skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No the problem is needing docs. Emacs is software out of a different age of computing where it was not considered a dick move to make people read documentation for changing the color scheme. These times are over but people who got used to it or have acquired mastery of the editor obviously do not feel the pain in that.

I used emacs for 10 years and know lisp quite well but I'm a textmate user now. There are a lot of us.
now they think he shits gold

What's worse is that he thinks he shits gold... I've noticed that certain personalities tend to go this way as they learn something well - they use their knowledge it to feel better about themselves, as if the entire point of learning was to make up for insecurities. Once they know enough to sound knowledgeable, they stop learning.

The worst thing about this is, I think, that it becomes impossible to hire people smarter than them.
> It doesn't matter if they've only got a few % market share, that's just the way it works.

Well, no. I used to share your opinion on this, but not anymore. The thing is, supporting a certain browser costs time and (therefore) money. At some point, the revenue earned from a certain browser gets below the costs of supporting it.

As an Opera user, I do encounter sites that don't work. Though it happens rarely, it does annoy me. But I do understand the choice made.

As for IE6: of the mainstream browsers it's the one holding back web developers on the most points. Newer browsers have many features that would break IE6 if used. That's where the anger and annoyance with IE6 comes from. Even if it is irrational, it is understandable.

Personally, I love initiatives like this (even though this is the gazillionth "badger IE6 users" Javascript out there) and I hope many people join them, but I won't join them myself. I hope it speeds up the marginalization of IE6, so I can stop supporting it. Currently, the browser is just making me too much money to ignore. Even if it annoys me...
Freelance. Salary-wise, $1250 a week is about $62K per year which anyone with a pulse can get in silicon valley.
Ask HN: When, and why, did society lose its respect for culture?
I look around with disdain. Why is culture a means rather than an end?
As an Indian living in Bangalore, I feel odd saying this, since I know that the myth of the "substandard outsourced coder" is largely just that - a myth IF you know what you are doing, but that said, but do not use sites like rentacoder or try to save money by outsourcing unless you personally know someone good.

Find out the market rates for a good developer in your area and pay a decent wage commensurate with the time taken to write good software (2500 $ isn't much even here in Bangalore, I think the guys is just taking you for a ride, unless the software is very simple in which case it can be rewritten trivially) .

Try to meet up with the developer every 3 or 4 days (or at least talk on the phone) and as someone mentioned here, own the repository he checks into.

Good Luck!
Many crimes are not solved only by DNA. It's far from being the perfect crime. They can't prove their guilt now, but having narrowed the list of suspect, I think the police has now a good chance of finding further evidence and convict the perpetrators.
If you sign on an adviser, you might give them a comparable percentage for $0K. It's worth it in the right cases.
Coding War Games Definition (need your views)
Don't. Restart from scratch. If you continue with this programmer, he'll never support your code anyway.
What precisely is transferred depends on the contract and the legal jurisdiction.

I have some clients that were gypped for a lot more than USD2.5k - they thought they were getting the IP and instead they were getting a non-transferable license to use (and the software was buggy and had - appallingly - developer backdoors and remote off-switches).

Explicit terms in contracts is a very smart move; don't assume anything about what the local version of contract and tort law will deliver to you.

Of course, off-shored development makes it all a bit more complicated - which party actually holds source code and can be sued? It's a bit of a mine-field.
Making influential people into stake holders is always a good thing. It would be worth it for $0, in fact, it might be worth paying Y Combinator to take your stock.
I believe it was the idea that: "Americans don't like tie games" combined with 4-on-4 hockey and shoot-outs will create many more short exciting scenarios that can be shown as news clips on sports shows.
> Simple...sue him.

That's probably not going to help the OP achieve what he really wants, getting his software finished.

The programmer he hired agreed to do the work for about $8 / hour. Not sure a lawsuit can possibly make sense from an economic perspective since people that work for near minimum wage don't have a lot of extra cash to cough up for monetary damages.
Why a New Operating System?
Sorting out $15k is the easiest part of an early phase startup. YC seems to mostly focus on the harder parts.
Quote: "13. As the MVC project is very much a reactionary response to staunch the outflow of devs to other MVC frameworks, there is a worry that MS will drop the project if forced to make a cost cutting decision (see licensing comment 6). They are certainly not going to drop normal ASP.NET."
Oh, I agree with the exception statement. That sort of shoe-horning is exactly what goes on when you REST up a rich web-app. But how does it simplify anything?
Hamilelikte Bebek Gelişimi | Anne ve Bebek Rehberi
I'm not a 10x coder, but over the years I've learned to deal with buggy 3PLs by avoiding them, or encapsulating them once and for all. The problem with buggy 3rd-party libs is that the bugs are random. They quite literally keep you dumb by forcing to you memorize random trivia instead of new concepts.

