skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Milestones are great. However I like to have reasonably consistent prices. For a $4000 project you can have, say, four milestones with prices $500, $1000, $1000, $1500. This way the client can bail out after the first milestone if things aren't going well. And they won't lose too much money. Also the client gets the "carrot on a stick" with the hefty fourth milestone without being obnoxious (with a $3200 fourth milestone for example).
Cocos2d uses SpiderMonkey, not JavaScriptCore.
It probably generates enough revenue to be protected, but it isn't Adwords, search, or Adsense. It is probably less important than android. I'm not sure if it is more or less important than Chrome.
You're right for single messages, but I'm not seeing group messages in Adium.
Given how infinitely variable names are, I'm not surprised that programmers have trouble getting them right. But I've also seen problems with validating something as simple as an e-mail address. For example, I wanted to get e-mail updates for a shipment on Fedex.com and discovered that I couldn't enter an address that contained more than one dot after the "@": name@example.com was OK, but name@subdomain.example.com wasn't accepted.
There is a large difference depending on part of country (deep south, northeast, west coast), town, and part of town.

In some rural communities football and ROTC is glorified and science is for the nerds. In other parts of the country it is different.

> Or you could be a loner and that's fine too.

Or you got picked on, beaten and made fun of and adults (who have also mostly bought into the "sports are God" mentality) didn't really care to do much about it.

Now I am talking like I had extensive experience with this, but in reality I went to one American High School for one year only, otherwise I went to one in Eastern Europe.

I would say overall the East European one was poor, didn't have any extra curricular activities _but_ science, math and English (foreign language) was top notch. Just to compare, math material I studies in 9th grade back home was taught to seniors in 12th grade in US. It was nice tutoring them math. And I also got a taste of the sharp boundaries of cliques and social groups in US High Schools. These are the "band" people, they hang out together, these people smoke pot, they hang out together, these are the nerds they talk about Start Trek and hang out together and I had to pick one. I picked the nerds, and it was strange how many things revolved around "whom do you hang out with". I definitely saw that as a negative side.
With HMTL 5, Javascript, and a fast VM, you can do a lot of damage nowadays.

And the problem with Java isn't technical. I have a couple of Sun certificates, use it every day, and know what it can do. The problem is that I don't want to depend on a company that doesn't even pretend to have customers and developers' best interests at heart.
I've long dreamed of a resurgence in the open source community, attacking big media much as the community attacked Microsoft in the late 1990s. It's depressing that the PR machine has so thoroughly succeeded that most of those who still call themselves "geeks" now consider building throwaway hacks on big media services cooler and more meaningful than coordinated efforts to replace the services themselves (in the name of serving some ideals much greater than say, amateur entrepreneurialism).

Talking here about Docs, Gmail and so on. Somehow it became embarrassing for a nerd to straight out clone the competition, much like AbiWord and suchlike once did, simply in the name of freedom. Nowadays we have to compete on "sexy" innovative site designs and related sundry crap, and how many cloud "services" we integrate with.

I'll keep hoping for this resurgence, in the meantime I'll continue privately working toward cloning some of these services myself, until such a time as there is an established community for me to join. We basically need something like the (early day) GNOME foundation, but for the web.
Totally agree on the price. There have been many of these types of posts on HN in the time I have been following it and all have said the same thing.
And the global object nonsense alone is enough to make it suck. Throw in the lack of an integer type, the curious `for each' statement, and the oddities surrounding `this', and it really starts to feel like this is the sort of language that over time is going to cause you a lot of heartache. It makes me sad - seriously, do people not expect better from their tools?

The maddening thing is that Javascript could so easily be vastly better, and it wouldn't take all that much. Remove any kind of implicit binding (and this could easily be optional, like Visual BASIC's option strict, or the similar thing in perl) and you'd be about 75% of the way there, in my view.

It would take a bit more to convince me that this kind of language is suitable for larger-scale projects - this based on my experience with pretty much any language that isn't statically typed - but this would at least remove one obvious type of error without impinging too much on what people appear to see as their freedoms.
They host nothing except links.

That was precisely my point. ;) (Basic math logic...)
True, in that sense you're essentially forcing the bank to make a loan they didn't intend to make (which does indeed expand the broad money supply).

If the bank had sufficient excess reserves, other banks would honor the new money. And today most banks do have big excess reserves (which is historically unusual).
Webmoney got big after e-gold, iirc. (I was a consultant to e gold and was working on a digital blinded token currency backed in egold at the time in Anguilla). My memory that far back is kind of hazy, though.

The HYIP stuff was amazing. I don't remember it being so popular for gambling. The other gold currencies which turned out to be scams (osgold, etc) were super lulzy too.
I think by now we're really arguing semantics, but I would argue that I do not lump anyone in with the people I call retards.

