skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As already stated, do not get into freelancing until you know that 1) you can deliver a project and 2) you have a decent idea of how long it will take to do it.

My advice is to keep your day job, quit reading hacker news all day, and quit staying up all night doing Project Euler.

There are a million ideas for building websites, web apps or mobile apps. Pick a platform for now, whichever you're most comfortable with, and build a product. I don't recommend this product necessarily be a startup-type deal - it can be something simple. Easy even. If you like, you can pick something you don't have much experience with and focus on shoring that experience up. Don't know how to work with REST APIs? Build a twitter client. Want to expand that knowledge? Build a dashboard for a random project (like this) that pulls in from Github, Stackoverflow, Twitter and Reddit APIs.

If you want to do the world some good, make it so that I can go to a page that looks like that Ember dashboard, type in the name of my project, and get a dashboard out of it.

After a few of these, you'll know what you can do, and have an idea for how long it'll take. At that point, you'll also have a code portfolio. Open source the code on Github (free if it's open source). Then come up with something more ambitious. Maybe a two or three week project. Figure out how long you think it'll take. Work on that and track your time diligently. When you're finished (if you finish), you'll know how close your estimation skills are. If the app is worthwhile, it can be a startup.

Whatever happens, by this point, you should have a public-facing application that solves a problem, and a couple of utilities or libraries or gems that have gotten you some credibility as a developer, and a code portfolio at the very least.

Finding a job at this point shouldn't be terribly hard if that's what you want -- you should at least be able to get a junior level position somewhere within a few months. They may not pay relocation, but anybody that can prove that they can build an application from zero to completion should not have a problem getting a job.

You can of course freelance at this stage if you want, but I think it's harder to go all in on while depending on a regular paycheck and clients can be much more demanding than you might have time to fit in on nights and weekends.

Regardless, there will be open doors by this stage, and all it will have cost you is your 'screwing around' time. Best of luck, whichever route you choose.
London Data Center Geeks Will Live in Pods to Dodge Olympic Traffic
Question: Is there a YC company that does not put "YC" in front of its name?
You might also find eldoc-mode[1] and it's various mode-specific children (c-, perl-, ...) to a useful minor-mode. It displays a short string describing the function-at-point, and the order and name of it's arguments. Sort of zero-click docs. Whatever way it does it could probably be hacked up to display more complete docs in a split window or frame. Something I'll think about when I finally get an SSD :)

[1] http://emacswiki.org/emacs/ElDoc
All the comment links go to some entry on living the dream and the thumbnails flicker terribly ~ Chrome on OS X.
No, 30% is also for handling in-app payments.
Google and Facebook were/are "legally required" to have IPOs? I believe they are only required to release financial statements. Even if that were true, though, claiming this is their sole reason to IPO strikes me as disingenuous, given the improvement in liquidity it provided/will provide for the fortunes of the company's insiders. Surely that played a significant role in their decision-making.
My prediction is that Apple has been biding their time and preparing to dominate the console gaming market. Think about it- the iPod touch and iPhone are becoming more and more robust in terms of hardware, I don't know the benchmarks but I'd wager they're close to consoles in terms of actual power. Apple has enabled "AirPlay" through AppleTV, which allows the iPhone/iPod to stream directly to the TV.

So what you have is a gaming platform that's already ubiquitous, can act as it's own controller (gyro, accelerometer, speaker, mic, vibrate, touchscreen, buttons are all built-in), and is able to stream wirelessly to any AppleTV. These devices already have a fantastic network in terms of downloading and paying for content. At this point all you need is some games to take advantage of it and you're set.

OR they could just be trying to integrate Steam into their upcoming tv. My hope is for the former though.
Ditto on Chrome *.162 on Snow Leopard.
That's the "None of the above" part.

All of these are just tools to help you get it right. Even with plain JavaScript you will need tools. jshint for example is awesome.
the real roadblock for Apple becoming a payment company is resistance from the carriers. The carriers have competing products. Google's thinking about sharing Google Wallet revenue with carriers to work around the issue.
I completely understand where your coming from. However, I think it's worth stressing that - from what I've seen - there are two major concerns.

