skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Hiring a Freelance Hacker/Finding a Co-Founder
Hi there,

I'd like to hire a freelance hacker for a project. Even better, I'd like to find a hacker co-founder. Where are some good places to look/recruit?

A little about the project: I'd like to create an e-commerce site that's determined to provide customers with severely discounted priced products (without compromising quality).

It'd be extremely important to keep physical inventory levels low. To do this we'd keep inventory at maybe 50 items per product cycle.

To keep customer's attention we'd "introduce," or post, new and established products frequently. Perhaps multiple times a day.

I've think brick-and-mortar companies are unable to sell a lot of their product, especially upscale fashion retailers, because the price is too high. (Many are still considered successful, though.) And I'm confident retailers and suppliers will sell these "neglected" products at a certain price. And I'm determined to negotiate hard (but with integrity) on this.

I think this market has not been fully captured. There are some companies that focus on a niche (whiskey militia comes to mind), which has worked well for them. But I think there are many markets that are still untouched. But it'd be important to think and focus locally to build a great brand and company.

And given the current economy, people are focused on savings. I think right now, perhaps more than ever, people want to save anywhere they can. And if you combine savings with great taste, style, and reputable brands, I think you provide customers with a lot of value. I think this is what people want.

I think I have multiple skills to offer, though none are "technical" in nature, which is why a technical co-founder is instrumental. It'd be important to strike a relationship with vendors to be able to purchase these products. This is where my personality and skills come in. I'm a product/people guy, by passion. I enjoy going out and talking to others. I'm an obsessive doer who pays particular attention to the intricacies of peoples' individual personalities, as well as their common characteristics.

At the same time, I have considerable respect for technical people. For hackers. I think a great product guy and a great hacker would be a natural match for something like this. We'd both be dependent upon each other. We'd both drive and motivate each other to do what we loved doing and are best at.

Thanks!

P.S. If anyone is interested in more info. please shoot me an e-mail: stevenjames134 (gmail)
For a non-startup, I TDD where it makes sense, for example when I'm implementing from scratch and requirements are pretty vague. However, I try to cover existing code with automated tests where risk of change is very high (bad code).
These times are when you need automated testing the most.
Cull Lingering Erlang Heart Processes
I think a great product guy and a great hacker would be a natural match

This is how legendary companies are founded. Think Steve Job and Steve Wozniack.

Good luck :-)
Are there any performance statistics? I'm interested to see how it compares to MySQL/SQLite for light to heavy workloads.
didn't you ask this same question, like, yesterday?
You can cover any song you like and publish it. Just contact the Song Rights Organisation that deals with that song. ASCAP is one.

I once covered the Outrun theme, and managed to find the guy who composed it, who said go ahead. (When he heard the song, he cut off contact - I guess he didn't like it),
Restaurant lets patrons reserve a specific table
It's hard to tell without more information. On their blog it was directly asked what the difference was and the response is "I hope you see the enhanced value in what we’ve come up with at Alice." [1]

If they are trying to simply win a branding war with Amazon... yikes.

--

[1] - http://flywheelblog.com/2008/11/the-3-advantages-of-a-start-...
This previous posting (18 days ago) found by using the search tool:

http://searchyc.com/laser+bike+lane
Google bought YouTube instead?
A good reminder that success doesn't always come overnight, or without sacrifice.
Except fireeagle doesn't have a client with an install base as large as Google Maps' and is really more of a pipe/aggregator than a client in the first place.
I'll jump in, because I spent six months developing a web app using Sass. It's a nightmare to maintain on any sort of complicated, big project. For various reasons... I previously blogged about it here: http://fecklessmind.com/2009/01/28/fuck-sass/

Ultimately, yes, you can use whatever the hell you want. But if you're a front-end developer, if you care about your webiste scaling to millions of users, if you care about providing best experience even to dial-up users or users of old PCs / Macs, then you're going to spend the time optimizing everything you can. Sass goes against that and creates bloat. Fine for back-end developers who just want the pain of working with CSS to be over, maybe, but not for front-end developers.

