skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And as a site owner, it has the bonus of being much easier to track than RSS. It's difficult to quantify how many people "read" your RSS feed in a week. But it's pretty easy to count how many people loaded the images in your email or clicked a link.
Fliggo Lets You Build Your Own YouTube [YC S08]
MongoDB: Yet another "fast", scema-less document DB
George Carlin was a master at this as well. I'm not a huge fan of Bill Maher, but some of his stuff would qualify too.
While I'm certainly in the "work smarter not longer" camp, to suggest speed, and therefore efficiency, doesn't matter to business is shortsighted.

How much you accomplish in a given timeframe affects everything - from perceived worth to how much you can charge.

Time is money, whether you like it or not.
Ask HN: Managing Two Contracts
Hello all,

I have a very problematic dilemma. Currently i am working 70 - 80 hrs a week between two contracts. One of them, which pays pretty low ($19/hr), i took through a recruiter because i needed the money -- it was after quitting my job to work on a game. The second contract i took after the first because one of the smartest programmers I have ever known called me up and offered it, (the day after I started on the first), and it pays a relatively decent wage ($35/hr).The second contract company is now asking me for more time--time which i do not have. In short, it is not a very sustainable situation.

So for most people the choice i have to make is pretty clear cut, right? Quit the first contract and focus solely on the second one! Except i'm kind of worried that if i quit this one (which requires me to be onsite 8-5), i'll damage my reputation, because the project isn't done.

I have considered asking to work from home until it is done or asking for wage parity with the other contract (because i'm now losing money on this contract), but again, the project isn't done and I am the only person at the company that knows how to complete it (its a legacy app written in Actionscript 2), so I am worried that this would be viewed as some form of extortion or at the very least a little dishonest, because i did present myself as a specialist and if I quit because management didn't want to pay me more, the onus is now on the IT manager that hired me, and he doesn't have a clue how the app works.

Thoughts?
As a manager, especially when I'm not coding in the project, I need some way to know how hard the engineers are working, and whether there's anything I can do to help them be more productive. I have no doubt there is a clear correlation between hours worked and results produced. I think as long as you give engineers the flexibility in their work schedule, I can't imagine not counting hours.
and when people in the topic talk about seeing "how bad others have it" as a route to being more satisfied with your life they are trying to hack the treadmill. That is, reset it to a lower level.
Any chance of a sneak preview? I promise not to share with my fellow Authors Guild members until instructed to.
Ask HN: Why are some of the older developers afraid of javascript?
They do everything in their power to avoid using it. It seems like they missed the memo, and still think majority of the population doesn't use javascript enabled browsers?
Basically, we need to relate working effectively with working efficiently. Another way to look at it is: is the person that spends 10 hours a day sitting at their desk any more dedicated than the person who spends 6? The person who spends 6 hours a day at their desk can potentially produce more results if they focus on effectiveness and efficiency (Parkinson's Law in effect), especially if the "dedicated" 10-hour-a-day person spends 5 hours checking email.

It's also a generational issue that everyone goes through at some point. The young people think the old people are "dinosaurs", and the old people think the young people don't have any work ethic. The focus should be on results, not hours spent.
Online classifieds case study (CBS case competition)
Case competition reveals insights and considerations that might be valuable to those looking to start online classifieds businesses, particularly in developing markets.
I don't know why I read these articles. It's so depressing to be in Canada. I'm not allowed to watch Hulu, use an HD tivo or even try a kindle.
Awesome - we've wanted to add user-generated reviews on Dawdle, and video would be really neat. Definitely looking into this.
So it's a YC/Hacker slan-shack.

That's cool but stuff like that has been going on in geek fandoms for decades.
It's surprising, and a little disappointing, that the original author had not already submitted it.

