skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We had lossy RGBA many years ago with JNG (a simple PNG/JPG mashup format), but Mozilla killed the format along with MNG. The reason was that the MNG lib added about 100kB to the installer. They suggested to use Flash instead. (Yes, seriously.)

With JNG those massive parallax websites could be ~1MB instead of ~5MB.
Yep, when he talks about Europe he could easily mean Hungary, where salaries are about half what they are in Germany or England. Europe is a big place, and just saying "Europe" is like saying "United States". Hell, he could have hired a developer in Regina for less than a developer in Vancouver.
I can't think of any specific "exile event", but it did seem some time before he left that there was a trend in the Ruby/Rails community that made him feel unwelcome. That trend was "replace why's libraries and make noise about how his library wasn't any good".

Hpricot in particular was under heavy assault. I'll be the first to say that maybe it wasn't always the most performant solution, but for a long time it was the only good solution (and I tried a few). So when people are ripping your libraries left and right, forgetting to pay a little bit of respect to how big an impact he had on the community, then yeah...I could see how he'd feel the need for a self-imposed exile.
The power of lonely (2011 article)
Yup ... I feel the same way. Frankly, I think Canadian developers aren't paid enough. That's one of the reasons for the brain drain to the US. I recall in 2006, some of the smartest masters CS students I knew were getting offers around 55-60K in Toronto!
Article: "Case 1 says it might be infinitely many,
case two says it might be none."

> What? Case 2 says that all the balls will be put
> back in. In both cases, there will be infinitely
> many balls back in the barrel after midnight.

Yes, and in case 2 there will be none outside, which is what's being asked.

Quoting more completely:

How many are outside of the barrel after midnight?
We can't tell!

Without being explicit, without actually naming the
balls and saying which ones are being removed and
replaced we simply cannot tell. Case 1 says it might
be infinitely many, case two says it might be none.

Case two has all the balls in the barrel after midnight. That means there are none outside, which is what's being asked.

Or have I misunderstood you?
This is adorable.

Telling phrases:

1) "But I didn’t want to be constantly worrying about financing, loans or diluting my shares by raising funding to stay afloat. "

That's nice, if you can't have 100% of everything it's not worth it. Tell that to every other small business owner. jackass.

2) "Finding the right talent in Canada wasn’t difficult. That’s right, it was easy to find. Talent was plentiful. There were extremely intelligent and capable developers. But the price tag that came along with their talents made me wonder how I would even stay in business."

Huh, so you don't want to take in seed money, but you can't afford talent (that you were able to source without much work).

3) "Our first projects involved building on new technologies: mobile and Facebook apps. At the time, there were only a handful of us in Canada that could do this kind of work."

You built "mobile" and facebook apps and thought you were special and unique? Bullshit.

I worked for a guy like this - it was the worst 5 months of my career. I asked for $55k, he talked me down to $49k suggesting my experience was weak. Was out performing every other developer in the shop (including the CTO) within a month. Asked for a raise and got laughed at. Left that company shortly thereafter and landed a "low paying" job at a local startup - this move ended up giving me a $10,000 raise + stock options. Meanwhile the asshat I worked for before has had his company collapse as he tried off shoring to bargin bin shops in India and Mexico. I would be sympathetic if the guy wasn't such a sales oriented jerkoff.
No, the comment seems like the author being a jackass.

A genuine desire to understand would have used different questions altogether.
I have Lion installed. I have a copy of Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion sitting around. Lion is pretty solid.
You are making the (quite appalling I think) assumption that "more artistic" means "better". Video games are not movies. There is far greater variety in video games, and far more reasons to enjoy them. I think people doing research on why human beings have "fun", what fun means and how we can provide more fun experiences are doing far more for the future of video games than people trying to pretend they are movies, and should aspire to be "art" movies.
The United States of swearing: Where America curses the most
Imagine a graph where the x-axis represents the size of your mining farm (from small to big), and the y-axis the percentage of the mining income spent on operating costs.

