skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So you actually wrote the article at the same time you started your first side project, and expect people to follow your @#$% goldmine example?

As any software developer knows, projects fail. And 90% of the time they do not fail from technical reasons, as you found out (the hard way). Any developer worth his salt can make a project work from the technical point of view, but only few have a great idea that they can actually market. It's not the programming that matters, it's what you sell with that program. And you have to know how and what to sell more than you know how to program.
This looks more like an elaborate, very early prepared aprils fools joke.
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starwars in ascii! Wow!
I think you are missing the 'part of' part. To get an interoperable solution for cloud storage, you need a shared protocol for cloud storage, but

a) it the only thing you need.

b) I do not see why the normal users would have to be able to set up a server providing the service. Normal people do not run a mail server or know anything about POP or IMAP, but they can (sometimes with a little help from their email provider) set up er devices to work with any email provider.

If WebDAV were as wide-spread as POP and IMAP, we could have a world where, say, an iPad had a setting where one entered the URL of a WebDAV provider, a user name and a password, and the iPad apps then use that dropbox by default instead of hard coding a way to connect to DropBox.

Having an easy way for people to set up a WebDAV server at home would help getting there, but isn't strictly necessary. What is necessary is that a significant fraction of cloud storage providers agree on a protocol. For that to happen, I think those providers must feel threatened by a large provider (or maybe not; IIRC, Dropbox already has WebDAV support)

With that in place, the final step would be to get device OS manufacturers to support that user setting. That might be the largest stumbling block.
I pretty much just get my wife's IM messages via Adium / Growl. Growl lets me scan them to see if I need to switch workspaces to respond, and if I don't, then I don't break flow.

Nothing much else bugs me in Growl on any regular basis.
Using collaborative diffusion rather than path finding
Retracted - working now.
> Perl don't allow code execution blindly in regexps.

Blindly? No. That e (or ee... ) at the end of your match will stare you in the face as if to ask, "What the hell were you thinking when you thought this was a good idea?"

(I say this and yet I love Perl.)
They can spring up wherever they want, but they'll be blocked in the US and thus will have access to a lot fewer users.
I agree that your explanations are quite possible and hinted by the reported facts. But also, there can be communication problems inside the startup as well. Maybe the people sending the strongest "can't wait for your return as full-timer" signals hadn't yet heard others' concerns. Maybe even the founder and lead engineer are being squeezed from other stakeholders. And even though a legal complaint is unlikely (and unlikely to succeed), liability concerns can lead to strange omissions and spin in the 'official reasons', to provide maximum legal cover 'just in case'.
Reasonable costs here appears to mean "a plane ticket home", and appears to only apply if the former employee elects to return home; in particular, the first page of Google results will tell you that the company isn't responsible for moving the former employee's property (which is the real relo expense).
Thanks! I've modified it.
I think you missed the point. It was meant to be inspirational to those who WANT to. There are no valid excuses if you WANT to.
"Why The MongoDB Hate?"

Very simple, because the product appears to be severely overhyped and underdelivered.

Your primary datastore is not something you want to be taking risks with. If you are looking for a toy you can use any DB you like, including Mongo. If reliability is important to you why would you want to serve as a guinea pig for some seriously buggy product?

NoSQL has its place where you have a very specific use case to be solved, but your primary datastore of record is rarely one of those. Mongo specifically is being positioned as a general-purpose datastore and because of that (for me at least) it fails to demonstrate any value whatsoever. Every time I ask any Mongo advocate for why it is a good choice the most compelling thing I hear is "schema-less DB" and "speed of development". Guess what, maybe if your database forces you to think about your schema, data layout and the query load you are going to have to develop a more reliable application. Having to think through your schemas in advance actually forces you to be disciplined and prevents you from making errors.

Once you are ready to confront the reliability issues SQL databases that had years of hardening against all sorts of risks look like a safe harbor. MySQL is not too bad for Facebook and Quora, what prevents you from properly tuning it to work for you?
I wonder how many of these non-Google $200K+ salaries are for developing in non-Java languages/frameworks
My big concern with so-called NoSQL solutions is the "culture" that seems to be brewing there.

If you go to the "Don't use MongoDB" post ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202081 ) you will read some, IMO, extremely worrying comments from a few pro-NoSQL users including antirez (Redis).

For some reason NoSQL now apparently means "unreliable datastore for unimportant, throwaway data" and defaults are chosen accordingly. Why the hell is that?

NoSQL for me doesn't imply anything other than "no SQL", and at a stretch "no schema" - this makes a lot of sense for many of us who routinely need to create databases that are logically trivial. In many cases they are a bunch of glorified persistent hash tables that usually don't fit in memory. But this doesn't mean they aren't critical. Why would it have to? This isn't anything new either, we've had Berkeley DB for a long while. It's just a bit of the dry side and it may fall short in many cases.

