skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll share a similar (positive) experience I had a few years ago. I'm not quite what I'd call a developer, but I'm a company founder who's "code savvy".

I made the decision to outsource the development of a moderately big PHP project a few years ago -- I went through a LOT of profiles on oDesk and finally settled on a guy (who billed about $30/hr, which was on the high end for non-US guys on oDesk). He was _terrific_ -- we were basically on IM with each other constantly, and he was very open with regular code reviews and feature checks. He added a ton to the project and it worked out way better than I could have guessed given the stigma outsourced development has.

The key, I think, was as other folks have pointed out - that I speak the same technical language and wasn't throwing big meaningless features at the guy ("I want it just like Facebook, but for pets!!").

My only frustrations were things that, unfortunately, can happen with outsourced work -- timing. My guy was an A developer, but a B/C time manager. So the project took about 2x as long as it should have.

But as they say -- quality, price, speed: pick two.
That’s actually pretty good way to bootstrap torrent anonymously. The issue is just keeping webseeds alive long enough, which can be tricky if the upload is fairly big.
You're reading entirely too much into minor points.
Good journalists should be able to plough through the data and put the information into context; referencing previous news stories or other organisations.

Unfortunately, as can be seen by the bloody awful mess they make of almost any scientific or medical or technical press release, it's unwise to rely on a journalist to provide sensible analysis.

Maybe there's some great crowd-sourcing website that could do this? (A bit like the "Human Flesh Search Engine" in China, but different.)

Or perhaps as a MVP someone could just write a script that turns many words into links to a wikipedia entry?
Are you worried he's going to take off with your $20?
I don't think anyone would claim it's hard to drag and drop a file into the extension manager window. Yes, it creates enough friction to stop the typical drive-by download attack, but it's not a difficult operation.
Simple: cargo cult economics. All modern western countries have big cities, masses of office space, and huge shopping malls.
It's funny, I didn't know that the Google+ app did this until I read the article. I always assumed that it was a back button.
You'll hate Windows 8
While you make good points, iOS apps currently make significantly more than android apps. My guess would be at least 2-1 if not more.
Why Quitters Win
So needed. Thanks.
Do you still have great ambitions for Arc? Do you think one day there will be a book "Programming Arc" from O'Reilly?
Gay Marriage is also illegal in many places, but that doesn't make it wrong.
This particular STM is promising because it is only about 5x slower than a well-optimized JIT, and yet it has no JIT yet. Once they do some low risk work it should be very close to vanilla pypi and faster than CPython. I'd love to be able to use the programming semantics you get as an app developer from an STM language.

The usual problem with STM is that generates many writes to memory. You ruin your cache locality and your program bottlenecks on the bus to RAM. Clojure solves this by using custom data structures that use "structural sharing". Pypy could solve this by using their JIT to elide writes.
Digital Cameras and Summer - How Hot is Too Hot
Who said anything about leaving a vulnerability in the code? If your security model depends on a suboptimal implementation of strcmp(), you have bigger problems than timing attacks.
That engineer would make a good Haskell programmer.
Leverage Java technology’s benefits on Web
I would imagine that some of this is CEOs of companies getting tired of being dragged up to Capital Hill for a "hearing" every time some 3rd party developer does something bad[1] or the press mis-report the impact of some design decision[2]. A developer or IT friendly solution takes a lot of work, and with the size of the consumer market and number of lawyers getting hip to tech, I would imagine the full on lock down is the final goal. WinRT, OS X 10.8, and Chrome browsers / ChromeBooks.

