skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think it's a cop-out. It just explains (probably correctly) that a petition is not a good medium for expressing the problem and talking about possible solutions. There is a link http://www.uspto.gov/aia_implementation to the place where this conversation is already underway, and which you are welcome to join in.
> caught acknowledging
instant classic.

Those that can, comment, those that have nothing to say, make fun of those who speak English as a third language.

http://blog.mongodb.org/post/381927266/what-about-durability

Feb, 2010

"We get lots of questions about why MongoDB doesn’t have full single server durability, ...there are some very practical reasons why we think single server durability is overvalued"

http://www.mongodb.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=2752708&...

May, 2010

"MongoDB does not publish any official benchmarks...."

EDIT: Added link to blogs, quoted parent, in case gets removed
You can sign up with a couple clicks and it won't ask for your CC.
How Microsoft Killed the Courier
I can see how TDD could be useful for writing a relatively static piece of code, especially code that is likely to be reused by a lot of people.

But I develop web applications in 1-week sprints for my stakeholders and they're likely to change their mind about what they want at short notice.

In these circumstances it simply doesn't make sense to write tests up front. I don't even have time to write a lot of tests when I'm done :-(
Yep. "If enough people care, we'll copy/paste a press release." But what else could we have expected? That they'll drop everything, gather the experts, and rethink the past N decades of policy just because enough people on the internet clicked a button? Just another reason that the type of mass democracy that people keep saying that the internet will bring won't work without some Big New Thing for how people interact. There are still too many people and too many ideas.
Well, they clearly state in the response that the executive branch does not have the power to regulate what is patentable. I don't see that as really being a cop out. They legally cannot do anything about software patents.

This can only be handled by Congress. They say that. It's a perfectly reasonable response.
Since he doesn't allow comments, I will comment here.

While I agree with the author's comment that the switch is ambiguous, I disagree with his perception of the current state. To my mind the switch shown is a rocker switch that has the off side currently pressed. But that just shows how bad it is since different people see different things.
My take is this: LiveDrive Beta was featured in HN.

LiveDrive got lots of users used to having working and functional virtual drives, including me.

LiveDrive closed the beta and got users searching for a replacement. I found Dropbox in a post about LiveDrive alternatives.

LiveDrive could have been Dropbox, but they 'monetized' too fast and killed the product.

And still some people side with Saverin in the Social Network movie...
GarageBand Arrives On The iPhone And iPod Touch
I've used Odesk in the past for basic Internet research / housekeeping stuff. I emailed 5 people with one person responding who has been fantastic. Very easy to use on e you get used to the website. The one thing to pay attention to is to provide at least 2 examples of the finished work you want as well as all intermediate steps. This helps you get to know what you want and it helps them follow instructions. I started out with a one hour task and eventually moved up to about 10/15 hours per week. Extremely helpful.
San Francisco, CA - Full Time - http://www.crowdflower.com

CrowdFlower is changing the way work gets done, and we want you to help. Our technology platform takes large, data-heavy projects and breaks them into small tasks that are distributed to a multi-million-person, on-demand workforce around the world. Our technology then aggregates the results while performing continuous quality control, allowing us to deliver best-in-class results in record time.

This week we're hosting CrowdConf, the largest conference on crowdsourcing and distributed work, and we have previously published papers about our work with the crowd.

Hiring for:

- CrowdSourcing Solutions Engineer

- Development Operations Lead / Manager / Director

http://crowdflower.com/about/jobs

Feel free to contact me (matt.gordonATcrowdflower.com) with questions or for more information.
San Francisco - Full Time - https://www.hellofax.com/info/jobs

HelloFax (YCw11) is hiring full time mobile developers. We're building out the paperless office and the iPhone is going to be a key component of it. We have catering 3x per week, an awesome office in lower haight, and a top notch team. Plus, you'll be building something that people already use and pay for.

