skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So what's the total cost?

- What's the cheapest Arduino board that would work with this sensor? Wouldn't it be cheaper to get a Raspberry Pi?

- How much is the power supply?

- It would also be cool if there was a way to send SMS over the regular wireless, like with one of those cheap emergency cell phone plans. That would make it a really nice alarm, no need for the internet, and it can work off a PSU even if burglars shut down the power/internet.
Bahaha, I sure was :)
How I built Hopper in a week, without internet
If each one of us contributed just a little bit of time to the open source software that we love, we could prevent hundreds of valuable projects from going stale or dying.

Or, alternatively, we could speed its demise. (Disclaimer: I'm massively speculating here.)

Brooks's Law applies to open source projects, too. As the number of people working on a project increases, so does the amount of time more-experienced project members have to spend on supporting less-experienced project members (giving advice, evaluating their changes, fixing their bugs, etc.). So does the amount of time that can be eaten up by communication in general. That creates a succession of traps:

- Project maintainers can get caught spending all their time doing the unfun bits (bureaucracy) instead of the fun
bits (cutting code).

- By extension, more coding work has to fall to contributors who are theoretically less productive at the task.

- At some point, this results in each new contributor being a net negative in terms of productivity.

- Meanwhile, the core team members are getting bored or frustrated or both, and burning out.

I'm thinking here, too, of that recent study suggesting that 40-person teams are approximately as productive as 4-person teams. Speaking from my own experience, I suspect that the team that's 1/10 the size is also having 10x as much fun.

So I suspect that a project is generally much better served by a few people who work on it because they are really dedicated to it, than by a large number of people who make small contributions, perhaps only out of a sense of obligation. Sure, the vast majority of developers are most likely just consumers of open source tools and not producers of it. That's ultimately a good thing. If everyone's making bricks, who's left to build walls?
Behind a Backend-as-a-Service Provider: The How and Why of Our Architecture.
Facebook shut down a big component of their Open Graph integration: the spammy auto-publishing. The decline followed shortly after. https://twitter.com/#!/rabois/status/194259967816105984
The majority who contribute say state "Because I enjoy it, it's a hobby" as their reason. Different people have different hobbies. Just because someone develops for a career doesn't mean that it should automatically be their hobby too.
Sounds like a wonderful opportunity for someone to offer cheaper third-party certification.
How important is SEO to founders in the early stages of their companies?
This is obviously going to vary dramatically based on what vertical you're in, but do startup founders view SEO as important, or is it neglected because of other more pressing priorities?
Un-Patched PHP-CGI remote code execution vulnerability can expose Source Codes
A national law that imposes at least 0 weeks of maternity leave.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave#Americas
Firebase Ruby brings realtime apps to the backend
> If the user closes the browser tab and no other pages from the same site are opened, the browser may send an explicit request to end the connection, so it does not keep tying the server.

Does this mean keeping a background tab open uses a remote server's resources indefinitely? How can I as the server dev prevent unintentional DDOS?
Funny, my first post on hacker news was about programmer salary in Austria. I got offered a senior programmer job in Vienna for a fraction of what I'm making here in the US.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2473544

It's good to know that I wasn't crazy for thinking the salary was too low.
For what it's worth (relatively new to Clojure), I've enjoyed using IntelliJ with Clojure. Tried using emacs for a while but I'm hooked on vi-style bindings and evil-mode (+ emacs's unconventional ways in general) just didn't cut it for me.
I should add: next week we should start seeing the Hegelian Synthesis (Aufheben) on this topic, where someone positions themselves as even-handed and purports to explain circumstances where BigData is good, and where it might be a waste.
Nor do rockets grow on the moon, but going to the moon is a decent goal for a man or woman interested in rocketry.
Good for you, stay away from it. One less half-assed js developer in the world.
Show HN: Sortbox – Organize your Dropbox
css2less website is home hosted on a small server with a small bw. And there are lot of visiters today. We will move it on a bigger hosting soon.
Meantime you could use it locally with command line using the rubygem : gem install css2less
The one thing I do need is the ability to pay rent and bills WITHOUT WORRYING about them.

