skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah. I think a business founder looking for free tech work has already failed the first test as a businessman: He hasn't been able to raise the $40k-$80k in seed funding needed to build an MVP.

If he can't convince a guy who doles out capital for a living to give him a tiny bit of it, why should he expect a programmer to front him that value in highly skilled labor?
from reddit:

SR&ED is [reorganized.]

Whew, so it's not completely axed. If anything Canada needs significantly more investment and tax programs like this. Brain drain has always been a problem for Canada because of the lack of investment from the government and the lack of tech-oriented VC.
Why CFML | ColdFusion | Railo is still relevant for 2012
> rudiger: When you say you know these women, do you mean in the biblical sense?

This crass garbage has no place on HN.
It doesn't matter. Everything dies.

You get hugely successful, defining a new product. You build a very effective business to capitalize on your product. The state you were operating in when you designed/built your product is by necessity baked into your business. Life, for a time, becomes Very Good.

But the world state changes. This is inevitable. You don't care — there's enough money in what you do so that changing your business just isn't rational. So you keep on keeping on, and your culture continues to grow in the direction allowed — fighting to keep the status quo, even as the rest of the world is moving on.

And then at some point, once the world state you built into your company (that has been profitable for you since day one) and the current world state diverge to the point that you can't even understand the change required, and you are going to be staring down obsolescence. There's nothing you can do. Your entire company is predicated on fitting a context that no longer exists. You can't understand what's happened, because to understand what has happened your company would have to be a very different company.

And you die.
I'm kind of confused by where conferences (particularly large/government/etc. focused conferences) choose to be. Paris isn't really my first choice for a cost-effective place for a tech conference.

It's not as bad as the ICANN meetings, which were deliberately held in obscure/expensive places around the world just to keep people from attending, in the guise of "being globally representative". The funny/sad thing is that this isn't one of the worst decisions ICANN has made.
Erm, I think there may have been a bit of a misunderstanding in my attempt at some dry humor. :(

I intended to imply disagreement with your claim, mostly due to the one-sided nature of it (as my parent reply suggested). I imagine the downvotes are due to the fact that your phrasing seems to imply that the male should have no say in the matter.

It's not that women should not have control over the process (perhaps even most of it), but that both parties need to have the ability to say, finally and without being overruled, "no this will not result in a child."

That was the purpose of my comment, it should be a

(she->wantsChild() && he->wantsChild()) makeChild();

not

(she->wantsChild() || he->wantsChild()) makeChild();

sort of deal.

EDIT:
"Its as if most people think that the pill would have been as revolutionary if it were for men instead of women."

I think you've hit it right on the head here, though. The advent of the pill allowed for equality of sexes in the manner suggested above. Had it been for men, I don't think it would've changed much at all.

However, now that that is the case, we've kind of got a situation where women can choose to have relations without getting pregnant regardless of what their partner is doing, whereas for men the options are both limited and uncomfortable. A woman on the pill can have sex without protection (though there are obvious caveats, of course, know/trust your partner, etc. etc.) and still be assured of results, whereas for a man he pretty much has to either be wearing a condom (uncomfortable) or have had a vasectomy.

This would be another round of equalization, better for everyone.
Break out and start your own company? That's what I'm working on.
I'm curious what problems you have in mind. Of my friends who I know use an IUD, 4 out of 4 say some variation of "how could you consider using anything else?" The only complaint that I heard from this admittedly small sample is a day's worth of discomfort following insertion.
I do see a market with this, but it's got a lot of problems you'd need to navigate. Nothing a smart team couldn't figure out.

Most of the time, men trust women when they say they're on birth control. Women get pregnant--a big deal. It's less likely (but not unheard of) that a woman wants to get pregnant and then lies about birth control.

Men, on the other hand, would love to not use a condom. And men don't get pregnant. So saying "yeah baby, I've had my shots" would probably be a lot more common.

You'd need to market this to couples. Relationships with trust--not teenagers. Or, as an "and-1", extra step prevention. Not as a first line of defense. Then, the low cost would be more of an extra procedure that would get them thinking more about being safer. You wouldn't hang your business model on it but could actually do more business by offering it.

Lastly, being a man, the idea of someone putting forceps in my scrotum gives me the willies. Just sayin'.
Used old Nokias (no, really); the highest cost would be moving them to-and-fro, and battery replacements. I still have a fully functional 3410, some ten years old. Battery is gone of course, but apart from this the phone took quite some licking, yet keeps on ticking ;) And of course the venerable 3310s - built like tanks, apart from the clip-on plastic covers.

Calls? Check. SMS? Check. English? Check. Not sure what you mean by "GSM" - it uses the 900 MHz and 1800 GSM ranges, if that's what you're asking

Alas, they don't make cellphones like they used to.