1) Ambiguity. A lot of people aren't so much concerned over the license restrictions you have placed on the project, as completely confused over what those restrictions are. The GPL is written in a way which is extremely ambiguous for a JS framework and (partly) as a a result it is a vanishingly rare license in the web framework/JS space. You should spell out your understanding of what the license does and does not allow on your website.

1b) Your second option ("just send us an email") is also full of ambiguity. For good or ill, people in western cultures tend to hate this sort of haggling. A price sheet would be good, or at LEAST some clarification of the type of commercial license you imagine. Are you expecting to charge a flat rate per developer? Per website? Per visitor? Are you looking for revenue sharing deals? If I want to use Meteor for a closed-source app am I looking at the price of a cup of coffee? The price of a steak dinner? The price of a new smartphone? The price of a new car? Also, what protection do I have from you deciding to slash your commercial license costs by 80% after you think over the response you've been getting?

2) I think a lot of the concern is coming not so much from people who want to write closed source commercial apps as from people concerned that the restrictive license will hamper uptake. Everyone wants to get in on the ground floor of the next Rails/Django/Backbone, and to be able to brag in job interviews looking for an expert Meteor dev "sure, I've been using it since version 0.3!" But dual-licensed projects (like ExtJS) tend to have relatively low adoption. If nobody used Meteor, then Meteor's future isn't going to be as bright, and I'm less excited about using it myself. If everyone is using Meteor, then Meteor's future is bright, and it would behove me to learn it ASAP.
> If you've fixed the design to 320px that's about half the width of my phone screen and a quarter of a portrait tablet screen.

Take a look at Twitter's Bootstrap. It has a variety of different responsive design levels, not just one at 320px. Great example of how a design can fit many different devices.

> Mobile Safari doesn't automatically zoom because Apple were to rushed to take that feature out, it auto zooms because Apple went out of their way to add it.

Yes, and the reasons they did are good ones - many sites don't have a responsive design.

You know what else Apple went out of their way to add? The ability for a web developer to disable the zooming feature!

> ... maybe I'm in a moving vehicle or using it at night in low brightness and can't see well, or without glasses or when tired or while holding something else and viewing at a distance or anything ...

A trade-off I'm willing to deal with. There are accessibility features in iOS and Android for most of those situations, so I'm fairly comfortable making the site work best for most people instead of the small number edge cases.
Great concept. This is kind of similar to an editor we've been talking about for Overtone. How about,

* allow for render plugin functions so values can be rendered with images, rendered canvases, control elements, etc.

* treat the AST as the primary data for each function or form, and then make the source code one of multiple renderings of the data.

- makes paredit type manipulations just operations on the ast

- allow for decorating the ast with additional data, which can be rendered with plugins (for example, heat-up regions of code as a profiler runs)
"AppleTV would surely be an ARM platform"

Battery life isn't an issue in the home and ARM can't really do full fledged ports of the most demanding and popular AAA console titles. So I'd expect an Intel chip. It could possibly have an ARM chip too but I'd guess emulation is good enough and higher profit. Alternatively they could put in a bunch of ARM chips but iOS just makes a lot more sense on paper. With an Intel chip you gain the whole iOS library and the whole OS X library. At that point the library and capabilities may be good enough to forego other console purchases for many consumers.
Three Things Everyone Needs To Know About The Apple Antitrust Case
Apple Falls Behind in Home Networking
I love the great interaction between backbone.js and coffeescript. It's not often that you get two pieces of software that work so well together.
How are "project-less" applications going btw?
Department of Labor forcing media to use government computers
Mind sharing what you switched to? Another schemaless data store, or a more traditional RDBMS?
I pay Comcast $60 for 20 Mbit / 2 Mbit up, with 250 GB a month (with threats to disconnect me after that and ban me from ever being their customer).

