skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. I wasn't expecting it to be within my price range (though I'm glad that it is).

Buying is a trivial decision at $300. We sell a $350 product, with high margins. A single sale and this course pays for itself. (2-3, if you include my time spent watching and implementing it)

edit: turns out I didn't even notice the price. It's actually $250. I was prepared to pay anything up to $400 without thinking about it or discussing reimbursement with my company.
I program in Ruby most days.

A while back I was trying to figure out something in Python. Python isn't hard, and I can read it (since its practically like reading Ruby) and get by writing it here and there when needed.

So... I'm trying to use some Python library (whatever your equivalent of a Gem is). I spent a few hours ripping out my hair trying to find good documentation for how to install and manage Python libraries. There didn't appear to be the equivalent of RubyGems or Bundler. There did seem to be 2-3 different ways of managing them (eggs?), but just getting those programs working on my local system wasn't liking me either. Googling for "Using Python libraries" didn't return much useful- nor did "Installing Python Libraries".

I'm still unclear what the standard method for managing these is. When I checkout a Ruby thing, I just type 'bundle install' and all is fine then.

Yes, the technical docs were fine- but the baseline "how do I get this damn stuff, working!?!?!" wasn't.
Very... absorbent. You really get... sucked in.
Look at the very top-right of the site.
Any reason you decided to launch this on a Friday? Or just random? I'm wondering what kind of data people have seen for the best day of the week to attract attention to a launch.
Actually, I'd argue it is relatively easier than Google is making it. It's a solved problem. It's called a "customer service department". They've been around for probably a century now.

And yeah, Google doesn't want the overhead of such a department I get it. But there isn't even an automated solution to this. A human still has to deal with these issues, but now they have to be taken off of their normal line work to handle these cases.

The "solution" to manual or automated cusomter service is not to just get rid of customer service.
Show HN: Mojo - a django-like framework for Tornado (v0.1)
Wow, check out that pricing. What a fucking disaster.

5 users for 10$/mo (2$/user)
10 users for 25$/mo (2.5$/user)
20 users for 50$/mo (2.5$/user)
50 users for 125$/mo (2.5$/user)

I have a hard time trying to think of any corporation incompetent enough to pay for an IRC server that serves so few users, and even then, the only corporations that could probably afford it are those which have IT guys to tell and scream at management to prevent them from wasting money on such a service.
Doug Engelbart Institute posted a link to videos and transcripts of the Oct 1995 Brown / MIT Vannevar Bush symposium celebrating the 50th anniversary of AWMT:

"As We May Think: A Celebration of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Vision,
An Examination of What Has Been Accomplished,
and What Remains to Be Done"

Excellent talks and panels with Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Andy van Dam, Alan Kay, Tim Berners-Lee, Paul Kahn, Lee Sproul, Raj Reddy, Michael Lesk, Bob Kahn, and others.

Douglas Adams was the dinner speaker (great talk, unfortunately no video or audio record).

http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-symposium....

"The event was in fact an exhibition of Bush's legacy, a self-referential, interweaving (intertwingling, Ted Nelson would say) of all the themes - social, technological, and psychological - from Bush's paper. In the course of two days it became very clear how deep and ambitious - socially and culturally - Bush's most central ideas were. At every turn we were reminded that Bush was writing about how fundamentally new intellectual practices could change the entire landscape of human social life. Bush's vision was not just about hypertext, or data management, or information retrieval, let alone about microfilm or calculating machines; rather, it was about extending the power of human beings by giving them radically new ways of working together.

The goal of fundamentally changing how we work in order to address pressing human problems continued to be central throughout the development of Bush's legacy in the '60s and '70s, most obviously in the work of Engelbart, Nelson, and Kay. Its continued evidence throughout the symposium - even (perhaps most notably)in the presentation of Tim Berners-Lee, the youngest speaker - and the warm response of the audience made it clear that this optimistic social agenda still resonates. It seems that we are not too jaded, skeptical, or post-modern to believe, 50 years later, that technology can bring us 'a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge', one that will promote 'the application of science to the needs and desires of man' ('As We May Think')."

from http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/Bush_Symposium_Interact.html
Don't forget the racial slurs.
This requires effort on your part, specially if you happen to take advantage of CPU specific opcodes like NEON.

If you happen to compile just for ARM, then it won't with AMD CPU out of the box.

This is what I mean, when journalists talk about technology without explaining how compatible is AMDs solution with Android apps.
Industry: "the government isn't training enough workers for us on the public dime."
People really love their iPhones. I find is barely believable that a large number of people will change that based on maps alone.
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=600736
That may have just been because they want to emphasize a native mobile app rather than HTML5-based mobile experiences, and Google has not yet released their own native maps app for iOS.
It isn't so much that I'm calling certain lifestyles lame, it's just that I've met so many folks who are very unhappy with the choices they've made--and paradoxically offended by those who don't choose the same path.

