skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Services for startups / gigs for hackers
Hi folks,

Had a chance to meet some of you at the recent nyc meetup. Had a couple questions that I'd like to ask the group out there.

As a bootstrapped startup, what are some "bite-sized" needs that you'd be willing to pay someone local to do, assuming the process of getting this help was efficient? (I'm thinking one to a few hours, maybe $50-200 compensation).

I suppose this might cut against the "do everything yourself" mantra (which I actually firmly subscribe to), but in some circumstances it might make sense considering the value of time (or perhaps the limitations of the founders' skillsets).

On the flip side, as a hacker, what are some services you could provide to a small company to make some cash? Ideally this wouldn't involve creating significant IP, as that might get tricky.

Best,
Ep.
@vlad @run4yourlives @wheels Your comments make good sense. Reading up on the contest laws now.

Perhaps I should start a 'Help me out with legal issues' contest ;]
People just don't want to maintain 2 sites. Extra features and sections often don't get updated to the text only rendering.

I guess my point is that screen readers like (even prefer) well written markup. A text-only site is a kickback from when they couldn't and the accessibility guidelines were written to deal with that.
Man, if you are Y!Hack regular and need an article to create a website, we are all in trouble!
I agree...but, now what about Schwartz time at the helm? The past couple of years, I think, have set a pretty interesting new course for Sun. The acquisition of MySQL is merely the most obvious example, but Sun has open sourced everything in their software stable. Literally all of Sun is Open Source now (hell, they even have an open CPU design or two). This has beaten down their revenues a bit (OK, maybe a lot) in the short term...but I wonder if it's the beginning of a dramatic turnaround. It feels kinda like they've put the nerds back in charge. I don't know if that's always a good thing. Would Apple have become what it is today if Woz had been at the helm? It's almost comically obvious that it wouldn't be...but still, Sun was founded by nerds for nerds, and was explosively successful because of that.

In other words, I have no idea what's going to happen to Sun. But, I like them better as a company under Schwartz than at any time in the past ten of fifteen years.
Dealing with forks in a DVCS
I think the dangerous part is when other people receive them.
Agreed. While I can see that it's a clever thing and nicely done, I can't think of anyone who routinely needs to screenshot all (or at least multiple) windows at once but separately.

Someone who saves a ton of time using this, please tell us what you're using it for!
Consultants are supposed to consult, not make business decisions. If you hired a consulting firm, expect them to give you advice for you to make a decision.

If, on the other hand, you care only about results, you should have asked for a flat-rate bid on completed work by a development company. In that case, "how to develop" or "which api to use" shouldn't matter, since you are no longer making development decisions but simply awaiting delivery of the features you paid for.

You can't have it both ways: either you're hands-off and pay only for results, or you have a collaborative environment in which you call the shots (since you are writing the checks) and are responsible for dead-end paths.

As as side note, I wouldn't get into finger-pointing and bad blood here. If you truly care about your product, move forward with it. You could easily spend more on litigation than the 2 weeks were worth. Better to spend you energies on something productive. If you don't like the way the development company is treating you, amicably part ways.
Interesting article. About ten years ago I stumbled into some IRC channels where people were trading credit card numbers, sharing information about how they operate, etc. For curiosity's sake, I hung around and chatted there for a couple of months. It was fascinating, but I was very surprised at how freely thieves were speaking / showing themselves online. It looks like little has changed.
I don't understand your meaning. Linux is a very fine operating system, and for many purposes (like desktops and small servers) it is vastly superior to Solaris. Red Hat has some of the most productive and important Linux kernel developers (along with dozens of other developers working on Gnome, databases, and a lot more) on their payroll, so they're definitely involved in the making.

