skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why aren't more technical books self published?

I've heard these same things echoed from non-technical book publishing experiences too. The publishers are quite simply middlemen, they can front some production costs to get books in to brick and mortar stores but expect very little unless you have a proven track record and you give a lot up for that. A friend wrote a book (a novel), found a publisher, and basically he was going to pay for everything, literally, pay for the first round of published books, pay to promote, effectively self-publishing the book but sharing the profits. His best avenue for making money on it is to sell the books himself on amazon. Never mind the crappy nature of so many technical books anymore.

Technical books, with technical audiences? Short of the tiny amount of money upfront, I can't see at all why you wouldn't self-publish. The audience is forward thinking, they get it.
Please, let me view the source code of that defibrillator
Seriously, pypy outperforms Cython in pretty much all cases unless you provide type informations and even then, pypy is often faster. Complex projects, like twisted or django tend to have a flat performance profile - in order to run them reasonably fast, you would need to put types everywhere and very likely convert classes to C structs. This is not going to fly and you know it, cython is only useful for people inside numeric community.

Also, it's true that pypy took many years to build, but it actually does work. If you claim that pypy never shipped, it very likely means none of the "new python interpreter" projects would ever ship for you, but hey, there are people out there for whom it works.

Cheers,
fijal
Yes. They funded every major email crm plugin (etacts, rapportive, and xobni)
This has been all over the New York Times (to give just one example):

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/us/politics/obama-signs-mi...

More in the L.A. Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-d...

MSN/MSNBC covered it, as did Rachel Maddow on her show. I couldn't find anything recent on Fox News or the Wall Street Journal so maybe the "media blackout" is just the right wing press.
Narrow choices.... How about Solaris, MINIX or BSD? (Yes I know, you'll just say UNIX is UNIX, but still.....)
So far just faster python have been a killer feature for some people :) True, it does not fit anyone, but hey, nothing does.
Budapest, Hungary: Prezi is looking for smart people in several different positions. I won't go into detail, generally if you are interested in working in Budapest, this is a great place to be. For details go to: http://jobs.prezi.com/
If Google is able to achieve what it needs with "onclick" or whatever and provide direct links, it should definitely be doing so. The indirect links are not user-friendly at all.
Exactly. He's not discounting any of the other stuff that's required. He's just emphasizing that you should fish where the fish are.
Starting a Continuous Delivery Project
Mac. Because with one you can have all three.
The key I've found is not worrying about how beautiful or clever the code is, but how maintainable it is.

If the code is designed properly, the only requirement I have is that I can go back into my code and change it easily to what I now need it to do. It should be malleable like silly putty. If I can do that easily, without requiring massive rewrites, then this means that the code can change as my requirements change, and that to me is a good design, and "good enough" code. So don't worry about optimizing too early, but make sure the code can be optimized easily when you need it to be.

If I want to make code changes that requires massive rewrites when my requirements change a little, then it means I've coded myself into a corner, and I've done a poor job designing the code.
People probably don't know this yet: IBM probably has stopped R&D for their software (DB2, WebSphere family, IBM JRE, LotusNotes, etc). They're just milking the license and support money. At IBM, the motto is: "It's not a bug, it's a feature" when you call their tech support. Sometime you get bitten by a bugfix that supposed to cure the problem for General Motors so the only excuse they can give for you is that "it's a feature (for GM)".

The latest WebSphere Community Edition is apparently just Tomcat + additional throw-in features. IBM HTTP Server is just Apache + IBM plugins (plugins for integration with WebSphere, WebSphere Portal, etc). I wouldn't be surprised if IBM rolls out new DB2 Community Edition based on PostgreSQL or something (they're not currently, but who knows...). They even have their own Hadoop thing going on too: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/ebusiness/jstart/hadoop/

With Open Source, they know that software has become a commodity. So why not invest with moderate expense in Open Source as opposed to keeping expensive Software R&D? They did what they had done to their PC division. By the way, they still have their R&D but probably operates at a different level of requirements.

"Combining research, specialized skills and sophisticated technology is the recipe behind I.B.M.’s Smarter Planet initiative, begun in 2008. It now has more than 2,000 projects worldwide, applying computer intelligence to create more efficient systems for utility grids, traffic management, food distribution, water conservation and health care."

This is probably one of the most crucial strategy at IBM. Once you're tightly integrated in the core function of a city, a town, a state, a country, it's almost impossible to replace you.

Microsoft is making in-road to the government too lately but judging from the progress, they're frying small fishes: Sharepoint for Intranet, a bunch of business processes, windows for desktops, MS Office for documents. Even with their cloud initiatives, Azure and Sharepoint for the Cloud, they're still stuck in that market: intranet.

