skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, I find it unprofessional to work for free and you do yourself and everyone else a disfavor.

With two exceptions; internships via universities (where it is part of your education) and certain kinds of work for non-profits. And even then I am reluctant to work for free.

If you cannot even contribute at least minimum wage worth of value to a company, why bother contribute at all - go spend time on open source or for a charity instead. Or you know, go out and network at events (or bars for that matter).

The other points made in the post are good and relevant. Being able to show off what you have done is always helpful and writing a blog is always worthwhile in my opinion, even if barely anyone reads it (hello my own blog).
Google Cloud SQL API
Yes, JRuby should be much better.

Run it on top of JDK 7 and use the CMS garbage collector, as JRuby (and Scala) tend to generate a lot of short-term garbage and experiment with the new generation proportion (something like -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:NewRatio=1 -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=850). You can also profile memory usage (make sure you're not stressing the GC, as that can steal away CPU resources) and for that I believe you can use Java profilers (like YourKit which is pretty good).

Also, try to do more stuff async, like in another thread, process or server. Use caching where it's easy, but don't over do it, as dealing with complex cache invalidation policies is a PITA.
Well done a Reuters reporter back in March :)

"Exclusive: EMC, IBM eye web hosting company SoftLayer- sources", suggests a $2 billion valuation.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/15/us-softlayer-sale-...
Problems with GPA and a Possible Solution
> Work for free. This is my boilerplate advice for anyone getting started in any industry, not just web developers. Finding someone that will let you work with them is not that hard, if you offer to do it for free.

Yikes.... I would never advise someone to work for free for a company. If you want to work on an open source project then that's probably a better use of your time.

The problem with free is that it lowers your worth to a company.m

Heck even university co-op terms pay well these days.
Wow, congrats to them!

I've only used their services for a short while as they bought a company I was using, but they seem hard working.

They have a massive control panel they wrote completely in-house and there is a heavily documented API for 3rd party access which was an nice indication of a good attitude.
My friends and I built a Sig Figs calculator
We want to expand this to other areas. Suggestions? Comments? Thoughts?
http://sigfigscalculator.appspot.com/
Here's some perspective from someone deep within the Salesforce ecosystem: Salesforce has very concretely and deliberately pursued the "imperial" approach in the B2B/Enterprise market, which is to do a careful survey of existing products in a particular space, the potential revenue to be gained from expanding into that space, and what is needed to get a heads up on existing products.

As is generally the case in the enterprise space, this means providing more features than the competitors. There is also a network effect in that the more features and integration points a particular platform has, the more valuable it is.

Salesforce has done this extremely effectively, from salesforce automation, to customer relations management, to customer service, etc. In many cases now it is virtually unimaginable not to use Salesforce, since the feature set is so extensive. One note here is that although the UI has had its warts, Salesforce is actually has a much better UI experience compared to most other enterprise apps (lightweight competitors tend to be better, but not deliver the feature set).

In any case, marketing is a natural extension for Salesforce at this point and I have ever reason to expect they will be successful at dominating this market segment just as they have in other sectors and points on the value chain. If they have to pay a bit of a stock price premium in order to do so that's not a lot of sweat off Benioff's brow.
Yeah, I feel you dude. I also experienced I/O issues.

Unfortunately we also need auto-scaling capabilities and map-reducers and stuff. Maybe Google's new "Compute Engine" service will prove to be better.
> I don't work for free. My time is more valuable than free.

I think this doesn't probably apply for students and/or recent graduates, as it would be a way of escaping the typical "I can't get a job because I don't have experience, and I can't get experience because I don't have a job" catch-22.

True, my time is always worth a certain amount (probably higher than I assume), but if I get a tangible benefit out of it, I could assume that I just switched from "I pay you and you give me knowledge and a degree" to "I pay you and you give me experience and a recomendation".
In the quotes they seem to playing on the "CMO will eventually have a bigger budget than the CIO" card. Whether this is a reasonable expectation, I don't know, but there seems to be the expectation of explosive growth in this sector. (I don't know the numbers or how Heroku has grown since but Salesforce did pick up Heroku relatively early in the cloud hosting lifecycle too.)
Wow... this is my dream job... it's a shame I just accepted an offer :( Best of luck!
It's hard to see that Bitcoin itself could be the undoing, but there is potential now for disruption that hasn't existed prior. While I also feel the article is a ... umm a bit overboard. The root point is that it feels like it could be possible to shake the banking system a bit. That assumes that the banking system isn't manipulating Bitcoin for it's gain as well.
That is so refreshing.
You should try http://www.plexapp.com/ with the roku. It's what I use and it is great.
More likely, you prefer not to pay because it costs way more than it should.

