skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
$84k average salary is surprisingly high for non-production-ready engineers who are still in training, especially when compared to the rest of the industry.

I wouldn't have expected there to be so much money in a field that is so approachable. Is there a dearth of quality rails engineers, or is it related to web engineers in general?

To tell you the truth, this makes me wonder whether there's significant opportunity in the web space for senior engineers with traditional software engineering backgrounds. If people are so desperate that they're willing to hire brand-new engineers at an $84k average and spend months/years training them, how much will they pay for people that require no training at all?
The arm itself is just the platform you build on to implement the end device. The hand and base are specific to the application.
That's what I found weird.

>... a nearly empty room with five or six people and another entrepreneur presenting on stage. Next up, was me.

Why was the first person even on the stage talking? There had to be an MC.
It's like they didn't consider landscape at all. Rotating simply adds margins to the side of the main UITableView. Baffling. But after they made a power play to ensure they don't have competition in the Twitter app space, it's infuriating.

In a very short time they have taken out 3rd party apps and made their own worse (for no apparent gain on their end, the new app doesn't appear to have more ads or anything).
> Right because programming is just like installing parts into an aircraft.

...

> Since you are obviously an expert in programming language design, I am curious to know, what programming languages have you designed?

...

> Any language can be abused or used in styles that are difficult to read or maintain.

These were three classic fallacies in a row.

As to the second one (ad hominem demands of authority): an in argument, it is never classy.

That being said:

> "Put down your programmer's card" -- very uncalled for.

That was meant as a joke but I can see that it might deservedly cause offense. And so I rescind it and apologize.
Alakazam, spontaneous flight App Acquired on Apptopia
You nailed it. GKNT shareholder here. They have struggled for years to monetize the media business, with little success (profit-wise). Cost of revenue is always very high. Add in a lot of turnover in editorial/content/business leadership (basically everything on the media side) and it has been a whole lot of operating losses. ThinkGeek, meanwhile, has had great year-over-year sales increases, and costs are being brought under control. With the sale of media business, 2012 could be GKNT's first profitable year in many a year (or ever--haven't checked back more than 5 years). Or it could be they finally unloaded the media business (they hired a company to shop it around, BTW) and will now try to sell the e-commerce side (say, to Amazon) and close the doors.
> There is another meaning: culture is what a cultivated man has.

Cultivated as in "educated and refined"? And somehow who doesn't give a shit about Kant isn't educated or refined?

> It is something one person gains with time by broadening his familiarity with the best products of the human mind, like classic books, paintings, etc.

Expanding your horizons is good. Claiming reading obscure books is the way towards a better world is douchebaggery.
The British are using something the size of a phone box to explore the universe. -- Haven't they been doing that since 1963?
Scaling has a number of components to it - it's not just about the absolute number of requests. There are always trade-offs (read up about the CAP theorem). My experience with Mongo has been that it has very inconsistent performance. Such inconsistency makes capacity planning very difficult. Also - stuff like failover, sharding etc. are not elegant.
A Robot You Can Teach Without Programming
Not to mention only answer the "personality" questions a single time... haven't had to deal with those in some time, but I know many companies use them.
End effectors depends on the task, many are already available on the market. Some applications might not even require an active end effector at all. Same thing with the platform. Research labs who want to explore user interaction with safe, compliant arms without designing their own now have a much cheaper option that before.
So, am I right in assuming that this does not clearly reflect that early stage in development when there are less than 20 people in your company and there are individuals with multiple roles? I understand that there's a 6-20 group in there, but what happens when your software engineer is also your administrator, QA and tech support and your CFO is also your sales developer and sales engineer.

