skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I learned web-development while making a little price-tracking/wishlist app: http://www.rankique.com/
(and a german version, pretty much for myself to use..: http://www.rankique.de/)

Together they make about 30-50€/month. I'm working on a couple of new features and I'm searching for a new name, but currently school takes up most of my time.
I've had very good luck with eLance. I've hired an illustrator, a proofreader, a designer, a virtual assistant and a marketing consultant. All of them were great, and very affordable.

Make a good ad, and include some kind of filter phrase that makes people prove they read it. Then look at their reviews, and general proposal.

You can usually start work on a trial basis.
Maybe that's true. I don't really care; it's beside the point.
Apple Never Invented Anything
Oh to be back in the home country where a pint only costs 1/8th of a Raspberry Pi..
The actual conversation is more interesting and revealing than the blogspam on top of it (toolbar I have to dismiss? really?). This quote is noteworthy (from Linus):

> I personally think that one reason that the Linux kernel has been so successful was the fact that I didn't have a huge vision of where I wanted to force people to go

I agree. Thing is, this just doesn't work when it comes to user interfaces. You end up with a morass of principalities and wanna-be-kings who all have their own different view of what Linux on the desktop should be. This is an area where consistency really matters (to users).

What's more the primary contributors are engineers who are unrepresentative of any kind of mass user base (potential or actual). People who want to be able to customize everything when no one else cares.

Ultimately I think the pseudo-anarchic development process doomed Linux on the desktop but some external factors didn't help, namely OSX. OSX really is "good enough" for anyone wanting a nix desktop/laptop. Sure it has problems but it means the gap between it and Linux is just that much smaller. And with Linux you give up great hardware (to varying degrees) and a snappy and consistent* UI/UX.

The company that has had the most success putting Linux interfaces in people's hands is, of course, Google with Android (disclaimer: I work for Google). And even there the principality problem has created a fragmentation nightmare as different vendors seek to "differentiate" themselves.

Phones and tablets of course don't have the same expectation and technical legacy that desktops do (from X11 on up). Hell, Apple did the same thing with iOS (essentially forking OSX).

Audio is another problem. Peripherally I've had to deal with PulseAudio and it really is a solution looking for a problem. Graphics drivers are another issue. AMD/ATI and nVidia have of course not helped matters here.

I think Canonical had a chance to make a real impact here but they essentially blew it.
When I go to a butcher, all variables involved in the transaction are known. The butcher knows the wholesale price of meat, the overhead she/he carries, and the expected margins that must be maintained for the business to be profitable. I know what I want, or at least how much I am willing or able to spend. The meat itself is known to the both of us - its properties are in no way mysterious or unknowable. Most notably, my purpose and/or intentions in purchasing this known quantity are entirely irrelevant to the transaction. (I can't speak to butcher shops, but I can tell you for a fact that the margins for a bakery [and the grocery sector in general]are razor thin, and anyone doing it on a less-than-industrial scale is in it for the love more than the money.)

I would venture that more comparable model would be that of the general contractor (project manager), with programmers acting as independent subcontractors. In this model, the ability to bid jobs is the difference between financial success and ruin. I have know several highly skilled craftsmen that have lost their ass trying to strike out on their own, as estimating costs, administering a business, juggling workers, legal compliance, etc., are an entirely different skill set than doing the actual work.

As an independent contractor, you the project manager/contractor are paying for my time. If you are not ready for me to work, you are paying for my continued availability, or I am seeking work elsewhere. As an independent contractor, it is not my concern if the house is ever finished. I am paid for what I do. If no one was ever paid until the last nail was driven and someone moved in, we would probably all still live in caves.
I've been building web pages and web applications for many years.

What optimizations do you think that software can't do that justifies hand coding CSS and HTML? Probably the first one is related to autosizing layouts.. but guess what, graphical editors CAN do that. Regardless, the majority of web pages today STILL are fixed width.

There are plenty of tools and platforms that demonstrate the concept of graphical UI and application editors. Less so in the web space but there are still several out there. Most are not very popular and are missing some important features like open extensibility.

I have studied SEO and done some of that. Let's get specific. What exactly do you think needs to be in the markup or relations between pages in order for Google to give you a fair representation?

Are you really trying to say that if the div class isn't "whysuperspam.com" or something that it won't get a good Google ranking?
"Are you hiding your DNA because you know it matches a crime scene, perhaps? Let's have you down to the station for some more detailed interrogation."

That's why.
well, give http://Salon.io a spin .. here´s an invite for you http://salon.io/users/sign_up?token=H7DqXNBcUFAnXtRQYExr
You often hear those words, "X killer" but funnily enough Watson is actually a game-changing thing. Even if IBM fails in the consumer market the very fact they're pulling big financial and medical contracts is still just as good for IBM.

