skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I'm stuck. What should I do?
I'm stuck. I've been stuck for at least two years.

I want to get involved in FOSS and I've the time, motivation, and skills required to make worthwhile contributions, but I've no itches to scratch [1] and my interests are what some would refer to as `outdated'; that is, I wouldn't touch GUI, web, or mobile development with a 100m-long pole.

I'm interested in [2]:

* Compilers/PLs

* GCs

* Legacy *n*x programs (e.g., Bill Joy's vi)

* OS Kernels

* VMs

What should I do? I'm starting to _hate_ my day-to-day life [3]. (And, yes, my diet, exercise, and sleep are all fine.)

--

[1] I work as an SE for a defense contracting company, so I'm rarely (read: never) exposed to things that both interest and annoy me enough to want to change them. Furthermore, I can honestly say that there's nothing I'd want to add to- or modify in the various computing environments I interact with when I'm at home.

[2] I've also recently developed an interest in Functional Programming and Lisp(s).

[3] Sometimes I think that I'd be happier with an academic life in CS, but I can't return to university to earn my PhD because I'm married.
Agreed. It's a good first step, though.

To learn about how a web server actually works, I'd suggest setting up your own VPS on Linode. They've got a great library of information to help someone get started: http://library.linode.com

If you're coming from a Windows background and don't have any Linux/Unix command line experience, though, this will be daunting.
http://numbersapi.com/#1337 :(
Nintendo has a history of looking the other way at non-commercial fan games.
Thanks for the feedback. It should get your location from the network if GPS isn't working. Will look into it.

Yeah, place lookups are really rough now - that's really high on our priority list. Forthcoming version versions will be much better.

Thanks again.
the mapping of 2x IOPs to 2x cost seems tenuous to me.

Well, it's not just the number of disk I/Os which increases -- you've also got the network traffic and CPU time associated with each copy of the read request you send out. Given that (a) DynamoDB is using SSDs, and (b) Amazon seems to love using slow languages, I'd guess that the CPU time is what ends up dominating their cost.

why shouldn't Amazon just provide this data?

Amazon is very secretive. And I can't really blame them; after all, why would they want to subsidize their competitors' development?

And finally, why not allow users to place this cost on the write path instead? "W=3" seems like a reasonable option

I'd guess they wanted to be able to tolerate partitions without sacrificing availability. (At least for the common case where "partition" means that nodes are completely offline and are both unable to communicate with other nodes and unable to receive incoming requests.)
I got to read some, but not all. Looking forward to read up on the rest when you get your hosting in check.
Democracy is flourishing when free elections occur. Hitler was democratically elected.

Democracy is not everything that is good about a state. Modern liberal democracies in Europe and North America also have traditions of rule of law, divisions of power, individual rights, collective rights, property protection, public education and welfare, etc., etc.

Fareed Zakaria has written very interesting things about illiberal democracies and why democracies sometimes produce populists or repressive governments.
Apple's massive 'iPad 3' air freight deal with DHL shaking up shipping rates
Thanks. I have WP Super Cache installed but realized it wasn't turned on. Just did that so hopefully this helps!
Agreed, but learning web server admin is a pain.

I spent all of yesterday trying to upgrade ruby/rails on my linode for the first time. Kept running into errors and eventually decided to just start over with a clean Ubuntu install. That kind of demoralizing experience isn't a problem when starting with Heroku.
I question the assumption that this is zero sum. Just because Apple makes money doesn't mean they are taking it from developers.

If you're still stuck on how unfair it is, I encourage the you to move up the risk chain. If you want more of that 'river of gold'; All you have to do is design, manufacture, distribute and service complex devices across disparate networks globally. Do this better than anyone else, and then you can decide how fair you want to be. Don't forget that anything short of the top three and you've probably wasted a large fortune.
Thanks so much! This is really helpful. I have WP Super Cache installed but realized it wasn't turned on. Just did that so hopefully this helps!
I don’t even use Clojure, but DAYUM this app looks sexy.
11 separate pages, with a landing page to get to the 11 separate pages? That seems a little excessive, especially considering the low content of each page.
With Mirrors And LEDs, Yayoi Kusama Offers A Taste Of The Infinite
Thanks a ton for the <title /> issue. Fixed. Video forthcoming!

