skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If only someone would rethink music notation successfully.
Break Google
Just this past week I've finally stopped checking Google+ because I only ever saw posts from my Google employee friends. Am I the exception or the rule here? Is Google+ getting any traction?

I prefer it to Facebook and hoped it would take off, but, based on my anecdotal personal experience, I fear it's going the way of Buzz and Wave. If their new platform is on a sinking ship, it's hard for me to get excited about writing apps for it.
> If I were you I'd recommend trying to get the two data centers to use the same images.

Yes... we have tried... this is not going to happen. The battle I'm picking is to get a compiler on production.

In SUSE dev and stage started as clones and production is very close to dev/stage but built by a different group; but in solaris land things are more divergent between dev stage and production because the openCSW packages were all installed on different days from the main public repository which is consistently being updated. Plus, since -dev is shared with ~30 developers and stage is shared with about ~10 developers and folks ask the dev/stage admins for different packages things start to diverge more as dependencies get upgraded.

Where I have problems is trying to compile things like GD and openquicktime that are used by some legacy processes that seem to be very sensitive to certain libraries being at the right version -- maybe this is not going to be an issue on SLES but I've been bitten in the past so many times by subtle library version issues and I find I have the best luck if I always rebuild my entire stack after any OS update or package changes.

I know it was another age (when in one day I might have to work on old SunOS, new Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, BSDi, and IRIX boxes -- and dev and stage machines were unheard of), but the grey beards (these dudes literally had awesome grey beards) I learned this trick from had a lot of experience and I still believe that building locally is the best bet unless you can guarantee the systems are identical in every detail (which I will never be able to do because I'm not a sysadmin anymore).

> If that's not possible and all the prod machines run the same image I'd build a package on one prod machine and install that on all of them.

I will only have one production vm for my app. The main application I run has ~6k unique visitors a day and ~130k unique visitors a month with an average of 4 pages per visit -- not super high load so I don't need multiple back end servers -- at least on my shared solaris host. I haven't done load testing on the vms yet -- but if I do need multiple production vms they will be able to clone the vms for me in production.
Show HN: Write down your goals&project, motivate yourself looking them everyday
I want to show you my desktop wallpaper, it worked for me and maybe it will also work for you. I made sort of list of logos of my startup projects, which were not realized 2 years ago, and iconic main goals, so seeing them everyday I don't forget them and concentrate on them.

In my opinion, startups should not be the main goals, but they must be the stepping stones for your main goals in this life. So, it's important to write down your goals, and motivate yourself, why you really want this startup(s) so hard.

Using this technique, I already found 3 of 5 my startup projects and they are very successful today.

P.S. if you want to ask which language on the wallpaper it is, it's azerbaijani.
Prizewinning 2004 research by LC Davis of Umich showed that stop/go traffic jams were eliminated by adding in a certain percentage of cars with Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC.) It only took a little less than 1 in 5 cars.

http://www.ur.umich.edu/0304/July19_04/19.shtml

http://www.google.com/search?q=%2Btraffic+jams+%2Bdavis+%2Ba...

What does ACC do? It imposes proper safe driving headway distance, as well as providing near-instant reaction time for braking. No tailgating, no accumulation of 1-sec human reaction times.

But couldn't human drivers do the same by simply padding out their 2-sec spacing to 3-sec? And only a few need to do it.
The paperwork, namely creating detailed line-item invoices.

That's why I created this gem, Big Bucks No Whammies, to automatically generate my invoices from my git commits.

https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies

Here's a sample invoice :
https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies/blob/master/...
College Kids
I want to show you my desktop wallpaper, it worked for me and maybe it will also work for you. I made sort of list of logos of my startup projects, which were not realized 2 years ago, and iconic main goals, so seeing them everyday I don't forget them and concentrate on them.

In my opinion, startups should not be the main goals, but they must be the stepping stones for your main goals in this life. So, it's important to write down your goals, and motivate yourself, why you really want this startup(s) so hard.

