skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The biggest difference between OpenSource and what's going on with Silverlight is that there is a lot more, possibly even complete transparency with the OpensSource and you have options. I think if you do just a minimal amount of investigation you can get a good idea if a project is healthy or not. Likewise, you ultimately do have the source, you can look at it, understand it and decide if you can maintain it on your own or not. There isn't even a straight answer with Silverlight.

With Silverlight, they're going to suffer the same fate IBM did with OS/2. First they don't know what they want to do, it was a "me to" product because they thought Adobe was getting too powerful or worried about DOA JavaFX, it might live, it might die, they don't know. Second, they don't know what to tell develoeprs that have invested in it, these people don't retarget to your other technologies, many of them leave after getting burned like that. Mixed messages come out, "they're completely committed" but their actions might not suggest that. The third step, they will retarget it and say something like 'Silverlight is really for x,y,z applications' maybe throw in a little 'we never really intended for it to replace the web or flash.' Ultimately, they pull the plug, any other company might attempt to sell the technology to a 3rd party to try and breath life into it or to make maintenance money from the few true believers that are left, I've not known MS to do that and even if they did, the damage is done once the uncertainty starts.

Just that fact that people are asking if Silverlight is dead pretty much dooms it. MS has 2 options, let it die or show some kind of overwhelming support and double down. Anybody know how many companies have really bought in to it?
To my memory, this is not true. California says "they're null and void within our borders and that's that".

Rather like slavery, come to think of it, the big issue of the status of a slave who escaped to a free state. Dred Scott is not considered to be one of the finer moments in US Supreme Court history.

Are you sure you're not remembering a case that falls under the exceptions to California law?
Using color temperature to distinguish between primary and secondary elements -- brilliant.

http://uxmovement.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/checkout+or...

I have a little problem with the star at the end of "your price" as it creates dissatisfaction: "Oh, so the price isn't 12.98? What is it? Like $300? $500?"

About gift box... I'm sorry, I had to pull out Ill/PS and do this: http://olekbeluga.com/targetgiftbox.png
>Why are you against competition?

you made a very far reaching conclusion.

Taking your clients (that old employer invested in bringing in) is obviously unfair competition. I feel ok toward enforcing non-competes where otherwise would be situation of unfair competition.
Video Presentation: Google on Google+ and the +1 Button - Marakana
captcha...
Outstanding -
Original story: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3001020
Arduino Comic Makes It Easy to Get Started with Electronics Hacking
Why Not Hiring Unemployed Jobs Seekers Is Stupid
Same here; I do like to keep an archive for myself, but it's safely stored in a truecrypt volume and I don't think I'll ever share that password.
Poll: Hacker Relationship Statuses
Just curious how other work driven, tech centric people are doing in this area of life.
Divorced / Other separated from long term relationship
Civil Union / Married / Long term domestic partner
Long term relationship
Happily single
Unhappily single
I would be more interested in seeing how node.js, apis and everything was tied together. Great work!
I hate finding projects. I know they're out there, but it's all word of mouth. Sucks.
I wonder if apple might do this with their iPad 3, i.e. include their full OS as an alternative.

With (reputed) quad-core and 2560x1600, there's sufficient power.
I don't like 'em in this usage, because imo they just add to the Matthew Effect of recognized stuff getting more recognized (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect_(sociology)). I'd personally prefer an option to completely filter out domains I don't want results from, and then no visual differentiation among the rest.
I don't understand holding up the checkbox as well executed. The primary text on the "is this is a gift" is "somebody special". If you're going to use smaller lighter type near large bold black type, then the bold section needs to convey the information and the lighter type just needs to add context or turn it into a grammatical sentence.

Also, "success" is patronizing.