Re unbounce, yeah we'll build our own site shortly.

Thanks again!
I wonder how the "$12 per iOS device" changes when considering iPad versus iPhone apps. I tried looking around but couldn't find anything definitive. Anyone know?
It's interesting that this is one of the most hated (http://hatepaste.com/paste/f5da3584):

if (someBoolean == true) {
doSomething();
}

I got into the habit of doing this since it's immediately obvious that the value you're comparing is expected to be a boolean and not something like an integer, which could cause subtle bugs later on if what you thought was a boolean gets negated. More commonly, it's of the form:

if (someValue == false) ...

rather than:

if (!someValue) ...

to distinguish this from:

if (someValue == 0) ...

It only takes an extra fraction of a second of typing and increases clarity for the next developer, or for you six months later. Anyone else do this too?
a couple of things. first, egor's actions are a good example of the "full disclosure" debate that's been around for a long, long time. some pointers:

http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0111.html

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/debating_full_...

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/12/recent_develop...

secondly, egor's motives are NOT clear, you're assuming certain motives. while he demonstrated some effort at trying to contact github to get their attention and a modicum of restraint in his demonstration of the bug, don't assume his complete set of motives are pure and goodly. he has, after all, gotten a truckload of attention over this. fully disclosing an issue benefits the reporter quite a bit, often more than anyone else (attackers included). it would not surprise me if he had this in mind when he acted the way he did.

before you encourage others to walk a mile in egor's shoes, you should probably figure out what kind of footwear he's wearing. you may be surprised.
The article confuses app development with publishing. There is a clear market for developing apps for stakeholders.
Somewhat off topic, but I remembered the author of this Excel add in's "Ask HN" when it first came out ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794317 ). 2 or 3 years later, it looks like he's expanded and now has 2 software products and a SAAS ( http://www.OakFocus.net/ ), so very inspiring.
Text Messaging to Groups is Simple & Free w/ SendHub
Strange to see a Google comms person claiming that "modern Internet-connected phones exist mostly to run apps."

I'm a big fan of apps, I write apps, but I still think modern Internet-connected phones are basically for browsing the web and getting directions.
Flagged. This is just ridiculous. I actually support Egor, but this borders on absurd. The question is stated incorrectly. The actual question is:

"Is storing your private key in a public repository a security concern?"

It's a parody of a security question. This is a needless distraction in an important discussion.
"high point in world history"

hahahaha - for who ? Look how many conflicts today have their roots in the decisions and actions of the British Empire.

Seriously, yes, there were some side benefits eventually for the colonies but the cost was great and continues in many parts of the world. I resent that ignorant statement.
Could this be because of the stock browser you get with Android rather than the devices themselves?

I'd like to see these sorts of tests performed with Chrome4Android as the browser.
If you actually read my comments you would see I say the exact opposite- that's it's easy to justify opening the issue. My original comment just highlighted the fact the parent conveniently left out details, simplifying the narrative intentionally in my opinion.
1.000 players are playing Twenity
Seth Levine: Sick of start-up BS
Good luck! I'm quitting my corporate job on 4/3/2012 so I'm very interested in your post at the moment. I only have about 6 months of runway + 2 kids + wife + 2 dogs....maybe I'm crazy? Probably. I suppose I can sell the dogs if worse comes to worse.
You are blindly calling it a scam without even looking into what has changed in the last 23 years...

For the first time since 1989, we now have more and more accounts of reliable experiments producing anomalous heat. This is why research activity around cold fusion / LENR has significantly increased in the past 12 months! I am just reporting the news.
So there's the idea in business of creating vs. capturing value. You want your product to create value for the user, but you also want to be the one that captures that value (in the form of $$).

IBM in the 80s/90s created a massive amount of value with the PC, but let Microsoft and Intel capture just about all of that value. Bad move on their part.

