skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
EDIT: I just (re)posted a summary as a top-level comment.
<sarcasm>Yeah, it sounds like Bethesda is the one who's violating intellectual property</sarcasm>
> The point is, if you hire someone full-time for $X, you probably expect something like 40 hours a week out of them.

Then you'll get 40 hours of physical presence instead. I'm sure that'll go well.

> If they just stop showing up 4 days of the week without talking to you, it's the same as if they somehow managed to withdraw 5 times their salary from your bank account without talking to you.

No it's not, as long as they're doing the job they're supposed to do in full. That's like saying the guy who runs a 100m in 8s is a thief, and should run the whole 10s. It's retarded.
I'm honestly afraid this is going to turn into another ridiculous partisan battle in congress that ends up with a terrible solution because of infighting.
When I was in high school, just before the Internet became widely available, I was the greatest programmer in the world.

These days, with the Internet and constant promotion of projects, I see that I'm just a talentless nobody.

We're now regularly exposed to the work of the tiny group of truly excellent programmers, and only the very best output of the masses of regular programmers. How can anyone who stays even slightly up to date (i.e. programming blogs and social bookmarking sites) feel good about what he/she does when bombarded by success stories of amazing sites/applications/services?
For the sake of ease of use:

http://pastebin.com/sW1PMknX

Which contains:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2058172/CJ/dashboard.jpg

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2058172/CJ/jobs-search.jpg

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2058172/CJ/jobs.jpg

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2058172/CJ/people-search-results.jpg

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2058172/CJ/profile.jpg

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2058172/CJ/settings.jpg
I often feel this way.

I try to reason to myself that it's normal to feel this way as a programmer / techie simply because there is such a vast amount of stuff to know, that no one really knows even half of it.

What with the multitude of programming paradigms, languages frameworks, mobile dev, webdev, front-end, back-end, sql, no-sql,... I could go on.

In the past 1-2 years I've picked up Android and iPhone development, and am now doing a deep dive into ruby and rails so I definitely feel like a phony at the moment.

On the flip-side, just being able to pick up those skills and do a few successful projects with them gives at least some counterbalance to the phony feeling.
> Co-founder of Reddit.

Wait, what?
How to use oDesk contractors for system administration tasks
How can you use contractors for system administration tasks, without having to hand them root passwords to your servers? The better solution is to let them work on the automation (scripting) of system administration tasks instead, the article explains.
This is the author on the job: http://tinypic.com/r/2vifkw6/7
The court's opinion in this case (the CyberSource case) is at http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/stories/opinions-orders/....

Tl;dr: The three-judge appeals court panel affirmed a summary judgment of invalidity. The panel announced a pretty straightforward test as one "filter" that can rule out patentability for certain claims:

1. If a method can be performed by the human mind alone, or with paper and pencil, then it's an "abstract idea," and therefore unpatentable under Supreme Court precedent.

2. If as a practical matter [a] the method cannot be performed with paper and pencil [b], then it passes the filter described in 1 above [c].

3. If a method would be unpatentable under 1 above, then a claim to a storage device encoding computer instructions for performing the method is likewise unpatentable.

NOTES:

[a] In its discussion, the court distinguished a couple of prior cases where such non-paper-and-pencil methods had been held patentable. See pages 20-21 of the PDF. EDIT to respond to petegrif's comment below: One of the earlier methods that had been ruled patentable was "for rendering a halftone image of a digital image by comparing, pixel by pixel, the digital image against a blue noise mask ...." The CyberSource panel distinguished this precedent by saying that, as a practical matter, that earlier method could not be performed by the human mind or with paper and pencil; see page 21 of the PDF.

[b] An unanswered question: How exactly are ordinary people supposed to determine whether a method can or can't be performed with paper and pencil "as a practical matter"?

[c] Even if a method gets past the "paper and pencil" filter, there are still other filters to pass before it will be patentable---but once the Patent and Trademark Office has issued the patent, then a presumption of patentability applies.

COMMENT: This is an area where the net effect of the precedents is not entirely clear. It wouldn't surprise me if the court were to take this case en banc, namely to have all of the court's 12 judges rehear and redecide the case in an attempt to clarify the law. (An en banc opinion is generally regarded as carrying more precedential weight than an opinion by a three-judge panel.)
How exactly does DDG make money? You aren't storing search info so I can't imagine that any ads would be very targeted. Is it a "Scale then revenue" plan?
The Internet is global.

Of course you can start a business. You just need to find a way to charge US customers from whereever you are (assuming that the credit card companies will block you if you ignore US lawsuits).