I've not played around with Magento but my understanding is that it's based on the Zend Framework. Zend_Form has a dedicated element for preventing CSRF attacks: Zend_Form_Element_Hash. That said this looks more like a poor design choice rather than a limitation of the tools/framework used.
"The problem: supermarkets don't have a section for frozen breakfast goods."

Huh? Every grocery I can recall has had an aisle full of frozen pancakes, waffles, sausage, etc.
Fisker Taking Orders of Karma S Hard-Top Convertible Electric Car
the refresh rate is way faster in this version. but it doesn't scroll, it just goes to the next page when the voice gets to that point.
This article has nothing at all to do with a semantic web, it is simply about the length of search engine queries steadily growing and google increasing its market share.

I DO believe there is a demand for a semantic web, but saying so and implementing it are worlds apart. Earlier today I posted a link to a database that I think might be key in doing just that.
Agreed. The author needs to look at Hotspot's parallel server GCs and the upcoming G1 collector.
I respect you for carefully considering this ethical dilemma and not just jumping for the higher pay. I have several questions about your situation:

1. What are the terms of the original written contract (e.g., hours per week, hours total, deliverables due, date for completion, etc)?

2. Are there verbal expectations set forth between you and the client outside the written contract?

3. When do you expect to finish the low paying project? Do you have 40 hours remaining or 400?
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query...
Jonathan Zittrain’s brainchild Herdict is Launched
a lot of older developers still view javascript as the unstable, insecure language.

as an example, steve gibson (of grc.com) won't use it, iirc.

and they're right, really. you can't put bulky business logic in javascript if you have any need for security.
This seems a lot healthier and more mature than the industry standard approach towards abandoned open source projects, which is absentee landlordism. He's giving people opportunity and the clear signal that it's OK to fork the project.
I'd love to see what you think. Matt@mattmaroon.com?

EDIT: Or just drop a line: my email's in my profile.
I can't see an argument that Erlang is automatically tested in the body of the link. Perhaps I missed something. All I read was the usual arguments for functional programming - which has some merits but ... whatever. Where is the unit testing connection?
"Lets go" is not an accurate title, "abandons" would be a better word.

He's written good code and it sucks that he's burning out, but it's not cool to ignore questions and not even try to find a maintainer. Capistrano is used by nearly every Rails project, abandoning it is grossly irresponsible.
Join the party!

http://ticketstumbler.fliggo.com/
In 89 you complained once every September about the students ruining the Internet; not a major change.
Requesting The Opinion Of Hacker News:  Received This Letter, am I alone?
This was sent to our CEO, is it legit? Is this Chinese Cyber Squatting? They sent this message to our 'feedback@TapInko.com' account (which they must have received by going to our website).

A message from: jake shen(jake.shen@qpnic.org.cn):(If you are not the person who is in charge of this, please transfer to the right person/department. Thank you.) Dear CEO, We are the department of registration service in China.we have something need to confirm with you.We formally received an application on February 24, 2009,One company which self-styled "Path soft Corp" are applying to register (tapinko) as internet brand name and domain names as below (tapinko.cn tapinko.asia tapinko.mobi tapinko.cc tapinko.net.cn tapinko.org.cn tapinko.com.cn. .etc). After our initial checking,we found the internet brand name and these domain names being applied are as same as your company’s, so we need to get the confirmation from your company.If the aforesaid company is your business partner or your subsidiary company, please DO NOT reply us,we will approve the application automatically.If you have no any relationship with this company,please contact us within 7 workdays. If out of the deadline,we will approve the application submitted by "Path soft Corp" unconditionally. Please forward the email to your decision maker,and let them contact me in time,so that we can handle this in reasonable,Look forwarding to hearing from you. Best Regards, Jake Shen Senior Consultant TEL: +86 21 69929440 Fax: +86 21 69929447 Website:www.qpnic.org.cn Address: Room 301, 42th, nong 1519, Jinyuan 1st Road, Jiading District, Shanghai city.
In most copyright doctrines you cannot -- even if you have bought the identical CD -- download mp3s extracted from other copies of it, if the author does not explicitely allow it. (Those other copies are counterfeit goods)

Without an agreement with the author, you cannot make copies of a copy you have bought legally, for he (or more exactly, the copyright-holders) is the only one allowed to make further copies.