It will be interesting to see where this goes and what happens.
Video of Eruption on the Sun
Right, I was of course being glib about weather.com. It may then be a useful service for something with Watson's capabilities to narrow down to your specific needs and historical data. I am fascinated by weather prediction, it's an interesting field, and I find I can't trust any detailed weather reading more than 3 days in advance (aside from large weather patterns, which seems readable for about 10 days ahead) so if there is something out there that works longer-range it would be quite amazing to know.
Facebook and Python – The Basic Sauce
I'm not being snarky, and I don't think this is about discrimination at all. It's about our culture directing people away from the jobs that best suit them. It's a problem that should be fixed for everyone.
I get pretty bad AA on many vertical lines, once it zooms in on mouseover. Seems like it needs hinting?
That looks even better. Thanks.
Yeah I really like your application and you guys have inspired me to keep working on my system.. I think that it should be as easy as you make it to put text, images etc. on the page. I have been working on something similar but open source and more comprehensive which it has a bunch of other stuff like custom plugins, widgets and forms/blogs. Its taking a long time for me to finish because its so involved.
Hell of a let down to find out it's just a concept. A good concept, yes. But the wording on the page like "...what can Enterface do for you?" you mean could
NES emualation project on RaspPi using RetroArch
I make between $200 - $400 per month off my HTTP testing tool: http://www.uresk.net/httpclient/

Not very impressive (who knew selling a niche tool in an environment where $5 is considered "expensive" wasn't the road to instant riches?), but it has been fun to make and it is always cool to hear about how useful the tool has been to fellow developers.
Javascript can send hash tags to the server.
TL;DR: So this thing that has absolutely nothing to do with this other thing is going to kill the other thing because it's going to be so much awesome when it's a thing because as soon as its a thing then you can use it as a thing that's totally unlike this other thing.

Because IBM and smartphone cloud.
There's an internal debate right now about whether or not it makes sense to release specific numbers, but if I have my way, there will be a post on HackerNews in the future explaining exactly how much money we're making, and how we got where we are.

For now, here are some things you might find interesting/motivational:

-My brother and I started the company about three years ago. We launched an MVP in January 2010.

-After 6 months we had about 10 paying users (at $10/user/month). After 12 we had 50, after 18 we had 200. Since then things have picked up and we're adding >100 paying users each month now. Both my mom's blog, and the SaaS business took a long time to ramp up, but both had their tipping points after about 1.5 years.

-About a year ago we hired our first employee to help out with customer service and other random things. We plan on adding four more over the next couple of years, two of whom have already started working part-time.

I hope that helps. There's nothing better than seeing thousands of people passionately using a product you created, so stick with it!
Samsung flew bloggers to Berlin, then threatened to leave them there
What's the ROI on that?
Dirty, thieving, copying bastards, I hope Apple sue them for everything for ripping off Siri like that!
An 83 is the first machine I programmed on and I think it's still a great tool to start with because of its portability. The Pi is nice because of projects like this article mentioned.
Make fewer excuses for people and you’ll make better choices about who you work with.

So the author argues that first impressions should be given priority over the benefit of the doubt. First impression should direct inquiry, not cast final judgement. Tha author is merely trying to rationalize being lazy.
Measuring Slow Code
About 90 dollars a month in a little iPhone app called TweakyBeat .. it was free for like three years, then some day I asked myself if I could change it from free to pay, and yes you can.
eckyptang: I think you may be mistaking synergistic placement of methods at the technical level (which I don't recommend) which synergistic placement of methods at the business level (which I do.) And you are right about the difficulty of managing messages. This is why the "simple" concept is critical. You might check out my Math of IT Simplification White paper for more on this.
- Roger
The Inebriator - Arduino Cocktail Machine
I had the same reaction until I considered that the HUD is probably just a visual representation for the viewer's sake of all the decisions and data the drone is processing.

A drone wouldn't need a HUD at all.
Depends on how you're designing your apps: I've cleanly separated my app code (which uses a number of current Python modules) from the more stable system package (Apache, Varnish, etc.) and it's been at least 2 stable releases since I've needed to worry about backports.
Wow. Samsung really needs to clean up its act.
I think there's a spectrum around how many different ways the machine could choose to execute what you wrote. E.g., V8 creates hidden classes rather than naïvely following the prototype chain, where C pretty much dictates how things are actually laid out in memory.
Raises quite a few issues about conflict of interests. Should there be a rule for such declarations by writers who are paid to promote brands ?
To be fair to Samsung, I do not think this is a Samsung specific issue. It raises larger concerns about well known companies also like TNW, TheVerge, Engagdget etc. FWIW these websites directly affect consumer choices.
About $20 a month, from some flash games I made about 8 years ago... Not too bad?
It is of course very unfortunate that this man had to spend 8 months in jail. There was no lab error in this case (the man was a cab driver with a rare skin flaking condition and his skin flakes stuck to the nail polish of a passenger who was later the victim of murder). But of course errors do happen, someone in this thread quotes a 1% to 2% error rate for DNA testing.

