skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, but that's not easy to do. If you're going for VC, you get the same crap from investors. If you're going to bootstrap, that requires an orthogonal skill set in addition to a bit of luck.

I think that the 2010s will be dominated by self-started firms that evolve from consulting into product spaces, but most of that activity will not be in the startup hubs (e.g. Silicon Valley, New York, Boston) because the burn rates are too high. The geography of that growth spell will be very different from what we're used to.

I think the way out is to become an "X Who Programs". You become something else-- financial quant, startup founder, game designer-- who also happens to be a programmer. The reason this is so powerful is that no one (except a top programmer) can evaluate programmers, which creates nasty politics as people jockey for visibility, so you establish yourself in your more-visible X but use programming as a secret weapon. It keeps you from being treated like a commodity programmer and also gives you an edge on the best projects.

XWP is what the data science phenomenon, in truth, is. There, the X is statistical knowledge.
As a programmer who has gone the MBA route (will be done in the Fall), I have to say it's been positive for me. Not because I can point to it on my resume and say "look what I have!" or "look what I'm getting!", it's been positive for the following reasons:

a) It's increased my ability to communicate clearly in small and large groups.
b) It's given me great context regarding where IT and programming stand in the overall business model
c) I've met many professionals around the area in all industries

It's contributed very much to my personal and professional growth, and I haven't even finished yet.

But should you just go get it? Only if it's right for you. Know yourself first, and what you want to do with your life. If it fits in, then go for it and it'll be a great experience.
For what it's worth, it won't work on my Linux Debian box either...
There are two different ways ads can be displayed. Either the message is scanned for a topic and ads are displayed to you based on it, or they build a profile about you, like you described. You can opt out of that:

https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/preferences/?hl=en
I think he's saying that he set up a web crawler to scrape python.org, and he was hoping that in the process it had made copies of those Wiki pages. He's apologizing that, as it turns out, the crawler did not make it to those pages after all.
Building a "product" is not the same as programming a computer.
I'm not really sure this is anything to do with programming at all.

As far as I've seen all industries suffer from this. You have a lot of people who if given control over their own work would make things a lot better. But good management is very hard and often the business need just isn't there. There's things to be done and experimentation is seen as a waste.

I also think we can be a bit dewey eyed about 'great' programming. But most of programming isn't great. It's nasty, it's boring, it's edge cases and testing over and over, dealing with formatting, slightly incompatible outputs, etc.

Much of programming boils down to simple looping and modifying data. Getting data out of some thing and putting it somewhere else slightly modified.

Programming's fun when we experiment, but a lot of the time experimentation's not the thing you need to be doing. It's boring repetitive but slightly different code, really ironing out the edge cases and a lot of attention to detail.

You see it in all startups, the product is built, something new, exciting then the product seems to crawl forward, tiny changes here and there even though they've got more programmers than they did before. I sometimes wonder what on earth all those programmers are actually doing at Microsoft or Google or Facebook as their products don't seem to change much. Because they're all just touching the details on the edges, the main picture's been painted.
I might agree if the text wasn't so wide (edit: on my screen, at least). Longer lines are less readable because you can't easily find the next line when your eye flicks back to the left after finishing a line.
Yeah I get that feeling a lot. The Product monkey and the "UX" snake oil sales men get the credit for nothing they implemented.
I've been quite happy with the responses I get to Fedora/RHEL bugs in bugzilla.redhat.com, especially considering what I paid for it ($0). I also suspect that, once a problem is identified as coming from upstream, the Red Hat folks get more attention from the upstream folks than others.

Based on a small sample, Red Hat seems to do worse with "documentation bugs" - such as when their documentation described using raidtools in RHEL4, when it had been replaced by madm (which appeared to me at the time as "missing raidtools").
I rather take a bad .com name than launching my game on a .co. Sorry.
This seems like a really nice feature! At work I maintain an open source project but also have a private fork containing customizations just for our centre. This should make it very very easy to keep my private repo in sync with the public version.