Since this would make playing CDs on a computer impossible laws provide exceptions for the purposes of playing your legally bought representation (copies are made in cache memory, buffers etc...)

Other exceptions may be given (fair use doctrine, explicit mentions in other countries) letting you arrange a performance of the work (playing the CD) inside your private circle. (This would be impossible to enforce against)

So it stands to logic that if you have bought say, a vinyl of a particular work, you do not have a right to obtain counterfeit copies made of other representations (of the same work) as CDs or digital files.
The Polaroid approach
You make me wish that Dawdle was in YC just so that we could be a pre-release beta partner for other YC companies. :(
Usenet is a crappy P2P file sharing system now, as pretty much everyone who ran a Freenix-rated Usenet server predicted. It was something much cooler than that before the file sharing douchebags wrecked it.
Just Found This: http://www.hhtimesheet.com/blog/2009/02/how-to-build-a-domai...

Not sure if it answers any of my questions though.
ummm... Shouldn't it be "The Importantance of Writing Good"?

;)
Rob Pike on Newsqueak, a concurrent language
the pirate bay doesn't have to prove anything. the business model of the recording industry should not be the courts concern. the cromulent question is this: is the pirate bay an information service and thus not responsible for the content that they help distribute.
I think Github will really help that situation. The problem with traditional open source projects is that somebody can control who contributes back, and if that person isn't around, the project dies. Sure you can fork, but there's no way for others to keep track of where the project has gone to. When this happens, it tends to just acquire a new name and become something else.

Github solves all these problems. Github rocks.
Why is it "grossly irresponsible" of me to take this action? Are lives going to be lost or injured as a result? Will the economy suffer? Will my leaving this project result in a health epidemic?

I've never made any promises about the project. I never claimed that I would be around for ever. I never said I would ignore questions, either -- just that I would ignore emails sent directly to me. But I'm going to remain on the mailing list, and will remain about as responsive there as I have (and I'm, by far, the most frequest poster there).
Generally true (for the mass market), but there are some significant areas where e-mail is next to useless versus RSS - certain highly technical areas, programmers, etc.
I have literally gotten as much done in 4 hours as anther teammate did in 2 weeks. (Fixed the same bug.) However, usually we don't have direct comparisons.

I wonder if breaking a team down into 2 sub teams that compete over 2 week periods to fix the same bugs might be an interesting solution. I suspect most people would be more productive, but less than twice as productive. However, you would then be able to directly pick the "best" output which could be vary valuable. Add in the ability to discover and drop unproductive people and you might have a net win.

Edit: Ok, you might also create a hostile, environment that is so stressful you force the most productive people to leave.
> As a manager, especially when I'm not coding in the project, I need some way to know how hard the engineers are working

You could just ask them in a clever manner, you know.
That's also generally the reasoning behind mocks, dependency injection, etc. used by OO unit testing. If something is supposed to, say, update something in the database, you abstract out an interface to the database and mock it out in your tests, and then use interaction tests to verify that your code is calling the right methods on your database abstraction.

Of course, it's kind of turtles all the way down, and you then have to test that your production implementation of that database abstraction does, in fact, call through to the database. And of course, there are the ever-raging holy wars in the tdd community around interaction testing versus state testing, and that level of abstraction and mockage can sometimes (in my opinion) make the code harder to follow, so it's always about tradeoffs.

But whatever the language you're in, encapsulating side effects and state as much as possible is going to be the way forward, using whatever tools are at your disposal. Some languages tend to make it easier to do that (or harder to avoid doing that) than others.
A LOT of "ordinary programming" is moving some messy bits of information from one place to another, taking into account some messy cases and occasionally putting information into a third, messy place.