Apple, on the other hand, has positioned itself in such a way that it captures a huge percentage of the value that its mobile products create. Its pretty amazing what they did, particularly in the US where historically the power in the mobile industry was in the network providers, not the device companies. And as you've pointed out, they've somehow convinced app developers to work for almost nothing to add lots of functionality to their products (which helps sell more products).

Obviously not a groundbreaking recommendation here: pay attention to what Apple did. When you generate value, be sure to line things up so that you capture a fair amount of it.

This can be applied for both your business and your career. IMHO developers tend to create far more value than they capture in the workplace.
10 Stinky Things To Avoid In Java
I'm confident that we'll implement "brain uploading" in the next 200 years, and this greatly opens up the upper limits of knowledge. Humans are very I/O bound, but a few of my friends have been trying out a thing where we both talk at once, since we can talk and listen at the same time. Other interesting ideas to hacking communication: add "metadata" by using hand signals during verbal communication, combine the most efficient aspects of different languages to "compress" conversation, etc.
Built with Bootstrap: Over 200 sites in the queue
Regis McKenna On Advising Startups and Why '1984' Is Overrated
Sure thing.

1) Hmmm is there some sort of timeout if it can't get the location via GPS? I'm in a room with no sky view so it can't effectively get the location via GPS. It seems to me like it never gives up if it can't find the location (maybe I'm wrong, that's just a guess).

2) It'll be way more awesome when you can do that.

Keep up the good work!
London, UK. Full time.

Front-end Developer at Newspaper Club.

http://www.newspaperclub.com

We help anyone make and print their own newspapers. We believe the web is too important to be left to screens, and that newsprint is a highly evolved technology too. We build things that combine the two, using each medium for what it's best at.

We're looking for a great front-end developer to work alongside our co-founder and engineer (me, @tomtaylor) and form the start of a tight knit development team.

You'd be our first engineering hire, and we're looking for someone with solid Javascript experience, but happy to get stuck in across the whole stack. Enthusiasm and attitude count for more than lines on the CV.

If you're interested, drop us a line at jobs@newspaperclub.com, with a note about yourself and links to things you think we'd find interesting (eg. Github account, CV, portfolio).
Perhaps to would be better to split governments up into areas of expertise. Foreign and Diplomatic. Health and social services. Transport. Justice and policing. Each has it's own remit and representatives from each region. They meet in a forum to discuss overall issues. Representatives are specialised in their field. Combine with continuous voting whereby you could withdraw your support for a representative and tag your decision with an issue. Something like that...
They use a deceptive camera angle to make it look like it works much better than it does in reality. As thoughtful people, what are we supposed to conclude about hydrogen fuel cells?

It's still a great ad, and I enjoyed it. Some of the secondary press coverage is terrible though (PC World: "Mercedes makes invisible car, tricky to find where you parked it"; says that if the invisibility isn't perfect, it's because the LED sheet is too low resolution.)
I've never consistently rated myself as "above average" on anything but a few things. Does that make my ignorance and knowing it half the battle?
It's funny you should say that. I'm fairly certain Tumblr and Posterous use the same theme format.
Reinventing Fire
33 Free and Premium PSD and EPS Brochure Design Templates
That is why using the PSD and EPS brochure design templates for business is a great idea. These templates are very attractive in look and can impress the clients very easily.
haha awesome. hated it
Props for dealing with the feedback in this thread so quickly and sorry for turning HN into a low fidelity bug tracker. I promise to submit future bug reports in a more useful manner.

Fwiw, folks, this is staying on my phone. One of the great things about the android marketplace is I can expect this will be updated sooner rather than later.
Chute (YC W12) Launches A Twilio For Photos
Apple is making money off of the developers. That registration fee 8x more than the average one will ever make.