Using this technique, I already found 3 of 5 my startup projects and they are very successful today.

P.S. if you want to ask which language on the wallpaper it is, it's azerbaijani.
WinRT Is Replacing Win32
The Economist on making SSL more secure
Awesome integration and I also noticed Python support. Win!
> Shouldn't they attempt to be occupying some part of D.C. instead if that is their goal?

I was thinking that occupying Wall Street on a Saturday is pretty much guaranteed to go unnoticed.

Hope you prove me wrong Anon.
Long time lurker and made an account just to reply to this. What does it say about the expectations of this industry when you have to even weigh working almost 60 hours a week against 15 hours with your daughter!! Good god. I am so glad that you made the right choice. Great article.
Money should be talked about in the first 30 minutes of discussion about any client project. Rates, budgets, ability of client to pay, etc.
This seems like a last ditch effort to appease social app developers before they all jump ship to Google+. 4 years too late for me.
Thank you very much for featuring a link to our website here. Calculating the time of the post you probably missed the newest video of a prototype gimbal mount for the Quadshot. You can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd1js8WIL7E So Quadshot is not only a mix of a quadrocopter and a plane but also an aerobatic aircraft that can be stable enough to shoot areal footage.
Ruby always needs a few more minutes than Java to get things done.
Do you have ~100 developers using it and 1000s of issues? Definitely does not scale.
This happens everywhere where clowns have the money, unfortunately.
What are you using for the “Text” version? RSS or are you parsing the source HTML?
This is the stuff that brings me back to hacker news everyday. So helpful.
Let me remind you that Target's main color is red. 101 principles do not apply to all cases.
The data spinner on the iPhone is a good example. The 3G/Wifi spinner is at that "normal" speed, just fast enough to be smooth and not fast enough to be unintelligible. The Edge network spinner is at perhaps half speed and is painful to watch. It's quite an effective design.
I'm taking an approach where if your browser isn't CSS3 compliant, it's not my problem.

People with good browsers get the "HD" version, and anyone else gets the working, slightly less glitzy "SD" version.

It's like people with black and white televisions complaining they can't see their favorite new shows in color. Upgrade your television or stop yelling at it.
Yeah, I actually think you've got a better shot at specializing in interesting work as a consultant. As a staff developer, even if you work on interesting things most of the time, you can still get stuck with bottom-of-the-barrel shit like the equivalent of writing a VB app to track the secretary's time.
Whats with all the Coding?
> It looks like your browser might be out of date. Your experience on Idealist could be better if you update to the newest version.

I'm using Chrome 13. Amusing.
The best quote from the article:

"This is what boards need to learn: top slot = product person, second slot = operations person. Not the other way around."
My friend Mike has a company that does upside sharing for contract dev work, and their solution to the problem is to require 50% in cash as earnest money; makes the conversation simpler: if you're willing to put down 5 figures in dev expenses, you're probably for real.

(Thankfully, revenue sharing doesn't make sense for our business).

The other big problem you touched on that isn't in the poll is client scheduling; clients will slip and slide all over the calendar, and it's nothing to them (they're used to slipping), but for an outside firm, it's havoc.
We had this clown come in once all sweaty wearing a suit with no socks, and he tried to pitch us on some idea which involved building a Windows client application and distributing it using the "AOL CD distribution model." He also went to a private college and blamed his parents for his business problems.
This kind of stuff happens pretty frequently to momentum stocks when they have what is perceived as bad news. Baidu is another stock with similar volatility sometimes caused by news.
get() doesn't create a value in the dictionary, though; it only returns a default value. For what you describe, you would want setdefault(). It works here because you're assigning a value to a['foo'] after get()ing the default value.
you could try use my hn scraper written in python to overcome the api errors.

https://github.com/ga2arch/py-hackernews/blob/master/hn.py ( it's not good code, but it does its job, i have successfully run it for 48+ hours with no crash ( at least the previous revision :D ))

if you need help just send me an email =)

Awesome work =)
You can use the Counter class from the collections module[1] for that as well.