Because every minute I spend worrying about my financial situation is a minute I absolutely cannot spend working on your software.

After that, it's all good.

Though sick days and vacation is nice, too. Or at least don't ask me about it when I just kinda disappear for a day or have a completely unproductive day.
RubyMotion - Ruby for iOS
Taxi Driver director launching a campaign on KickStarter without Hollywood
Let's get physical(units)
So they replaced an easy and obvious way with one that requires careful coordination. And still ruins the bag for reseal. No thanks. Like the other guy said, "design of everyday things".
I don't think that's true at all, actually.

I just did some (admittedly) anecdotal job searches for radiology, and there's a $150k price difference between New York and Indiana.

I knew a few attorneys that have moved into the DC area to raise their rates (and one who commutes two hours in to DC because otherwise, his billable rate is halved.)

The positions people are paid also depend on the cost of living in the area. If the median income for an area is $28k vs. $50k, they're simply not able to afford legal services that cost twice the market. This might mean that lawyers in rural areas only work half as much at the same rate, but that means that without some clever accounting, their yearly income is still (approximately) halved.

I'm not saying that no such positions exist, but I know that doctors, lawyers and the like ARE subject to cost of living variance. I don't know of any position in any field that isn't at least somewhat affected by the median income of the municipality in which they operate.
Take a look at this: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/30/2988798/paul-miller-year-w...
We built this over a few weeks to scratch our own itch as heavy Dropbox users. Feedback greatly appreciated. I've been using it as a Quicksilver like single action file sorter, which works pretty well.

It's BSD licensed on GitHub in case anyone wants to check out the source: https://github.com/mustpax/sortbox
Lottery tickets might be a better deal, they tell you the odds straight out and you get your picture in the news if you win.
I get that devs are in demand and that folks should be paid fairly, but after reading this, I don't know if I'd want to work with you in an employer-employee relationship or even as a colleague.

This smacked of a level of entitlement that I think would be cancerous to any group of people working together. Just my $.02.
caring about family more than job != not caring about job

I'm not sure how you get that out of what he said, you could conceivably care more about your job than anything BUT your family which is still a lot of caring, IMO
Hey,

"Your startup needs to sell experiences, not features"

Check out our startup!

http://blinkcollective.com/

Experiences, not products
Double-Spending Attacks on Fast Payments in Bitcoin
This is our ethos, we're Blink Collective: Experience Marketplace for the UK

Check us out: http://blinkcollective.com/
""Learn to produce Average Code in 3 months or how to make the real programmers on your team miserable"."

What team? If they had any say on the interview, they'll have brought it on themselves.

I really don't see the harm here. Within three months one can have learned something, and have a notion of what coders really do. At that point, one can decide either to give it up or to learn more.

It is written in what seems to me a women's magazine style, but male old-old farts are evidently not the target audience.
Google Is Becoming Less Relevant As Apps Grow, Says Yelp
>"ideological rant" implies that something I said re: "free markets" does not hold true and I say it because of my ideology. Can you point to it?

I can. You didn't say (as in "state") anything. You asked a rapid fire succession of rhetorical questions. Rhetorical questions are one of the best indicators of ideology (as in "zealotry").
He didn't say he would do nothing when he got rich. He said he would code whatever he wanted, without regard to making money. Big difference. An independently wealthy person could become a star of the open-source world.
Intro to Colour for Research Reporting
New "spawn" function in Fexl makes it easy to interact with a child process.
> writing Java is a shaving offense

This is spectacular in its depth and brevity.
It is not considered being fired by you ;) This particular layoff was a strategic decision - and a bad one too, they are now advertising in TV that Siemens is a good place for IT folks.
As a long-time affiliate marketer, I'd have to say be careful about the prospect of passive income.

