skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unless you are doing realtime embedded programming there is absolutely no reason why Go isn't a good substitute for C & C++.

Having worked in a large games company writing realtime performance-heavy code in C# I know that GC isn't the barrier you think it is - in fact quite the opposite: most of the time it makes things faster, cleaner and safer.

Having a GC can give you more control over how your garbage is freed – it helps you put it off until you have time to do it (without writing your own complex garbage collection routines like many C++ programmers do). In the rare places you need a malloc/free you can easily write your own and manage your own memory pools.
Your project is useful. 'alleri' + one word comment + your recent status fit the pattern I've seen lately. I've up voted your post.
Completely agreed! I moved from the Bay area to NYC last year and was pretty shocked at how cheap the Bay area was (in relative terms).
Clicked you up but:

1. Seriously, try iWork ;-). Not only does Pages kick Word's butt, it can sit in the middle of a Word-based workflow (e.g. preserving change tracking).

2. Visual Studio doesn't kill Realbasic (from a tiny developer) or Xcode. Xcode has a different level of abstraction, but the result is that Xcode devs consistently produce far more polished apps than Visual Studio devs. But yes, it's pretty darn good.

3. Win7 is a tactical success but a strategic failure.

If you want an end-to-end picture of just how big a hole Microsoft finds itself in, go to http://microsoftstore.com

1. Their back-to-school incentive is a free XBox with each PC sold. Aside from just how big a loss this must represent (given the XBox 360 is, itself, a loss-leader) parents are going to LOVE this. Here's $25k college tuition and you want a computer with a free game console?

2. Because they're selling a weird hodgepodge of third-party products they need to provide things like a "recommend a PC for me given I am this kind of person" tool, and it makes no sense (e.g. I picked "develop with power" and got no results).

3. The chief selling point of the PCs they're selling is "no crapware".

4. Try to figure out their Win7 phone comparison tool.

And this is what happens when Microsoft goes out and deliberately tries to build an imitation Apple Store.
They've been around for a few months and were one of the higher volume exchanges. They were doing ~800 BTC in trades/day for the month prior to this, so ~$11k/day with their commission of .006*2 (I think it was .006, and on both sides) they were pulling in ~$130/day.
Disagree:

I've found a number of VC's to be quite helpful and informative. Not only that, but their contact lists are usually really, really impressive. And, a lot of times, VC's are able to point you to interesting people that might be able to help.

It also depends on the VC. Some of them only want to talk to you if you to hear you pitch. Others rather prefer to get acquainted and talk and get to know you over months before they invest. If you hit that kind of VC with a pitch, then you'll be asked to follow up in a few months.
Just to follow up your note on the E-commerce Directive, is that the same point of European law that England accidentally/conveniently forgot to enact in its local interpretation?

I've heard what I suspect is the same issue raised before, in the context of End User Licence Agreements. The question of how EULAs can have any legal standing if you don't buy the software directly from the copyright holder was raised: if a contract necessarily involves consideration in both directions, and you get nothing of value from the copyright holder in return for "agreeing" to their often onerous EULA after you've completed the purchase of your software from a third party, what right do they have to impose any conditions on you at all? The answer being debated was that by merely running the software in the normal manner for which it was purchased, you are inevitably making copies (in RAM etc.) and thus copyright law applies and you require a licence. Ah, but making transient copies in the course of normal use is excluded from copyright by the point of law we're discussing, right? Except that unless something changes since I last read about this, that point of law hasn't actually been legislated in England, and thus this shady argument for EULAs having some sort of legal weight isn't completely DoA.

Apologies for not citing the source of this argument. It was a rather interesting and well written paper, by a law student IIRC, but I regret that I didn't bookmark it at the time and have never been able to find it again since.
I remember a story from a book (could've been Innovator's Dilemma, I don't remember), where he said that around 1900's I believe, they needed 200 humans to do a job, like carrying a big lumber from a cargo ship. Then cranes came about, and they could do the same job with just a handful of people, because most of the physical work was replaced by a crane.

Fast forward to today, and we have to have done alright by replacing those jobs. As long as robots are not smarter than us and can't think for themselves, I believe there will still be plenty more jobs in the future to go around. There could literally be invented hundreds or thousands of jobs by the end of this century.

Robots making iPhones is not some kind of huge milestone that could put humanity on the verge of collapse. Automation already exists for making cars for example. The net result of that was positive. This is just another transition.
You guys really need to quit pointing fingers and focus on doing something positive. You're getting the "bullshit" you complain of all over you. As you should well know, one of the first rules of business is never to take it personally. Here's a re-post of a suggestion I just made to Brian Chesky:

"Although there have been negative PR effects for Airbnb due to this incident, it appears that they have benefited as well, by wisely using the lesson learned to improve their business by adding essential insurance and pre-deal inter-member communications services, among other things. The future value of that benefit to a start-up company most likely far exceeds the damages suffered by this host, assuming the PR issue can be positively resolved. There was no similar benefit for the host, unless you count the lesson learned that they should avoid the sort of activity your business is built around.

