skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And don't even get me started on the lack of documentation for many parts of the standard library; the source code is the only real documentation.

I've rarely heard anyone say this. Do you have an example of an area that is severely lacking in documentation? Maybe I don't use a wide array of modules, but I can't remember the last time as a user I had to dive into the source code.

I know the stdlib lacks examples in a lot of areas, often going for purely API coverage, which is welcome to change.
As a preview, here's a quick spreadsheet I pulled with a few stats for month of April (via BigQuery): http://bit.ly/github-bigquery

- 5.8M events in April

- Most popular languages? Javascript, Java and Ruby.

- Most popular new repo? Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II

- Most watched repo? meteor

If you want, you can also access the raw archives, see instructions on githubarchive.org
Understanding PaaS Limitations
I meant nobody cares to prosecute copyright for trivial, personal activities like making backup copies or fan art, so it's quite disingenuous to continually bring them up when the topic of piracy/file-sharing arises.
Really? This is what shows Facebook to be irresponsible?

I didn't see many folks on HN complaining that Facebook/Google/etc. shouldn't take an advocacy position on SOPA, so it strikes me as odd how controversial Facebook taking one on organ donation is.
+1 "DuckDuckHack"
SalesPortal Names Bo Mullan Senior Vice President, Enterprise Sales
"No client worth having cares what your work structure looks like if you're capable of producing"

That is very easy to say when you are an established freelancer with work being thrown at you. Just starting out though, there is a fine balance between what's ideal and staying afloat.
You have to analyze your target audience. Will people who are new to using a restful api being using your api? Will you provide a wrapper yourself?

There are about a million questions you must ask yourself in order to come to the right answer for YOU. At the end of the day what matters is that the person using your API finds it easy and intuitive. If that means that you use PUT for updates, and POST for creation, so be it. It could even mean that you convert PUT to POST requests, and treat them all the same. If you take that route, you check to see if the resource ID is specified in the post data. If the ID is in there, you update that resource, if it's not in there you create a new resource.

While you go forward, keep in mind one thing. If your API is hard to use then no one will use it. If no one uses it, then your API doesn't matter. If your API doesn't matter, then you made all the wrong decisions.

Also, have fun with it. Creating APIs is incredibly fun, enjoy yourself, and enjoy creating something people will enjoy using.
DDG is getting better all the time. These days, I use it almost exclusively. I love the !bang syntax.
> Do you really invoice clients for "11 hours, 3 minutes"?

I would certainly hope not. I personally tend to round to the half day (including down to zero), and sometimes to the next hour depending on the client, the frequency of work, how much we've worked on together over time, etc.

I think you might be skipping over the personal benefit of time tracking. Sure after a few years of freelance development, Most estimates get easier, but only because you know how long things have taken in the past.

If I didn't track all my hours in the past, I'd have no idea how to estimate tasks, much less entire projects. The hardest part when I was first starting out was estimation. After a couple years of getting it wrong - and eating hours instead of food - I was finally able to get my estimates within a couple days.

Of course when projects get more innovative, it gets difficult to judge how long things will take, but I can still count on the parts I already know to build a groundwork for how long most of the project should take.

Otherwise, I've found charging down to the hour can be a good practice for new clients with small intro projects to make it immediately clear that they will pay my high hourly rate for the work they request. It's a filter. Over time, I'll probably eat plenty of hours for one-offs and whatnot. But I certainly don't want a new client to think so until a relationship has been developed.
I have been through the same struggle with my co-founder last year...

My main advice to people who leave their job to start working with a co-founder without an idea AND without a clear verticals they want to focus on...is not to do it.
Time constraints (when you are brainstorming as a side job) and outside dynamics (being in the middle of real everyday life) can help you so much be more creative and drive toward a decision. Then, once you have committed to something, you jump chip and start working on it full time if you can afford it.
I haven't used browserify so I may be wrong, but because browserify is not AMD compatible and depends on a build step, the advantage of RequireJS appears to be slightly faster/simpler (or just different) development experience.

It looks like with browserify you only ever reference a single script file in your HTML, regardless of development or production environments. While this unifies HTML rendering across development and production environments, during development every time you change a module you must rebuild that script file. In actuality, this is not much of a problem since browserify appears to have a "watch" mode to do this automatically. If you have a huge codebase, building could take a noticeable amount of time.

With RequireJS, this build step is not needed during development. When you save module changes and reload your browser (with caching disabled), the changed module will be delivered. If you have a huge codebase, no time-consuming build step is required. Of course in production you want to deliver only a single file, and RequireJS can be used to build this. However, depending on your overall build, you may need to conditionally render different script tags for production and development, which is a tiny but not insignificant bit of complexity.

