skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Speaking as a contractor, you hire/fire/manage just as you would any other employee. You are the ones who define "finished", based on a set of defined requirements, not the contractor/employee. And just as you don't do in-house development by locking an employee in a room for two months and then checking out what they've done, you don't send away contractors to do stuff and report back when they are finished. You do the usual code reviews and status updates, etc.

In short, manage contractors like employees, with the added bonus that they are much easier to fire and they are generally cheaper in the long run.
I think Mercurial (and Git) is ridiculously complex for a non-technical user (say, my mother, who has helped with translation projects online, using Word + email). TortoiseHg is great as a GUI version, but it doesn't effectively reduce the complexity - you still need to understand the basic concepts of a DVCS to use it.

In graph, they'd be like:

|--|------------------------------|-------------------------------|
git hg wiki actually usable
by non-techies
Two things I've half seriously considered if I ever need to do a progress bar:

1. Make the errors amusing to the user. For instance, if the operation goes over the estimate, go ahead and fill the progress bar to 100%. Then pause a second, and act embarrassed. Change the progress text to something like "Uhm...err...well, this is a bit embarrassing...", then go one to explain it's taking a little longer then expected.

Then say something like "OH MY GOD! THAT SPIDER BEHIND YOU IS THE BIGGEST I'VE EVER SEEN!!!". While the user is presumably turned around to check out the giant spider, drop the bar back to 80% or so, and pretend nothing ever happened.

2. Report progress bar inaccuracy back to the server, which can look and see if there thing is being consistently off in one direction and make a correction factor available to subsequent users of my software.

Might also stats to the user at the end of the operation, telling them things like "This progress bar was off by 10%. The average user's progress bar was off by 20%. Congratulations! Your computer was more reliable and consistent than average!"
I _love_ putting together IKEA furniture. I just hate schlepping it in from the store.
Congrats to Lim for his success, I remember my question being featured in issue #1 although I was never mentioned as the poster of the question, not a big deal but hahaha little fame is nice.
For anyone turned off by the CoffeeScriptiness of the page, here's a bookmarklet that will compile the CoffeeScript into JavaScript:

javascript:(function(e,a,g,h,f,c,b,d)%7Bif(!(f=e.jQuery)%7C%7Cg%3Ef.fn.jquery%7C%7Ch(f))%7Bc=a.createElement(%22script%22);c.type=%22text/javascript%22;c.src=%22http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/%22+g+%22/jquery.min.js%22;c.onload=c.onreadystatechange=function()%7Bif(!b&&(!(d=this.readyState)%7C%7Cd==%22loaded%22%7C%7Cd==%22complete%22))%7Bh((f=e.jQuery).noConflict(1),b=1);f(c).remove()%7D%7D;a.documentElement.childNodes%5B0%5D.appendChild(c)%7D%7D)(window,document,%221.6.1%22,function($,L)%7B$.getScript(%22http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/coffee-script/1.2.0/coffee-script.min.js%22,function()%7Bvar%20a;a=$(%22code.coffeescript%22);a.each(function()%7Bvar%20a;a=$(this).text();return%20$(this).text(CoffeeScript.compile(a,%7Bbare:!0%7D))%7D);return%20a.each(function()%7Breturn%20prettyPrint(this)%7D)%7D);%7D);

Aside from CoffeeScript's __hasProp and __extends boilerplate at the top of each code sample, it's pretty readable if anyone's interested.

I still think it ought to decide whether it wants to be a CoffeeScript or JavaScript framework, though.
Ugly sites can convert better:
http://scobleizer.com/2006/03/04/the-role-of-anti-marketing-...

See also: Any direct marketing long form sales letter.
NHL Trade Deadline Day Tweet Tracker
I understand your point but I don't think it's as influential as you make out.

First, you're assuming that developers have (sufficient) influence over swathes of non-developers. I'm not sure that's true, especially in the case of hardware.

Second, it's in developers' "profit-minded interest" to get their stuff on every relevant platform. It's where the customers are that matters.

