skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. Excel bashing often comes from web developers who lack real business experience in a gritty production environment.

Belittling Excel is an effective way to burnish one's programming credentials.

I know many languages (Flex, Html, PHP, JS, C# etc). Excel and VBA have their place, especially for very rapid app development.

Web apps are perfect for trapping data. However, output is best handled in Excel. The first thing people ask when getting a report is "How can I get this into Excel?". People like to play with their numbers.
If your protocol is that rapidly changing, you shouldn't be launching anything to the public, period. Especially if you're replacing an existing service with it.
Unicode Character 'Slice of Pizza'
Scotty & Spock figured it out near the post-TNG timeframe and future Spock gives reboot Scott the solution.

Just as an aside there's a hilarious Cracked post about how transwarp beaming obsoletes the Enterprise.
I've used both and they both work quite well. I prefer Github for the community, and I find their design and overall experience to be nicer. But Bitbucket really isn't bad either.
It's both surprising and alarming to me how many VCs cite "emotion" (rather than logic) as a main if not primary factor in their decision to fund a startup or not. I'd venture (no pun intended) to say that this is the root cause of much of the "politics" and cronyism described by the OP, and I don't think YC is immune to this either.

Sure, we can talk all day about "human nature" and how "those are the rules of the game", but there's gotta be a better way for investors to make funding decisions than "trusting your gut" or "I have a good feeling about this team."

Yes, VC has changed and evolved over the years thanks in part to new institutions like YC, but the overall VC landscape still reminds me way too much of that scene from the based-on-the-book film "Moneyball" where a bunch of old baseball scouts are sitting around a table discussing who to recruit for next season, and they keep recommending players based on fluff and BS like how good a guy looks swinging the bat (vs. actual hitting stats), how confident he looks, how good he he looks with his shirt off, etc.

This all leads me to believe that, while things are getting better, there's still a long ways to go before Silicon Valley and michaelochurch's so-called "VC-istan" can be considered anything close to a true meritocracy.
That was my first thought as well. Glad I'm not the only one.
It could be that getting them to pay more taxes is not the goal:

http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/tim-carney-apple-becomes-lat...
Running cronjob backups and looking at them in passing to see that they look like valid backups is not sufficient for any serious website or web service.

Automated backups need automated backup restoration and testing. Otherwise, the backups might not be created properly, or they might be perfect backups that have some hidden error that will cause them to fail when they're put to use.

As an example, Jeremiah Wilton's self-case study on Amazon's Oracle database problem in 1997. http://www.bluegecko.net/download/disaster-diary.pdf

Other than the one missed backup, backup procedures were fine. An Oracle bug caused Oracle to refuse to start due to a database format/schema change weeks earlier. TESTING backups would have caught the error, and allowed them to fix it before they took down their production database and triggered the bug on the next attempt to start it again.
He went from fired to $30k in six months. I had a plan, quit my job with a runway, and still didn't make that much in my first six months as a freelance developer. Finding leads, selling, delivering, and billing take time. I'm averaging a lot more than that now; hopefully he will too.
ARgh, and they still haven't released the Android app (and apparently the iOS app) in Japan.

It's available in Peru, it's available in Ukraine—but not Japan (which is much larger, richer, and almost certainly has more photographers than those two countries), and this has been the situation for ages.

WTF, Flickr...

[And unfortunately Flickr has always had a very annoying habit of completely stonewalling on such issues.]
That isn't the question though, once you know you are living in a simulation what happens? This was a very interesting question that was raised in the TV show Caprica (a Battlestar Galactica prequel series). If you know it is a simulation then you can just do what ever the heck you want, reboot/restart when necessary. Doesn't make for interesting cinema or literature as the question of future value / future outcome vs present action / inaction is what creates tension.
After all these years, why do we still have CPU architectures that don't trap on integer overflow?
Those are all things that nobody wants. Not only do we not want them, we abhor the thought. That's what Google isn't getting.

