a visa that lets you work in the US, any current tourist visa you have is cancelled, making staying there when you're between jobs is a major undertaking (at least in my case, I think it means a trip back home and to the consulates here to get the visa changed, so that may not matter all that much.)
> You could work for a startup in the USA simply for wages, but that would be certifiably insane.

...why? It would just be like, y'know, having a job.
A few ideas.

Practice your skills (google "code retreat"). If code flows from your fingertips during interviews, you'll get the offers.

Move to where your skills are in high demand.

Try contracting. Get to know people in your area that do the work you want. Ask them how they landed their jobs.
Installed the beta2 the other day. Built the usual hello world app so can't tell much about building larger apps. What I can say is I find the IDE and Emulator really snappy. Visual design is really smooth, much better imo than for example Android development using Eclipse. My $.02
I was accepted for a startup in Philadelphia from Europe; but the salary was quite low. So a sponsor may push the salary quite low; for them you would have an advantage in this case.
I've done it twice now (one initial application and one transfer) and the fees were nowhere near $10k. I think they were $5k, max.
Purely from what I've read it's capabilities atm are a bit of a failure. Honestly though, with Mango being release in about a month, that could change dramatically.
For the record, when I said "try something similar" I was thinking about a banner/notice across my own plugin's settings page. I think this may be worth some experimentation to see what works.
I don't get why people seem to have confidence that we'll find new ways to employ everyone when automation takes over. The whole point of automation is that it takes an order of magnitude less human labor to produce the same output. That's a lot of people to work at a McDonalds. The end game is that there will be jobs for no one. A humanoid robot can do any manual labor job potentially hundreds of times more efficiently than a human. Most white collar jobs could probably be replaced by a sufficiently advanced AI. We need to start at least thinking about the type of society that will be needed when significant human labor is no longer required. Just brushing it off by saying "they'll get other jobs" is burying your head in the sand.
Quant blogs
In my case I mean, what I had was almost certainly mental.

I strongly agree with you that mental illnesses have a very strong physical component, if not being completely physical. I think it's incorrect that they are sometimes thought of as being "imaginary" or "in your head". You don't tell someone their heart disease is "just in your heart", and you certainly wouldn't tell someone with a brain tumour to buck their ideas up!

> their application to CFS as anything other than a mild management technique is absurd and has been proven time and again to be a dead end

Given that CFS is not defined, I would strongly challenge anyone claiming that such-and-such is "proven" with regards to it.

I know the viral aspects are a big thing, at one point my doctor suspected I had post-viral fatigue syndrome (which affects people who had mono that just.. sticks around a bit after?)

Another interesting anecdote of mine is that one of my friends "had CFS" and was "cured"... she had anaemia. Like, basic, common-or-garden iron defeciency. You would not believe how many health officials she went through before a chance conversation with an ex-nurse led to the correct diagnosis. So I do wonder how many poor souls out there are suffering from crippling fatigue that could be quite simply solved!
I would never ever rewrite the public history.

The public history is what ends up on the repository from where we deploy from. Whenever a commit is pushed there, it stays there. There will never be any rebasing (minus emergencies like removing accidentally committed files for which we don't own a license for - didn't happen so far though).

"rebase -i" is a tool for personal development use. It's not a tool to use on a public repository as it will make following history incredibly hard and it will screw with the clones other developers might have.

Conversely though, what I do on my personal development machine or on my personal public clone (everyone of us has a personal public clone we use for code reviews or discussions around code), is my business.

Nobody is telling me which editor to use and nobody is telling me whether I can clean up my commits or not.

Now in general, since learning that having clean commits is possible (it's not in subversion for example), I encourage my fellow developers to have clean commits and I discourage them from committing those famous "oops - removed typo" or "oops - added forgotten file" commits as they are completely useless for the overall history of the project.

Two months from now, nobody is going to care about you forgetting to add a file. But I'm likely going to care about when a feature has been added and why some lines have changed. So that's what I want to have in the public repository. Not a history of your personal forgetfulness.

If they manage to do that without ever rebasing (you can do it with add -p, it's just easy to make a mistake), then fine. In the end, I only care about a clean history on our public repository.
I've just done this- you're mostly correct, but with an important caveat.

If you switch between jobs, you can start working for your new employer as soon as you've sent off the paperwork- you don't have to wait for them to process it (which can take many, many months). However, you cannot have a gap between jobs- your employment must be continuous.
Here's a gamasutra article on the various mobile OSes:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6440/smartphone_and_ta...

The interesting quote from the article is from PopCap:

"It certainly hasn't resonated with consumers as anyone would like," says PopCap's Stein, who uses a WP7 device as his everyday phone. "Given the install base of Windows Phone devices, our games have actually sold quite well, and it monetizes very well for customers who have a Windows Phone. There just aren't enough of them right now."
> People think the email is weird or unique because they are surprised that Bill Gates made 40 Billion dollars by running a company that builds products that bring intense pain to it users, and he appears to as frustrated as anyone else about the problem, and yet is completely powerless to stop it, even though he is in charge of everyone involved.