1) Path

2) The iPhone's cell tower list http://www.mobiledia.com/news/88279.html
Rule of law? That's a quaint pre-2001 POV.
Once I bought the most expensive Vita bundle on Amazon and a day before shipping they included some free stuff with the cheaper bundle (I think it was a Sony decision because other stores did the same). I sent a email to them simply asking why this was the case and they sent me $50 credit with no questions asked.
Doesn't Apple still forbid programs written in anything apart from Objective C, JavaScript (and a third language, that I don't remember)?
Yes, I don't set hard deadlines in my business so this drawback wasn't a big deal to me but if you outsource, you can expect things will be slower than if you'd do it yourself.
In China, a married couple who are both only-children can actually have 2 children. This was an alteration to the policy made in 2010 and was exactly designed to stop the 4 grandparent problem.

Ref:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2009/10/28/f-rfa-germain....
ICFP Contest weird Twitter
Came across this weird stuff on reddit, any clue anyone?
> If the artist wants money he should set up a donations account so I can pay him directly. I'm tired of these middlemen.

The middlemen play an important role in some industries. Many people ask cstross why he doesn't have a donation link so that people who've read a pirate version of one of his books can pay him. He is very clear - he wants you to buy a book of his (any book) so that his publisher can get some of the cash as well. Books need to be written, edited, typeset, 'printed' / 'put into ebook format', distributed, etc.

Some of this could be taken away from the middlemen. Kindles could have a "highlight typo / highlight grammar error" mode, which sends possible corrections to the publisher who reviews, then corrects them, and they get updated on the device.

I've never trawled through a slush pile. But having seen some of the rubbish that comes out the end I dread to think what goes in the other end.

> If you think piracy is unethical you are either a dolt or benefiting from current copyright and patent laws.

I am happy to pirate a lot of content. But I try hard to pay for everything I pirate. Sometimes that's not possible (out of print book, no longer distributed video, etc.) There are lots of things about content distribution that really suck. But I do try to pay for my content.

It is wrong to suggest that wanting to pay people for the work they do is something that only a dolt would do.
Removing Visual C++ files
thanks, this is great feedback. the product is physical note cards, i will clarify that on the website as well.
Why the test of both $# and $1?

tr -dc '!-~' </dev/urandom | head -c ${1-12}; echo

Change to A-Za-z0-9, etc., to suit.
Does the idea of paying some guy $20 to complete a job that you would charge someone else magnitudes more for not make anyone else feel guilty?
That ignores the effect of your friends sharing with their friends and so on. I added the final graph to illustrate this point - yes, having 2 entries is better than having 1, but the network effect of your friends pulling in their friends eventually kills your odds.
Whenever I want to showcase bad logo design I always search some random location based business service.

Such as bouncy castle hire in Manchester:

http://www.jalmacleisure.co.uk/
http://www.castleempire.com/images/Castle%20Empire.jpg
http://www.king-of-the-castles.com/

I often wonder what people think when they look at a logo as bad as some of the above. Personally I think it just shows a lack of effort, you see this in the startup game also.

But clip art. Come on.
This pattern comes from the official Android Design recommendations for Android 4.0: http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/multi-pane-layo...

It's clearly a way to adapt the tablet multi-pane paradigm to fit on small screens. Based on my Android experience, this unified approach requires a lot less work than maintaining completely separate layouts (and Activity design) for tablet and phone.
thanks. i thought that having a 'benefits' section on the main page would answer the question as to why use the cheat sheets, but i guess i can try to push that message through in an even stronger way.
I don't think I got lucky. I went through this process three times now (looking for a developer for c#, another one for ruby on rails, etc...) and the amount of people looking for work online means that if you filter well, you will be able to get the quality you are looking for.

The rewards of finding the right developer far outweight the upfront cost of looking for one in my opinion, but it depends how long you are planning to be in business for.
I am using gedit. I would use vim but doing more visual copy/paste seems to work better for me here.
The guidelines say nothing about any particular programming languages.
It would have been interesting if you allowed the users to approval / reject all sources of applications including the Google WebStore.
> Does repeating a statement as "Piracy is not stealing" make it true?

When it's the supreme court repeating it, that certainly make it true. [1]

> Why would any content creator (except, of course, producers of software, they laugh at you from their SaaS cloud) want to create anything if a pompous and self-righteous "respecting" in quotes is the spit in the face?

