skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Improve performance, especially on multi-core machines

This is scary. I'm not ready to see the comeback of time when a single app would lock up the entire system for 5-10 seconds. I hope the next generation of OSes will have an option for how many cores each process is allowed to use.

Multiple cores aren't the answer to bloated software. Hey, my iPhone renders animation much smoother than Linux version of Firefox on Core 2 Duo - sure there is plenty of room for improvement, but don't touch my cores, I need them to run other apps/sites!
Yeah doing some more thought on the issue I reached the same conclusion. It would be great if someone could prove that I am consistent enough in what I can control and my body is also producing a roughly consistent random factor on top of that. If so, this would make the relationship to a coin flip a lot more sensible.
Where to Place Your Most Profitable Products
Of course I could, but I don't have the time to put into this. And that would still do nothing to the fact that reading PDF files not formatted to the Kindle (such as magazines) is painful. A 12" 4xXGA (2048x1536) screen would be my guess as what's needed for this to work. 800x600 just doesn't do it.

There _must_ be someone willing to explore this niche. Where's the TechCrunch tablet?
Taking the Guesswork Out of Design
I don't know if you misunderstood or just didn't read the linked page, but this is a compiler for hierarchical Bayesian models, not a compiler that uses Bayesian inference in the process of compiling, neat as that would be.
Never ever ever ever __ever__ do a fixed amount for a project. You will get screwed.

I've made this mistake twice in my life; both times at the end of the project it worked out to something crazy like $5/hr along with sour relationships with both clients.

An hourly rate is always fair, for everyone. The client gets what he pays for and you get paid for what you give. No more, no less on either side.
they still get very hot. they still don't have dedicated pgup/pgdn keys, the resolution is too high (1280x800 for me), the antialiasing is very blurry!, so expensive, so cold in the winter (the aluminium you ken)

a kick-ass t400 can go for 50% less for a comparable configuration. wait around in the lenovo site for a 20% off deal. they're running them non-stop now. i have t40/t61/z60t and t400. love them all to pieces. one powerbook (my great blunder) sold on ebay :)

oh, i dropped the z60t on its side from a considerable height. (~ 4m) a bit of the plastic on the side flew off, the monitor became unhinged. i just popped everything back together, kept working. wouldn't try this with a delicate powerbook.
If you are going to do some of those freelancing sites, you really can't charge more than $15-20 hour to be competitive

And you shouldn't admit to being an emerging developer, people are pretty wary of dealing with "amateurs". You need a reputation before anyone will pick you.

My advice is as follows:
a) Spend about $500 to get some feedback. Don't get greedy and make all of those large projects. You need to start out with a few small ones, then get a few large ones. Your goal is to have 7-8 "feedbacks" about how great you are.

b) At the same time you should bid on other projects, doesn't matter if its big or small, if its a $20 project or a $30 project. Your goal in the early stage is to get a lot of feedback points.

c) Once you reach 20 or so feedbacks you'll be able to actually win some of those larger projects. At this point your skills will improve, and you can actually start charging more than the average offshore developer. You can explain the difference by saying you are in the USA and are actually in the same time zone as your clients.

Also if you have some free time, make 5-6 websites, that you can point to as your "work". They don't need to be super complicated, but they should look good.
The issue tracking on github is very basic and just about useless in my experience for managing any private development environment. Hopefully they continue to improve it like the rest of their services so I won't have to use other systems in the future but it's really not there yet.
You know what else is a household name? Hitler.
yes.
unless x=powerbook, and y=thinkpad.

ho ho ho.
ever tried importing old mail? oy vey!
I hate to be this guy but you violated a contract that you agreed to. If you weren't happy with their refund policy you shouldn't have bought their ticket.
I think you can charge more for iPhone development versus web development just because there are fewer folks with those skills. I've only done a few contract jobs but no one has every argued my rate ($100/hour). I always charge by the hour and I would suggest doing this, especially if they don't have a detailed spec. Most of jobs are with folks who don't have a background designing software (since now everyone thinks they can get rich off of a dumb iPhone app) and so its inevitable that the project will change. This way, if they want to tweak some feature, they have to pay.

