skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: The build vs buy debate... should we hire a programmer?
Hi all, I'm currently writing up a business plan and getting feedback from various contacts I've made that are entrepreneurs or VC's... the only issue is I'm not an experienced programmer. I've been trying to teach myself (via code academy and google python), but feel as if it will take me way too long to get to the level of building a site for this company. (I'm still learning to code regardless, just speaking in terms of building my site).
So I started looking for a programmer... is it worth paying a freelancer to do the work? Has anyone tried doing this before? If not, what are my other alternatives?
In a brilliant master-stroke, between 2001-2005, Google bought out dark fiber, dirt-cheap, from many failed Telcos, http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Google-and-Its-Co...

Now they reap the benefits.
Well said. I was honored to have you as the programming team pres while I was at UF.
I, for one, was hoping "show detailed technical info" would show me some detailed technical info, you know, to keep me going while gmail gets some defibrillation.

But all it says is "Numeric Code: 93". What's that? lmgtfy doesn't help - partly because google groups/forums are also down, and that appears to be where the answers are.
I'm not aware of any open source ones for Java that can do that, Atlassian Clover (not open source) might do it but I'm not sure on that. If you know of one I'd love to take a look at it.
Not just H&R Block: http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000026667
Just flag the whole article like I did.
Run to the hills!
Seems like sarcasm.
Monet's ultraviolet vision
Florida standardized science tests are a disaster
Yeah, that's very detailed technical info.
It is very common for companies to have dark fiber built between data centers. Once you hit a certain threshold, it is more economical than lit services for a given path.
A poll would not be possible: http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
Free consultancy. Looks good on the CV I suppose.

And, ok, its probably quite fun -- but I was paid double this in 1991 (£10,000) for a week/10 days -- my first consultancy.

It wasn't even NASA or a mega-corp. It was documentation on the Victorian Architect, Waterfield, for a small museum.
RubySource | Deploying Rails  in 5 minutesRubySource
Ask HN: Which laptop do you use?
I've heard most hackers use thinkpad / macbook. Which laptop do you use?
And what's your basis for saying you have insight into the vast majority of startups today? Because an assertion from an anonymous, semi-coherent commenter isn't doing it for me.

As another counterexample, I just checked the YouTube purchase. They started much later than Google. When they sold for $1.6 billion, about 140 million ended up in the hands of the 20 non-founder employees with enough equity to list in the SEC filing:

http://www.secinfo.com/d14D5a.uM1t.htm#10gr

That includes these titles: Senior User Interface Designer, Director for Networking at YouTube, Senior Engineer, Engineering Manager; Vice President of Content at YouTube, Director of Product Development, Director of Customer Support, Systems Architect and Office Manager.
Looks pretty, as a Bing wrapper, but it can't find itself yet :(
http://kligl.com/web/#kligl+hacker+news+locale:en-us
There are plenty of good ideas on how to do this, for example: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/10/how-to-really-s...

Unfortunately, the political will to implement these ideas is almost entirely lacking.

Also, while most people claim to object to tax credits to special interests in principle, in reality they only object to tax credits that other people enjoy.
"All you've done is talk about the process with as many technical words as you could"
Introducing the Rutgers Hackathon Club
Ask PG: Interview advice for no idea applicants? 
We applied with no idea and have been accepted for an interview.

All of the interview tips on the web and on the YC website are for teams with ideas.

What interview and preparation advice do you have for teams without an idea?
Yes, Query:James – 0.1 seconds is a repeated query, so I assumed it was a warm query also.
If you're a W2 employee, they already have that information. It's on the W4 form that you fill out when you start a job, so that they can deduct the right amount from each paycheck.
There are two MS "JET" database implementations. One that runs access, and then this one. I think this one is commonly referred to as JET blue. The Access one is called JET Red. This is outlined in the wikipedia article linked in the parent.
It's working again for me..

this made me think how much dependent to Gmail I am...
also in Brazil, though workin' fine for me
治疗早泄多少钱啊
The article uses the analogy of road traffic congestion being defeated by autonomous vehicles with swarm-like intelligence enabled by centralised computing. Which is interesting.
I miss the simplicity. For better or worse lobbyists are part of the US political system that won't go away any time soon. The "right to petition" is granted under the First Amendment. The intent was probably different from the reality, especially in regard to access to government for individuals. Lobbyists seem to be the gatekeepers, and only corporations can pay the fees.