For the same reason humans have been creating art since much before the existence of copyright? The notion that we can attribute as "property" on something not tangible only appeared recently in human history [2]. While we have been creating art for much longer.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985)

[2] Before UK monarchy started granting monopoly privilege on printed books. The common notion among humans was that knowledge cannot be owned.

8 centuries ago, Piers_Plowman said “Human intelligence is like water, air and fire – it cannot be bought or sold;”

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piers_Plowman

2.5k years ago, Heraclitus said "the logos is common to all".

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus
Arc is in much the same state as essays. YC has grown so big that I don't have much time to work on either, except as related to YC (i.e. essays about startups, and Arc tweaks to support HN). But one way or another I will work on both again.
thank you, very useful feedback. i need to change the name -- others have raised the same point as you about it sounding too much like little shits - and also add more details.
> "obscurity does play a part in security (you don't go around publishing your private keys...)"

Security by obscurity is the opposite of using private keys. The algorithms for security by public/private keypairs are published and open to anyone to see; the strength does not depend on keeping the algorithm secret.

(Worth mentioning, some public/private keypair algorithms may actually have security by obscurity built in, such as the DES algo that some people speculate has hidden backdoors in how hashes are created.)
Maybe some. There are so many applications now that I couldn't say for sure.
If I want to distribute an extension that users want but Google won't allow, such as a pornography browsing extension (disallowed by the CWS policies [1]), there's a HUGE change from an end user's viewpoint. I am FORCED to host it elsewhere.

Installing an extension from the CWS is as simple as clicking the CWS Install button and accepting the security/permissions warning. Currently, installing an extension from a third-party site is as simple as clicking the site's Install button and accepting the security and permissions warnings. To the end user, these are practically the same experience, and only one extension method must be learned.

After this change, the end user will have to learn that extensions are powered by files, that only .crx files are extensions, that a .crx file must be downloaded to install an extension (but only manually if the extension is hosted somewhere other than the CWS), and that they must drag-and-drop a previously downloaded .crx file to a Google Chrome or Chromium tab that has a specific settings page open.

This is confusing, and necessitates that a user learn two different workflows to accomplish the same task from different sources. This turns non-CWS extensions into second-class citizens, and it's not as simple as enabling inline installation [2] if your extension would go against Google's policies.

[1]: https://developers.google.com/chrome/web-store/program_polic...

[2]: https://developers.google.com/chrome/web-store/docs/inline_i...
Yes fire fast. Recently I tried to hire someone. He was a good communicator but he was just not technical enough. So I let him go and two days after I found the right person.
Can this be done in an automated fashion in an enterprise environment? Asking a user to click is easy, drag onto a window gets kinda hairy.
In America here, it's a state recognized religion with a Church of their own. Hell, Tom Cruise is a Scientologist. That cult is a money hoarding organization. I wish this hack attack happened in America.
I usually try to draw mockups to describe the work. I have a tabletPC so that helps.
Also, for really technical stuff, I tried to put myself in his shoes and describe how I would approach the problem.

There is a fine line between clarifying and micromanaging though.
Concept: build sophisticated Android apps in minutes, using building blocks.
Please Stop With The Dancing, Microsoft
Sometimes simple and ugly triumph? We read some marketing experiences of ugly banner adverts getting more click conversions than modern ones. 1 it's an odd one.

http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/keep-it-simple-...
Yes, and their test work is useful too.
It seems that the hard facts continue to rain on the parade for the writers of this NYT piece, to the point where they cite some tech writers blog on Schmidts failures and have a bunch of unnamed "sources" attest to Apples "eyecatching new 3-d map service".

Only to top it all off with a paragraph on one developers tough love relationship with Apples "hands-on approach to approving software" (read: anticompetitive, arbitrariness).
100% agreed with all of the above, except I would add one caveat to #5....