To allow RequireJS to load node (CommonJS-based) modules the module needs to be wrapped in a special function call. RequireJS supplies tooling to help with this. Alternatively, RequireJS can be used in node to load AMD modules, to allow modules to be used client- and server-side.

If you have a small codebase and use the same modules in node and in the browser, browserify seems to be the way to go. For large codebases, browserify is only an option if you have lots of modules being used in node and in the browser and find RequireJS' tooling inadequate. Otherwise, RequireJS' flexibility seems to make it the preference.
As jodrellblank says, it's been possible to do this for a long time:

Inferno IE4 plugin: http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/plugin/index.html

Lively Kernel: http://www.lively-kernel.org/
Berkeley Ridiculously Automated Dorm (youtube video)
This is the exact problem I ran into.
Philadelphia area, Full Time Junior Web Application Developer, No remote. No recruiters.

Are you an energetic, smart, hard working developer looking to make a difference? We are the place for you. Our company is at the forefront of the emerging sleep industry. We are the leading Sleep EMR company and have a backlog of projects and ideas being asked for by our customers and employees.

We currently need a junior web application developer. We use PHP, JQuery and MySQL, but if you are a whiz at some other web programming language, we are willing to teach the right person to use our languages of choice.

Here are some awesome things about our company: We are an employee and customer focused business with benefits like - we offer flex time, Christmas week off and, every other Friday, our developers get to spend time working on things that motivate and interest them.

If you are an A player looking for an A company you have found your spot. We are offering a package that could pay as much as $70k for the right person. This is not a remote position, and we are not offering a relocation package at this time.

Actual candidates only please. No recruiters.

SleepEx is the leading provider of software for the Sleep Lab Industry. We are a small team, about 13 people. We dress casually, and work very hard.
Heh yeah, I was referring to the Mike Monterio talk. But in the actual talk that I'm giving at the school I changed it to "Hey you. Pay me" if that makes you feel better?
Financial Times to discontinue iPad, iPhone apps, move to HTML5
This is like Google Labs turned inside out. Innovative stuff. I love it. More power to DDG!
My company has a line of credit from our bank. Thankfully, we've only had to draw heavily on it once, but it was a life saver at the time.

We had a situation where we simultaneously hired new employees, kicked off several sizable consulting projects and were stuck with late payments on several projects. As a result we were cash-flow negative for several months. Drawing on the line of credit helped keep payroll, AP, etc running smoothly. As a small company it's a nice low cost way to have ready access to money which you can use for anything (not just purchases).

With decent credit we were able to get a line capped at about 1/6th of our yearly revenues with a ~4.25% interest rate. This was a much higher limit and better rate that we could get with AMEX advances. The only downside is the amount time and paperwork involved, since you generally need to provide tax returns, P&L, balance sheets, AR statements, and go through lengthy approval process.
Are big companies usually that bad to work for?
Sorry if this comes across as a vague question. I'm currently a freshman in college and disliking the experience. I don't feel like I'm getting much out of classes, and it seems to be a lot of memorization or inefficient work that doesn't go anywhere.

After lurking on forums and reading articles, I've started to get the feeling that big companies are similar, or maybe worse. I'm having trouble getting excited about stuff like working on Microsoft's new version of Excel.

It's this general feeling of doom that I've started to have. I don't know if you can generalize experiences at big companies, but do they typically contain the drudgery, repetition, and corporate feel that I'm experiencing in college?

What are the alternatives? Working for a small company?
I find that I'm always coming up with ideas I'm sure are great, and regardless of if they are or not I also tend to jump to the next program to make, or the next project to research, or the next something to something-a-fy. Turns out after a long time of this I have ADHD. I've learned that sometimes it's an asset, lets me bring renewed vigor to a project, but usually it just makes me look lazy. I've also found that since limiting myself to two or three projects that I can freely jump from one to the other (but still only the three) I've managed to mix the best of both worlds. For the first time ever I'm actually getting stuff done.

Edit: coming isn't spelled comping
Big Maconomics: How McDonald's Explains the Modern World
One of the main differences in accountants is risk tolerance. Freelancers have considerable leeway in the way they structure their taxable income and accordingly can have considerable variation in their risk of an audit. Make sure you interview a couple accountants and try to find an accountant whose risk tolerance matches your own. Don't expect that a big firm will be more conservative than a small one--the opposite is often the case.
Firefox.. since nightly 15 i think also does stuff like, when you go to the search box, it open the connection to the http server before sending the search request
i believe chrome does it too
> Well, you are, if you ask me. Not donating is tremendously selfish, I'd say.

I don't disagree with you in the general case, but remember that some people can not donate for medical reasons, or because of significant social pressure. While it is easy for us to say "fuck your family / church / other peer group, they are a silly bunch of idiots / misinformeds / fundies who you are better off without anyway" on the social pressure front it really isn't that easy for people in such a situation. Anything that stigmatizes someone in that position will push them further into the hold of the errant peer group as they'll feel less welcome outside of it.

