skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a third option that is more accessible than building your own products - consulting.

Clients seeking consultants have different interviewing tactics, even though the clients themselves have an engineering background. A good consultant is too expensive / too busy to be asked about detecting loops in linked lists or about how many balls can fill a bus. Therefore for a consultant references and a portfolio are what's taken into account.

And these can be built through hard work. At first you could build something for demonstration purposes and open-source it. Or you could work on a project pro-bono. Of course, consulting requires good marketing skills - but we are talking about generalists here.
As far as I'm aware, this kind of clause can't be enforced in the EU so if you're in Europe, sue away!
since when does a designer do html/css/js? or am i confusing a designer with a front-end dev?
Well, you don't need extensions, but lots of library interfaces still use them because they haven't been updated to FFI. So sometimes you can't use the code you want. The good news is that it's usually pretty painless to whip up your own FFI binding.
Don't they already use EC2?

It isn't the answer to everything. In fact, it's the answer to far fewer things than people think. EC2 is great because, as you say, it has no big up-front cost. But when you start scaling it isn't actually very affordable.
NASA's Kepler spots Earth-size planets outside our solar system
In my opinion Mac OS X is already pretty great and I don't need to add very many things. Focusing on all of the different apps and tools we use seems like a dangerous rabbit hole.

I recently had to re-install Lion on my MacBook Air - here's what I installed after: http://milesmatthias.tumblr.com/post/14366026639/i-re-instal...
Yes, I'd say that's at least partially true. The innovation on JRuby's side is in new ways to integrate with the JVM, rather than in API or language design. MRI folks need to innovate both in how they design the language and APIs and in how they implement them.
Chip executives are gloomy, says KPMG
Quality Coding Takes A Break For The Holidays. But Why?
It's been mentioned, but check out Alfred. I'm a big fan.
One of my faves on the list: http://panic.com/~wade/picker/

Nice time saver
https://github.com/daeken/Emokit/blob/master/Announcement.md

(I've heard a few people make similar complaints to yours, which is really really saddening to me. Regardless I'm still going to buy one and see what I can do with it :))
OpenSSL is a terribly complex library to support, but we've managed to steadily improve our pure-Java port (originally a herculean effort by Ola Bini, it wraps bouncycastle in an OpenSSL-lookalike API). There's still probably issues, but we have tried to fix them as they come up.
Fill in the Fucking Form
My hardware is a brand new 13" MBA with an old monitor, comfort curve keyboard, bose notebook speakers, and the magic trackpad.

For software, homebrew and perlbrew are essential. vim and tmux are how I do everything related to my job.

Adium is for OTR and annoying scripts I've written[1]. Chrome for the being Chrome. I use dropbox like an addict, too.

I tend to script everything I need with Perl, including mechanized tests and creating quick REST APIs[2]. Being able to use v5.14 in place of whatever comes natively is a nice touch.

Homebrew brings in git, tmux, haskell, racket, go, and redis.

Combinations of these tools let me do pretty much what these other lists allow but I probably haven't had the most elegant experience, either.

[1]: http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=4187
[2]: https://metacpan.org/module/Test::WWW::Mechanize
Peer to Patent needs help finishing their pilot
That's definitely our hope. JRuby has come further than any implementation in making Ruby fast enough to replace C or Java, and if it's possible to write more in Ruby then all implementations will benefit. C extensions are the number one thing holding the C/++ implementations back.
I don't really understand the appeal of Quicksilver. If I want to quickly launch some random program, I just press Command + Space (activates spotlight), type in the first two or three letters of the program name, and press enter. You can also do calculations and look up words in the dictionary. Isn't this what most people use Quicksilver and Alfred for?
I see no paradox. Their legal funds are larger than yours, so they can do whatever they want.
This one's awesome: teehan+lax recreated their logo by painting the partners blue

http://www.teehanlax.com/holiday2011/
Piratebay Anti Sopa video
Apologies if this has been posted already but I couldn't see anything about it posted. Thoughts?
A reasonable question to which I have no clear answer, but this is the company that tried to turn a $420 million operating loss for 2010 into a $60 million operating income by amortizing their marketing and acquisition costs. Perhaps they're still bleeding money on such costs?
In this case the 'cycle of violence' goes back thousands of years.
Thanks for the encouragement. I'm in the process of two related posts, but they're not quite finished.