I may be biased. I hate Target because the one in Foster City has a repeated pattern of ringing up sale items at regular price. I don't care much about the 8 cents, but it's the principle.
The Obsolete Marketing Degree - Colleges can't compete with tech
Scope creep is always the worst for me. It happens with almost every single side-project I take. That said, since I started billing hourly (with nightly updates to work / invoice), it's gotten a lot better.
Investing your time wisely is working at whatever you can to make however much or little money as you can right now. You can't 'go back' and wait tables for the 3.5 months you have covered right now.

Take those 3.5 months, wait tables, AND code. Trust me as someone who's done both coding and waiting tables - in all likelihood even a mediocre service industry job collecting tips will eclipse your coding income for 2/3 years - Especially in your situation.

Don't make the mistake of thinking you're 'wasting' time waiting tables, what you're doing is turning that 3.5 month cushion into a 1 year cushion by maximizing your earning potential NOW.

Probably not what you want to hear, but my 2 cents.
I'm sure there are several similar services out there. This was a fun mini-project though.
Beyond Expectations – Getting The Most out of Facebook Like and Share
Following bartonfink's advice is investing this time wisely.

It's not either or, it's this and.
Dutch hackers send letter to government (translated)
OK I just updated it to have disqus comments, would you mind trying it now? I was a little hesitant to have comments because my blog's going to get pretty inflammatory, but maybe newer comment systems can handle that.
How To Create ASCII Drawings in Vim Editor
their HTML text everywhere site looks horrendous on my PC with font smoothing off

If you don't like how text looks without font-smoothing, then maybe you should consider turning on your font-smoothing...
I think a killer feature for this (or a competitor...) would be auto-turning pages using the ambient audio.
"While I am playing piano and have no hands I have to deftly change the music, therefore I need another human" is a huge pain point for performing pianists.
Is this a common demo effect? There's a very similar effect on http://generalrelativity.org/BitmapStuff.swf (it's been there since 2007).
Getting unlimited calling from clients who are not serious is number one by far! signal to noise ratio in the freelancing market is dismal.
The Statistical Error Everyone Makes | Psychology Today
There's third-party vendors that provide an API to verify address information. QAS is one of that's used by some large retail sites: http://www.qas.com/
Tonara does this.
Most parts of my projects go pretty nicely, but getting paid has always been a pain after the first couple of months on a project.

Getting a deposit up front definitely helps with clients paying on time the first couple of months.

I work with a lot of "green field" projects though, and it seems like many clients operate under the impression that the site is going to start making money right away without any marketing or advertising. I usually help them put together a plan for that (and help them with AdWords), but they are for some reason reluctant to actually start making calls, sending emails, reaching out to bloggers, etc.

After a few months, they inevitably start paying later and later as they start to get concerned about running out of money.
The main question is whether it increases the clarity and flexibility of the code. I can't think of any contexts where it would, but I wouldn't rule it out.
Here is a page that takes care of the "comprehensive" piece:

http://www.quirksmode.org/compatibility.html

It's readable enough, but a little dense on information. :)
You only have to improve upon the idea by 10% and it is a value-added alternative.
Data scientist: The hot new gig in tech
Usually, hate-ons are perpetuated by those who lack the skills to make shit happen. Or, at least, that's been my experience. They're usually more concerned with Being Right On The Internet than anything else.
I dont know a complete list but http://www.brandsoftheworld.com/ is mostly pretty helpfull in finding usable logos
To be honest that makes the article a lot less interesting. So... you spend more time with your family _and_ you're more productive? Yay!
Ya I think so too. I feel like I'm just getting started, and trying really hard not to fall back into old patterns of passive cynicism. Here are a couple of posts under my old username along these lines that didn't get much attention:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1988313

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2841993

I'm watching all of these and am trying to put together some kind of site like idevgames.com only with the idea of several developers working together to make a hit and if they do, dividing the funds more fairly (like maybe the main dev gets half and split the rest evenly among everyone else). It would have really forward-thinking concepts, like encouraging people to work remotely if it's better for them and using non-mainstream tools and languages if it gets the job done.
It seems like the right way to do this is to have a positive list, but to accept anything.