This kind of programming has little mathematical content and little similarity to the canonical factorial example that every functional programming language LOVES to give.

Here, functional programming seems to lose its elegant minimalism. Indeed, when you have a bunch of arbitrary, (meaning random) cases and conditions, no language can make your code elegant and minimal since your code must contain the information in the cases and random information is incompressible.

I mean, how would you write a WIN32 GUI in a functional language?

Show me otherwise but I haven't seen the good argument for functional programming languages as general purpose languages and so the folks dumping Java don't really seem very much better.
As long as you're fine with web crawlers not seeing your content, people not building mashups based on your HTML, and so forth, be as much of a heartless bastard as you want. But do keep in mind that Googlebot is the biggest disabled user in the world. If blind people can't see it, search engines can't see it. And if search engines can't see your website, who cares about you?
I would say, the only valid objective measure is results.

That, interestingly, is what a couple of psychologists tried and succeeded in implementing at Best Buy, of all places. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE

They seem to have been very happy with the results they got from that.

If you want to evaluate results, why measure hours?
I think the security aspect is not entirely why. The guy I talked to, won't even use it for image popups or to navigate a form. Instead of clicking one pulldown, and having the next one auto-filled, he has users click a button.
The business model of "We are going to create X for Y", where X is a service like YouTube, never works. After viewing the intro video I saw that you can do things like create private communities and invite people to join, and I thought that this is the same way I share photos with the family on flickr. But wait, doesn't flickr also support video? And so does Facebook, and I am sure there are others.

Maybe I am just misunderstanding their business model, but I don't see the value of this service.
I disagree with you, but I think this is a common enough viewpoint that it shouldn't just modded down into oblivion.

To state the obvious, he owes you nothing. The source code is there. If this were proprietary software and the vendor went bust, would you expect its employees to show up for work every day and support former customers for free? Now consider that Jamis has been doing just that this whole time!
Gadget Photo Mania in action: iPhone in action
If I had to guess, it'd probably be roughly related to things like this:

var x = 1;
var y = 1;

function methodA()
{
return
{
javascript: x + y
};
}

function methodB()
{
return{
javascript: x + y
};
}

(Hint: They don't do the same thing)
1. 40hrs/week. I was not given a hard deadline.

2. I gave them an estimate of 6 six weeks (we're in the 5th)

3. Probably around 200, but I have no idea how stringent their QA is.
I only watched the video... but can you share video weblinks as well? The interface is fantastic, well done.
I think this is partly the point of the article: when you're forced to rely on objective metrics, you will avoid some of the questions that distinguish good performance from great performance. That's one advantage of tiny companies, which don't have to rely on such metrics because everyone takes the company's overall performance as their personal responsibility.
Starting with your first point, 1) except among the upper classes, Mexicans are not generally Spaniards. They are of mixed Native American, Spaniard, and to some small degree African descent. The upper class Mexicans tend not to be the ones encouraged to cross the border by Mexican government policy.

2) America's underclass starts looking much like Europe's once you account for race. Look at NAEP scores for North Dakota some time. Awful smart for a state with the same per-capita education spending as New Mexico. Guess what North Dakota has more of (and what it has less of) than any other state in the union.

3) The best measure of East Asian creativity is probably through patent studies. It is a hard thing to get a hold of. But there seems to be less of it -- and it's entirely possible that it's all due to living in highly socially conformist societies. But I'd be surprised.

4) Again, wrong. East Asians tend to do well even in places where they are imported as common laborers. All those Chinese tin miners in Malaysia, what do you think they're doing now? Certain groups become market-dominant minorities wherever they go, and certain groups become the opposite wherever they go. IQ is by far the most parsimonious explanation (as is backed up by a vast amount of evidence).
I only turn javascript on when I need it for a site that I trust (easy with Opera). If I forget and leave it on, it seems like far too many sites bog down my machine with crappy eye-candy and advertising. (Maybe I won't care so much when/if I upgrade to a faster PC.)