> Organ donation costs me nothing.

I'm told that the key problem, in this country anyway, is not people who don't want to donate but people who either never state a preference or do so and never explain their wishes to their family (who can and too often do override a donors instructions). Why is hasn't been legislated that the family can't override a person's decision to donate I'm not sure (though I suspect it has something to do with lobbying from certain religious groups).
Please do. I'd like to read it.

It seems to me the outstanding feature of Lua's design history is its designers' determination to make the core ever simpler and more general. That takes vision and courage over a long period of time. What emerged is truly interesting and inspiring (much more so than cobbled languages that grow only by accretion of features) and is likely to grow in importance.
JIRA seems much better than any other "enterprise" software I've used before.
Switching my default search in 3..2..1..
You can claim all the experience you want, but your statements belie the truth. JSON is in no way limited to raw data interchange, and the files puppet manages cannot be put off to one side in some magical place where root cannot access them. System administrators will always have access to the files no matter where they are or what permissions you have set, and they need to know that the files are being automatically managed. The system also needs to know where to find the files, you can't start randomly moving /etc/fstab around, for example.
SEEKING FREELANCER - (Remote) Web UI Designer/Engineer

We're looking for someone with solid HTML/JS chops and experience with designing UIs, esp. for customizing products. We're building a new customization system for www.frecklebox.com and we're looking for someone who can make it simple for users to navigate the available choices when customizing a product and viewing previews. Bonus points if you are familiar with .Net MVC templating (Razer) and/or Rails templating.

Send portfolio to bo at printhq dot com if interested.
> it's kind of amazing to me that Usenet doesn't get more attention

Perhaps because the saying "the first rule of Usenet is that you don't talk about Usenet" has helped prevent it from going viral.
Gmail now magically translates email written in other languages
INTERN (Madison, WI or remote) - http://codiqa.com

We are building the best development tools for HTML5 mobile apps. 30k users since launch in late Feb, paying customers, active in jQuery Mobile community. We have a complex drag-and-drop tool built with Javascript and backbone.js. Backend built on Python+Django.

Interested? Send an email with a link to something you've made to max@codiqa.com
Consider OneJS here; http://github.com/azer/onejs

see my comment above for details about the differences; http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3915403
Yeah, pinboard is definitely good for collecting everything.

However, we don't want briarpatch to collect everything that someone posts on all of these sites because it would lead to content pollution (like you see with most content discovery sites these days). We want briarpatch to thoroughly limit the ways content is collected. Whether this experiment work or not remains to be seen. But thanks for your feedback!
YouTube deletes Ron Paul's 2008 channel
You compared this to Firefox Add-ons. Does that mean that these won't be integrated into DDG natively? Will that only be at your discretion?
Google offered something very similar to this a few years ago: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/10/google-search-add-o...

Sadly it seems to no longer be supported.
It's fine to have two products for different segments within the consumer or business markets, but having one product for consumers and another for businesses is not as simple as changing a single value. Very different customers with different needs, demands, and expectations of your product.
> no time wasted waiting for compilation

Fwiw, this is less and a less a problem with static languages. In the Scala ecosystem, for example, on-the-fly compilation is available with Play, or any framework that uses SBT [1] (Lift, Scalatra, etc). Edit, save, and your edits (and only your edits) are automatically recompiled and reloaded.

> more boilerplate

Not sure about that. Lift at least (maybe Play too, not sure) is about the same lines of code as Rails, less if you include tests.

1. github.com/harrah/xsbt
If you want to run your business suboptimally in the hopes that it will attract your first clients, that's fine, but you shouldn't do so while pretending that it's the right way to run a business. I have a hard time thinking of clients who are particularly well-served by, say, 3-hour billings. Customers that need sporadic work like this are probably far better served by retainer arrangements. If you find yourself doing lots of 1, 2, and 3-hour projects, you should consider a staff augmentation arrangement instead of project billing.

For the most part, I think all consultants kid themselves about how productive they are juggling multiple projects in a day. It's not as if this is some great insight on my part. I'm a developer; I've read all the same stuff as you. I just paid close attention to the stuff about getting "in flow". Re-read Joel Spolsky's "Fire and Motion" essay.
I learned this lesson the hard way several years ago.

I can't stress enough the importance of making sure wherever you go isn't a place that just rubber-stamps W2 returns.

I made the mistake of going to H&R Block during the year I was 1099'ing, and aside from the person doing my return having to go ask someone for guidance at every line item on the forms, I ended up getting a letter in the mail from the state saying that they'd calculated I overpaid by a few grand.