Email me at joseph at hellofax dot com. Would love to talk more about what we're building.
Show HN: My 24 hour project SpendStudy.com 
I could complete this project from idea to release in under 24 hours as I had most of the screens and code required for this from an earlier project.

The idea came from a friend of mine who had been talking about his need to manage/track expenses of his company's sales executives on the road.

I would love some feedback

link: http://www.spendstudy.com/
The new search dropdown is what I am excited about. I know that the operators were always there and advanced search was a click away, but what can I say, I am lazy.
> and now, since 2 versions

So 20-30 days ago only?

> yes, fire and forget is a significant advantage in a lot of cases

Sorry, but not as a default option in a DATAbase product.
This is an essential upgrade for modern Ruby development. Everyone knows staying on top of gem versions becomes like herding cats, so any help would be appreciated. The service is a nice combination of technologies into a useful, specialized service with clear value. I actually appreciate how focused it is - it addresses a real issue and I have no problem believing the site can deliver a good solution.

Is this the first commercial service specifically building on the Github platform?

Also, great front page, covering all the basics. This is a great example of a web service front page. It has it all and the design is superb.

Good pricing on the plans, but I think Large is maybe $5-$15 too cheap. Yes, I know it's $25 for a Bronze Github business plan but if they have the cheapest business plan I doubt they'll be customers anyway. It also gives a good bracketing effect, making the next step down seem like a better deal.

Consider taking a page from 37signals here - look at making the top end a gold-plated product with high perceived relative value and price it higher than its "natural" pricing. The company can spend some of the difference in providing personal support which in turn encourages its customers to become endorsers. Customers can still congratulate themselves for saving money in developer time while providing a comfort that their developers will appreciate (it's like Hopt... er, Airbrake: web services as a developer amenity). I would also suggest the top-end plan be the only one available on a yearly basis so that it can be more easily expensed.
As a matter of course, MIT and BSD licenses are non-threatening to businesses and organizations who do not necessarily have software as their primary focus.

Non-software shops who may be interested in using a piece of software may balk at using GPL3'd software because they don't know what the legal ramifications are of failing to comply, or the knowledge/wherewithal/processes to do release the software that they're using.

Talking to people about BSD/MIT is really easy: "You can do whatever you want with it as long as you retain the license and copyright".

At the risk of getting into a FOSS license debate, i'd like to think that FOSS contributors do it out of a motivation other than license restriction (and hell a lot of people still rip libs off, even when they are GPL'd!).
Hardly, nothing can become law without the president's signature, and Obama just signed a new patent bill into law.

Just as important, the president can use the power of his office as a "bully pulpit" to lead his party and the country on this critical issue.
tl;dr: The author critiques a poor imitation of the iOS on/off toggle.
The Republican Race to Cut Taxes on the Rich
Is there a petition for "make login work so I can sign petitions?"
The Nintendo DS / 3DS?

A large amount of the software available for those consoles utilises a dual-screen interface in an interesting / useful way.

Admittedly not a device designed for creation (beyond the camera and associated silly visual effects), but the original DS came out of nowhere and proved a dual-screen device with a stylus interface could work properly.
Digg - 9264 Results For video backgrounds
That would be a niche feature. I doubt many people can write shorthand.
Creating Value in the Ordinary
Shane O'Neill Fakie 5-0 Fakie flip.
Advertising is saying "free ice cream this weekend at EE's ice cream shop". What EE does though is say "free ice cream" in their ad on tv, and then inform customers at the cash register that the ice cream is only free if you purchase a $50 plastic spoon as well.
I wouldn't idolize either of them. Idolatry seems like a bad idea. How about just reading about their lives and seeing what makes sense for you to copy for your life?

As one Zen teacher puts it: "there are no enlightened beings, only enlightened actions". So do the actions and ignore the beings.
Three Future Waves of Innovation in E-Commerce for Fashion & Apparel
Funny I did swimmingly in racial test showing no bias at all when the exit questions reminded me of my strong fear for big black man in a dark alley.