Solaris is so embarrassingly bad in a few areas that I get pretty angry every time I have to use it. It makes it even worse when I use the stuff that Sun has done really well (ZFS, Zones, dtrace), that I then have to use their stupidly bad package management tools, their neanderthal old UNIX utilities (or install the GNU tools myself, and remember to use the g variants), and their general disdain for anything not invented by Sun.
I expected a comic
Zimbra founder and investor Satish Dharmaraj leaves Yahoo
ClipClipSave might actually be something you'd be interested in investing longer than a week on. :-)
I completely agree that the message "Always drink responsibly" is focused on escaping legal problems while getting customers to drink more. That said, this site has exactly the same goals as the alcohol industry - to get their clients to drink more, and use this product in conjunction with that drinking. So, perhaps "Always drink responsibly" is actually what they want.
Filing in the GAAP — an Apple earnings primer
When in doubt, turn to _why
I find that screentoaster.com is pretty straight forward and NO INSTALL required.
I was also at the NY meet up. This is off-topic, but do you know if there are labeled photos of people attending? I'd like to double check who everyone was and who I was talking to.
Blogs build reputation by good work. Lowering the threshold to publishing will make people more likely to publish.

It's a lot of work to publish, and publications won't accept negative results as interesting.

By self publishing on an accessible medium, negative results are more likely to be shown. Not every blog post would even be about results, but about the process.
I'm not sure why the parent is downmodded - it seems to me that $15 is indeed a relatively high price tag for something that seems like a single feature of a graphics program, albeit a useful feature.
Right. http://highscalability.com/new-facebook-chat-feature-scales-...

http://www.erlang.org/faq/introduction.html#1.5 (Who uses Erlang?)
Thanks for the info. I'll take a look at it sometime soon...
AFAIK, turning on multicast would create many additional RIB/FIB entries in routers, possibly running routers out of RAM and requiring upgrades.

Also, because multicast duplicates packets, it could increase bandwidth usage in ways that are not easy to bill for, potentially increasing costs without increasing revenue. I don't think this is a real problem, but some people have cited it.
I don't think you want random entries. Why not interview respectable designers and offer 5% to the the one who agrees as well as has the best portfolio, references, and ideas you like? That's a much more sane thing to do (considering somebody mentioned here at least one law firm in California offered to incorporate some companies in exchange for small ownership of the new entity, and small independent game developers often offer game royalties to artists in exchange for artwork.)

But the best plan, and one most congruent to advice you would get from both the programmers (successful game developers, business-savvy hackers, etc.) as well as the artists themselves (designers: www.no-spec.com) is this:

1) ask around for recommendations on designers who've done related work before and how they were like to work with

2) establish what you are looking for, together with the designer, and let him or her create the art, of course making sure to have a contract that stipulates what is to be done and allows for a couple of additional levels of iterations

3) pay an agreed upon amount, not stock options. Yes, although I mentioned that some indie game developers go the route of offering royalties to artists, the real advice is to pay a flat amount to contractors for art, sound, and music and then keep full ownership of the game, and save lots of time and money managing royalties for the entire lifespan of the game, worrying about trust and tax issues, creating contracts with others, and more.

As well, on the hacker side of the equation, the author of the submission mistakingly equates "offering a few lottery tickets that might win five to seven digit figures" with "attracting the best designers." If you want to have a good design, you will have to do the leg work, and not throw it to chance and then say, "well, I tried! Let me offer 5 or 10 more percent."

And here's a new submission that design contests might not even be legal:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=443758
Joss Whedon's Top Writing Tips
I'm more interested in how to make that damn chime stop chiming whenever I turn on my Macbook.

People have suggested that I mute it every time I shut down. This is asinine, and doesn't help me if I have to do a hard-shutdown.
Thanks, I think it has potential.

I was a little disappointed when I submitted it for review here. Didn't get much feedback.
Why would somebody give away 5% of a company when they can pay ~$175 at a site like 99designs for a design?