For small values of X the curve is close to zero. As we move to the left the curve suddenly jumps, and then decreases and decreases but without ever coming back close to zero.

This illustrates my point: small miners have operating costs close to zero, above a certain size you suddenly start needing to spend quite a bit on operating costs (first rack, first A/C unit, etc), and as you scale up and up yes there is some amount of economy of scale, but never enough to reduce your operating costs close to zero.

I say "economies of scale do not exist" but what I mean more precisely is that they are not sufficient to cause big miners to push small miners out of the market.
I've not. I will though.
He probably doesn't mean London, but anecdotally most UK programmers I know make 1/4 of what most bay area people earn.

Since their website mentions Sofia, I'm going to guess Bulgaria.
Buggy Code on Production, Survived
Experiences on project management.
Canadian engineers are in high demand in Silicon Valley where you can easily start for 50% more than that.
Someone added "I hate your choices" to the list. Awesome. The beauty of the All Our Ideas platform is that you can add your own ideas. They'll be rotated into the choices and will be eligible for voting.
Maybe 75K is high for a recent graduate but I would certainly not expect to be paid a fifth of that like the author boasts he was able to pay his offshore hires. Especially since that makes it fall below minimum wage at 35h/week.
Depends on your industry. For what the OP does? Not so much. However, I'm 2 years out of uni making just that + benefits (Pension, Bonus, etc.) and have a few friends doing even better. I don't consider myself anywhere near top tier as far as software engineering talent goes because I have met plenty of people who exceed my skills completely. That all said to ask me to work for you when my options are taking a massive pay cut for a high risk venture are not likely.
$ file DESOLEE
DESOLEE: HP PCL printer data
$ file DESOLEE
DESOLEE: HP PCL printer data
$ whatis -s 1 file
file (1) - determine file type
But yet, it is.

I know many people who have been in that range within a couple of years of graduation - not senior by any means. $75K for someone with a light sprinkling of experience is the market, at least in major urbans like Toronto.
Yup, basically the author is cheap and does not respect quality talent and does not believe in fair compensation. It's clear when he says 'it was a tough pill to swallow' which also means highly egoist. I'd recommend staying away from his company any day even if he wants you.
T-mobile begins $99 iPhone 5 sales
Sadly, I think it's a prevalent attitude so I'm actually happy to see it being shot full of holes, especially in light of the recent RBC (and others) outsourcing stuff.
The only thing I like about USPS is my mailguy, who is always smiling when he rings our doorbell on occasions when we have a shipment from Amazon and it's too big to fit in the mailbox.

He never fails to brighten the day of whomever greets him at the door at our house :)
For me, the biggest hurdle to 3D printing is the cost of the filament. It's plastic for goodness sake. Are companies just using the traditional economics of printing (cheap printer, expensive ink), or is this stuff actually expensive to make?
For this first pass I went with a markdown-like syntax. However, I'm not tied to it.

Submit a PR here https://github.com/adamschwartz/log/pulls and we'll consider it if there is wide support.
Why should reexaminations be so expensive?

I think this is an area where Google could really be useful. With their database and search algorithms, it'd be doable for them to put together a service to do prior art searches. Maybe use text analysis to summarize prior patents into English (since they're written in a fairly structured way to begin with).

It doesn't need to be advanced AI. Anything they came up with would certainly be better than whatever process the USPTO uses now.
How to grow a user base
Update to Chrome 26 (latest stable)
This is a continuation of our disagreement above, I know, but if you have an entity that has advanced problematic proposals multiple times when it comes to regulating technology -- and at times demonstrated a near-complete lack of understanding of what they're trying to regulate -- it's not unreasonable to apply more scrutiny to future proposals.

You're right that nobody should be making inaccurate claims about the bill (though I try to be charitable and say inaccurate claims in either direction are misunderstandings, not intentional distortions). I'm making a slightly different point, which is an argument for lower threshold to trigger scrutiny, and a higher threshold to legislate in the first place.
Thank you for connecting the SMS to the lack-of-dial tone. I thought it was the most interesting part of the article, but wasn't explained very well.