I think one does need to focus on macro, long-term, and broad scoped stuff a bit. This doesn't mean keeping it as a goal (which I think is your point) but it does mean setting aside time to plan, think about the long-term, re-evaluate where you are from time to time, etc. At the same time these plans should be shelved once complete and only reviewed periodically. The point of such planning is to think about the long-term not map out how you are going to get there. As Eisenhower said, "Plans are nothing. Planning is everything."
It's Jason Shaw, a fairly avid blogger.
This week has finally got me off my ass, and I generated a truly random password for all 260 sites I have built-up in Lastpass over the past few years... as well strong Lastpass password (most likely going to be hardened with a two-factor via Yubikey in the near future).

I must say, just finding the password reset function on some of these forums and less popular sites is a beast. Also, I was shocked by the number of 10 and 12 char limitations I hit.
The wrapper is pretty elegant weighing in at 3 functions; it all depends on how high-level you want to go.

If people are having trouble they can refer to the Rails ActiveSupport source code for help.
If you think Scientology is "weirder" than mainstream religions, it's b/c you are buying into the propaganda sponsored by its competitors.
My experiences with personal outsourcing
How Racist Are We? Ask Google
Brilliant.

I did the same thing -- http://outletmapper.com

Some learnings:

1. It really does free up your head to think about harder issues (read: getting in front of the right market) if you're not distracted by code. For me, code is "my happy place", so it is too easy to spend too much time there.

2. I asked hard questions when picking someone to work with. Not just "have you used MapKit" but "how would you do hit detection inside an arbitrary polygon efficiently -- on iOS?"

3. Keep feedback to the right level. Sending back a stack trace and commenting on an edge condition was fine. Somehow sending back a patch seemed over the line.

4. The product will only be as good as your specifications. Get them right. Build test cases. Build a set of better test cases that you use -- that you don't share.

5. Get it right before paying someone. Paper, PPT slides, HTML demos all help to get the ideas baked before your money is pouring out the door.

6. If you're in the US, hire US. Why? You can have them sign a contract that is actually enforceable.
Heh, good thing I didn't add my Mont Saint-Michel photo, since it doesn't remotely compare to the one someone added in the intervening 8 hours: http://mostbeautifulplaces.org/item/5291532

Too bad the images aren't available in a higher res, btw.
Objections to Scientology are not (for the most part) based on their religious beliefs, but their practices and behaviors. They have a history of being aggressively litigious, similar to patent trolls[1], and have used frivolous lawsuits to harass critics into giving up the fight. There are also some indications that they're emotionally abusive to their members, and encourage them to cut off all contact to non-Scientologist friends and family. These allegations are difficult to substantiate, in part because the Church is so aggressive about quelling criticism.

In general, the Intarwebs regard Scientology as an organization that invests substantial financial and legal resources in limiting free speech on the internet. This is generally unpopular, regardless of who is doing it. The Church's status as a religious institution is largely immaterial to this perception.

[1] Very similar, actually. They claim copyright on their religious writings, and use that to sue people who release them.
IIRC anything that is a `therapeutic outcome` (?) is automatically the life-or-death class

So a computer screen that display a result the doctor relies on must be a medical grade screen
If Google gobbles Meebo for $100M, this time I won’t eat my hat
You're misremembering things, Google had already passed Apple in US marketshare in 2010:

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/12/business/la-fi-googl...

In the US, Google accounted for 28% of smartphones versus Apple's 21%.

Apple opened its App Store in July 10, 2008. Google opened up its Android Market in 22 October 2008.

If you follow Apple's conference calls, you'd realize that Apple gives frequent updates of the amount being paid out to developers. In the last quarter, Apple paid developers approx. $500 million. So far as I can see, Google doesn't release figures for what they pay Android developers in either app or ad revenues.

If Google was to be more transparent with their revenues and how much Android developers receive, then there could be a genuine accounting for how each platform is doing, but ironically in these instances Apple is far more open than Google.
I think it's interesting that reporters are still using the Therac-25 as their go-to example of medical software harming people.