You can also discuss taking a cut of the app revenue in exchange for a discount, but i would be wary of this. I am doing it for one project because the project was smaller in scale, so its less of a gamble. I had another that I almost offered a 50% discount in exchange for 50% equity... and that app has made about $10 in the month or so its been in the store. So, my experience tells me avoid royalty arrangements....
PyQt developer makes "financial decision" not to follow Qt to LGPL
LOL, you just don't know how to estimate how long it's gonna take, or you don;t specify what needs to be done well enough.

Lots of people work for a fixed price with happy clients and they end up being happy with the outcome too (myself included). The key to everything is to be good at specifying what needs to be done, and then be good at estimating how long it will take you to do it.

Also, lots of clients do not want hourly, because THEY feel it is unfair. They do not see you working, and you could be taking them for a ride.
Read my lips:

Apple does NOT need twitter.

This is a fake story to put a reference value for twitter in our heads.

In my opinion, twitter is not worth more than 100M.
i had a lot of issues, but they are fixable.
http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=13708

at any rate, took me less time than tweaking a powerbook.
What I want to know is, how do you guys get this stuff? I wanted to try it awhile back, but couldn't find a legit source on a net that wasn't selling a cheap knockoff from India.
What did you use to generate those graphs?
ChunkHost offering free xen vps for beta testers
ChunkHost is a new Xen VPS web host and they're offering 512MB ubuntu xen instances with 20GB disk and 200GB bw for free (normally $19/month) to beta testers for a limited time.
I've found feeds become much more manageable on Google Reader if you get used to the keyboard shortcuts of j/k'ing forward and back through items. Assess each item based on its headline, and build up a rhythm of j-j-j, moving quickly past less interesting items. I've noticed myself reading far less inane articles since picking up the habit.
Are those active? I've heard a lot of Twitter's "users" sign up but aren't posting.
That's not an ad, it's a picture of the author - Joel Spolsky.
Apple's iWorks Pages
Ask HN: Brainstorming ideas to help the charity world
Hi HNers,

Today I was having a discussion with some friends and the topic of nonprofit charitable organizations came up--the kind that feed the hungry and distribute medication. During our discussion we started to wonder: How do groups coordinate their work? If you're doing work to stop malaria in one country, how do you find and make contact with suppliers and other charitable organizations? How do you make sure you're not overlapping, and share advice and expertise?
I still don't know the answer to this question, but this seems like the sort of thing that technology could help with.

1) Does a great solution already exist?

2) Any ideas about how to make it better?
You could.. multiply the average register by the count register, then add the new integer to the average register, increment the count register and then re-divide?
Are there honestly many people these days who aren't donors? I'm sure the answer is yes, but I'll still be surprised by it.
I don't think this is a joke. Essentially, he means "content such as offensive references to religion, abortion, 9-11, or the devil." The topics themselves are not offensive, but it's easy to talk about them offensively.
Ten Things Twitter is Not
Whatever the deal I am ready for some kind of renewal and excitement in the tech scene. Too many economic sob stories for over a year now.
SoftLayer's real advantage seems to be in bandwidth. Offering bandwidth at $0.10/GB or cheaper in bundles, their CloudLayer Storage can offer some nice savings over S3 depending on what you need.

Likewise, while they haven't published their CloudLayer Computing prices yet, the plans do include 2,000GB of outbound bandwidth and free incoming bandwidth which is potentially a huge cost savings over EC2 since 2,000GB of bandwidth would cost $360 on EC2.

SoftLayer tends to have a wonderful reputation with many YC companies choosing it for their hosting. I'm not sure I'd want to be one of the first customers on this new service, but I'm definitely glad it's happening. If nothing else, hopefully it will put pressure on Rackspace and Amazon.
RIM founder offers to bring Pheonix Coyotes to Canada
It's about time Toronto got some competition :)

What does everyone think?
I did some freelance web design / html coding as well as standard computer repair work about 6 or 7 years ago when I first got out of high school and charged $60 per hour for both. One hour minimum, charge by the half hour after that.
Most popular sites running on Google App Engine
Few patients suffer more of mental discomfort than the unfortunate possessors of some unsightly disfigurement on the face which attracts constant notice, few are more solicitous for any operation which promises relief, and none are more grateful for the slightest improvement in their condition

http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/2004/1/...