Haml on the other hand is great.
Especially since those are just static HTML files.
Sharing your location is, at least right now, more of a feature than a product in users minds. If you have a google maps client on your phone already, you'll probably try it.
Users probably won't download an app that does just that as readily.

Google has the classic big company/large install base edge in this area.
This is a post about JavaScript as a whole, and so I can only hope he meant "first class functions and closures". If he didn't, well that would be even more worrying.
they are Venture Capital funded.
yes:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465298
Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?
I'm slowly getting up to speed with Emacs, switching from TextMate. There are a lot of ways to use emacs on Mac, from Aquamacs to Carbon Emacs to the Cocoa port of GNU Emacs. I've dabbled in each a little bit.

I'm most interested to hear your thoughts on keybinding (and which Emacs distribution you use). I like the thought of keeping Mac shortcuts consistent a-la Aquamacs (having CMD-Q still bound to exit, etc), but it seems like the Option key is too poorly-placed to be a useful Meta key.

(I've bound Caps-lock to Ctrl.) It seems like binding CMD->Meta and CTRL as Control would provide the best placement ergonomically, but obviously you then lose the standard Mac keybindings when in Emacs.

What does your Emacs setup look like?
CrazyEgg Makes Me Serious Money... Again
I recently researched this and I thought Digicert looked pretty good. Digicert includes Subject Alternative Name.

Our CEO insisted on VeriSign so that's what we went with - way more expensive and to get both www.example.com and example.com you either have to buy another cert (for example.com) or go through their Sales team's Managed PKI to get a SAN - ridiculous!

Cheers
Completely agree. It's a feature, and if it was a free add-on, it'd be useful.

eg if someone is going on a long journey, be able to track them to see they get there safely etc

But I don't think it's anything more than a feature.
NyxWulf -- You should consider the size of the companies you referenced in your message. Nary a startup in the bunch.

For startups, a Divide & Conquer strategy turns into a Divide & Fail result. Startups need laser focus on a single product/service.

As the startup grows, sub-brands can be incorporated. Quite easily, actually.

Reason being, the startup isn't a national/global player that has pigeon-holed itself into a single niche. The sub-brands are equated with the growth/expansion.
Further down the article it says that they did, but he declined as it "isn't his field".

The BBC has this thing about the "Rock'n'Roll" simile. Last November they ran a similar item for math:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7729010.stm
Incidentally, I have a similar adapter. I got a lot of fun out of playing all the old classics that I haven't seen in forever, like F-Zero and the original Mario Party.
Google open sourced one: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/09/cmockery-easie...
Or your reason could be that aerobic exercise makes you smarter.:)
I did. But I deleted it and re-posted this morning. (I thought it might be more effective in the morning.)
I seriously wouldn't worry about it too much. They either do or they don't it's a bit like the weather, it will influence you but since you can't control it you might as well simply adapt to it.

If it wouldn't be for that then you could never do anything at all for fear of some 'force of nature' coming along and destroying it.

And who knows, maybe you'll be better at it than they ever will be simply because you are focusing on just one thing instead of on 50.
Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic
How a controversial entry in Wikipedia has changed over time [img]
I think that Urchin was the basis for GA. Urchin is still available from google here though http://www.google.com/urchin/. The main difference that I know of between them is that Urchin has the ability to parse server logs as well as track users through javascript.
or kozmo.com ;)
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If sharing the location is not the neat feature - perhaps it's visualizing/mining that information accrued over your daily life/time. Here's some concepts from MIT

http://web.media.mit.edu/~orkan/projects/portraits/main.html
Can PG or a mod delete/reformat this post? Fixed width is looked down upon for anything that's not a short code snippet here.
> If Joel can write down a life's work in a couple of sentences, then there is definitely not much to it in the first place.