I would never call a mentally handicapped person a "retard". To me, that would be an incredibly insulting and inappropriate thing to do. The only people I'd call retards are people who are not mentally handicapped.

Similarly, if I call someone a dick head, I do not consider that to be insulting, or even related, to physical dick heads... it's just an insulting term. If I call someone (a guy, usually) a bitch (e.g "Yo, bitch, pass me the beer"), that does not imply any connection with female dogs.

Btw, I don't see how you can argue that being mentally handicapped (which by definition means having mental issues) can be neutral. It's clearly a net negative. It doesn't mean the person is more or less good, much like missing a leg or an arm (aka physically handicapped) doesn't make the person more or less good, but it's definitely a "bad" thing.
You can dispute a transaction here
https://support.google.com/wallet/bin/request.py?hl=en&c...
I'm replying to this comment on a forum that PG built, so he deserves the courtesy of me being in his house.

Also I'll say that he was a phenomenal inspiration to Matt Tanase and me when we started Slicehost. I've learned so much from his writing. The guy is a giant. I had the great pleasure of meeting him one time at the YC office on a random Rackspace visit that I tagged along on and I considered it to be a 'bucket list' item.

That being said, YC just has a different strategy than we do. And in addition when you are talking about the act of creation there really aren't limiters, so the net-net is that they can kick ass and we can too.

The most important point on the topic to me is the one he made at 9:30- "even though we've funded a lot of startups it's still only a small percentage of the total number of startups".

There is a lot of work out there to do on building great businesses. Given historical evidence, not all of it is going to originate from Mountain View.
Is this only Gmail-to-Gmail? or between existing wallet customers?

If you allow any email, then what about man-in-middle attack as the email might go over SMTP/plain text?
Payroll on Auto Pilot, done in 0 seconds
IO is the place to launch new products. It's just slightly more impressive than showing a message "And btw. we've lunched this new version of maps. Check it out (with the probability of 0.00053846)".
Google's "lack of marketshare" reason seems to be a bit lacking to me. Windows 8 sold 100 million and they still don't make any apps for it.

In contrast, Yahoo Mail which is barely making any money by manages to make a nice one.

http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/yahoo-mail/f90f3...

And Vimeo has apps for both WP and Win8.

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/vimeo/ff8dadc8-8...

http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/vimeo/6608d199-0...
How mitmproxy works
Well, frankly, STEM has a reputation of being hard because, well, it IS difficult. It requires certain kinds of critical thinking that the K-12 education system can fail to adequately teach.

I know plenty of people who started college in engineering or computer science knowing there's good paying job opportunities in those fields. But a big chunk of those people drop out once they start taking the more difficult courses.

Retention is just as important as getting people into STEM in the first place but it's hard to retain students who aren't adequately prepared for the challenge.
To the sibling post: actually Rackspace has horrible support. They regularly experience downtime and outages and never notify customers or update their status blog. Can you get someone on the phone? Yes. Do they have anything of value to offer you? No. My favorite was when they referred me to their twitter feed, which hadn't (at the time) been posted to in 9 months.
When google does first-come first served (Google I/O last year) they get dinged. When they do randomized (Nexus4 initial sale and this year's I/O) they get dinged.

Fact is, they can't satisfy everyone. The algorithm used to differentiate the few from the many will obviously upset some groups.

Would you rather they charge for it? That'd be the Microsoft thing to do [1].

[1] http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1011983/microsoft-t...
That extension is essentially broken (running iceWM), as the text input box dips below the taskbar. Furthermore, it requires chrome to be open. I don't necessarily want to keep my browser open at all times, nor do I care to use my browser as a chat client. (Also, what happens if switch to some non-standard browser? There is no way that my choice of browser should impact my ability to chat.)

I'm trying to stay open-minded, but so far I really dislike this product. I hope gtalk stays open.
The biggest plus about Google Apps Script is it runs on .google.com, which means you can do things like set calendar appointments, programmatically access Gmail etc, with the user's authentication cookies.

The biggest minus about Google Apps Script is it runs on .google.com, which means they can't do anything that would let you steal people's authentication cookies. This means all your HTML and user-facing JavaScript needs to be run through a sanitizer (Google Caja), which means the performance really suffers, and there are a lot of things you can't actually do.

It's possible to build a full web application on Apps Script - someone has even ported Bootstrap to it, and most things work - but most people who try quickly hit the limits and move to Google App Engine.
I would assume that Google Now-type products work better when they have as much information as possible, and making all chats save by default all the time would be a good way to get much more information from people.

