skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your team should work like an open source project
Anyone know if he's still honoring the names we reserved back during the original SomethingAwful thread?
Another threat
- They might as well end up dead somewhere. Extreme but not unimaginable.
What problem does monkey patching solve? It seems to only add complexity onto the already complex nature of inheritance. What do I gain by adding camelize to String vs. using MyModule.camelize?
BlackBerry 10 gets demoed in a 10 minute video
This looks awesome.

What would you do if you wanted to create a web-app version of your mobile app as well?

Would you hook it up to the api that is generated?
Who the hell cares? You got 400 people you otherwise wouldn't have.
This is something I view along with the "Ship it" idea. When I work on any project, I try to think of what the minimum is for the project to reach the real alpha stage. Where it is at least usable. Only then do I begin to entertain the various notes I have made on additional features or details.

I always go back to the sentence: "The best camera is the one you have". Finishing something and getting it out, no matter how much it lacks in terms of features, is important. The best way to finish is to keep it simple (or small).
Apparently the Aussies are very good at this kind of thing. If you look up their anti-drunk driving commercials you see how they really care about the effectiveness if these things.
What do I do after getting a teeny bit of traction?
A non-programmer guy bootstrapped a school that made over $1M in its first year.
This looks like competition for Parse (and a few others I guess, but Parse was the first one I heard of).
However I have tried neither. Is there anyone who's tried both? What are their pros/cons?
I'm not great with stock charts, but it looks like the stock has fallen from $630 to $550 since October.
If you do it right, you are never getting paid the value you provide. The model is always: generate value, get a slice of that, repeat. Think of a very rich person; if this person is so rich, it is because s/he provided much more value to others than the value it captured for him or herself. (Except for conmen)
I can see a tagline like:

<name>@goatse.cx - When you really want to say where your words are coming from . . . .

I cringe at the thought of someone actually using an account there. . . .
>Musk said it was important that societies create an environment where it’s “important it’s seen as a socially desirable thing to be an entrepreneur.”

I think this is something whose importance is hard to fathom when living in hot startup ecosystems. When I was living in Japan, I was shocked at how people saw entrepreneurship in an undesirable light. In fact, new graduate polls showed that the most desirable type of profession was a public sector worker, followed by megacorp employee, then SME employee. Entrepreneur was literally at the bottom of the ladder [1].

This is in sharp contrast to the States, where polls show that people look up to and want to become entrepreneurs (the "start ups are cool" mentality) and see public sector workers as the most undesirable type of employment [2].

It's hard to live a life that isn't widely socially accepted, and having a society that looks favorably upon entrepreneurship or sole proprietorships is hugely important for giving people the peace of mind and confidence to embark on their individual paths [3]. Say what you will about the current proliferation of startups, but anything that promotes the long term social acceptability of starting a company is a net positive in the long run for making it easier for people to take the plunge themselves in the future.

Our environment skews our perspective, and our perspective determines what we think is possible. We tend to believe in the triumph of the individual spirit and determination over mental hurdles, but it's a rare specimen that has the both the hard skills to create something great and the mental power to actually convince themselves to do so against conventional wisdom. Don't you that that it'd be desirable to reduce the mental hurdles so that those with different mental predispositions can roam freely?

[1] I think doctor/lawyer/accountant were omitted because there are very few who enter these professions each year and is statistically somewhat irrelevant.

[2] This isn't to say that working in the public sector is actually a bad gig or not useful, but public perception does matter in many ways in attracting talent.

[3] In fact, patio11's lifestyle is generally derided in Japan, even though us HN'ers look up to the example he sets both in terms of skills and lifestyle. I have friends who work in the same city that patio11 used to (and perhaps even in the same industry...) who cannot get themselves to leave their megacorp jobs even though they have mid-5-figure income streams from their side gigs that they could obviously grow if they resigned from their day jobs and committed themselves to it. Their reasoning? They fear that they would no longer be accepted by society without said megacorp job. You need supreme confidence in your self worth to live without the "social proof" of an establishment on your shoulder in this culture, and it's a disservice to the world that great talent remains locked up because of this.
...whaaaat a neckbeard. really, what sane commentator says unequivocally to not buy something because of (present, yes, and bothersome, yes) but niggling issues that really don't interfere with the core functionalities of an operating system?
On the other hand, if you can pull in $200/hr consistently (i.e. your yearly income isn't far from $400k before taxes) for at least half a decade, you can save up enough to retire early with a modest standard of living. But as has been said, consistency is harder for these things.