Or you just ignore the US market and target the rest of the world. Actually that's what already has partially happened in the banking/broker sector: Try to open a broker account at one of the European brokers and they'll very likely tell you that they don't want to have you as a customer because you are US citizen or resident (just happened to me some weeks ago). Of course the reason for the brokers aren't patents, but US regulations that would be too much of a hassle.
The trick is the sales process: finding companies who are willing to give what amounts to a 75% discount. This is the part that's so expensive in Groupon, and what's eating into their profitability the most.
Offliner - Go offline in Chrome
Rob Sobers on Learn Ruby The Hard Way
Didn't know about requirement files. Useful!
I'd like to point out that congress, as a whole, is a set of useless jackasses. I wouldn't hold my breath for them to do anything useful, about anything, ever.
This has the potential to be a good series, and a pretty nice tool for recruitment.
No, that's where my analogy fails. The intention was to use an analogy that someone who doesn't understand software development would understand. It only applies to the development aspect and work required - not the ability to make copies (Minecraft Mobile is not a copy, a separate version).
Soon enough, everyone will be doing this and it will no longer be a way to stand out. But the blog post is probably one of the best articles I have read on relationship building with journalists (Thank you Gabriel for continuing to be so open).

Rather utilizing Twitter to suck up to journalists hoping they notice, I note how DDG has created an online community that advocates loudly and clearly. Read: DDG has users that feel apart of the brand so much so that they engage journalists.

DDG's strong community is obvious here on HN and the internal forum is a great idea too. Credit to Gabriel for knowing not just the importance of being transparent but also HOW to express himself and his brand.

I'm only wondering how this can be applied to B2B brands where it's harder to gain traction with people that have the time to advocate.
Or maybe just "Markets can be perfectly efficient if and only if P = NP".
Firefox 6 released
It's not cool to be passionate. It's always been cool to be intelligent though.

EDIT:

I did not mean to say that being passionate is bad. I meant to say that in most social situations, appearing overly passionate is often bad. Right now, I am struggling to maintain passion for the project I'm working on and I know that I will fail as soon as I stop being passionate about it -- so I know there are hard times when passion is necessary. However I think that my point about appearing "cool" holds -- more people get excited about my projects when I put up an impression of total control and slight lack of passion rather than the other way around.

One has to know how to program both oneself and others.
How do you feel about "Apple"?
> I wouldn't say it's as bad as 9/10.

You say what you want, I say what I did.

> They can afford to be more liberal about banning spammy sites, which helps a lot.

It's cool, but I've not seen it helping much so far, since the base results suck ridding them of some of the crap don't improve them noticeably.

> 0-click info and search ideas are really nice features.

They're nice features when they display information I want. They generally don't.

> Another useful hashbang I use a lot is !a which searches amazon directly.

No. Just no. Firefox has been able to do that since 0.9 if not earlier, I'm sure other web browsers can handle that as well. I have no need whatsoever for the indirection through DDG. Here's how I search amazon: focus address bar, type "a somethingsomething", return.
I don't get the Office reference. Do enlighten me please ...
> So, then the question is, if there is nothing that prevents a race-to-the-bottom, aren't the companies that maintain the highest operational efficiencies (and profitability) - not the ones that grab fastest the most of the ultimately indefensible lands - going to be the ones that prevail, in the end?

Yes, yes, yes. As the OP correctly notes, this business model does not generate positive network effects for subscribers and, in my opinion, for merchants either (i.e. the larger the list of subscribers the smaller percentage of high quality sales leads generated). I think Groupon was scaling under the assumption that their business model was social and that network effects would be generated somewhere down the road once they were at scale. As we have seen, in mature Groupon markets where they are locally at scale, this has not occurred.

From my outside perspective, it seems that Living Social might be in a more sustainable place than Groupon (although I might be biased as I'm in their home market of DC). They generated some goodwill by taking a smaller cut of deal revenue than Groupon and, anecdotally, do a better job at maintaining good relationships with their merchants. Their deal quality (i.e. range/quality of merchants) has also been consistently better than Groupon's in my experience.
How can you use contractors for system administration tasks, without having to hand them root passwords to your servers? The better solution is to let them work on the automation (scripting) of system administration tasks instead, the article explains.
Have you tried org-mode? It's not a traditional wiki, but I switched recently and am very happy.

(org-mode supports everything you would expect from a wiki, links included)
Have you tried org-mode? It's not a traditional wiki, but I switched recently and am very happy.
Skillshare Founder, On Why He Needed That $3 Million
you can copy a virtualenv from your build environment to your production environment by just copying the directory

Not if you're developing on a different platform/architecture than you're deploying to (e.g. OS X vs. Linux). Unless you're only using pure Python modules, which excludes PIL and most database drivers.