Cool graphs though.
Cloud to grow 20% this year to $109B market
Really interesting idea. Could seriously see myself using this.
For Canadian customers, Canada Post has finally added an API to create & print labels. My company uses Stamps.com's API to print USPS labels (I have Django code if anyone's interested) but this would definitely have saved us some development time.
Does anyone know of a better landing page for convincing people to leave Internet Explorer? (specifically, aging relatives)

Browse Happy is the only one I know of.

http://browsehappy.com/
so the article is misleading, isn't it? it says "Lisp programming language, invented in 1958 by John McCarthy. Lisp pioneered many fundamental computer science concepts, including closures", but closures were first created elsewhere - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_science)#Hist...
There is an interesting typo in the article:

The bulb on the light is quite lovely

Obviously meant to be "right", but I had to read that sentence 3 times before I read it correctly and not as "left". Seems my brain was expecting "left" or "right" and saw "left" since they start with the same letter, instead of seeing "right", the much closer word.

Sorry to be offtopic, thought that was kind of interesting.
That's what usually happens, I guess. I remember from an old Steven Pinker book that there is a theory that love is a necessary craziness, because without it we would constantly be looking for better mates (the rational thing to do). That would explain why falling in love makes people do silly things, because they demonstrate "I am crazy, therefore you can trust that I will stay with you".
Do you host it on a public repo ? I'd be curious to see how people iterate when writing emacs extensions.
The journey starts today
PIC microcontroller blinking LED without cheating
Missing iGoogle? Try Backstitch Instead
http://www.scribd.com/doc/106190890/PersonalWeb-Technologies...
One thing I've not seen anyone mention: MSRP for the Windows ecosystem devices tends to not be what the devices are actually sold for. There's a lot of margin built into those prices to allow for sales and other retail actions. Apple doesn't have to add buffer to their MSRP as they tend to not leave much margin for other retails; the reason you can buy an iPad at Best Buy isn't because BB makes much money on the iPad, but because they can make big money on the accessories.
Yahoo closes $7.6 billion deal with Alibaba Group
That's good, but where is the incentive to stay at the job?

They should make a requirement that you are at the job for 3-6 months before you get the pay.
Would love to use this for my ecommerce site (StartupThreads) as we move to a custom system.

Most interested in the shipping price comparison: what providers are you supporting?
I think USPS labels are returned as PNGs - would probably be easier to just shoot that back, no? At least our method of generating USPS labels (Stamps.com API) shoots back PNGs.
It's possible that I'm misunderstanding Sourceforge's goals, but for a site that is ostensibly about hosting software development, having the developer-oriented part of the experience be less convenient than that of an end-user seems backwards. I'm ashamed to say that I've never had anything on either Github or Sourceforge, but Github seems to be very much about sharing the sources, whereas Sourceforge seems to be much more about conveniently distributing the project's binaries.

This is probably largely related to the behavior of their users, though: Github's interface is not a lot more informative than Sourceforge's if no one writes a useful readme, and there have frequently been well-written projects hosted on Sourceforge that have lots of good information on how it works, or how to use it. However, I rarely seem to hear about new projects at Sourceforge, and frequently do see stuff at Github that has well-written introductory documentation accompanying the sources.

I frequently want to read about projects that solve interesting problems, but might not have the interest in installing or using it. Moreover, many people seem to now be using Github as a "Host my interesting document easily" host, which reinforces the "I go to Github to read code / read about code" perception. I'm sure a large part of it is confirmation bias, since most of the interesting code-related things I read about here are hosted at Github. ;)
He's completely discounting the value of building a direct relationship to the customer that Kickstarter allows. For many startups that's at least as hard as the technology.
DA was featured a couple weeks ago on TC: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/06/quora-airbnb-others-made-30...

Seems pretty successful to me!
I totally disagree, sounds like you work in Wall Street. Your argument defeats the purpose of a minimum total pledged, and is pure internet speculation.

Companies and individuals go to Kickstarter to create great products - that can't be financed in no other way (bank debt, VC capital, etc.).