When it comes to individual action many people are protective of things that are not necessarily in their best interests. Anything that threatens the freedom of the individual trumps everything else even if the alternative is slightly better. This happens with healthcare reform, to corporate taxation, to individual taxation (where people want to keep the status quo just in case they "get rich").
we're a profitable company with paying users and an experienced team and we got no-sir'ed and I don't know why.

i don't know who they decided to interview over us, but i can't imagine that every single company is actually generating a profit like we are. feel free to get in touch and ask me anything.
This tech has been around for well over 100 years, and is not a hologram. Check out the wiki article on Pepper's Ghost for more info. Still very interesting. I worked on something similar for a client a while ago, it was a lot of fun.
> Our personal creative projects over commercial products the world doesn't need

This invalidates the whole manifesto. Why are you working?

I think it's bad to polarize things like this - being a 501 developer vs not having a life. Balance is key, and you should work on things that matter to you. Don't blame the world.
I made one as polling on HN is down.

http://www.polljunkie.com/XAq3zW/Poll16008.aspx
Tumblr Gets a Data Firehose
was down. back up as of about 5 minutes ago. US-CO
12:00:00.000 - Alice - SELL $10.00
12:00:00.100 - Eve - BUY $10.00
12:00:00.200 - Eve - SELL $10.01
12:00:00.300 - Chuck - BUY $9.95
12:00:00.400 - Chris - BUY $9.90
12:00:00.500 - Charlise - BUY $9.80

Oops. Compare:

12:00:00.000 - Alice - SELL $10.00
12:00:00.300 - Chuck - BUY $9.95
12:00:00.400 - Chris - BUY $9.90
12:00:00.500 - Charlise - BUY $9.80

Eve took the day off. Alice is screwed.
Respect!

We just turned every other 'project management' app off but Trello (goals/tasks/bugs/feedback) & Beanstalk (repo);
ok, asking from total ignorance here - I know 0 about the film industry and live 1000s of miles from LA, but sorta curious.

Isn't there a minimum scale for wages required for any film? Or is it only if the film somehow becomes a "union" job?
Pinterest Cracking Down on Amazon Affiliates
API appears to be working, my Mail.app and Sparrow app are receiving mail fine.

Enterprise Google mail also appears to be working.
same in Spain
It depends on the site you're wanting to build, if the site is the at the core of your business then probably you should build it yourself, if it's just a business card then probably outsource it.
Gmail suffering downtime
Thank you and yes, I know what you're alluding to [1]. ;-)

[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Perhaps they're distracted.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120416085550303
Title of post: Gmail Down

Opened up the article: :Less than 2% of gmail users can't access gmail.

Hype much? Though email is one of those things that you never want to go down. I couldn't give two shits if any website goes down for a little bit of time on the rare occasion but email? That could make me miss the spam / opportunity of a lifetime.
It's back up for me, with a Swedish account, I am in Sydney Australia.
Occupy Wall Street: Here's how you can beat the 1% at their own game.
Train your self-awareness everyday
Again, one more instance of the unhealthy trend in giving for-profit, 3rd-party companies your sensitive personal info, that the US Govt should be handling and be responsible for directly in the first place, making identity-theft and such nefarious activities easier.
They bill for texts and calls, for rates hugely separated from the data cost of the operations.

They should naturally be just dumb pipes. They are fighting tooth and nail to not to be forced to that role.
There exists a school of thought that says making taxes painful is a great way to remind you that taxes have visible consequences on your life just like spending does, which is a point of non-trivial interest ot the American polity. Someone subscribing to that school of thought might rationally oppose non-economic ways to make taxation less painful as a way to prevent a transition to invisible (or even fun!) higher taxes.

