skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Administrative help. Necessary HR functions, an affordable group health plan. Legal advice/framework. Recruiting. Doing it right is a huge hassle (I've been there) and it takes away from getting the product out the door. A couple of things that I've seen friends get bitten by are lack of a formal agreement between partners and lack of formal work-for-hire agreement for contractors.
Music Industry Starting to Target "Copy Left / Free Culture" Enemy
Well, gee, if it's so awesome to empower one's staff to start their own business while working on your payroll, I'd expect employers of software developers would be trumpeting their fine examples from the hills to attract the best staff possible!

Why the silence? Because starting a business while working full-time for another employer does not work, and any person who has started their own software development company would understand why.
Booo. iTunes link. :(
Hey man. I'm looking for a developer for my web startup as well. I'd be happy to discuss details if you could email me at alexjmann@gmail.com
Once you get past integers and strings I think you'd start hitting language and library limitations where things don't translate smoothly - the same core reason that the languages are usefully different in the first place.

Not at all web 2, but the PLEAC project ( http://pleac.sourceforge.net ) has been working on equivalent samples of code in different languages for a number of years.

These days I'd half expect it to be a crossbreed of Google Code and Google Translate.
Sure, maybe if you've never done it before because it's a learning experience, but it's a patently horrible idea otherwise.
symfony here also
The Amazing iPhone: Guide for developers and business owners [pdf]
There is some good detail in the Wikipedia article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest
The Dojo examples page always froze my browser. Even after switching computers and operating systems, it would hang for a while. I never did figure out if it was just me or nobody else seemed to notice.
Yeah, it would be nice if there were no required fields to join a school. Great site though.
If you just tax carbon emissions at say 1$ per ton it's easy to track. But with cap and trade people who say plant 1 million trees in the desert can get credits for making things cleaner and sell them. Now the plants all die, but that's not important as long as you can convince the regulators that some of them might make it your in the clear.

With a simple tax everyone pays, when it get's complex those who understand the system pay far less.
I noticed too :)

Just wondering why Zend chose it as their main ajax framework.
The domain xsyinz.com is available...
Symfony also !!

and am going to try Grails soon
Not sure if you're trolling or not, but I'll respond anyway.

I'll give two reasons: 1) it's dishonest 2) if your mgmt does notice, this will burn bridges with both mgmt and your coworkers who have to pick up the slack.
I think anyone in the world can search the catalogs of Minnesota libraries through MnLINK.

http://www.minitex.umn.edu/mnlink/
> If you don't care about being unemployed then that's fine. All power to you. But most people do care.

Because they live paycheck to paycheck, with perhaps a finite safety net on which to make their debt payments. The need of people to be productive is another topic, which doesn't necessarily need to be (and sometimes isn't even) fulfilled by full time day job.

> They [recessions] force people into bankruptcy and reduce total wealth, now and in the future

Yes, which is why I'd like to stop the inflationary bubble policy. Remember the dot com bust? And then 2004? Our current problems stem from patching those up by permanently lowering interest rates. Further lowering them now will just cause another bubble that will burst in several years.

> Almost everyone suffers in a recession, not just the people who caused it.

Yes, but as we're talking about monetary policy, we're talking about the people who caused it.

> That would be a reduction in wealth, as people would be forced to make economic decisions they otherwise wouldn't.

Well if you've got a problem with the "forcing", then how about just government subsidies of 5x salary to those who work 16 hours a day? Flooding the market with cheap money is the same kind of manipulation which causes people to make economic decisions they otherwise wouldn't.

> This is just conspiracy theory nonsense.

I'm not saying they meet up an plan this, or even do it consciously, but there most certainly is a parasitic economy that receives all of the newly introduced money first, and therefore gets its benefits before the effects of the inflation are felt. Furthermore, the wealthy are able to hire "asset managers" to help them avoid the inflation, while the little guys have their savings eroded.

> I'm advocating a stable price level ... However, if we are forced to choose one or the other, it is better to choose inflation.

And if you haven't noticed, prices aren't anywhere near stable, but are generally on the rise. One can't claim to be for "stable prices" but also be against any possible drop. There will always be fluctuations, so suppressing any downwards movement will always produce a net upwards trend, not stability.

But the main problem is that technology disagrees. To maintain a stable price index while technologically influenced goods are dropping requires everything else to go up. When efficiency is increasing, why should prices be stable?
Official Google Blog: How to become a Dummies.com author
STDs disrupt genetic bottleneck that usually constrains HIV infection
How to create perfect form mark up and style it with CSS
Drupal and Rails
Until the boomers die out, they will continue to matter.