What open source projects have you seen people make good chunks of change from just knowing how to work them? http://www.pentaho.com/ is one I've seen. Also people who know the AWS stack can make a good chunk of change migrating someone's software to the Cloud.
And the answer to, "Why won't people share" is probably because people are extremely tired of automated 4square-like notices. I know I instantly unfollow anyone from Twitter if I see a 4square notice. If I started seeing yipit ones I bet I would react the same way.
Absolutely--you can use the same API without modification to write a web, Android, or Mac client.
The Sprawling Guide to Content Marketing that Made Us $10,000
How do you make business acquaintances? I have a hard enough time leaving the house.
Dear Sir,

I wish to protest the previous letter, which makes all people who type WORDS in CAPITALS seem INSANE. Many of my friends type like this, and only a few of them are RANTING LUNATICS.

Yours sincerely,

Major Charles Smith, Deceased (Mrs.)
Generally speaking, there's always a market for expertise. If that's your area of expertise and are markedly better at it than the next guy, there's a market for it. The key is in figuring out the niche

"I can train your people to build better APIs than you have now, and hence enable much better engagement from the customers of your API" -- that's a value proposition, and people are willing to pay for it.

"I can build your company's RESTful APIs to better engage your developer community" -- that's a totally different one in both feel and purpose, but one that you'd likely find customers for.

The only thing you need to do is be able to back up those claims, be personable, and ideally, be able to demonstrate how much value you can add to your customers, in dollar terms, how they would benefit from your services.

If you don't believe there to be value, then you just need to think about what your company is paying you for now (assuming employment), and how they're able to justify said employment and still make a profit.
After launch - it was about 3-4 months before we started growing at all. There was definitely a hard gruel at the start to get noticed and gain trust, and that's not say it's gotten easier!

We then introduced referrals, and that's probably the reason for our steady growth. The more users we have, the more we grow, whereas marketing can only ever do so much and your just optimising your user acquisition cost all the time.
Documenting a startup journey from the beginning
What would you do if every website blocked you from visiting them? What would you do if every site online started charging money to view their content?

To me, it is useful to extending these ideas to their logical extreme to see what type of internet I would want to use. And for me, I would much rather not have to pay a subscription to view content, but instead see a few ads in exchange for viewing content.

On the site I run, which discusses office design projects and trends, my goal is to be much more magazine-like so that seeing an ad for a new office chair is basically the same as seeing content. Because my readers are interested in office design and learning about new products, seeing an ad for a new chair is not a negative experience.
Geeks and privilege
Kudos on making a slick looking product. I'd say that if your UI was less like GMail, I'd consider using it. If it was just that, a UI for any web mail from any domain, like a Mail.app for the web, I'd definitely pay for it.

And to anyone who says they use Gmail for Security: They're an advertising company who openly mines and sells your personal data. Exactly how is that safe?

Keep on working man. Doing good.
Excellent article.

1. I would be interested in learning more about what a programmer brings to the table in the consulting field. I mean, besides raw programming knowledge. The OP mentions Fog Creek as one of his first clients, a place that obviously is not short on programming insights. What does a consultant with programming chops bring that a non-programmer doesn't? Better ideas? Better tailored ideas?

2) Pedantic alert: "peek" is spelled as "peak" in the introduction.
These posts make me want to write a Startup FAQ:

Q: How do I get on Techcrunch:

A: Ignore Techcrunch. Don't waste brain cycles on them. If they cover you on their own, great. It almost certainly won't do anything to improve your odds of success, but it probably can't hurt. A better question to ask is: how do I design and implement the right marketing strategy for my startup?
Took the words right out of my mouth. :)
Azure IaaS is even more expensive on a small scale (though it does get cheaper as you scale up). Azure PaaS would fit the bill very nicely, but someone at MS completely dropped the ball: you have no option of using SSL + your own domain!

You can have either your own domain name or SSL w/ their subdomain.

Who the bleep would settle for that? What kind of "enterprise solution" is this?
Trading Away our Digital Rights: More Nations Join TPP
I would imagine that exposing yourself to noise (on high volume?) 18 hours a day would cause permanent hearing damage.
How userfox sends & tracks emails in their Ruby app using the Mailgun API
C# had an easier time here, though, because it's statically typed. Extension methods rely entirely on static types and static binding.