I'm pleasantly surprised that we haven't had a bunch of more spectacular examples since then.
Thanks for the comments plus all the HN visitors.

Had 250 referrals from HN domains in approximately six hours landing on the home page. c. 100 blog posts were viewed

Not earth shattering but more visitors than normal. Just need to work out how to make them stay for longer than 10 seconds.
Outsourcing is a learned skill, definitely. I didn't start with outsourcing a full blown startup project. I started with small admin tasks using a virtual assistant I'd pay $5 / hour. It helped me understand how to be clearer via emails, what processes to use to gain visibility on progress without micromanaging.

Also I am a seasoned traveller and I think it helped me understand cultural sensitivities. An Eastern European contractor usually behaves differently than a Filiino or an Indian. They tend to be more direct in their communication style, to the point of sounding rude sometimes. Once you know that, it is easier to tolerate it :)
Read the article and find out?
You know, if a task isn't particularly urgent, I have no problem with procrastinating for a couple days on it (and working on other things in the mean time) as long as I keep coming back to it.

This resembles the Feynman method of how to be a genius, but sometime if a task is hard, and seems insurmountable, sometimes all you need is some time for your mind to grasp the task. I have occasionally tackled a problem, given up as it seemed hard, come back a couple days later and discovered a trivial solution, completing in half an hour what I figured would take me 3. So I call this "productive procrastination" and it's a good thing. Another function of my complex to-do list is that it gives me a chance to think about tasks before I start (again, I don't worth through it sequentially). The difficulty is in figuring out when to procrastinate and when not to. There are a lot of things you never want to procrastinate in doing (if you take a long time to bill your customers, they will usually reciprocate when it comes to timeliness of payment, for example). But there are a lot of cases where procrastination can be helpful. So the challenge is when to and when not to.
4. Give credit to the author of the font you used.. http://www.dafont.com/harabara.font?text=goparti&psize=l
The scorn in the TorrentFreak article is so heavy that I thought that, surely, they were exaggerating to stir up the masses, and the method described in the patent was not so heavy-handed as they claimed. (I am a university professor, and I would like to believe that my profession is an honourable one.) Well, no. They've got a link to the actual patent (with many spaces missing, for some reason), and its text, or at least what I could bear to read of it, is just as they describe.

By the way, as someone unfamiliar with this sort of patent, is there some legal meaning to the constant reference to "a plurality of lines of code" when detailing the mechanics of the software, or is the author just fond of the term 'plurality'? (He also refers later to a plurality of teachers and students working together.)
Google to become default search choice in Russian Firefox
Reminds me a bit of http://www.where-is-this.com/. Also a collection of very nice places.
#4

How detailed are your test cases? Do you have a sample document, I am interested to have a look at it.

#6 If you're in the US, hire US.

Mmm I disagree with this. I think the risk that someone decides to steal your idea or code and go run their own business are fairly low. I accept to take this risk to be able to reach developers that I will pay 4 to 5 times less than the local developers in my country.
To be more precise, he used isolation tanks and not meditation (as far as I can tell, after reading his autobiography "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman", highly recommended).

He played around with lockpicking too. Outstanding dude.
You still need to have fun though, don't outsource everything :)
Rhapsody as a Developer Preview was shipping in 1997 or 1998, within 2 years of Apple buying NeXT. Yes, it ran on x86.

You can see the timeline here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_%28operating_system%29

Rhapsody was the first OSX.
"It is difficult to say whether Apple’s position with developers will remain strong if Android continues to gobble market share. But various surveys have tried to gauge which smartphones developers plan to write apps for in the near future, and the iPhone often scores very high."

I don't know what surveys the authors are referring to, as they don't list sources, but I doubt multiple surveys are needed to deduce mobile developers are interested in the iPhone.
Twitter launches first TV commercial - Put pieces together