If you're thinking in terms of "gotta be a new phone", you could probably get <15 USD if you licensed those and had them built in huge batches.
That's actually really close to what I want to do... I just need to learn how to parse correctly and replace.

I have 4 basic page layouts, but only 2 that I regularly generate content for. The header, footer, nav bar, sidebars, and major layout DIV's on these pages are all constant. I'd like to be able to take a text document of paragraphs and run it through the parser that would apply <p>'s to the paragraphs and format the image links properly based on some sort of predefined replacement markup.

This is where I fall down. I need to figure out how to parse and I'm not finding any links to learn. I can read lines and stick open and close <p>'s on newlines, but the parsing of stuff inline is where I'm stuck.
What programming related blogs do you visit regularly?
At least once or twice a week I go and visit some blogs that have at one point or another helped me out with a problem or had a couple of good programming related posts that I have enjoyed.

However many of them post infrequently now so I'm curios if I might be missing out on some great frequently updated tech blogs in 2012.

This is a part of my list:
http://www.facebook.com/Engineering
http://blog.heroku.com
http://engineering.twitter.com
http://blog.reddit.com
http://code.flickr.com
http://wanderr.com/jay/
http://blog.ksplice.com
http://cr.yp.to

Anyone willing to share theirs?
no good deed goes unpunished?
Relevant HN discussion from 10 months ago - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2602785
At risk of sounding like a sore loser, IQ tests, whether or not they are bias, are not a good indicator of success (in fact, I'd question it's ability to measure "intelligence" or "potential"). Scoring well on an IQ test does not mean you will be successful at your job.

It does not measure your willingness to learn.
It does not measure your ability to retain information.
It does not measure your reception to criticism.
It does not measure your ability to play nice with others.
It does not measure your interest in the job.
It does not measure your ability to work hard.
Among others.

As such, I think giving someone an IQ test at a job interview is a fairly bad idea.

What we should have picked up from Gwen's job interview is that she is willing to learn and work hard given a fair chance.
As always, it depends on the woman; I know one who swears by them, though I've never had sex with her so I wouldn't know for sure.
No affiliation. I think they might contact you to get quotes for media about how cool it would be and to notify you of their progress.
That's only male to female. Although upon further research, female to male infection has a very small chance of occurrence. Nonetheless, still risky!
Enyo JS Community Gallery
The Wikipedia article raganwald kindly linked to has an archived set of talk pages that go on almost endlessly, as the article has long been the subject of edit-warring. That article and related pages have been the subject of an Arbitration Committee case (opened at about the time I became a wikipedian, by coincidence)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...

with ongoing administrative sanctions. In other words, I'm not sure if the article is currently in good enough shape to recommend. The Wikipedia user bibliography "Intelligence Citations"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...

points to sources that are generally reliable, as does the bibliography "Anthropology, Human Biology, and Race Citations."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol...
_This_ was the root cause of the banking crisis and this is the industry which needed tightened regulations (such as those seen in the UK or most European countries)

We agree then.

Capital ratios can be helpful too in some circumstances. I'd consider tighter regulation of the loan industry as financial regulation, but I don't really care about the semantics.
> They should solve this problem by using the federal sales tax to round up/down. $1.25 + 5% = 5¢ of tax instead of 6.25¢.

I see nothing but confusion there.

$1.25 + $0.05 = $1.30. After rounding, $1.30.

$1.25 + $0.0625 = $1.3125. After rounding, $1.30.

> It would be a tiny incentive to use cash rather than credit cards (which cost the merchant 2-4%)

Dealing with cash instead of credit cards is also a similarly percentaged inconvenience - that's why they're getting rid of the penny in the first place!
In my opinion, if they had sold it for much cheaper, then that trade off (next to no support) would've been fine.
This is not a vasectomy. It's not even related to vasectomy. Please RTFA.
All right, I see what you mean. I'll explain why I think there is a best method.

For a single person considering the question on their own, the best choice is limited to what's available to them. Since there are (approximately) equal numbers of men and women considering this, neither population affects the universal rankings.

But for a couple considering their birth control options, it doesn't matter on which of them the responsibility and direct benefit fall. What matters is the effectiveness and side effects. So they can agree on which is best without worrying about who holds the responsibility, etc.

So, for example, the pill is better than condoms, because it has a lower failure rate and doesn't have the side effect of severely reduced pleasure. The fact that a single woman can't depend on condoms and a single man can't take the pill cancels out, because there's one of each of them, and the couple is making the choice for both of them.
Posted this because I'm starting to feel like we've seen this story in Canada before.

With RIM there is a little less corruption (at least from whats come out so far), but the plan is to get back on the horse. Do we think that's going to happen, or is this just another Nortel?
No.