Granted, you get what you pay for, but 5% is a massive overpayment even for "sweat equity."
Billions of dollars could be saved by businesses everywhere if they were to migrate away from Microsoft products. It is a fact that Individuals and Businesses alike pay Billions of dollars in Microsoft Software Licensing and Computer Security alone. Clear and viable alternatives exist today in what is termed "Open Source Software". A number of viable alternatives exist under the generic name "linux" in which the expense is optional or "Free". For those individual users requiring additional assistance the optional support License average around $80 U.S. currency. Linux is an extremely "User Friendly" Operating System which by itself is not only easy to install, use and Update, it comes complete with "Open Source" Microsoft Compatible Desktop Utilities to replace those commonly used and relatively expensive applications such as MSWord and MSExcel Word Processing and Spreadsheet applications. In addition to these, a complete array (literally thousands)of readily available, easy to locate, install, use, update or even un-install just by selecting / de-selecting a check box!And most are equally functional to their commercial counterparts!. Applications such as Games, Educational Applications, highly useful Computer Utilities and Internet Applications exist TODAY. Not only is Linux easy to use, is well known as being invulnerable to attack by Computer Viruses. The fact that additional Billions of dollars are spent on System Security as a result of these omnipresent and dangerous Computer Viruses should be enough for the average PC user and business owner alike to see the value at hand. In just minutes, any computer system can be converted to the Linux Operating System by even the least savvy Computer user. As if we need any additional reasons to switch, Linux will outperform Windows which is like going out and buying a faster computer, without actually going anywhere! Do yourself and your pocketbook a huge favor by converting to any of the number of Open-Source Linux Operating Systems. I personally recommend "UBUNTU Linux" for any user. Not only will you have a Desktop Operating System that is much faster and easy to use, you will have removed that "Virus Target" from your PC as well....
Illegal? How is it different from Verizon putting out an RFP saying "We have $250,000 to spend on advertising in the social media space, show me what you've got". It's the same thing but on a smaller level. The Wikipedia page describes it accurately: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_Proposal

Bad for business? I have to call BS on that too. It's only bad for those catering to < $500 price point. If you can't handle pricing pressure on the bottom end, don't compete on price.
You can use characters to draw, and it's cross-platform, too:

http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200805/css_homer_animated.html

(Not that I'd recommend it.)
I wonder who got the first 5% for coming up with such terrible domain name?
Not for me, but still voting it up because I was curious enough to click the link =P

It is exactly as sharp and pointy as I had feared - but then again, XML was never meant to be looked at by humans right? Isn't the point that it's easy to traverse and build tools around?

An XML based language would definitely aid in creating more visual IDEs. I suspect the example they give could be done easily in Yahoo pipes, and is likewise stored in a similar XML document.
There was some notice usually on such channels that was attempting to forbid the usage of the channel by law enforcement agents. I don't remember the wording but the strange thing was that people believed that such a notice would just work and they could freely discuss everything.
I agree - not a lot of utility in this (for me at least), but I'd pay $100 for something that did this for webpages.
This is hilarious. Maybe it's an improvement over their previous product, a CSV-oriented programming language.
This would've been damn cool - If we were still in the year 2000 or so, when XML was all the rage.

I'm sure people will find lots of uses for this, though.
Roubini: "U.S. banking system is effectively insolvent"
Well, I'm guessing you'll be using this site, so just figure out what works! Off the top of my head I'd think of either putting drink recipes online, or letting people talk and tell stories about each game, making it a bit more social. But it's your site, so I'd figure just make it whatever you want and if you like it, other people will too.
5% is a ridiculous amount. What does this show to potential investors? You either value 5% of your company at ~$1000 or you're insane.
Camtasia is much more powerful. Jing limits to 5 minute clips and you can't edit the resulting video.
Seems to have missed a trick here, if you have a good application, but lacking an area (design), and its a small startup without many resources.

why not have the contest worded more to attract a design orientated co founder, 5% is a reasonable chunk of the company, for a template that can be knocked up in a few hours.
> "Corporate Simplificator"

We call it "the startup".
A fully working e-mail auto-responder using only two statements...

and 28 lines of code.
In general, good designers will not participate in contest as it is spec work which is always a bad way to do design work (or coding work, or anything else). If you value good design, pay for it. This is why there is controversy within the design community over sites like 99designs or the Sitepoint Design Contest forum.