What I was looking forward to and I hoped I could find in the "NoSQL scene" is an alternative to traditional DBs but without the overhead that many times is not necessary (but sometimes is, and I intend to continue using PostgreSQL when appropriate). Ideally, something as simple as mongoDB appears to be (tried the interactive tutorial).

So when exactly NoSQL stopped meaning "no SQL" and started meaning "unreliable cache"? Other than the simplicity, I fail to see where it would fit in the market then (other than the amateur market). There are better, stablished DB caching solutions. There are persistence libraries in any moderately language. There are reliable databases that are fast enough when you have the budget to scale to several dedicated servers.

How about Riak?
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The key to making Growl good is to prune what it notifies for. What do you actually care about? Me, I mostly use it as an iTunes track info display, just a little note in the bottom corner of my screen that fades in and out quietly, and reappears when I hit a hotkey. I've also used it to display error messages when debugging an Applescript. There's one guy who uses it to [give himself instant visual feedback when he breaks the build](http://szeryf.wordpress.com/2007/07/30/way-beyond-cool-autot...).

I don't have it notify me with info about every email. I don't have it tell me when someone IMs me. If an app starts spamming me with notifications about something I think is unimportant, I go into Growl's prefs and turn that app off.
10gen might become a victim of it's own popularity. I have heard:

* Yes, playing with Mongo is playing with fire. Know what you are doing. We don't claim that you should use us as your only database.

* We're going to fix these issues soon. The beginning days of MySQL etc were also frightening, with Oracle and MS SQL Server admins warning of all the dangerous things that can happen.

If they confront their issues, I think it's just a matter of time before Mongo wins the NoSQL race. They have what matters most - good people, a brand, and great expectations from customers.
Beautiful work. I felt the jolt upon entering was a little unnecessary but still. Just gorgeous work. Downloaded source. Thanks :)
There are a lot of fair points here, but I know personally for me that I was using jQuery for a lot of websites, then saw the beauty of some .coffee files and got into it. Since then, I've cared more about just plain ol' JavaScript and have stopped using frameworks (most of the time).

So while the syntax of CoffeeScript may mean giving up on the syntax of JavaScript, it's brought me closer to vanilla JavaScript and made me more aware of it, without being in the context of a framework like jQuery or Prototype.

Just my two cents...
I suppose I could have re-branded it and generalized it a bit. I decided to move on partially because I was so turned off by the attitude of the Boy Scouts organization at the corporate level. At a local level, they all rock (I'm an Eagle Scout myself), but at the top corporate level, its a different story.

Perhaps I gave up too soon, but I've moved on. I'm well into my new project, which is certainly not sexy, but I'm excited about it.
See also: http://www.hackersdelight.org/
Unless you are doing cutting-edge research in your daily job, you are not much different from those indies working on "superficial crap", apart from the fact that being "part of a company" gives you the illusion that it's more legitimate. Was google search or skype superficial and trivial? They started as programmer toys. The point of the article is that a programmer can start with $0 and build the whole product. A programmer is like a farmer or an artist, a de facto entrepreneur.
New 1 TB models just came out, so obsolescence doesn't explain the pricing.
Sometimes building something entirely on your own takes you away from the craft you love. If you are master chocolate maker, but have to focus on business, accounting, marketing, etc., maybe you'd rather just work for an awesome little chocolate company and focus on your craft, ya know?
I am not sure if I got your question but the best source of available marketing I see is SEO. If you want any of your product quickly publicized you must spend some money on SEO marketing.
Politics-oriented software development [2005]
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since you're being deliberately obtuse, i'll spell it out for you on his behalf.

WILL USERS STILL LIKE IT, WHICH IS WHAT GETS DEVELOPER SUPPORT, NOW THAT IT COSTS MONEY?
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Ouch, didn't know that. Thanks.
No, ideally you'll send it directly to other people's appliances, and use public-key encryption where possible.
Last remark on the issue:

Let's all agree that, before saying something like "a portmanteau, if you want to get technical", you are 100% sure that it is correct. Maybe that should be in the HN guidelines ...

I only brought up this issue because technically it's not a portmanteau (at least according to how OED and a bunch of other dictionaries define the word), and probably wouldn't have made a remark if the phrase "if you want to get technical" wasn't used ...

I lay down my guns ... now
Probably because there is absolutely no mention of the limitations - especially the durability issues on the website.

People who want to store schemaless documents are going to approach MongoDB as a safe data store and get some very nasty surprises if don't have the proper configuration. You would expect a database to run slowly if misconfigured, but never to lose data.
I DON'T LIKE CoffeeScript either, it's more Ruby like, why can't people just love JavaScript for what it is. Please read the good parts by Crockford or listen to his talks!
Personally, considering they are well-funded, doing normal lobbying is just better IMO.
The offer letter is the written contract we're referring to, but your underlying point is valid because no competent offer letter is going to concede to the candidate the employer's right to terminate employment at will. Most offer letters go out of their way to bolster the employer's at-will employment rights, for instance by making mention of "probationary periods".

