skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It may not be the best "overall" advice but I've met a lot of people looking for freelance developers or simply rubyists to hire by going at local ruby meetings.

I can't say anything about Ruby groups other than Paris, but at each of our meetings I talk with people having trouble to hire a ruby or rails developer.

Conclusion: Get there and even try to do a lightening talk ! You'll learn a lot, create your network with Rubyists. It's simply about getting closer to other people working in this field.
Terrible sign up process. You have to link either a github, twitter or linkedin account -- there is no normal username/password signup. And once you do you're greeted with this message:

Welcome to Coderwall! We add new members to our beta at the end of every week.

So, it takes them a week to create an account?
Do you have an opensource project? We are giving you BugSense Premium for free
> why not do something like that for engineers and scientists from accredited US universities? Or people who are working fulltime in those sorts of capacities?

The folks advocating for that have tied such proposals to open borders for low-skills folk.
>"Most outsourcing projects don't go nearly that well."

Do you have a source for this? I'm a "business guy", but I read the hell out of Hacker News. I hear this a lot, but it hasn't been my experience, whatsoever.

Seriously, how is an outsider supposed to read these arguments as anything more than people on the inside trying to justify what they do and the prices they charge? Read that article again. It's written for other hackers, not for business people. He says, "making an app is hard, here is why" and lists a bunch of things that, to be frank, I don't care about. I need the product to meet my specifications for a good price. Nothing more, nothing less. And generally in my experience (which, again, is mostly small projects) that is fulfilled through outsourced work.

The fact that any mention of outsourcing draws the ire and down votes of this crowd is disappointing. At the end of the day, like it or not, people like me are also an essential part of this ecosystem.

Edit: after reading through many of the comments, it looks like there are varying degrees of this problem. I'm not talking about trying to get someone to build an app for my "big idea" for $200.
'Mob Mentality' Destroyed SOPA, Says Viacom CEO
When you are told one thing and the opposite happens people get mad.

What is so evil about adding social networking features to everyone's account? You have a Docs account and a Picasa account too, even if you don't use them, and nobody complains about that. What's the difference between Docs and Google+?

Thousands of businesses depend on your search engine.

This I understand. People are upset that they have to play with us even though they don't want to. Nobody likes to do things that they're forced to do. But this seems like shooting the messenger; it's not Google being evil because users won't use any search engines other than Google. That's just loyalty to a pretty nice product.

Google's customers are the people that click on search results. So while re-ranking your site may kill your business, you're not a user and that re-ranking makes the experience better for our users. If the social cues that Google now adds are truly irrelevant as you say, they shouldn't affect users' behavior at all. Users are not going to stop searching for something to buy just because they have to scroll the results page. If the social features are relevant, though, then users are getting a better experience. And that's a good thing, even if individual pages get less traffic from Google. Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That's a good thing because SEO can't scale, and SEO isn't good for users or the Internet at large.

If you look at the Google experience from the standpoint of customers, it's pretty good. Users get relevant search results and ads. Advertisers get their content on top of everything else. It's a good compromise between advertising and usability, and it works really well. It's a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads, and Google is trying to fix the bug. Manipulating Google results shouldn't be something you feel entitled to be able to do. If you want to rank highly in Google, be relevant for the user currently searching. Engage him in social media or email, provide relevant information about what you're selling, and, generally, be a "good match" for what the user wants.

What if Apple created their own applications for 50% of the categories in the app store and then placed their apps at the top of each category?

They already do this. Apple's apps are included for free on every phone. And you aren't allowed to replicate their functionality, either. It's expectee. Apple makes phones, Apple gets to put whatever they want on the phones. Google makes search engine results pages, Google gets to put whatever they want on search engine results pages.

This isn't quite the right analogy, though. I can see why MapQuest would be upset about Google Maps and why Yelp would be upset about Google Local. But even in those cases, Google ranks things as you'd expect. Yelp results often appear over the Google business pages, because Yelp is more popular for reviews. So overall, I don't see Google as being evil. They're being competitive and they make good products.
any info on hygiene?
Why the Raspberry Pi Won't Ship In Kit Form
Funny how Amazon AWS newsletter gets flagged as spam by gmail each and every time. Even if I tell it 'not spam' each and every month. Something tells me Amazon SES will not get a better gmail treatment.
Node.js: Unprecedented Growth Distorts True Acceptance
Cool. Then if you use their findings published in this blog post, they will publicly shame you and your investors.
> a foreign national kidding around about a trip in which he or she will 'destroy America' shouldn't be surprised to be questioned about that by law enforcement officers.

I don't see why saying something that has a threatening meaning shouldn't attract interest by law enforcement officials.