I find it terribly annoying when a site requires javascript, but doesn't do anything compelling with it. For instance, why on earth does this page require javascript to be on, just to show me a .jpg map? http://www.arkansashighways.com/Road/mapopt.htm
Then he's an idiot.
The problem predates NCLB by several decades. Besides, why do East Asians and Europeans do so well under similar circumstances?
American politics is not hacker news! People can get this rubbish on all the other news democracy sites! Please leave it out of hacker news.
Ask HN: Review my startup, After the Deadline - Proofreading Plugin for Wordpress, TinyMCE, etc.
if you'd teleport that thing back two decades

Sorry to nitpick, but teleporting "works" at space dimension, not time dimension; You would have to use a time machine if you want to go back two decades :)

Although you can bring in the time dimension into teleportation by arguing about the time variation that can result from teleporting, since teleported objects would be traveling at the speed of light.
In a previous life I wanted a much narrower implementation of that idea. Combine igoogle (drag & drop widgets), with a more freeform grid.

Use it to build management guis, customized to the user. "Ohh, you want sales per hour, but don't care about inventory?" Here you are.
It seems funny to me that he chose to discuss the technology behind the voice synthesis as that seems to weaken his argument. It is clear that the audio experience (the effects to make it sound like a human voice) is largely a result of the technology and the copyrighted material is still being used only in text form
Dependency injection is great for testability and awful for code clarity as far as I can see.

I started using dependency injection as
f(x,y, z)
where x and y were generally the same.

I changed the reference in my code to
y.x = x
y.f(z)
and it got so much clearer and dryer despite losing the dependency injection. Perhaps I'm doing this wrong but dependency injection seems like cruft from the test department. I am not an OO fanatic but OO is extremely useful for juggling a bunch of information in the best bad way possible. And juggling information in that best bad way possible is a way different problem from functional programming paradigm of finding perfect, elegant solutions to well defined problems.
Suggestion: keep (the time you're on the screen)/(the time Paul is on the screen) ratio as low as possible. There's no need to repeat what he just said, or spend a long time introducing him. Sorry if it's blunt, but I'd be interested in what he says even if he goes on for an hour, and not interested in your summaries of his opinions in the least.
Cappuccino doesn't use html as it's main language. HTML / CSS / Javascript are Cappuccino's assembly language. You write everything in their Obj-J language (which is a cross between Javascript & Obj-C. And apparently actually all legal javascript).
Japan is infamous for "butt-in-chair" as a measure of productivity. The stereotype of the middle-aged salaryman coming home late at night just to leave again in the morning is rooted in reality.
X for Y is just an easy way of explaining things not a business model. It's straight out of the book Made to Stick.
I've been working on it daily since October. Compared to osCommerce, Zen Cart and Volusion, Magento is slow and extremely flexible, mostly due to its EAV architecture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-attribute-value_model. You can bend it to meet various business models (inventory vs drop ship, physical vs downloadable, etc.). Its most unique strength is running multiple sites from the same db (though again, performance becomes an issue).

Interface-wise, Magento is years ahead of the rest. Just visit a demo site.

It does run on the Zend Framework, so studying that (and OO PHP in general) is a requisite for writing modules. The ZF brings sophisticated inheritance logic, both in terms of object overloading and template inheritance. Thus, extending Magento is a breeze compared to other software.

Magento's downsides stem from being young and free. The documentation is hit-or-miss, and the forum is full of FUD from inexperienced users who are attracted to the price tag.

The Magento team has a habit of scrambling a maintenance patch right after a release, which probably means bad QA. If a new release comes out, it's best to wait a couple weeks and watch for x.0.1.

Having a dedicated server with a solid control panel and shell access will be a lifesaver. Crontab control is a must. I'm amazed how many people try to jam this thing on GoDaddy.