skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like this upside model of freelancing where the companies have to bid for the freelancer's work. I wish there were more generic freelancing websites that did this, though. Could be a start-up opportunity here.
Commas can be valid and our servers manage them correctly.
Congrats on the launch, guys!

I like this in theory, but in reality the most important thing when hiring is not how good they look on paper, but how well a developer fits in and works with a team. If they're a team player, how well they can resolve disputes, etc.

We've surveyed a LOT of employers, and that's definitely the number one thing they look for in employees. Culture fit, personality, empathy, etc.
This misses the point entirely. The point is rarely to avoid fake email addresses, but to make sure they don't contain spelling errors.
There's also the problem of "validation rot" in which validation functions can be correct today, but might not get updated if the data format changes.
Ah, I thought your concerns were about outdated hardware or software (the TL-MR3020 is on sale now, and I'm running Linux 3.3.8 on mine).

It's definitely not a powerful machine, though, you're right. You can hardly fit anything on the internal flash, and you can only recover flash space by setting it all back to first boot state again, so setting up an external overlay is the first thing you have to do. I think I only have about 10MB of RAM free, too.

It sounds like the Raspberry Pi would actually suit you better than most of the alternatives.
Found it, added the links to the end of my original post
Would you recommend Arc to modern startups in general?
Yep, like they said in one slide, they don't want to make money when you buy it, they want to make money when you use it.
Found the links:

The article I probably read: http://99u.com/articles/7198/How-Goals-and-Good-Intentions-C...

The study: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597812...
Ask HN: Success with a Cross-Platform Mobile Framework?
I played with multiple cross-platform mobile frameworks (Phonegap, Titanium, and Air) last year, and I kept hitting walls. In some cases there wasn't enough support for native operations. In other cases we battled inflated file sizes. We ultimately finished an app with Phonegap, but it felt sluggish on iOS, even though it was very simple.
The creative use of Green Graffiti has been one of my favorites:

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/featured/moss-grass-gra...
It's true, and I wasn't expecting them to say anything like that. Of course they would trumpet it as a revolution, it would indeed be terrible marketing if they didn't.

My post was muddled, so I guess what I was really trying to say is this: Most of the tech reporting I have seen around this event has uncritically parroted most of these claims. This bodes poorly for getting accurate information in areas where it isn't as obvious to me. It caught me off guard this time because I saw it being done by several resources which I had previously viewed as being more in-depth and trustworthy. I guess it's like reading an article in the newspaper about a topic you know quite well. It makes you incredibly suspicious of reporting on topics you don't know as much about.
Ecklund's claims are greatly exaggerated, if not blatantly false. See http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2010/05/20/scientists-... for the debunking and http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2010/06/sciencereligion... for a more detailed examination of the compatibility of science and religion. Or go straight to the source and try to find an angle that supports your original statement, 'cause I can't: http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/8594/ecklund2.jpg.
I'd add "business risk" into the discussion. Mysql has an interesting road ahead of it, and there are certain people that just won't put open-source Oracle in their critical path.
Rush Holt is great. I met him when I was in grad school lobbying for more research funding / better loan situations / better health coverage for graduate students. He took a decent chunk of time to sit down and talk with a group of grad students from all over the country who weren't donors or anything.
Reportedly, Development To Cease For Twitter’s Mac Client
Merchant accounts are one of several business services that young companies can't set typically set up without somehow binding the contract to the business owners themselves.

I've noticed a disturbing trend in this respect recently, with seemingly everyone from law firms to banks wanting personal guarantees from someone to back up the company. This practice should, IMHO, be prohibited by law, and this should be impossible to override via any contract.

The entire point of a limited company (in UK terms) structure is that you know you are running a legally separate entity, and everyone else knows they are dealing with a legally separate entity. Everyone should judge the risks they are willing to take and offer terms that factor in those risks accordingly. This is done to incentivise people to start new businesses where there may be some degree of risk, without having to risk literally the roof over their heads to do it, and is universally acknowledged to be in the interests of economic development, which is why every major economy in the world has a concept analogous to that limited company.

Checking the credibility of the principals and asking for things like business plans and company financial statements is all perfectly reasonable so that a potential business partner can judge the level of risk. However, allowing piercing agreements is simply a completely one-sided deal: the little guy is now back on the hook for all of the risk, yet still takes the hit on all the bureaucracy associated with running a formal company.

If such agreements were banned, the banks and lawyers and other high-powered services would still have to deal with other businesses or they'd have on customers. They'd just have to be more realistic about what they charged if they wanted to continue working with profitable customers in the long run.