Finally, no matter how good the product is, I doubt any technically capable folks (not just devs) want to end up as the de-facto 'tech-support guy' for all the people they convinced to sign-up.
Is there an option to turn off the curve smoothing? It causes some misleading effects.
On a desktop or a device, you can play the music "from the cloud" without the whole song being on your computer. That's streaming enough.
I completely agree with you about the title, as I've said it twice already (thrice, including this one!). What I completely disagree is the other parts of your original comment.

I wish you the best regardless of your scripting language of choice! :)
I upvoted you before reading that you were downvoted. Your idea's just slightly off-topic, but it's a brilliant idea.
Ok, cool. It wasn't clear whether you wanted Clojure-only, or might be interested in other acceptable JVM-based ones. As for Lift, the folks on the mailing list (liftweb @ Google Groups) are very helpful when it comes to figuring out whether Lift is appropriate for any given project or not (basically, do you specifically need its features and have a developer team with the ability and bandwidth to ramp up quickly enough for your deadline).

PS - nothing against Clojure, not trying to hijack this whole thread, just add to it. Clojure + Scala makes the JVM a truly awesome platform. The power and features of both Lisp and ML, the brevity of both.
These details are great! But also too technical for me to follow immediately since I'm not a statistician. It's enough information to point me in the right direction, though.

It's hard for me to express my writerly intuition, here. The key is to (1) define your target audience as concretely as possible and (2) understand what shared vocabulary you have at your disposal.

Saying "Bayesean" or "gamma distribution" is going to put you out of reach of anyone non-technical. Saying "conjugate prior" or "shape parameter" is going to put you out of reach of anyone who isn't a practiced statistician.

I'd aim somewhere in the middle. Technical people who aren't afraid of following a well-outlined, mathematical description of a problem they encounter regularly. "Why a gamma distribution?" would be a good footnote, for example, linking to a paper or another blog post of yours that explains it in more detail.

I find the articles that do the best are ones which take a somewhat-complicated topic and explain it, step-by-step, to an intelligent, technical audience. Pretend you were giving a lecture to a room full of HN members -- all technical and versed in basic mathematics, but not practiced statisticians. Write something that is not just a one-off, but could serve as reference material months and years from now.

I'm probably at the upper-end of this target audience in terms of mathematical maturity, in the sense that when you say "conjugate prior" I know what you mean but can't remember the definition off the top of my head. However, I could look it up and understand it instantly. I'd have a harder time understanding why being the conjugate prior of the exponential distribution implies that the gamma distribution is well-suited for modeling customer behavior on an e-commerce site.

(I'd really like to know, though.)

To this day I have people link to articles I wrote 3-4 years ago when talking about certain topics (A/B testing, viral marketing, etc.).

Example: http://blog.socialcam.com/mobile-ab-testing-made-easy

This isn't to say the article SocialCam linked to is something fantastic. The content is really basic stuff anyone who has taken one or two statistics classes knows. It's success is more in how it is written and explained than the content. In other words: digestibility and clarity are features.

Anyhow, I'm done yammering. Nice article! I've printed out a handful of academic papers related to the topic.

Cheers!
Well, if bdunbar is correct there may be prior art.
As far as almost every major JavaScript framework coming with it's own style/approach to inheritance -- I don't blame the frameworks, I blame JavaScript.

Inheritance in JS is at best awkward and unintuitive; if this wasn't the case you wouldn't have so many people trying to fix it. And let me just add that it's not this way because it isn't "classical", it's because it's also not really "prototypal" either. The awkward in-between mix of the two approaches means that no one can decide which, if any, direction is the "true one" to go in.

You have a bunch of people claiming theirs is the fastest and how JS is designed, but then others are claiming theirs is more elegant and fits better with JavaScript's semantics, then another focusing on how inheritance would have been had they probably not decided in the last minute that "oh no, this is too weird, it needs to be more like Java".

