skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I fixed a spelling issue using the iPhone app. For some unknown reason it published an earlier version. It has the same content, but a different date.
How much time did you spend on this?

It is very nice. I would use it.
New Born Startup
"open for users" this is not true, for all intents and purposes, Android is as open for users as iOS, but unlike Android iOS is not full of bloatware from the carriers. If you want to get the most out of your Android phone, you have to install community mods no different from an iPhone. My phone costed $3000 MXN and it was paid in cash, and I feel it was no worth it. I just hope one day (when my warranty expires) my phone gets a mod, because right now my phone is not supported. My next phone is certainly not going to an Android one. If you have the cash go for an iPhone, if you don't maybe Windows Phone is better?

P.S. Android is definitely the Windows of the smartphone world, but unlike on PC you can't replace it with the OS of your choice.
Clever Optical Furnace Could Cut in Half Energy Required to Make Solar Cells
This hits me like the most elaborate humblebrag ever.
http://www.google.com/ads/preferences

See "Your categories"

Edit - Sorry, I copied the link from the Google results page, it acutally shows up as adspreferences in the ad, but ads/preferences below. Kind of strange.
Oh, I know. I was making a more general point that degree equivalency is just a giant mess.
I gave up on the project after the split. Why can't there be a concerted effort behind OpenOffice or LibreOffice? Two half-baked open source projects don't equal one good commercial project. I'd rather give my money to Apple and hope that they eventually build a better product.

Free is great, but I'll take reasonably priced quality commercial software. That reminds me, it's time to upgrade to IntelliJ 11.
Congrats Patrick (she said yes)! You have been an inspiration to tons of folks on HN that are starting out on their own. Wish you the best for 2012 and beyond.
I see you have experience of the 'picking your battles' thing and that is exactly what we need to do. This has been very useful and given me valuable perspective. I'll research as necessary and definitely post back here as to how we proceeded.
Surely he/she should have said "German laptops should have LibreOffice or OpenOffice". It seems built into the German mindset that policy should be enforced at a federal level.

Whilst I agree with a more integrated monetary policy in the Eurozone the continual assimilation of power in Brussels is the wrong way for Europe to go.
A simple HTML tag will crash 64-bit Windows 7
Mindjet moves to cloud; do viz tools give it an advantage over Asana?
Nice and very useful application. Looking forward to an iOS client in the future.
Microsoft XBox 360 with Kinect Gaming Console Review
The new Xbox Kinect has been tested and shown around the gaming industry for some time now, to get their opinions and to tweak what ever problems there have been in any new console development and now it is ready to go on sale to the public. And the gaming industry is very excited with the feed back from the professionals so far.
>Just look at how many H1B positions are advertised and how much legal but shady stuff goes on. Put ad in local paper among classifieds for "free dirt available", if any resumes are received from US citizens they are discarded (note they have to be "considered" but not accepted), and so on.

That video has nothing whatsoever to do with H1B.

It is for a green card application which is completely a different thing. The choice the employer faces is, does he sponsor a green card for someone working for many years and has invaluable company knowledge, or send them home and hire someone with the same qualifications but train them again on the company internals.
The LivingSocial in house team knocked it out in a couple hours -- they're crazy good. I couldn't believe we used "found light" in a hallway and had respectable results.
I thought the same, but it seems they display the image 1:1, so no scaling is applied. If that's the case, then I doubt any of the phones will process the image. (Though there might be reasons to do that, which I'm not aware of)
Hrm, I think I have to refuse to watch the video then.

The idea of a plexiglass factory is enticing enough that I choose the fantasy over reality.
I think this may have been posted prematurely. Even in the version you linked to, it seems like part of the traits example has been cut off.
This issue comes up a lot on hacker news. While I do stongly support a stronger emphasis on skilles immigrants, and I do believe STEM grads are valuable, I believe this article (and this genre of article in general) overlook a critical point.

I've mentioned a RAND study many times in my comments on hn. This study took a very objective look at the pay, career prospects, completion time, attrition rate, and so forth of STEM grad degrees vs the professions (MD, JD, DDS, MBA, etc). The conclusion reached was that STEM grad degrees are unappealing to young americans because they are no longer competitive with other career paths available to the "best and brightest".

So, does it make sense to specifically staple green cards to evey stem diploma when the most objective research suggests the shortage may be market driven?

I don't have a definitive answer. I think it's a complex question wothy of discussion, and not at all the no-brainer the atlantic article claims it it.
When is the winter solstice?
The dude is a hypocrite. What is he actually hoping to accomplish by doing this? Who is he going to help? Instead of this BS, he should either live his life an enjoy his money, or, if he's feeling guilty or something, he should consider donating some of his money or volunteering for something he believes in.
FTA:

> Apple targeted HTC instead of Google because the data detector feature isn’t a standard part of Android OS. Instead, HTC modified Android to include the feature with its phones.

