skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is my preferred working style as well. Noise, as long as it is unrelated to what I am doing, doesn't bother me. I can work well in a library or a coffee shop (at least until someone recognizes me and comes up to say hello, which happens about once a week).

A crowded open plan office, with interesting and relevant conversations going on all around me, is detrimental to my productivity.
To be fair, none of those are worth close to $50B.
LINQ to Hive, part of the .NET SDK for Hadoop, is released
There are lots of ways to find a first client:

* Craiglist/eLance/oDesk ad
* Tell people you want to do consulting work. People know other people.
* Walk into a relevant business, after having found something could contribute, and ask them if they'd be interested in you helping them make money.

I've used all three. A local Kijiji ad has been surprisingly lucrative. Probably 10K over the past couple of years.

Referrals work great, as you're already proven.

The third one may sound iffy, but if you ACTUALLY can help, and you sound like you can, people will JUMP at the opportunity to have you help them. Happened to me multiple times.
> Real big government is the multiple layers of crony contractors you're talking about.
That's entirely the opposite of that the GOP means when they say Big Government. They mean large offices of government employees. They demonstrate a love of having a few contract managers and a slew of corny contractors.
Airbnb should build this
Surprisingly, there's very little uproar about it. Is it working for most of you as merchants?
Vivek, I tried signing up using Github but it threw the following error:

The change you wanted was rejected.

Maybe you tried to change something you didn't have access to.
To do this Charlie must use some insiders in AMD, but all they were probably fired soon after Rory Read became CEO.
In my experience, one driven, completely bought-in and trustworthy cofounder with a business and sales background instead of engineering can make all the difference in the world. To be in business, not just raise money and spend it, you need someone who thinks about revenue and sales the way you obsess on technology. To retain this kind of person, he/she is going to have to be a real owner the same way you are and live and die with the business.

A stock plan vesting over X years, allowing for the usual dilution and acceleration clauses, along with very substantial part ownership: somewhere between 1/3 and just under 1/2 of the original shares, is what "co-founder" means to me. An idea and even a MVP demo are useless without sales, marketing and operations if you actually plan to run a business.

However, if you get too many high stakeholders you will probably have enough negative attributes collectively that nothing will ever get full buy-in, and worse, you risk creating factions in leadership.
Does anyone know how Objective-C categories handle some of the issues brought up with Ruby 2.0 refinements?

It seems method swizzling is a far less touched trick than monkey patching, and the latest LLVM compiler throws a warning if a category overrides an existing method. I am curious about low level differences in how the two languages approach this problem.
I might be a little biased considering I own one, but many people find the click clack sound produced by a keyboard with Cherry MX Blue switches to be quite relaxing.
You think you could never get paid the value you bring to the table because you are imagining delivering services to the kinds of companies who would think to look at freelance markets to find the going rate for building code in the platforms you work in.

But the world is full of businesses with absolutely no technical competence at all, and so much operational competence in their own field (health services, benefits consulting, reinsurance, whole animal butchering, whatever) that they could take over the world if someone anywhere would just notice the opportunity to scale their processes (lead gen, customer retention, supply chain, market expansion, franchising, customer service) with basic technology.

To many, maybe most of those businesses, just being able to throw together a Bootstrap/Rails app makes you some kind of terrifying Wizard. If you can get over the urge to talk like a Wizard, and apply the customer service aptitude taught to every new employee at Nordstroms, you would probably find it's nowhere nearly as hard to capture the value of your work as you think it is.

I'd also note: if you're incapable of convincing a tech-impaired local business to consider a value-priced engagement that will make or save them millions of dollars, you may have a hard time building your own company(ies). Maybe not, though! Totally possible to skip that step.
I agree with the intent, but unless you're referring to something else (could well be), Extension Methods in c# aren't monkey patches. They're just semantic sugar. They didn't require new runtime support, just compiler support.