You seem to presume that Joel has written down Beck's life's work in a couple of sentences. The whole point of Kent's post is to refute this presumption.

Joel himself wrote a post giving a twelve-point "Joel Test" for software development practices: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html

I'm sure you agree that Joel did not write down his own life's work in articulating twelve simple yes or no questions about software development practices. There's more to Joel's own experience than those twelve questions, and there's more to Kent's life's work than Joel's off-hand remarks.

I'll close my rebuttal to your comment by pointing out that you have just summarized your own stance on software development with some amazingly superficial and non-actionable prescriptions.

But I would never presume that these prescriptions, right or wrong, would summarize your life's work either. Nor would I jump to hasty conclusions about your experience based on whether I agree or disagree with your stance on TDD.
$1.5MM from Spark and angels, yeah.
American Mathematics Competitions Test Dates Coming Soon
It doesn't look like anything more than a gimmick. Restaurants usually allow reservations of a specific table; I know of one restaurant that asks you where you want to be seated when you call, and their best table 'the window seats' is a small 2 person table in a little alcove and the only table in the place that is actually next to a window and they only book it if someone specifically asks. I believe the restaurant can do that because it's considerably upscale and actually only does 2 reservations a night, but we worked it out that it doesn't cost much more to go there at $100 a meal per person (unlimited soup/salad, feta cheese, and they have the best steak I've ever had), over any chain restaurant where you can end up paying near $20 for an appetizer, $30 for a main dish and $20 for a dessert and nothing's of comparable size.
I'm an old hand in Emacs and new to the Macintosh, so I use Cocoa Emacs.app because it's closest to the "standard" distribution, and override the Mac keybindings. I avoid using the mouse (those things are very bad for the wrists), so my .emacs turns the toolbar, menubar, and scrollbars off -- just a plain white screen.

I use a 25" widescreen LCD, and I like to jack up the font size until I get about 200 characters across; this lets me hold two 100x47 buffers side by side, which is how I prefer to work. Most of my interaction with the computer (besides web) goes through Emacs -- eshell, gnus, bbdb, calendar/diary, planner, etc.
Mathematica is a very powerful Lisp-based programming language(without user-visible s-expressions). It is (to an extent) designed for numerical/symbolic math; there are a lot of libraries available for that.

However, they've added a lot of other libraries, for things like image processing, etc.

It is a very powerful system, however somewhat limited by poor market penetration (nothing else uses it, so only people with Mathematica could use it).
How Amazon's EC2 Service Was Born
And i thought tetris was addicting. I was just getting going with that head-to-head version on their site and i heard footsteps. Ahh well.
You should just open a McDonalds, they're gonna do great in the coming depression.
The problem with Mathematica for serious development is that you need Mathematica to run the stuff. So if you write a gadget/utility, only people with Mathematica can run it.

This is an attempt to get deeper penetration into the hobbyist market.
Jeff Atwood has nothing to say yet posts anyway (satire)
Windows 7 Security Savaged: "Allow / Deny" Prompts To Return?
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Spolsky's significant bias in this argument:

His company makes bug tracking software!

Of COURSE he wants to cast unit testing in a bad light - done properly, it could put him out of business.
I would pay for increased Twitter API access though, thats for sure.
Singularly Stupid
Just out of curiosity... why do you want something that is not a table but behaves exactly like a table? Isn't that what tables are for?

I think starting from the premise that CSS (as it is currently implemented by major vendors) is a super set of tables, and as such, must do everything tables do is misguided. From my experience, the absolute need to use tables doesn't appear in every layout (for me, at least, it's rather rare), and pragmatic CSS developers tend to use tables only as a fallback when CSS / IE / whatever doesn't quite work.

I've seen css examples that can't be done with tables, so I don't know exactly where we are trying to get with this line of reasoning.
A note to all the people arguing about whether TDD is a good idea or not: You are arguing about the colour of the bikeshed.