Other than that, you're very right.
Hi, I'm the author of the article. We've definitely looked at virtualenv but for right now we're just developing a single app. Thus far, we've been able to get away with munging the global package list but this could change in the near future. I tried playing around with virtualenv earlier this year but I couldn't figure out how to push directories OR make virtualenvs reliably relocatable. The main problems for us were/are:

1) We develop on macs
2) Our deploy environments are a mix of 32-bit/64-bit machines running Ubnutu
3) It wasn't clear if each deployment required its own virtualenv to start from scratch OR if we should reuse a virtualenv (which seemed to defeat the whole point of using virtualenv)

Got any ideas on what we could do?
The IE guys are saying this needs to be kept for backwards compatibility. http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=11960#c8

Why can't it be kept for old doctypes and quirksmode like Gecko does? The HTML5 doctype should get rid of this. Surely that wouldn't break top sites as MSFT is saying: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=11960#c12
The long-term problem is simply this: Groupon isn't adding value to anyone.

For customers, Groupon adds almost no value. A great marketing deal will get publicized anyway - there are hundreds of websites devoted to coupon/code sharing. So if a business wants to offer 50% off, they could spend five minutes mailing a couple of these sites, and there would be plenty of publicity for their deal.

For almost all businesses, Groupon adds negative value. It costs money to fulfill these deals. "Losing money on every sale" is not a way to build a real business. The customers are the worst possible: solely money motivated, never going to do repeat business, and all coming in a giant surge which your business is not likely prepared to cope with... that's absolutely the opposite of the kind of customers you want.

Groupon has been able to paper over these problems with creative accounting and venture capital. This will not last forever.
The problem I have with this is the following.
a) There is no software that we cannot put into hardware - literally! Software and hardware are interchangeable. So the oft cited distinction between s/w and h/w is, to say the least, somewhat arbitrary.
b) "If a method can be performed by the human mind alone, or with paper and pencil..." This test sounds as if it might make sense but runs into real problems once you bear in mind issues of computability. E.g. is it therefore patentable if although it could in principle be performed by the human mind with a paper and pencil the degree of computation required is so enormous that such a method is completely impractical. e.g. real time graphics processing. I suspect that the class of such methods is extremely large.
Where did GP bring up permission? It looks to me like there's just a tacit assumption that people prefer to keep their bodies in good condition.
How can we market our site and get more users?
We have a really cool site, www.jabsy.com, that just launched about a month and a half ago.

There are a few (not that popular either) websites that are similar, but none that are exactly like ours. You should be able to figure the site out just by looking at it, however I'll explain quickly.

You log on, it finds where you are, and you can post "Jabs" from your location, or switch your location and "Jab" somewhere else. Posts are shown by where they were posted from, and are sortable by a bunch of different things. If you connect with Facebook, the site stores all your "Jabs", and let's you post to your Facebook wall as well.

Simple site, yet we think it's really cool.

Problem:

We've had 900 unique visitors in a month and a half, that's nothing. We're approaching 7k total visits in that timeframe (150-200 a day) - which is also nothing. We're seeking promotion and marketing ideas, as well as other ways to gain traffic.

Can anyone offer some help to a fellow startup :)
Often these are issues with improper setup.py configurations, by the authors of these packages. It's not uncommon for authors to forget to list their package dependencies in setup.py, for instance.

Forking these projects and fixing the setup.py is probably the best solution. If they're active projects and you'll want their updates, they're likely to accept your patch. If they're inactive, it doesn't really matter that you're using a fork anyway.
What? The Fed is Still Paying Banks Not to Lend
Auto Transport 101 - Your Start out To Finish Guide To Auto Shipping Businesses
The auto transport organization owes all its success towards the net. With its substantial marketability, a lot more people are joining the trend and also the company. The growing market place even so poses complications for clients. If you're new to the entire business enterprise of auto transport and have no thought on what to do or where to start the following section will give you an idea on the best way to go about every little thing.
HBR Blog post on Android strategy and Google+MMI
That a contract has been drafted and signed, even in good faith, is only half the battle. It must also be enforced. The court can simply ignore some or all of a contract which is obviously unfair or exploitative to either party. Centuries of legislation and case law go into determining what sorts of clauses are, in fact, enforceable.

This is why you need a lawyer to draft a contract, and cannot just write whatever on a piece of paper and sign it. Even lawyers overreach, however; it's part of their job.
You can explicitly specify which version of a package you want to install. For example, if you wanted to install an older version of Tornado,

pip install tornado==1.1

OR if you know you ONLY want tornado 2.0

pip install tornado==2.0

From my experience, pip has been able to fetch PYTHON dependencies if the author of the package wrote their setup.py correctly. I agree that things could be better with regards to C dependencies (MySQL-Python requiring libmysql5dev being particularly annoying) but this is hard to do as every environment has their own way of naming dependent libs.
More than congress its Google who needs to realize that all its partner device makers are spending expensive resources on lawsuits rather than focusing on making cool android phones and its all because of some missteps that Google took to not properly license their OS.