[Edit: Incidentally, piercing agreements do not seem to be completely universal. We've seen some fairly unpleasantly one-sided terms while investigating payment services, frequently including things like requiring direct control of your main bank account so they can grab whatever they feel like whenever they feel like it, but not everyone has asked for personal guarantees (as opposed to a personal credit check) at least at the stage we've got to with them.]
Things like SOPA fail to convince me of the quality of education held by current lawmakers.
Which option would be the fastest? Anyone have a recommendation for all of my traffic that won't severely slow my 50mpbs connection?
Totally agree. There are benefits that a scientific stance would have in some circumstances, so it's a nuanced situation. :)
Not really. Engineers venture out into the grey even more than scientists do - they solve problems of interest to humans - their job requires them to be grounded in reality and be sensitive to human needs and constraints (well, at least the good ones are).

I often think that while a purely technical background and education might be really powerful and enable one to analyze and predict well-behaved things better than others - which could lead to better decisions, it is extremely important to be receptive to the "inexplicable-until-experienced" stuff like music or business or relationships - to know that there are things that can't be controlled and shouldn't be controlled - that some things should evolve of their own accord - the chaotically evolved imperfect being more beautiful than the mathematically-designed perfect. (Edit: a combination of both works quite well, in my experience - some of the best businessmen, economic and political advisers I know of have engineering backgrounds - and no, they aren't unreasonably conservative or dogmatic).

In my opinion, the fear of "what will happen if I let go?" can lead to authoritarianism via technocracy (aside from the fact that anyone can get drunk on power) - not one's profession.
I freaking hate the Google maps app on iPhone - I don't have any need for a map app on a mobile device unless it has turn-by-turn voice navigation along with re-routing capabilities. It's only good for looking up locations/directions when I am stuck somewhere for traveling. If I'm home, my macbook's google map is good enough to serve that purpose. So I have no clue why on earth Apple created such a neutered mapping app for a mobile device. Waze saved me.
Is signing in with AngelList really a requirement? Why must these new services force you to leave your social footprint on their website..
Kindle Paperwhite vs Kobo Glo, a side by side tech-specs comparison
> The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss

It's also a perfect description of how orbital mechanics work - the Moon is actually falling down towards us, it's just moving so fast in the other direction that it constantly misses the Earth :).
I'm certainly not a top graduate - I eked out of university with a 72% average. Neither are the other Canadian expats I know who are pulling this kind of cash - all are smart and hard-working, but none were among the top of their classes.

$110K 3 years out of college, at least in the current climate, is not at all uncommon in either NYC or SF/SV. It is not universal, but it's not rare either. If you look at the major investment banks, the institutional tech companies (see: Google), and the startups in NYC, this is the going rate for a mid-level engineer (i.e., $100-140K base). Hell, I have trouble finding fresh undergrads starting below $90K in these areas.

The point is, someone who is skilled at programming right now and has a few years of experience under their belt can very well pull at least $120K base, and even adjusting for cost of living differences, that's a hell of a lot more money than you can get in Canada.

In any case, this somewhat distracts from the point - it's not just about money. Myself and many other Canadian expats do not feel we can go back to Canada without working for the likes of SAP, IBM, TD, Royal, or any of the vast number of institutional enterprise companies that pound out rote, uninteresting code. There are some companies in Canada doing interesting work, but they are few and far between, demand for these jobs is intense, and job security sucks (after all, what incentive is there to treat you well when the employer knows they're the only interesting game in town?).

Compare with the SF/SV/NYC/SEA, where you can't throw a rock without hitting a row of innovative, interesting tech companies doing interesting things. We are hacking on interesting, immensely impactful things here, and we enjoy tremendous respect and security - after all, if management starts screwing around you hop down the street and go do something else that's interesting. The Canadian landscape looks incredibly bleak in comparison - a small handful of elite shops that everyone's clamoring to work for, and a vast tundra of code sweatshops where the problems are as uninteresting as the salary.
Yes. That a thousand times.
"Amazon: 'We are pretty much done' with the Kindle DX"

http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/6/3298468/amazon-kindle-dx-ki...
Right - I recall reading an article/blog/comment/pundit (Gruber? Marco?) that suggested that their were was a greater percentage of people using IOS 6 than there were Jellybean in the general population, right around the time of WWDC. At WWDC proper - I would expect a sizable percentage of developers were running IOS 6 on their devices.
Related question: what happened to the code for it? PG promoted it as an example of what you can do when you're free to do pure Lisp, but as best I can tell Yahoo has since gutted most or all of the Lisp that it ran on.

Edit: essay I had in mind: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
I'm definitely aware that there are tons of companies doing amazing things. But I think that people are confusing tools for communication with tools for education, and that the distinction is unfortunately larger than the landscape suggests.