Whether you love a life of Starcraft II, travelling the world, or living in the suburbs, is of little difference to me. My point is simply that folks shouldn't feel obliged to follow the same path as the status quo.
A great collection of patents -
http://patently-useless.tumblr.com/
As jballanc pointed out, they did admit bad decisions, as with MobileMe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4586814
As someone who has been involved in the hiring of engineers at a large multinational corporation you might recognize, there is some truth to this sentiment.

Two of the main issues are that employers have been increasingly unwilling to train new employees, even if they're clearly eager, bright and have the proper basic credentials. Everyone wants to hire seasoned veterans, because logically those people reach a higher level of productivity much faster and require less development talent/skill set wise. While there is a specious logic to this, it's extremely short-sided. Everyone starts at the bottom and needs an opportunity to grow and get their initial experience from somewhere.

Even with experienced individuals, companies often don't want to pay the premium that substantial experience in a field will confer. There were some interesting news stories (don't remember the actual links, but they're easily google-able) about the large numbers of former NASA engineers laid off in the last year having tremendous difficultly finding new employment. The interesting part is that it wasn't that they weren't getting job offers, on the contrary many employers seemed to be eager to hire highly qualified individuals with 20+ years of high quality experience, they just didn't want to pay for it. These people were getting offers that were literally a fraction of the salaries they were commanding previously.

You can't have it both ways. If you want experience, pay for it. Or else invest in less experienced, but otherwise qualified talent.
Good example, definitely shows this is not "unprecedented" as OP says. Except maybe for the "extremely sorry" part :)
I think there's a nuance to "selling shovels during a goldrush" suggesting that shovel-sellers exploit the naive 49ers, the majority of whom will end up with no gold. That really isn't the point of the exercise.

Most of my consulting clients, and the people I build this for, are not in a gold-rush. They run profitable businesses selling software to other businesses. This is a business input for them which they have a clear path to profiting from. It is about as speculative an investment as a pizzeria buying basket of tomatoes.

If there is anyone hypothetically thinking of buying this basket of tomatoes because they want to aspirationally run a pizzeria one day, please don't. I don't want your money. Go read my blog. Found a pizzeria. Find customers for it. When you need this you'll know, and it will be a screamingly obvious mutual win.
Ask HN: Portugal tech scene
Hi, Portuguese people!

I'm a Brazilian software engineer, with Portuguese citizenship.

This week I was wondering: what about the Portuguese tech scene ?

I'm web developer for 5+ years and iOS for 2+ years and some recently plans and ideas didn't go well, so I was thinking about moving out and try new things.

There is a good startup scene in Portugal and are they hiring ?

[note: I'm not looking for a job right now, just researching my options to make plans]
"Whatever value there is to outsourcing IRC server setup, it isn't $10/mo"

If it takes me a couple of hours to set up an IRC server and 20 minutes of maintenance per month to keep it running, $10/month is a STEAL.

Not to mention... at anything less than $10/month you need one heck of a lot of paying customers for a service like this to cover its costs.
Raise prices (well, wait 2 days, so I can get my purchase through) -- I just sent a note to my boss that this is a no-brainer for the $999. And, we already do email campaigns like this, and probably do 80% of what you are going to suggest (at least), and we only have 3 people that would directly benefit from knowing this -- but, we think it would be a nice perk to employees to see the course.

Quote from co-worker: "It would be worth it even if we learn one new, non-generic thing to try" Of course, we sell software that goes for $x0,000+, so anything that moves the needle with leads ROFLstomps $999.

(I have been waiting to write a response to patio11 like this for a while)
I will give you that. My iPhone 4 is actually still on iOS 5 because I've felt hesitant and wanted to hear more feedback before I downloaded the upgrade. But I can honestly say that Google Maps has failed me and others many times, so it'd be interesting to know if the "failure" rates of the two mapping solutions are closer than one might expect, and that people are just posting the Apple ones online because iOS 6 is under more scrutiny at the moment.
Adium (and just about any other jabber client) works just fine with HipChat.
It was supposed to be launched weeks ago, and I was hoping for a Tuesday, but a) waterfall development sucks even more for videos than for software, b) we totally blew the ship date about four times as a consequence, and c) I step on a plane to America in ~12 hours so I wanted to get it launched prior to the next several weeks of conferences & etc.
I'd have to wonder if this is essentially that you learn to think then more about function than syntax for getting things done. Whereas if you just learn one language, you've learned perhaps how to do something- not what it really means to do that, or even have that functionality. In learning to think about a problem multiple ways- you really strengthen your knowledge of why over just how.
Look, matey, I know a dead startup when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
There are all kinds of problems with comparing one field to another, I'll agree. That's why I find this question so difficult to answer. It puts me in a position of "command central", trying to figure out what various professions "should" be paid, rather than letting the market do this.