If every single person who wanted to help out looked for the most efficient thing to do on the margin, then there would hardly be any malaria patients. The most efficient opportunities for philanthropy would be exhausted. Then the next most efficient, then the next, and so forth. Maybe eventually we'd get around to giving these kids morale boosts, but if we didn't, it'd be because there were more important things to do.
Free jQuery Photo Gallery ( Tutorial )
In this tutorial, I'll show you how to create a minimalistic jQuery photo gallery. You can use it to present your latest works or as a photo album.
I'm confused. If you read Griggs vs Duke Power Company, it would seem to allow IQ tests if they can be shown to relate to job ability. For a programming job (or, indeed, a lot of jobs), IQ or "g" should be correlated with performance. Is there some other ruling or law which prohibits IQ tests?
Seems to me that the lack of a Google blessed tablet has a lot to do with why we're not seeing much in the tablet optimized app front. We need a stable development platform that's going to get updates at a reasonable clip. I don't want to have to buy a pile of devices or discard them left and right so I can dev on newer versions.

There are other reasons why tab apps are few and far between as well, but not having an n1 equivalent tablet held me back. I gave up waiting and bought a tf prime in December and am finally working on a tablet specific app, but I wonder how long before I'll have to replace it.
Is RIM the new Nortel?
Showing before tax prices (almost) makes sense in the US where every other street has it's own local tax rates. But Canada only has federal and provincial taxes so I suspect it's just to make the price look better - especially if you are comparison shopping with the US
From skimming the news it seems like it's cut significantly.

>The changes include a cut in 2014 to 15 per cent from 20 per in the tax credit rate and a restriction on which expenditures count toward the credit. For example, capital expenditures – buildings, equipment and product prototypes – will no longer be eligible. The amount of eligible overhead expenses and subcontracted R&D will also be reduced.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/gr...

Bad news for Canada's tech innovators.
This. Android is posing a serious problem for businesses as people demand to BYO with phones that are a huge melting pot of unknown versions, vulnerabilities, levels of support for exchange, etc. They need to provide their stack as a virtualized system that can work on any Android handset and then have their own analogue of Google "experience" devices where they do the whole thing. They can make some serious hay out of guaranteeing updates, security and support which the Android vendors largely are either ignoring or failing at.
This is simply patching over the underlying problem - dilution in the money supply. There is no reason why countries like the US and Canada who have only become a lot wealthier in the last 200 years should have such inflation. Stop printing money, and the penny will remain valuable!
I still don't understand how that is a win for consumers. If anything, my limited experience with the stock market tells me that market makers and HFT have been stealing cents on most transactions made by individuals since we've made the switch.
Is that the going rate for a job that has a high likelihood of not existing in a year's time?
I can't seem to get DDG to show me UK results, although I have set my preferences to UK. Still shows amazon.com when searching for products etc... Search for the same thing on google.co.uk and it always shows me .co.uk sites.

I tend to use DDG as my first choice and only switch to google if I can't find something.

Dave
Isn't most non-condom birth control primarily intended for couples?

All the other types prevent pregnancy only. Condoms prevent disease as well.
I don't think drugs are incompatible with being a responsible and productive person either. I think that they are negatively correlated with being a responsible and productive person. I think a search will turn up a lot of evidence to support that.

Pot isn't the worst thing ever, but it isn't going to help you start a business or become a great programmer. While you are high, you will be worse at reasoning and your working memory won't be great. This makes it harder to write code. There is also a legal risk, justified or not.

Drugs are a frustrating topic to debate. On one side there is a huge amount of misinformation intended to scare people away from drug use. Then, in reaction to that and coming out of the cognitive dissonance of millions of people doing something that they know isn't good for them, there is a ton of 'pot is good for you because it comes from the earth' bs on the other side. I think people on the internet (and apparently on HN) tend to be in the latter group, and I feel like it is worth pointing out the downsides.
What you have described is not a "best method;" it's a compromise due to limited resources. Using multiple complementary methods will always result in a lower risk than deciding on any one of the options.
I posted this because it feels like we've heard this story before in Canada. The plan to come back, but will it happen?

With Nortel there was a lot of what I would consider to be corruption (Large C level bonuses that ended up being returned in part, and financials that got re-stated), and we're not seeing this with RIM (yet) but maybe thats yet to come out.

What do you think?
Green Card process
I recently relocated from Brazil to Seattle, to work for one of the big software companies in the area. They already applied me for a Green Card so, my question is: after how long should I expect to get my GC? I have a B.S. in Computer Science and around 11 years of experience in the field.

How long, on average, until Google and Facebook apply you for a Green Card after you join?
My grandmother maintains her own wifi router, and nobody even taught her how....
While it's always a good thing to see people working together towards a common goal where the issues of gender and sexualization have faded away, the amount of faux-minist political-correctedness in this particular context is really mindblowing.