More capital (pledges) result in more orders, more inventory, higher working capital and a production/logistics nightmare. None of the hardware projects/companies I've seen to date on Kickstarter have the required infrastructure to handle "as much capital as possible" or as many orders as possible.
The Very First Documentary Shot With Google Goggles
I tried to do a 'Show HN' this morning but I think I might have submitted it a bit early. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4537457)

We just opened our product for public testing and would love to hear what you think.
I got my wife a moissonite ring. I took it to a jewelry store once to get it cleaned. The person there went on about how beautiful it was. I said it was moissonite and she quickly said we don't work on moissonite and handed the ring back and left. Everyone assumes it is diamond because it is double refractive and actually brighter than diamond. Only a gemmologist would know the difference.
I'm looking at starting with USPS, FedEx, and UPS
Pretty Code Editor in WordPress
Judge can't lift ban on Samsung tablet—even though it's not infringing
Why Nikola Tesla Is Your New Hacker Hero
This would be like Monster.com purchasing Fark.com. Not really news because none of those things have mattered for years.
Exactly, that's what I"m hearing from a lot of potentials--too much dev time to get postage working
It still catches some interesting stories that the other aggregators I visit miss. But I haven't gotten much if anything out of the conversation threads in some years.

Even after it became somewhat "swamped", for a while one could still find some interesting comments. (Not infrequently, those having rather low user ID values.)

I suppose I should re-enable Javascript for it and sort out the "4" and "5" rated comments. But I disabled JS when the interface became so bogged down by it, and if nothing else I'm lazy...
Works for Fox.
API not up yet, sry
Extremely interested in address verification. Please tell me it does normalization/correction that is able to take fuzzy/dirty/invalid data and yield a proper and well-formatted address into standard fields?
Food Genius Scores $1.2M for Real-Time Analysis of Restaurant Trends
I disagree. Given what the app is about, I don't care about the UI. In fact, I'd rather they spend more time on the backend than on the website - at least to get started. Bootstrap is familiar, it's not bad - there's a difference.

Once the service is proven to work and they've got customers, I'm sure a UI refresh would happen. At this stage it's probably more important to worry about the things that matter most to the longevity of the project.
Show HN: Our first OSX app, FontPrep, free for 24 hours
Cool! Exactly what I've seen with my own integration. Huge pain points here
Why You Should Apply to TechStars Cloud
Oh, I agree, it was just surprising to me to see them there.
"We need more Macs in this room; it'll pretty it right up" certainly implies that we don't need Macs because they are good machines. It's not "secretly insulting their intelligence", it is explicitly and overtly discounting the professional capabilities of the people he supposedly wanted to recruit.

You seem to be being purposefully obtus to me. If it weren't a sexist joke people wouldn't have laughed at it.
Your right, I totally missed that bit. And I agree strongly that the execution risk here incredible. I'll add them to the Ouya and Pebble guys of people who've bitten off way more than they expected.
This site is not loading for me, so I can't see how they arrived at that, but it seems unlikely. Israel's military budget is about 6% of their GDP. US military aid to Israel is about 1% of Israel's GDP.
Alibaba CTO: Google has strayed from its ‘Don’t be evil’ motto
My senses have now been trained to ignored those first few 'results'. Similarly, sites like kijiji, autotrader, etc. where people pay to have their posting moved to the top, I usually skip over those ones.
Subscriber numbers themselves can be useful, even if only to count as possible future revenue or marketing.
This was on the frontpage yesterday... ?
Microsoft has already issued a patch..
I like this one:

- drawing together app. similar to draw something, but lets parents and children to use separate devices to draw together, or color cartoons, etc.

I could see me playing that with my daughter.

As a general point, currently educational/fun apps for children in Google Play all seem to be aimed at pre-schoolers. I'd like some games/apps for those aged 5-11. Doesn't necessarily have to be educational. EG:

Girl/boy takes headshot photo of themselves, and is then able to choose a virtual outfit for themself - Princess, Pirate etc etc, and then email the pic to friends.
Out of curiosity, how are you doing this? IIRC a few years ago when I was playing around with the FedEx API it explicitly forbade using it for price comparison with other carriers.

