skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hhahahaha, comment on the blog

"Please post the Visual Basic codes for this. The language you post in the article is not Visual Basic.

Thank you."

xD God !
"meet interesting people and learn lots of new stuff. Freelancing is almost never that."

Not my experience. Freelancing is what you make of it. To get some experience you may do some boring stuff early on, but if you've got no or little experience your 'startup' will likely fail.

90% of the freelancing work I've done over the last few years has generally been 'learning new stuff' and 'meeting interesting people' in somewhat challenging problem domains (trucking logistics, education, etc).

"Working at a startup is, provided you pick the right one."

Freelancing is what you make of it. Find interesting projects.
"I started rebuilding my life overseas, and I find a quantum of solace in the thought that my residence abroad makes it a little more difficult to be served."

Does this mean things are better outside the US these days?
I've been freelancing in London and always calculate my yearly expected income by multiplying it with 200 to account for holiday, sick leave and general overhead.

£350 * 200 = £70000 before taxes, I think £84000 is overly optimistic here.
It's not so hard as you think to get into USP. Actually, it's kinda easy if your family paid you a good education by brazilian terms, which basically means you studied in ETAPA or Objetivo and can't reason about more important matters but have over 9000 test exercises under your belt.

I advise you to not give a shit about it because you can learn way more at home, unless you want a degree. If you do want that piece of paper with their name, study and get inside.

99,9999% of research there is shit, if you are serious about it, try to find a way to move and study abroad(depends highly on your family's social status, hehe).
Did you know him before that?
you could ask why does Facebook feel the need to fill every inch of the screen, even when it results in a non-chronological timeline
This is the crux of it. In other industries, the "idea guy" would usually be an investor bringing $$$ to the table. A random hustler can't just approach a civil engineer with "an idea" to partner on a new bridge and expect the engineer to quit working and give up the next few years. They have to offer major value.

I think the best thing a non-technical founder can do is follow lean principles and bring actual data to the table. Show they've actually done the research - MVPs, letters of intent, etc - and make it clear they have a vision they can execute on. All of that is in the realm of possibility for someone who's not a programmer, and would help to make the case they're serious and capable.
"You'd be crazy to have me work on this for a few months for 50% equity when you could just spend 6-12 months yourself learning to code and doing it yourself and have 100% equity. Of course, if you don't think it is worth spending a few months of your own time why should I take a chance on it?"
We were introduced by a friend.
Some Notes About Time
They didn't allocate it, you did. Most people are not on large screens. First they were uncommon, then just as wide screens became normal, so did small screen handheld devices, like what I'm on right now lying in bed sunday morning.
Comparison for 'startups' isn't as appropriate, because most startup operations won't be using Java (at least not as a primary platform).
I'd love to see MintEye respond.
It's totally sarcasm
Barring the likes of China, things were always better outside the US.
Where does the 10x more expensive come from? Not questioning just want to understand.
There is not the slightest chance that the U.S. government would be held liable for Swartz's death in any fashion. Prosecuting someone is not going to be held illegal in any U.S. court, ever.

Even if that zero chance somehow came true, Ms. Ortiz has absolute immunity from personal consequences, as she was acting as an agent for the government in the course of her employment.

She can write whatever she wants with absolutely zero fear of any adverse legal consequences against her, and you should not make excuses for her on that fictitious basis.
Comparing cost of a cpu vs price of running an EC2 instance (and over what time)? Bit strange...
I've learned by meself when I was 12, I had no one to teach me. It took me two days to understand BASIC and one week to adapt to DBASE III+

As for context, says Paul Graham:
"Use succinct languages. More powerful programming languages make programs shorter. And programmers seem to think of programs at least partially in the language they're using to write them. The more succinct the language, the shorter the program, and the easier it is to load and keep in your head.

You can magnify the effect of a powerful language by using a style called bottom-up programming, where you write programs in multiple layers, the lower ones acting as programming languages for those above. If you do this right, you only have to keep the topmost layer in your head."

More here:http://www.paulgraham.com/head.html

How many months does it take to master the HTML+JS+CSS mess?
Meh no worries.

If there is a flaw you probably need to write like 5M of XML to exploit it.
Yes, you can turn the journaling off. You can do that in ext3 as well (ending up with 'ext2')

But maybe JFFS2 or similar 'flash file systems' can be better depending on the use, not sure how the state of these kind of file systems are
Oh wow that's amazing! Obvious in a both auditory and graphical way.
Second example, "function scope"

"Based on knowledge of several other languages (such as Java or C), this would certainly be true. However, Javascript doesn't change scope when entering if statements, loops, or anything like that, really."

Dude what the hell?