Which is a neat way to go about it.
Parse OS X SDK
It's extremely disappointing that the majority of (or is it all?) Android tablets do not have screens with a 4:3 aspect ratio. 16:10 is awkward and silly; 16:9 is something I won't even bother trying.
Nice discussion.
Thanks folks.
Dev Guide page gives 404 https://parse.com/docs/osx_guide
Hands-on with Intel's Next Unit of Computing
It's Timecube with nicer layout and a tragic, cautionary tale: mind your sanity. Anyone can lose it.
The Efficiency Obsession - The Industry
Turkey's PM: Israel carrying out 'terrorist acts'
I'd say the takeway from yipit is that they need to build a better product. If the engagement is that low after receiving 8k+ hits (resulting in 3 returning users), then it's probably not the right time to work on a marketing strategy. you need to go all the way back and work on the fundamentals of your product. 0.03% (as well as the 1.5% for users who successfully signed up) is an abysmal rate for returning users - no matter how you put it.
Apart from "be awesome", "know your abilities well", and "manage project scope carefully", do you have any advice on not choking? Have you ever had to scale back on delivering what was initially agreed upon?
If I might humbly disagree: The only thing you need to do to sell consulting engagements is to sell consulting engagements. There is no licensing department, no exam, and no Client Cabal which requires that you be blessed by a gatekeeper prior to doing this. I spent years coming up with reasons why I could not sell consulting engagements. In retrospect, that was sort of silly.

You know what I did when I was a Systems Engineer and had business cards saying it? I read stuff, talked to people, went to meetings, produced computer code which compiled, and wrote stuff. You know what I do for clients? I read stuff, talk to people, go to meetings, produce computer code which gets interpreted, and write stuff. I'm just really, really picky about what I'm working on. (See sibling comment by Thomas.)
Doesn't work to me... it just shows the booting screen, then it does nothing.
Gmail Now Supports Cherokee, Its First Native American Tribal Language
Show HN: This is how you commune with 'the internet'
True. Many companies have come up with solutions for this problem, including VMs. But imagine having a VM for every project without the need to download or distribute them. That's what Cloud9 offers~
Better examples:

5.days.ago

User.where(:age.gt => 5)
Wow...I'm impressed. I just spent a few minutes setting up an account and I was blown away by your execution on the editor alone. I haven't even tried using the other features yet. The screenshots made it look very similar to SublimeText2 and I wondered how smooth it would be. Vim mode, zen mode, even the find options were very similar. I was able to do everything I expected to do, even down to getting the theme just right.

It's the first time I thought I could use a web-based editor. That's a big deal. Well done!
There was also a time you could barely walk.

Even if you have social anxiety, or are somewhere on the autistic spectrum, you can still improve your social skills. Because they are skills, not traits. You can improve them through practice. It will be difficult, of course, if you have a problem such as social anxiety. But consider seeking help for that, if it is a problem. It can improve your life immensely - and not just professionally.
Here's an idea on how Apple can "win."

The phone market is quickly turning into a mature business like the PC is today. Essentially all of the major innovation on the hardware side is done and the software side will be where people choose their phone/tablet.

IOS has the best apps, period. Apple needs this to always be the case. Just like people buy Windows because of its apps (games, etc.)

Developers make more money on the IOS platform (by far) than any other. Apple needs this to always be the case.

I submit that Apple needs to drop the commission rate for apps sales from 30% to some value approaching zero. This will
starve Android/Win8/BB of developer mind share.

Developers will write great apps, make more money and users will pick the IOS platform because it has the apps (games) they want.
Yes and no. I block ads, but when I find a good article I reshare the link to friends/followers who do not block ads. If only two of them view the content and ads, it's a net positive for the publisher to let me view the article.