The problem with Joel and Jeff's podcast isn't that they disagree with TDD. If you poll 100 random smart people on the subject, you will get a continuum of answers.

The problem is that they then made a sweeping generalization about Kent Beck and Robert Martin's experience and competence based on their disagreement. The old, "If you don't develop software exactly as I do, you are an idiot" line.

I think Kent is right not to argue the fine points of TDD, because that isn't the issue. The issue is that his competence and experience were attacked on the basis of advocating TDD, and his response is to suggest that J&J are unaware of his experience.

If someone wants to suggest that Kent is a very experienced guy but they don't think TDD is a good idea for their project, I'm sure Kent is fine with their stance on the matter.
I have a huge amount of Sass files on my site (~140) and I can't recommend it more. It makes my life a lot easier.
You realize you can set-up a store on amazon and they can handle most of the technical stuff for you?
It give you a chance to play with your business model (as their isn't anything specifically technical about it) and try different avenues instead of building everything from scratch in the beginning.
If you decide later that it makes more sense to bring all the technical in house, there is nothing stopping you from doing it at that point.
Tell me all about it, while I remember the most recent north east ice storm.
Thanks, I didn't realize the cut & paste messed up the formatting so badly. I fixed it.
Here's mine: http://github.com/larrywright/emacs/

It's mostly stuff borrowed from other people, but it gives you a good starting point with Ruby/Rails support, Twitter integration, snippets, etc. I use it at home and work (Mac and Windows respectively), and it works well for me.
My primary focus, for the time, has just been to not start talking until there is a breaking point in the conversation. I find that is what drives people up the wall the most - when they can't finish a thought because I am interjecting.

As I think on it, this has been a recent development. I wonder if it stems from my daughter starting to talk a year ago. My life has become a cloud of "uh uh", "yeah", "allright!" and generally sounding excited about completely unstimulating conversation. When I can have a discussion with someone that challenges me, it's very exciting and usually the highlight of my day.
Employee First Customer Second
I just have Aquamacs with all the default bindings. Then I installed ECB and all the rails goodies, of which I use very few actually! Flymake is the most useful as it highlights syntax errors without even compiling.
I don't have the time to confirm it for sure right now, unfortunately, but I think http://sqworl.com could be used for something along those lines.
Black swan author's rules for living
I'd been thinking about writing an Atwood slam for a while, but this guy has crafted the definitive one. There's nothing quite as satisfying as slamming a guy's shitty writing style using his own form.

It'll be hilarious/horrifying to see how Jeff Atwood will link to it.
How to film customer case study videos
I just realized I only partially answered the question.

I use the standard emacs keybindings, rather than the more os-specific ones, since that way it's the same regardless of which platform I use. I use Linux, Windows, and OS X on a regular basis, so keeping things uniform works best for me.

On Windows I use Emacs Win32 of course, and on OS X I use Cocoa Emacs rather than Aquamacs. I played with Aquamacs briefly but it's focus on making Emacs an OS X app doesn't really mesh well with my needs.
I use emacs in a terminal window for probably 75% of my editing, and textmate for the other 25- I have Aquamacs but couldn't get into the flow with it for some reason. I keep all the default keys for ctrl/etc, and it does help a bit that they newest macs have changed the enter key that used to be to the right of spacebar to alt.

While it's not really emacs, I generally do most of my development in Eclipse- but I change the keybindings to Emacs mode (window\preferences\general\keys). Makes eclipse almost nice to use.
I'm using the Cocoa Emacs.app cause it's most like the old Emacs, no new keybindings like Aquamacs has.
2. "Joel is a dolt" - Neither on the lines nor between them have I seen this in Kent's post.

1. "Joel is neither stupid nor malicious" - Stupid + Malicious != AllThereCouldEverBe... Pompous and AttentionCraving are missing for example. Others are too...