So it's probably an HTC Sense feature, as I've only seen it on their customised apps.

Given it's something I used on featurephones 5 years ago I think the whole thing is rather absurd, yet sadly it's one of the more insignificant patent battles that has been happening recently. It's madness.
I don't have such a problem with founders moving here. Although I guess they might compete for investor money, I don't see that as such a big problem for our economy as competing with workers for jobs.
VC firm & Valley companies cover Rebecca Black's "Friday"
Wow, I seem to have missed the boat on caniuse.com =)

Thanks for the info, everyone.
He strikes me as being completely out of touch with the value of money. He's living as a single man on the median income of a family of four and he's acting like he can't have a single luxury? It's ridiculous.
Who gives a shit.
The 64M number is for everything: browser development, website, various infrastructure (direct hosting costs, development, maintenance) like bugzilla, the addons site, the update servers, and so forth. Also for legal, marketing, HR, QA, etc.

300 people is a very low estimate for every single browser development effort on the market right now. For example, Opera had over 700 employees in Feb 2011 according to <http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2011/02/01/decade>. I'd be incredibly surprised if Google doesn't have at least several hundred people on just the non-WebKit parts of Chrome, plus the people working on WebKit at Google, Apple, and other places. Microsoft had somewhere between 30 and 50 people working on just the JS engine in IE9, according to unsubstantiated rumors, for what those are worth.

So the short of it is, browsers are harder and take more effort to develop than most people think. ;)
> The bits of PHP that are "much worse" are mostly either legacy cruft that nobody in their right mind uses anymore

Ever dealt with PHP code in the wild before? The amount of PHP written by people not in their right mind is VERY high.
I would say do the Gist essay, and at the close of the essay say "And I'm getting started with programming, here's a Github repo".

That way you'd get past the person who's checking "Did this applicant follow the directions (submitting only two URLs)?" But we can (likely) check out the code during the in-depth review.
Yes, Stanford dropped out.

"Stanford University has withdrawn its application to the city of New York to construct an applied sciences and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island."

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/december/nyc-campus-12161...
I completely agree that WebSockets are a very good innovation and have their place but I do think that there are a lot of situations where you can achieve the same result easer with SSE and using a HTTP PUT to send messages back to the server.

For example a collaborative project management tool like Asana where saves are silent and update live on other peoples screens is a better place for SSE and a REST api than WebSockets, where as a real time game is probably a good place to the latter.
ImGame - Social gaming platform launched - 800 users in less than a week
Congratulations on your engagement!

I've been in a similar situation (though with much less traveling and speaking) as you with consulting with US customers while living in Japan, Malaysia and now China and at the beginning it's really hard to gauge how much time is lost due to the overhead of finding customers, proposals, communicating across timezones and so on...
I would gladly (and have) trade half of my income for the freedom to work on what I want, where I want, when I want. You simply cannot compare working on your own stuff from a home office with working a salary job for someone else in an office.

That said, it rarely works out that way for the best developers, who end up making more than they could if salaried. Particularly in the long run and when value of your time is considered. Did you catch that he worked about 15 hours on BCC, made $55k in "a few weeks of consulting" and put AR in a place to explode in 2012 and 2013? He doesn't say how much time he spent on AR, but I doubt the total of all of those was equivalent to the stress of working 60+ hour weeks as a "senior programmer" at some valley startup.

Not to mention that Patrick is WAY past the senior programmer level :)
I would imagine that employees would get training for the software they use so the benefits of the software being easier to learn on your own isn't an issue for government workers or really any place where they train their employees.
Since this post seems to actually have been made in July of this year, does anyone who has been following WebSocket details have any comments on how this situation has changed?

My impression of WebSockets is that it's not actually a "finished" high level protocol. They could have just brought a basic socket style interface into JavaScript and left it at that. (And based on its name, that's what you'd expect at first.) But they decided to add various features, (for better or worse, I don't know yet) on top of that. (I guess part of it is the challenge of working not just on TCP, but sort of within HTTP as well). Just as you wouldn't just pick up TCP and start blowing "data" through it without some additional application specific structure, you're going to need to add your own structure inside WebSocket's framework.
Hopefully it will turn into one man's quest to get in touch with the value of money. Why this is on the HN front page baffles me though.
thriving ecosystems don't matter? that seems like a silly thing to say.
>PHP continues along the path of adding "features" randomly and without even understanding the purpose behind the feature, and so you get half-features that kinda work and don't really solve any problem in the context of PHP, but were just added so they could check off "some feature we don't understand" on the feature list.