As a side note, I disagree with your choice of word “abusing”. How about “disrupting”? No one has an inherent right to make money.
An iPBX in an Amazon Cloud? A disaster recovery story
added info: flexible spending arrangements (health FSAs) are capped at $2,500 for 2013. This is a rather large drop and might require you to do some additional budgeting this year.
Don't forget that Google has a better advertising than Bing so they can offer more for the search deals. They can easily overbid Bing if Microsoft doesn't blow money into it again.

When there are a lot of players, they have the upper hand in bidding.
New Android & iOS app - Online board game
Face detection & recognition on iOS
I'm really against the second-screen space. I feel like it's this weird industry where broadcasters, who have checks to spend, want this tech that users tend to avoid. Users like interacting in the places where they already interact, with the people they already know. Getting them to buy-in to a specific place to interact isn't that compelling.

Maybe try a gameshow via iPad, and you might have something pretty compelling. 1 vs 100 would actually be pretty amazing if you could pull off the backend video infrastructure needed.

And why not make it 1 vs 1,000,000... and have each member of the mob be worth $1.
this is perfect timing. We just spent the weekend getting an app deployed on heroku for desktop view. thanks!

lumawake.us
Ask HN: Is there anything like Reddit Enhancement Suite for Hacker News?
Yeah, I'm quite surprised to hear people complain about the lack of inflight wifi in the US. American carriers are pretty far ahead of carriers in other countries on this.
The post was loosely based on our experience years ago. We now have many users and our conversion rates are much higher.

I just wanted people to know that getting some PR isn't the finish line, it's the start of the race.
Hey thanks.

I make extensive use of http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/ (a godsend for hackers), though I use it more as a style-guide and rebuild most parts myself.

and for icons:

http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/

The font is "Open Sans": http://www.google.com/webfonts

The ui/ux evolved in this app, which means I started with the bare minimum requirements (it looked bad. really bad) and continually improved the "look & feel" as needed. No photoshop involved.

It's still not finished, but it has come a long way :)
Memoto Lifelogging Camera by Memoto
Well, I would take some issue with the idea that a typical $200/hour consultant is billing $200/hour for 40 hours a week and taking that much home (taxes not withstanding). A lot of time gets eaten up in client relations, contract negotiations, skill development, etc... none of which is typically billed for. I've seen agency types bill $200 or higher an hour and log 2000+ hours in a year, but the agency is taking a huge chunk of that money.

For me, Magento (e-commerce) is the open source system that I lucked into. I got involved with it about 4 yeas ago which gives me a significant jump on the majority of devs I encounter. Besides being slightly ahead of the game, Magento has a reasonable learning curve that scares off a lot of the wordpress-eque devs and lots of more competent devs seem to thumb their nose at e-commerce, so the market isn't flooding.
If you're really hardcore about canceling noise I would recommend buying a pair of actual earmuffs, not headphones, and wearing those over a pair of earbuds. It's what StarCraft 2 pro gamers do to ensure they can think and concentrate when they compete in front of large audiences.
On the bright side of javert's arguments, if we allowed for perpetual copyright, Greece would no longer have a debt problem, since it could be argued that every modern western story is derived from a Greek epic (not to mention all the royalties for the Greek language used in the New Testament).
We built Basecamp while I was working from Copenhagen, Denmark. I currently live and work and wrote that piece from Spain. Out of some 35 people, only about a third has base in Chicago. Out of that third, maybe half of them go to the office every day.
Five Things Every Windows User Should Know | PCWorld
How do you account for the fact that every story is derived from some other story? Why should Disney get to exploit Grimm's stories, but nobody can exploit Disney's?
Sir, the odiousness of your arguments is exceeded only by their selfishness.

Thank you. I consider selfishness a virtue. (However, contrary to what society has taught you, my selfishness does not hurt anybody else as long as I go about it in a rational way.)