Not strange. Actual pain has known bounds, but if you have some unsightliness, you never know what people are thinking. Socially, you might be a monster--and you can't tell.
Found Manuscript Details the Unmasking of the Original Ponzi
Stack Mode Brains Explained
http://http.cdnlayer.com/softlayerweb/PS_CLStorage_GettingSt...

I don't see any API; looks like a Web interface only.
Introduction to AWS for PHP Developers
I'm pretty sure I just read my quota of (tm)s for the month.

In other news, it sure would be nice to see a list of places they have a CDN presence. Their CDN seems pretty limited as is, though. 24 hour sliding expirations for the origin service? Yuck.
Tweetcoding in ActionScript3
one reason facebook is so viral is that it largely implements this naturally by its decomposition. that is, randomly choose seeds within a dense section of the graph (an island, or in facebook lingo, a network). it will quickly spread to the whole island, and you can grow virally island by island. this is a decent approximation under certain assumptions to an optimal centrality metric.
While I haven't really used this particular service, I disagree with your general premise.

I love graphviz, for example. Graphviz is actually quite awesome. I can draw dependency graphs, or any other kind of graph, without touching the mouse. I don't have to care about the layout, and I don't want to, since I'm no designer. Actually I'm quite bad at layouting stuff - and the algorithm gets it right most of the time.

I can quickly change things, insert or delete an element, without having to worry about re-layouting everything myself. So, cut a long story short: doing visual tasks text-based is not a bad thing per se.

Again, I haven't really given this thing a try for long enough, but right now, the text-based interface seems OK for me. But maybe that's just me, being a very text-driven person.
Where's the value add? Do we need yet another VPS host?
Amazon provides a host of support services (Cloudfront CDN anyone??) that are trivial to manage from an existing EBS volume. The extra services that Amazon offers really make the process of going from zero to scale much simpler (albeit not 'easy') than any other host or collection of tools that I've used.

That makes it worth the slightly higher costs for me.
I don't like the credit card info required but if they can offer 512 for 20 bucks a month they will have an up on some companies. Someone will have to report back if they try it.
When you have a problem with a mac you can't fix it, 90% of the time the problems are hidden away and impossible to troubleshoot.

Demonstrably false. As far as systems and hardware are concerned, I worked as one of the guys who troubleshoots and repairs macs at a busy Apple store. Never once was I forced to say "I don't know. The problem is hidden and I can't troubleshoot it."

On the programming side, macs ship with dtrace. How much more troubleshooting power can a developer possibly ask for?

Just because you haven't bothered to learn enough about a system to troubleshoot it doesn't mean the problems are hidden. They're just hidden form you.
Really? I didn't know that about them.
Children's Fashion Directory
Who You Are Now is Who You'll Be in 10 Years
How Michael Osinski Helped Build the Bomb That Blew Up Wall Street -- New York Magazine
0. Profitable (yet)
Insurance for Tech/Web Startups?
I wanted to know about the HN communities thoughts on Insurance for Startups (tech/web).

Our startup is a pure web startup, so we are not dealing with any office spaces, properties, physical items, or interacting with the customers directly. We will have a services people can pay for, but that's about it.

Only thing I can think of is another company coming at us for IP related lawsuits. We did lot of research early on to make sure no one has done it, or there were any patents regarding it.

* Do you think Insurance is something early stage tech startup should look into? Personal Experience?
Good Article. I'm not Twitter's biggest fan but if I'm honest with myself I have to admit a lot of what I don't like about the service isn't from the service itself but from the crazy hype that surrounds it.

In the end Twitter is a nice little service that provides a function that a lot of people enjoy. When seeing it that way it's hard to have something against it. It's only when people start claiming it will replace e-mail or be the news service of the next century that I get annoyed.
I second that.