You're focusing on the negative and forgetting the positive. Yes, Windows can be counter-intuitive, but it has enabled millions of people in the world to be more productive. This is why most of the planet is using Windows.

> Microsoft has been a slow-motion train wreck for 15 years

A lot of companies would love to be able to live for that long (and by the way, it's more like 30+ years).

Yes, you will be right at some point in the future, Microsoft will fall. It doesn't seem to be in the near future, though, considering their recent blow out quarters.

I'm a Mac user myself, but come on, let's be fair here.
So your position is she's lying? And you seem quite convinced.
Truly clever idea. Thanks.
It always makes me scratch my head when people brush off the coming automation revolution by saying "they'll just get other jobs". The point is, eventually, there will be no jobs at all. This is going to require a major rethinking of our social structure. Even the process of getting to that point will be slow and cause severe economic and social upheaval. We need to be thinking about this now before we have 10 million rioting in the streets because there are no jobs left.
> I hate it when people give Bill Gates and Microsoft credit for whole computer and IT advancements.

Or maybe the original poster was saying this because he was typing his response on a Windows computer.
Yes, that means, even current popular web services such as twitter can still be out-invented.
Seo Services Anywhere And Everywhere
"Our only salvation seems, at least for now, to expand ourselves in creative professions that cannot be performed by machines (yet)."

Yes. We have to move "up-market" in the job market, just like the disruptive innovation theory says. But this will also create many more opportunities for us. Automation of work is not new. And in the few last decades that we've used it intensively, it has only led to the growth of country economies and to a more advanced society, with more opportunities for non-physical work.

Now, what happens when robots become "smarter" than us at everything we can do and can think for themselves? That's harder to predict right now. But it doesn't necessarily mean we'll become their slaves. We might still use them as our "tools", or worst case scenario we'll literally merge with technology to keep pace with them, but I don't think that will happen until nano-technology is mature enough (http://www.nanofuture2030.com is an interesting blog on this).

In a way we're already starting to merge with technology, just not physically yet. If we watch the trends in computing since the birth of the mainframe, computers have become ever more "mobile", smaller and more "personal", from Mainframe > Mini-computer > PC > Notebook > Smartphone.

Whatever the next big computing paradigm will be, I know that "device" will be more mobile, smaller and more intimate with the human being.
What do you mean by "employment"? In the far enough future, anything that's deemed profitable can be done much faster by automation. No one will pay a human a check to do something that can be done dirt cheap by a robot.

The point is that our society rations limited resources through money. When resources are no longer limited, and no one can earn any money through employment, we'll require a completely different social and economic system for distributing resources.
I really find it hard to believe that the researchers have an agenda to trivialize CFS, and that categorizing it as a mental illness is evidence of such an agenda. Mental and physical well-being are linked to an extent that we can't really understand, so why worry so much about making a distinction? Every mental illness has a measurable physical manifestation, and every physical illness will have a mental effect. I think it's naive to try and find the direction of causality when they're so inextricably linked. In the end a mental illness is just as legitimate an illness as a physical illness and is probably linked to a physical problem with the brain that we just don't yet understand. Let's appreciate any and all legitimate research.
The issue is interviewing in the first place- you'd have to fly out specifically for the interview and hope that it works out. Quite a financial gamble if you do it repeatedly...
I dunno - this is a pretty hysterical piece. Weren't there capitalist bastards in the world before the Internet? I guess Standard Oil isn't a concept any more.
Some of my friends just bring burner phones ($50 for a Boost chirper) and go through the hassle of distributing new phone numbers for the weekend.
Still though - someone will have to design, make and maintain the robots? Its still pretty gloomy, but until the time that robots can make better robots, there will still be a place for us.
You Won’t Find Startup Funding From These Sources
Ask HN: Hosting trade-offs and options
Hi,

For many years now I've used a small, family-run web and email hosting option, and it's been great. The service has been extraordinary, the facilities great, and although the price has been slightly higher, the quality of the service has been worth it.

But now as I'm using more and more facilities, and depending on the access more and more heavily, the drawbacks are becoming more severe. I'm starting to have to consider moving away from this friendly, personal service to one that's more reliable.

Any recommendations? All advice and comments welcome.
Config flags and how we commit code are two completely separate issues. Very simply, you need config flags to operate a site that degrades gracefully when something is going wrong. They cannot be avoided. Is there a query in the forums suddenly hitting the database too hard? Turn off the forums while we fix it so the rest of the site isn't affected. Etc.

When a feature is in development, its config flag is off or enabled for admins. We deploy it as we develop it, in pieces that are generally not more than a few dozen lines of code long. This is another critical idea: we don't push out all of the code for an entire sizable feature all at once, ever. Doing that is a recipe for having a problem and having to review thousands of lines of code to try to figure out what it is.

For new features, we generally do not remove the config flag once a feature is live because we want to be able to disable it if anything goes wrong.

If we are replacing a feature with another one, we generally want to keep the old one around for a little while (we generally do A/B testing or ramp up new versions whenever we do this). After that, we do delete the old code and reduce the config flag to an on/off switch which was probably there in the first place.