skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The so-called borrow rate, or fee imposed by brokers on traders who want to sell short, has dropped to about 30 percent from 99 percent earlier in the month, Leung said. At 30 percent, Groupon’s shares would have to decline by at least that much before the trader makes a profit."

I must be missing something...

When I buy shares, I don't get to inform the broker that the stock needs to go up by 30% before they can execute my trade at today's price.

Betting on a stock to dip 5% seems like a big enough risk that I should be able to make money on it. 30% just sounds crazy.
Super informative, and noted on the 23 yo "me," djb. I've had similar experiences in music (touring the country in a van post-25 years old starts to look pretty aggravating).

I'm about to supplement this thread because I feel the information shared has gone beyond the scenario question (which wasn't meant to carry any ulterior motive but simply help us ascertain what value that might hold in trying to hire a team).

That said, because of some of the talent that has responded with a 'I want to know more' proposition, I want to address that as a blanket comment.

-Aloha
I have some modest experience. None the less, I'm interested. How much do you hope to teach in eight weeks? What should a Junior Rails Developer be able to do?
Seems high compared to the cost of a comparable EC2 node. Of course - you avoid the administrative costs. But it's pretty expensive for an early-stage startup. Possibly a good deal for a larger company, but at that point you might prefer to just configure the EC2 nodes, backups, etc. yourself and save a good bit of $ every month.
Grooveshark did this without inking the necessary deals. If I understand correctly, their library is provided by their users uploading.
So, you're a rails guy that decided to become a recruiter?
You are probably right but this is a war of attrition. There are many, if not the majority, of industry music types who will act this way, but the old guard is literally dying away. So if GS doesn't outlast then a new company most certainly will, it's just a question of when. The power is starting to shift to the artists anyways, and I predict you'll soon start seeing the music industry being run by former artists or artist managers. Take a look at Troy Carter for example, who is Lady Gaga's manager. I'm pretty sure he is an investor in Turntable.fm.
[askew]
"snuck" sounds ugly because the correct word is "sneaked".
Being a Programmer (specifically a contractor or consultant) actually solves a few of those problems for you, since it allows you to throw money at them. Here's what I've been doing since saddling myself with wife, kid and mortgage:

- Consult. Thus freeing your wife from needing to work (knocks off two items on your list).

- Consult from the road. Thus taking care of those financial responsibilities.

Other ways those problems go away if you're travelling and working most of the year:

- Travel. Thus turning defining your community as "Travelling Rock Climbers", "Travelling Surfers", or simply "Travelers"

- Kids might be hard. I chose to have them this year instead of 10 years ago, thus meaning I can bring them along

- Pets are harder. Maybe a really big bowl of food and leave the toilet seat up?

But the short version is that if you want to make travel a priority, you can. Pretty much any excuse you come up with is for your own benefit. I've met plenty of families on the road with school-age kids who weren't planning to go home any time soon.

It's all doable. We'd love to run into you out here.
Sounds exciting.
I'd love to see something like that implemented - for the benefit of having semi-structured messages... Oh wait, there are lots of daemons which already do that. And they use properly documented formats, like GELF. And they support forwarding over network. And they store data inside a proper database, instead of yet-another-file-format.

I'd much rather they simply blessed one of the existing solutions (greylog2, fluent, loads of others) and created a compatible minimal daemon which can be included by default in a distribution. Currently they're neither providing new good solution, nor solving the structured log problem (flat k/v? why not just go json/bson?). They're also trying to solve single-host security, which seems pretty close to impossible without moving logging into something like TPM - just send the logs outside, so that the logging channel is append only.

There is also one point which makes me really worried about what the hell are they thinking... "The timestamps generally do not carry timezone information, even though some newer specifications define support for it." Simple solution is to log in UTC, always, everywhere. Run your servers in UTC too - unless it's your local desktop, there's no reason not to.
It wasn't so much of a question of why, but when. I don't think any sane person expected Groupon to stay up there.
Thanks - I missed the DHE optimizations, and it's really nice to see that these improvements were immediately fed back into OpenSSL.
Since I have just spent several hours unsuccessfully debugging a problem with a Journal template, a missing font, and my TeX distribution, I understand why the author thinks Latex is messy.
Just for starters, the 2 year old and 4 week old wouldn't handle it so well, nor would my wife's medical condition.

Life gets exponentially more complicated as you get older -- something very hard to see before it happens to you.
John Carmack recently discovered that source control systems support code trees can be branched?
Old data so probably a bit useless, but I did a 24-country around-the-world trip in 03/04. We eventually had 37 flights all up, but the backbone was a 17-flight ticket which was about $3300. That gave us something like 4-5 continents including Australia, plus 3-4 flights within each continent.
Data from the database is just as unsafe as data from URL parameters which is why escaping of data must be done in the presentation layer. This is basically the same thing as SQL queries. You have a template like this (most of the HTML omitted).