Why doesn't Google take responsibility of all these lawsuits? Afterall HTC, Samsung, LG and all other device makers are having to cough up money because they adopted android.

Google should lead the charge here and not leave it to its partners to fight it out.
Then you'd be breaking the rules of JS1K, because JS1K demos have to work in Firefox, and Firefox doesn't support this feature (except in quirks mode, which you can't turn on in JS1K).
I'd say Apple don't entirely - ipad 1 vs ipad 2. They could've waited another 6-9 months for a camera (and the ipad2 camera really isn't all that hot anyway). Apple doesn't put out gold 100% of the time.

A lot of people waited on ipad 1 for v2 because of the things it didn't have (camera, etc) But... perhaps closer to your point, what the ipad v1 did, it did very well. Better to leave a feature out altogether than do it half-baked.

I've been wanting a webOS device for a couple years, but I'm not going to pay the premium for it when I know out of the box it'll be less useful to me than the ipad these days (volume/variety of apps, third party products/etc).

I said this a couple times before - a touchpad - 7 or 10" - at $249 or $299 would KILL. HP could take the money from lame commercials and airport branding and magazine ads and such, apply it towards subsidizing cheap tablets, and own second place, possibly even the tablet first place in certain verticals. But they keep approaching this with marketing ideas that pretend that the iPad is 'just another product in the marketplace'. It's not. It created a marketplace. It defines the marketplace. So... quit trying to play in that market, and define your own.
Not necessarily.[1]

[1] http://www.finishing.com/156/65.shtml
Useful for testing web apps against network problems.
Show HN: Sketching with fonts
I know these guys personally and have been to their office a couple times. WYSIWYG. This video did a nice job of showing the great atmosphere there as it really is. I think Viximo is a paragon of startup culture, the way it should be. Hats off to Wistia, and more so to Sean and Chris and the rest of the team at Viximo, for showing the way. Keep it up!
Windows 8 and the Death of Silverlight
Journalist Crowdsources An Article About A Crowdsourcing Company. Funny stuff.
Self-image, affiliation? Branding, indeed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock_branding
I think the general rule about headlines phrased as questions, is that they can usually be answered with a "no".
If the industry waits for congress to sort it out it will be left waiting for years. Even the critical issues such as debt ceiling were down to the wire. Its the problem that the industry has to figure out within itself.
> It means you're relevant.

It also means you are attracting nutjobs.
Auto Transport 101 - Your Begin To Finish Guide To Vehicle Shipping Companies
The auto transport organization owes all its good results towards the web. With its substantial marketability, a lot more individuals are joining the trend and also the small business. The growing market place however poses difficulties for clients. For anyone who is new towards the whole business of auto transport and have no concept on what to do or where to begin the following section will provide you with an notion on the way to go about every little thing.
Charlie Stross (cstross of this parish) has almost certainly already written it.
I addressed that four hours before you posted this.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2894221
Never say "no." Negotiations, the Japanese way.
I addressed that three hours before you posted this.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2894221
Kaspersky reports Adobe software is biggest security risk
No surprise here:

FTA: "all of the top ten most frequently detected vulnerabilities are to be found in Adobe or Oracle products. Almost 41 per cent of the computers tested were affected by a critical vulnerability in Adobe Reader for which an update has been available from Adobe since last autumn."

Another unsurprising result: Flash is the biggest loser.
I wonder if Notch thought this through... Bethesda can draw on id employees to play for them.
No great thing was ever accomplished without being passionate.Even the research field which is all about intellectualism needs you to be passionate about your ideas and ploughing away at them even though they are just untested hypotheses till it gets proved
It is simply not true that a "great deal" will get publicized by itself, or that any pre-2009 channel for publicizing great deals was effective for most businesses. I find this comment facile. Small businesses die all the time because nobody discovers them.

I don't know about Groupon, but it's flat out wrong to say that small businesses don't have the problem Groupon claims be addressing. They clearly do have the problem.
The FAQ says:

How do you make money?

A couple of ways. First, there is some minimal advertising in the right column with providers that work within our privacy principles, i.e. no targeting or sharing IP addresses to serve ads. The other way we make money is via affiliate sales, e.g. Amazon and eBay. This affiliate model also doesn't share personal information -- see our privacy policy for details.
Maybe they are reading too much Hacker News and the "ship ship ship" we preach over here. I know I have heard some companies thinking like that without realising it's not the best strategy for every company.
To this day I still do not know what the actual investment situation is. It seems to be a sensitive topic whenever I brought it up during our conversations.

Should've suggested him to get funded on AngelList to make it more transparent.
No knowledge of RoR required? I ask because a couple of the authors list RoR in their bio. I love the book idea though. Will check it out if it's just HTML/CSS/JS (which it sounds like it is).