I don't have any other Internet providers that service my house...
Interesting. A few years back it wouldn't work in Lynx at all- but they returned an error explaining that and included the message "Keep it real."
MacObserver keeps up in HN Spamming

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jmartellaro

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=digiwizard

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Semteksam

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=davethenerd
-click search, it drops down a search bar without reloading the page. Fast, nice.

I posit that the search bar should be static, that is, always visible. It actually took me a while to find out that I was supposed to click the little magnifying glass.

- actually do the search - updates in place.
Again, confusing. It wasn't immediately apparent that the search results actually displayed below the search bar.

- on the sidebar, no reload for switching between "most popular" and "latest"
This is a good use case for Javascript. However, if Javascript is not present why would it not default to just opening separate pages for each of the tabs?

- Commenting: again, why does it need Javascript? Slashdot commenting system works just fine without Javascript, as an example.

I'm not questioning WHY they are using Javascript - obviously, you are getting plenty of use from that method. I am questioning why it is necessary to have those features to view content?
Weird, crap... it should be Pjax-ing, but I can't reproduce this bug yet. I'll keep trying, thanks for letting us know.
Quick fix, nice!

I'm assuming this would be a quick fix, since the information appears to be structured...but I think in the profile information, this:

Lieutenant Governor, State of Connecticut, 2011-present

Should be:

2011-present
Lieutenant Governor, State of Connecticut

Or some other such differentiating between time and position (bold text, underline, etc)...just for easier reading.
Excellent! Thanks for the feedback. That's the type of useful information we need.
If you've never held a corporate job, you are lucky. It sucks your soul and crushes your dream.

There are good corporate jobs and bad ones. When I, for example, worked at IBM, I had a pretty good time and enjoyed the work, the people and the environment tremendously.

Conversely there are small company / startup situations that are totally soul-sucking. Especially when the economy goes into the tank and layoffs start and the managers start acting like fear is their only tool to motivate people. This happened when I worked at Lulu.com, and I never felt a great sense of the relief than the day I resigned and walked out the door.

I mean, don't get me wrong... I loved my colleagues there, so nothing about this is meant as a slag against them... but the job itself, the management and the vibe had reached a point that, when I walked to my car on my last day, by the time I got to my car, I felt like a 10000 lb weight had been lifted off of my shoulders... I could almost swear that the sky was a brighter shade of blue, and that the grass was greener and that the air smelt better, on the way out than on the way in. Sometimes all the nerf gun fights, and free soda, and $whatever, just can't make up for the other stuff.

If there's a point to all this, it's that whether a job is good or bad does not come down to whether or not you're working for a large corporation or a startup. There are a LOT more variables in the equation than that.

That said, if your job is sucking your soul and you feel the drive to quit (or get fired) and go found a startup, I absolutely advocate doing so!
I actually make quite a few purchases from amazon on my phone. It's pretty easy for me, especially because I have a lot of items I want to buy vetted out, and in my wish list already. Also, there are times when I'm on the move and dont have internet besides my phone, or spur of the moment purchases I'll make as I think of it, that I use my phone for.

Edit: "moving at the speed of business" is actually kinda applicable here, think it, get it done, move on, kinda mentality when I use my phone. On a laptop, I have a tendency to dilly-dally around my purchases and over-think/read too much into reviews and what have you.
You're right. The Postgres equivalent to "appendfsync always" is "synchronous_commit = on". Which AFAIK is the default.

However, one of the nice things about redis is that even if you run "appendfsync everysec" you never run the risk of corruption. You're only risk is losing a maximum of 2 seconds worth of data.

If you missed it, there's a wonderful blog post by antirez covering all of this (and a lot more) here: http://antirez.com/post/redis-persistence-demystified.html
SMS Reader in JavaScript using Tizen APIs
A big revolution is going out there
The example given is valid js...

Nobody is "force-feeding" you anything, just close your browser tab. If you missed the top of the article, it's the author that was offended first for using CS, there's no need to continue calling names.