If you put in a city on the list, then you get the green SUCCESS (and probably some autocomplete suggestions to take you there), if you put in one that's not on the list, you get an no cue at all (or an equivocal one)

Then as you make successful orders to previously unknown cities, you can add them to the known list (possibly as aliases of the "real" city name, which you can then display as a choice to future users on entry.
You must be slow. I build my services to work in whatever browser my clients are using.
Yes, the thing to do would be to archive it, and then delete the contact. Similar to taking the love letters out of the desk drawer and moving them up to a trunk in the attic.

Also has the added benefit of not being dependent on gmail retaining the logs. This needs to be made easier and encouraged.
The price difference included the staffing costs - including onsite sysadmins, a NOC, network engineers, systems administrators, DBAs, Facilities Planners, Inventory Tracking Staff, Circuit Managers, Project Managers - fully loaded.

What I meant by "And then they would have to hire smart operations people" is that that is both (a) challenging, (b) fraught with risk, (c) not something anybody at Netflix with a sufficient seniority was interested in doing.

It wasn't that those staff cost a lot of money, though at the time, Netflix was paying a bit more for infrastructure staff, it's just that nobody was interested in building an operations empire. If they'd had a Chief Infrastructure Officer who had a passion for doing it, Netflix would have paid approximately 20% less for their infrastructure costs. But, at the end of the day, given they didn't have that CInfO, and 20% less on infrastructure wasn't that material to their business, they just outsourced it all to Amazon.
People wasting my time with stupid ideas.

The amount of Groupon clones I've had come in front of me with "a special twist that will take the market by storm" is ridiculous.
I'm excited about Tonara, but the app itself seems like a tech demo for that specific technology.

They have yet to experience the pain of a thousand cuts that (that my team and I have gone through) that is working with the music publishing industry.

The thing with these apps is that people who don't really understand them group them all together. "Oh, another music-y app for fancy music people!"

While their app now is not remotely a competitor, if they actually get some real funding, they could pivot in a number of ways to compete against apps like mine, because they've been able to position themselves well in the "music app startup" slot by presenting at TC.
I don't know a lot, but Zepto seems to be focused on (mobile) Webkit.
The main problem with sheet music is copyright law. Its differences across Europe will make anyone's head hurt. If that weren't enough, the established publishing industry is extremely conservative. In my experience the musicians --that is users-- would be the last and least hurdle.
Naming can be an agonizing process, especially the need for domain name and SEO consideration.

OT. Are number in product names or domain names bad in general? E.g. foobar101.
When you are early, you should only have one product and your name should be synonymous with it, unless you want to spend every encounter explaining the distinction. That doesn't include the numerous people (press, investors, potential hires, potential customers / biz partners) that will have your business card and not associate your company name with the product they used.

From my experience, startups can work on one thing at a time (and that's hard enough). The more difficult you make it for someone to associate your company with your product, the worse off you will be. You can always change your company name later.
Not really. imagine it was the other way around. imagine as company owner you can be eliminated by your employees on a "gut feeling" or because they decided you just weren't doing the job they envision you should be doing. I think most founders would be tossed out on the curb at one time or another.

I'm pointing out that culpability in a perceived bad job performance isn't a two way street and it would be responsible to speak about how you don't always get it right. nothing is more irksome then someone who has fired dozens of people and says they made the right choice every time. statistically impossible.
I saw this going around a bit last month: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/tax-the-super-rich-or-revol...

It is all speculation, so none of these predictions really should be called 'news,' but people have been known to riot over jobs or some proxy issue before. Also, if you dismiss a protest for being silly, ineffective, and stupid in these sort of circumstances, how are you not advocating riots? They are going to protest under the banner of 'Occupy Wall St.,' with a list of issues that boils down to 'generally pissed off.' I can definitely see how a group like that could start rioting at some point if they feel their efforts were ignored.
Also fun if you have a MIDI keyboard: http://synthesiagame.com/
Your site is similar to http://www.icombinator.net/
The evolution of data products
Is non compete a kind of cartelization?
Opensocial is dead right? Myspace was the biggest user for it when it came out, it's dead now. LinkedIn signed up and has moved away from it.
People who want to consume media and are willing to pay money for easy access to it aren't their target market?
Having to work away from home, family and friends.
I'm going to assume trello, like trellis!