In Java and C, 'if' blocks don't have their own isolated scope either. The equivalent Java or C code would also work perfectly fine.
Zamorano D.O Cheese, produce with sheep raw milk
It's useful for exposing profiles where someone is pretending to be someone else.
A Facebook screen is packed with information, which is one reason why it's much more useful than a G+ screen. Both Reddit and HN also pack in a huge amount of information: 30 entries per screen here. Is that bad? Would you rather have just four headlines per screen, like the new Digg?
I can imagine it being weird to walk around a 3D world while standing still in real-life (using keyboard or some sort of controller). But the Oculus Rift should be awesome right out of the box for any flight simulator. For a flight simulator the Rift makes so much sense.
We know the api (at least the one which changes the mind resolution when called) pretty well thanks to Albert Hofmann. It's a pitty we can't use it freely and have to resort to much more time consuming open source alternatives...
http://i.imgur.com/s6LSUFR.jpg Much better.
It's also the guiding principle in economics. People will always have infinite wants and finite resources.
Wasn't there something about how 'high' sarcasm is undistinguishable from the real thing.

Unfortunately I can't make the distinction, and I think it's most likely the commenter was serious
Rug Cleaning in Putney SW15 - The Leading Rug Cleaning Company
Pod2g working with Planetbeing on iOS 6 Jailbreak
WATERCRESS SOUP
Ask yourself, are political appointees selected on their careers merits or on the basis of their political clout? Bzzz. Sorry, trick question. The answer is already on US Attorney Carmen Ortiz’s very own wikipedia entry. Says it right there in the second sentence, immediately after her title. "In 2009, she was nominated to the position by President Barack Obama. Ortiz is both the first woman and the first Hispanic to serve as U.S. attorney for Massachusetts."

Unless you count being born a women and hispanic as an accomplishment, the answer is plain as day. Make the boss man look good!

Flagged. There are lots of good articles that discuss the various issues and injustices involved with Swartz's case. This is not one of them.
Kim Dotcom's New Mega Encrypted Cloud Storage
Its actually a super fun excercise to do. I did that years ago with a browser game that showed images on login, some years ago. Also with python. It was a fun learning experience because it's so much more visual then your typical "todo list tutorial" or "hello world".
The drug war is a particularly egregious example that's been going on for decades with a shocking number of people imprisoned and money wasted, to no apparent benefit.

Surely anyone who's aware of the history of prohibition in the 1920s would understand that prohibition itself gave power to violent criminal gangs, that exactly this is happening again on a much broader scale thanks to drug prohibition.

Any reasonably intelligent, informed person should already be aware of these facts. And yet, the only real progress has come very recently, and it's come because of direct democracy, not from politicians. If they can't even manage to fix these terrible, obvious mistakes of the past, what hope for arcane computer laws?
Facebook’s Graph Search Isn’t That Great
Reading the comments on here, it's incredible how many on HN don't realise how privileged they are. $75,000 is a lot of money, even in NYC and SFO, and the people who think otherwise are probably single 20-30 somethings that insist on living by themselves. Traditionally, children lived with their parents, even after marriage, until they can afford to live on their own.

There are millions of people in America living in much less than $75k per year and doing just fine even in the big cities. (Otherwise, there wouldn't be a "bad part of town") My parents raised three kids on less and they now own a house and two cars. People in higher incomes forget that there is an entire other country of people who make much less money than they do. 72% of households in the US live on less than $75k. In Manhattan, median income is $65k! There is living breathing proof of people living below these numbers everyday. These aren't unicorns. It's not rich, but nor is it poverty, which is defined as $11,500 in NYC for an individual.

Truth of the matter is, if I made $75k, I'd have a $75k lifestyle. If made $150k, I'd have a $150k lifestyle. Even if I made $1M per year, I'd have a million dollar lifestyle and probably still feel poor. I'd drive a more expensive car, buy more expensive groceries, live in more expensive housing, eat at more expensive restaurants, wear more expensive clothes, have more expensive hobbies and take more expensive vacations. What this article claims is that past the magical $75,000 mark, we are as poor as we allow ourselves to be. Saving money and not building debt is very hard to do for most people. It's a fact of life that people like to live beyond their means. I know I do.
> Everyone with access to your Mac can access it just as well, i assume

If they're logged on to your account, but not if they are using a different account.

>I guess it can also be read by applications, uploaded to the internet?

Not Mac App Store apps - they're quarantined.
48 weeks * 5 days a week is really best case scenario.

You have included 4 weeks of holiday, but not sickness, training courses, conferences, company admin, next contract sales and worst of all bench time between contracts.