You can ask for anything, but in general there's no piece of paper you can get (outside of executive recruiting) in the US that is really going mitigate the risk that the employer can change their mind. You might be able to cover any expenses you incur getting ready to take the new job. If you negotiate that.
No more than the C64 or (arguably) the Amiga, though. There have always been games for every platform but I think the author's point is that if you want to look at what's been transformative in gaming (at least in the US), it's the rise of NES, the ubiquity of good computer based games (which for the past 20 years has been dominated by Windows PCs, not Apple), and more recently casual gaming. And for my money, if you want to talk about casual gaming (which the iPhone is now catalyzing much more rapidly than the predecessors), I'm sorry but it's Adobe flash and web based games that started to create that market. iPhone is probably taking it further, but for anyone who still thinks Steve Jobs belongs on this list - what is your favorite Apple created iPhone game for that platform? Or even the Apple 2? Personally, I liked Mystery House, Canonball Blitz, and all the Infocom games.
If Steve Jobs is that much serious about gaming then he would have taken the acquisition offer from Bungie first time, not after hearing that Microsoft also wants to buy Bungie. Source http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/10/jobs-turned-down-... .If they bought Bungie then there was a chance that Mac would have been a gaming platform not PC or XBox.

iOS devices emerging as a popular casual gaming platform is a side effect imho. The credit goes to casual gamers who plays games for time passing. By that same logic one can easily say that Mark Zuckerberg is the pioneer in gaming, in a sense that he brought gaming to 800+ million user.
Yes, because not being notified is equivalent of gambling and heroin.
The learning curve for CoffeeScript is so low and the benefits so high that it's a smart decision to use it. You're not giving up Javascript, the number one rule of CoffeeScript is that CoffeeScript is Javascript. I don't think anyone expects you to learn CoffeeScript before Javascript. CoffeeScript is basically a tool you pick up in an afternoon after you have spent the time needed to understand and wield Javascript.
I hate to denigrate mini-compiler projects, but calling this a "Lisp to JVM bytecode compiler" is a bit much, isn't it? Unless I'm missing something, it looks like the language it compiles is just prefixed arithmetic expressions.
That's almost exactly my point. Being an English major isn't about literacy, but literacy is a prerequisite. Being a CS major isn't about programming, but programming is a prerequisite. Literacy is taught from a young age; programming isn't.
which is strange since its hard to tally this: http://blog.foursquare.com/2010/10/05/so-that-was-a-bummer/

with what Harry says today about it never being serious and never losing money: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3203223

Or maybe he doesn't count the opportunity cost? Or reputation for that matter.
Firefox is 6 parlsee but my website is 3 files so

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7133749/can-i-split-jquer...
Why link to blogspam?

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/740785012/touchfire-the-...
The comments here so far seem oddly negative. This looks really amazing. I mostly program in screen sessions on servers, and I've so wanted to use the iPad to do this. Unfortunately, you either have to carry a separate keyboard everywhere--defeating the point of the svelte iPad--or use the on screen keyboard, which drastically reduces my accurate typing speed. I wouldn't have believed it were possible, but this addresses all my annoyances.
>I don't know how much more simply I could have said it, but I'll take a shot:

Your previous comment was only four sentences, one of which was an exhortation to read the previous sentence twice! I'm sure your implication wasn't intentional, but I find the suggestion that you aren't speaking simply enough for me to understand your reasoning offensive.

It's not that your explanation was too complex. I just don't agree with it.

It's rational to demand more from someone who you pay more. If one employee of a certain job-title asks more money than his/her colleagues who have equivalent skills, then expecting that person to handle more work or less desirable work that comes to the team is rational. It may not be optimal in every case, but it certainly doesn't make the manager's entire company "a bad employer".

There are many good opportunities in life that can come from not being maximally greedy. Some are once in a life time, some are more commonplace. One need only read biographies to find examples.
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Ha! Yes! 'Cs get degrees' is also another execution of the college strategy. Another one is to take easy courses (cough humanities) to inflate the GPA for the GPA-as-only-signal employers.

Like you, I wound up being more ultimately interested in the knowledge.
I've done quite a bit of Python and I agree. If you want to be "readable" or explicit that you want to copy the list, then you use copy.copy().