"So here's a suggestion: acknowledge publicly that this incident exposed ways in which the service could be improved and offer to make this one host whole as compensation for that value. Solves everybody's problems in one fell swoop without accepting blame for something that isn't Airbnb's fault (and more importantly without resorting to blaming the victim - not the host's fault either). I'll bet it would cost far less than the usual media blitz companies commonly use to repair their images after incidents such is this. Consider it a good investment in the company's future."

It appears that Airbnb has made moves in this direction. You say, and EJ confirms, that some financial compensation has been offered, but apparently EJ remains unconvinced that meaningful compensation will be forthcoming. Given the mixed responses EJ has reported from Airbnb staff and mixed messages we see from Airbnb in the media (claims of compensation offers and links to TOS policies denying compensation), I can't say I blame her. This needs to be remedied immediately, and all it would take is a press release and personal communication between Brian Chesky and EJ. Her remarks which were far less flattering toward Airbnb in her second post could have been avoided had she been contacted by someone in authority at Airbnb expressing concern for her problem rather than concern for theirs. You should have realized that her problem IS your problem.

The difference between "oh, they're the company that made immediate efforts to improve security and insurance options after being completely blindsided along with the host when somebody ransacked an apartment and went the extra mile to compensate the victim even though they weren't legally obligated to" and "oh, they're the company that was so concerned about the effects on their funding efforts that they tried to suppress the story and blame everyone else when one of their customers ransacked the apartment of another customer" when someone thinks of "Airbnb" depends wholly upon how the crisis is responded to. So far, Airbnb has done at least as much to reinforce the latter image as the former. You need message discipline and a positive message, and you need it now.
Given the price they're selling for I assume they'd use that money to refund the funds from the lost wallet.
23 Year Old Mark Andreessen Explains the Web (29:55)
I agree, it does fit the pattern (I checked his/her profile), but it's still not me. There's nothing I can do about it...
I was at Apple in the early 90s, and my parents called me one day to ask what newer model Mac I recommended they replace their old Mac with.

I couldn't tell them.

I /worked/ for the stupid company, and I couldn't figure out what they needed. Quadras, Performas, any number of pizza box things. I asked my cow-orkers, and none of them had any idea, either.

To this day I look at a product line with more than about three choices as consumer fail.
1. How do you "increase the amount of RAM" on an EC2 instance other than spinning up a new larger instance?

2. Why didn't they use EBS and take frequent snapshots to S3?

It sounds like they were running an instance store EC2, then fired up a larger instance and stopped the first one? This has to be a textbook case of how not to use EC2.
No worries, it happens.
Nice! I tried dragging components onto the screen, took me a minute before I realized I had to click them and then drag them around.
Coming directly from university I was earning about 45.000 Euro (+ Bonus) at a top-5 consulting firm here in Germany.

After one year I started to get very bored. In my free time I picked up Ruby and Rails and finally could not stand Enterprise Java and ABAP (SAP) any more and quit my job. I didn't have any freelance gigs set up yet, but I knew that I wanted to work with RoR.

Through a mailing list I landed a job at a Rails-startup and started to work there for about 300 Euro per day. Freelance. They didn't care if I was a normal employee or a freelancer, so I just said I want to freelance.

It was the best decision I have made in a long time.

First of all working for a startup you learn about 10 times as much as for a big company. There's just more stuff that needs to be done. From tweaking the database to writing front-end javascript. My colleagues were great tutors and especially through several sessions of pair programming I picked up some good skills that would otherwise have taken me a much longer time.

I also decided to work only 4 days per week, on average, which left me with one extra day for my private projects. While the jury is still out if we will succeed, it was a very comfortable situation, since I could work two days on my own stuff (Fri + Sat) and have the Sunday off.

Today I work for 500 Euro a day for a larger company that decided to use Ruby. They don't really care when I show up as long as the work gets done. I don't get called to as many meetings as the regulars and I know in a few months it will be over and I'll be working on something completely new.

Job situation: It's not "totally awesome" but by maintaining a network of other freelancers I'm never out of work. If one guy is engaged and gets an offer, he forwards it to the others, and vice versa. I'm not afraid I'll get in a financial crisis any time soon, because I have very nice savings and because I can always get a regular job for a big company, should I ever run out of offers.

I think it's important to stay up to date on new things (say the new RoR version or interesting ruby gems, nosql databases or caching methods), because a part of my job is consulting and offering suggestions, but that is easily done by reading blogs, watching some Railscast now and then and monitoring sites like HN.