Never do unknown amount of work for a fixed amount of money. Forget about "good guys" and "friends". You either charge them per hour or (if fixed job) control the contract with detailed requirements. You deliver that - you get paid. Charge per milestone. Split new features/changed requirements and your bugs. Charge more for new features. Always emphasize the fact it is not a bug, even if you are willing to do it for free. NEVER do life-time free maintenance of the project - set and meet the deadlines.

ALWAYS CHARGE.

People who can not organize and manage the process of development properly are deserved to be charged to the maximum extent.

Charge, charge, charge!
I've used EC2 for running web servers as well as database server with the db servers being replicated to rackspace for backup.

I have always wondered about how EBS as disk will affect database as it is essentially a network drive. Any info on that would be great.
Almost everything we do is fixed-price. I can't think of a client that has screwed us. But we go out of our way to find ways to work ("for free", gasp!) with clients; nothing is more valuable than the relationship.
Create a free RightScale account and check out their shell scripts. One can get good ideas of automation from them.
Yes. We need as much competition as possible to drive down prices and improve service/capabilities.

I'm still waiting for my $10/mo 256meg/10gig xen slice.
From anecdotal evidence, it's not unusual for iPhone devs to make $120 an hour or more. $60-$80 for a skilled developer with limited experience seems appropriate.

Don't be afraid to start at a high hourly rate, it almost always works out in your favor. Excuse the metaphor, but clients want to feel like they're getting a great deal on a Lexus rather than a satisfactory deal on a Hyundai, even if the price is the same. The key is elevating your perceived value. Talking clients through complex technical issues and possible solutions before negotiating often helps.

Don't bother with the freelancing sites, as rates are low. You'd be competing on price with overseas developers rather than playing to strengths like availability, perceived value of your formal education, and communication skills.
You probably also manage your hours well and have provisions for work outside of scope. Going hourly is much safer for someone new.
Not getting paid? Wow. I wish I had that problem. I'm stuck under the $250 threshold. sigh
They partner with Internap for their CDN:

http://internap.com/flash/maps/overview_map.html

More details on the service:

http://internap.com/cdn-services/deliver/http-content-delive...
I was thinking that the project blogs, wikis, forums and the fact that it's hosted (plus the developer-specific stuff) make it like Basecamp.
You know what someone needs to build; a cloud agnostic layer.
A standard API that translates across all these cloud companies.

It would reduce migration barriers and help drive down the price.
I signed up a few minutes ago, have yet to receive my email with the root passwd.

Looks like it comes with Ubuntu 8.04 and no option to change it.

I have 2 linodes currently, I plan to run some benchmarks vs Chunkhost to see how it stacks up.
Several such efforts are underway; OCCI looks the most promising.

http://www.occi-wg.org/
I found that I like hourly rates better than fixed prices. Fixed prices work great if you have a lot of experience on which you can base estimates. For someone who is an emerging developer, I would suggest starting out at a modest hourly rate. Once you have some credibility, you can bump up the hourly rate or start estimating using fixed price.
SoftLayer has a good history of building an API for just about everything they offer. There is currently an API for the CDN [1], I'm sure they'll do the same for the other CloudLayer services.

1. http://sldn.softlayer.com/wiki/index.php/Cdn
Here's a TechCrunch article on just this.

http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/05/05/rest-in-peace-rss/
What's your app? Why not put it in your About section
I guess what I meant to say was "all people that use Debian are cool" ;)
Curious to know what issues you've had with SL's private network? We have more than twenty servers spread across Dallas that rely heavily on their private network. HTTP, MySQL, memcached, etc. Peaks into the hundreds of Mbps. While there have been hiccups, it's generally been fine.
Command line made easy: five simple recipes for grep
I realize that this is semi-tautological, but if something has no mainstream media coverage it really isn't notable. Heck, even most things covered by MSM don't seem notable to me. (Example seen on TV today: Ferrari spins out of control in NYC! So what.)
Not true: http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/daily-brief/2008/10/17/...
I belive you're wrong about separare process in Linux.