BitBucket has been pushing a lot of nice features lately!
My first job after graduating from Maryland in 1984 - writing 6502 assembly for a voice/data switch and feature phones for GTE's OMNI series. Yes, the Leventhal book was all there was back then (it still sits on my shelf). I was working with some incredibly talented hardware and software developers, and the learning experience working with assembly and hardware was unmatched.

Later moving on to the Motorola 68000 series chips which were great, but just not as fun as working with the 6502. The 6502 was so simple and well designed, writing in assembly was actually productive.

To this day, the best job I've ever had.
My beef is that Lego have become so highly branded. I would rather my kid play with generic space and castle and pirate blocks, than with Star Wars and Harry Potter and Pirates of the Carribbean blocks. As a product of the 80's I can say I spent a lot of time playing with highly branded and marketed toys, so it's not necessarily a bad thing; but there's something special about Lego that makes me feel like they should be above film tie-ins and in a special airy realm of pure imagination.
Why the World Needs to Stop Treating James Dyson Like a Hero
In the case of this tool, it seem that "code quality" means "formatted the way this tool's author believes is correct." I disagree with this definition.

When I think of code quality, I consider things like:

- consistent memory management practices
- consistent use of accessor methods vs. direct ivar access
- descriptive method, function, and variable names
- commentary to describe caveats and tricky functionality

Those first two (as well as formatting concerns) can be handled by tools while the next two are very "human" and subjective.
Glib, but given the delta in the quality of thought displayed in an average CS professor's papers, and, say, POSIX, I would say it's safe to put this old saw to bed.
If I were making decisions at MS, I would plan for a future O/S built upon Linux. It makes so much sense.

RS
Interesting. Do you mind expanding on this? What problems were they trying to solve?
We recently launched a simple website monitoring app for the iPhone where we ping sites from our servers, and send push notifications when we detect something is wrong (a poor man's pagerduty or pingdom where you do everything from your phone and can subscribe using IAP).

Probably the biggest lesson we've learned from collecting data on latency and timeouts from our backend is that there are a LOT of very poor hosts out there. Trying to strike a balance between intermittent failures, and actual "Your site is down, you need to do something" is pretty difficult, unless you are willing to simply wait long enough. We'll regularly see timeouts from places like Tumblr and Github Pages--they never go down, but things can get spotty. We can also tell when certain hosting providers are doing their weekly backups (or something - just guessing) because things will just go to pot at the same time every weekend for about an hour.

I can second the S3/CloudFront recommendation. Pretty rock solid (modulo downtime in specific regions).

For anyone curious about the app:
http://vigil-app.com
Then updates to the customer's configuration requires modifying code, compiling it, and shipping the result. It's easy to put an interface on configuration file modification and in many cases, updates can be applied without needing to restart a running system.
Those licenses are not to protect the Doctors/Lawyers, they are to protect their clients.

Having such a system for programmers would make no since and would make the situation much worse. A college degree means a lot but you can be a very good/success programmer without one.

I would NEVER go to a doctor/lawyer who did not have the correct credentials to practice. As such you "practice" medicine and you "practice" law. Do you practice programming(in the same sense?), no you don't.
You're most likely to encounter a common aircraft type. Airline sompanies have reserve pilots that they can call on short notice, so it's highly unlikely that ATC will be unable to find someone to help. If you're in a small plane, there are many flying clubs they can call. All of this in the case that there are no pilots available on the current airport.

See this video for an example of an SEP pilot landing a King Air:

http://flash.aopa.org/asf/pilotstories/pinchhittingkingair/
It's called a premature midlife crisis (usually happens right before or at age 30). Some people get over it by dumping their life experience before that point completely while others, like myself, slowly wean off programming onto something else.