So my suggestion is: Go for it. If everything fails, you're still a software engineer, a currently very sought after profession. (I assume it's the same in Scandinavia.) Remember: A regular job isn't very safe either. If the economy collapses you can still be laid off.

Todos: Find out about insurance and taxes. At least in Germany you're basically leaving the social security safety-net when becoming self-employed.

And yes, a long commute really takes the joy out of life. Quick tip: Get a kindle, use Instapaper to sync articles and read them on the train. ;)
I think the link to create a new document breaks.
Very interesting, however it doesn't seem to have many iPhone apps.
Some up-and-coming chefs are skipping culinary school
"an indicator of the lack of trust from the public in MS consumer products."

That doesn't sound right. Consumers are buying products like Windows 7 and Xbox 360 in droves, but they wouldn't be doing that if they didn't trust Microsoft. There must be some other explanation.
Thank you for the in-debth response.

My spouse is on board emotionally, we've talked thoroughly about it. Health insurance stuff will be taken care of if I do quit and is baked into my calculations (as is VAT, taxes, etc).

I start networking and pitching actively to my contacts for work/ the day after I resign, which means I'd have three months left in my job to find clients/contracts before I started working on my own - standard notice of resignation in my country is three months.
This is a great list of good reads.
I wonder, what would the author think of this essay, relating to some potential faults on the Quant approach as it is currently practiced:
http://mises.org/daily/5352/What-Mises-Can-Teach-the-Quants
You can deceive the user pretty easily with content that looks like the main page and prompts them to do something you want them to do. (like login to the parent app even though they are logging into your app, anti-phishing stuff won't take effect if you keep it all in the iframe)

You could also just execute whatever JS you want if there is a browser vulnerability you want to take advantage of.
More laundry automation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMBOwWEPUbc&feature=relat...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glAXAMonops&feature=relat...

And getting beers from the fridge:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3Cq0sy4TBs
they get paid well, but they're also doing work of dubious value. i left trading because i wanted to do something that i knew would make a positive impact on the world.
Can you please link to the source ?
Wonders why there's no comments yet

I think app stores like this serve a good goal, first they bring together apps that some companies might have tried removing from the normal app store in fear that someone would get offended, and also it makes a safe haven for the religious (or otherwise belonging to a group.) people that normally have no where to go for those unique apps that remind you when the best time to pray would be etc etc.

I'd like to take a second to point out that I almost didn't post anything in fear of someone being offended, and then realized, well this wouldn't have been put here if someone didn't want to talk about it.
Is Bret Michaels Bald?
Thank you, I fixed the problem :)
Thank you. I'm also fairly certain I'll easily find new salaried work if all else fails and I run out of funds. Would feel like a big defeat though. :)
Sure, but that's a 60 minute driving commute vs. a 60-minute public transit commute, which makes a big difference to a lot of people (e.g. I can read a book on public transit).

A lot of the statistics are questionable, most certainly including the average apartment cost.
Dear HN, how do I hire a good coder?
Hi guys, long time lurker here.

I run a (semi) successful Australian startup that requires very little technical knowledge to operate. Now that I have some cashflow, I'd like to hire a software engineer (either virtually, or in the flesh here in Sydney) to work with me on a couple of ideas I have for web applications. I myself have basically no programming knowledge, so pretty much the best I'll be able to do are (CSS coded) mockups.

I was wondering if HN had any hiring tips for me? Specifically, what are some ways for a non technical person to tell a good hacker from a bad one?

A few other questions if you're feeling generous:

- Bearing in mind I'm going for web applications, what kind of language specialisation should I be looking for? From my own research, it seems like Ruby, PHP, and Python are all good contenders.

- I know this varies greatly from place to place, but how much do I need to pay to attract the talent? Is equity a more attractive option than a salary?

- How much does experience play a role? Is a naturally talented coder fresh out of university a better option than an average one with 5 years of 'real world' experience?
I don't think that will happen until we have "replicators". Until we can make literally everything ourselves, we'll still need jobs. We'll also need almost limitless resources, too, unless our desires will tend more and more towards virtual things rather than physical. Either way, it's really hard to predict what will happen 50 years from now, but I'm quite optimistic about the human race.
I was speaking relatively to Apple and Google products. When Apple announces something, millions of people flock to the nearest Apple store to marvel at the shininess of the products that "change everything...AGAIN". When Google announces something, millions have nerdgasms and scour the net for any bit of rumor or info they can find. When MS release something, millions go "WP7...what's that? Is that like an iPhone?"
Former Bush NSA Director calls for "digital Blackwater"
Really like the idea of this community driven cdn.
IMO, that's really the wrong way to go, and it's one of the big reasons I absolutely loathe git. I want any changes that are in my tree, ever, to be in the order and position in which they happened. If somebody screwed up and forgot to add a file, fine--add it in another commit. It's not like commits cost money.