I'm also comparing a small field tightly controlled by what I believe is a cartel with a large, generally open market. A PhD in CS is great to have, but there isn't an association of CS PhD's that can bar people with lower degrees (or no degree) from writing code.

Still, I think the comparison is more relevant than you do, because it's a reflection of what people who are academically talented can earn in other fields. If we're going to start talking about how there "should" be more supply of engineers at a current salary level, it does make sense to see what people can earn with degrees that have higher completion rates and often take considerably less time, with lighter undergraduate requirements to boot.
Actually, it's even worse than that - the judges weren't spectators, they were players, so they'd probably be too busy dodging to look closely at what the bots were doing.
Some of my friends moved from Microsoft to Google for both better pay and less bullshit.
And making up that 5% is going to take 95% of the work.
That's cool. I'll definitely buy your app in the future if you incorporate a Tasker plugin. http://tasker.dinglisch.net/developers.html
I had this problem on OS X too, but it had to do with login, not the shell. Try `touch ~/.hushlogin` and see if your shell starts up faster.
Let me refer to IE here. IE gets shipped with Windows. Many(actually, too many) users don't like using it and install & use Chrome, Firefox etc.

Let's hope that Apple plays fair game and lets Google, Bing and other Maps applications compete with Apple Maps. If Apple Maps app can't become/remain the most popular app in the category for any number of reasons, Apple Maps will get reduced to a product which is forced on to users.
There are various methods for installing 3rd party python libraries from PyPI [1], including easy_install, pip, or just extracting the tarball from PyPI and running `python setup install`.

1: http://pypi.python.org/pypi

Edit: There's also the official documentation page called "Installing Python Modules" which covers the last of those three methods: http://docs.python.org/install/index.html

Edit 2: and from the FAQs, http://docs.python.org/faq/library.html#general-library-ques...
I came here to post the same thing.

I use to play UT/CS competitively and worked for a startup that licensed our technology to id Software and Riot Games / League of Legends a long time ago.

UT2k4 was an amazing FPS game with a really steep learning curve. It's one of the only FPS games that I refer to as the "basketball" of online gaming. The diversity of movement, weapon tactics, and map control meant a seasoned gamer could really define their own style. But it also meant few people ever transitioned from public servers into competitive play because 1 pro could easily go Godlike and demolish an entire server, making it extremely frustrating and unexciting for casual gamers.

That being said, watching the videos included in this article signaled that these judges had no experience with UT2k4.

In a match with professional gamers, it wouldn't surprise me if those judges thought WE were the bots. 50%+ accuracy was not uncommon with prim shock or lightening gun.
As a Canadian working in the US, I think provide a very different of the tech industry than most Americans. The fact of the matter is that there are skilled people with technical degrees and proficiency around the world and the best way to hire those people is to not restrict yourself to hiring from your own town, city, country, etc.

The US generally has higher salaries for tech positions and, as someone else pointed out, salaries in Canada are 60-70% of the salaries in the US. Yet, a competent new grad from a top-tier US school or a competent new grad from a top-tier Canadian school can still effectively make 90-100k working for Microsoft or other big companies in Seattle or Silicon Valley. 90-100k for a new CS grad at Google? Seriously?

To me that definitely seems like market forces are driving up the prices of new hires. And let's not forget, we're talking about hiring someone with technical programming chops and not just your run-of-the-mill computer technician here. The fact of the matter is that truly skilled Software Engineers are in short supply and an infusion in STEM education to move people towards being competent Computer Scientist and Software Engineers is what Microsoft is saying with this.

They aren't giving pay cuts to foreign workers (or even people like me). We're getting paid the same salary because we have the skills. If the unemployment rate in the US is so high, it's simply because the unemployed simply do not have the skills necessary to do the job.
You write YOUR scripts in bash, it's not about my scripts though ;)

Also, it's annoying to constantly switch between zsh and bash when you are working on other servers over 50% of your time.
Caveat lector -- http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/help.php#comparecodeused

"This paper [pdf The Effect of Language Choice on Revision Control Systems] compares one scripting language, Python, with C in the domain of revision control systems, as large working implementations exist for both languages. It finds no clear evidence that scripting languages produce smaller systems…"

http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~migod/846/2011-Winter/projects/Simo...
Our Adsense account was abruptly shut down
The technology cycle generally goes:

1. A few big wins causes a huge bubble.

2. Tons of sub standard tech workers jump on the bandwagon for the money. In some cases these are outright con artists.

3. Average skill plummets as the market is flooded with cheap beginners and pretenders.

4. Market implodes. Everyone jumps off the sinking ship. Only people who stay are dedicated to the field regardless of market dynamics.