Rewriting the same functions yourself in a better and more efficient way teaches you a lot, especially about 1) how to spot good libraries, and 2) when not to write it yourself.

If you look at the code of really effective hackers, the one thing they have in common is how small the code is compared to what it does. Look at web.py, or bret taylor's datastore built on top of mysql: http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql
The support that YC provides is definitely more valuable than the money they provide. With that being said, however, you can't discount the benefit of having that extra cash. $5,000 for 5% equity essentially valuates your company at $100,000. Ask yourself, would anybody outright pay that much for what you have built? On top of that, YC also provides an additional $5000 to cover living expenses. Thats a deal if I've ever seen one.
It's customary to quote text using italics (that's * around text). Four spaces are for code.
If your goal is to have people click on your ads, what other denominator is there than the click-through percentage? Google is a middleman for advertising, it's not for them to judge whether their viewers are worthy of clicking on their ads.

And do you really think there's a socio-economic divide along the lines of blue vs. yellow text ads? Because that's pretty ridiculous.
Really?

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/2009-03-05-for...

"More than half of the nation's foreclosures last year took place in 35 counties"

"A few of the 35 counties leading the foreclosure boom are in already-distressed areas around Detroit and Cleveland. But most are clustered in places such as Southern California, Las Vegas, Phoenix, South Florida and Washington, where home values shot up dramatically in the first half of the decade, then began to crumble."

What do all those areas have in common?
Well, obviously a blacklist wouldn't work, so are you suggesting a whitelist? Seems like that would seriously reduce the usefulness. How would you know what foreign-language dissident news sites to include?
Is an elite college worth $150k?
It was clear from the slides that Azul thinks about financial analysis/trading systems when designing its stuff. Many other cool technologies have been developed with financial services customers in mind (Terracotta and various other grid computing stuff comes to mind). This is well and good, but I'm worried in general that the ill health of the world's financial institutions will erode the market signal that has brought so much innovation downward to less lucrative markets. If Azul was trying to raise money now, would VCs bite given the ill health of the most likely early adopters?
Well, I thought that the cornerstone quote of the article was this:

"Deep technical competency is overrated compared with the ability to make excellent decisions and to create a culture where forward motion is valued and personal initiative is rewarded."

And, on average, I don't find that deep technical competency is overrated compared to...well, he's talking about social skills here.

At every stage of the hiring and interview and HR process, the deck is stacked in favor of social skills and social advantages. Is it better to be 25% more competent or to be 6 foot 3 inches tall at a job interview? The answer is unfortunately the second a lot of the time.

Yes, there are cases where one bad apple spoils the bunch and you need to get rid of him. In my experience, the bad apples are far more likely to be managers than technical people (think about it: what sort of person wants to boss others around?).

I see a much larger risk, for a medium-sized to large company, of driving out technical expertise by focusing too much on interpersonal skills. In fact, this may be exactly why larger companies tend to stagnate.

Smaller companies that survive more than a year or two already know how to focus on talent.
Thats what I'm saying. I'm not saying sue him to get him to finish, I'm saying sue him to recover the money.
The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions,
There is a lot to say on this, but much of it has already been said. I'll add just one thing:

An important red flag (among all the others in your post) is the statement that he is "almost" done.

When any programmer thinks about that statement, it's almost certain to elicit a belly laugh.

If he appears to be "almost" done, it is highly likely that he is really around 50% done. Keeping that in mind should help you make your decision to walk away.
I would think that the Police, or a judge in particular (who allows this warrant) would require at least one more piece of cooberating evidence before 'breaking someone's door down'.
Stereotypes don't happen by accident.

Yes, everybody already knows about exceptions. My kindergarten teach spent a godawful long time on the subject, eh?
"But Brin says he isn't worried: "When somebody searches for 'cancer,' should you put up the site that paid you or the site that has better information?" Brin is betting better information will win the day. "

Sad that the answer now is 'both', which to un-savvy Internet users sometimes means the paid placement is the one they see first and think Google is serving as the top ranking site.
Here's a wikipedia article that I found more comprehensible as someone who knows nothing about transactional memory:

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

So, as a Java guy, here's what I take this stuff to mean:

Synchronization blocks are implicitly pessimistic locking. Even if the probability of a collision is close to zero, we still make threads line up for admittance to critical sections.

Transactional memory allows us to employ optimistic concurrency. If any other thread modified stuff that is encompassed in your transaction, you get an exception.

This sounds much like the scheme employed by Hibernate to do optimistic locking for DB stuff. Am I thinking about this correctly?
Who is voting comments like this up? Not offense lakeeffect but typically a short comment like this that doesn't add to the discussion is either ignored or voted down. What gives?
Word games are an example of a genre of game that becomes utterly different at expert/professional levels than what it is at the amateur level.