We just want to search. Or keep using email like we have been for a decade. People switched to Gmail because it was like hotmail with a nicer interface and a large mailbox limit.

Maybe some people do want those other things. That's fine, give them their own corner, let them play with the toy social network or social layer or however you want to pitch it. Stop force-feeding it to the rest of us. I don't want to know what my friends are searching for or what recipes they like. It's just unwanted noise.

And let's call a spade a spade - "sharing" has very little to do with friends and everything to do with advertisers. It's very disingenuous and insulting of Google to pretend that the primary purpose of +1 buttons is to "share with friends".
I am confident the number of people who wish they could quit their jobs and then make 60K a year freelancing is quite high -- especially in the competitive design industry.

People very rarely choose freelancing for the money. If I was told I could quit my job and freelance for two thirds of what I was making, I'd probably take it.
https://bitbucket.org
You're right, if he were to continue earning only that amount, while working just as much. We'd need to know the context to judge:

1. He might be earning the 30K while working less than at his old job (or more, to be fair).

---

2. This is his first six months. There's nothing stopping him from earning more. Salaried employees face much bigger barriers to increasing their earnings, unless they switch jobs.

Most freelancers are not profitable right out of the gate.
I respect the effort and love that education and students receive but I would love to see companies offer these sorts of deals for other important industries like HEALTHCARE. It's "cool" when companies announce these deals but the reality is, more college students care about getting loaded than building software. Healthcare is arguably more important than education and the companies fighting to improve it have more financial challenges than most students. NOTE: I'm a 24 yr old college dropout and co-founder of a health startup.
Well, the second paragraph says the following:

This post covers all aspects of lambda functions in ReQL from
concept to implementation and is meant for third party driver
developers and those interested in functional programming and
programming language design. For a more practical guide to using
ReQL please see our docs where you can find FAQs, screencasts, an
API reference, as well as various tutorials and examples.
If I were to try to do this would I need to sign up with another carrier first to keep me number?
We did look into disassembly, but decided that it's far too much work because it is not portable across languages and drivers, and would require an enormous engineering effort (both for ourselves and for community driver maintainers).

From a purely theoretical POV, I do like the idea of disassembly better, but unfortunately we couldn't make this work and remain pragmatic.
Moving from Noir to Compojure and lib-noir - Marc Liberatore
Hoax Interview with Bjarne Stroustrup
I know this was comedic, but I honestly think commenting (and reading) on HN has improved my employability more than anything besides actual employment. It's open my eyes to technologies I'd never learn about otherwise, it's gotten me contacts, and -- most importantly -- commenting is an exercise of writing, and clear communication is arguably the most important skill one can have regardless of discipline.

A lot of scorn can be placed on HN for its echo-chamber qualities -- most of it fair -- but at the end of the day, arguing too much about JS frameworks is still a better use of one's time than animated cat pictures.
Not exactly what you're looking for, but you may find this interesting nonetheless --

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synsepalum_dulcificum
Twitter share your email and purchasing data with advertisers
See http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#IEEE
I remember using SourceForge back in the day. Not so much for hosting my own code, but for downloading projects. I don't know for sure and I'm venturing a guess, but I feel like they kind of fell behind and spun their wheels for a bit.
Really? To me, the extra stress of dealing with clients and wondering about each paycheck would mean I'd have to earn more, not less. I'm happy to take a guaranteed 100k vs 100k with a potential 50k swing and dealing with clients who might not pay me.
He also says "mummy and daddies"

https://blog.whitehatsec.com/interview-with-a-blackhat-part-...
I second the "100W sustained" number. I did the math once with the assumption: 2000 kilocalories/day diet, 4.1852J/calorie, 86400 seconds/day, all input calories are eventually given off as heat.