This is not how features get added to PHP. Please spend some time on the PHP mailing list if you would like to know how it works.
I just edited the date manually. The original link is back up.
So it's really not outlandish to include it when talking about the subject.

If you want the startup visa to pass, there is a very good reason to do it by itself: the startup visa is likely to pass, whereas comprehensive immigration reform is not.

Lots of putting words in people's mouths, very little contribution.

It contributes even less to deny his claims, which are basically correct. Obama's blueprint for immigration reform does include amnesty (you need to scroll to page 3 to find it).

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/imm...
Kudos for thinking hard enough about this problem to not do what everyone else is doing.
Out of Harvard, and Into Finance
Apps to Keep Children Happy
This looks great - but we shouldn't forget your competitor workflowy.com - the grand daddy for this domain.
It's hard to say how much time I spent on it. I started the first iteration, standupbuddy.com, about a year and two months ago. I've tweaked it here and there, until about two or three months ago when I started working on it every day for an hour or two.
Sebastian also had a similar thought:

http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/the-genius-and-tragedy-of-p...

Discussion on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1720244

And here's what Patrick replied to him.

"Well, I'm happy that people like me and are invested in my success. I'm also a little discomfited by the psychoanalysis. I'm pretty happy with where I am in life, have a pretty decent career trajectory at the moment, and life is improving in non-career ways which matter more to me anyhow.
That's about all I think I need to say."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721309

I think what he has written is still valid. Hope you got the answer.
Money isn't hugely motivating for me. I mean, if I wanted more of it, I could have more of it, but I'm clearly not really optimizing for income-this-year. I have all my needs covered, live a comfortable middle-class life, have health insurance, etc. Also, ahem, $70k is not exactly a life of poverty.

Things I really enjoy other than money: my kinda quirky work-life balance, a fair deal of freedom in how I arrange my affairs, not being bossable, etc.

Longer-term, I wish all SV senior programmers at startups every success and happiness, but I don't see myself going down that path. I could get 0.5% in a funded startup with a modest chance of success, too... by giving away the other 69.5% of it after raising a seed round.
Huge congrats on the business and personal accomplishments.

Can you talk a little more about the two paths for AR? Specifically, talk about the math behind growing it organically and why you couldn't grow it to $N million / year (or even $NN million / year) in the next five years without taking money?

From my perspective, you'd be crazy to take investment right now, but I haven't run the numbers and maybe there's a hard ceiling on your growth rate if you don't.

EDIT: The "crazy to take money" part is because of you saying this: Things I really enjoy other than money: my kinda quirky work-life balance, a fair deal of freedom in how I arrange my affairs, not being bossable, etc.

If you raise money, all that goes out the window. Not only do you now have new cofounders to answer to, but they're expecting you to spend their money, which means hiring a team and growing quickly, working crazy hours, etc. Doesn't seem to fit you, does it?
Vivante is going great guns in graphics, a rival to Imagination?
Multiple inheritance is a silly implementation of traits/mixins and interfaces. MI combines implementation and type inheritance but with traits/interfaces those concepts are separate and therefore it is much more flexible.

The 'use' keyword already exists in PHP for use with namespaces; it's pretty common for C-based languages to overload common keywords.

As far as I'm aware, there are no backwards incompatible changes in this release and servers have been tracking the most recent PHP versions much better these days.

Also, array[1] is the correct terminology.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associative_array
Agreed. If he wants to be poor, he should give away his money.
Free eBook for Effective Online Software Selection
Thereby losing all search for and within documents, when faster alternatives for the most-common action exists? It's a tradeoff I'd never make, but it makes sense, and then it'd probably be lightning-fast.
Ask around your work place and find some of the grey beards that got their start as programmers in the early 90s.

You'll find quite a few that didn't study programming or CS in school, but got their start via company training programs in COBOL, RPG, or Visual Basic in the late 80s and early 90s.
This was back when most universities didn't have a CS Program and programming was just a skill in high demand (much like today).

Some of these folks went on to management, system admin work, or kept pursuing the craft and still work side by side with us today.

So what Hungry Academy is doing isn't completely new, but it's a new idea with a fresh face.
So they have, I only skimmed it. My bad.
Steve Jobs Memorial Statue Unveiled In Budapest
i doubt prevailing wage in new york city is $45k for a programming job.
Prevailing wage determination has nothing to with H1B even if that was the case.
I posted an update when HyBi 13 came out; http://www.lenholgate.com/blog/2011/09/the-websocket-protoco...

The wording was improved around the suggestion to provide only a message based API.

I think the WebSockets protocol ended up being a little more than it should have been. You have to understand that it was being pulled in all sorts of directions by the working group members and that there are good reasons for all of the parts of the protocol (though some of those parts could work better with other parts IMHO). It had to be finished at some point though and I think the working group did a good job in the end.