I just find it quite ridiculous because I can't think of another language that has these types of problems over something as fundamental and basic as inheritance in an OO language.
Is Foursquare a Waste of Time? - Plus Infographic
As a customer, that's how I want it to be. One of main reasons I consistently order from Amazon (and buy Prime) is the bad experiences I've had when trying to get customer service / return / exchanges on other sites. Saving $5 or $10 isn't worth it if I have to waste an hour dealing with issues like getting the wrong item shipped to me, or trying to return something.

It's hard to argue with the logic behind a customer-centric policy here. Merchants are going to go where the customers are and they can spread the cost of dispute resolution, etc over far more transactions than an individual. Makes sense to inflict the "pain" on their side.
> Sounds like a brogrammer to me.

Is that necessary?
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We did this last year in our research. We used Pitt Patt software instead of face.com. Here is the link: http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/face-recognition-study-FA...
First of all, I'm not condemning using CS. Frankly, I couldn't care less if you use it or not. If it fits your needs, good for you. Second, OP is probably a big boy and can decide for himself (as can I) what tools to use to get stuff done. Pissing contests like 'you are not a nerd if...' are not for me, so let's not 'get into a virtual pointless argument'.
Valuations double for early-stage startup companies
The answer is it really depends. In my experience both in hiring and working as a contractor, I tend to do a day-based rate when the contractor is working essentially as an extension of the in-house team, that is they don't have a project with explicit requirements and timeline, they're just going to be delegated tasks as they come up. A library for a REST API seems like a task that can be fairly well defined upfront. Assuming that you can define what you want in a fairly tight spec, I think most contractors would be willing to give you a fixed price for a project like that.

Defining 'finished' goes hand in hand with the spec. Write up a document with some basic design reqs, the classes you want, the methods they should have, include examples of what you API outputs or at least have links to your docs, and call out any edge cases. Additionally, I find it hugely beneficial to ensure that contractors right unit tests, then as you're QAing the code and find bugs, you can add failing tests for them to fix.

In the case of 'finishing' maintaining a good relationship with your contractors throughout the project goes a long way. Most people are happy to deal with a handful small issues that you might have forgotten to add to the spec, if they're enjoying working with you. If you've been adding new features and constantly changing things throughout, they're going to be a more interested in getting rid of you as a client than helping you out at the end.

Not sure exactly what you mean by project overrun. But one key is work with the contractor to put together a timeline of milestones. And be sure to include time you to QA and then for them to resolve any issues. Once you have that, immediately understand that the deadlines will most likely be blown. Also, obviously make sure you have a contract that references the spec and the timeline, so in the event of a failure to deliver on the contractors part, your not stuck still footing the bill.
A discussion which was inspired by this rant by Linus Torvalds on Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/q/1995471/89391 (Is learning C++ a good idea?)
You end by saying that downvoting !== hating him or disagreeing with everything he thinks, yet I can't find a worse reason to downvote than the explanation you gave right before: you literally downvoted him because of a personal decision he makes in his life that affects no one else regarding the learning of a programming language, and not at all for any factual inaccuracy in his comment.

He never said anyone else should not learn CoffeeScript nor that CoffeeScript was bad, but that for whatever reason in his own personal life it hasn't become valuable enough to do so. And yet still, the point of his comment had nothing to do with that, and instead simply requests that stories be labeled accurately. Seems completely uncontroversial to me.
Excellent piece of work. Useful, quick and subversive.
I look forward to your next off-the-cuff project!
Apple announces Developer ID for Gatekeeper
Jerry Sandusky is also from Pennsylvania. Would you have Santorum lobby for his pardon?
It's a little more involved than a simple graph tool, but I can heartily recommend d3. Especially when it comes to live data, granular control over rendering etc.

http://mbostock.github.com/d3/
Anyone have insight into how this might complement / compare with "The Joy of Clojure" http://joyofclojure.com/the-book? At first glance, having read JOC and seeing the TOC for this new book, what most piques my interest are the sections on macros, protocols, and the web stuff.
dygraphs can do (b) & (c):
http://dygraphs.com/tests/stacked.html
http://dygraphs.com/tests/dynamic-update.html

You could hack in (a), though it might be a bit of a challenge. If you have a lot of data, the other valuable thing that dygraphs gives you is the ability to pan/zoom your charts.
Steve Jobs ignored Warren Buffett's advice for a stock buyback
Chances are very good they're really not hiring, but wish to continue to have a Kabuki theater appearance of hiring.
this book just shipped at my home, excited! also started learning R from 'R in Action'

Thank you for your feedback!
Really, for print edition? Surely that's not viable long-term.
This class looks good, also Jeff is a well known person in this field, I am going to attend it offline for sure.