One is on my master's thesis and how a design can actually be the result of a complex dynamical system. The other is on the process of navigated a design state space during the web design process.

I'll be sure to post both here when they're completed.
The Icon Handbook by Jon Hicks is now available
Seriously? Except its not a plasma, its a fluid, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations don't include (at this stage) electromagnetic forces. Show me a paper that can describe a fluid in motion where the force on each element is computed as a function of the electromagnetic state, the thermal state, and the viscosity state of each other element and I'll show you a candidate for a Nobel prize.

At least in the open literature I haven't seen CFD models that consider the influence of elements beyond a few centimeters, the magnetic forces in the Earth's core move elements meters, if not kilometers, away so the date sets do get very strange, and you have to mix in that if they cool to much or you hit an eddy current and the pressure drops the current gets cut off and the electrodynamic forces stop.
A better solution would be a political and legal reform, so crap like this from the heights of $$$ stops "trickling down" on everyone else.
Its a political post so my politically loaded question should be forgiven. Wouldn't it have been acceptable, if United States had liberated North Korea instead of Iraq?
PhoneGap 1.3 Released
Here is hoping for you to have even half of the marketing juggernaut of that other pig game :-)
In Jobs' case, it could be psychologically related to the fact that he was adopted.
This will things much easier for me. Thanks!
I love TotalFinder, and also can't live without flux. I don't really understand the excitement over Alfred/Quicksilver though... what does it do that spotlight can't? Just activate spotlight by pressing Command+Space, and type in whatever you want to do (you can launch a program, do a calculation, look up a word, whatever).
giant technology union. that's the only way we're ever going to have the type of cash necessary to lobby congress to do anything.
I had checks printed up that had that wording with a URL pointing to a page of T&C. It was the same language that was on my phone / cable bill. The checking account and the page are long gone, but it only had a couple of clauses. One was that this agreement overrides any other and that my ISP/web host was to notify me in writing via certified mail and allow a 2-week grace period before taking my account down for overages. They had a habit of preemptively taking down my site if I reached 85% of my bandwidth before the 15th of the month. And it was only down for the internet at large. Anyone on the ISP, including me, could still see it fine, which was very frustrating.

They always cashed the checks without complaint but I moved to a better hosting company about a year later and never got a chance to invoke the "agreement".
There might be some cases where it makes sense. Think about stupidly extreme sports (SES) for example. If someone organises a SES event for you, it might be reasonable for you to have an agreement that says they checked everything they could and you were informed about everything you should. But you shouldn't be able to sue them when you get hurt, since you knew from the beginning the whole thing will be dangerous. It doesn't have to be SES to apply this logic to some extent however. Every time I go kayaking on an artificial course I sign some "I'm aware this is dangerous and I want to do it anyway" papers. I'm sure those papers would be the first thing presented in court if I wanted to sue the organisers for breaking some bones. It's not giving up my rights really, but has almost the same effect in a limited scope.
I would agree that calling ext3 obsolete is odd, but I don't know enough about the particulars of file system performance to understand why data=ordered is or is not problematic. This leads to the interesting problem of judging the opinion of several contradicting, but apparently similarly qualified people. I'm sure someone on HN is able to decisively explain: can someone do so?
Absolutely. It's headlined as if the situation is some kind of financial failure, but there are no numbers on the premium they're currently paying or the cost of a new center. 1/4 of the piece quotes prospectus boilerplate. No named attributions, nothing from analyst types following the industry.