I agree with your points but think trello is fairly unambiguous, considering it was an available (? or cheap) 6 letter .com domain.
Amen about the lead qualification. I just had this happen today: I spent a few hours on an email for a potential client whose project sounds like 3-6 man-months of work.

Now, does he really have that kind of dough laying around (ie: angel funding), or will I never here from the client again because he was hoping to get it done for $200? (Or worse: profit sharing / equity arrangements. Equity doesn't pay my rent.)
Similar - 1 GB VM, allocated a single core, MySQL backend. Been running for years (although moved from a dedicated machine to a VM a bit over a year ago), solid as a rock. Confluence is running on the same VM.

One of the bits of infrastructure I never have to worry about.

edit: never tried any of their other products however. We use Pulse by Zutubi for continuous builds.
Like python syntax, except it compiles to GObject-using C. Reminds me a lot of Boo for .NET

Don't like the arg:type syntax, too used to python's : symbol meaning begin new block. Maybe it got that from functional languages that use arg:type?

The real problem is that nobody will be using this, since there's no libraries for it (can't even use GObject C libraries because not everything is available at runtime, e.g. you can't tell what non-virtual member functions an object has available). It compiles to C and supports plain pointers, plain function calls, so why not have a feature that scans C headers and automatically generates bindings out of it?

I see absolutely no reason to use this over Vala, which has far more language features and has the same "compiles to C and doesn't have VM bloat" advantage.
I'll just make a comment from my cosy European perspective. He's still working 9 hours a day. But it's okay, he "doesn't feel as burned out". Seriously, is this what is expected, or is it just the default?
RT is a nice ticketing system, but Software Development Organizations run into a wall pretty much immediately (as in, once they grow beyond 40 or 50 employees) because of their lack of support for more sophisticated software development methodologies. The plugin and developer community is limited, and there is almost no commercial third party support for an ecosystem on top of RT.

Finally, it may have changed since the last time I used it (it's been about 8 years), but it had limited issue<-->code checkin integration (which is critical) and I don't even think Agile tools are part of it's vocabulary.

Nice ticketing tool, and, if Jira wasn't available in a 10 user license version, RT and Trac would be on my shortlist for quick-n-dirty ticketing tools for smaller software devel shops.
i was just joking. thanks for helping me vent
Getting paid. I finish work; I send an invoice; I get an email back saying "thanks, we'll process this right away"; and I wait. A month later, I send another email and get told that it "slipped through the cracks" or "got lost", and a week later I get a check in the mail.

I think I'm batting roughly a 50% average on getting paid without sending the "uh, where's my money" email. I always get paid eventually and without complaints, so it's not as if people are trying to avoid paying; it just seems that people who hire me almost universally suck at doing paperwork.

And really, that's a bad way to suck. I suck at doing paperwork, but I at least pay my bills promptly.
How? What are they actually protesting? The existence of the banking industry? It seems like poorly informed reactionary tactics to me.
Why Saturday?

Why not during normal trading hours which are 9:30-4, Monday through Friday
Glad you realise something subtle here. It's not so obvious.
The most interesting part of this article is that the CEO of the company enforcing the non-compete says that the Massachusetts economy would be better off if they were non-enforceable. (He just doesn't want to "disarm unilaterally".)
The source code is really small and quite readable. From the source:

var homeDX=this.homeX-this.x;
var homeDY=this.homeY-this.y;
var homeDistance=Math.sqrt(Math.pow(homeDX,2) + Math.pow(homeDY,2));
var homeForce=homeDistance*0.01;
var homeAngle=Math.atan2(homeDY,homeDX);

It seems it is just using gravitational like force, where a point is attracted to its original position. So I guess it is a more common effect for particles.
Smartphone Use For Business People
Windows 8 Tablets Won't Run PC Apps, After All
As an orchestral violinist, my biggest pain point is that I can't mark bowings into one part and have them appear in the parts for everybody else in the section.
You really think D.C. is the place were decisions are made? Really?