<li class="<%= user_type %>"><%= username %></li>

Where username and user_type are variables containing data fetched from the database. This template is then compiled to something like the blow. Strings literals of the HTML-safe type start with s", and concatetnation to the output buffer is <<.

out << s"<li class=\"" << user_type << s"\">" << username << s"</li>"

So to implement your own templating language and and template helper functions this is a useful concept. But query building should be in the database layer and HTML building in the presentation layer. People using the database should not have to know of or care about that the data might at some point be displayed in a HTML page.
It's some money but I'm definitely interested. Scroll down and you see some interesting things:

- fork of databases (looks great to try out migrations easily)

- read-only asynchronous replicas

- connection from EC2 or elsewhere

- health checks and "continuous protection"

Looks fairly solid at first sight.
"Would it be different with any other large touch screen interface?"

Yes, I have an android phone and my wife has an iPhone. My 1 year old can navigate between apps, find the app she is looking for, and use them without assistance on any IOS device. She can't do the same on an android device.
I'll take you up on this offer; I'll do it. My contact info is in my profile, if this goes forward.
Yeah, that was a pretty cheap shot. The whole thing comes off as a manufactured controversy; It's worth something to OSHA just to know whether they are reaching the general public via this method or whether they're better off sticking with the existing approach of requiring employers to display posters.

I'm having a hard time feeling outraged over the extra 0.06 cents this is going to cost me and every other American. It's all 'fail early, fail often' here on HN until the government does so, then failure and experimentation are considered intolerable inefficiencies.

This particular project seems like a bit of a miss, but even simple statistics can be enormously useful for some people: http://explore.data.gov/catalog/apps/
How To Travel Safely When Overseas
Google's Thanksgiving doodle up early
How to Talk Dirty to Your Boyfriend or Husband
Right, Grooveshark's entire business model is centered around DMCA protections. Only "user-generated content" affords a DMCA safe harbor defense, so all the copyrighted music they host has to be uploaded by individual users who each assert that they have the rights to distribute the song.
Wishbox Lets Your Visitors Complain About Your New Layout
I think this is enormously exacerbated by roundtripping. Even if it's just 2ms away, and you go back and forth a few dozen times, you are doing a ton of waiting.

This is one of the problem with joinless NoSQL databases, as well, since you HAVE to roundtrip to join.
I've been traveling the world and running my site, Scribophile, for a few years now. I just spent 3 months in Germany living with my girlfriend, and now that my EU visa is up I'm in Colombia for a few months enjoying the warm weather in Cali.

Whenever I tell people about my lifestyle, they 1) are shocked and awed, 2) enthuse about how jealous they are, and 3) assume I'm a millionaire. I wish I could just grab people by their collars to shake them and say, "We live in a marvelous time! With internet access everywhere, you too can do what I do! Plus, you don't have to be rich to do it--I probably make much less money than you do at your desk job!"

Nobody believes me, and if they do, they don't want to take the risk. (To be fair not everyone is able to do so, even if they wanted to.) So they stay jealous. It always makes me a little sad that people stay stuck in their situations often because they can't even envision an alternative, and a little happy that I somehow managed to make it happen myself.
That's not a fair way of describing him, as he's actively becoming a supplier of new developers, not merely acting as a middleman.
Read the article. He was talking about how you need to be able to instantly switch between implementations in the same code base. Sometimes even at run time.
On the other hand, $200 is a common price for two hours of Rails consulting these days. So as a developer bootstrapping a product, I'd rather pay for this and sleep well (one of their bullet point).

I'd be curious to know how reliable it is in practice, compared to a home-grown EC2 setup.
That is not accurate in my experience. Their contracts were even mentioned to be in the piece to be for foreigners, so no one cared, etc.

Sponsers care a hell of a lot that things do the right things when it's important.
The Big Data Boom Is the Innovation Story of Our Time
Wikipedia Co-Founder Larry Sanders' Latest Startup: ReadingBear.org
Great questions.

A junior rails developer should have
- A good grasp of Ruby
- A good grasp of the rails framework
- Experience pair programming
- An understanding of the Agile Software Development, and Test Driven Development
- Basic HTML, CSS, and Javascript skills
- Basic git (source control)

More importantly, they need to know how to reach out to the ruby community, and have developed the skill of getting stuck and learning their way through the stuckness.
It's sad that this is basically a microcosm of the way things typically are in our field.
I've been experimenting with being a joyful and optimistic programmer, and I feel a real difference when I code.

At first, I started with little things, like leaving semicolons out of my JavaScript. I understand the subtle bugs that may manifest from automatic semicolon insertion, but I've yet to have a problem, and I really love the aesthetics.