For online advertising at least, there are many ways to generate large amounts of money - the difficulty is that there is a very low barrier to entry but an exceedingly high barrier to success.
That test is broken. In JavaScript the value of an undefined property will be `undefined`, not `null` so the second test is doing twice the work of the first.
1. [Public education]. If one supposes a good public school in the US is comparable to schools in France or Scandinavia, which I doubt, the issue of secondary education being at least 10 times more expensive remains.

2. [Healthcare]. Not all insurance plans are equal and most of them do not cover limitlessly. In the unlucky event of something like cancer, Americans are left bankrupt, Europeans are not.

3. [Vacation]. Most of the times those two weeks actually include sick leave. Moreover taking one month of unpaid vacation can be a career suicide, so people don't actually do it.
Honestly, it has never gotten the focus it deserved. I was too overwhelmed fighting for my life to give it adequate attention. I would like to give it the shot it deserves since I am now healthier and currently unemployed. I feel some sense of obligation to try since for the previous three years all my sites were kept online by donations inspired by the health site and given to me to keep it alive. None of my other sites have inspired a similar response.

I have done something doctors said could not be done. I think it is replicable. I am not the first person to defy medical expectation and I won't be the last. I remain torn between feeling like I have done something amazing which could benefit the world and feeling like the accomplishment is more ordinary than it sounds to some people. But ultimately I am still on the hook emotionally because of the response the site gets from people in spite of the fact that I have failed to properly develop it. It seems to have a spark which has do far refused to die, in spite of long periods of starvation. Perhaps is tended to, it is the sort of spark which could grow into something.

I hope to also develop other projects alongside it. Perhaps that is foolish but I don't see why I can't. I have often been the poster child for excessive longwindedness on various forums I have belonged to. This was while ill, going to college part time, homeschooling my sons and doing volunteer work. My sons are grown. I don't do volunteer work anymore. Most people seem to find me more tolerable when my attention is split. Otherwise, I seem to be too much to take. Getting out of my own way in that regard has been a longstanding goal and I think I am finally on the right track in that respect.

Thank you for asking and giving me the opportunity to address that question. I wrestle with it myself but, for better or worse, I currently still feel on the hook for trying to find an effective means to share my story.
I'm knowing people who are getting "web developer" certificates and degrees, and who also never hear the words "testing" or "source control". In 2012. Sad.
Too true - we also had a marketing department for an entire year before we had said product. Now I certainly understand that you need a marketing department before the product launches - but consider that at a time when development was in full swing (about three quarters before launch) we had two software developers and three marketing people.
Something tells me this question exists in all industries and has existed for most of human history.
Passive income is indeed real, but is often exaggerated.

I've been doing quite nicely from my ebooks and ad-supported sites for some time, with no additional promotion or other activities to drive sales since they were each published. However I could certainly not pay all of my bills from them.

However, just like anything else, you get out what you put in. If I had no other career and just spent all my time writing ebooks, I would probably be earning from ebooks as much or more than I currently earn from my other, non-passive, activities. It's all about what you put into it.

The guys who lead you to believe that you will make millions of dollars with no effort are just plain frauds. If they really had a method for doing that they wouldn't sell it to you...
What about an account age threshold instead? Sort of like the /classic link.
Everyone should have some FU money -- or an FU portfolio (diversified) -- even if FU does not appear to be in the cards.
Introducing a field guide to Twitter platform objects
New CERT Tools Help Developers Find Vulnerabilities
Is there something intrinsically wrong with giving someone 30 days' holiday per year? Surely this is the same kind of freedom to spend your time as you wish that Google (with its 20% time) is famous for?

As you said, in Europe this is common, and the viewpoint that it "smacks of entitlement" is puzzling. Is it just a cultural difference? I'm don't think there is any evidence either way that this affects productivity.
Most of the software companies in Memphis are probably selling to relatively local customers, thus tying their income to the local markets. The software companies selling to everyone everywhere are in the big tech hubs.
Here's the direct link to spawn:

https://github.com/chkoreff/Fexl/blob/b1e149d1a0795aa191b887...
Money can buy Experiences.