As to your second point, a rebuttal; the success of metro, among others:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_International
A design goal of Rails 3 is to have less magic than Rails 2. I think that's a good change. Less magic please.
A little bit of self-promotion never hurt anyone. Although, I'm honestly hoping someone will find it useful as I know a lot of people struggle with forms and styling them in a cross-browser compatible way.
I think its a waste of time only in the trivial sense of time spent at HN doesnt' translate into work done. On the other hand, hard work requires making the brain work well, and the brain works best when its you cycle between doing different activities. So I think in fact having a source of novelty of consistent quality as HN, is ultimately not a waste of time at all if you are infact working on something intellectually nontrivial.
I try to get 6 figures, but its hard to find startups that can afford to pay that much for long. What you make totally depends on where you live/work.

When it comes to stock, I view it as a useless bonus, many times I was promised stock and it was never issued, and most of the time it would be worthless anyway.
It isn't a horrible idea. Using a ready made framework all the time without regard if it's right for the job is a horrible idea.

For some apps which have a certain level of complexity and require some extra flexibility, you end up wasting more time fighting the framework than getting the job done.

It helps if you have a well defined standard in place, for python, that means WSGI. Coupled with good libraries, it's hard to beat.
If import cgi works for you, it's great. I love simplicity.
I think you meant,

"this begets the question."
Django with Google App Engine
It's now fixed. I get sent to the home page when I'm not logged in.
This is as good a place as any to toss out my lingering idea:

I feel guilty when I go more than a day w/o checking ycnews (I know, this is bad!). However, I think I've figured out why - I don't want to miss posts that will make me a better hacker. For example, last week there was a "Top 10 tips for linux admins" post where I actually learned something useful (I didn't know about the reset command, when you corrupt a shell by more-ing a binary file).

Is there a way, via some combination of features and/or "Ask HN" style tags, to mark posts as useful? I have nothing against posts that are not useful (but nonetheless interesting). However, if I could filter the posts by utility, it would make it easier to stay off the site for a while, and also make the time here more "justifiable".

There certainly could be downsides to such a system, that I haven't considered.
Yeah, I think there's a disconnect in our vocabulary here. I see them as User Generated News Sites which is a different mentality than Social Networking, which I assumed when I saw "social web app".

So my comments probably don't apply as much.
Ruby + Sinatra for now. It's great for tiny services that work together.

A full web service to implement '/add/1/2' is just

require 'sinatra'; get('/add/:a/:b') { params[:a].to_i + params[:b].to_i }
Ok, but I think that would just make the other issues worse. Mind you, I'm an old cynic who couldn't get it to work, and you should never listen to old cynics. If you think there's something there I'd like to see what you come up with.
Background on MyWindowsTools.com - Trying to Find a Good Problem to Solve
Why Software Engineering Sucks
Hey PG, what about enforcing procrastination filters? EG just removing the override link?
Right, but that's not "writing a framework", it's "using existing libraries in conjunction with one another". There's no real "magic", directory layout rules, etc.

Maybe you end up writing a couple scripts to tie them together or something, but it's hardly a framework. And in many cases, yes, it is a better choice than a framework. And still a better choice than writing your own framework.
I seem to recall that the reason mercenaries (at least in the US) are viable is because they hire ex-military. So most/all of the expensive training is done. Furthermore, mercenaries are not so good at things like air forces and carrier groups and artillery (v. large capital investments that lack adaptability to smaller situations).
How funny, I came in here to ask about French taxes. Is there anyone here who can tell us what the French generally pay annually in taxes? I'm paying almost 40% of my annual income in taxes in the US, and in exchange I don't get health care, I don't get paternity leave paid for by the government, and I sure as hell didn't get a newspaper subscription when I turned any age.
You trust your daughter more than I trust mine. =)
socket & sprintf FTW!!!
I am not a parent, so I'll admit a skewed perspective here, or perhaps a lack of context entirely, but I think you need to be very careful about putting forth authority -- what I assume you mean as discipline and respect -- as a sufficient basis for different standards of behavior.

From watching people grow up in my generation under the same sort of philosophy, I've seen them develop the mind set that anything put forth by authority must be correct, and in the process hold obviously contrary points of view without batting an eye. One of the causes I've been able to gather is that they spent a large part of their growing years being told how things are and to accept that as sufficient evidence, but not having what is asserted jive with their own impressions. Enough of that, if they don't rebel they develop the sense that their own impressions and intuitions are completely flawed, and should never be trusted without someone else to tell how things are.

I'm not saying that you are wrong to enforce a no swearing policy with your kids -- that's an entirely different discussion that you have already said you don't want, so I won't push for it. But from my teenage perspective of not so many years ago, I can imagine being very different -- less curious, less assertive, less independent -- if my parents had been more authoritarian, and not to be harsh but less reasonable, approach to setting ground rules for my behavior.
It seems like whoever is working on marketing Windows 7 right now is doing a pretty good job. I'm seeing glowing reviews of it all over the place.
Are cloud services the new subprime mortgage?
I don't use the script. I'd just thought that 'hnblacklist' would be a better name.
Most of the brilliant teams I have worked with have a process but they are intelligent enough to follow things that make sense to them. Mindlessly applying a fat process without understanding why to any project is obviously illogical and bound to ruin the project.
Down and dirty, guerrilla style. I'd bribe bloggers and exploit social networks.
Being economical is a sure way to be forgotten.
Disabling the back button is not cool.
Point taken. VB.NET has come a long way from Altair BASIC.