>>> from collections import Counter
>>> c = Counter()
>>> c['foo']
0
>>> c['bar'] +=1
>>> c['bar']
1
>>>

[1] http://docs.python.org/dev/library/collections.html#collecti...
MAXO signals - A new and unfortunate solution to the Fermi paradox
How big a problem is that variant of qualification, really? Why don't you just approach these things as if there's no real business there?

I may be jaded about this because so many of our bids are competitive, and even a simple bid takes a couple hours to put together. We win most of them, but you get used to sinking time into deals that don't pan out and build it into the process.
My biggest problem is educating customers on an iterative process. We don't do strict contracting, but we do license our iOS software platform and provide custom development work for the apps.

Both for our own products, and partner products, we like to begin beta testing apps at quite an embarrassing, early stage in the process. We also basically refuse to spec anything but the most basic features of the app, until we hear from users.

In almost every case, the partner agrees to this structure, but then when it comes down to it, they see what we want to release to beta (50-100 users), and then they push back and try and get us to implement features they think are important, or fix bugs they believe matter. They are somewhat incredulous when we push back and decline to bill them hours.

It always works out in the end. When the partner starts hearing the incredibly valuable things users say when they test the apps, they immediately understand the value, and it's smooth sailing from there.

But trying to get a company to release crappy, buggy, unfinished software to 100 of their real customers seems to always take some doing.

We've never had an issue getting paid, and we always require money up front. I did have to struggle once to get 10% of a contract, but I honestly believe it was just accidentally FUBARed.
Let's be fair though.

1) It's still in preview.

2) It has been somewhat primed with members, but has yet to reach the tipping point where everyone wants to (or even can) try it out.

3) The feature set is almost certainly not what it will be when it goes public.

My take on the field test is that it focused on bringing out the features most wanted by the technical crowd, who are crucial early adopters (and people paying attention to Google). The service will be refined until it is deemed ready for public consumption.

Finally, as with every social network, who is using it is more important than what it can do. We'll see if the "right" people take to it and bring everyone else with them.
Electric Guitar Epiphone SG Review
Seconded. The direction keys (j, l, I think, and I forget which the other two were; I just kept the mapping from movement-of-fingers to movement-of-cursor) may not be as intuitive as they are in qwerty, but after a short while you just ingrain them in your muscle memory and it doesn't matter anymore.
Thanks for the link and reading. I do a lot of coding and have many projects I work on.

Was also curious, do they expect you to know right away, as I usually have a more iterative style right away. I guess what i'm asking is what are the protocols or whats established norms for these interviews? No one has ever really explained to me what they want.
Anyone have an explanation for this? Looks like its messing up the CSS for the top link nav.
Why Facebook is the New Yahoo
Great idea, could you release a PSD?
I've been thinking about revising my tactics some, to try to get a potential client to spill what kind of budget they have to work with before I even start thinking about anything else.

It certainly helps sometimes in picking out project infrastructure ("I have to do this cheaply, so let's get inventive")
This is my favourite part - I find it helps if you treat it like the game it is. Meet people, ask about their business, be friendly and before you know it they are asking your advice on an app. Get in there and close the deal, do a good job, get a referral, rinse and repeat.

It's all about networking and talking a good game. It doesn't come natural to engineers I admit but once I decided to just go for it I found it can be fun.

On the plus side you do get to meet a lot of interesting people and discover interesting ideas for apps.
ihackernews is great but I feel there is many bugs when it comes to comments. I use the Hacker News app for android created by Jazzy Chad which is great but the ihackernews api for comments always fails to load. I wish there was a fix for this.
有机健康食品
Supra Cuttler Men Shoes
I'm not sure providing detailed line-item invoices like this is a win. How are you getting cornered into pricing on a commit-by-commit basis?
Velocity 2011, recent trends on improving Web performance
I'm not seeing it. Can you post a screenshot?
Being Mindful in your Startup
Checkout Launchbit they do this for you without sales people.
I am the biz-guy in my startup and have been learning Python during my lunch breaks. I work on building a consulting business in the evenings so I can leave my day job and work on my startup. This would free up time for learning to code. I am only responding because I find your insight into Rails interesting and will be looking into that for myself. Good luck with your education (coding) and your development project.
Welcome to life in the big city. Your most lucrative clients are likely to end up being the biggest pain to handle receivables from.