Experiences can lead to competence through learning, respect through skill sharing, love through meeting new people, wisdom through education from others and creativity through leading by example.

Experiences bring us things that products simply cannot. Please visit us at http://blinkcollective.com/ to find out more.
Precisely. It's a business, treat it as such. If you want to focus on The Holy Craft Of Programming, get a PhD and good luck with the academic track. Otherwise, go into business as a businessman who happens to be an excellent programmer. (Assuming you don't want to be underpaid and unappreciated your entire career.)
A Mechanical ExoHand, to Crush Your Enemies
I had no idea that that Diego worked on Inktomi. Although it makes sense why IndexTank worked fantastically.

If I had to pick one reason why Google triumphed (and you can only pick one), I think it would be their Page Rank algorithm. It added that extra bit of awesome-sauce to and already tasty stew.
The Marvel's Avengers Workout 2012 (Insane & Funny)
This is sickkk!!
All the more reason to get the most of what you can out of the inequality before the cycle swings back the other way.
Drew Dudley: Everyday leadership
Why? It doesn't seem at all unusual to use from-that-time photos of the other people who worked on the project, does it?
You're right, it's a trivial wrapper with a subjective/opinionated usability improvement.

I think the biggest service here is

1. Education about Python's pretty decent standard smtpd lib.

2. Food for thought about making thin custom interfaces over standard libraries.

3. Perhaps inspiration to do more?

It's no Linux kernel, but I enjoyed reading through the source and I feel like I have a better understanding of Python's smtpd lib and I've some of my own ideas for future API design.

Additionally, I like your generator-based API proposal. Also inspiring. Need to think more about routing in that context, though.
Scentsy warmers
Zombie ants have fungus on the brain, new research reveals
The slideshow on the homepage is hard to use. There is quite a bit of information, and I would like to read it, but the length of the slide is set too fast for me to read the captions (not to mention look at the image!). Then if you hit the left or right arrow, it pauses for a moment, but then restarts itself.

If you just have two steps in the slideshow, I would recommend making the images more narrow and having them side-by-side with an arrow in between. This would mean that a user could easily see the flow of the process (step one: make filter, step two: enjoy filter) and read at their own pace.
Can you spot the Freudian slip? Facebook phishing – May Contain Blueberries
HTTP 2.0 has been in the works for a long time. It's picked up again recently, after the HTTP-NG working group disbanded in 1998. The working group will take some features that SPDY has shown to be useful and stable and integrate them into the spec. They are also looking at parts of Microsoft's "Speed and Mobility" protocol.
That's not true. Linking to jQuery stuff on Google's CDN is widely accepted.

If you're using Noscript, don't act surprised when modern javascript websites break for you.
This looks really cool -- would be nice if there was some way to try it out before buying.
Create native ios apps using RubyMotion
You sound like an arrogant dick. Who the hell would want to work with you?
Really cool. It reminds me of a project my brother-in-law did to receive an SMS when the Ph levels in his salt water aquarium change.
Show HN: Turn Chrome into an intelligent assistant
Mgeraci - Thanks a lot for your feedback. We will revisit the slideshow and incorporate your comments.
This is from Laurent Sansonetti, the original author and long time maintainer of MacRuby. It doesn't say that anywhere until after you buy it, which they should really change since that made me go from "Uh, did some random guys just take MacRuby's code and hack in some extra stuff to sell it?" to "Holy crap so THIS is what he's been working on!"
An Open-Letter to Pagoda Box
What's true for railways or airlines is not always true for applications and web services. The barriers in the latter markets are much, much lower.
Another lesson from this article: If your engineers refer to those who make decisions as "the execs" instead of "we": Quit.
Worth noting that `undefined` is a variable, and not a keyword.

undefined = 1;
>>> 1
null = 1;
>>> ReferenceError: invalid assignment left-hand side

It looks like Chrome and Firefox no longer let you assign to window.undefined any, but I'm not sure is IE has the same restrictions. The correct way to check for undefined is via `typeof`.
I recall the story of Yahoo giving Larry Wall enough pre-IPO stock that they effectively paid his daughter's way through college.