Not even clear cash is the key here anyway, I would think they could finance a data center with some kind of construction mortgage, and maybe some leasing deal.

Now, pulling things out of my hat, I understand that companies can fully deduct their IT investments made in 2011, that's a huge tax advantage. I don't even know if Groupon can make use of that (are they paying taxes yet?). But if Groupon is missing that window because they _cannot_ get financing in place, _that_ would be a story, one with implications for Groupon, their model, the banks, and bank valuation of corporate IT capital assets.

This, on the other hand, is not a story of any sort.
Firefox is an amazing piece of software and the fine folks at Mozilla are always pushing the envelope of online experiences. Am happy that Mozilla folks can concentrate on the software for the next couple of years without having to worry about funding.
Ask HN: Success from A/B testing?
I am interested to know how many of you have initiated an A/B test of your home page and was it instrumental in helping you make decisions? We are considering a redesign and are thinking about an A/B test with the two different landing pages but I wanted to hear about your experiences first.
data=ordered certainly does have significant performance problems. Most notably, it causes fsync() to actually act like sync(), so flushing a single file to disk can potentially cause a flush of the entire disk buffer instead!
Excellent points. Interesting to note that most startup businesses that go through traditional investor route exit via acquisitions or getting acquired to get returns for investors (or IPO).

I had this conversation with an angel investor with our team, when we said we are interested in staying in business for a long time and build our user base & let them speak for us. The investor said you need to take a call whether you want a 'lifestyle' business or you want to take the other route to build scale fast. Haven't heard from him yet. :) We were not convinced that we should throw lot of advertisement money, get lot of eyeballs, convert 1 or 2% into sales & just grow.

So, the question is: what kind of commitment can we give to our customers to assure them that a B2B business here is to stay & serve them. The purpose is to "exist" not to get acquired.

Would love to hear examples & stories of businesses that have managed to do the balancing act.
StumbleUpon hits 75,000 advertisers
Google's integration is actually the reason why I'd switch back to Firefox in a heartbeat if the performance kept up -- there's some serious privacy issues involved in browsing the web using a Google browser while logged in to a Google account.
I would highly endorse Slate (https://github.com/jigish/slate), a free, open source, awesomely configurable window manager for OS X. Also Vimium (http://vimium.github.com/) for browsing the web is incredible. It's made browsing much faster and more enjoyable. Both were developed by former co-workers of mine.
Son of Obsidian is currently my favorite

http://studiostyl.es/schemes/son-of-obsidian

I do not like the contrast of Solarized (low contrast) nor monokai (super high contrast with bright pink). Son of obsidian is a good in between.
Porting big codebases to Android
the key to this post is here:

"They’re doing something on their own, are already kicking ass and are not available."

It's not that they can't use an extra $10k per month. They most certainly are available.

They're not available at 'speculative, "startup" wages' with unknown prospects even if you get them on board with a token amount of equity and even if you get funding.

They can do it all, and are doing it successfully. They don't need you.

So what? I don't need Google, I don't need Microsoft, I don't need IBM. These companies would hire me by putting some money on the table.

The key to the 'desingineer' is that, you know, they don't really need you. One of your skills (the person looking for a desingineer) is putting the pieces together, finding the people and getting them on board, none of whom can singly do everything. So, they need you.

THe desingineer doesn't need you. If you want them on board, you're going to have to actually open your pocketbook. Imagine that.
* calibre - ebook management and conversion
Are they allowed to do this as a public company? Would their growth be attractive enough for someone to take them up on the offer?
I am dumber for having watched this....still it was funny/corny.
It's really just Spotlight on crack. Once you've done your initial search and the file/app/whatever is highlighted, you can then proceed to instantly perform actions or scripts on it. It's basically just a really nice macro feature baked into Spotlight with a new UI.
LinkedIn holiday cheer from Snow E. Mann
I'm game, but it needs to meet near subway; preferably down- or midtown.
Ask HN: Company Structure and Timing
I'll keep it short and without much fluff:

My partner and I are committed to starting a company (so this is no "dream," rather a real commitment). We checked the market (it's viable, profitable, and growing), we wrote some test code for a proof of concept (so we'd be convinced it can actually work), we spoke with some potential business partners (they're interested), etc. On the surface, everything is going smoothly.