I'm stopping here to avoid committing politics on HN.
I had the pleasure of looking through forum post after forum post on Numeric Code 93 shortly after the problem started. This actually didn't appear to help. There was no information, only people reporting the same issue over and over.
This is an important thing to consider. It used to annoy me that people would dismiss an idea or company because of some peripheral (and not necessarily material) bit of information. Jim Breyer was an investor in FreeGate (a startup I did in the first bubble) and he explained it fairly simply, he said "Chuck, people invest (or don't) for their own reasons, not all of them (either the people or the reasons!) are rational." And what that means for the budding entrepreneur is that you have to cater to the irrational ideas that live in the ecosystem, even though they are irrational. The whole "we won't invest if your seed round investor isn't" is similar to people who won't hire engineers if a company that they did an internship with didn't offer them a job. Irrational, but it's something to be aware of.
Most people have their employer automatically deduct a chunk each paycheck. The annual forms are to figure out exactly how much you owe and whether you need to make up the difference or get a refund check. Most people get refunds.

It's more complicated for the self-employed, or if you don't want to loan the government money for free.
A High Frequency Trader's Apologia, Part 2
A Journey Into Linker Hell, And A Mistake
Not sure about your reasoning why, but I agree with potential fix. Why can't the IRS send me a form that says this is what we have, sign if you agree? For most people this would work. For others it would be a starting point for deductions additional income, etc...

What floored me this year is that after I submitted my taxes the state sent me a letter asking me for my W2 to verify the numbers. My confusion was, why doesn't the state already have my W2?!
> This comment makes sense only in the context of a message board hypothetical, because it presumes foreknowledge on Alice and Bob's part. Here, Bob showed up. Eve looks like a genius. But it was equally likely that he wasn't going to show up.

Equally likely? So HFTs are flipping coins blindly and just happen to make a lot of money because they can flip quickly?

> If you're not equally likely to get Chuck instead of Bob, why are you selling?

I don't understand this question at all. I'm selling because I want to sell my stock. Maybe I'm liquidating assets to buy a house. Maybe I'm speculating that the market is going to tank. Maybe I'm just adjusting my asset allocation. I could be selling for any number of reasons, and I don't care about Bob or Chuck. I just want to sell and get the market price.
Not just complexity, but vagueness. Good luck writing a program that calculates what's "reasonable". Was the construction work a "repair" or an "upgrade"?

How about determining what would be a reasonable amount for someone to pay if they were in the shoes of the businessperson but dealing at arm's length?
IMAP works!
There is literally no equipment available in the market that does what these Google's switches do. Cisco, Juniper, et al, protecting their technology and investments into switching over the last 30 years, just didn't have the balls to kill their old lines by doing this wholeheartedly.

Essentially, they have spent the last 20 yrs building their software which runs on Motorola, MIPS, PowerPC, etc., running arcane switching protocols - not always interoperably even. And these 'software-less' switches can be made by almost anyone, since the software is their secret sauce.

Think of it as going from Minicomputers, which were custom boxes which had custom hw/sw from a few vendors, to PCs, which have an 'open' design and are designed for interoperability.

That's what OpenFlow does to the switching/networking ecosystem.

And since none of the incumbents want to commit hara-kiri, a few startups are trying to do this, Nicira, BigSwitch, etc. Many others have OpenFlow compatible switches, but nowhere near the scale that Google would need in their datacenters.

Brilliant stuff. And I'd love to see Cisco die because of this - they've kept the industry back for long enough.
If you need liquidity but want to retain your upside exposure, there's a whole class of tradable instruments that does that for you.

If you need liquidity and aren't confident enough in your upside to want to be exposed to the downside, you're happy to have Eve.