Umm...

http://www.salon.com/1998/10/13/feature_269/
Maybe close the connection when it hasn't been used for a while?
How to automagically go to DND in HipChat while in a Pomodoro
I have a relative who is a doctor in an ER and they are essentially an independent contractor (not on a W2), they don't really get any sick days, per se, they are paid for what they work (at a very high rate, or I think a share of the income for that month for their department, something like that) but they have to manage it as a business, essentially (own health insurance, etc), I think its different for some as they may be an employee (like for Kaiser) but a lot are contractors.
Her Wikipedia article says "In the BBC television drama Micro Men a young Roger Wilson is played by Stefan Butler and Wilson herself makes a cameo appearance as a pub landlady.", I wouldn't think she has that much of a problem with it if she appeared in a movie with herself portrayed pre-transition.
Much easier to sneer than get stuff done, isn't it?
This is really awesome, but I found some bad news in the FAQ:

> Because RubyMotion implements a dialect of Ruby that is statically compiled, regular Ruby gems will not work in RubyMotion. We provide documentation which describes how to architect gems to work with RubyMotion.
nice, but where is the advantage over just using objc? the hard part of coding for iOS isn't objc, it's learning how to use all the API's.
Isn't this fact obvious to any hacker worth their salt? This doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity (per the guidelines). Flagged. Please keep these articles on Slashdot/Reddit.
Free Comic Book Day: 5 things you need to know
Not competing with your customers is a not-invalid reason, tho' there are real-world examples that go either way.
(X/5)+3 I presume?

Your system sounds good. Do you also have the flexibility of working weekends in lieu of weekdays or at home instead of the office?
Relevant: http://youtu.be/E91oEn1bnXM

It's a recording of a very very good talk by Inktomi co-founder Eric Brewer called "Inktomi's Wild Ride - A Personal View of the Internet Bubble"
I interviewed a 'senior' developer who had been a consultant for several years. When we asked how he implemented past projects, his answers were really vague. We got suspicious and dropped down to a simple problem like, "write a loop to print the numbers from one to ten."

The guy was writing some really weird stuff. When asked to explain, he confidently told us that in C++, every time you reference the iterator variable inside the loop, it gets increased. His solution was something like:

for (int i = 1; i <= 10; i++)
{
printf("%d\n", i); // <== i gets incremented!
i--; // need to compensate for the extra increment!
}

(except I'm pretty sure he didn't get printf right)

So, yeah, I see FizzBuzz as a wonderful way to weed out the incompetent right away, allowing you to focus on deciding whether you need capable or exceptional.

Incidentally, one of the guys on my senior project team in college didn't understand how variable assignment worked. He would write:

int flagsVar = COMMON_BASE_FLAGS;
flagsVar = ADDITIONAL_FLAG_I_WANT;
CallAPI(flagsVar); // Why doesn't it work?!

He graduated.
Yes, that talk is excellent. Deserves its own submission.
5 fun facts about Facebook's IPO roadshow
Great article. One note: Google's dynamic abstracts were not only very useful, they also improved perceived relevance because they let users see why the pages were selected.

When I was at Altavista, we were also blocked from doing dynamic abstracts by cost.

Google's main advantages were:

- managed by the founders with a total focus on search and measurable results

- google's hiring process produced a very strong team early on

- strong focus on controlling costs from the beginning (Altavista's use of the DEC Alpha was a huge handicap.
This looks very similar to http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/ - they've even used the same graphics!
I've always been a huge fan of the entire MailChimp library, both in terms of concept and execution. It's a win-win for everyone, MailChimp gets to promote their brand and platform and give potential users something unique, while we get free information distilled in an extremely user-friendly fashion.