At this point, we believe we should incorporate: to avoid potential problems between us in the future (so far so good), to allow investors to come in, and to allow us to work with other business partners and affiliates. We have no revenue at this point (we haven't put anything out in the open, yet, only tests).

1) What does your experience tell you about forming:
a. LLC
b. C Corp (Delaware)

We understand the differences between LLC and C-Corp. My question is really whether LLCs are so "bad" (we were told by a lawyer that VCs would be reluctant to invest in us in the future, if we choose this structure). Is it such a big deal to change the LLC to a C-Corp in the future?

2) Considering we also want to bring in other individuals and offer them equity (again, we don't have money so our idea, proof of concept, and equity are the only way), is it the right time to incorporate now, or can the incorporation wait?

3) Did you defer payment to the law firm, or pay upfront? We spoke with one prominent Valley firm and we were told that it could cost us ~$5000 to set up a C Corp and write up all the stock verbiage. Is it better we bite the bullet, dig deep, and pay now, or defer (again, from your experience)?

4) How much do you normally pay equity to UX specialists? A one time job (could take 3 months) vs. long haul.
I guess it just depends on your definition of "big". I'm curious to see how many views they have. We have many, many views.

Our new Posterous Bar -- http://blog.posterous.com/introducing-the-new-posterous-bar -- was also built using a few Backbone views for those interested. We love Backbone.
It's hard to say why the other applications don't have sorting, but I think it's a stretch to think there is some design genius behind it. It could be for pretty mundane reasons.

I agree you don't have to reimplement spreadsheet features, but make sure you have a CSV dump if you think your users would appreciate that.
This post highlights the difficulty in making data accessible in a "traditional" web app. One of the most intuitive interfaces for accessing and manipulating tubular data is the spreadsheet, but very few web apps look or behave like a spreadsheet.

I would argue that there is an inherent friction between usability and accessibility of information. Adding options to sort, filter, search, or selectively show or hide fields might make data more accessible but result in reduced usability overall. The exact point where the tradeoff happens isn't clear to me, but 37signals tends to err on the side of usability, at the expense of accessibility. Of course, one could argue that in a data-intensive app, accessibility _is_ usability, and vice versa.
This program is a proof of concept that SOPA will not help prevent piracy. The program, implemented as a Firefox extension, simply contacts offshore domain name resolution services to obtain the IP address for any desired website

Part of SOPA is a provision that any tools for circumventing the DNS hijacking are themselves banned. So this extension would have to be removed from the Mozilla repository. At best, it would be distributed underground, and hence would not help to preserve the freedom of the average user.
They still brand and export all kiwifruit from NZ as Zespri (http://www.zespri.com/). Country of origin labeling has no doubt made this irrelevant to the average consumer though. If I remember correctly, the name was a bit of a mystery to most kiwis at the time.
> The specific terms of this commercial agreement are subject to traditional confidentiality requirements, and we’re not at liberty to disclose them.

This sentence lets one think about the importance of openness in the Open Source community. I wonder if the community would accept the same clause if Microsoft/Bing were to provide the next three years of Firefox searching.
> Why wouldn’t a user just use a spreadsheet then?