Take the other fork of possibility: If Foreign National (FN) had joked about it, been ignored, then blew something up, there would be an unbelievable outcry. It would - in my honest opinion - have been a terrible lapse in judgment by the officer not to have followed up on such a joke, and the office would not have fared well in the ensuing hue and cry.
The essay explicitly seems to suggest that are not Tier 1 support: "Yahoo laid off the highest level of Flickr's customer support, the people that end up filing bugs against the developers and helping the trickier cases get solved for the members."

Not knowing how Yahoo! structures its support personnel, I assume that the "highest level" is not also Tier 1, although I could be wrong. Still, I think the rest of the essay is more of a general paean to website customer support people, and has less to do with the specifics of Flickr.
Sounds like you're threatening to put me on iamachumpconsultant.com while discouraging me from putting you on iwasntpaid.com.

Just like corporations can ruin consumers' credit ratings almost without recourse, the concept here is to ruin these delinquent payer's reputation via a registry everyone can check.
Turning search results into RSS feeds pretty cool but it is something entirely different. What I meant was, to include the pages in my RSS feeds I am subscribed to, to the search you are doing just like you include Facebook to your search.

Regarding Facebook integration. Can you give me a use case where this integration is helpful and improves the search results? I don't think the survey argument is a valid one because our friends are usually not qualified enough to make an informed decision on this.
Gezond koken met de stoomoven
I wholeheartedly agree with this. Having connections and keeping your eye out for potential cars to buy can make a huge difference.

The first car I bought, a 97 Opel Corsa, was going to be scrapped by a friends neighbor until I stepped in. It had been sitting without use for ~18 months. The parts needed were minimal. It cost me €150 and 6 bottles of wine. It still drives absolutely perfectly.

The second car I bought was again going to be traded in/scrapped. $20 later and a can of 44K to clean out the engine it passed smog and has been running since.

tl;dr it pays to keep an eye out for cars that people are looking to sell. Offer to take them off their hands for a reasonable price and you'll find they're very receptive.
I would love to see a Flickr balance sheet.

"Where good companies go to die" is the story of most acquisitions but Flickr still feels like it has great potential.

Why don't big companies figure out a "entrepreneurial outreach" program or something - stick in a good driver with a big incentive for turning around, or carve out as independent similar to Reddit in Conde?
The Other 99% of Entrepreneurs
Who's your most valuable Twitter follower?
There's a pervading sense of "to succeed you have to graft hard and long" in this piece.

In contrast, I'm reminded of Seth Godin's note about Richard Branson: Loads of people can do almost everything he does everyday, except for those five minutes where he is exceptional.

So you use a default template for throwing up a web site. That's good, that means spending more quality time on the idea -- where it should be spent. A good enough design is good enough.
For Facebook, it shows Joe Hewitt. I know he created Three20 but he isn't at Facebook anymore.
complicated = harder to work on = takes more time to do ecah tasks = if you go to dealer you pay more
As it happened: The Dáil debate on the ‘Irish SOPA’
The other feedback mentioned is almost invariably excellent. They're great things to try.

In short, expecting a waterfall of activity after three months is very impatient.

If you're an actor trying to make it in Hollywood, it's ridiculous to expect to be an A-lister after three months.

Similarly, if you're a band that was in a garage in November, it'd silly to expect to be headlining Madison Square Garden in three months. It even took Rebecca Black longer.

These things can take an absurd amount of time. You could be around for five years before "going viral," but will feel absolutely fresh to those seeing it for the first time.

If this whole "patience" thing is a hard pill to swallow, take an honest look at what you're doing and how your expectations align with the harsh realities of being an entrepreneur.

Good actors love the craft and would be perfectly content to perform in their local theatre for peanuts for the rest of their lives. While capitalism means the same can't be said for an entrepreneur, the principle is the same.
HotelSweep Adds More Depth to Hotel Search
His Github profile says "Facebook", which is where they pull the data from.
How are you going to know how to replace it unless you can figure out what it does?
Calling them bugs doesn't make them less in need of fixing or easier to fix.
IGN’s tags Chilean developed game as one of The Weirdest Games of 2011
I still believe smart people can make a difference. The real danger is a country ruled by bad ideas with a strong military. Believe me: it's easier to bring change from the inside.
Probably not... closed a Series A yet?
This site mocks 37 Signals after it attacked a YC startup for stealing code
Another middle ground would be to name and shame just to thing that are factually part of the public record: "I am suing John Smith in court for non-payment of $9k for work done 3.5 years ago". Don't go into fiery detail, keep it to the facts that are part of the court record.

Of course, the hard part is keeping all the opinion stuff out of the blog posts around the fact-only one.
Limiting login to these services makes sense - there's no point in signing up without an account to pull data from (one could argue that you could limit logins to Github / other code repositories explicitly) since the whole point of an account is to receive achievements for code you've written. I think the real problem is hiding the rest of the leaderboard past the top 10 behind a login, which seems awfully silly.
Sorry accidental downvote.