Are there aggregator APIs that you're using? Or have the T&C changed?
The 25 magic words in American television
I don't think I could bring myself to spend $800 on a 10" tablet, nor could I convince myself to spend $600 on a tablet that runs Win RT.

Besides, Windows 8 is just plain gross to look at and nothing ever fits on the screen.
A little explanation of what it does would be useful...
They contacted me before saying if I'm willing to pay for the $3,000, I will get the top 100 award. It's a joke. But there are still so many companies willing to pay them every year in Asia. So sad.
Version controlling for Powerpoint. Seriously. I do lots of Powerpoint and keep replacing them with wrong ones sometimes.
Fun idea, but it seems extremely sensitive to downswings in the demand for developers.
Ah, okay. Yes, that'd be easier. Other services provide PDFs but agree PNGs better
Forkit.js
Hi Dustin, I've sent you an e-mail to @spy.net to continue the discussion. Is this your working e-mail?
Somewhat related question - are these types of services capable of printing first class letter postage ie something to use in place of a "forever" stamp?
Never mind, I thought it was possessive.
Well I guess that depends on what you're doing within you're research.

In bioinformatics knowing about, say, functional programming and parallel algorithms could be really useful where data coming out of sequencers is growing faster than Moore's law can keep up, if you want to scale across many cores as efficiently as possible.

Or graph theory, or... any number of useful techniques waiting for an application.
The gist (ha) is that Github and Rackspace themselves use some techniques that are described in those patents. Because of that they're now being sued for patent infringement.

It's an 'obvious' patent troll, I doubt these patents would even hold up in court but 'till then...
Back in the late nineties a variation on this was for the scammer to call and say you'd be featured on some cable business show hosted by a big shot ex-politician. When they called me it was Casper Weinberger, but I remember hearing about other names too. The catch was that you had to pay the production costs of $15-25k.

More info: http://800notes.com/Phone.aspx/1-954-461-2100/2

This is also a common charity tactic. They throw a big dinner party honoring some rich guy, then shake down all his friends to pay for tables at dinner.
Agreed. Stuck between working on the product and working on UI I chose an admittedly weak UI (I'm not crazy about it but it works) so I could work on more important, for now, pieces of the product
I heard $5M.
No, I just read it wrong.
The secret to hiring a designer
This is exactly what I'm looking for. I'm really hoping I don't have to integrate with FedEx web services for address verification. If the price is right, my company will gladly pay for this service over the free service provided by FedEx.
Do you mean FRANKLIN Roosevelt? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighteenth_Amendment_to_the_Uni...

Prohibition took effect after Teddy Roosevelt died - during the Woodrow Wilson administration. It was repealed in the first few months of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration in 1933.
Okay, but it's still turning away most of us, right?
Very nice. Would you plan to offer international shipping options ? Just out of curiosity, what mapping engine are you using to geocode?
The patents in question:

http://www.google.com/patents/US5978791

http://www.google.com/patents/US6415280

http://www.google.com/patents/US6928442

http://www.google.com/patents/US7802310

http://www.google.com/patents/US7945539

http://www.google.com/patents/US7945544

http://www.google.com/patents/US7949662

http://www.google.com/patents/US8001096

http://www.google.com/patents/US8099420
The WiFi on Virgin America has grown steadfastly slower as more people became aware of it, and despite the $10-$17 price point, has now reached the point of being nearly totally unusable on most of my flights.

Unless Jet Blue has a solution to provide significantly more bandwidth, I can't imagine that free WiFi is going to be less saturated than the paid option on Virgin.
I wonder why all recruiters don't do this? It would really put them at the top of the line for a developer's attention, and with the market being so tight, you'd think we'd be seeing this.
Common Crawl announces Open Source Big Data code contest winners
Clever Algorithms: Nature-Inspired Programming Recipes in Ruby [Free]
Cambridge Startup Cloze Releases Updated Beta
Great, what's your use case?
I've been using this for years now and love it:

https://rocketship.it/

It is a slightly different concept, you pay once and get code that gives you a uniform interface for communicating with the different carriers (USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc.).