My calculation are you are down to 45 weeks after 5 weeks holiday and UK bank holidays. Add 5 days for illness, 7 days for courses and conferences, 1 day a month for admin, 3 days every 6 months for sales, and suddenly you are down to 39 weeks. Add at best 2 weeks of bench time as lining up new contracts perfectly is tricky and you are down to 37 weeks.

£350 * 5 * 37 = 64,750 before tax.

Then it is the whole consideration of whether you are within IR35, which basically taxes you more than a normal employee, and is very difficult to not be within if freelancing on longer contracts in the UK.

Then accounting, insurance, hardware costs etc.

You would have to be on some real long term contracts without benchtime, no illness, no training and no expenses to get towards you numbers.

Working in Shoreditch myself I know most of the decent developers with 10 experience around here are earning a lot more than a contract guy would make on £350 per day.
Very crudely (Haskell experts please chime in!):

Every Haskell program is a lazily-evaluated tree of expressions; the program output itself is the root node and links represent data flow dependencies. The Haskell compiler turns source code into an initial representation of this tree as well as machine code that performs a sequence of reduction steps to turn the tree into a final output value. So a tree node at any given time is either a concrete value, or a chunk of code that can be executed to obtain that value (a thunk).

The compiler has the right to choose an arbitrary (semantics-preserving) node evaluation sequence to reduce the tree down to the final result.

Through strictness annotations (http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Performance/Strictness#Ev...) you can force particular subtrees to be fully evaluated whenever-in-program-execution their parent node begins evaluation; to programmers in other languages this seems alien, but in Haskell you, by default, turn control of operation sequencing to the compiler.

Such annotations are sometimes desirable because the thunk representation of, say, a large chain of arithmetic operations on a list of numbers can be very expensive in memory, so one might want to force it to be reduced down to a concrete double as soon as possible (see, e.g., http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/program.php?test..., and note all the areas where function arguments are preceded by exclamation points; those are strictness annotations).

Strictness annotations are often important for getting good performance out of certain kinds of Haskell code, and are in some cases not just important but essential for controlling memory consumption.

It can be very hard for non-experts to reason about where and why to use strictness, and I submit that this is because you're essentially doing an indirect second level of programming. The un-annotated source code describes the value-transformation semantics, while the strictness annotations are a side-band language for controlling the tree-evaluator that is embedded into your compiled program.

Hope that helps :)
I doing find the alleged agreements particularly outrageous, personally. I find the common 'confidentiality' clause about disclosing your salary more offensive.
Yes, I agree that freelancing can be fascinating work. I mainly wrote from my own perspective (and since HN was once called "Startup News", I imagine also from that of others), where I do not have the right credentials or connections to get very amazing freelance work. I'm 20 and without a degree. If anything I could maybe get slave-trade $20/hr Odesk work or something, but not considerably better.

Now, since (good) employers often manage to look past a lack of credentials and connections, I was able to get a great job at a YC startup (run by entrepreneurs with past successes/exits). They're taking a chance on me, which almost never happens with freelance work (especially not if there's a dude with 10 years experience competing with you).

And also I would argue that is much easier and quicker to find a good startup (just go down the list of YC companies) than to find amazing freelance work.
6-12 months learning how to code? Good luck building a business on top of software written by a junior-level programmer. Even better luck expanding and scaling it if/when the time comes.

It takes years to reach a reasonable level of competence in software development and on the order of a decade to master it.

The problem with taking people's word on how much work they do when they are involved in marketing and the soft sides of business is that they have a disproportionaly (as compared to tech specialists) large amount of experience in marketing, negotiation and soft skills. Hence, they market themselves and over inflate how important their contribution is. In my experience.
Wikimedia's newest project - Wikivoyage
I ported LaTeX to Javascript
Eternal September has arrived for Hacker News. A post of this type or a loose twist on it (generally "engineering > ideas") appears every year.
Thank You for the free alpha copy! :)
definitely will buy the final version - or Donate
"Disruption as a path to success" -- Women need to realize work isn't school
Maybe I am doing something wrong but I have never been approached by such an idea guy - the last closest was running an insurance brokerage and just got fed up with poor delivery from his current devs yet had a laundry lost of features needed in his site

Maybe if you are getting approached by morons a lot you might want to review where you are hanging out - just there mus be some reason
Good work...looks like something similar to dropifi...isn't it?...I am myself interested in this space...maybe we will be future competitors..:)

A few (frank) suggestions:

Not a big fan of name.i.e FormWho.

You should charge more and prcing should be more granular.

Post a free/trial version.

Start building email list.

Show some form of user validation/feedback on frontpage...e.g. used by so and so ...etc

Good Luck.
And to think I thought SF had the market cornered on dramatic prose ;)
Also to be fair I don't want to work on the idea of the guy paying 350-400 a day - but at least they pay.