So if I have this correctly: the Push-To-Dial feature necessitated an out of band control mechanism, and this mechanism is what SMS lives on?

Do SMS messages still use the out of band? I'm guessing that iMessage, etc., use the data channel (based on the encryption discussion last week). But when I send a text that's a proper SMS, or an SMS from Twilio/etc., does that use this out of band mechanism?
There's another thing that doesn't really jive with me about this guy's story. Take 2) and 3) together. He says that "there were only a handful of us in Canada who could do this kind of work", then "talent was plentiful". So which is it?
Of course it's not a deal breaker. All I'm saying is that Bitcoin doesn't enforce exchange. There's nothing in the Bitcoin protocol that forces Namecoin to give you a domain name.
75k is not an entry-level/recent grad salary.

Four years ago my intern went to Amazon after graduation for $86k and his degree was from SFSU, which is not a CS powerhouse. I believe entry level salaries have gotten higher since then...
Google Now, Not Google Glass, Is A Game-Changer
It's funny how this asshole used IBM as an example.
Who basically does EXACTLY the same thing. Abuse immigrants on HB1 to push down salaries.

My God, the irony, I can... taste it.
Neon Waterfalls : Long exposures of glow-sticks floating over waterfalls
Me to. I've work for people like them. Abused, weekends, night, all nighters. I was young and stupid. I thought they were doing me a favour. Gah. I want those nights back.
The booze industry spends just as much money in "on premise", essentially bribing bartenders with trinkets and events. Guess it worked!
I think you raise a very interesting point. When you read stories about trading, often people bring up the question, "What value does it provide to society?" Much of the commentary I read wants to apply that judgement to trading, but nowhere else. Are designer jeans a benefit to society? Is fast food? Are casinos? Does everyone's job need to be beneficial to society? And if so, who makes that call?
My wife (a software engineer) has complained of this - guys that would just interrupt, ignore or talk over her in a meeting like she is wasn't there.
Silicon Alley Soiled:$41M Silver Lake loan keeps Foursquare afloat
It's not supposed to be used everywhere.

It's a developer tool for browsers that have the requisite developer tools support.
Microsoft is not shy about "posturing themselves as opponents to Android", and has been doing so for a long time. It's not really a surprise here.
That is why while making important business decisions it is so critical to think 10-20 years out if not 40-50 even if that makes making the tough choices.
ReelSurfer (YC S12) Gets A Makeover, Clip ESPN Or New York Times Videos
Show HN: Relaunch of my weekly DevOps newsletter/magazine
For every outsourcing success story it seems there are two horror stories. I know at my prior employer we hired a development team in India for a year and it was a complete disaster. Not only was the work shoddy and buggy, we ended up paying more than what we would have had we just hired a good local developer. They ended up charging us 300k for the year. We were supposed to get a 25 developer team for that 300k but the work they turned out could have been easily done by two decent experienced State-side engineer and done a lot better too. I had to spend 6 months rewriting large chunks of their code, it was just terrible.

From my experience it seems really hard to get good talent overseas. And if you do find good talent, they usually want almost as much a good local talent.
Jquery Exchange Q&A is now using an open source Java Q&A software
That's really what I mean as well. I can hire remote devs in Canada for 1/2 the salary of Toronto devs. I worked for a company where I had an entire team "Down East" that cost peanuts. The tech lead there laughed at the idea of moving to Toronto and doubling or trebling his salary, he loved the lifestyle he could afford where he lived.
Hah, he's a product manager. No wonder.
1 stock represents fractional ownership of the company, which owns physical assets, liabilities, accounts payable, etc. In other words, real life assets.

On the other hand BitCoin fundamentally has no tangible asset backing it. Its price is driven purely by supplly/demand, rather than any sort of book value.