0. I _partly_ dislike both stands on software dev. methodology (Kent's and Joel's) so don't take this a fanboysm. I respect Kent's life work more though.
Why Lisp has no generic COPY or EQUAL functions.
I'm emacs newbie, and I do use Aquamacs, with separately downloaded SLIME, and custom .emacs (borrowed from many people - mainly from comp.lang.lisp)
This is really cool, I may start using Sass (but probably not Compass), but it doesn't really solve the argument.

There are many things that tables can do that CSS just can't (or that take much longer).
Sass actually takes pains to make the source code it outputs readable. This isn't always entirely possible, since by its nature expressing something in Sass can take significantly less code than the CSS counterpart and properly organizing the expanded code automatically is hard. But there are several output styles designed to be readable, and it's possible to add comments that are rendered as CSS comments.
I'm going to work on a SASS /Compass like framework for a scheme webframework called leftparen for google summer of code. http://blog.leftparen.com/
Good point, but it's not just fanboys, I've seen Uncle Bob speak and he's a lot less reasonable then he was in his response to Joel.

The thing is, it's appropriate for his audience, large cubicle farms with a completely broken system.

So oversimplifying and extreme work for Uncle Bob when he's consulting.

Joel was obviously talking about the kind of super star programmers he hires in his magical fairy land office.
(Just kidding Joel, I wish I worked in an office like that.)

The problem as I see it, is the difference between what's good for good programmers, and what's good for most people who happen to diddle with visual basic. (No offense to VB rock stars, keep on rockin'!)

Kent Beck and Bob Martin are very good programmers, but they get paid from consulting large organizations with not so great programmers.

Joel gets paid by hiring and working with great programmers, in his magical high rise office, with free gourmet food and rainbows.
Well, they say something like 35% of people on dating sites are married so that might have something to do with that.

Personally, I use GreaseMonkey scripts to hide the ads on Facebook.
"If I'm constantly changing my mind about how best to do something" then you're finding /more/ not /best/ ways.
In a way this is very similar to the 'Start with NO' http://www.amazon.com/Start-NO-Negotiating-Tools-that/dp/060... negotiating technique. The idea is that when people say no they will feel obliged to give you the reasons why and then you can adjust your proposal, if they answer 'maybe' then you'll not get any information from them.
It's one thing to tell what rank you are on what keyword, but quite another to track how much traffic you are getting from a specific keyword. Though I guess there's ways to estimate that.

You bring up a good point, though. Guess it's not as grand a scheme as I thought.
This reminds me of an experiment I once read about. It was a comparison between 'angry' and 'calm' driving, during the angry days the driver was supposed to avoid letting people in front of them and on the calm days they were supposed to slow down and let people turn into their lane from side roads. This wasn't about fuel efficiency, it was about how much time it would cost you and quite counter-intuitively the 'calm' drivers who let multiple vehicles go in front of them actually ended up getting to work faster.

They also mention the ants collecting behind an ant that's carrying something. It's probably for a different reason (IE not losing the food) but it reminds me of the fleet-style of driving where they want to get vehicles to drive behind each other, sharing the same air pocket, which IIRC Mythbusters showed that tailing a big rig could reduce drag by up to 80%, however that was equivalent to being like 5 feet behind the big rig and they couldn't drive 'calm' enough at that distance and reduced efficiency, but at around 10 feet they got like a 60% drag reduction. Fleet driving (by computer) would allow vehicles to drive at 5 feet behind a big rig and get that drag reduction. However, I don't know how you'd pay for fleet-style driving because vehicles like a big rig would be improving efficiency for dozens of vehicles, which would assume nationalized transportation control so big rig drivers don't get ripped off on gas.
You can freely distribute your UI-based 'gadgets' and what not using Mathematica Player, which is a free download. http://www.wolfram.com/products/player/
It's pretty much a non-news -- I think everyone is aware of this -- but backing it up with actual tests and data is great. Thanks for sharing the post
In addition to the cultural resistance, retrofitting unit tests into an existing codebase is usually a big technical challenge; certainly much harder than doing TDD to begin with.