Then again, I'm Chinese, which means I'm a bit racist against all non-chink people.
Slightly off topic, but do you have particular information about JVM being used in HFT environment?
Pip is an awesome tool for Python development and deployment. One of the great things is its ability to use version control commits and tags as packages, as well as tarballs, and PyPi.
> Experts Exchange currently displays its answers for free at the very bottom of its pages, but it misleads visitors into thinking that they have to pay for access.

Only if you reach the site with a google.com referrer. Without referrer there's no answers at the bottom.
Reston, VA (west of Washington, DC) - FULL TIME, INTERN, CONTRACTOR (H1B maybe if already in US)

Lucidmedia Networks - http://www.lucidmedia.com

Internet ad network startup looking primarily for Java developers (experience with SQL and front-end web experience would be great too). The Internet advertising industry is quite complex behind the scenes and somewhat parallels the structure of the financial markets. We are analogous to a high frequency trading firm, buying page views to serve ads in real-time on exchanges like that of Google or Yahoo. Our server software runs on Spring, MySQL, Redis, and AWS at a glance. We handle at least a billion page impressions a day. Big data, big throughput.
Small yet experienced team, catered lunches _everyday_, your choice of Mac or PC (dev team is almost all Mac now), good benefits. Our office has superhero posters all over the walls.

Contact me directly at sahil_lmn@yahoo.com.

I actually got hired through a HN "Who is Hiring" thread. These things do work!
Amazon has reduced Kindle costs supported by ads but I'm not aware of any ad supported books.
I'm not sure what sort of thinking you think I attacked, but I'm not against people starting startups to sell them. I think it's a mistake when people come up with startup ideas by trying to think of startup ideas, instead of looking for real problems that need solving. But you can be working on real problems and still intend to sell the company.
The Radeon stuff is improving rapidly. You can't buy a diesel truck for the power and then complain that it won't take gasoline. ;-)

To hell w/ NVidia. If they won't play ball, I'll spend my money on an arguably slightly lesser performing product that is more open.

Though, currently the linux emulation layer in CURRENT has a change that broke the linux Flash binary. I've been flash-free for about 2 weeks now. I can't decide if that's a curse or liberation. Otherwise, I personally think FreeBSD is a mighty fine desktop OS. ZFS is really nice.
Yeah here is one for Python:

http://wordaligned.org/articles/essential-python-reading-lis...
People support marijuana legalisation primarily because they want to get high rather than because of an e-petition.

Decriminilisation in places like california and modern research into medicanal uses has probably helped too.
Exactly. The UK government did this a few years ago, and every response amounted to "we're going to do it anyway".
Loaded: Cracking Captcha
Ashton was pure. Deeply moving, insightful, perfect delivery. I loved the Carl Fisher story.
One thing I dislike in the new Google styling is the general lack of contrast. It makes navigation a bit slower due to delayed object recognization for power users.

Everything just takes milliseconds longer to sink in.
> The content industries don't cause this. They go to politicians and say "pretty please take away people's freedom to protect our profits".

It's not the fault of corporations. It's not the fault of politicians. It's the fault of corporations and politicians working together. When that happens, it is usually not in the public interest.
I would have thought that too, but I know there are some superfast edge servers that reroute to their datacenters.
I view time in a similar way. Whenever I remember something from awhile back, I quite literally visualize "rotating" the year in question like a dial until I'm on the correct day/month.

I also view numbers in general in a similar fashion. For example, I see 0-10 as points on a line that is about a 45 degree angle. 11-100 are the same but they are at a 135 degree angle. 101-1000 goes back to 45 degrees. This keeps going in a sort of logarithmic fashion... each turn between 45 and 135 is smaller/"zoomed out" as the numbers get larger. When I think of a number, it's almost like pointing to it (except all in my mind). Kind of hard to describe, but maybe this makeshift diagram will help.