There is absolutely nothing wrong with [:]. This kind of judgmental critique of code is completely absurd IMO. If someone doesn't know something as basic in Python as slices, he or she shouldn't be reading Python code. If by all means you want to have people who don't know Python reading and understanding your code somehow, try copy.copy(). It's not like the performance hit is meaningful compared to list() and [:] is the fastest of the three.
If you already have iOS apps making money, I'd say the easiest path to additional revenue would be iOS tutorials/screen casts/code examples. There's a market for this, I've paid for such things several times. Take a look at:
http://www.raywenderlich.com/store/ios-apprentice

Get a Stripe account and a copy of ScreenFlow. Pick 5 new iOS 5 features and make a tutorial + example app. Then spin up a little Rails/Django app to take $10 in and spit out a .zip file.
This is another Kickstarter iPad keyboard project that successfully funded this summer and is shipping soon: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1030552097/ikeyboard-0
Actually, being notified at unpredictable intervals, as a bit of random-reward, has effects on the limbic system similar to gambling and drugs. Onscreen notifications let you binge on these little pleasures: enjoyable, yes, but rarely productive.

Your strawberries are ready to be harvested!
Yuuuup. If data gets into your DBMS then it can't get lost. Period. That level of fuckup is simply unacceptable.
CoffeeScript < JavaScript. I find the CoffeeScript syntax very confusing.
He means THIRD PARTY developers, not Growl developers themselves.
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DocRaptor is a great way to quickly generate shareable PDF and Excel documents. It's easier to use than similar web applications and produces better results.
Sounds about right, unfortunately. The usual policy is to have you evacuate to the designated area (or the backup thereof) and to remain there until an okay is given.

I'm surprised the managers were even allowed inside, really. They wouldn't do anything because they didn't want to lose track of their workers and they never planned for this. They're usually too afraid of legal problems to take any initiative at all. The only good thing is that a lawsuit like this might make them and others plan for such things in the future.

I doubt this is the place where people have been stuck outside in inclement weather during an evacuation.
To save $2 and cheat the developers out of earning something for the work they've put into the program over the past 7 years?

It's still open source and you can still compile your own version, but nonetheless the developers deserve a tiny bit of compensation for the work and support they provide.
Thanks for the heads up, I'm using an older version (mostly because I personally review the code and host the extensions I install).

This is worth doing it again.
http://blog.foursquare.com/2010/10/05/so-that-was-a-bummer/

You had 11 hours downtime and didn't lose money?

What about opportunity cost? Reputation?

Now you have to share your secret :)

(I guess, if you weren't profitable, you had nothing to lose?)
For those that didn't read through the entire linked page, there is also an Eclim client for Emacs under active development (https://github.com/senny/emacs-eclim). I don't know that it's quite as feature-rich as the Vim version, and it's certainly less well-documented, but it does add some nifty IDE features to Emacs without forcing you to do your development inside Eclipse itself.
facepalm. Indices on disk is a solved problem.
Also to keep in mind: if you downvote this, you are probably an addict in denial! Our 12-click program is arranging meetings now in major tech hubs, check meetup.com for all the details.
Hi! This is the Market Economics Fairy! I help supply and demand equilibrate everywhere! If nobody can find good programmers to hire, it means that programmer salaries are too low! Raise programmer salaries until...

...erm, actually, students are remarkably goddamn insensitive to their future salaries when it comes to picking a major. And the other way S&D could equilibrate here is by fewer companies even trying to hire programmers because they know they can't afford them. What's really needed - considering the Camel Has Two Humps effect where some people have the magic programming gear and some people don't - is a mass effort to take students in journalism studies or, heck, smart unemployed adults, and administer some simple tests to see if they have large amounts of hidden programming talent, screw the college degree. But that effort would benefit lots of companies equally, and that means it's a commons problem. Not sure the Market Economics Fairy can easily solve this one.
I guess GCC is a text compiler then.
Traditionally, interns and foreign exchange students are used as slave labour, then disposed of when their tenure expires. One thing that I found about business, which initially was a shock but soon became the expected norm, is that people will make all sorts of promises about all sorts of things (especially pay, employment or promotions) and the substantial majority of those promises will be broken. Usually such promises turn out to merely be pep talks.
Tip: You can make swype in landscape (on a tablet) take up 1/2rd of the screen and place it in the bottom left or right corner, so you can actually have the same feel as using it on a phone or in portrait mode.

Check out the screenshot: http://www.smartkeitai.com/swype-3-0-for-android-honeycomb-t...
[Edit: I have only used /e when I really meant it. OK, sometime, I might have gotten that code from a config file... :-)]

An O/S or language can only have so many levels of security.

The same goes for using input strings for "/e" as when you explicitly write use re 'eval' and use input strings in regexps. Or use input strings as shell commands, for that matter...

(Am I being trolled? I get lots of beginner lectures and strange side issues of insignificant problems. Should I just stop criticizing PCRE? :-) )
As far as I was aware only the US government has everything in the public domain. In most commonwealth countries, Canada, UK, Australia, NZ, India, et al, the copyright is either vested in the Crown or the sovereign state itself.