And please drop the straw man arguments:

> 1. In order to debug CoffeeScript, I will need to know JavaScript.

Of course, and that's the beauty of it. CoffeeScript is a tool to write javascript.

> 2. If I run into a tricky problem, not only will I need to know JavaScript but I'll also need to know the CoffeeScript compiler's internals.

You never have to know the CS compiler's internals. The output is always valid (if it wasn't that would be a serious bug, not a problem in your script).

> 3. If I run into a really tricky problem, or if I need some sort of optimization, I might have to use JavaScript anyway.

Optimization can be done in CoffeeScript itself 99% of the times, and it already outputs very efficient javascript.

> 5. All of the libraries I will be using will be written in JavaScript.

Yes, that's nice isn't it? They all interact perfectly fine with your CS code.
For a large table, adding a new column can be non-trivial, each record is updated when the new column is added.
Its awesome how Google provides us such cool tools
You assume that any AI worth the label will already be as capable as current PCs.

But perhaps there is a tradeoff? Maybe becoming "intelligent" in the way we understand it is incompatible with the "dumb calculator/encyclopedia" capabilities of regular computers? Maybe true AI will necessarily lose the ability to look anything up instantly or calculate large columns of numbers?

I don't really believe that, but it is a possibility.
Works. Awesome.

Gesture seems to be the next frontier.
The output is there for you to take. It is javascript.
Whenever I start the interview process, I feel like I'm back in high school again. Mostly because I feel like I should be interviewing other people for my business and not the other way around.

OMG, I know that feeling all too well. At my last dayjob, I spent 8 hours a day basically asking myself "why am I taking orders from these mindless drones, instead of working on building my company?" Talk about soul-sucking / soul-crushing / whatever.
Netflix never used its $1 million algorithm due to engineering costs
Don’t Negotiate Your Lease Before Reading This
Intel’s Windows 8 tablet requirements: Move along, nothing to see here
strangely enough, I own roll20.com and am working on something similar...
I don't use CoffeeScript, among other reasons, because honestly it's just another syntax to learn and remember. Despite what people say, it's not "just JavaScript." I write JavaScript everyday, as well as CSS, HTML, Python and PHP. Adding one more syntax layer to the stack, with its due postitives, also comes with its own costs. As for speed, I utilize tab completion in my editor and make advanced use of keyboard shortcuts, which makes my writing/editing more than "fast enough."
But performance
The Jack Tramiel we didn't know
This. A million times, this.

I promised myself I will escape and never look back. Obviously there is no certainty in startups, but from my point of view, that's comforting. Even though there is no certainty, you always know you are in control of your own fate, and that's reassuring at least to me.

Exactly. I would rather take a chance and fail, doing it on my own terms, than continue to waste my life away doing shit that is highly unlikely to move me significantly closer to living out my dreams. Life is too short, as Kacy said.
I was wondering who had that :-). We were originally going to go with d20.io but couldn't figure out if it sounded good or not, and so now that is our shortening URL instead. I checked before using roll20.net and nothing was set up on roll20.com, so we moved forward.
"The top articles about coffeescript posted in r/javascript are anti-coffeescript articles."

Ah okay, r/javascript isn't in my regular rotation. So as I said, my only evidence is anecdotal.
SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!
Light Table has problems for non-trivial code anyway. What happens when functions have side effects like deleting files? Most of my code involves networking, especially Android devices talking to http servers providing functionality that has state. Things don't run in isolation, there are databases involved and code can't be called willy nilly.

And a lot of code is about error handling. In addition to the normal path I really need to see the flow through the problems - permissions issues, timeouts, resource limits, service failures etc.
I'm a PhD student at Stanford working with Andrew Ng, who is known for his work on Deep Learning. I've worked on these networks for the last few years.

I think it's great that people get excited about these advances, but it is also easy to extrapolate their capabilities, especially if you're not familiar with the details.