And that money has been side funnelled into something far more lucrative - infrastructure for distributing books and movies.
You seem to be making the assumption that many of those people are working on Django full time. It's pretty clear from their descriptions that most of them have other day jobs.
I'd sell my house and a kidney before I got rid of my dogs.
As a rabid fan of your project, some things I think it needs:

a) cloud storage - somewhere to stash Lua scripts and retrieve them for playback (See moai cloud for inspiration: http://getmoai.com/)

b) sound synthesis - not just .WAV playback, but real synthesis using a small but happy engine. (See sfxr for inspiration: http://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html)

c) some sort of network/multiplayer integration - again, with the cloud, it'd be nice to be able to push messages out to a queue and get messages back

d) 3D primitives .. ermm .. maybe this is going a bit too far. Okay, instead of 3D, how about some .png loading and basic sprites management?

Actually, I guess I'm describing MOAI at this point, but yeah .. you're definitely on the right track! Maybe I should go pester the MOAI guys about making a code-editing IDE for MOAI, in MOAI .. ;)
I'm a hacker and an entrepreneur...

Exactly. Our inability to accurately evaluate people extends to ourselves.
I think, of all the manufacturing jobs available in the world in 20 years, a large fraction of them will be in the U.S. I'm talking like 5 or maybe even 6 of the 30 jobs will be here.
Interview with SEO Evangelist Rand Fishkin
AT&T May Try Billing App Makers
Apple’s gaming user is worth 10 times as much as Facebook’s gaming user
That not enough money goes to non-evil advertising networks.
Jason embeds content from all over the place. If you load the page while running Chrome's developer tools open to the network tab, you can see the wild variety of hosts being touched. Many of these will involve separate DNS lookups and TCP/IP connection overhead. I've always viewed it as a consequence of his format, and well worth the wait.
Really looking forward to being able to use Archer and Ideal Sans on the web. My work is about to become a whole lot prettier.
Oops, terrible oversight. Fixed now - http://numbersapi.com/#1337 :)

Feel free to send entry suggestions to numbersapi at google mail. We may add a feature for this soon.
NASA rocket barrage will light up Mid-Atlantic coast
We'll try it out in a place where we can't get a GPS signal make it better. Thanks again.
Make it easy for me to pay for great articles. Make it easy for me to subscribe to online content (and maybe give online subscribers an ad-free Readability option). Consider a scheme for people to subscribe and donate the dead-tree paper to schools / colleges / prisons / hospitals / etc.
This is really cool. The entry barrier to building HTML5 mobile apps gets lower every day, thanks in part to developers like those at Twilio who open-source their hard work for the benefit of the community.
Thanks for sharing.
Show HN: dead simple weather with HTML5 geolocation
Damn, I've been working on nearly the same thing for a little while now.

Nicely done!
Am I reading this wrong or is the math on page 3 off by an order of magnitude?

If this is true: "every partner reads every app over a period of about 10 days" and there are "2000+ applications", then each parter would be reading 200 applications per day, not 20. That means you have 2 minutes to catch their attention, not 20 minutes. This only further supports the message of that page - impress fast.
My understanding was that the $12 is per phone across all apps. So the app developer "team" is really the union of all the teams who sell apps rather than just one team. Which is probably much bigger than all of Apple.

Also, invoking the law of the market in a market tightly controlled by one company (Apple) should be done with caution. The app store is very far from a perfect free market, so making broad generalizations about it from an economic standpoint is more difficult. (I certainly don't know enough to generalize anything :P. I just know enough to tell that it isn't exactly a free market.)
API Security for Mobile & Cloud
Caching is fine when I'm actively using Twitter, but if I do something else these 2MB will be competing against other junk|useful stuff.

I've used Twitter not very long ago (since then I've visited a forum, a piece of docs, left my browser idle half an hour, and visited HN), now I've just looked in about:cache and twitter/twimg only have a handful of profile pictures.
It should be noted somewhere that this project currently appears to only work on OS X Lion due to usage of a few Lion-specific classes, namely NSOrderedSet.
Thanks for sharing this! lscache is super cool. I also just watched and thoroughly enjoyed your Google IO talk on shyness work-arounds (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Ml_zax4A0&t=24m9s). Great stuff all around.
looks good but the controls suck
I visit a couple twitter feeds daily (because I don't particularly want an account and their RSS is broken), so presumably I normally have a warm cache.