Thank you !
Excellently stated. Up until a week ago, I was following around 200 projects on Github. I recently went through and unfollowed almost all of them (I think I left about 5-10 that I really care about). I did all this because the news feed had become completely useless for the reasons you describe above.
OP here - If it helps, you can find an example of the kind of library that we're looking for at https://github.com/gocardless/gocardless-ruby/
Ebooks: The Giant Disruption
Happy to see he gets permission to reprint each first. That's good.

This seems like a great idea and I'm happy to see it's working well. I thin curation is something everyone wants in some regard. And the interesting tibit is, Hacker News is already 'User Curated' so half the work is being done for Lim already.
For anyone who missed it, here's an idea for making progress bars way more fun: http://xkcd.com/1017

And I'll throw in this one just because it's funny (and quite on-topic): http://xkcd.com/612/
WikiLeaks' Stratfor Email Release Raises Uncomfortable Questions
thank you for your valuable suggestion, I will definitely spend time in understanding the data first!
Hundreds of Chinese have flooded Obama’s Google+ page to post about human rights
Machine Hearing in Google Music
It's good that the US is still the land of "Innocent until proven guilty" and not vice-versa or even secretly guilty while it's convenient.
I'm using GitHub Feed Filter extension for Chrome

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jcpkhafkpnaljjbgdg...
Patient of the Future (quantified self, crohn's disease, larry smarr)
How is that slavery? Sounds to me like that person would consider themself very fortunate - they have a job when no one else does.

Such a person does not want to quit - they have found the best possible situation in their environment.
Note that many 200mg caffeine pills are scored and can easily be split in half. You may find 100mg to be a better daily dosage; 200mg at once makes me too jittery.
Stratfor: Osama bin Laden 'was in routine contact with Pakistan's spy agency'
Using Amazon Mechanical Turk to skew Facebook popularity with a 80% success rate
Facebook's news feed has managed to keep the news feed relevant despite massive social changes in my lifetime Facebook usage (everything from high school, to college, to working as a professional software engineer).

Maybe for you, but my experience is exactly the opposite. I find the Facebook news feed to be just about as useful as the Github news feed... which is to say, totally useless.

The problem, as I see it, is that G+, Twitter, Github, etc. all make the same fundamental mistake... assuming that "connecting" to an "entity" means "I want to see every update from/about this entity." So, I "friend" somebody on G+ or "watch" a project on Github, now I'm on the hook to see all their updates. But there's NO particular reason to think that the above assertion holds. At best, "friending" a person or "watching" a project says you're more interested in it/them than a random project/person.

These "event stream" implementations really need one or both of two things: The ability to specify more about what it is you're interested in, and smarter ML algorithms to figure out what to show you, based on both declared (or, for that matter, inferred) interests, and social connections, OR the ability to specify filters to exclude "stuff you don't want."

If I had to choose, I'd ask for the latter. Better filters would go a long way towards giving us control of our streams / news-feeds. I'd like, for example to be able to say "I don't want any pictures of cats with funny hats, regardless of who posted them, in my stream." Or, in the Github example "I don't want any commits from project $FOO in my stream."

If I'd seen much (or any) evidence to suggest that the machine learning stuff was smart enough to give me a truly meaningful feed without manual tweaking, I would care less about filters, but so far I'm just not seeing it. Facebook appear to try, but my feed there is still full of crap because they assume too much based on who I follow, not what I'm interested in.