Note well: your hypothesis is that Alice should get something for nothing. Alice wants liquidity (ie: no downside exposure) and immediate access to the next significantly better price to hit the market. It must be nice to be Alice! :)

As for your first question: HFTs do not have crystal balls. If they did, Chris Stucchio would be a billionaire.
I was mostly referring to a relational database, but I do a lot of work with multidimensional databases (mostly SQL Server Analysis Services). You don't typically do full text searching on a cube. In warehousing, you often get wide tables because they're optimized for the reads, not the writes, so are typically second normal form (2NF) rather than the third normal form (3NF) that most people are familiar with.
One of our accounts was down.. but just one. US-CO
Redis + RDBMS use cases?
I have seen a few instances of projects establishing or moving to a Redis + PostgreSQL combination, instead of a pure NoSQL platform.

I am curious to know from those who have implemented this, what was the idea behind the design, and what problems did such an implementation solve?
Creativity demands an ebb and flow - you need to let the tide roll out just as often as it rolls in. For every 12-hour marathon session at the keyboard, there's a quiet walk in the woods, or a relaxing evening at home on the other side of the scale.
No license or copyright stated. Doh!

(Which technically means we don't have permission to do anything with the source at all, though I doubt that's what Jordan intended.)
It is in the market's best interest to reward liquidity, so by giving it to the earliest bidder they reward those that have maximized the market's liquidity over time.
I like the feature where I can click a word in the search results snippets to add or subtract it from the search results. That's neat.
Feel free to ping me with any technical questions - ted@cloudeo.tv
Sorry for the lack of guidance in my original response.

Latency arb was born out of the fragmentation that was introduced when the SEC passed Reg ATS.

For those unfamiliar with trading, there are many exchanges, not just one. All of those exchanges are obligated to trade at the same prices. To ensure this, Reg ATS establishes the NBBO: National Best Bid/Offer. If you're buying, and one exchange has an offer at $10.00 and another has an offer at $9.00, $9.00 is the best offer. If you send an order to the exchange that has a $10.00 offer, they are legally obligated to send that order to the exchange with the best price.

Latency arb is the process of keeping quotes/prices in sync by trading when a specific exchange's prices don't match NBBO. Many of the largest HFT players work on a very simple principle: they subscribe to all of the exchange feeds and construct their own NBBO that is faster than the best commercially available NBBO feed. With this, you know what direction stocks are moving as it happens.

Keep in mind that a "price movement" rarely occurs at a specific instance in time. It occurs over the horizon that it takes for the market to synchronize -- which happens as fast as possible and is based on the infrastructure investments of high frequency traders. If you can do it faster and you build the infrastructure the world is yours. Like Vanderbilt with railroads.
University mail hosted on Google Cloud goes down
I agree with you, which is why I use Android. But, I see an appeal to the walled garden.

I can let my children get on the app store without worrying too much it will lead to questions I don't feel like answering at that age. I have greater confidence that getting a game for the kids won't come with overly onerous spyware. I also have a better feeling that it will generally work.

This is not the way I want to operate, but I see how it appeals to some people.
Lenovo W500 with 8GB RAM (the max, sadly).

Sub-17" WUXGA screen and trackpoint mouse are must-haves for me.
Note that the openflow protocol has been implemented in Haskell by Galois and Yale - http://hackage.haskell.org/package/nettle-openflow - and you can also configure openflow networks - http://hackage.haskell.org/package/nettle-netkit / http://hackage.haskell.org/package/nettle-frp
I was talking to a musician friend of mine about a website I plan on building and he mentioned a hip-hop centered site that made a mix-tape track everyday. The artists on the site paid for a slot on the mix-tape and it was available for anyone to download for free. I think it would be cool to have a few mix-tapes, separated by different genres, maybe once a week. I'd probably even pay to get a mix of all new artists every week.
As someone who writes an html content extractor, you have no idea how much I hate you.
1) Notice that Google has removed this app too.

2) Carriers (AT&T) are known for disabling app sideloading.

3) Having to root your device presents the basic user with a major technical hurdle, and in some cases, an outright impossibility.