Anyway these Anonymous are just kids and I don't think they understand problem - let alone the solution to the problem.
Koomey’s Law: Energy efficiency of computers doubles roughly every 18 months
I Code While You Sleep
I don't delete any data, and in fact on my Drobo and RAID on our home server I have files going back to Jr. High.

I often look at how my parents remember things, like my dad remembering his now deceased parents and realize that memory for me is going to be fundamentally different.

For one: they have a memory dictated by the physical effects of chronology. Their photographs and videos age. Mine age only when subject to progress of technology and arbitrary concepts that are based on representation (i.e., datestamps).

My memories live outside of time now. Ten years ago is morphologically no different than yesterday. The only fundamental fissure with chronology is file formats, but even that isn't insurmountable.

My wife and I first emailing, our first date, my child's birth, our wedding: all there in a Spotlight index and on redundant drives.

The memories of my great grandpa, my wife's grandmother: all there.

The thing is: does this stop? I've taken 2900 photos of my son so far (in two years). When do we live so fully outside of time that we lose our concept of it passing? We can live without letting go with so little consequence, just the addition of drives, that its silly not to try.

In ten years, I'll have accumulated exponentially more data than in the ten years, or twenty years prior. I don't yet know if that's a good thing.
I would say, the unwillingness for companies to outsource the interesting work.

IME, most consulting work is just grind, no interesting problems, and the pay rarely really makes up for the real amount of work.
LTG  Disrupt: Pic Collage from Cardinal Blue
Really cool! It doesn't work on WP7 though (which doesn't matter too much, because most people don't have a WP7 device)
I've been a vim user for about 10 years now. I've recently started using emacs for lisp/SLIME dev. The number one feature I miss when I'm in emacs land is vim's "i" and "a" commands.

di" deletes everything between the double quotes.
da" deletes everything between including the double quotes themselves

It works with other matching pairs as well (ie di(, di[ di'). I use it constantly. I've searched and search, and have not been able to find an emacs equivalent.
What forms of advertising have you tried if you don't mind me asking? Just online stuff?

Effective or not, I've been struggling to think of ways to advertise a small contract development business to enterprises other than adwords and seo.
Perhaps finding clients should be there. How are you guys finding clients? Im looking for clients that I can deal with on the side along with my day job. How did you guys go about getting first client
Quemar Grasas Rapidamente en un Corto Entrenamiento
Having gone through half a dozen different issue trackers in my career, Jira is the first one I've fallen unreservedly in love with - and I'm fascinated as to why others wouldn't feel the same way.

Is it a Jira issue, or has someone created an overly restrictive workflow, complex data entry screen?

I'm not sure if you can blame the product for how it's configured by it's users, particular when the default configuration is pretty bog simple and easy to use.

What about Jira do you hate? What about other members of your team?

I'm genuinely interested - maybe I'll see something in a different light.
Find your niche and only contract in that space. For quite a while, I only did reverse-engineering contracting; I gained a reputation for doing it, and my available work and hourly rate rose as a result of that. Figure out the intersection of what you're interested in, what people are willing to pay for, and what you're good at and you're set.
efficiency = output / input

you can't measure efficiency by only looking at time spent. if the 80 hr a week guy produces twice as much as the 40 hour a week guy, their efficiency is the same. if the 80 hr a week guy produces 3 times as much, his efficiency is 50% higher
> Others will see you do this and leave space, too.

You certainly don't drive where I live.