As far as rolling back later--meh? I've never had a trouble in 300Krev heavily branched SVN barf, I strongly doubt it's suddenly harder in a DVCS. Merge tags are your friend, and indelible history is a good thing.
File Dropper: Send large files up to 5 GB free, without any registration
Internet paranoid handbook
And it's not really a tree, it's a crappy timeline. An "evolutionary tree" of Apple, with relations between the products (something similar to the wikipedia release timelines[0] but more fleshed out and with better relational links à la Unix History graph[1]) would have been nice.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Macintosh_models

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg
Of the games powered by mogade.com (they are all WP7 games as far as I know), I can tell you that:

-The most unique devices 1 game has seen is 129824 (more than twice the next)

-The most game starts a game has seen in a day is 9928

-The most unique devices a game has seen in a day is 4914

Of course, exactly how/when developers are calling the stats tracking functions, I don't know. For all I know, the guy's got a for loop killing my server on game start...
Wedding dress veils
Uh oh, the "new document" button is still directing to localhost for me!
Designing a Better Food Label - Information design
I agree with all that. The point is the current social structure isn't set up for that. We still distribute resources based on how much money you can earn. When there's no money to earn, we need an entirely new framework.
I have a friend who works in trading. He's very sharp and very smart and has friends who work for D.E. Shaw. I used to ask why he didn't go work for D.E. Shaw and he said that he would never survive the interview gauntlet there. And most importantly, he would not be smart enough. Now, I know how good at math my friend is (he used to win Games t-shirts - from the magazine and studies math at graduate level). And now when I talk to him about HFT, he's like even if I could bluff my way into an HFT job they'd fire me after three months once they found out.

My math abilities will never ever approach my friend's. If he is not confident about his ability, it speaks volumes to me about the ability and sheer analytical horsepower of some of those working in HFT.

Yes, they may be financial wizards who cause far reaching effects but they are doing what challenges them.
When you are used to the SVN/CVS workflow, it takes a long time to get over it. It took me a long time to understand why the distributed approach is better, despite having read a lot about them.
In my company we are using git as well, but most developers refuse to work anywhere else than on master. They probably had their share of trouble with branching in other systems.
"This mail is from 3 years after Gates stepped down as CEO."

Questions: Was microsoft very different 3 years earlier?

Wasn't Gates still very involved with MSFT at that time?
The problem's description is deceptively simple. It poses at the end a combinatorics problem that is non-trivial. I submitted a correct solution after a bit of research; my first approach was the naive solution.
While not legally gambling look at penny auctions. They are essentially a raffle and a ripe for governmemnt control.
I was in your position 2 years ago but without a family to support. With a family I would be cautious, have a run away of 12 months salary or have some working contracts ready to start before leaving the work.

Also, expecting a constant flow of 100-150$ freelance work can be difficult, and although you might think that you just need to work 2 days a week, when you have a company you have lots of other stuff to deal that take lots of time like meetings, emails, social security, taxes, accountability, project budgets etc.
The difference is the pace and the scale. When its not just hand-weavers, but large swaths of society being made obsolete in a matter of years, we can't expect it to play out the same way as in the past.
It wouldn't mine, if I used git (I avoid git specifically for this reason, actually, and use Mercurial). If you're actually looking at your commit logs, I find that rolling back is trivial; I can't remember the last time I accidentally rolled back into an incremental commit.

Personally it feels more like an apology for git's bad behavior than a good method of development.
Piano emulator in HTML5
I think you need to refresh the page
Back in the 90s I worked for two different commodity traders as it seemed like a good way to make a lot of money fast, which was very appealing to my 20-some-year-old self. I rapidly grew disenchanted by the entire thing. While I respected the men I worked for, everyone who's successful ends up driven by the two ghosts of the trade: greed and fear. That's not how I wanted my life to be.
I guess the bitcoin economy is ruthless on its entrepreneurs and users.

Failure to backup, improper trust in individuals, improper understanding of the technology, poor security practice, and bad decisions will wipe out early adopters' wealth continuously and relentlessly.

I doubt we will see much of the early adopters retaining their bitcoin wealth from these early days. Those who did are either incredibly lucky, or incredibly competent.

I am an early adopter of bitcoin and I hope to survive or avoid the many dangers and poor decisions that ensnared many of peers on the road to bitcoin richness.
It's Mercurial-based, not git-based, but you might have them read HGInit, by Joel Spolsky:

http://hginit.com

Really, really approachable guide to how to properly use a DVCS.
I'm currently in San Francisco with a H1B at Academia.edu, a reasonably well-funded startup (not that early stage, but still only 5 developers and very much a great startup atmosphere), so it happens.

Also, they/we did/do interviews through Skype, so no flights. Though interviews being convenient does not make them any easier :)

(ps: we are hireing: http://www.academia.edu/hiring)