I want to work on my idea - and that's hard enough
Contracting isn't freelancing though. In my experience contract gigs are pretty easy to find, and you don't have to work that hard to get them. Send off a CV to a few agencies, wait, that's it.

If you're a consultant, spending time establishing thought leadership etc etc then yeah, but you'd be crazy to work for 350 per day in that case.
Maybe even closer than you think. We've already done simulated tactile feedback in monkeys! http://io9.com/5846275/biotech-breakthrough-monkeys-can-feel...
>as a freelancer you have to work for every hour of work twice

This has not been my experience. I've been doing this for years and I don't think I've ever spent more than two weeks looking for a gig. Even during the current crisis the market is great for developers (here in Denmark at least).

These projects have typically lasted three or four months. That makes me enough money to live off for the rest of the year which I have then spent travelling and working on my own projects.
I get "502 Bad Gateway". Oh the irony.
Top Startups of 2012
I think EC2 is almost always going to be more expensive than bare metal servers, unless you are taking advantage of the ability to pay by the hour, or leveraging flexible pricing. Reserved instances will save quite a bit of money, but spot pricing can do you even better. Check out this post from a few months ago from someone who is using spot instances for core services, and estimates 70% savings vs on demand pricing.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4662644
Engineering is not the solution
Ideas are not the solution

Feedback and willingness to be flexible are the solution

Who cares if the original idea sucks - is the prospective idea guy willing to invest time effort blood and tears making something happen - constantly measuring and validating ideas as they go

If yes leap in with both feet.
"Connections". You worked on connections to get in a YC startup (an amazingly small number of potential opportunities in the universe of opportunities).

I'm suspecting that you had a hankering to work at a "startup" and that colored your behaviour. I know many people without any major credentials who are doing just fine in freelancing, making good money doing what they like to do.

Never bother with odesk - you wouldn't have gotten a YC-startup gig on odesk - why look for anything else there? Work your network/connections - if you don't have any, build them up - that's what takes time and effort.

I also suspect many people on this forum (and on specific topics) are 'startup' focused. While there's nothing inherently wrong with that, I do feel it sets a lot of people up for failure ("fail fast! fail often!") when many of them aren't psychologically or financially prepared for so such failures. We rarely read about the failures of people who attempt 'startups'. Even when we do, it's often a post-mortem look from someone who's now writing from a position of success, reviewing their own failures in public for others to see. The implicit (sometimes explicit) message is "see, even if you fail, you can be successful later in the same space".

Good luck to you on your journey.
Nutella Homemade On Curt's Webpage
First Grader Becomes Youngest Person to Ever Develop a Mobile Game
It shall be seen what happens on Tuesday. I am not discounting that there are unknowns that will surprise the market. In that sense the market is like betting, albeit based upon hints and rumors and misinformation.

The market is speculative. A lot of people are speculating that Apple's best days are past them -- which is how $9 billion worth of AAPL was sold in the $500 range on Friday -- while a lot of people are speculating that it is still a growth company. Those competing interests set the market price (and FWIW those who bought at $700 -- if they actually still believed in that entrance price, would be doubling down right now for dollar-cost averaging, which itself would pull the price up).

What I said above is not at all what the conspiracy theory is, which is where everyone apparently thinks everything is fantastic and it's going to shoot to the moon and there is no uncertainty or risk, but for options reasons everyone is looking the other way for a couple of weeks/months and letting it slide because something-something-options.

Market manipulation absolutely happens, and it happens a lot. However it generally targets low volume, low cap, low interest equities, or less common instruments like resource futures. It would be incredibly expensive to manipulate AAPL, it being one of the most watched, most traded equities.
Python speeds up GaN models
I did a course this semester at university about bioinformatics. I was very impressed by their attitude to knowledge sharing. Almost every paper referenced by our professor and any citations in those papers that I used were published online for no charge. But even better than that, the data and code used to generate their results was shared too. Our professor noted that in the bioinformatics field a paper is considered pretty much worthless if the data isn't made easily available in one of a few archives.

I really hope the rest of acadaemia can follow through. It seems to be we might make more progress in all of the sciences if results are easily replicable and research is published to all.
Theres a seperate action for that, see the screenshot.
This is such a nice gesture! However I have a (maybe small) concern: They use creative commons no derivative license. Doesn't that make forking pointless, if not a breach of terms?
Lawrence Lessig Responds to Aaron Swartz's Prosecutor
It depends where outside the US, one imagines --- but there are certainly places that are generally worse. Law enforcement agencies in, say, China, are not known for their respect for the rights of the accused or their scrupulous attitude towards due process.