2000 * 1000 * 4.1852 / 86400 = 97 watts
Understanding Polling, Long Polling, Comet, Server Sent Events and WebSockets
People keep asking me about all this and the answer is always the same. Doesn't take much to understand the concepts but having to say it over and over gets tiring. So put my blabbering in writing form.
I know a lot of people who call it casualty but on signs at the hospital it's usually A&E (Accident & Emergency). It might be regional or something that's changed over the years.
The future of reverse engineering: Dynamic Binary Visualization (Derbycon 2012)
Steve Jobs Wins Book Price Negotiation with James Murdoch
Possibly because the down and up vote buttons are so close together, it's easy to hit the wrong one if you're using a touchscreen device.
That discussion is actually pretty stupid. It's funny to see how DN can be as biased as HN, except in the opposite direction…
Big picture wise, I don't think Microsoft's advertising group is very good. In this case Hanlon's Razor probably applies. I don't know what target market would find the Surface Pro dancing commercials compelling. (My guess is: none.) The new Office ads focus on silly things like deleting large numbers of emails, which is underwhelming from a sales-worthy feature standpoint. And then there were the early Windows 8 ads with the little girl creating art in the new Paint app. Anyone who has purchased color ink would look at that wall of art and see huge dollar signs (at least I did).

I don't know if I would blame the ad group though. When the ads focus of the fluffy stuff, I take it as a sign that they struggled to find real features and benefits to push.
Honestly, this is not just something that works with design. Do you know how many programming jobs you can get just by talking to people? One-person design projects are like small, one-off web applications. You don't need a firm to attract business if the jobs end up being done by single individuals anyway.

On the other hand there are good reasons to be a part of a company. The reason I work for a company that gets contracted for web application projects is because I don't like thinking about business, and I'm not good at selling. If you have a head for those things, that's awesome for you - I wish I did. But not having to think about those things too much lets me focus on what I can do and still get a decent salary and benefits.
"They all had very minimal copy, and usually a short designery phrase like, ”Pixel perfection,” or whatever. You know, you’ve seen them. Basically, sites like this: http://kerem.co/ "

Kerem is an amazing designer and in very high demand-I would know.
He probably makes 2-3X more than this guy. So not sure why he is dissing him.

To be honest 30K in six months is not that great. I'm guessing ultimately he wants to make big money like Kerem one day.
And for the love of all you hold holy, do not ever put drives bought in the same batch in the RAID at the same time. They tend to fail at the same time. Check those serial numbers first.
jerrya gave a hint of a possible "reason" somewhere in this thread: "men are often discouraged by society from seeking first aid or admitting any sort of ailment or weakness."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5759447
How to Clone a DVD as an ISO Image File
If you are one from those DVD movie fans, you must usually make backups of your precious DVD collections. The question is what is the most economical way to backup your DVD movie discs, especially when your collection is growing on a weekly basis, if not daily? The answer is to make ISO disc image files, saving your budget on purchasing blank media’s. How do I do that? You need a piece of versatile DVD cloner software. DVDFab DVD Copy just meet that orientation, making ISO files of your DVDs and put them onto computer HDD, or other large volume storage devices.
I sincerely wish that more educators would teach about Git. Obviously I'm going on personal experience, but how many people are coming out of college with CS or BIS degrees and they've not even setup a Git repo before? From my experience that number is too high. Hopefully offerings like this will help solve that issue.
Actually, in the latest Office 2012, Access apps are now three tier apps with SQL Server 2012 or SQL Azure backends.
This site is an excellent way to find out if you've covered all your bases in your backup protocol:

http://www.taobackup.com/
Common enough in AU!
I think that's completely valid, but also an issue of differing personalities. I know I get a lot of satisfaction from client facetime and that the uncertainty acts as a huge motivation; plus, flexible hours, WFH, and the sense of independence as a freelancer all seem incredibly attractive.
If you really want to have some fun, test the hot swap capabilities in the middle of a very busy, data centric day.
It was instant for me. I used a .edu email.
looks different for me here http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f355/browserte...
If you read what I wrote up there again, I think you'll see that it actually is an argument for avoiding C.
Wasn't aware of it at all. I'll check it out, for sure.
For example: because the commenter upthread doesn't appear to know what it means, since they think that MBAs have no influence there. Because it doesn't mean anything; it's a slippery term, meant to diffract understanding rather than focus it.
Can you expand on what you mean by 'real estate listings'? I'm in the market to buy a house right now and want to avoid being a sucker.