IBM, on the other hand, is printing Driver's License and ID cards on behalf of the government (http://www.pss.gov.bc.ca/bcmp/id-card-production.html). They're charging per-printed-card by the way. So if you ever lost your card, government will charge you X and IBM will get a piece of that.

Check out IBM recent purchases: cloud, cloud, storage cloud, cloud, software for government (Curam: claim management system, social service, pension plan, etc).
Yep, I had a game pulled from the Android app store for using the word 'Pong' in the title. The game was ping pong. "Easy Custom Pong" was pulled about October I believe, so they've been prepping this for a while.
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Hiring C++, algorithms, and systems junkies. We've hacked the kernel, JavaScript, and everything in between. We love computer science and systems hacking. We dislike fads and one trick pony programmers who've only learned one trick.

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Pune, India. Full time.

Styloot is a search engine for fashion. Currently it's difficult for women to find the clothing they want online - it involves browsing many sites, it's unclear what to type into the search box, etc. We aim to make that process easy.

Currently we are 5 people on the tech side - myself (CTO), our CEO, a developer, and two designers, as well as 8 girls on the fashion side. Culturally we are pretty much a valley or NY startup - I'm a NY startup guy myself and I wouldn't work anyplace with big company culture.

We are looking for a junior programmer. There are a lot of things to do at styloot and we don't have time for all of them. We are looking for an entry level programmer to whom we can hand off the easy tasks. Web scraping is one of the biggies - we index a lot of sites and each site needs it's own scraper. Of course, if you can do more than just the easy tasks, that's even better.

If interested, send me an email. Contact info is in my profile. If you have code on github/bitbucket, you don't need to waste time writing a resume.
> Say you are throwing two outdoor parties a year, but otherwise will not serve more than 8 people. The best solution, if you start with nothing, is to buy a set of dishware for 8, and then throwaway plastic cups and plastic knives twice a year ad hoc.

Not really. Only if you've no time to look for good dishware (surprise party?), can't afford it this instant (or fall in the common pit of not doing the math for the long term) or you absolutely do not have space for the “extras”, which is fairly rare.

To extend the metaphor, this “disposable” code tends to end up in unexpected places and stick around polluting the ecosystem forever.

Or, like some people, using disposable stuff every day and probably having trash all over the house to show for it.

…

That said, disposable code is fine. The metaphor isn't exact, but does point to some things to be cautious of.
We Won’t be Divided | Authspot
That's the case for Factual. We have perma-openings for software engineers and are always trying to find additional great people to work with.

I've been posting to HN monthly for about a year. I get responses from 2-10 HNers each month and several have been hired at Factual. About 20% of our technical hires in 2011 were people who came from HN.

I wondered about whether a similar post each month would be useful. I've been surprised in two ways: 1) The number of applicants has generally gone up each month, not down and 2) almost every month, one or two of the people responding say something like "I've seen your post several times now and have been meaning to reply. Today, I finally decided to do it."

I guess what I'm saying is that my experience with posting jobs to HN has been great, and posting (almost) the same content each month seems effective.
My company hired someone from one of these threads - he is still with us and doing well. I stopped posting for a few months.

I posted again today, hopefully we'll hire someone else.
Top 7 Items a Startup Needs to "Kill It"
You can either do it direct from the exchange or you can licence it from an aggregator like Interactive Data or Six Telekurs
SEEKING WORK - Remote (Tokyo)

Web interface designer from California. I work with companies around the world on application design, usability, and branding.

HTML5 / CSS3 (Sass, Stylus) / JS / Photoshop / iOS

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Is it safe to assume (since you're an ASP programmer) that you're already competent with HTML?

If so, then I'd highly recommend you get up to speed with HTML5 and mobile development. It's the direction things are going.

Try to think as many moves ahead as you can. :)

Good luck!!
Not quite the midlands but in Brighton I've done this and know people who do it regularly. A kind of middle ground is a co-working space, these are sort of like offices that are available for freelancer user, you sign up for a anything from a couple of days a month to full time then you just show up with your laptop. I find it a really great way of working, being independent but still having lots of others around who also create stuff.

<plug>The co-working space I work from in Brighton, The Skiff, is expanding. Anyone from around Brighton in the UK interested in co-working should definitely check it out: http://theskiff.org </plug>
Five Myths of The Enterprise Startup --Aaron Levie(box.net)
A Senseless Conversation
Deploying your django application with mongrel2 and wsgid
What? lol.

Correct me if I'm wrong, it's only what I read. A fool who asks questions is a fool for 5 minutes, a fool who doesn't is a fool forever!
New York, NY - Software Engineer - Fulltime

Canvas (USV Funded) is looking for engineers #3 and #4 to join a small close team building the rich-media community platform of the future.