Spreadsheets are hard to share and hard to version-control, and the data is cumbersome to access programmatically.
Brilliantly Simple Idea: the Treadmill Desk
2012 Trends: Analytics Comes to IT
did you use cocos2d?
I've been using about:blank as my home page for awhile, does Google ever advertise Chrome on the default Google/Mozilla homepage?
I realize I'm one user in 300 million, but I'd describe it as an "utterly confusing mess" before I say it has a "soul".
The obvious other choice is to hire a designer or a design firm as needed (or depending on what you need, buy a design template to get you going).
I am genuinely surprised at how much others spend on software. I started totaling up his list (excluding monthly services like dropbox) and stopped when I reached $500, which was right around Cornerstone.
Sometimes, a pen is just a pen. :)
I'm a Mozilla web developer. Mozilla controls the homepage now, and all "snippets" on the about:home page are for Mozilla-related projects or things we believe in.

So, no.
imo it depends largely on your co-workers / environment. For instance, where I work (bigco) there is no way a large number of OO-java programmers are going to switch to a functional language like clojure. However, there is a chance that OO-java programmers will switch to scala because the mental models can be similar enough when you're first getting started. That is, you technically can program java-like scala because you have objects, strong-types, assignable variables, etc. So while scala has powerful language features available, the barrier-to-entry is lower (for a "regular" OO-java guy).

With clojure, on the other hand, if you haven't done "functional" programming at a large scale you literally have to relearn "how" to program. You don't have state, you can't assign variables, you only sort-of have objects, and there are all these funny parenthesis all over the place.

So first ask yourself the question "who are you going to be programming with" and "what do you want to learn".

I've written and deployed non-trivial production systems in both and I'm fond of saying that scala drove me to clojure. I'm not trying to start a flame-war or anything [1], so let's start with the good stuff:

* you get functional constructs & concise iterators

* ruby-like mixin functionality is awesome (implicits) - this allows you to architect using composition over inheritance which is a huge win over java imo.

But...

* the syntax of scala can get quite perlish at times (my favorite being the "crying-kissy-face-operator" :_* [2]).

* the strong typing can be maddening. For instance, if you're trying to use two different JSON libraries (as in early days of Lift) you have to do all sorts of ugly type conversions. This leads to type boxing and...

* For "nothingness" tests you have: Null, null, Nil, Nothing, None, and Unit. Fun. [3]

* inline-xml (who asked for this?)

It was when slogging through a Lift-based recommendation system that I discovered clojure and I have to say, I love clojure. You can program in a lisp but still use the gobs of java libraries available. The syntax is straightforward, the performance is good/acceptable, and because it's on the jvm you can use it in Hadoop etc.

So while it does take longer for an OOP-minded person to think in more functional terms, I think you'll find that learning a lisp will make you a better OO programmer.

* [1] I have tons of smart friends who love scala. I like scala better than java, but if I had my pick, I'd pick clojure over scala. YMMV

* [2] http://www.mail-archive.com/liftweb@googlegroups.com/msg0822...

* [3] http://blog.sanaulla.info/2009/07/12/nothingness/
maybe I'm a weirdo, but I care a lot more about memory consumption than processing performance. Starting up irb with jruby-head and java 7u2 uses around 80MB. 80MB for vanilla irb!

MRI uses around 8MB

Edit: I get down voted for saying that I care about memory consumption? My use case may not be everyones, but it's a legitimate issue is it not?
googlecl posting to blogger, fwiw. I'm not maintaining a blogger blog, but the command line options are pretty neat.

http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/
Why sex workers' rights supporters are upset with Google
Electric Knife Sharpener
The electrical chefs knife sharpener has been in existence us all for quite a while nevertheless it can be easier than you think to get those who are unfamiliar with this. We could see that most of the people these days nonetheless make use of their own classic guide-book sharpener to get their blades razor-sharp.
That's certainly not inevitable for most people.

If you find that you are declining mentally after 30 or 40, you are either doing something wrong or are genetically extremely unlucky.

Exercise, a good diet, proper sleep, combined with plenty of intellectual and social interactions seem to be enough to keep you from measurably losing any mental faculties well into your 70s or 80s (and even 90+ if genetically lucky).