There's not a whole lot you can do about it, is there? It's usually not your direct contacts who have anything to do with it, so it harms the relationship to complain to them about it (they have better things to do). Tracking down the right person in accounting or purchasing to get things moving is a waste of your time. For a long time, before we had a dedicated finance person, we just built these delays into our process.
You might want to add rur-ple (http://code.google.com/p/rur-ple); it is similar to Guido van Robot (and was inspired by it). However, 1) it uses Python (instead of a more limited, Python-like inspired language); 2) it has more lessons and exercises than Guido van Robot; 3) it provides an embedded programming environment to go beyond the robot's world.

A second addition to consider is GvR online (http://gvr-online.appspot.com/ui/index.html), an online version of Guido van Robot.
Exactly... we do nothing but mapping apps, leveraging a platform we license out. Our partners know that the apps we produce are going to rank and make money, and so they pay.
http://i.imgur.com/OrqtK.png
I use defaultdict a lot. It's useful not only for counters, but also for sets, lists, dicts, and even other defaultdicts. It usually results in very succinct code compared to alternatives:

occurrences = defaultdict(int)
digraphs = defaultdict(lambda: defaultdict(int))

prev_ch = None
for ch in long_text:
occurrences[ch] += 1
if prev_ch is not None:
digraphs[prev_ch][ch] += 1
prev_ch = ch

print "Occurrences:"
for ch, count in sorted(occurrences.iteritems()):
print " %s: %i" % (ch, count)

print "Digraph occurences:"
for ch1, counts in sorted(digraphs):
for ch2, count in sorted(counts):
print " %s%s: %i" % (ch1, ch2, count)

(I'm aware that digraphs could be done as a single flat dict; it's just a trivial example to show defaultdict nesting.)
http://i.imgur.com/3UuEZ.png
Here you go http://i.imgur.com/9y5TK.png
Randite. Surprised?
I have invested a lot of time into sivlerlight app. I think the best possible outcome is that Windows 8 Metro will support silverlight natively and silverlight apps will be sold in the app store. I always thought of silverlight as a stalking horse to get people hooked on XAML and C# anyway.
If Colin's clients are anything like our clients (very likely), that's a bad idea. Nobody he competes with is asking for anything up front.

Breaking projects into billable milestones is a good idea for other reasons (it's a buffer against scope creep, providing you with periodic scope/schedule resync points), but it doesn't solve the payables problem. It's bad business to tell a client "I'm not going to proceed on milestone 3 until you pay me at least milestone 1".

I'm sure there are people on HN who are shocked-shocked! to hear that suggested. But you can safely assume that HN consistently undervalues what is probably one of the most valuable assets a consultant can have, which is "ease of working with".

When you commit to 4 milestone phases, and you client says your payment is in process, you have to keep working. The client is depending on the job getting done. You may be tempted to reply "but I'm depending on being able to afford dinner tonight". Your client doesn't really believe that it's their problem that you're not well capitalized.
My friend and I just wrote something today that I hope will become the bedrock of a similar service, but for Perl: Oyster (http://github.com/gatlin/oyster), so named because it contains a Perl.

We tied Redis lists to filehandles, and then redirected STDIN/STDOUT in a local context to the Redis filehandles. Then, we simply eval code. It's a proof of concept awaiting sophistication / configuration.
How “Loss” Can Be a Winning Strategy
That would be no problem I'm sure assuming English was the only language I need to display on my browser. Unfortunately I don't fit into that profile.
How Whole Foods "Primes" You to Shop
With a rhythm-game type app, you can dictate what the user is supposed to be playing. With a sheet music app, not so much.