A friend I've known since high school gave up a very lucrative career as a managing consultant to become... a farmer. Yup, he plants stuff and sells them at a bi-weekly market and keeps going in the winter thanks to his greenhouse. Currently engaged to a lovely lady and, to my surprise and delight, he's completely happy.

It's a funny thing to feel like the industry you're good at (or been cornered into) is really not how you want to spend your life. And may in fact be zapping what life and vigor you have.

Which is why, I've been improving my carpentry while keeping up with automation tech (Arduino, Raspberry pi, Beaglebone etc...) so when I build my smart green house and cabin, I can get down to what I really want to do.

Making soap.

Side note: This isn't as crazy an idea as you might think.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IryIOyPfTE
First one free, and once you're hooked it's exorbitantly expensive? Sounds familiar. :)
If all you need is static hosting then S3 is great. The benefits of a CDN, and it's incredibly cheap too.
Show HN: B2B SaaS apps
> But back to civil disobedience. Swartz stole the material, pure and simple, and he seems to feel that he and others have, in this case, the right to steal because they are beholden to a higher moral standard. I am sort of fine with this if he’s willing to accept the consequences, as Ellsberg and the Civil Rights activists were.

This argument has been used to discredit Aaron as an activist, and at worst, to paint him as a spoiled sissy. But I'm not so sure that Aaron should be judged as a civil rights activist because I don't think he intended to promote his cause with civil disobedience.

Instead, I think Aaron seemed to care more about the successful dissemination of the information, with attention to his cause being the secondary objective. Or else why would he engage in such subterfuge to download from JSTOR, when he very well could've just walked into the MIT Library, shouted "FOR FREEDOM!" as he flipped on an AlienWare laptop and the scraper script?

He masked his face, hid his laptop in the closet, because he wanted to actually get the data and disseminate it...the information itself was the greater good, it seems. Unlike MLK Jr., who wanted to get arrested to bring attention to the plight of minorities, getting arrested would prevent Aaron from actually distributing the academic information. Ironically, if Aaron had acted like a MLK Jr. of Information Rights, people would be ripping on him as a showboat.

One of the interesting anecdotes that came from his memorial was from someone who had asked Aaron to deliver the keynote at F2C2012. The person had expected Aaron to talk about the JSTOR incident in order to raise awareness for his cause, but instead, as you probably know, Aaron chose to talk about how the people stopped SOPA:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg

When Aaron pitched his fundraising drive on HN, IIRC, he didn't put much of an effort, even after he received a huge amount of criticism. Maybe Aaron was just awful at PR in general, but I don't think someone of his skill in civic activism would've come so unprepared to beat the drum if beating the drum was his real objective.

So yes, Aaron deserves some criticism for thinking he could get away with it and for not planning for the worst-case scenario. But to say that he's a wimpy hypocrite for not accepting the jail time for his moral stand seems to miss the point...taking the moral stand seemed secondary to him in comparison to the greater good of spreading information.

And to imply that he was cowardly misses the fact that not too long ago, Aaron was subjected to FBI surveillance for doing something that was undoubtedly legal when he "freed" the PACER archives. That he so quickly jumped back into the fray after that -- nevermind the work he did in raising awareness against SOPA -- strikes me as being pretty brave, if reckless, as far as tech-revolutionists go.
Have you been to a lego store ?

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5215/5460874051_7fbf9e4bf3_z.j...
My blog (elweb.co) has been on the HN home page a few times. I use Wordpress with WP Super Cache, hosted on cheapest available shared plan from Dreamhost with no problems.
The website looks terrible for 2013.
It should make your blood boil that our government operates in such a way that companies see this as just another vector for competing against each other.

Dan Lyon's piece is pure sensationalism. Reality is likely more like:
1) there is a government affairs group inside MSFT with a $50m+ annual budget (not crazy given the DOJ impact on the company)
2) they hire a connected political machinists and give him marching orders to drum up concern over Google in DC (the same way Oracle, Novell, Netscape did against MSFT--http://www.stern.nyu.edu/networks/homeworks/Microsoft_Case.p...).
3) Guy needs a network of folks to do his deeds—he runs around DC recruiting people telling him he has a massive budget because money seems to be the most effective way to persuade people in Washington (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/461/t...).