I actually couldn't agree more. As a professional post producer, I work with a lot of editors and post houses, and know many more. And what your friends are telling you is right; Apple didn't "change" the product. They destroyed it. Literally destroyed it. As in, took absolutely essential elements (think engine in a car) and just left big empty holes in the places where they ought to be.

And this @nirvana nitwit has no idea what he's talking about when he says people simply don't want to learn "new ways" of doing things. If he had even the slightest grasp of how actual post production works, he'd see that there are no new ways to learn - unless he means people need to "learn" to get out and push vehicles they can no longer drive.

Dropping XML support is probably the clearest example. Assuming you're talking about something more professional than wedding videos, editing isn't simply about "being creative". It's also a traffic management job in which you're responsible for thousands of files coming off a range if systems run by a multitude of facilities, and having them all line up with a precision that can come down to 1/48th of a second. XML is the interchange format that allows this work to take place. Deciding to drop that is like walking into an air traffic control tower and smashing all the radios. That's bad, of course, but it takes a real moron to turn around and say "I don't understand why this is a problem" before adding insult to injury by saying anyone who thinks otherwise was never really a "professional" in the first place.
> Being able to identify them means being warned.

Not usually. It'll come with experience.

Which, to be frank, it sounds like you could use some more of, both to have more and better options available, and to be more adept at recognizing those options. Chalk this one up to relative inexpensive experience, as it's a trivial amount of money in the long term: I was aware of (but didn't have a fiscal stake in, fortunately) a project with a TV & movie studio that did $7.2B in rev last year, ($300M of operating income), and the guys working on their site had to eat an ~$80K invoice on the ultimatum that they could either press for payment and get it, but 'never work in this town again,' or write it off and get more work in the future, that may pay better if that film doesn't flop.

Consider yourself a business: businesses eventually write off and move past losses, in part because of the opportunity costs involved, but also because it'll ruin a culture of any size to get too bitter and petty debts.

Anyway, bad clients usually have no shortage of warning flags, but until you're relatively secure and diversified, you'll be too hungry to notice and/or pay attention to them. And that's fine, provided you don't wreck your own reputation and business model in the meantime.
Subversion or Git? Decisions, decisions ….
IRS helps bust 105 people in massive identity theft crackdown
As a competitive cyclist, this is pretty awesome.

Less thinking about what I need to eat and more eating. Huge time saver.

How much science is behind this? It'd be nice to see some kind of "weekly exercise level" worked into this, with some suggested on-day/off-day caloric intake recommendations PLUS the actual food bit.

EDIT: Just read deeper into how it's deriving the numbers. Top-notch. Hoping I can work this into my daily routine. A "weekly grocery list" option would be sweet.
I used to work for a company that put a late-payment clause right in the contract. If you didn't pay us you were on the hook for a fee plus interest on the outstanding balance. So essentially it was like owing money to the IRS.

As far as I know nobody ever gave us trouble about payment.
Which is exactly, of course, why we get such overreaction. Like referees, those in charge of security are only noticed when they do a poor job. Except, unlike referees, there is absolutely no penalty for false positives. They will always err on the side of safety, no matter how remote the probability of harm, because they can never punished for the unseen.

Even when they get it wrong, even when what they initially thought might be a threat turned out to be no threat at all, there is no incentive to admit fault. So this aggressive attitude amplifies, until at some point, it deafens.
interesting, looks like flipdog for hotels
Psychedelic chemical subdues brain activity
Which big ones use that as their white label?
Sorry, but bleeding out $7,000 a year instead of $3,500 a year is still an extra $3,500 a year, regardless of how much you paid for the damn thing.
Yup. I'm the only person from NewsBlur. Got an RSS feed url that has full text? I'd love to use that. Otherwise, I'm planning on building a Text view that effectively extracts the article text. It's not highly prioritized, but it will be after I launch social in a month or so.
I disagree; you do not have to be a negative person to point these things out. IMHO the author was simply trying to help
anyone developing a web app avoid what he sees as a bad tool
Agreed. Sites like Tumblr and Twitter are mostly full of people reblogging and retweeting other people's posts, and the source posts are often things that have been posted before. Many Internet users have short memories, and even shorter attention spans.

The Internet is increasing full of people linking to content, instead of creating it, and there's a fine line between "curating" links and simply spamming them.
Amazon S3 is serving 762 Billion Objects; 500,000 peak Reqs/s
What startup could make me a millionaire if i got hired as an employee today?
The only thing wrong with C-11 as it stands currently are the digital lock provisions. Everything else in the bill is rather liberal, and, frankly, some of the provisions are outright good for Canadians (limits on fines, ISP liability exemptions, educational use exemptions, "mashup" exemptions). Calling for protests against the bill in its entirety is ignorant and blaming "the majority government" for passing draconian laws is outright sensationalist and false. That's not really how we do things here in Canada. There's a better way to get things done, and it doesn't involve hyperbole.