I can't even fathom how bad of a job they must have done, if the state was the one to inform me that I'd given them too much money.
I couldn't figure it out from the docs, do the plugins get approved by DuckDuckGo? Or does the user have to install them for their own account? I'm a bit confused at how you would mediate between different plugins trying to provide an answer for the same query, etc.
Voxer, San Francisco (SOMA), Full time

Voxer is a Walkie Talkie application for iOS and Android. We launched in 2011 and have since become the fastest growing mobile voice application in the world. We're also the largest user of Node.JS in the world.

What we've built is already an important part of the daily lives of millions of people. We're making voice communication faster, more efficient, and more social. Our goal is ambitious - we're building the next generation communication service at the intersection between phone calls and SMS.

We're a surprisingly small team doing this. Only about a dozen engineers who previously worked at Danger, Android, Apple, Twitter and Heysan(YC07). We helped build things like redis for node.js and are contributors to the node.js community.

Ryah Dahl talks about Voxer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...

We use a lot of:

★ Node.js

★ Riak

★ Redis

We try to stay out of the spotlight and focus on building something amazing. The problems we're facing are at a scale only seen at companies like Twitter and Facebook and we're looking for exceptional people who can help us tackle them.

We're hiring for:

★ Node.js / Infrastructure Engineer

★ Analytics / Hadoop Engineer

★ Data Scientist

★ Android Engineer

★ Engineering Internship

★ Growth Engineer

★ iOS Engineer

★ iOS Product Manager

★ QA Client Automation Engineer

★ Engineering Recruiter / Talent Lead

http://voxer.com/jobs

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/10/popular-like-voxer/

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/11/walkie-talkie-app-voxer-
goes-big-ivp-and-intel-lead-30-million-round/
The pricing gap is still huge between hosted and enterprise. For 25 seats, it's $600/yr hosted and $10,000/yr enterprise. Hopefully Atlassian will drive them to fix that.
That looks cool, will look into it. Does it support the http node core module, like browserify?
That's not really the same thing.
What you are doing is offering a commodity product at a large discount to larger organizations.

Take MS for example, you can buy Windows for $100 or so a copy or you can take a site license but the product is the same.

For a large enterprise what they need is someone to take that and fashion it into something that fits their needs, this is where consultancy businesses and "Microsoft Partners" come in. They will have a small number of clients for whom they will support the MS products and be the first port of call if anything needs to be changed/fixed etc.

Then MS has a nice side business is selling training and certs to these partners.

We tried to do a hybrid strategy some years ago and it was a disaster. What we tried to do was create a product that could be sold as a basic system for $100 or so and then provide a "custom" version to a handful of companies based on the same codebase.

What we learned very quickly was that these are competing goals, we would get requests from the bigger clients to fundamentally change something about the software to fit their use case which they expected us to do because of the amount they were paying. Of course many of these changes would totally break stuff for anybody else, so the choice was either to build some sort of monstrous configuration system for the product, break it up into modular constituent parts (very hard to do) or just give up on the idea of selling it as a commodity product.

We chose the 3rd option.
Chicago, IL. Full time.

The Applications & Analytics Architecture Group in Motorola Solutions is looking for an software engineer. The group performs research and development on video, image, audio, and data analysis algorithms, applications, and services, to create next-generation public safety and enterprise solutions.

Job Responsibilities:
• Collaborate in cross-functional teams to develop system prototypes, integrating video/image analytics algorithms and software.
• Contribute to the development of video/image analytics & processing algorithms, develop efficient software implementations of the algorithms, run simulations to evaluate performance and refine the methods.
• Generate patent disclosures covering the system solutions and the underlying methods.
• Present results and demonstrations at internal meetings and meetings with customers.

Basic Qualifications:
The position requires an MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or Electrical Engineering.

Specific Knowledge/Skills:
• Enthusiasm for solving complex problems.
• Extensive C++ and/or Java programming experience and strong object oriented design experience, including working knowledge of core libraries and design patterns.
• Significant software development experience, including use of software development tools and version control in Unix/Linux and/or Windows environments.
• Application programming experience on Android mobile platforms.
• DSP and/or GPU programming experience on embedded platforms is a plus.
• Web applications or services development experience, including server-side and client-side web scripting (e.g. JavaScript, Python, and/or Perl) is a plus.
• Experience with multimedia frameworks (e.g. GStreamer, WindowMedia) and video codecs (e.g. MPEG-4 AVC) is a plus.
• Experience deploying video/image processing applications in live prototype or pilot systems a plus.
• Some hand-on skills building circuits is a plus.
• Familiarity with one or more of the following areas is desirable: video/image processing, computer vision, machine learning, data mining, and pattern recognition.
• Strong teamwork and communication skills, creativity, productivity, and learning agility.

If interested, send me a message.