Meanwhile, there's a guy with a Google laptop bag doing the same thing.
Hi,

This is a little side-project of mine. The goal of the site is enable freelancers and small businesses to discover new SaaS tools that can help improve their business.
Owners of an app can sign in with Twitter to submit an app, or edit their profile page.

Any feedback is appreciated!

You can also contact me here: info@applist.io
Ask HN: Logo design competition?
I need a logo for my startup (www.criticue.com). Because the service is for web developers, I really want the logo to shine.

(I know -- the design of the website sucks; it's merely a prototype.)

Anyway, I'm looking for feedback from ppl who have run a logo design contest via platforms such as 99designs.com or designcrowd.com (they seem to have the best designs so far).

What is your experience? Is this the right path to take? Or should I hire one good designer/agency? How does the prize influence the quality? Finally, is it better to hire the same designer for the website design and the logo?

I'd love to get as many opinions as possible before spending upwards to $1000 on the logo. Thank you for your help.
This gets especially bad on mobile.

I can sit on a mobile connection under bad conditions, barely capable of pushing 10kb/s. But you know what? The raw article text isn't going to be more than those 10kb.

Anything exceeding that is fluff, and when you need to DL 5MB/s of webfonts and god knows what to read those 10kbs, something is horribly wrong.

Good presentation is good, I don't disagree with that, but when you go down that route, make sure that the actual content gets the priority in loading and rendering, and not fluff.
Testing is kind of a side effect. When you design your code with IoC in mind, you naturally will create more logical separations and avoid tight coupling -- which in turn will make your code easier to test. (Source: I wrote Ninject. :)
Dear Startups – Never under quote your initial projects
Airtasker acquires taskbox
The CTO's job is, by description, to get on the cover of a magazine.
No, but that'd be great.
IoC is an usual technique and buzzword from the C#/Java + XML + ORM + SQL hell.

There are many programmers working in the Real-World [TM], powering great apps and webapps, using saner technologies who have never heard of the term.

I wrote my own IoC container (a clone of picocontainer IIRC) to see what the fuss was about when the term started to become fashionable. No big deal. It can help reproduce various states (for examples in testing environments) to more easily test your app.

Sure people will say: "You need an IoC container to do DI, what you're talking about is DI, not IoC".

But, fundamentally, it is once again related to "state" and the difficulty to recreate a state in {dev,pre-prod,prod,whatever}.

So it's once again a "solution" missing the bigger picture.

Sure, people stuck in the "stateful OO" mindset will love IoC and, honestly, if you're stuck in such an hell IoC can be useful. With the caveat that IoC makes it much harder to reason about what's going on when some shit hits the fan.

"Every problem can be solved with another layer of abstraction, except the problem of too many layers of abstraction"

But there's light at the end of the tunnel. There are other ways to design great apps.

And to make you feel even better: being "smart" as nothing to do with knowing every technology out there ; )
destructuring-bind (and the Python analog) are one of the nicest structures I've ever run across. Good on the ECMAScript people.
How we’re working, at WebPlatform.org
Ask HN: Where are all these jobs coming from?
There's this huge explosion of jobs recently, specifically in the tech world. How are their so many jobs when it feels like most of us are using a handful of services?
There's a difference. Microsoft is doing malware scanning, which does mean they access message content, but not in a way that is meaningful to privacy.

Google is scanning and indexing your material. They are using that index to build a dossier on you, and they are measuring the accuracy of that dossier by evaluating your responses to ads and content fed to you.
Founder Speed Dating with Jumpstart Foundry in Nashville
Ask HN: What other companies are more bottom-up/bossless like github and valve?
I'm not sure what to call this organizational style, but I'm interested in companies, like Github and Valve, that have very little hierarchy and support a lot of bottom-up production. Do you know any other companies with this organizational style? ... in NYC?
The trend you describe is old news. Lego realised that the vast proliferation of pieces was undermining their profitability, by bogging down their supply chain. Over the last eight years, they have massively simplified their inventory, cutting out huge numbers of single-purpose pieces. The number of colors in use has been halved.