I don't know enough about macro finance to discern whether this is a good/bad/neutral thing for BitCoin, but it's a worthy distinction to make in comparing stock and Btc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/...
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/15/why-a-tale-of-a-p...

TL;DR a prolific pseudonymous rubyist who was very active in the ruby and rails community. Noted for his particularly whimsical (and/or arful) style of approaching problems and communication. Probably best known for "why's poignant guide to ruby", currently mirrored here: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/book/chapter-1.htm...
Ask HN: Innovative way to help education?
So, I was just thinking about this. It's not-at-all tech-related, but I'm just curious why I never read about it or if it's even been explored at all.

My idea to better education, specifically for middle and high school is this: make EVERYONE'S grades somewhat dependent on the lowest grade in the class.

This will help the annoying slackers get their act together since they're not sinking alone. They're drowning everyone along with them.

This will hopefully also help everyone come together to help the person with the lowest grade. However, I'm sure it could lead to massive amounts of resentment if the experiment isn't managed well.

Anyway, I have no idea if this is a usual HN thing, but I read HN religiously and I value the input from its members.

Thanks.
>That’s a relatively new concept in the enterprise world, where traditionally software had been built for the buyers, most often IT. That has resulted in years of overly-complex software built with many widgets and checkboxes that IT admins love but that leave regular users scratching their heads.

There's more to this, but I generally agree.

I've worked in "the enterprise" or something akin to it for my entire career. During this time I've fought an endless battle against IT departments who fail to understand or outright reject their role as providing a service to the rest of organization.

Simply put, the role is not about us, making our jobs easier or enabling us to implement to most interesting and advanced systems.

It's about enabling the rest of the organization to work more efficiently. Ideally, we're all but invisible.

I believe that failing to understand and embrace this is the root of much internal strife, siloing between and within departments, failed undertakings and all around waste in many organizations.
It would probably be more ethical to charge users for installing AppGratis. Then the incentive would be to provide the user with useful information everyday, or risk being uninstalled / canceled / refunded / whatever. Consumer Reports works this way and they seem to be pretty successful.
"Unless a truly insurmountable flaw is discovered that renders any system with the features of bitcoin infeasible."

Be careful with words like "infeasible." That has a meaning in cryptography and in complexity theory, and it is not quite what you mean there. I think what you are trying say is, "There might be no protocol like Bitcoin that is secure against polynomial time attacks."

That is not such an outlandish scenario. It has been proved that Merkle's Puzzles cannot be secure no matter how they are instantiated; in fact, Merkle's original system is optimal. I would not be surprised if the a similar statement were true of digital cash systems without central authorities: that there will always be a polynomial time attack, no matter how you instantiate them.

Of course, before such a statement could be proved, you would first need a rigorous security definition for Bitcoin. What does it even mean for Bitcoin to be secure? "Double spending" is not even well-defined for Bitcoin; the existing rigorous definitions of double spending in digital cash systems invoke a central authority. Without good security definitions, it is hard to say whether or not Bitcoin is secure or could be secure.

I doubt that even a minority of Bitcoin users are terribly concerned with the lack of rigorous definitions or analysis. If they were, the system would never have gained any traction. As you say, it would take a sustained attack on these systems to really erode the trust in them (although by the second or third system that was attacked, I think most people would just give up).

It is also worth pointing out that the end game might not even be to destroy the system, but just to use it to cut off organizations like Wikileaks. The same attack that can be used to double-spend in Bitcoin can be used to prevent transactions from being confirmed; the government might just stop select targets from using Bitcoin. This would probably shake people's trust in the system, but perhaps not -- maybe the government would be very judicious, or would try to frame the target and make it look like they are trying to cheat.

We could sit here coming up with possible motives for an attack all day long, of course. That is yet another reason that rigorous definitions and formal analysis are valuable: if we can show that no feasible attacks exist, then we do not need to try to guess what the attacker's purpose might be.
Especially these days, a Manhattan hedge fund guy is more likely to be a Quant than a Jock.