It creates an underlying feeling that design is less important than the coding of the app - if you want a designer, bring them on as a co-founder and offer them equity. If your app requires a good user experience, you need a professional, not someone who spends a "few hours" to win a contest. I put "few hours" in quotes because that is a very low estimate for the amount of time it takes to create a great user interface.

Holding a contest is just a way to look at a bunch of free work and only reward one designer.
Red Hat have a luxury Sun have denied themselves: breaking stuff between versions. Do you know they won't support you if you upgrade RHEL4 to 5 in-place? They want you to start again from the bare metal. Sun hang onto the legacy stuff because they guarantee nothing will break when you upgrade.

Now fair enough, maybe that's not so important in a world where you have a "cloud" of a thousand identical machines that you just build from gold master images and throw away when they break, but Solaris is not like it is because Sun doesn't know how to get new versions of their userland. Rather, they've chosen not to.
If it saves someone only an hour of their time, then surely it would be worth the $15 price tag?
This reminds me a lot of ColdFusion. It seems like the purpose is to make it easier for non-programmers to embed code into a web page. The syntax is just mind numbing though.

It made easy problems manageable for a noob, and hard problems impossible (to stand working on) for anyone that enjoys programming.

This doesn't seem like a good evolution.
What Do Bill Gates And Karch Kiraly Have In Common? | infoChachkie
Why was the link [dead] immediately after I submitted it?
I am pretty sure you could rent time on a Sun cloud long before there was EC2 or AppEngine. They were doing $1/CPU/hour back in '04. Except they called it a "grid", not a cloud.
Passage: a moving video game about life and death
I pray this is someone's cruel joke. You just wouldn't write code is poetry at the bottom of every page for an xml programming language unless this was a joke.

Also, it runs on the JVM, but is called X#. I mean... I'm honestly speechless.
Sun finally fixed this problem by forking. Solaris will remain crufty and backwards compatible until the beginning of time. OpenSolaris supposedly threw out all the cruft and has modern userland.
Then who was that on the dais at precisely 12:00 who looked like Obama?
Hmm, I suppose that's a pretty good point. I would have a hard time justifying the purchase unless I were in a position where I regularly took screenshots of my desktop and needed to move windows around as separate layers on a regular basis.
>but then again, XML was never meant to be looked at by humans right?

Actually I think it was, in as far as it is a text markup language. The only case when I have enjoyed looking at it, and editing is docbook - where its mostly text, just with limited docbook XML markup (and having the redundant closing tags does help you navigate).
And these rules are...?
Congrats. SGN does a lot of cool stuff
It's worth playing the game before reading the creator's statement, but the statement is really useful in understanding the intent behind the game.

http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/statement.html
Yes, but then they basically never improved it. Hardware got dramatically cheaper, but Sun didn't drop prices AFAIK. People started wanting to run Web servers and databases in the cloud, but Sun did nothing. Now they are racing to catch up by productizing Caroline and Q-Layer.
People who take a lot of screenshots are willing to pay for convenience. SnapzPro has sold a ton of licenses at $69 for example. I just sent this app to my dad, he writes computer books and screenshots can be the bane of his existence--if it saves him time he'd pay 5x the price.

Update: He just wrote back, "I can't believe it's only $15!"
The irony of proposing saving money by using an outrageously expensive* piece of technology seems to be lost on him.

* http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=cDZUk67FpB0
Didn't Google just do this?
Thing is, it's not easy to traverse and build tools around...

You can write a json encoder/decoder in a few lines of code. XML libraries run to a fair few lines and are pretty complex beasts.
Reminds me of a panel-discussion I was in the audience of once. When panel-participant Steve Vinoski was asked which trends he saw for software development 10 years in the future, his only response was "I just hope we're not all programming in XML".