Americans earn 30% more than Finlanders adjusting for PPP. I.e., taking into account higher cost of health care, lower cost of most other things, we still have 30% more on average.

Americans do pay more for education than Europeans, but our results are quite good compared to most of Europe. The only reason it appears our educational system is poor is because certain subgroups of the student body drag our averages down.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...
There are two schools of programming that have diverged: low-productivity and high-productivity development. It's not always about language. I know people in the HP world that use traditionally LP languages like Java or C++ for performance reasons. But the horrid mess of a stereotypical JavaJob is the LP development world where, as you said, those horrible Big Designs are created without irony.
I once made a point of reading & counting every sign around a bus door. There were 18 signs. Somehow I'm not surprised nobody reads any of them: so often irrelevant for all practical purposes, we've been trained by the signs to not read them. Ergo I won't fault anyone for following their warning-sign-induced preprogramming to give warning-like signs little more than a cursory glance, even when admonished to really pay attention this time.
Excellent point that I try to make to people who come to me with ideas. They all believe that they can raise money for an app and then sell it before they ever need to test their business model. There is nothing wrong with starting small, taking it slowly and growing a business on profit reinvestment.

Having said that, we've taken VC as we had no choice. So, when you want to start a capital intensive business then taking money is often the only option - just make sure your business model is solid.
When to use Dublin Core 'references' and when 'isReferencedBy'
always some bozo with a sharpie

Protip: If you go back over the Sharpie with the dry-erase marker, usually you can wipe off both nicely.
I am reading a good book by Daniel Pink called "To Sell Is Human" at the moment, which makes the point that many people who do not think they are working in "sales" actually are. It sounds trite, but he does go into a lot of useful detail and advice from there - and this ties into your point. I look forward to your book.
"Beautiful" -> Easy to read, succinct but not so succinct as to obfuscate

"Clean" -> Modular, separates concerns, loosely coupled, not in need of significant refactoring, easy to write unit tests for
Counter to your point, RDS, EBS, and all of our services have never failed even when we went under extreme load last month.

Its computing and hardware, absolutely everything fails eventually.
Project Looking Glass / How To Connect 2 Offices
I made a lightweight CSS grid, and I'm blown away by the 700+ stars. Creating something that people can use is a wonderful feeling.

https://github.com/ThisIsDallas/Simple-Grid
I don't understand. The tragedy of the commons is about resource depletion in the absence of price signals. If I choose to work rather than take paternity leave, what resource am I depleting? Or more generally, what harmful externality am I creating?
Ask HN: How'd you deal with a client who insists to pay you less than decided?
I confess my mistake, I should have had a written contract signed by both parties before the training had begun. It was a basic JEE training with Spring+Hibernate stack and I created a short course outline which I estimated to take 15-20 hours depending upon the how quickly audience would learn different concepts. One of the company's technical manager said that I can add more things into the outline if I find necessary. After every session, I would email company seniors with number of hours consumed. Finally we ended up consuming 22.75 hours. When I went to the finance officer for paycheck, he said I was supposed to take 15-16 hours but I took a lot more than that. His tone was as if I have tricked him into paying more and he was now worried how he would justify the case to his seniors.

What would you do if you were in this position?
I would say that knowing how operators are affecting your code is something that a lot of JS devs probably don't fully grok. For example, why this works: ~function(){}(); or why this... x = (y = 1, 3) ... sets x equal to 3 and y equal to 1. It's not too useful in day-to-day coding, but it shows a deeper understanding of what's going on in there.
Quite relevant Pecha Kucha by Dan Pink related to signs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9...
Ask HN: Free trip to Angola. Why is nobody interested in this offer?
Hi.

First, sorry for the link bait. I'm posting this for the third time and I really expected more feedback.

I am trying to find a developer who is interested in the following:

Job description:

Python developer with a verve for adventure sought for an already developed OLPC-project in cooperation with Dom Bosco Angola. We estimate between 2 and 3 months for the project, starting in August 2013. Due to the charitable cause, we can only provide costs for flights, basic accommodation and a fairly allowance. Your job will be to help the schools faculty members establish extensive training activities for their XO computers as well as teaching the administration staff how to amend the activities' contents.

Requirements :

* Python (Minimum 2 years)

* You need to be able to cope with one-of-a-kind Luanda. If you love challenges and are looking for a fantastic addition to your resume, you might just have found exactly what you're looking for!

* Basic Knowledge in Portuguese or at least Spanish (You still got some months, so get cracking!)

* Of course experience and knowledge of the OLPC-concept would be great, but motivation and good apprehension would convince us even more.

About the project The Angolan OLPC-project was established by the African Innovation Foundation (AIF) in cooperation with schools operated by Dom Bosco Angola, based in poor areas where children do not have easy access to computers. Today, 700 students use their laptops as a regular teaching tool, and 400 more XO laptops are on their way. Now we need your help to add more content to those computers.