Please do explain how an idea, which can be copied at no cost and used to enrich the receiver, should be held in same esteem as a physical good

I specifically said in an ancestor comment to this one that I don't believe the position I've taken on copyright would apply to "ideas."
If you are taking requests, Go would be nice as well.
It's horribly irritating, I agree, but Google gives one the choice of picking the new "dynamic" template that's active there now, or old templates of which each and every one looks like it came from 2003.
Given the number of stories that TechCrunch writes per day I fully expect my dog's next poop to be covered at some point.

There is no point even thinking about TechCrunch.
Have you considered remote classes on how to prevent the messes you have been called in to clean up?

Or even specialize in when shit hits the fan? I mean the advice to startups are always 'find a customer with their hair on fire'.
Ultrabook or a tablet? Which one to choose?
That is true for most environments, but not necessarily all of them. I was going to bring up examples, but I found it funny that the only ones I thought of were probably NSFW. The work environment isn't really a place for either though.
i'm pretty sure that whole article is a troll atempt to make people go check out the "webmail" service on goatse.cx... i found muself urging to check the site out several times while reading it, but will not. fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.

...the lenghts some trolls will go.

-- gcb@lemonparty.com
My impression is the same as yours--that this space is currently being driven by broadcasters and advertisers. Bringing actually fun, consumer-happiness focused interactivity to television (you gave a great example) sounds disruptive.
Almost anything is daunting when taken as a whole, but when broken down into smaller steps becomes much more approachable. Nice writeup.

On a somewhat related note: When cross-site requests are turned off the text renders as black text with white dropshadow on red background which is very, very hard to read. This may or may not be under your control, but I would support the idea of graceful degradation - if the bells and whistles are turned off, the text should render as black on white or some such high contrast thing. Thanks.
This is how I first learned about CSS circa 2001. More importantly, you could provide your browser user-defined CSS.

My first entry? Making any link from goatse.cx struck-out and brown.
I still use Ctrl+Insert, Shift+Insert =)
I agree. Also, it turns out that improving their product involves marketing. I went to the site and I had no idea why I would want to sign up. How is it different/better than all the existing coupon/deal sites? The "about" link is below the fold, and on my laptop screen I had no way of knowing that there was anything to scroll down to. Chrome doesn't show a scroll bar until you try to scroll.
And no small part of that negative sentiment, at least for some of the population, seems to stem from the same "growing pains" that accompany the early steps of any skill set.

Socializing can turn into an enjoyable activity over time, just like how a multiplayer game turns fun once you get past the newbie mistakes.
Scalable Databases for Startups
Lacquerous - Like NetFlix but with nail polish
that's encouraging to hear. so what did you do to increase conversion rates? work on the landing page, change your product or something else?
Parse sounds awesome. I'm learning iOS development atm... I definitely need to look into this.

If you are to integrate it with a web app (like Instagram also is a webapp now), would you still use parse then? How would that work out?
Wondering how legal that is, since the video the same site posted is now removed from youtube due to copyright reasons

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/14/mlk-jr-i-have-a-dre...
This is probably the most comprehensive article about the background to this situation and reasoning as to why McAfee seems to be losing his mind: http://gizmodo.com/5960138/the-crazy-secret-journal-of-john-...
I never would've guessed that the software industry would produce such engrossing real-time dramas. Take Kim Dotcom, John McAfee, throw in Elon Musk for good measure (maybe Branson too) and you're well into comic book territory.
Thanks for the kind words! We try really hard to make the concept of an online IDE move beyond just editing and saving files in a browser.

Best of all, unlike ST2, we're open source: https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9
"I'm sure AMD would be more than happy to sell their position to any would-be competitor, if it's transferable."

It's almost certainly not transferable to the extent allowed by law, given the trouble Intel caused just over AMD spinning off their fab business.
Samsung would lose access to Google Maps, Gmail, and Google Play among others. Their sales would be devastated.
Which part comes across to you like the ravings of a madman? If it is such - and to be sure, I can't claim to know it isn't - then in my opinion he's doing a good job of appearing sane.