Getting normal method call syntax while still being lexically scoped like extension methods without opening the monkey-patching can of worms is still an open research area as far as I know. I know of classboxes, a proposal for something similar to ES Harmony (that they ended up passing on) and Ruby refinements, and that's pretty much it.
Why Pro Gamers Don't Play Call of Duty
It's totally doable. You'll probably start off with a lower hourly at first, but you can quickly establish a higher rate and then eventually a consistent weekly as patio11 described. Early in college, I found the best way to find my true hourly rate was through project-based pricing with well defined scopes. The scope needs to be clear and you have to prevent any scope creep, as that will negatively affect your rate. Once you've gone through a project or two this way, you will have established a pretty good reputation with your clients, which would let you bill out at the real rate. After that you would be free to continue billing at an hourly or make the jump into weekly rates.
Sure, it is hard to write a C++ compiler. Yet neither the C++98 standard nor TR1 fixed the template/right problem, despite it being a major source of headaches among C++ programmers, because compiler writers complained about the complexity it would have added to the grammar. It was not until the majority of commonly-used C++ compilers began to emit a suggestion about the problem that the committee finally fixed it in C++11, and even then, the committee had to convince compiler writers that it was a good idea. That same pattern of behavior can be seen with the double exception faults: compiler writers were unwilling to put in the effort needed to catch an exception before the stack is unwound (without making compiled code slower), and so instead the standard was updated to further cement the idea that destructors should never throw exceptions.

No, it is not purely for compiler writers, but compiler writers and library implementors are a powerful group on the standards committee.
For sending out "letterhead" documents, embrace the medium instead and have some nice HTML email templates made. If you must, send PDFs.

For collaboration workflows, use wiki-style platforms.
> Ars spoke with the webmaster behind the reborn goatse.cx site, whom we'll call "Bob.

that one cracked me up. for the uninitiated, "bob goatse" was one of the names people used to refer to the goatse guy.
Google+ Should Have Been Marketed for Organizations/Work
Some users think:

"foo".camelize

reads better than:

MyModule.camelize "foo"
This meme about there being "contractors/freelancers" and then "consultants" is toxic.

In the markets that Patrick and Jason Cohen and Brennan Dunn are talking about, almost the entire difference between "freelancer" and "consultant" is "how you price engagements".

It is true that consultants value-price engagements, so that they collect a percentage of the revenue or cost-savings derived from their code instead of a scaled hourly rate. And it's true that to do this, consultants have to think about the actual business context of their code, and be able to confidently propose the value of that code to a real business.

But that's where the differences end! Patrick is writing code on his engagements. He's using the same problem-solving methods you're using. On a day-to-day basis actually delivering for clients, he's writing code to generic metrics and then optimize them. The only thing he does differently from you is that he chooses to work on metrics where he knows he can make a case for revenue directly attributable to the metric.

It does not take a "big business win" or an Ivy education (WAT?) to "consult" for clients as opposed to "contracting" for them. You don't even have to be particularly attentive to your clients businesses, because so many people have built and written up methodologies for using code to make money for businesses; you can literally start by reading up on those, and offering them to clients who don't already do them. How many of your freelance gigs were for clients with sophisticated email marketing systems? How hard do you think it is to send triggered email updates to clients? Start there.
"How early can I start doing this?"

Read the book Million Dollar Consulting. It pretty much gives a step-by-step guide, from lead gen to writing proposals to how to bill by value:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_19?url=search-alias...

It repeats itself a lot and is generally poorly written, but there's still a reason why it's been the top consulting book for decades.
How did you make the layout? Graphics design is my biggest weakness, all my webapps look like the design is made in Paint. And yours is so clean, the fonts are good, everything looks so professional.
And once they get around to adding std::make_unique (or you add it to your codebase yourself), you won't even need new there either.
Elon Musk is an inspiration - he looks at big, real world problems and solves for them instead of spinning his wheels on the next shiny app. Especially appreciate his views on too many people going into finance or law rather than science and engineering.

Poor editing in this article, if anyone finds a video of the original interview please post - tried to search for it but no luck.
Fair point, but what I was trying to say, and did not said because I only wrote a single small paragraph, is that I fear a nationalistic bill passing in American congress that basically only allows american companies/scientific projects using SpaceX services.

About scientific projects I doubt it will ever happen because you can simply find a group of American researchers to collaborate who probably would be open if the research advance their field, about companies I'm less sure, they can simply put extra regulations because of idiotic nationalism, for example do not allow a German company to use a Falcon rocket because it has sold some type of cheap telecommunications equipment to Cuba for example.

I think no one that is sane will enjoy SpaceX doing clearance sales of old rockets to warlords in Somalia.

EDIT: As I understand SpaceX do not intend to sell rockets but just the service of having rockets and selling launches. But I can be wrong about that.
This isn't a purely technical pros/cons, but still a good way of looking at them both:

- They are both well backed (Heroku by Salesforce money/profits, Parse by great investors), have awesome founders, talented employees, and are both YC companies.

- Parse is pretty much 100% mobile focused. This is their bread and butter.

- Heroku is Polyglot and spans dozens of platforms on multiple OS's, with no real focus.