It typically takes anywhere from 4-8 seconds before the first tweet appears, and another 2-4 seconds before the page is fully loaded. Twitter is quite definitely the slowest website I visit on a regular basis.
Very cool game. I keep getting a technical error and a stack trace every time I fight these guys and try to cover myself using the building to the north east of them.

http://www.hick.org/~raffi/gangstagangsta.tiff

Google Chrome 17.0.963.65 on MacOS X 10.6.8.
I wasn't taking anyone to task for not building it. I was saying what I, as a user, wish I had available to me for my primary dev environment.

I don't care what toolkit it gets built in. I typically use Gtk-based environments and stick with Gtk apps but have no problem using a Qt or other toolkit app when it meets a need.
Ask HN: Have any cool Google Analytics dashboards to share?
I'm curious if anyone has created any interesting dashboards in Google Analytics that they would be willing to share.
It sounds like you should become a Clojure or Parrot committer. They both tick off a number of things on your list and both are under active development by a vibrant community.
Sorry to make you click so much - I set it up in a chapter model partly to help me keep track of everything. I think next time, I would make a single page with quick links to various sections. Lesson learned!
Thought of this one a while ago. Some of my thoughts:

- How will you know where I am? It would be expensive to run my phone's GPS continuously to figure this out.

- My car might not be immediately available. The time it takes to get to the car will have little or nothing to do with my GPS distance from it.

- Parking can take a significant amount of time.

- Traffic estimates are often wrong, sometimes greatly underestimating travel time. Being late is much worse than being early, but this is appointment dependent.

Looking forward to more details!
Thank Larrys for the feedback. The product video was modeled off other web 2.0 intro videos (Dropbox 2min, Linkedin 2:35min) and was designed to provide first time users with an overview. We tried to create the stumbling blocks in the beginning b recreating events that commonly take place in the sharing of documents that the viewer would relate too. Probably, could have done better. Ultimately, we hope the video sparks interest by showing people the advantage of using our system over traditional document distribution methods. Thanks again.
They should've become MS's bitches when they had a chance.
"I’m nontechnical" - your cofounder was technical then?
Sounds like he's sick of the deluge of marketing dollars into these events, not necessarily the startup game.

Problem is, it's unavoidable. These guys have to get their name out there as quickly and loudly as possible. It's unfortunate, but until everyone in your target market has heard of you, you can't stop screaming "Look at me!"
Should solrnet become an ASF subproject?
What I like is that they put some time to make good HD graphics and make it looks good (even though the control sucks as many have mentioned). The other HTML5 games that has a 95 GUI gave a feeling that HTML5 is going to take the gaming experience backward.

Design does really matter. A good step forward.
The Best SLA Ever
I'll believe there's a bubble in tech accelerators when I see too many of them here in RTP. Here, we still aren't close to having enough accelerators, angel investors and seed-stage funds to help worth entrepreneurs get funded and get off the ground.

When I see this phenomenon of (supposedly) "easy money" for startups happen here, then I might believe that something extraordinary is going on.
Condom: too many errors when using, instructions for use-photos-videos
In Java, it's a compile error to pass something not of type `bool' into that expression, so things like

if (someBoolean)

Are unambiguous.
Not only a cool implementation, but, amazing music and amazing character words. "It's like that cuz!"
> it's still illegal.

Screw the law. Thinking that right/moral == legal is a very naive view of the world.
Its far easier to read if (!someBoolean) than if (someBoolean == false)

Ofcourse, your example probably applies to JavaScript since anything and everything can be a boolean, or not depending on the phase of the moon. In Java at least if not someBoolean is nice to read, and if (isGood) is nicer than if (isGood == true).
The (Un)common Lisp approach to Operations Research
Cool and thank you very much! Our vertical is the convention/ conference space. We live in Orlando which is a large convention market and have been tide to the space for a while which is the reason why the product was developed.