Indeed, we are making good progress but most of it relates specifically to perceptual parts of the cortex-- the task of taking unstructured data and automatically learning meaningful, semantic encodings of it. It is about a change of description from raw to high-level. For example, taking a block of 32x32 pixel values between 0 and 1 and transforming this input to a higher-level description such as "there is stimulus number 3731 in this image." And if you were to inspect other 32x32 pixel regions that happen to get assigned stimulus id 3731, you could for example find that they are all images of faces.

This capability should not be extrapolated to the general task of intelligence. The above is achieved by mostly feed-forward, simply sigmoid functions from input to output, where the parameters are conveniently chosen according to the data. That is, there is absolutely no thinking involved.

The mind, an intelligence, is a process of combining many such high-level descriptions, deciding what to store, when, how, retrieving information from the past, representing context, deciding relevance, and overall loopy process of making sense of things. A deep network is much less ambitious, as it only aims to encode its input in more semantic representation, and it's interesting that it turns out that you can do a good job at that just by passing inputs through a few sigmoids. Moreover, as far as I'm aware, there are no obvious extensions that could make the same networks adapt to something more AI-like. Depending on your religion, you may think that simply introducing loops in these networks will do something similar, but that's controversial for now, and my personal view is that there's much more to it.

Overall, I found this article to be silly. There is no system that I'm currently aware of that I consider to be on a clearly promising path to Turing-like strong AI, and I wouldn't expect anything that can reliably convince people that it is human in the next 20 years at least. Chat bot is a syntactical joke.
Forget Med School - Be a Startup Doctor
C# 4.0 actually has all the pieces you'd need to write Go-style concurrent code. It just won't be pretty.

The upcoming 4.5 release fixes some of the ugly.
So are you going to buy the design off kyro?
I have to give this team some respect for their candid words upon launch. Awesome to see another sw/lsm team continuing through the ecosystem. More specifically, using the available mechanisms like sw > incubator to their advantage as a natural vetting process for product and team evolution.
wow, people really buy 3-5 apps a month?

i set up my phone with a few apps (2 or 3 paids) and never think about it again. Let alone 3-5 times a month.
Really super buggy...using Chrome on Mac 10.7...letters get stuck all the time, sometimes keys don't register...needs work, but looks like an addictive concept, if I could make it through one round without it misregistering my keystrokes...
Since it looks prettier, are you going to buy the design off kyro?
Video: Typesafe & Klout on Play 2.0, intro, code, and use examples
Facebook Explains Support For CISPA
I use (and recommend) Vim, but if you are looking for something less 'alien' and with a shallower learning curve, I'd recommend Sublime Text. They do an amazing job of making a lot of stuff (specially file navigation) extremely easy.
Sorry, the muse for my post was to vent tangential memories that it recalled moreso than anything you said that seemed particularly rude or short-sighted :)
1M/1M Video: Does Your PowerPoint Have Power?
Tough times in Germany for affiliate programs who advertise on piracy sites
It hasn't made international news yet, but today the german police has raided the offices of several affiliate program owners and arrested 2 people

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzp...827344,00.html

What did they do?

They advertised on kino.to, a huge piracy website that was closed last year. 5 people who ran kino.to are already sentenced, some of them will do up to almost 4 years in jail.

The main owner is still waiting for his trial and now they're going after their advertisers.

and btw - most content on kino.to was hosted at Megaupload

So when does it start to become dangerous for those who advertise on international piracy sites like pirate bay (DoubleClick Ads) etc...?
Why Airport Security Is Broken—And How to Fix It (former head TSA)
That's most people's findings. If your dataset can fit in ram [1] and you don't care about your data being safe then there might be an argument for MongoDB. Once you care about your data, things like Voldemort, Riak, and Cassandra will eat Mongo's lunch on speed.

[1] But as Artur Bergman so eloquently points out, if your data can fit in ram, just use a native data-structure (http://youtu.be/oebqlzblfyo?t=13m35s)