Yes, the digital locks portions of the bill could use some reworking-- but as mentioned, the enforceability of the law as its codified now is questionable, so I wonder how big of a deal it would actually be for the law to be passed as is. Remember, as pointed out, use of VCRs is also technically illegal, but you don't see any enforcement of that. The issue surrounding digital locks may very well have the same practical effect. We should certainly try to get these provisions changed before they are codified, but IMO it's not really the end of the world.

Yes, there is going to be a lot of push from powerful lobbyists to get "SOPA-like" provisions into the bill. However that is a reason to remain vigilant, not a reason to pre-emptively black out the internet again. As it stands, those additions have yet to be added to the bill, so right now, the lobbying power hasn't done very much. Maybe it's just me, but I'm not the type to start blaming people for things that haven't happened yet. I'm going to watch and wait until there is something reminiscent of SOPA in this bill, which may or may not happen.

FYI for those who are just jumping on the bus because SOPA is in the title of this article, please read a bit on the issue before injecting your opinion or outrage. Michael Geist is a good and well respected source on this issue. He's come out (more or less) in favour of the bill, minus his open objections to the digital locks portions, which I pointed out above. However, his general approval should say something about the bill-- Geist probably knows a lot more about copyright law in Canada than anyone here does. His comments regarding C-32 (now C-11) can be found in this rather old posting: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5316/125/
Software Security Weekly
Ask HN: Solution for bookmarking HN and referenced link together?
How risky is it that I bookmark the news.ycombinator.com/item?id=xxxxxxx url for links I like instead of the actual link? That way when I read the link again in the future I also have all the comments people made about the link (pointing out errors, better resources, etc.). I'm a bit worried these links will expire or ycombinator will piss someone off and and pull a megaupload and have all their data nuked, then I won't be able to get to the actual articles I liked. Does anyone have a better solution for storing the ycombinator url and the actual url referenced, without needing to bookmark everything twice? If I bookmark the actual link instead is there a way to do a lookup on ycombinator.com to see if it has been submitted and get access to the comments that way? (seems like it would be a safer approach). Thx.
Delighting the Highly-Social Customer, Part 1 | PandoDaily
- I agree, I've had bad experience with both. Be wary of individual/companies who work for clients and outsource their technology to you. Often the specifications will be very vague, and even if you manage to communicate a better level of understanding what THEIR CLIENT actually wants (which takes time and effort..) - you might end up not getting paid, because their client doesn't accept the solution, and doesn't want to pay the guy who hired you.

- Always have signed agreements, ALWAYS, can't stress that enough. Unless you have very good reasons of trust. Chat logs, e-mail conversations, all cool, all legal, but you will always get a yes-no story. Signed agreements are often very clear cut.

= Never agree on doing a revenue share with individuals or smaller companies. They probably won't have a clue what they're doing.

- If you don't believe in the product when you get your first impression on it, you never will. Don't let 'em fool you and convince you otherwise.
Yes indeed. I got both my cars checked. The courteous thing to do is take it to a reputable mechanic (I took them to dealership service) coz if I am the seller; I would not like to take my car to a shady place even though I don't mind it being inspected.
Site Mocks 37 Signals After Startup Stole its Code
> Sometimes, you need to cut off an arm to save a body.

Why not sell the arm (more like tentacle)? Flickr has a huge fanbase and great street cred, if it's not sustainable to keep it, why not sell it?

The only answer I can think of is that the tough decisions are not being made.... what's being decided is how to keep the cash flow going until the inevitable external acquisition, mining brand value.

I've lived in this kind of corporate mentality. Expect Yahoo to be sold soon - just wonder who's buying.
This is good news. As an undergrad at a liberal arts college (and a community college transfer) I'm painfully aware of how much information is locked away behind the Elsevier pay wall. In my case, I wanted to do an independent study project looking at citation analysis in early molecular phylogenetics, but so many of the relevant papers are locked away that I just gave up.

This is the second time that Elsevier et al. have tried to kill PubMed Central. I hope that this is a turning point in the OA movement.
The very first thing vim users learn is to avoid the arrow keys. I hate moving my fingers off the home room to navigate. Using hjkl for navigation removes that pesky break between inserting text and navigating.
No programming background.

Try not to write a book..but hard to answer.

Might sound cheesy, but the truth: Woke up one day and knew I needed a change. I decided to take a couple years out and retool.

I'm sure every hacker says this, but I want to change the world.

Took advice from CS friend at Stanford, who told me "your totally a rails guy" and it kind of grew on me like a disease I couldn't shake!
The newer organizations on your blog spot don't seem to have problems meeting a similar uptime to you guys. Doesn't sound like this holds true anymore.