The Lego you remember is still available under the Bricks & More line - big boxes and buckets of simple, primary-colored pieces.
A little off-topic but I find LEGOs are usually over 50% more expensive in Canada than in the US :-(

http://www.amazon.ca/LEGO-Star-Imperial-V-wing-Starfighter/d...

http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Star-Imperial-V-wing-Starfighter/...
How to discover and share the best content on the web
It's not like everyone at Google is reading my email. No privacy intrusion here IMHO.
> It's creepy, and I would gladly pay google monthly to prevent them from abusing my privacy.

OK..... how about $5/mo for Google Apps for business?
They say ads can be disabled.
Yes, I usually keep the feature branch on my machine and rebase master on to it every day. I would also like to know how to push it while continually rebasing it on top of master.
Don’t Let the Peter Principle Kill Your Dream
ZX81..... clue in name, not 1979.

Still, love and upvoted you for also having a ZX81 and, like me, typing in insane machine code. Probably felt like travelling back 2 years in time!!!! :)
This might be an off topic question, but is there a way to get ongoing static analysis on either Python or Ruby.

The same way CLANG works with OBJ-C in Xcode.
How do you measure wheter what you just typed is more expressive to me than raw ascii numbers representing the characters you typed? ...

Why do you need to make a small problem big, just to sound "academic" ?

..you can easily measure the expressiveness of any given language by how easily you can understand it based on what you already know (i.e. your mothertongue language).

The same old principle of the least surpise..

And flexibility ?
How would you tell if one language is more flexible than another ?
It takes no academic graduation to understand that flexibilty is the degree of freedom the language allows you in combining the language fundamental "bits" in syntactically correct ways.

So, getting back on topic for you to understand better... :

Ruby different Ways To Loop
http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/151837

The beauty of Ruby through examples
http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/217762

Good reading.
Turns out people are actually very, very good at following a conversation. They hold the state in their heads. Try going to a bar and sitting at a table with eight or nine people at it. If you could write a transcript you'd see the conversation spiralling, branching, merging and branching again. And nobody gets lost.

All a forum has to do is record who said something and in what order. Threading is a ridiculous "solution" to a problem only programmers believe exists. Nested threading makes it impossible to see what's new since you were last in a thread, encourages anti-social digressions and most fundamentally it works against the deep human ability to understand, manage and participate in complex conversations.
As far as I know, black rights protesters weren't charged with 13 felonies.
> The new number has 17,425,170 digits—just writing them down makes for a 22.45-megabyte text file

Um, what?

Even if you include commas... um, what?
Agreed. But then you're not benchmarking Ruby execution speed, which really makes comparing the two not very worthwhile. By the same notion, then when you compare on something like JRuby, you really should be comparing JDK 6, 7, and 8 builds, along with various startup flags, both JVM and JRuby. E.g., short runs may benefit greatly from turning off JRuby JIT, JAR verification, and using tiered compilation modes. May as well add Nailgun and drip in there as well, since both can speed up startup time on subsequent runs. Which one of these is going to be the JRuby you use in your comparisons? Or are you really going to show 20 different configurations?

You can run into the same problem with MRI and its GC settings. If too low for your test, you're going to hit GC hard. It's best to normalize that out so you have an even comparison. Confounding variables and all that.

There's a lot you can do outside the Ruby container to influence startup time. When comparing two implementations, the defaults are certainly something to consider, but not when trying to see which actually executes Ruby faster. They are two different metrics of performance and should be compared in isolation.
Google Joins JPMorgan in Seeking Software Patent Limits