The job title says "Software Engineer" but really we're looking for "Software Entrepreneur" or a "Startup Engineer". Yes, your day job will be writing code. But that's the only similarity to a big company software job.

You'll be challenged to take big ideas and turn them into concrete testable hypotheses. Shipping a great feature is important, but positively changing user behavior is the ultimate success criteria. Built-to-spec takes a backseat to moves-the-metrics.

More details and how to apply http://canv.as/jobs
I was reading a great investing book this weekend which mentioned that companies seldom stay leaders if they only dominate in one discipline.

The author cited technology companies and how sometimes a great engineering culture simply isn't enough to maintain leadership, you often need to combine it a strong position in another discipline such as sales/marketing.

I think this rings true for IBM. I would guess that around 20 years or so ago, they stopped being primarily a technology company and shifted to offering services that were sold be a great sales force to keep customers hooked.
The List You Can't Miss: Top 5 Blogs of 2011
Happy New Year 2012 | Nowy Rok
Ten years later, Windows XP still dominates the Web
Guessing the Teacher's Password (2007)
> In 2004, I.B.M. sold its PC business to Lenovo of China. Mr. Palmisano says he deflected overtures from Dell and private equity firms, preferring the sale to a company in China for strategic reasons: the Chinese government wants its corporations to expand globally, and by aiding that national goal, I.B.M. enhanced its stature in the lucrative Chinese market, where the government still steers business.

This doesn't surprise me, but I'm still blown away by this concept. It's highly unlikely that Lenovo happened to offer the same amount as whoever else was the true highest bidder, so this was essentially a huge extortion payment from IBM to China. The deal involved roughly $1 billion of assests, so it's not unreasonable to think that IBM paid of order $100 million to get into the Chinese government's good graces.
The big difference between the two forms of paranoia are that the parent's paranoia is an exaggerated response to a real threat. Getting your car broken into in a major city is a relatively common experience. Car accidents are one of the leading causes of death.

Your paranoia can be lumped into two categories -- minor inconveniences to you or threats with a very very low probability of happening.

I'm not trying to dismiss your paranoia. I completely sympathize that the shady looking fellow can make anyone afraid, and the only "cure" is habituation and rationalization. And you can't habituate if you're not a regular transit user.

On the other hand, one of the major problems with driving is habituation. If you're not paying attention, it's quite easy to kill a family of four. But people do it so often without having a problem that they let themselves get distracted. That's when accidents happen.

Driver training really needs to be more like the firearms training I received as a kid. Loaded firearms can be easily handled safely, but you always have to remember that they are deadly weapons and treat them with care and attention. A multi-ton vehicle moving at velocities well in excess of those evolution trained us to deal with is also a deadly weapon. Safe when used properly by yourself and everyone else on the roads, but always a deadly weapon.
A better way would be to share a folder to their Dropbox email account, so you only expose to them what you want.
Always wondered about that, I spent a lot of time in Borders reading the Apress Ocaml and F# books (and bought the F# books). The Ocaml book is ... exceptional
Fetch
Merge
Commit
Push
--
I love this - thank you for sharing.
SEEKING WORK - Remote or on-site

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London (Soho) - Full Time

At Qubit - http://www.qubitproducts.com/ - we're helping some of the biggest companies in UK understand their data and providing them with actionable intelligence. Founded by 4 ex-Googlers 2 years ago, we're looking for top Front-end/Back-end/Test/Infrastructure/AI/Statistical engineers to help build our core infrastructure to find deeper insights into our huge data sets faster.

We mainly use Java, to develop our Hadoop pipeline on AWS, and JavaScript, both in browser and on our nodejs/redis servers, with a bit of R, Python and what not in the mix.

2012 is going (to continue) to be an exciting time for our company and we'd love to have a bunch more people help us grow!

Have a chat with me at will+yc@qubitdigital.com an let me know what you are looking for to get the ball rolling.
It's entirely free as well, so there's nothing to lose by giving a shot.

So basically it will stay up for 6-12 months and then shut down.
How did I explain equals() and wrapper to my mother and learnt a bit about TDD
QR : redis powered python queue, stack and more
In theory you can't use the trademarked word "google" as a verb.

I have no idea if Google is still trying to stop people doing this or not.
As my boss at Google always used to say: "Bing it!"
SEEKING WORK - Remote or Los Angeles

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Projects I have worked on:
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My Github:
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contact: pvwoods.public@gmail.com
That's no longer necessarily the case, especially for highway driving. Modern automatic transmissions are often more fuel efficient than the standard transmission option on the same car.