I work a lot in a language that supports gradual typing, but I and many other devs fall victim to "type guilt" and annotate everything. I started omitting types where they wouldn't offer a performance benefit, or work as documentation.

You know how you're always supposed to store an Array's length in a `var` when looping with a `for` statement? That way you don't waste cycles every iteration re-evaluating the Array's `length`? If my Array has only a few elements, I'll save myself from the clutter of declaring a new variable and just use `array.length` in my condition. Wild, I know.

Does every function need to be littered with `assert`s? Does every program need 100% coverage? Isn't there room for free-thought where there's a best-practice?
I'm not interested in using a discussion about depression among startup founders as a coat rack for a debate about "group think" and the merits of the HN karma system. You can feel free to the last word here.
Real estate courses
AppFog launches first Cloud Foundry service with paid plans
The :: is Scala's cons operator, the Nil means end-of-list. It's actually much more common in Scala to create a list like so:

val nn = List("Jim","Bob")

This creates the same list that the example using :: did. It doesn't need to be explicitly terminated with Nil.
Sort of.

I'm a rails guy, who really enjoys being around people. And I'm asking companies to pay me to train devs, instead of find devs.
This is one of the most gratuitous and condescending replies I've seen on HN. You don't know anything about me, so why would you insult my intelligence?

Computers are very hard to use for people outside of our bubble. Changing that is a major contribution to society and far more than a "wow factor". Seeing disabled people use an iPad is an amazing site.

I'm not interested in ranking ligt bulbs vs iPads, it servers no real purpose. And I'm not particularly interested in having a discussion with an asshole, but I wanted to point out how absurd it is to call something that opens doors for so many people as merely a "wow factor". You are not likely in a position to understand much beyond your own narcissism.
Flickr does something similar with their feature rollouts, instead of branching code they define "flags and flippers" to implement it alongside the existing code.

This lets them gradually test it at scale (expose the new feature to x% of their users and slowly grow x).

More details on their dev blog: http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/12/02/flipping-out/
I really wanted to short this ticker during the IPO, but I was worried that I would have had to pay dividends that would go over my budget and I'd have to give up the positions before they were profitable, or that I'd accidently get futures instead of options (and potentially lose an arbitrary amount of money overnight). Does anyone know how one could have gone about shorting this in a way that made money with a budget of say $2500, (i.e., in a way that would have incurred a maximum loss of $2500) given what happened?
This story and its, "OK, now get this..." tone is bizarre to me. Is the way Fry's has been doing their checkout for the past 20 years really such a strange thing?
The first trademark was issued in Europe. BibLibre were responsible stewards and thus no objection was raised at that point. They acted as they stated they would: they applied for the TM on our behalf, received it, and were generous enough to sign it over to HLT at their expense.

Outrage was expressed over the US trademark and still is to the current day. It would be interesting to see how US courts find in this department.
"webkitMediaSourceURL is not available"

Guess my latest Chromium isn't bleeding edge enough.
ΕΠΙΠΛΑ ΠΕΡΙΚΛΗΣ
12factor.net is not connecting for me right now. Google cache says it is this: http://twelve-factor.herokuapp.com/
Isn't it still up from where it started?
HTML5 Could Mute Apps-Browser Argument
Tuition will be 6k paid over 5 years ($100/month)

I haven't asked the companies' permission to publicize yet. Sending them emails now, and will get right back to you once I get their ok.
Yes, though I'm probably moving to Oakland. If it's not in your gmail, look back into your movie project email from ~March.
"check-in" apps
Are you seeing comment karma totals at all? I see your account is old enough that you date back to before the current practice of not showing comment karma scores by default (except the scores of each participant's own comments are visible to that participant when logged in). So are you asking for a feature that would be visible to each participant, to see up and down votes on that participant's own comments?

The site founder, pg, asked for suggestions on how to "stave off decline of HN" in a thread he opened 233 days ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

He then announced an experiment with the current practice of not showing comment karma scores in general 224 days ago,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333

noting that he might change settings back and forth as the experiment continued. About two days later he opened a simple yes/no poll about the experiment

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039

and 216 days ago he replied to a question with a preliminary report on how voting behavior has changed.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465271

As I recall, and as I just tried to verify by using HN search, the site founder pg and most of the other high-karma, long-time users here are reasonably well pleased with the results of not showing comment scores except to the participant who posts each comment.
That one minor restriction of your freedom of speech really doesn't carry a lot of weight when I compare it to the widespread abuse of power by cops.

If I'm stopped by a cop in Germany or the Netherlands, I don't have a thing to fear, except for being fined for a traffic violation or a car malfunction. You don't hear stories about cops abusing their power, because they are extremely rare. Cops can be trusted.