Since it is a one time fee I didn't expect support, however, the developer has been very responsive and helpful whenever I've run into a problem.
Yes, but I think we all use adblock, so I'm not really sure where their views and clicks would come from.
Products are low-margin. Solutions are high margin.

There isn't much money in selling commodity tablets. But there is a huge amount of money out there in solutions built around tablets.
Everybody's PIN Revealed!
Excellent article, I really enjoy reading about the nuts and bolts of languages.
Normal is purposefully vague, all-encompassing and uncommunicative. If I'm describing my home setup I don't say "I run a normal server" I say "I run an Apache server". The first could be referring to hardware, software or a total lack of clue on my part. The second is actually descriptive.
Agreed. It makes CL look way easier than assembly :D

edit: not that I consider it to be like assembly, really.
Get rid of the .json, use a specific media type, if at all possible refer to a schema description in the metadata presented.

Search is a service, not a part of a resource. Whether a seperate search service aggregating all different REST resources is supplied or not is irrelevant in the example case as resource collections can be filtered, which the article highlights (the colour= parameter), for a dogs resource, or a phonebook resource etc. filtering on attributes (which can use wildcards or regexes as seen fit to do so) provides the necessary functionality anyway. Search is a diversion in these cases.

Go versionless.
Excellent. Yes, I'm hearing from a lot of potential customers that they're having to pull in address verification from one source, labels from another, and all hacked together in Magento.
It may be and your might have encountered an exception(s), but as whole the venture industry has clear economic drivers and generally people's behavior matches the underlying incentives.

Of course, my point excludes the examples of non-ethical behavior.
will offer free basic Wi-Fi services until the service is installed on 30 airplanes

While nice to have, if the installation is anything like Gogo (less than 24 hours) it doesn't sound like it will be free for long.
I built something like this for a hackday (actually it's still up http://worm.cloudfoundry.com/) - I only ran it with 50 people so I can't really speak about the scale, but I one thing I found was that lag can be a significant issue.

Different people will have different lags so you need to take that into account and adjust the historical view appropriately (i.e you can't just chuck all incoming data into a "current" bucket).
This doesn't belong on hacker news, nor is it remotely accurate.

The Israeli defense budget is $15 billion dollars, and the American aid is $2.5 billion. The article is attempting to classify the Iraq war as aid to Israel, which is absurd.

It also falsely claims that Israel receives more aid than any other country. Pakistan receives slightly more, and Afghanistan receives 4 times as much.
There's also a good book called Subliminal that discusses the neuroscience of how our subconcious brain make decisions that we often believe we made ourselves.

http://www.amazon.com/Subliminal-Your-Unconscious-Rules-Beha...
> so far there’s zero evidence that it’s a good way of providing startup capital for would-be businesses

This drives me nuts. There may be insufficient evidence to say that Kickstarter is "a good way of providing startup capital...", but there's not zero evidence. If you're trying to come off as the measured, realistic alternative, flailing hyperbole doesn't help.
wow, very impressive! I look forward to using it :) I have a couple of webapps that need frontends, so definitely giving this a whirl when it's released.
Strictly speaking that's merely a convention.

Python simply has explicit method receivers.

There's nothing pretty you from calling it `obj` or `foobaz` or whatever - it's just a normal variable.
I'm curious how their device might be configured. The eyefi includes a usb dongle that require you to use a computer to configure the wifi settings with. They could do something like the electric imp where you configure it via sending it data via light. I don't think this is as easy as you make it sound -- there are definitely engineering challenges to make it easy for the end user.
Tungle will shut down the standalone service
Why would highly qualified engineers even sign up for this? Love the idea, but seems like most talented engineers I come across don't even have the chance to check their email short of having tons of inquiries from startups and other companies looking for their services.
For a moment, based on the backtrack (amazonaws.com), I thought Amazon was suing Rackspace. It'd be nice to get that fixed.
All-New Healing Tool in Pixelmator 2.1.1