A stick is also only more fuel efficient if you're always in the right gear. It's much more natural to drive aggressively when driving a stick, so I suspect that many drivers negate any fuel efficiency savings.
Ask HN: Will 2012 be Bitcoin tookoff?
In terms of transactional volume and product development (i.e., 3rd party products, services, apps, etc.)? And, if so, how will "the man" react?
Easy AJAX Pagination Using JQuery CakePHP
The whole experience (which went on for something like 2 years!) was screwed up from beginning to end. My apologies to you or anyone who spent money on that book. It was published against my advice. Apress promised there'd be a heavy copy edit/rewrite before publication, but that never happened.

Jason Hickey's OCaml book (search for it - a PDF is floating around) is excellent.
I thought you we're someone from our company - exact same thing happened to us!
Ah, good times. This reminds me of a college project back in 1995! We created around 10 java applets illustrating Dijkstra, Kruskal, Prim and other well-known graph algorithms. For anyone interested in such illustrations take a look at: http://students.ceid.upatras.gr/~papagel/english/java_docs/j...

(and please bare in mind that these were created 16 years ago :))
According to rumors swirling around Apple community, next iPad to feature a “3”
> the belief that they are not able to understand the technology.

I agree with this entirely. My grandma does not want to mess with a computer or the TV box. My grandpa did all of that before he died.

She uses a telephone primarily. She has a cell phone with big buttons and big text (but not a jitterbug) but she uses her landline more because of the bigger buttons, and that's what she's used to. She will never text anyone.

My other grandfather didn't have his voicemail set up for 2+ years on his phone. He was concerned about getting charged minutes for listening to voicemail, because he thought that your minutes were billed on 1) listening to the voicemail and 2) while the other person was talking. In effect, he thought he was going to get double billed for the voicemail.

So I think the biggest hurdle is education.

My parents, on the other hand, eventually got in to texting. They use a netbook (no tablets were out when they bought it) because the computer is mobile and they can sit outside on the patio with it, or at the table, etc. My mom's only complaint is that the computer is a bit small to spend hours researching something, like a vacation. I think that will be your argument against tablets.

It's probably worth looking at both demographics, because your 55+ today are going to be your 65+ in a few years.
Or ignore economists and build something useful in 2012
Watch the Ruby on Rails episodes, learn Ruby and assuming you know HTML, and CSS you quickly may charm a younger team. And if you know SQL etc, it will have an advantage.

Or you may simply maintain an ASP- VB application in MS environment. This days it is hard to find maintainers for VB, VB6, ASP legacy apps.
SEEKING WORK - Derby, UK or commutable; Remote OK.

Experienced Microsoft stack developer with 11 years in industry. .Net in C# or VB.Net, web, desktop or back-end, lots of SQL Server (v7-2008R2), VB6 and classic ASP, SAS, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery. Anything from implementing a pre-written spec to workshopping requirements with clients / end users.

Or, if you want a photographer, I can photograph your products, your staff, your offices.... whatever you want for website, brochure or similar uses. Samples available on request.

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Contact: eftpotrm@yahoo.com
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Oh but they are: the number of technical howtos and tutorial on the internet is huge. Just because they are not collected and printed on dead trees doesn't mean they are not published.
What do you think the Watterson's did?

They may have paid his way through 4 years of college, but it seems pretty clear that he held jobs after left college, he just wasn't making any money off his comic strip.
Submitted 83 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3093130
JavaScript port of Minicraft, works in iOS & Android browsers
Denver, CO: iTriage - Improving the healthcare process and reducing costs.

HIRING: Frontend UI, Android, Rails, and Devops

A lot of major people in the healthcare industry are excited about what we are doing and where we are going. Being on the inside, you don't interact with those people so when you hear and read stories, it reinforces our notion that we are providing a meaningful service. Some of the IOS and Android reviews are pretty moving.

http://about.itriagehealth.com/jobs
SEEKING WORK
Remote or onsite around Boston-area. Full data stack: from database extracting/web scraping to tedious data cleaning to analysis to statistical report writing.

software skills: Python, R, SAS, SQL, NOSQL, Excel+VBA, MATLAB

I prefer project-based rates.

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Why there are no children and we should think less
Meanie Registrar Gives In After Yanking Nonprofit’s Domain
What about the various mesh nets around the world?

http://guifi.net/en/node/2413/view/map

There are quite a few already operating. All that's needed is to keep scaling them up by driving participation.
You could still handle it so that non-javascript clients got the href=redirect and javascript users got the real href value and kept the redirect in the onclick handler.

For whatever reason they seem to be doing the opposite
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