You're probably more likely to find jocks in the mega-banks, particularly in the flow trading and sales departments.
Incidentally, I'm consulting out in the bay area but considering heading to Austin for the cheap land and nicer people. Probably shortly before or after I start my next project.
For the last year or so I've been running a small email newsletter on the interesting world of DevOps. Its hosted at DevOpsFriday.com

I've had a reasonable amount of success with the newsletter, and I'm now hoping to take it to the next level and turn it into a free curated magazine summarising the best of weekly DevOps news.
I know his kind all to well.
Ship bullshit apps to bullshit marketing cunts. Get third world youngsters to do slave labour for slave fee's.

"A Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer. "
"Global Managing Director of Majestic Media, Canada's first Facebook Marketing & Technology agency. His extensive experience on the Facebook platform includes building out social strategy, campaign ideation, app architecture and social design"

I really want to punch this asshole in the face.
Even if I make a call from Skype to my cell phone, I can hear the audible "ring" on Skype long before my actual phone begins to ring.
Yes, that'd will show them!

This attitude reminds me of Mel Gilbson's house in "Conspiracy Theory" -- with locks on the fridge and on the food containers inside it and all.

Not to mention that even in Mountain Lion you don't have to "deal with the silly Mac App Store" if you don't want to. Just use it to get the core OS updates, and download all your apps from their original sources.
Question to the Rackspace guys:

Why don't you make a kickstarter project to pay for the IPR?

As you said, other companies are interested in sharing the cost, as trolls go after them too. Why not sharing the cost too?.

Companies that are affected by trolls are acting like independent entities, witch makes them extremely vulnerable to big companies and capitalized trolls.

You need to unite!

Small and medium business are most of America's or European business, but if you act alone and divided you will be easily defeated(divide and conquer)
Are there a substantial number of "haters" who have stated that Ruby is better with _why gone? It seems like a straw man.
There is nothing about marketing right? I mean real marketing not just by cutting the price. For me it is one of the main reasons they didn't earn a lot, specially with the video game industry. For instance, it is not surprising to see the marketing at 60% of expenses, and it can be even more.

They should send keys to journalists, do a real marketing strategy with trailers, put ads every time they do a big update, talk to the community, etc. Marketing is a core of the formula to be rich and successful. In an entertainment industry, more you can give emotions to your future players more you increase the rate of conversion and their future value (trailer, teaser, quality of gameplay, etc.), and at the same time if you put these ads on as much people as you can, it directly increases your own wealth.

It reminds me this article:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/173068/congratulations...
And for the equation you have the excelente book "The Millionaire Fastlane" by MJ DeMarco or more quickly:
http://personalmba.com/billionaire-formula/
I'm not sure, but at one time there were also a lot of party lines. A dial tone was a way of signalling that you had the line to yourself and you weren't picking up during a lull in someone else's conversation.

Today we have the signal bars to show you status. Back then, a light would have added expense and complexity to the phones of the day.
This guy's an outsourcing company.. of course he's going to look for cheaper talent in other continents. He also has little understanding or appreciation of quality of code and scalability, because he really doesn't have to worry about it. He's building Facebook apps that probably aren't vey complicated.

The salary of software developers in Canada is also substantially lower than the US. A $70k developer salary in Canada is approximate to a $90-100k salary in New York, Silicon Valley.

Not sure what the purpose of that article was, since a lot of us are building tech companies, not outsourcing agencies.. I guess this is why I don't read techvibes.
It was this experience that revealed to me that I should never be working for the guy in marketing. The marketing guy should be working for me.
Somebody is currently implementing something similar in Emacs for Emacs Lisp: https://github.com/Fuco1/litable
Win a Kindle and shape the vacation rental industry..
He should have just wrote an article about outsourcing your startup in order to "double" staff, extend runway, and get profitable faster. Instead it was a rather insulting look at Canadian developers wanting a respectable wage.