IRS, FBI, your divorce lawyer, former business partner's lawyer and the local police department also work better...when they have everything you've done, where you've been (hello Android!)searched for and said all stored and cataloged. If it's stored they'll get it, otherwise there's nothing to get. If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't be worried and all. /s
For quick edits I will turn to jEdit or vim. I've also been giving LightTable a try and enjoying the early stages.
Oh, I believe developers who get paid that exist. But they're the exceptions who happen to all meet each other because they get sent to conferences and are team leaders or primary devs on large open source projects and such.

If they were the rule the average salary would be 100k but it isn't, and all the 100k + devs you supposedly know aren't enough to move it.

I wouldn't take 80k to work in New York either, hence why so many startups whine about not being able to find 'talent.'

The 'shortage' is mostly a symptom of companies only wanting to hire these celebrity developers who already make a lot of money (and Stanford grads).

Likewise, the hoops you have to jump through in job interviews would be shrinking if people were really desperate to hire, but instead they're growing. Have a giant github. Do two 4 hour technical interviews. Only apply after solving 2 to 5 programming problems. Etc.
The long loading time might be unoptimized-yet parsing of various XML files of ones app. In general, it's mostly an evolutionary work on existing IntelliJ Android plugin.

The View editor afaik has some support for custom views, but only some - it's rather iffy (IntelliJ Android view renderer simply used Android libs to render them, but of course that doesn't work for everything, and anything fully programmatic is dead anyway). Fwiw, IntelliJ's XML editor was always much better at not freaking out at the fact that you haven't finished writing that new tag so of course your view doesn't validate (something that was a constant for me back when I used Eclipse).

The editors in general are standard for IntelliJ, with some nifty transformations added - the XML string example reminds me of how IntelliJ dynamically renders certain idioms into Java 8 forms while still keeping the code in 1.6 (well, that's how I have it configured, that is).

In general, it's nice, I hope it will be available as plugin into plain old IntelliJ as well.
GCE seems like another "me too" product. The PaaS thing didn't work out so well for Google or Microsoft. When they realised AWS was much more popular with IaaS they simply set about copying AWS. They are years behind AWS and by the time they catch up with what AWS has today the world would have moved on to bigger and better features.

So many new "me too" clouds, Azure, Rackspace, HP, even Oracle, and now Google.
Cool idea. One month seems a little too short though.
Google to Microsoft: Remove your YouTube App from the Windows Phone Store
Well done everyone.

Instant Messaging is now dead for me because all the people I used to chat with are now fragmented across 4 or 5 different services. Aside from those who gave up on IM for the same reason I now have to.

You've all literally killed IM. Well done.
How timely! I just wrote a blog post that explains STM in haskell with pictures: http://adit.io/posts/2013-05-15-Locks,-Actors,-And-STM-In-Pi...
I run two user accounts in Chrome during the day: One connected to my personal use the other to Google Apps for Business. I use Chat for Google for both (Adium sucks)

About an hour ago, the personal account had a changed icon, started looking nicer, and is now called Hangouts. The Apps for business one stayed the same.

I've never been closer to being a fanboi than I was with Google, but this seals it...I'm pissed. Closing off (yet another) service in favor of proprietary protocols is not something a "Don't Be Evil" company does...in fact it's why you have the motto in the first fucking place.

You could have made the change without breaking XMPP. This is just shitty all the way around.
> If there are a lot of unfilled STEM jobs, then you should push people into STEM careers to fill those jobs.

There aren't. That's the point.
I wonder how this app got approval from Microsoft's own legal department.
I have to disagree - Google Apps has the absolute worst support of any business application/suite I've ever used.

If Google provides meaningful support for Wallet going forward, I hope they consider extending it to Apps - it's desperately needed.
I don't dispute that banks create money and greatly affect the money supply.

Under normal conditions, the banks stay pretty close to their reserve requirement, so a hacker suddenly creating a gigantic new loan at a bank is likely to push them over the limit and draw attention, either immediately or when somebody tries to move the money to another institution.

But at present, many banks do have big excess reserves, so getting away with it is more plausible. It essentially becomes a loan the bank didn't really intend to make.
Pike's definition was "handling many things at once" vs "doing many things at once"; Sawzall or, to take a simple example he also used, a dot product where you compute sub-products in parallel, is basically doing one logical thing at a time - you have your inputs and you're computing the output. You're doing it with more resources but it's one thing. SIMD instructions or superscalar execution is like that and everybody calls it a form of parallelism and nobody ever calls this concurrency, though the Wikipedia quote could be used to defend calling this concurrency.