Personally I think it would have been better had it been explicitly stream based from a user's perspective, but then I don't have the javascript/browser background to know how foolish that probably sounds.
China Hackers Breach U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Decide which Web analytics tool to use for your website
Download the sample PDF on deciding which Web analytics tool you can use for your website.

http://decisionjam.com
The "path to citizenship" outlined there has very little in common with what comes to mind when you say "amnesty". Read the language there, it's all about burdens on illegal immigrants and prerequisites, after which they can get in the back of the line to apply for citizenship. "Amnesty" implies something more similar to what Reagan did.

Again, nobody was talking about this at all until anamax brought it up. And Obama proposing a startup visa by itself absolutely will not pass. You know why? Because it would involve Obama proposing it. See the House Republicans refusing to pass a tax cut this week.
David,

What about a curated list of open-source projects with defined needs, perhaps generated on a month-to-month basis? For example, you guys could comb through GitHub or any other repository and provide users with a top-50 list of projects/descriptions/languages used/etc.

Obviously, plenty of users will continue to contribute bug fixes to the projects they use on a regular basis. But some users might just want an interesting hack that stretches their knowledge and comfort zone - and if it fixes a problem for that project, why not?
China Software Developer Network (CSDN) 6 Million user data Leaked
On a side note, another word for kingmakers is "time-space engineers" as used by Fred Perlman in his "Against Hist-Story, Against Leviathan" work. Now more than ever are time-space engineers sought after and given opportunities to do their magic, to creating new (business) empires and hold Leviathan together for a little while longer.

As a developer, I would prefer to do the opposite. Dismantle Leviathan, dismantle empires. As developers we have the power to change the society, to stop making (business) empires, and to demolish those that exist, such as all those based on copyright and patents. We must base our work on vlaues such as freedom and not on currency.

What Im trying to say is, business as usual or really?
A Ninja in Our Sites
The Memory Glasses: Google's AR-Amped Specs Reveal A Brave, Branded New World
Well, I can tell you that it was, because I have the paperwork at home which says exactly that. While the wage determination isn't part of the H1B process it still has a key role to play in it.
It's been fixed. I found the correct revision and restored it with the right date. The original link works again.
Thanks for your comment. Most of our posts on Betabeat take way less than 5 minutes to read. In fact, I'd peg the bulk of the breaking blog posts on news about the campus at about a minute. This was an investigation into the backstory of how the deal for the $2 billion engineering school that could change New York's economy and tech scene went down. Did Stanford drop out because it was going to lose or is Cornell the second choice?

Sometimes things that take two pages to read are worth it, I'm sorry you didn't find that to be the case in this instance, but what you quoted above comes from Stanford and Cornell. Stanford says otherwise:

"A university source familiar with the negotiations said Stanford’s decision to drop out wasn’t based on any one issue, but rather due to “a whole host of things that held them liable for factors outside of [their] control,” such as big-ticket penalties for missed construction deadlines and the city’s desire “to indemnify themselves for any toxicity” at the Roosevelt Island site. Although a Phase II study was commissioned this year, a full scale analysis of the medical dump under the hospital cannot be done until the building is razed. Should serious hazards be uncovered, the school will be on the hook not only for the clean-up but also potentially for resultant delays.”You had a lot of institutions that wouldn’t even apply because of the terms, and they got even more severe in the negotiation process,” said the source."
I would argue that the brain processes verbal communication skills and written communication skills in different locations and so, while I may be able to write well, I may come across as Timmy from South Park in front of a camera. In addition, while they are thinking outside the box, maybe they should consider other ways of selection other than the same old stuff like resume. My first impression when looking at the site was that they were more interested in my email account so they could email me for years to come, just like when I entered in a contest to take care of an Island in Australia. Emails still come in even though I block the darn thing. But I also agree that it is not fair to assume that the future will be like the past. That would stop me from even trying.
Moving someone else out of poverty would be nice, but would you give up your job to do it? More specifically, do you think that family is entitled to your income? I don't see why the USA should pick skilled workers to move here just to compete with the workers we have, who are already struggling to find jobs in this messed-up economy.

It still puts them well below the US poverty line.

The US poverty line is completely irrelevant to a worker in India. Anyway, it's artificially adjusted to keep 20% of the US population below the line, so it's not useful as an indication of actual poverty.

Most poor Americans, who typically have no job at all, still have a higher standard of living than an upper middle class developer in India. So what?

I answered that in the very next sentence. If it's a simple matter of bringing Indians out of poverty, there's no reason for them to compete with skilled workers here. We could continue to bring random people here from India, which is the opposite of what the article recommends. In fact we should focus on the poorest and least-skilled workers.

I didn't see anything in this discussion about programmers.