10,000

\

\

\

1000

/

/

/

100

\

\

\

10

/

/

/

0
Do the following things 1) find a startup meetup on meetup.com in your area 2) find 3 startups you want to work with/for 3) start a blog where you interview people from those startups to a) provide them free links to their website b) to learn how they think and c) to chat with them.
Advantage Of Article Submission
Effective article submission is about writing quality articles that are useful or interesting to readers, using some on your own website and getting some published on other related websites.
They could be using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. That's what previous apps in the "give me information from a photo of my food" space have done.
Yes, they have lots of users (and the article doesn't mention how they used network incentives to increase the user count), but more interesting would be the rate of conversion to paying customer, typical time to conversion (also, segments: do some buy right away or use for years, then buy), etc.
JQuery 1.7RC2 Released
I did this last week, pretty much only crappy domains are left in .com, so you either have to buy one from someone, choose a different TLD, or get creative with spelling.
Craig Landrum, Ex-Army Cryptanalyst, Leads Darpa Shredder Challenge
SEEKING FREELANCER - SF, CA / Remote Possible but likely it will have to be in the US at this point. We pay competitive market consulting rates.

A Different Engine is looking to expand our contractor portfolio.

WHO WE ARE

A Different Engine is an interactive agency which builds advanced media applications for our clients. We've been focused on TV applications on Connected TV's (Yahoo Widgets, Samsung SmartHub) and Over the Top Boxes (Roku/Boxee/GoogleTV) but have been moving to doing more mobile work (particularly on tablets) and some traditional web (most of our web work is for web services which power out TV and tablet apps instead of consumer facing web apps). This is a bespoke design and development business. We've worked with CBS/NBC/Comcast/The UFC and others.

WHAT WE NEED
We currently have a few inbound projects which may exceed our current capacity so we're looking for a few contract folks to help bridge the gap. We tend to prefer local folks (SF, NY and we have some folks in Cleveland) though we will go remote for the right fit.

PRIMARY TECHNOLOGIES
Our two most pressing needs are for frontend Javascript folks and Android Folks. On the JS side we do full Rich Internet Apps on TVs our main libraries are Jquery and Backbone. On the Android side we actually have a few inbound tablet projects and may have some work on the new GoogleTV platform (V2).

When we do backend work we like Rails, we've played with Node/Redis/MongoDB - we think this may be a good stack for some projects, and we sometimes have to deliver apps in PHP. We're really technology agnostic. Because we do bespoke, project based development we can't afford to be tied too much to specific technologies. We use the best tool for the job when we can, and sometimes we use the technology we're told to use. Thats the nature of our business.

You can reach me at mike AT a different engine DOT com with questions or even just to chat ;-)
If someone comes along who writes poorly-architected messes but that achieve those goals better my client will leave me for them. I will be disgusted as a programmer that this happened, but it only makes sense.

I understand what you're trying to say, but I disagree that people perceive "programmers" as highly-paid peons. If they did, why would you want to work for them? There are companies who are desperate for good programmers and recognize that good programmers are hard to come by. Negotiating with them is much less adversarial, I assure you.

I don't disagree with a lot of what you're saying. I think we can both agree that a good programmer understands their role in the business and should view their practice holistically as a part of a much bigger entity. However, I don't think that people universally see programmers as overly-paid gurus or what-have-you. Assuming they want skilled programmers to work for them, why would they look for replaceable cogs and peons?

The true cost of hiring those kinds of programmers will not be apparent until 5 years down the road when you're spending 80% of your budget and time fixing bugs and putting out fires from pissed off client who cannot believe you would ship them such a shoddy product.

Again.. maybe there are people in the world who still do not know what a programmer does or the value of hiring good programmers. I would argue that they're probably in the minority or hiring for a position that doesn't require a lot of skill. In that case perhaps Patrick is right -- but again, why would you want to work for them unless you're desperate to fill in your H1B requirements or you're straight out of school and have no experience. A good programmer can do a lot better in my experience.
One of my coworkers is black and I don't see any racism here.
Ah, I think I follow then. Mathematical proof of very large software systems may presently be impractical; the verification procedures currently in place for avionics systems are pretty daunting as they stand.