People will want to play the first few measures over and over, try something again after messing it up, stop and take it from the top and so on. If you turn the page too soon or scroll the music the user is playing off the screen, the customer reviews are going to look like Armageddon has come.

The only way I see that works understandably and well enough is to recognize when the last measure of the last staff is completed. Even that may be incompatible with some music, but it should work well enough in general.
Hmm, anybody have an idea as to why mine's different?

http://i.imgur.com/OrqtK.png
Why do you believe it has commercial potential if a market has not been identified yet?

If an activity is being pursued before an interested customer has been identified, I'd have a hard time calling that activity a 'business'.

That does not mean it is a waste of time. If it is an activity that creates value, as you seem to think it is, it is probably worth perusing, perhaps even worth monetizing but don't get ahead of yourself or place an irrecoverable bet on mere hope.
I know it's red, but you can't put the brand over an universal association with red=stop. If you look at the data, I bet you they are losing users who stop or abandon.
Seems very bias to the Australian audience as they were comparing global incubators. I see no evidence that these two Australian incubators are better than 500Startups and Seedcamp.
Seems likely that it's due to a lack of escaping in a custom templating layer. I wonder if it could be used to perform a XSS attack?
Portal, now free on Steam
Maybe it's a specific theme? The old default theme?
yes of course, here it is. www.sciplex.com/wall.psd
Profits plunge for maker of BlackBerry
Definitely a common effect. I remember seeing this kind of thing in the demoscene a lot of times. In fact I remember seeing a larger evolution of this recently.

What they did is used smooth particle hydrodynamics to simulate water, but then also use the text mesh as a local attractor. So the water would drip onto the invisible mesh, but then it would stick to the text just a bit more than normal allowing the words to form.

Link: http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/numb-res/
> I'm working in my spare time

There is a subtle joke in there somewhere.

Great piece and thank you for writing it.
It's impossible to do that with a lot of non-standard notational music. And even with standard music, "the beat" is annoying to track and changes FAR more than you'd expect. Good musicians are constantly altering the beat in subtle and unsubtle ways.
Two equivalent paths share the same endpoints and have the same length. Two symmetric paths also have these properties but they can also be shown to be permutations of each other.

Seeing the permutation property isn't straightforward until you change your definition of a path: from an ordered sequence of edges to an ordered sequence of vectors.

Take the following two paths as examples:

p1 = {up, up, up, right, right, right}
p2 = {up, right, up, right, up, right}

Not only are they equivalent but I can derive one from the other by just changing the order of the moves.

Such symmetries are plentiful on grid maps: as soon as you have a large open area, you introduce lots of possible ways to cross it.
Oh, cute. Yet another injection flaw in Google.

Guys, (and I don't mean Google, I mean all of us), don't fix injection by plugging injection bugs; put together some framework that actually avoids all of these problems (or at least doesn't let you add bugs).
At the time, sources said, Google told Flipboard execs that if it did not buy the start-up, it planned to do a version of its own.

This kind of 90's era Microsoft-style predatory tactics from Google is hurting innovation in the Valley more than patents. Small companies with innovative products are at the mercy of Google.

No wonder Apple, MS, Oracle, etc. are suing Google for patent infringement. Can you blame them?
TaylorMade R7 CGB Max
I don't recall a similar email when Yahoo! acquired delicious in the first place, why they should want permission now is beyond me.

Hurley & Chen surely can do a better job and it strikes me as though an 'opt-out' would have been better in this situation, or at least a process that would survive the actual transfer of assets between the two entities.

Yahoo! has a long history of losing their users data through shutdowns (geocities!), to see them lose user data on the spin-out and sale of a company they acquired a few years ago is probably just another 'snafu' for them.
I don't think Facebook has launched any successful feature or product since the Like button. Even the Facebook commenting system has failed. Techcrunch is the only site I've seen using, and it's actually the reason why I dramatically lowered my visits to their site in the beginning (other reasons came later). Fred Wilson has said this, too, in a recent post.