If I'm stopped by a cop in the US, God knows what may happen. I could be beaten, have evidence planted on me or be accused of crimes where their word is simply enough. Cops are not to be trusted.

I'd rather yield to not being allowed to deny the holocaust, thank you very much. It's not as if the US doesn't have a whole range of exceptions to freedom of speech[1] anyway, some of which could reasonably be considered to include holocaust denial (incitement, defamation, obscenity). It's not arbitrary that it's forbidden in Germany and it's really ridiculous that some Americans keep bringing that up. Is that really the best you can do, complaining about the insidious nature of being denied the right to deny the holocaust?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country#Un...
This is an app to prevent heat death. That's completely inappropriate to have a contest for.
jumar, you're contact info is not in your profile.
My email is shereef@gmail.com
I'm not in the Bay Area, but would be interested if this if it were online based!
This is exactly what I want to be doing in my placement year starting june!

Traveling and programming. How did you afford the trip Alex? Savings or working on the go? If you don't mind, how much did it cost too?

Thanks
> I must be missing something..

When you borrow shares to short, the person you are borrowing them from (usually a broker) specifies a fee. Your quote from the article is saying that the fee is 30% (which is friggen huge, but is part of the manipulation that occurs with a hot IPO.)
see also more discussion on code4lib listserv http://serials.infomotions.com/code4lib/archive/2011/201111/... and http://serials.infomotions.com/code4lib/archive/2011/201111/...
Boxee Box app harnesses Slingbox content
Sounds like an interesting approach. I like how you're thinking and I'd make my way there for 8 weeks in a hot second. Would love to hear more.
Fundraising 101: When you raise, it's about customer acquisition and traction.
You can put clickable links in LaTeX.

And if you're including mathematical formulae, which scientific academia will do, HTML is rubbish for formulae.
Agreed. Tuition is $6k, paid over 5 years ($100/month) if you don't get hired, or don't want to get hired.
Chłodnice powietrza
Ask HN: how to get commercial experience
I'm a self taught ruby developer. For several months I've been trying to get freelance rails/ruby work but I keep getting told I lack experience. I made several small but significant contributions to open source in order to gain experience but now I get told they want someone with experience developing a full app and not just libraries or gems.

There are already several excellent open source apps that do everything I need. I don't want to reinvent the wheel. I've also contacted people hiring ruby devs & offered to work for free in order to gain experience but I rarely get a response.

This seems like catch 22. On the one hand I hear how in demand ruby devs are but at the same time I can't seem to give away my services. What is a wannabe dev to do?

P.s posting anonymously so people don't interpret it as an advert
I read a lot of slide decks. I go to very few conferences (live in NZ) and videos of talks are often not available or of poor quality (camera stays on presenter or slides obscured). Also I can go through a slide deck in a few minutes while a 1 hour presentation takes an hour to view the whole thing and a significant amount of time for me to decide if it is uninteresting.

Obviously you don't get much out of presetations that are just 20 flickr photos and 10 words but for decks like this you can learn a bit.

Since many presentations are "read" by more people than "watched" I'd hope that authors will pay more attention into improving the readability of their presentations (perhaps by releasing more wordy versions).
In-app purchases can be used to trigger your application to download new data, but not new executable code.
How does the brain grow if no (or few) new neurons are created post-birth?
many people have made heaps of money these past days shorting grpn. let's wait and see what happens by the time the 180 day lock-up expires.

the risk with shorting grpn today is the small free-float given that it's easy to create demand with small amounts of capital. it's a no brainer that when the lock-up expires this stock will fall like a brick.
Nice. Even for more risk-averse people, that's a pretty sweet opportunity.
You don't have to. For instance, in CouchDB, you can use view collation to retrieve related documents in a single request.
No, you sell someone else's shares immediately and promise to buy them back to replace them in the future. You're right that it's basically an IOU, but you got the order backwards.
Groups is also offered as part of Google Apps, where it's actually useful (as internal mailinglists with web-based archive) since it's a closed environment.
> Is it easy for programmers of all abilities to understand and use?

I am working with two guys right now who have less than 8 months of programming experience.

They are not having a problem with scala. They can do useful work in it.

What they have a problem with is all the other stuff that you just have to learn about building systems.
I didn't read too closely - isn't it basically an app that reminds you to drink water on a regular basis? Why not have a contest for that?

In fact why not have contests about stuff that saves lives?
I got tired of reading about building websites. So, I built this. attempts+=1
I believe this is a bad example. Because CVS is only under maintenance there is no new feature getting added and the last stable release was in 2008. Also anyone that does a bit of research on version control software would realize CVS is only around for legacy purposes and there is enough paths to convert to SVN or a more "newish" DVCS.