For amateurs, it's a game of vocabulary, whereas it's more of a strategic game at professional levels. http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated.php?a=6517#36

Although the scores for the letters might need to be re-calibrated; especially for a word game, Scrabble holds up extremely well at high levels of skill.
Do not operate without a helmet and a mouth guard.
Absolutely not.

But Demo Day is worth a lot more than 5%.
Removing the remaining hurdles for developing iphone apps by yourself: graphics and sound.
We need ways to automatically create and/or simplify graphics and sound for developers with little artistic ability.

For sound, one might use something like Microsoft Soundsmith where a developer with little music training can hum an original melody and have the software generate music based on that melody. For sound effects, one might use something like cfxr, but more sophisticated.

Graphics seem much harder to do when the developer has little artistic ability. Providing royalty free clip-art is a start, but we need to go further. Perhaps fractals and genetic art would help. More interesting would be software like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2H35SlLmUA

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:Ki2DQ1aDgMQJ:www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/
I believe Major League Baseball made significant efforts a few years ago to speed up games.
Ask HN: Moderate Noise Causes
There is a small group of users here who submit every possible link that might get votes. Usually many a day. With all this noise very good relevant stories and discussions are lost. Very often they post blog-spam meta-stories with more sensationalist headlines, the same front page story retold, or even the same story but print page (or vice versa.)

I don't even want to know if they do this out of pure karma-whoring or some way to make money with the links they push. It just makes submitting news pointless.

It would be good to block users with too many submissions without votes from posting for a while.

And the irony is this very post is very likely to get lost in the noise.
The article links to another article comparing Chrome to Firefox 3.1b2, with Chrome still coming out ahead on performance. The JS engine is only one part of the equation. Chrome is faster than Firefox in a host of other things, like DOM manipulation and startup time, as well as the process-per-tab design makes it scale to multiple cores far more effectively.

Mozilla's lagging pretty hard on the innovation front. Everyone (except IE) has fast JS engines now. It's not really a differentiator. They aren't really doing anything notable long term, they're just gliding on their inertia. At least Google is actively working on Mac and Linux ports and extensions for Chrome, which are their two big catchup areas. Mozilla isn't even thinking about process-per-tab.
Neither will waiting for the current guy to finish. If someone took his project seriously they'd be done in a couple of weeks, couple of months tops. What he needs to do is look back at his guy's performance in the last couple of months, and see if that level would be enough to get him over the finish line.
Most 10x coders deal with it by not using 3rd party libraries, except for ones that are very highly regarded and trusted. These tend to avoid most of the configuration headaches because everyone uses them, so the maintainers get lots of practice in making them easily installable.

It's funny how common wisdom in the software industry is "reuse, don't rebuild", but if you look at projects that are actually successful and developers that are highly regarded, they all have a massive case of NIH syndrome. Google and Microsoft both build all their own software. Mozilla completely reimplemented COM for Gecko. John Resig just got criticized recently because TestSwarm duplicates a lot of the functionality of Selenium Grid. Linus Torvalds wrote his own OS instead of hacking MINIX, and then wrote his own VCS rather than use Subversion or CVS. Chuck Moore wrote everything himself, down to the hardware, which he designed with CAD software he wrote himself in Forth, a language he wrote himself.

If you look at it by numbers, this makes perfect sense. The average library is, by definition, average, so a coder who is way above average can undoubtedly write something better given enough attention to the problem. Plus, many of these super-coders got their reputation by writing lots of code in the first place, which you don't do if you just reuse third-party libraries.

Unfortunately, everyone thinks they're above average, which is why we get such a profusion of libraries in the first place. ;-)
Twitter Turns Three
It's not even really that. Unless you're really abusing that bandwidth, it was probably sitting unused anyway and would have served zero purpose if you had not used it.

So it's more like taking a picture of a pretty flower in front of a sign that says "don't take pictures of our flowers".
w.r.t. 3pl stuff, the lack of good documentation can be annoying, but I find that my ability to use them quickly speeds up drastically as I use them in more places on more projects. I don't think this pattern is any different when I use a new language -- "What's that weird compiler error mean?" So, for me, it's a learning curve issue.
Neural network powered email inbox in virtual world
... if you believe you're going to get funding, and if taking funding is what you want to do.
ROFLcopter. Really funny to see punditry fail epically.
Don't forget extra coverage. Many of YC sites getting covered by Techcrunch would have never been able to get covered without being part of YC
While many responses are going to be "yawn", especially in the face of the git juggernaut, a great many enterprise systems are locked into svn for the foreseeable future (given economic forecasts, IT departments aren't getting tons of budget for SCM migration / upgrade). Therefore a few extra features coming in are welcome...even if they don't begin with git-
A Perfect Crime?: Twins Suspected in Spectacular Jewelry Heist Set Free
Ask YC: Does anyone know what Aaron Swartz is doing these days?
Just curious....He must be pretty wealthy now after the Reddit acquisition...
I guess there's always PG's Rice & Beans to look forward too! :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=525529
"C# is too verbose for most web work"