Still, I'd be happy if they killed off VB so that I wouldn't have to deal with its syntax and retardations. Working in an MS environment I can only ask for so much, but at least with C# my loops get braces.
Opening Doors and Smashing Windows: Alternative Measures for Funding Software Development
Apparently, Metro International does not see a future for the print medium. http://abnnewswire.net/press/de/60810/Metro_International_ST...

Sakari Pitkänen, Global Editor-in-Chief of Metro International, has been appointed Vice President of Metro Interactive [...] "I believe a strong Internet presence is clearly important for the future of Metro."
Code Igniter is solid.
I'll be intrigued (in the academic sense) to see what they come up with.

The GPL couldn't be fought (I consider the fight basically over after the last court ruling) because it gives rights where most software licenses remove them. In a way it is on firmer legal footing than conventional licenses, because it is much more clearly a contract; the law grants you these rights, but if you do X and Y, you get Z from me in return. It's hard to imagine how to eliminate the GPL without also eliminating software licenses.

Similarly for the creative commons; how can you block open culture which gives people rights they wouldn't have without losing the same legal structures you use to remove rights? Removing rights exercises those legal mechanisms far harder than a standard contract, just like with the GPL vs. standard EULAs.

I suppose they could try a pure social approach but I submit that they've already lost that fight. Trying to advertise that people shouldn't use the free thing is going to be one of the fuddy-duddiest things an industry has done in a long time, and calling further attention to free culture is unlikely to do them any favors.
I understand where you're coming from, but if you knew me better (or, I imagine, any parent that writes on HN), you'd know that isn't an issue in this case. And, there's a difference between thinking for yourself and growing up incapable of recognizing boundaries.
In the same vein, the best captcha is not letting anyone sign up at all.
Plan 9 seems to my untrained eyes like a more than modest improvement, but I suspect even immodest improvements will generally not be sufficient to oust an embedded solution that is, as Raymond says, "just good enough."
I'd forgotten that text doesn't show up with a link submission. Here's what I posted originally:
Not new, obviously, but an interesting story for those of us who don't know it, and some generally applicable lessons.
"In 2003 it looks like Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough."
I tend to find myself influenced by the karma count more than anything else. I have to log myself out after commenting to increase the cost of checking the change to my net karma.

I'm a strong advocate of hiding the karma counts entirely (for users, submissions, and comments). That greatly reduces the conditioning effect, not to mention karma-related drama and groupthink (as Surowiecki argues, crowd wisdom is best procured when evaluations are performed independently). Submissions and comments can still be ordered by net karma over time, as they are now.

Whatever you choose to do, I think there's a strong argument in favor of experimentalism. Especially since the site isn't a commercial undertaking and can deal with the occasional disruption.
>>> "You're moving things around drastically."

Funnily enough I just altered two sites this week by moving columns around. One was a simple CSS change, the other was one altered margin declaration and one moved div - I also get to see the alterations as they will appear live in a browser (FF).

>>> " Every time I find myself typing style="clear:both" I wonder why the hell I'm doing it."

Because of IE?

>>> "equally hard to change later"

It depends what you're trying to achieve, if you require a pixel based layout that renders identically in all browsers and completely misunderstands the original web paradigm (accessibility of information, not accessibility of design) then yeah, tables .. though you'd probably be more comfortable with Flash or just going the whole hog and printing it out on paper and pasting it to your screen.

When columns finally arrive in CSS3 (http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/) across the major UA will you still use tables for non-tabular data?
There's many different taxes as you can imagine, but I'd say a little bit more than 50%.
With that you get plenty of benefits (school, health care, unemployment, you name it)... but we also have a huge government deficit.
At some point, we'll have to change stuff. And that will be painful ! (Meaning that do should really not plan your vacations in France at that time)
Django when I get to and CodeIgniter when I have to.
People bike in the winter here in Chicago. I can't imagine breathing in the car fumes every day though.
LP here also. But you probably already knew that.
I avoid the "check HN every n minutes" addiction by using Google Reader to give me a static view of what's come to the front page. This way I'm never re-parsing the entire front page every visit.
I used to use Django, tried cherrypy and web.py, and have ended up starting to write my own (http://github.com/breily/juno).
Operating systems are a means to an end. What application can you build on Plan 9 that you can't readily build on Linux, or Win32?
Yes, Cowan wants to buy ARM processors. I believe he is planning on soliciting funding from the Mathematics Endowment Fund this term. (disclosure: I'm the MEF Director)
Plus jack and roundabout (ports of rack and sinatra to javascript), because we created those too :)

http://github.com/tlrobinson/jack
Don't forget strcspn!
They haven't lost the social fight; it hasn't even started. The average person has yet to even think to question bog-standard intellectual property practices; that Overton window has a long ways to move yet.