Whether or not it is a cautionary tale about minding your sanity, I think it's also a cautionary tale about not believing everything you read in the press. Until fifteen minutes ago I held the belief that McAfee had committed the crime of which he is accused; thinking about now I realize I held that belief based on essentially no actual evidence. I'm not saying I now believe his side of the story instead. I have no real evidence for that either (and I don't have time to follow up all the links he presented right now). My current conclusion is that at this time I don't know enough of the facts to judge either way.
Supergrid Project to Bring African Solar Power to Europe Runs Into Trouble
AAPL has had plenty of big stock drops in the last decade:

http://www.asymco.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Screen-Shot...

Apple makes more money now than it ever has, so the current drop isn't necessarily more or less predictive than the previous drops have been.
The Four Dimensions of Customer Value
That's cool.

Is there any examples out there on how to integrate it with a web-app as well?

What's the big advantage in relation to Parse? I love Heroku, but Parse seems like a really smooth solution for iOS/Mac.
Who's Next to Run Intel? A Look at Internal and External Contenders
This is Apple's opportunity to get involved. I love that I can iMessage from my laptop while on Southwest WiFi. They need to extend it to the phone.

Idea #1: Picture there being two WiFi networks on a plane: Internet Access and iMessage. Connect to iMessage from your iPhone/iPad, let Apple charge your iTunes account if necessary, then conveniently text from your phone. Great for the low-bandwidth situation they're limited by. [yes, you could pay using GoGo etc from your mobile phone and do this, but few know about it and the UX stinks]

Idea #2: Flight trackers as a landing page are nice, but get companies to pay a buck or two to put their product or commercial on your connection page to further subsidize the cost. Picture even a Google/Facebook ad model where you could target your ad to the person's demographic based on their gender and DOB from their frequent flier number.

Idea #3: For the love of God please do a better job throttling and/or blocking bandwidth hogs until the tech is better. Some guy sitting next to me trying to synch 20GB on Dropbox just doesn't seem good for the rest of the plane while my Southwest connection is too slow to load Gmail.
Take a listen to the podcast Patrick mentions in the P.S. Eric and I have had a lot of success in offering free seminars to local business leaders (e.g., "How to find customers online"), and use the opportunity to also create a networking mixer - centered around you, where people are talking about you and what you had to say afterward.

It's one of the easiest ways to build credibility and a pool of clients (direct or sources of referrals) I've come across.
there's no qualitative distinction between property rights and e.g. a right to healthcare.

There is. A rational person pursuing his own good simply wants to be protected from the initiation of force, whence arises "negative rights," such as property rights, and any other legitimate right (this was the original meaning of the word "right" in this context).

Any "positive right" (a right requiring the initiation of force) is not only qualitatively different (in that it requires the initiation of force instead of arising because the initiaition of force is barred), it is not a legitimate right.

Copyright law does not make individuals more free, quite the opposite.

Disagree.

It gives a small number of powerful organizations the power to control the much larger number of individuals who would want to create derivative works.

That's quite obviously untrue, unless you think that Time Warner owning Harry Potter counts as "control" or "oppression", or if you have a too-expansive view of copyright (e.g., conflating it with patents).

Every aspect of modern life is made possible by others serving the common good.

Most good aspect of modern life comes from people serving themselves; benefitng the common good is a nice side-effect.

And frankly, society would be better off without the "creativity" of those who are producing works just for the paycheck.

Really? That's an incredibly destructive and anti-life point of view.
So your point is that OEMs will ship Android phones with Google services because they're better than alternatives? What if Microsoft pays Samsung to ship their phones with Bing, and they're still wildly successful? How does being the developer of Android OS help Google reach search customers? If the most successful Android OEMs were to ditch Google services for whatever reason, then Android OS development costs would be better spent directly paying OEMs to ship with Google services, and Google would have little reason to keep sponsoring Android's development.
Android game developer makes $30 million in 6 months