Having done my share of XSLT, I could not agree more. :)
I just sent it to someone who publishes Photoshop tutorials for a magazine--lots of shots involve multiple windows and the layout people love to be able to play around with that sort of stuff.
Pardon my curiousity, but what did the "software for chimney sweepers" do?
What would happen to Java when/if Sun becomes bankrupt or irrelevant?
IronPython: Python evolves again (Jim Huginin creator of Jython) [video]
It's true they are focussed on compute, but it's also true that EC2 and AppEngine are not. I'm not entirely sure how you'd, for example run an FEA or CFD job on AppEngine.
Scott Adams is an eloquent, smart, funny, troll.

Entertaining, but not to be taken seriously.
IBM already spend more on Java than Sun do.
That's a good question. I'm guilty here of throwing around "common knowledge" without knowing the actual facts. Thanks for calling me on it :)

I have only heard that officers and directors of public companies have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders. Whether that obligation is legal or philosophical, I'm not sure. Doing a quick search here, I found little information pertaining to any legal requirements, but there are several cases of shareholders suing a company for not meeting their fiduciary duties. Based on that, it seem like there is some legal basis for this, but IANAL.
Technology introduces another dilemma for people of faith. To know God, we become God.
That was fun. Does that stop at spring 3:5? It seems like an odd point to end it.

Edit: NM, that was just a bug.
Everything about this plan is crazy talk.

(1), a professional design job for a template costs $1000-$3000. You're setting your valuation at 20-30k?

(2), the equity you're offering isn't worth anything. In practical terms, all you're offering is the opportunity for a designer to work on contingency. They don't like that.

If you really want to give up almost as much equity as a CEO takes 2 years in, or almost as much equity as YC takes up front, don't trade it for a design; find a partner who can do solid design.
Equity should not be a prize in a contest. When a company gives up equity, it should be for a specific purpose to get something one cannot otherwise, such 1) in exchange for investor money (YCombinator), 2) in exchange for a professional service from a top firm to file articles of incorporation, trademarks, and advice on setting up bookkeeping, and, 3) for a key hire. I hope somebody who's done more than run a shareware company chimes in if I'm wrong.
Microsoft expected to fire 6,000-8,000
Lord no! Think of the children!

I am all for DSL's because you can do some very neat things with them, but don't make it XML based. Use a reasonable language like Python (replace with your favorite language). XML is pretty hard to read. A good programming language should be concise. You can type only so many symbols per hour; make the most of it. I worked with VoiceXML a decade back. It was not a pleasant experience.

The seductive attraction of an XML based language is that the heavy lifting of writing a parser is done for you. That's just an illusion. There is most certainly a grammar for any language that you like. With a little bit of hacking you are in business. I've done it. It's a piece of cake, more fun than banging away at a DOM tree.
Hacker looking for work
I'm a programming-focused hacker looking for interesting work in the SF Bay Area. You'll find I have extensive experience in a wide variety of languages including C, C++, C#, Erlang, Java, Python, Ruby, and more.

Please contact me (wg@postpro.net) for links to my work, open source projects, references, etc. Thanks!
Good advice. The key step if you want to write is to actually do the writing part. For in-depth, and practical screenwriting advice I really like Terry Rossios's columns on Wordplayer: http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/welcome.html.
This is about xterm-256color. It's very much worth it, if you care about colors in your terminal. You will discover more and more subtle differences.

Quite an upgrade if you use emacs -nw.
As a consumer, SaaS sites that post information like this (that I find credible) definitely influence my buying decision (I don't have anything to say to you as a SaaS site owner yet).

Check this site out, it has a lot to say on this subject (and good examples in their 'hall of fame'):

http://www.transparentuptime.com
Peter Norvig has a good article about the implications of this and other research problems.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html