I'm not hopeful. Lessig, for one, is so bad at speaking to the uninitiated about these issues that he lost a debate with Stephen Colbert, who was trying to _make fun_ of the opposing position.
I've gathered from enough people that being a parent runs a moderate likelihood of changing my perspective on this; time will tell. And I also wasn't presuming on your capabilities as a parent, or anything else about you; just on the argument you laid out here. :-)

And I agree, there is a difference between thinking for oneself and learning about boundaries. Except that I could imagine my 10-12 year old self wondering why my primary role models seemed to be demanding one form of behavior, and then exemplifying a different form. At this point, I could only imagine thinking a boundary had been placed on where I was allowed to think for myself. They'd seem like boundaries for the sake of having boundaries. Maybe you see it differently or don't care what I think, but I'm still confused.
Sinatra is definitely an interesting project. We recently "ported" it to JavaScript:

http://github.com/tlrobinson/jack/blob/030685ef3de4c29c38b4e...

The same webservice would be:

roundabout.route({ path:"/add/{a}/{b}", get: function(){this.body = this.wildcards["a"] + this.wildcards["b"];} })

or, alternatively:

roundabout.get("/add/{a}/{b}", function(){ this.body = this.wildcards.a + this.wildcards.b; });

The first syntax is a tad longer, but its much more useful; you can define any method with the name of an HTTP verb for that path, and you can also define a filter parameter that will be queried before the path is matched. The filter lets you do whatever pre-processing you want, so you could filter out requests from a specific user-agent for example, or all URLs that use mixed case, or anything else you can think of.
We have have a similar thing in Denmark, it's called "stamp-support" (due do the cost of distributing). The logic goes that print media still serves as feeder for stories that eventually gets published online and therefore newspapers should get special support.

I remain unconvinced.
nice job mark & jason -- clever & well executed.

that said, it's the marketing equivalent of a lottery ticket; stunts can be huge (for example, our critical mass at dropbox came from one carefully-crafted digg post) but only if they're aligned with the target audience (which probably isn't the case with hilary swank & family social networking)
Newspaper ad-revenue forecast: down 42.5% over next seven years
I think the problems are pretty much 100% visual presentation.

My eye isn't drawn to anything. You have a standard font for a name. Make it closer to a logo, and much bigger. It's ok to center it, but the whole top area is centered, and doesn't look good.

The red line + highlighted line highlights neither. Then the horizontal line of users is confusing. Make it a grid and put it in a sidebar. I like the score idea, but draw in the the user to want to get that score up. Perhaps mirror twitter.grader.com and just let a user enter their twitter username to find some fake score that can be improved by using the site.

I played around with balsamiq for a bit, and made this:
http://ivankirigin.posterous.com/balsamiq-is-a-hell-of-a-too...

I'm obviously not a UI designer. I'd totally a Python geek. I would try to copy other sites more, though.
The author seems to confuse waterfall method with software engineering. Engineering means having a process not a specific process.

His first example sounds very close to the team I currently work with if you add in constantly touching base with the origional stake holders. But we are still engineering, we still make controlled changes that we, as a team, determine are the best fit for the problem.
It's not that easy to calculate (and most French people probably don't even know), because it's quite obfuscated...

For healthcare, retirement, various helps for unemployed people and other social benefits, companies are paying roughly the equivalent of your net income directly to the state. The so called "charges".

Then according to your revenues you will pay between 0 and 50% of your net income in tax (it's maxed out to 50%). For your average software engineer with a master degree, probably around 30%.

So that's a total of 65%. Hardly ever less than 50%, and hardly ever more than 75%.

Now the real obfuscation comes from the so-called "charges". They are payed by companies so some people consider them part of company tax. I don't, because "charges" are tied to an employee... fire him/her and you won't have to pay them.

The double obfuscation on "charges" is that only a part of them is showed on the payroll... so most people tend to see them as lower than they actually are.

And then the VTA is 19.6%...
So yes, French people pay an incredible amount of tax. And wages are not even high to begin with (much lower than in the United States, at least NYC where I used to be working).

Then again, nearly free education and nearly free healthcare is nice too... the "Grande Ecole" I went to, top tier, was 800 euros a year. Books and all materials included in the price. Definitely affordable.
I mess with Rails, dabble in Django & work in CodeIgniter.

Also fun - merb, cakephp, symfony, web2py
Serious question: don't you think people should be expected to be responsible for themselves?