I think this comes down to where you run the rest of your stack, how tightly you want things integrated, and which service is the easiest to use and most reliable. Is mobile 99% of what you do? Parse is probably the best choice. Is mobile 25% of your business and you're already using Heroku for everything else? I could go either way here. We use Heroku and AWS to drive 100% of our platform, but we're also not mobile (yet). I personally know the Parse guys and they are outstanding at what they do and growing at a phenomenal rate, so when we do dive into mobile I'll likely be giving them a shot first.
Show HN: db_leftovers: Better Indexes and Constraints for Rails
If you write Ruby and go to a SFRuby Meetup, you will learn quickly that even if you are looking for work it is quite annoying to say you are looking for work, as the recruiters swarm in like vultures to fresh carrion.
Maybe I'm just not used to that kind of consulting. eCommerce is much closer to the real dollars than web services.
Any HN readers in Houston,TX?
Hi HN readers, I'm in search of a few good developers friends in Houston, Texas. I haven't seen much developing vs designing here in Houston, but I know it can't just be me here.
> Go to conferences. ... Find conferences that relate to it and attend... later, speak at said conferences.

Well, I'm screwed. I can barely speak in private or deal with people.

Perhaps someone else can use your advice, though.
Yes, it's only about four times that.
I can reveal that right now. The 'other side' figured they were dealing with a scared kid that could be easily frightened and made to collapse under pressure.

They did not count on a group of 'filthy foreigners' to do as much as they could to balance the equation and to throw a spanner in the works.

Compared to filthy rich and very influential within India we could have still lost the case, were it not for a lawyer that was willing to go over and beyond the call of duty and a staunch cadre of supporters. I'm happy with the outcome but all too aware of how close a call it really was.

The only thing that helped to identify a good lawyer was to find one that didn't start off with how much their retainer would be but to find one that started to ask pertinent questions and that set aside his schedule instantly. That was still taking a chance but fortunately that turned out to be the right choice.

Let's take this to email, j@ww.com
That is an interesting assertion. While it is true that Intel has great fabrication chops, their biggest competitor in that space, Samsung, makes ARM chips. There is an outside possibility that AMD gets into the ARM space, gets some traction and Samsung brings their manufacturing muscle to bear and captures the 'high' end.

It is interesting to understand the 'Intel monopoly' [1] and how it came to be. I worked at Intel in the mid-80's and basically IBM 'created' a personal computer market by bringing their reputation to the market, Microsoft provided the software, and rigid compatibility was demanded by the market to maximize software re-use (software and training has always been the biggest 'cost' of switching instruction set architectures). Early on Intel was cross licensing that 8086 architecture with partners to get market share against the 68000 architecture but later they clawed back a lot of the licenses.

The requirement that is be 'windows compatible' created a giant moat around the x86 instruction set architecture. That moat wasn't officially breached until the early 2000's when AMD announced their Sledgehammer (aka Opeteron) AMD64 architecture. Here was an architecture that was not Windows compatible (windows didn't really support 64 bit chips until Windows 7) and yet AMD managed some big design wins in servers because of Linux and OEMs who could adapt quickly to the new extensions. Intel finally caved and shipped the AMD extensions in their own chips, even though they knew it was probably the end of the Itanium as a viable product.

Now AMD announces an ARM server chip, they have some expectation that it will gain some market share because they did it with Opteron. They are even calling it an Opteron perhaps as a nod to that history. They will be able to innovate in the peripheral chips because all off the 'bets' are off in terms of what has to be in the 'south bridge'. They can do more creative memory interconnects because they aren't constrained by folks expecting the Intel stuff.

And here is the interesting thing, there are easily 10x the ARM licensees than the x86 licensees. That pretty much guarantees a lot of competition and price pressure.

The strategic questions are these:

Can AMD establish a 'server' standard? Something like the PC spec but for ARM chips, a minimum set of things that will always be there and a way to find out what optional things are there. This enables shipping a generic kernel that boots on everything and customizes itself to the environment.

Can AMD survive the ingress of a number of other players earlier in the life cycle rather than later. If they are getting traction expect competitive chips in 12 months rather than 24 or 36 months.

What is Intel's "Thermonuclear war" strategy and would they be willing to pull that trigger. Unlike Apple's Android antagonists, AMD is not well positioned to survive a huge litigation punch.

We'll see of course, the game is afoot as Sherlock Holmes would say. I'm hopeful that we crack this thing open and start innovating again.
High Resolution Standard
The game is giving a 503.
Mine Kafon: A Low Cost Solution to Landmine Clearance
“In the year 2000… you will be able to instantly replicate your colleague’s dev environment on your own computer.”

Non issue, most companies use VMs for their dev environments for this reason among others.
Payment issues with Mastercard. 2Checkout unable to fix the issue in 4 weeks
I'd of course been wanting to move to something less proprietary than Gmail for a while. The recent Gmail suckiness finally prompted me to switch to Roundcube (hosted by Gandi) a few months ago. Your new thing seems as cluttered as Gmail, so I wouldn't use it.