I'm not sure what we would gain from an overall software engineering professional qualification. While I am quick to point to avionics development as (in my opinion) being true software engineering, I also acknowledge that a great deal of software is not built using any methods even remotely as rigorous. But then, it also probably doesn't need to be.

You put a lot more rigor into building a house for people than you do a house for dogs, and you put a lot more rigor into building a skyscraper office building than you do a house. And rightly so. Each needs to withstand different levels of pressure. I see no reason to apply rigorous engineering processes to iPhone games; it would be a waste of time and resources.

As it is, the industries that require rigorous software development have produced their own standards. I suppose if you could ascertain the similarities across industries and codify that into general software engineering practices, that could be a good thing, but you'd probably still need industry-specific regulations to make sure nothing was missed.

I dunno. Maybe if more software needed extensive rigor it would be more obvious what needs to be done across industries.
Leaderboard: http://www.shredderchallenge.com/
This brings back memories of Encarta, brilliantly executed.

Very interested to see how the API develops, would love to use it for http://quizipedia.org
That site is incredible and keeps getting better. Thanks for the post.
Not to bee too pedantic, but using "Why Combinator" in the article? I kinda looked down on the article after the first paragraph. Good great grammers, an awareness of what you're talking about, and proper spelling go a long way towards establishing proper voice. (sea what I did there)
Great ! Like the title and then click on the link , what you get is this -
HTTP 503 : Service Temporarily Unavailable , HUH !
U.S. Gov't Glossed Over Cancer Concerns As It Rolled Out Airport X-Ray Scanners
Take a walk in the park with Street View
I think this mini-debate is a clash of personal values more than anything else.

Jacques is essentially saying, "I'm a programmer, and I'm secure in that. Even when I'm just gluing existing code together, I'm damn good at it. I know that being a programmer who hacks code, first and foremost, doesn't make me a replaceable cog."

Others are not satisfied to think of themselves as doing gritty work that is not always an act of creative expression or a uniquely inspired solution. If I'm just wiring stuff together, the thought goes, surely anyone can do that? Ah, but the creativity lies in the problem solving, and that's what the employer/client cares about anyway. So I'm a problem-solver, first, and a programmer second.

I think some people are happy to be "just programmers" or "programmers first" and others are "programmers second."

In reality, there aren't two different jobs called "Software Engineer" and "Programmer" across companies, though glamour of title may be a hint as to how a company values and treats their programmers/engineers. If you have 20 years of programming experience and are hired to write code, you're a programmer by default. Whether the work is dull or interesting, creative or rote, or paints you as an "artiste" or a "cog in a machine" depends on the job rather than what you call yourself.

It can't hurt to bill yourself as a problem-solver with business and entrepreneurial savvy, etc., as companies will always say they want people with iniative and higher-level thinking, even if they aren't prepared to let you exercise it. Put another way, no potential employer is going to say, "We're looking for a programmer, but it says here you're an engineer. Are you sure you're not over-qualified for this position?" Your self-given title won't save you. On the flip side, a good company looking for highly creative engineers will know that many of them call themselves "programmers."

In summary, I see the "don't call yourself a programmer" advice as coming out of fear of being a replaceable menial worker, more than reflecting any reality about hiring practices or the deep nature of programming. Jacques's argument is, "Programming can be pretty menial sometimes, but good programmers are hard to replace. So avoid the duller work, and solve people's problems, and you can have a happy, highly-paid career."
Adaptive learning startup Knewton to power Pearson's digital titles
I'll be writing a blog post on the API soon. Stay tuned to http://blog.wikimaze.me
Richard CLAYTON, not clark.
Http://www.analoghype.com/music/16197/
Great example of where I wish I had a downvote button. This article is fluff linkbait, but it is also on topic.
It's like you've just described every major government contract site I've been on in the past 3 years.