Lame.
I doubt he's a really good coder. A really good coder would rather get the job done and get paid quickly rather than bitching and whining and making a big mess for months on end. And if the challenge was way above his skill level he'd say so instead of dragging the project for several months.
Which part of what I said is a "nonsense" exactly ?

I merely pointed out that ($2500 + 10% of profits) is a patently bad deal for the developer and it explains the sour state of affairs that they both ended up with.

The fact that the developer is not upholding his end of a deal is another matter. I haven't commented on it.
Offtopic but seriously? $50/hr is low? I've had people tell me that my rate is too high when i was charging $20/hr. I find that a lot of people treat freelancers with a lot of prejudice because of their geographical location..

To the OP. The programmer is black-mailing you. That never ends well. If you can, just scratch the project and start over.
The problem with CRA is not that it "obliges" banks to lend to people who can't afford it. The problem is that if you don't lend enough money to minorities (who disproportionately can't afford it), the federal bank regulators can block you from acquiring/being acquired by other banks.

For data on default rates see http://www.huduser.org/publications/affhsg/FHASingleFamily.h...

For data on CRA dollars committed see http://www.community-wealth.org/_pdfs/articles-publications/... (4.2 TRILLION between '92 and '05)
It sounds to me like he's talking about Bill Gates.
Combined Object Lambda Architecture (COLA)
It would seem that the slow creep of the Digg/Reddit effect is beginning to surface. It may simply be me but the articles on here are beginning to lose some of the technical/interesting nature and starting to turn into broader, general interest pieces.
As ScottWhigham mentioned, "The Art of the Start" is a great place to start. But if you don't want to wait until you're able to get your hands on the book, you can check out a presentation the author did on it: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/06/the_art_of_the_.html
What I didn't get from the interview was 'why'.
Does this thing have any significance?
With the Segway, even if it wasn't a commercial success,it was popularized for what was an amazing technical achievement. What is it that the team who created the Cajun Crawler has achieved.

I'm sure there is something, I just don't know what it is.
This is potentially very dangerous advice and I would not be so quick to accept it were I the OP. The question is, "Since the original programmer is almost finished with the entire thing, if you fire him before the contract is finished and start over, what will he do with the code?"

Depending on the contract structure, he might be free to sell it on his own, give/sell it to a competitor, or release it on the web for free. Meanwhile, poor OP is now six months behind schedule and has to start over.

Sorry but I don't know how you can be so black and white about the issue without us knowing more information. If OP followed this advice without thinking through the problem, he could be much, much worse off. It could be that you are right but, without more info about the contract, we don't know.
China has some open WIFI services (I deployed some FON routers in South China.) I have also been to Burma last year, and the biggest risk there is not technological censorship but human snitches. Burma is a massive country, some parts of which are controlled by the opposition groups, but in government strong-holds, you probably wouldn't find wifi, much less an unsecured one.

In any case, do not use someone's network to do something that might get them killed.
This stopped being about the defense of the vulnerable long ago. Once the laws were put in place that make it illegal to show non-children as if they were children, it became thoughtcrime, the persecution of people because they think differently than the rest of society. If a photograph shows an adult dressed as a child, or is entirely computer generated, then sure it's yucky, but what's the harm?

So it seems like one place to break the cycle of hysteria is through lawmakers, to roll back the thoughtcrime laws to the level that they're only protecting the vulnerable rather than punishing people for having weird thoughts.

(Off topic: Of course, the same things can be said about the war on drugs, and the obvious damage that it has done, but lawmakers aren't exactly falling over each other to undo their damage in that area either)
froo may be using a browser where that isn't evident.

Until PG fixes, you can fix this yourself client-side with a bookmarklet or a greasemonkey script. See ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=437002
It's not just about the browser by itself.
Don't forget all the great extensions built on top of Firefox.
Until Chrome has attracted developers to build great extensions on it, Firefox is going to stay as my main browser.
ditto, the lack of Ad Block is the only reason why I haven't opened Chrome since trying it out.
jEdit is the BEST. The hypersearch capabilities and windowing options are first class. Three cheers for jEdit.
Just store a session ID in the cookie and keep the client state on the server side, indexed by that cookie. No need to make a memory lookup into network transfer.