Thanks.
I've watched Greatist transform from a website into a platform that helps an incredible amount of people in a short time. This is a great piece for anybody looking for information on startups.
The talk is worth watching, but is based on a single big "trick" (but really language feature).

The key thing shown in this talk to unlock all the other cool patterns is that a nil channel blocks indefinitely in a select statement, meaning it is never selected. So you can set channels to nil in order to "turn off" certain code paths in a select. Example:

var myChan chan int
if someCondition {
// Turn on case by setting the channel
myChan = someChannel
}

select {
case <-myChan:
// Do a thing. Will never execute if myChan is nil.
// ... etc.
}
Disclaimer: I'm a Google competitor.

Good and fair points. The big issue here is the fact that all of what you said is tied to a persons real life identity. I think people should have the option to choose whether they want to surf the web using a pseudonym, or doing it with their real name. Google forces people to use their real name in order to be able to squeeze out more profits per user.

Socially slanted search is the future, and I agree with that. But not in the way that Google is doing it. Not everything has to be social.
Also known as hawkers, eg. street hawker.
For the lazy: 🍕
Because in the vast majority of cases you don't need to and it would unnecessarily slow down a lot of legitimate computation? You can already detect integer overflow extremely easily, why would the cpu need to trap?
Ignoring the "delete your portfolio" and "making $30k is great" parts (which I don't really agree with), for me the big takeaway here is having a more active approach to finding work.

If you're struggling to find work as a freelance designer, you should definitely be doing more to contact clients and meet their needs instead of simply showing them pretty pictures.

Then again, if you're Kerem Suer (http://kerem.co/) you don't need to do any of that because you've already established your reputation, and you can show up at any startup and they'll hire you on the spot.

Disclaimer: I'm the guy behind Folyo (http://folyo.me), the design job board mentioned in the article.
Convict hangover, being a victim is part of its identity?
Automated and tested is even better :)
Nothing personal, but that simply tells me that you're not an entrepreneur.
No one said that... -Werror is good when you are developing, not when you are compiling someone else's code.
Explain that, as a programmer, it's a useful investment to make in preparation for looking for a job?
I find this unicode character more entertaining: 🏩

(It's a "love hotel", one character away from a regular hotel, 🏨)
It just blew my mind to think that it was 20 years ago in March that I went to Space Camp o_0

Fun fact, we ended up driving through this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Storm_of_the_Century#Bliz...

from Michigan. It made for a very interesting couple of days sleeping in a courthouse in the northern part of Tennessee and then a Methodist church in the southern part of Tennessee.
Wow Github you just lost out on a new subscriber! I was eyeing the micro accounts and then found this HN link. Thanks for being awesome!!!
>Maybe go back and re-read the comment, it's pretty obvious, but I can spell it out for the language challenged.

We, "language challenged" don't need it spelt out thank you, we got it the first time.

It's not what the comments says we find problematic, is why he deemed it relevant to say it. I mean since it goes without saying that this situation applies to some people, and that not everybody can share everything in Flickr.

It's like posting on an article about a cool new email client, and somebody commenting "Alas, I can't use this for everything I mail, because a lot of that are physical packages, not just emails". Well, duh!

>I realize this country was founded by religious zealots he'll bent on eliminating any fun, but it's a fact of life that a lot of people have naked photos!