Buit to put it in context, according to the Innocence Project, in 25% of the cases when DNA testing is used by the FBI during the investigation, it results in the suspect being exonerated. That 25% is a large number of innocent people who would be charged and tried and a lot of them would be convicted if not for the existence of DNA testing.

Read this interview if you have a moment: http://www.slate.com/blogs/thewrongstuff/2010/08/17/reasonab... and then tell me whether you still think DNA testing is not a force for good.
I believe the resume building site Jobspice ( http://www.jobspice.com ) has a similar template.
Thanks a lot, your advice on Vectors over your last few articles has really expanded my knowledge of what you can really do with Arrays if you think of them as pieces of an object rather than just a (generally) unordered list of "stuff".
For me, the first half of that list is just as easy natively. Larger market from day one, platform, virulence - I can see that. But what of robustness? Access to lower level features in order to create something huge, fast and efficient. without being held back by the browser. Not to mention do I hate not being able to work without an internet connection.

Thinking on it more, you can leverage so much of both worlds and make the best thing ever.
The games industry is a scam, and this is why you shouldn't go to work for it
Interesting point. Apart from error messages what other features in Apple products are un-Apple like?
This code is actually not that specific to GC - this particular spinlock is used by our custom malloc implementation. It's just that our GC creates a different concurrency pattern than most other workloads for the allocator.
> Brief tangent: I'd be curious to try a ubuntu fork that was intended only for the Macbook Air with all the customization and optimization for that hardware ready to go after install.

That's what the XPS 13 Ultrabook aims to be: http://liliputing.com/2012/07/dells-to-sell-ubuntu-ultrabook...
Reminds me of Font Awesome:
http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/
IBM is also about monetization.

It also realizes that most of its monetization comes from professional services, and saw that 1) software subscription revenues were declining across the board, proprietary or Open Source, and 2) Open Source created (to IBM's lawyer's eyes) a possible threat to its patent holdings (a considerable revenue stream / business value themselves) which was best addressed by keeping core development outside the organization (Red Hat, Novell/Suse, Kernel.org, Apache.org).

Oracle's direction (as was Sun's somewhat schizoid approach to Free Software / Open Source before as noted by its supporting the Caldera/SCO Group attacks against Linux) are making it a non-credible source. Hence the forking of projects (Lumina, LibreOffice, OpenJDK, MariaDB, etc.) it had inherited.
Not saying that it goes back to semantic classes or anything like that, but if aligning alt tags, creating hierarchy with headings, being smart about the order of the code vs the order it appears- all those things are going to require 'coding'in a UI that is just as work intensive as coding them in the traditional sense.
The Arduino is based around Atmel's 8 bit AVR architecture which really doesn't have what it takes to run a JVM. The ATmega328P which the Arduino Uno board uses has 32KB of code space and 2KB of SRAM which isn't really enough for something like Java. The normal way Arduino projects are built is by defining a "setup" function and a "loop" function which, when compiled, are actually just called by a hidden C++ file with a main function that essentially does this:

int main(void) {
setup();
for (;;)
loop();
}

The actual file does a bit more and can be found in their git repository here: https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/blob/master/hardware/ardu...
In august I made about $122,000 from display ads, mostly Adsense. 5-10% of that is spent on stuff like server space and freelance employees. I can imagine that this will not be taken seriously due to lack of details, but for anyone interested, I'm open to answering non-specific questions.

Edit: I see 'from what' is also the question; I have a bunch of entertainment related sites.
> Brief tangent: I'd be curious to try a ubuntu fork that was intended only for the Macbook Air with all the customization and optimization for that hardware ready to go after install.

My guess is that you'd really only need to replace a few packages, rather than have an 'Ubuntu fork'.
Linux will never work on the desktop because it is made FOR neckbeards by neckbeards.

It is a community driven effort, which means the community pushes its development and design. Who do you see using the linux desktop? The exact type of people who design and develop it. Power users and developers.

They are a stubborn bunch. Even if Unity/Gnome 3/etc were more usable desktops, the majority of users would hate it. Because something like a newbie usable desktop just doesn't fit who's designing the desktop.

Something else will have to shove it into the wider market where it can be judged by those standards, not by what set of power user keyboard short cuts it supports.
> with Linux you give up great hardware (to varying degrees)

I assume you're talking about Linux driver issues. But since we're talking about OSX vs Linux here, it's only fair to note that Linux supports a much greater variety of hardware than OSX. Linux also tends to support the very newest hardware more consistently than OSX (perhaps excluding video cards). See eg the laughable specs of Mac Pros.