It will be great when it is. Process per window/tab next...
Twitter's naming is very clever. I was talking to my girlfriend about birds the other day in the park. "I wonder what they're saying? 'I'm here.' 'I'm here?' 'Hungry' 'Scared' 'Happy?'" We decided they're just saying 'tweet tweet.'

A lot of the time that's what we do too. We communicate just for the sake of it. People talk to their babies. It's important to talk to your baby. It doesn't really matter what you say specifically, but you should say nice comforting things. Same with other people. "Hi, Howya goin." "nottaa-bother' 'tweet tweet.'

It still carries information.
This requires installing shady coupons.com software, which as far as I can tell is essentially "coupon drm" + adware. This is in addition to having to provide email + name.

Not Hacker News and not worth a chicken dinner to me.
You can set the CPU affinity for specific processes on any modern operating system. Maybe you wanted to set this for every process that the application will launch? It's still possible, but even less user-friendly.
You can set which cores a process runs on in Windows. In task manager, right click on a task and click 'set affinity'. I'm sure there's a way to do it in linux too, but my linux box only has one core.
this may interest you:
http://prgmr.com/xen/
as well as:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=590993
Is this stuff any good? The ad photos I've seen look pretty unappealing...
Not sure I follow you. What "establishment"?
You folks have a nicely designed site, and it's cool to offer such a nice deal to the beta users.

But.

Even though it's beta/free for now, it would be great if you had a screenshot of your admin panel, and some specs about the system. (Aside from RAM we're not told about the Linux distro, file system size, bandwidth before we hand over our credit card info?!)

Other than that, site looks very nice, and I wish you luck and hope to check your service out.
There's red text that says "Having problems printing the coupon? Click here."

That seems to lead to http://unthinkfc.com/KFCPdf.pdf
You're probably right, but the thing I learned from the first successful startup I was involved in that has stuck with me my whole career is the marketing power of customer service. It kills me when we can't make a client happy.

Maybe the trick is, pick good clients.

(The startup was an ISP, in 1996. Even in 1996, an indie ISP was hard to differentiate from the majors and incumbents. Mike and Tracy, the guys who ran the company, managed to build an unassailable reputation for customer service --- to this day, I don't understand how they did it, because I don't see how we did anything different from the other ISPs, other than to tell ourselves we had awesome customer service. But our ISP kicked ass up and down the block based almost entirely on that reputation. I'd love to get some of that mojo at Matasano.)
Click on red text that says "Having problems printing the coupon? Click here."

That seems to lead to: http://unthinkfc.com/KFCPdf.pdf
Unfortunately, I am skeptical of brand new hosting companies whose only differentiator is that they are cheaper. I always wonder if they are really cheaper or if they are simply cutting more corners than the other guys.

BTW, Mosso is $10.95/month for 256MB not including bandwidth.
> The higher the level of the language rises, the less it allows making bad programs

I think it's more complicated than that. Ruby is higher level than Java, but I would argue that Java makes it harder to write bad programs, especially in a team setting.
When I tried Windows 7 inside VmWare, the coupon app detected that it was in a Virtualized OS, and refused to print the coupon. See my other post above on clicking on the red link instead for a pdf file.
I'm sure there are quite a few people who aren't donors and don't know that they have to elect to be one.

Otherwise, I guess maybe people aren't for religious reasons? I'm not sure on that.
Yeah, I know. On Linux one can use nice/renice, but they deal with priorities, not CPU/core affinity.
If it's covered in the MSM (or even in a very reputable blog), it's at least verifiable. Which is why Pokemon characters and Teletubbies can have articles, but psuedonymous Italian hackers have a hard time.
I saw that. it seemed just a little too sketchy for me.
I'll probably sign up for mosso at some point. I'm just lazy, and running down my dotmac account now (yes you read me. iphone address/mail/ical sync is sublime)
Firefox could be the real Facebook challenger
Anyone else here been following Chris Crawford's adventures into interactive fiction in trying to get away from the rule based approaches?
Microsoft Must Buy Twitter
It is easy to sell me on Smalltalk vs. C. Just not on performance. =)