I think I don't want to argue about whether parallelism is a special case or not, really; I'm fine with it being a special case, as long as I get the point across that this special case deserves special treatment and is underserved by tools aiming at the general case...
Yeah, but there are large software systems with a lot of boring, repetitive stuff that is being done.
The 7-minutes workout timer
Yes, PHP is only used for amateur useless projects like Facebook, Wikipedia, Drupal, WordPress ... Our projects on the other hand are too important for this low brow language.
How true is this still? Google Checkout was rolled out ages ago (in tech years). The Google today is quite different. I have been reading about "poor Google customer service" for years, almost like it's a running joke of anecdotes. Years ago it may have made sense, but today Google has Android/Fiber/plethora of web services. I can't imagine they haven't clued in on customer service yet with all their paid services.
I want to make use of this sooner rather than later. Is the rollout completely random or determined by some other meaningful factor. Lets say I connect my bank account with Google Wallet now, would that put me in line above someone without a bank account associated with their Google Wallet?
When there's a substantial amount of money involved Google has great customer service. Never had a problem getting issues resolved with my Adwords account.
How does Stripe have great support? I had to wait two days for a reply. The advice I got was very good, but the response time doesn't make for "great" support.
Indeed, my first move after every install is to change to classic appearance. I really don't know what they were thinking.
Sure. Much of the Google Talk video stuff was all designed for XMPP; they actively took part in the standardization at times.

WhatsApp is XMPP, fundamentally, in any case.
It isn't clear what, exactly, Macilwain objects to, because he never bothers to give specific examples of what he finds wasteful.

At the outset, he identifies three broad categories of funding: (1) luring young people into STEM careers; (2) promoting science and technology at graduate schools; and (3) raising standards of science education. But the rest of his argument lumps these all together as if all the spending is for category #1, "luring".

For example, he points out that "no such government-backed programmes exist to pull children into being lawyers or accountants." And his broad argument, as expressed in the subheading, is that the funding biases the system to producing more scientists and technologists than it needs: "If programmes to bolster STEM education are effective, they distort the labour market..."

Only by ignoring the distinction between category #1, "luring", and category #3, "raising standards", can he complain that businesses who want better-educated scientists, if they really meant it, would just pony up and "pay and train newly graduated scientists and engineers properly." Either he thinks that the technical skills businesses want can be achieved by a quick training session after a broad general education, or else he thinks that raising the salaries of engineers will send a market signal to grade-schoolers that they ought to be more interested in STEM education. The problem of poor preparation never seems to enter his head. If all the accounting firms in the country were complaining that few recent college grads can add a column of numbers, and the government responded by trying to improve arithmetic education, would Macilwain complain about the money spent "luring children into accounting"?

In short, he might have an argument. But until he grounds it in specifics, he's just hand-waving with the broad idea that trying to improve STEM education distorts the market. This is obvious tripe, because the same broad argument could be applied to education in general: "If programs to bolster education are effective, they distort the market for educated workers. If they aren't, they're a waste of money. Besides, if businesses really wanted educated workers, they would pay and train new hires properly."
The COL is bull if you're making a huge salary, sure. Then it doesn't matter where you live. But if you made $50k/year and got an offer to work somewhere for $75k/year but the cost of living was $20k more, it wouldn't make sense.

I know some of the best developers in my college class have ended up getting paid 45k to 65k a year in places like Phoenix because that's what was available job wise.
I'm not sure how these compare. The XMPP case and demanding the youtube app are two examples of Microsoft taking from Google but not wanting to return anything. In the case of Youtube, they're taking bandwidth but not giving back ad revenue, which is legitimate.

While I don't think that every action you list is necessarily Google trying to screw over Microsoft (dropping support for common protocols hurts everyone, not just Microsoft), I also can't deny there's some obvious bad blood between them. It doesn't help that Google has a fair number of ex-microsoft employees, and they have A LOT of products in competition with each other (google vs bing, gdocs vs office, android vs wp, chrome vs IE, etc etc etc)

And the fact that HN would have a slight bias towards Google should not be a surprise, as Microsoft veers more towards the business side of software while Google veers more towards the open source, free stuff, etc etc. Which do you think people would honestly be more supportive of?
Yes there are great developers and other professionals on Elance. Think about it from a developer's perspective: I can work at one company, on a relatively small variety of projects, probably maintaining some legacy code, with the same people at the same place everyday for years on end and earn $X/year. Or I can work for a few clients that I choose, on a wide variety of products, rarely/never maintaining legacy code other than my own, and work from almost anywhere in the world while earning something close to $X/year (probably +/- 20%).
The idea comes from this article from The New York Times http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/the-scientific-7-mi....
> The reason you don't push students into being lawyers is because there are more law students graduating than there are open jobs for them.

It's pretty funny that the article mentioned this as evidence that students respond accurately to supply and demand when deciding what to major in. Law is seen as a lucrative, high-demand field because it was -- decades ago. The reality has changed dramatically since then, but public perception has not. And that's why we continue to have more law students graduating than there are jobs for them, despite the blatant irrationality of this.