Software also benchmarks faster on Linux vs OSX on the same hardware. So there is still an opening on Linux for people concerned with performance.

But yes, the Linux desktop is still light-years behind in terms of design, for the reasons you mention.
Are there embedded linux distributions that work without a memory management unit? I ask is because it looks like the Stellaris doesn't have one. The Memory Protection Unit allows the OS/monitor/etc. to limit access to specified regions from unprivileged processes, but it does not appear to have any sort of remapping facility.
Am I right in saying backbone and knockout do not solve the same problem? I fancy dipping my toes into a javascript framework, and being primarily a .net dev I'm being pushed towards knockout. However backbone seems to be better adopted and more mature. Is knockback the best of both?

Can another provide examples of where one would be superior over the other?
Why not use a profiler?
Out of the Software Complexity Tar Pit
In the enterprise hardware world, I don't know any vendor who will offer an answer other than "call your sales rep" to a customer who didn't buy a service contract.
I'm not afraid, but I recently got my credit card number stolen somehow (no idea how). Orders with amounts in the hundreds were placed with my CC. My bank is covering those, but still.

Makes me think twice about buying online now (stupid, I know...)

Depends what the startup can do about this. Any ideas?
We use gearman (and PHP, but it works with many other languages). It's great.
Apple's Windows apps have traditionally been less polished than their Mac counterparts. I don't suppose there's a team at Apple deliberately sabotaging the Windows versions, but Apple has every reason in the world to focus on the Mac versions at the expense of the Windows versions.
...but you can't just pair program with some random person. If you want to recruit a pair programmer surely you are advertising for a new full time job - an exact copy of your job actually.
I'm not on facebook so I wonder why does facebook would need a credit card number?
Exactly, this is the IBM of the 21st century we are talking about. They don't make their money by doing business with people, they are all about research and contracting for companies now.
That's one of the more honest assessments I've read in a long time, although sadly i've heard similar stories.
"Wow, this just what we've been looking for! Where have you guys been all these years?"

The sad thing is it's not what we think that matters. If clients fall for the buzzspeak, it's irrelevant if that what they're paying for, believing it's "new" and "different", already exists.
Bruce Willis to fight Apple over rights to music collection after his death
Is yours an informed opinion?

Postgres is an extremely high quality piece of software.
I err on the side of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power. While it's true that code is data, arbitrary code is a form of data that's exceptionally hard to analyze or repurpose. Text config rules out stuff like dynamically-composed names of objects and properties (which you can't search-and-replace).
Ask HN: What is your ideal income?
So this was inspired by the other thread on income sources that's on the front page right now.

This one may be even more personal... But it's something that I've been thinking a lot about lately.

How much money do you need to feel secure?

To make this reasonable - lets do it like this:

1. How much income would be your absolute base requirement for 2013?

2. How much money do you want to be comfortable - pay all your bills, put an average amount away, and not "worry" about money.

3. What would be a realistic, "reach" amount for 2013? Something that you would be happily surprised by, but isn't totally out of the question. (no cheating! The lottery doesn't count...)

To make this work - let us know how many folks you are supporting, and what city you're living in.

Looking forward to seeing the results!
$700-800/mo from BitBuffet.com. Haven't touched it in about a year as I am 100% on my main startup.
Now you made me curious. How would I be able to switch between different sound cards on the fly without restarting applications if PulseAudio did not exist?
I have almost had exactly the same experience as you (the writer). I currently have an MOG and Spotify subscription, but when a song hit's a sweet spot and I get emotionally attached, I end up buying it in the iTunes store. I most likely will start buying CD's again as soon as I get a new AV system, but if it wasn't for piracy I have no idea how I would of ever been so attached to music. All genres. Now with me going legal, MOG/Spotify act's as my piracy used to in letting me explore, and if the music touches me, I buy it. Only time I "pirate" is I want it in FLAC. There still isn't an option for lossless music online that satisfy my range of genres. <i>I still don't have the guts to delete my music collection though. </i>

TLDR;

Used to pirate a lot, helped me be more open to listen to different types of music. Now use MOG/Spotify to explore, and buy what I want to KEEP FOREVER.
MySQL and Java don't affect me much personally, but I think the way they've handled Solaris is a real tragedy for the industry.

Larry is the new Bill. I blame Jonathan.
Apparently you can configure a vanilla linux kernel for mmu-less systems - http://opensrc.sec.samsung.com/
About $50-$100 per month on reading and writing software I wrote a while back (mostly writing). I don't advertise or promote it any more.
The extended quotes, and TNW's reputation, makes me think that this may be blogspam, but I can't find an original post.