If you're going to advocate as an alternative an entire platform you can't guarantee freedom on, for freedom's sake, why advocate it?
I've wondered the same thing. This year the state asked me to supply a paper copy of my W2 to verify my electronic return submission. Are things so messed up at the state level that they don't know who paid what and when? Why couldn't they just look up in their database that says I paid $X and it matches box 3 on form Y. For extra credit they could do this using this new technology called a computer.
For this kind of algorithmic heuristic work, the prize is measly. This takes both genius AND gruntwork, I would do it though just for the prestige of helping the patent offices if it wasn't so much work.
The Netherlands basically has this already. I think only of this year, though. If you're an 'individual' (as opposed to some kind of business entity), your tax form is sent to you electronically and you just have to hit the 'Send' button after checking it.
user:	rumournal

created:	19 minutes ago
Maxthon scores better than other browsers in HTML5 test?
Weather patterns are just a matter of applying some relatively simple rules a huge number of times. Taxes, by contrast, require clever parsing of the meaning of words and the intent behind them. Figuring out exactly what counts as "education" for instance.
Should Smart People Care About Video Games?
It's weird. When I was a kid, it took hours to make a trans-atlantic call to my grandmother. Now I feel like a man lost in the desert if I'm momentarily disconnected from globally available near-lightspeed communication.

For those looking for a distraction while email is temporarily gone, why not contemplate the lighter side of the singularity:
http://www.cracked.com/video_18400_why-scariest-sci-fi-robot...
Fixed in my last push.
Why debate the complexities of filing taxes when the tax code is kept needlessly complicated?
On GitHub: https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement
Twitter Introduces Innovators Patent Agreement
That's the limit the Free File Alliance has negotiated.

http://freefilealliance.org/
It was down for more than 50% of downrightnow users: http://downrightnow.com/gmail

Even though they say <2% here: http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=13...
FYI - I wrote the successor to posit. Point in time matching goes out of fad when volatility increases. Why take on the risk of executing a block at a single point in time when you can spread that risk out over the day?
The relationship has to work both ways - maybe they felt that you are at a place that is beyond were YC could be of extreme value? If you are making a profit, you've got some options that many startups don't have.
Wearable Computing Might Soon Intensify The Platform Wars
There are many good reasons to move to the US but having just done so I look around at friends filing and complaining about their taxes and dread having to do it myself.
Yep, the cost of installing the cable (digging trenches, pulling through conduit, and whatnot) usually dwarfs the cost of the cable itself. If you're taking the hit anyway, running multiple fibers/conductors is a wise investment.

This is true even on a small scale. When I was upgrading the phone wiring in my house a number of years ago I went ahead and ran ethernet and coax all over the place while I was at it. If you're already on your back in a crawl space, it isn't that much more hassle to drill a few extra holes. :-)
I saw this post on reddit as well but have been hesitant to comment. From what I've seen on HN, naming services have been (generally) poorly received here.

Many are of the thought that a name has almost no importance on its own so you can use any name if you are developing a brand from scratch.

Along those lines http://www.stylate.com offers name inspiration, a domain, and a logo for $249. The names aren't chosen specifically for your business but I still think they will be one of your strongest competitors among the HN crowd.

You might be better off targeting less internet savvy businesses as they will be less likely to know where/how to research their own names.

I think you can compete but you really need to push the methodology and sample report and rebrand yourself a little. I would work on refining your website to be more attention grabbing at first glance. My initial impression when looking at your homepage is that it might be a personal blog. Spruce it up and throw on a catchier tagline "Nomvilla - naming and branding services for new businesses, products, and websites" is a mouthful.

IMHO, YMMV, FWIW, etc...

Best of luck
Update: This is apparently a known issue that Parse is actively working on fixing.
You would be more in control of your holiday airliner trip if you were allowed to fly the plane instead of the qualified pilot, that might not be a good thing though.

Visibility of the issue is dependent on knowing what the problem is. When outages are only an hour to two long, would you rather the technician spend the time communicating the issue or fixing it? This problem exists whether your technician is working locally or as part of a cloud service.
... and we're back!
Here's an article from 2007 that says they've been buying fiber for years:

http://www.voip-news.com/feature/google-dark-fiber-050707/