Great point about incorporating behavior though - technology that molds and aids existent behavior is always needed!
The quote's from Programming in Scala, I wanted to look up exactly how the apply() sugaring is described by the author of the language. I'm not sure it is by definition OO, it just looks like operator overloading to me, similar to C++'s operator() or Python's __call__.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your broader point - claiming that Scala doesn't support module-level functions implies to me that you feel this is a deficiency, and that it's such an obvious one you don't need to explain why. From my perspective the only reason I care about namespaces is a) that I can namespace my functions and b) so that I don't have to type things out longhand - the exact implementation of namespacing (module-level vs module/object-level) is irrelevant to me, and seems to me to be nearly irrelevant in evaluating if a language is "really" OO or "really" functional. If module-level functions are important to the question I would like to know why. :)
Short answer: Any language can scale, and any language can perform well. The easiest language to develop and support is the one you know. Hosting is just as simple/easy/cheap with either language. If you already know one of those languages, go with it. If you don't, go with Ruby; it's a vastly better language, with a more mature ecosystem.

Longer answer:

* Scaling and performance is mostly an issue of architecture, and is heavily dependent on what you're trying to accomplish. You can go a long way just by using varnish/nginx/memcached as appropriate, and serving static assets from a CDN. The actual language is sort of a sideshow, because no language is fast enough; everything needs to be pre-calculate and cached.

* If you don't know either language, you'll probably find that Ruby is easier to learn and become productive with, but it's easier/cheaper to find good PHP developers. Kind of a wash. In either case, you will absolutely need to pick and learn a framework as well, which adds more overhead. (No, you aren't going to write a social networking app in PHP without a framework.)

* It's easier to get a basic PHP page hosted, but if you're even thinking about scalability and performance, then you need more than Bob's Discount Hosting. Doing PHP hosting right is no easier (or harder) than doing Ruby hosting right.

Basically, it doesn't much matter. At the end of the day, most (not all) programmers who have programmed in both detest PHP and love Ruby, and you'll probably find it easier to hire PHP devs.
Agreed about "most people have little idea...". I wish more companies were more honest and open about these things instead of burying it in the fine print. I wonder what would happen if you enable "Suggested Sites" but then install IE 9+ (since it appears to support the DNT flag) and select "Do Not Track". The pessimist in me suspects it will just turn off tracking for all non-msft experiments.

In any case, I think you've convinced me that my decision to use a non-windows OS and a non-IE browser was the correct one.

Thanks for mentioning this...
How to end fear of the dark
You might not like it but Google Maps has become synonymous with online mapping/directions the way Google is with searching, at least in the US and elsewhere (I have seen Bing maps used a lot on Europeans websites like france24.com). From that perspective, I think it is fair to put more focus on Google's efforts.
IPhone owners can’t sue Apple over broken glass, court rules
trial and error with sample size of one (yourself) is called a bunch of anecdotes. We have plenty of evidence by now of how useful this is when looking for the truth about something.

trial and error with a sample size of one is great at convincing you of something that's not true. It's horrible at everything else.

The least rigorously tested theories in the softest of sciences are still orders of magnitude more likely to be right than something one person has done through trial and error experiments on themselves.
As a Canadian who has worked at start ups in the bay area and returned to Canada, #4 is a big turn off. I like my work, but I like being able to escape the startup world and have a heterogeneous social circle. It surprises me that people aren't more outspoken against the bay area for that reason.
Interesting articles. I read part I and part II.

As a long-term mysql user who has dabbled with production Postgres machines I still don't see how Postgres really has any huge advantages that would cause me to want to run it for any new projects and deal with a new and possibly daunting learning curve. Postgres seems to do some things better perhaps, and in general seems to have more flexibility than MySQL. But it also seems to lack focus as a end-to-end db solution.

The clustering / replication complexity of Postgres is a huge issue for me, since scaling databases is not a trivial thing in the best of cases. With postgres, there seem to be 10+ different cluster / replication systems (both open-source and commercial?) and it's just a mess.

Giving people tons of options is great, but ease of use for developers and an amazing & simple out of box experience is so important. MySQL won the hearts and minds of developers this way... and now MongoDB is doing the same thing by improving on what MySQL what able to accomplish. The Postgres team should consider implementing something similar.
>> Question to the people who are objecting to the name: would you object to a punk band that called itself "Tampon"? Would you say things like "this will really harm adoption of your product"? If not, what do you consider to be the relevant distinction between open source software and punk music?

By punk standards, 'Tampon' would be a relatively boring and unimaginative name. However, aren't we comparing apples to oranges?

I used to play in a punk band, during which time I sported a very respectable mohawk. I also wore tweed jackets from the salvation army, moshed and drank aggressively and cursed profusely.