5. With all the pretenders and con-artists out of the way a few passionate geniuses build a few big wins. GOTO:1

Throughout this cycle the same people who support massive layoffs during downturns will wonder why there aren't thousands of engineers with 10 years experience during upswings.
Pretty cool. If anybody else wants to have a go, here's a useful resource.

http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.htm
From my experience, middle mouse clicks do not trigger the handler. Here's a fiddle to test: http://jsfiddle.net/GTWfn/. Try middle-clicking that link vs. left clicking.
Interactive Chicago Gang Map
A bit of a tangent, but whenever I hear people complaining about greedy professors scamming students into buying their books I think about how much more money many of these highly educated people (particularly STEM people) could be making if they chose not to teach. Most people didn't become professors for the money.

No, it's not good if educators price students out of education, no it's not simple to find funding for education, but we shouldn't expect our educators to be martyrs and then bemoan our declining global education rankings.
Asana from the inside out – A letter from Dustin Moskovitz to the company
Not just Canada, but really anywhere else. In any city with strong public universities there are strong pools of skilled tech workers. But tech companies are bizarrely centralized. Microsoft, etc, expects everyone to head over to their neck of the woods, and a lot of people just aren't going to do that.

Build substantially sized outputs in any of: Atlanta (Duke, GT, UNC), Philadelphia (Penn, Penn State), Boston (MIT/Harvard), Chicago (U of C, NU, U of I), Minneapolis (U of Minn.), Austin (U of T), etc, and you'd have access to a large pool of well-educated tech workers. These folks aren't going to leave their families behind and go to the left coast for jobs, but they'd love to work for a big well-known tech company.
How Accurate is Apple Maps in Canada's Largest Province?
For someone who isn't comfortable selling on HN you're doing a stellar job of it! Telling people that you don't want their money is a great strategy.
This is a 10 mile long sales page, down to the P.S. at the bottom. The copy itself, sounds genuine. However, the look of the page itself is a turn-off. Why did you decide to use this format as opposed to a simple, cut & dry page with a big "buy now" button?
"lower your standards"

If I understand your intent, I would prefer to read this as "widen your standards." You're not deciding to intake less capable people. Rather, you're deciding to intake people of more varied specific experience.
You are right -- typically courses in the $X k range need some interactive component -- but it needn't be a webinar.

You want 2k+? -- offer to edit 3 emails -- you probably wouldn't get enough takers to take too much time. Also, it price anchors the $249 and you can do it like Kickstarter and limit the # of sales of bonuses like this.

For $10k or more, write a first draft of emails and look over the final draft after they edit.
How do you do credit card processing without asking for a billing address? Your checkout process was very simple, makes my company's process look cumbersome.

Also, I noticed you don't use paypal. Could you elaborate on that choice? My guess is that you know your demographic is used to using credit cards, and it eliminates a step, but I'd like to confirm
Pure functional programming typically shifts thinking overhead from your brain as the programmer to the compiler (and the very design of the language). After using Haskell intensively for the past ~4 years, if I go back and write software in Python/Ruby/etc., I realize:

- How annoying it is to have to keep state (of objects, data structures, etc.) in mind for pipelines of computations

- How bad mutability in data structures is and how wonderful it is that in Haskell you NEVER have to worry about any of the data structures changing under your feet

- How nice it is that you can refactor massive codebases fearlessly, thanks to purity and the expressive type system

- How cool QuickCheck and unit testing is in Haskell vs. the mainstream OO languages

- That even Ruby feels lower level and more verbose after Haskell due to a lack of higher-order/first-class functions, among other things

- that if I'm using a dynamically typed language, it sucks that I'll likely get 1 - 10% of the performance I would get if I were using Haskell with no real special tricks

... the list goes on.
I really can't upvote this enough. They were selling the wrong thing.
I'm sure Python is used prevalently at Facebook, but if you search their career page for 'Python' you get zero results.

https://www.facebook.com/careers/search?q=python&locatio...

If you search for 'PHP' you get goose eggs too. Does anyone know if language names are intentionally filtered out of career searches at Facebook? 'GIS' and 'Logistics' work as search terms.
My suggestion for freelance sites: charge people for bidding on projects. $20 per bid will be just right. Refund these for the applicant who ends up being hired. You can decrease your commissions then to discourage people from circumventing your service, remaining profitable, and keep competitive by vastly increasing the value of your service to customers because they will not have to get through tons of spam applications. Qualified freelancers will flock to you because they will not be put off by crowds of low-quality, low-priced competitors.

There is of course another problem, which is harder to fix: spam projects. People who state that they want one thing and upon interview want to lure you into something else, like working for free, for some imaginary future profit sharing (always a scam), working fixed price with a vaguely defined project goals etc...
I hate that too, and here's a way to get that tab back: wait for the new page to load, and then the back button works, taking to back to the not-exactly-overwritten page.
Why does the article have in large letters "How hackers can access your credit card" with a video, when that has nothing to do with this attack?