Well, that was not my issue with his comment. For one, I could not care less -- I'm from another country, and I won't even raise an eyebrow for people having naked photos (or any kind of fun for that matter).
Everything is political, because everyone else is political, except for me - I'm not political.

The winners of the political game are the same individuals who reinforce the political game, and the people who complain about the politics are inevitably the ones who can't muster the energy for fake affection, enthusiasm, flattery, obsequiousness and therefore lose the political game.

As soon as something has become a culture in itself it is already too late - it is and will forever be political, til the very beginning of the next big culture shift, which will also inevitably become political.

It's self-selecting, and it's been going on since the beginning of history.

The only answer is to not give a shit. To not complain about politics, or if you happen to be a winner of politics, to be self aware enough not to then turn around and reinforce the game that you just won at.
Note: the website is an extended advertisement for a piece of backup software, and the user account was created 3 minutes before the comment was posted.
The worst part of the legislation is that interest and fees are not considered "using" the account.

*You must physically deposit or withdraw funds from the account.
This boils down to the very old sales axiom, "sell benefits, not features". It would stand to reason that the more successful designers are good salespeople too.
I just read all the comments on Designer News. All I can say is "wow". Did all those commenters even read the article? For those who didn't read it, the overall point was simply focus (don't get distracted with efforts that aren't directly contributing to your bottom line and measure your results so you can make informed decisions, honing in on what factually works for you).

Sure, Robert may have put a particular website in a bad light, isn't earning $1M, and maybe tried to find some value in some lessons from online courses (omg), but the point was clear: the competition was homogenous and he wanted to stand out (good). The best marketing strategy is to speak to your audience's needs, not necessarily your industry's ideals. I'm making a broad assumption here, but I feel like most business clients (those likely to hire an agency or a freelance designer) are more concerned with making themselves more money (through effective design) than "looking pretty". I think Robert was accurate in that observation.

Robert had some experience, found some stuff that worked for him, and is trying to share it with the community to help others learn where he maybe didn't have access to learn. I think that's admirable. I don't know why people on Designer News are shitting all over on him. Geez.
Unicode needs a character for jumping a shark.
I used to get RSI problems when I was younger. You have to understand that it is directly related to the amount of time you spend doing the repetitive task. In this case I'll assume its typing. (This affects a lot of people such as pianists and guitar players too)

When the pain was worse, I had a velcro wrist brace with a metal support, this helped as it limited movement. Ultimately, the solution to your problem is to simply reduce the amount of repetition if at all possible. Back in my most problematic years, I was a web developer who spent 9-5 coding and would return home every night to clock up 4-5 hours gaming.

Stretching movements do not help either, ie a lot of use from Shift + Control keys is bad - learn how to touch type properly using the action key on the opposite side of the keyboard to perform these operations.

Gaming is very bad. I would love playing FPS games and MMORPG's. FPS games force your finger movements to be very precise which is very straining. MMORPG's are notoriously bad for repetition. Give these up if you are suffering that badly, trust me, its not worth it.

Other things that might help? Well I personally have spent a lot of money finding the most comfortable keyboard + mouse setup. Don't buy based on what looks cool or gets the best reviews, get what is comfortable for you. For me, it is a small bluetooth apple keyboard (low travel laptop keys that have a light touch are MUCH less straining) and a Logitech MX anywhere mouse. Yes its a mobile mouse with no tail, this fits me much better and allows me to use a single battery which also makes it lighter to move about.

Good luck, and take a break!
US states do have programs for transfering inactive/abandoned bank accounts to a treasury (and for claiming those monies back): http://www.helpwithmybank.gov/get-answers/bank-accounts/inac...
Notes and diagrams show how famous authors planned out their novels
I can't recommend https://deadmanssnitch.com/ highly enough. This would have told you your backups weren't working a long time ago!
Why don't you hire this designer for a project, then? If you really feel bad, he could use your business rather than your pity.
Good luck with your below-the-minimum-wage admin.