Seriously, what was wrong about the project being called "Testosterone"? It's not like testosterone is SPECIFIC to men in the first place anyway, jeez (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone).
That's not the point of the post. The OP is saying that a lot of would-be entrepreneurs are vastly underestimating the amount of work involved in creating the actual software, and that the would-be entrepreneurs need a technical cofounder rather than an employed programmer.

To use your analogy, this would be more like the store owners telling the prospectors, correctly, that they would also need to find legal help to protect any land they found, security to keep them from getting mugged, etc.
I'm arguing that men who were admitted might be lower quality than women who weren't admitted because their gender exclude them, but that didn't mean those men were unqualified or even necessarily dragged their group averages down.
None of our measurements are accurate enough to correctly distinguish 5,000 very good students from the next 5,000 nearly-identically-but-slightly-better students.
If you look closer, your quote is 'stakeholders', not shareholders. The meaning is a bit different, but perhaps Steve still wouldn't have said it.
Incredibly Useful and Cool iPhone and iPad Gadgets for Traveling Bloggers
A solid collection of the most useful and creative iPhone and iPad gadgets. Either we talk about battery chargers, video enhancers or printing, these gadgets can do them all no matter where you are.
Clickable link to Beat Boxes on the App Store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/beat-boxes/id460798042
What Makes a Game?
Are programmers really willing to put together a site for someone else while the other person has a view to make money from the idea, even if the programmer is payed at the going rate? what is the going rate?
Google Now Using ReCAPTCHA To Decode Street View Addresses
That doctor was incredibly negligent about pain management.

There's a level called 'unconscionable pain' that is essentially always malpractice, and if you're clamping your jaw and arching your back reflexively, you've hit it and then some.

There's no reason not to mildly sedate a patient, and no reason why anyone should suffer undue pain. Sure, it'll hurt during recovery, but that's why they should issue with vicodin.
I was hoping for SR&ED to be completely axed. It's a huge monstrosity of paperwork, to the point that small businesses pay 30% of their tax credits to consultants who fill out the forms for them and large businesses hire teams of people for the sole purpose of tracking and classifying SR&ED expenses so that the tax credits can be claimed. I suspect that Tarsnap is eligible for some SR&ED credits, but it's simply not worth the time and headaches it would cost me to claim them.

If Canada wants to encourage innovation, they should set up a system which rewards people for doing new and innovative things, not a system which rewards people for being good at filling out forms.
Why Apple TV Won’t Kill Blu-Ray, Yet
Darren Kitchen does it again WiFi Honeypot Hackery with Noisebridge
SQL Lite Performance on Android
> Here's the thing: words (as opposed to physical violence) are very curious insofar as they can only hurt you as much as you let them.

Life is not that simple.

Psychologists have shown that exposure to 'harmless' sexist humor can lead to an increase in the toleration of hostility towards, and discrimination against, women.[1]

'Growing a thicker skin' might save your feelings for a bit, but the net effect is paradoxically that over time your ability to tolerate 'minor' comments will open you up to increasingly more serious discrimination.

Far easier to nip the discrimination in the bud when its still a dumb blonde joke, far harder when it's serious pay discrimination or outright sexual harassment.

[1] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071106083038.ht...
Oh, no, I absolutely appreciate that. I'm just saddened that lower-level stuff isn't exposed. Even just TCP access and listening would be great to have--especially as raw TCP connections are pretty much the standard transport exposed for HTTP (please correct me if I'm wrong in this assumption).

I'm not suggesting that it would be foolproof for consumer applications or what have you--but being able to write something like netcat in javascript for my browser would be pretty cool.
STAR interviewing just selects for talented bullshitters. An interview should be novel questions about someone's skill and experience, not a canned sales pitch.
Maybe it's a distant pivot.

But to me it doesn't seem a huge leap from "we keep your files for you and get them for you wherever you are" to "we let you do things with your files" or "we keep other stuff for you too." It seems like a very natural proposition to offer users.
Just schedule it along with your passport renewal! If you are in the US~
At 60+ companies in a cycle I think they're already going to start butting up into dilution.

If you have a program that is attracting the 60+ most viable candidates to start companies, it's kind of odd to expect that group to go into left field to start tapping risk-averse people for whom salaried jobs are so attractive they'd skip YC.

There's nothing wrong with those people! But the whole point of startups is to capitalize on timely combinations of risk tolerance and talent.

Can you imagine Larry Page and Sergey Brin taking Backrub to YC, had it existed, in 1997? It was their first startup. Am I saying they obviously would have? No. But I wouldn't have been surprised.
This will also let us stop hearing "men's rights activists" whine about child support. Didn't want to pay child support? Should have gotten the shot!
At least in the US, sales tax is assessed locally, so it can vary even within a particular region. Dealing with fixed prices and additional sales tax is the only reasonable way to run a business that crosses multiple localities.