<rant-over />
"They like to prove others wrong"

...what utter shit!
The Powerful Impact NPR And The New York Times Have On Book Sales
Show HN: Visualize your Google Analytics data with Hexbins and d3
It's because we are building so many other things.

The price of a house depends on how many people there are to build it (like your grandfather).

These days people build all sorts of other things, so the price of a house goes up. But on the other hand you now have so many other cool things that weren't available back then.
Note that everybody says Noir because Noir is the only thing that could be called a 'framework'. I pretty sure most clojure webapps are not written in Noir itself, people use all kinds of diffrent combinations of librarys to gather alot of the feature a framework would give you.
On the plus side: this will almost certainly be fixed by technological change. In a few decades workers in warehouses will be coddled specialists. There will only be two of them, but they'll be coddled.
The limit is actually 60k. And you can probably raise that if you talk to them, as they ask you to.
Same here. Don't forget, it's a tax writeoff if you're self-employed :)
When you're talking about some work as discrete as "write (or clone) an API Client library in [the contractor's language of choice]" Most of the advice here is overblown. It's a small amount of work, you probably already have acceptance tests for your other libraries (which can be copied verbatim), and documentation is minimal.

Just get a recommendation from somebody else who knows the language you're looking for well and pay whatever they ask, presuming that what they deliver passes whatever tests you already have.

Make sure that the contract says that you own the copyright when you pay/they deliver. the fact that it will be OSS doesn't really matter much either way.

If you're worried, agree on a deadline before you sign a contract and put in a positive or negative incentive around that.

I've been a consultant for several years. The ones you want aren't spending their time on oDesk and elance, and they're not cheap. I've tried to be that guy, you can't compete. I've tried to hire that person, and you can't get repeatable results. You guys are hackers, you have a strong network. somebody somewhere knows someone with C# experience who has read a decent blog post on REST.
Someone is Following You And You Don't Care
From as early as I can remember until about 14, I was a dangerously deep sleeper. I only sleep-walked a couple times, but there were times when I had extended, apparently-waking conversations with people, then had no recollection of them.

I could sleep through people talking, bouncing on the bed next to me, the TV, people clapping, etc. I would fall asleep any time I was not actively doing something. Sitting in class, sitting in the passenger seat of a car, anything where I wasn't actively thinking.

Around 14, I transitioned into symptoms like you describe here. I slept less heavily (though still very heavily) but I could sleep quite a bit, and in the afternoon, it would be willpower vs. drowsiness.

Around 18, I transitioned into what I now think of as a 26-hour day. Every day, I could not sleep until I was exhausted, which made me chase the clock around the day. This was obviously disruptive to work schedules and other normal social life.

Around 22, I transitioned into a pretty normal sleep schedule.

I don't know what changed in any of these cases.

Another oddity: I am able to regularly just not sleep at all, or sleep very little for days on end. I've been up for 72 hours dozens of times. It's quite clear that my functions decline, but 48 hours is not a big deal and longer is possible if there's some compelling reason.

Possibly related, my mother has had sleep problems here entire adult life, very rarely able to sleep more than 4 hours in a night.

I've never taken modafinil but have considered it quite a bit. I mostly think I shouldn't mess with it because I'm lucky enough to have a relatively normal sleep cycle now.
Though, to be clear, it should be easy to write a single app that works as both a Chrome app and a B2G/Firefox app, as long as you use APIs that work across both environments. (Chrome apps can access non-web-accessible APIs, but they don't have to.)
I would have trouble doing any of this, because If I'm going to come up with a new profitable niche, I don't want .0000001% of the profits.

It's probably why I didn't get promoted much while I was working for other people. I would do my job and all other energy was spent working on my own company and ideas.
This wasn't a game, merely an animation. Purposefully crude drawings to go with the story line.

Pity. If Oracle has wee little cartoon dinosaur mayhem I'd be a happier guy.
When I read "Hundreds of Chinese", my immediate thought was, "That's not that many. Maybe 0.00001% of the population?" It doesn't make much sense in retrospect.