As great fun as that was, I wouldn't do either of these things in a place-that-I-code. Not in a co-working space, not at a coffee shop, and certainly not in my place of employment.
I don't see what's going on. Anyone care to explain/give some context?
Is Oracle's ownership of MySQL becoming an issue? I realize it's open source but still it seems like things have become to deteriorate slightly. Is that causing any alarm?
One thing I appreciate about using Django and its DRM is that it hardly matters what database I use.

If I'm writing SQL by hand I much prefer Postgres to MySQL since it is more standards conforming and has fewer random quirks. But given that Django generates the SQL for me, which database to use is largely a matter of ease of deployment, and on AWS that's MySQL (via RDS) so that's what I use.
I just finished a large contract and am starting to look for positions at promising startups in Vancouver. Compared to SF, there really isn't many options. Most are video game companies.

The cost of living is high in Vancouver. While the salaries offered are higher than Toronto, they are no where near SF.

I wonder if it would be worth it traveling to San Fran to test the employment market?
Thank you very much =D and does it support HTML5?
Nail on the head - I wish the startup press would do stories on companies 12 months after they send out fundraising PR.

I also wish the startup press would stop romanticizing startup weekends, buses, trains, planes and boats.
Sadly they do an embarrassingly poor job at it.

The text of their notification e-mails is ridiculously bad ("You have 1 triggered Incident", not customizable). The mails don't even contain direct links to the incidents, much less links to ack/resolve them...

There are no notifications about status updates at all, not even an e-mail. People still call each other all the time to synchronize about "Are you on it or should I take it?" and "Is it resolved yet?".

etc.

I'm still baffled how they managed to ruin such a trivial product so thoroughly.

Needless to say we went back to a simple shell-script with TSV schedule (and that amusingly works better in most regards).
We've had a very positive experience integrating Hipmob in Killah Killah Whale and as a result we're on our way towards integrating it into all of our games.
Why would have been difficult to convince Robert to try again?
How would that help? Tracker leads back to IP of your VM instance. Although your VM instance doesn't keep VPN logs, the VM provider would happily cough up your Name/Address/PaymentHistory in response to a court order. They wouldn't need to know your home IP address.
> Being a "politician" is a full-time job. That's absurd.

Really? Representing thousands (if not hundreds of thousands or millions) of people and sorting/synthesizing policy suggestions to try and come up with something that will (a) work in constituent interests (b) will fly with some majority well enough to make it happen -- it's somehow "absurd" that this might conceivably take up 40+ hours a week?

A lack of information and disengagement on the part of most citizens is a problem, but it's not one that stems from having full-time offices or representative democracy itself.

> Democracy itself is distorted because it doesn't thrive for optimal solutions, instead, it thrives to please the people.

Apparently a displeased people would be more optimal?
What makes you believe that?

Not that I necessarily think you are wrong.
If you care about little things like if the tip/thing/hack actually works then it is yes.

How could knowing if something works or not not be necessary?
"DeveloperAuction.com is currently open only to employees of Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Zynga, and Google as well as Stanford & MIT graduates. If you'd like to be notified as we expand, please contact us."

Only Stanford and MIT graduates? What about the other 99.9% of tech grads?
Holy goddamned gray-on-gray readaibility disaster, Batman!

http://contrastrebellion.com/

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html

Stylish rewrite FTFW.
IIRC, under the bill they would only record which sites you visited , not which pages you visited. So this wouldn't make any difference.
Being a politician != representing thousands (or more) of people.
Looks like Wayland is not included in this release after all.
Presumably the other 99.9% are already being paid what they are worth.
Ebay acquires Svpply – Social Commerce moving towards consolidation
Explain to me how this is any better than ankidroid if you don't mind...
You only import from AngelList if you're a company. Otherwise if you're a developer you can either go through Twitter/LinkedIn/Github or create an account via e-mail.
The solution the OP proposes (validating email addresses through a clicked link in a "welcome" email) is pretty user hostile and unnecessary for most services.
You appear intragnizent.
I'd pay $50/mo/user for monitoring and alerting which was:

1) quite reliable (although not as reliable as my production app)

2) totally uncorrelated from failures in my own infrastructure

3) tuneable to eliminate false positives, get good confirmation from users that they've taken issues. An iOS app is the obvious solution here, smarter than IVR + SMS.

Even better:

4) tied into my ticketing system

5) tied into my config management/ops system, so I can let people have simple app/web tools for "roll back! roll back!", etc. At 3am if you get paged, it is nice to have good tools for that kind of thing.

I haven't found anything which is #1-3 without roll-your-own, and #4 and #5 I've never even built internally (but may this time).

If PagerDuty really is #1-3, then it is a bargain at $18/mo.
Note that this version of Ubuntu will not be shipping with Python 2. That's kind of a big deal.