Email: sven@internet.ao

Web: http://www.africaninnovation.org/our-projects/culture-education/one-laptop-per-child-in-angola-olpc/
Irregardless of your extremely poor attitude, I shall point out the obvious: 'ProcessBlue' himself has stated in capital letters that it is free. I was just correcting that.
People are really ridiculously similar to dogs and other animals; the response to negative reinforcement or negative punishment is at worst uniformly negative, or at best inconsistent and unpredictable. Positive reinforcement results in a positive behavioral change without negative side-effects. Truly the best way to change behavior, yet people still believe that negativity is necessary, especially in the corporate and beaurocratic world. Mind-bogglingly uninformed, to put it lightly.

*edit: sorry for the comparison to dogs (I have some background in animal training); but I hope at least the connection of corporate policy to empirical behavioral science and psychology isn't the cause of the downvoting... anyway if you're interested, a great book is "Don't Shoot the Dog" by Karen Pryor. And on the business side, W. Edwards Deming's seminal work "Out of the Crisis." Essentially both show a proven way of dealing with any living thing that's based on positive behavior and proven statistical methods and science rather than outdated and misguided beliefs about punishment and motivation that are now known to be less effective in the long term. Simple psychology, statistics, and science.
25k customers paying into this cloud is also pretty valuable for IBM
We were on Rackspace before moving to AWS. Their sales person flat out told us on our contract renewal call that the only thing they could compete with AWS with was customer service.

I appreciated their honestly but they were lacking a few required services for us at the time.
Giving something your all, which I wholly support, is not the same as time spent at work, sitting at a desk.

And as someone else said, I doubt you're at the end of your life. At least, I hope not!
Why You Should Be Measuring Time To Utility For Your Product
Advertising the 'work for free' thing pushes towards establishing a dangerous culture, in which slowly all first jobs are expected to be unpaid. And some companies would (and some already do) include these 'free' people in their business model.

There is no reason why those companies can't pay a basic internship salary which at least allows you not to work somewhere else to be able to eat and sleep somewhere else than a friends couch (or floor).

And if the company really can't afford that basic salary, I would double question if it's really worth for you to work for them.
How so? I mean this as an honest question. how does this "break the internet"?

I configure my browser to send the referrer as the site I'm currently on as I don't believe a site has the right to know where I've come from. Does this also break the internet?
The folks at Magic Whiteboard in the UK have a good half way house product if you didn't fancy painting the walls:

http://www.magicwhiteboard.co.uk/category/magic-whiteboard/

They also do a clear version:

http://www.magicwhiteboard.co.uk/product/magic-erasable-clea...

I remember seeing them on the BBC's Dragon's Den and winning over Deborah Meaden and Theo Paphitis:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
video(dot)io

app(dot)im
Stockholm Startup Jobs June 2013
Thanks, all, for the feedback! I just wanted to clarify on my 'work for free' point. If you have no real-world experience, get some. While you may not get paid at first, the amount of marketable skills you learn will more than pay for that. The point here is not to offer to work for free in hopes that you might eventually get hired (although that can sometimes happen). Rather, the point is that there are a lot of things that you can only learn by being thrown into the context of a fast-moving, multi-faceted company with real clients.
Comments/criticism on new SaaS that combines photos and video across platforms?
Photoslurp is a a service I've been working on for a while. We are not live yet, and only go into private beta next month, but would love opinions and feedback on how useful you all see the service to be:

www.photoslurp.com is us which includes an explainer video

And, a quick screencast here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hazw6J0yaDE

Thanks!
Ben
No, working for free is not a good idea. Perhaps for non-profits, but even then you are better off to either charge a friends' price, or just donate money.

How would someone that just graduated pay rent and food when they don't have a job that, you know, pays them?
I was about to say this. I bought a small can to do in one small area of our kitchen. I opened it up and my immediately shut down this project. We have a no VOCs policy in our house and this gave off a ton of fumes.
RDS and EBS both snapshot automatically.
Some awesome Swedish companies are currently looking for developers. The scene here in Stockholm especially is buzzing (http://economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2013/05/start-ups-swed...) so people should definitely get in contact if they're interested in a move to Swe!
Congrats! Met a bunch of the SoftLayer people at TechStars Cloud and they were a fun, incredibly smart bunch of people.
Ask HN: Why Erlang never got the mainstream status?
Erlang is a twenty-five-year-old programming language that has yet to win a popularity contest but has won many a hearts with its ability to do things just right. Erlang has got almost everything right - concurrency, functional programming, Garbage Collection, Network I/O, etc. Still, Erlang never got the mainstream popularity and widespread acceptance it always deserved. I wonder what might be the reasons
It makes a lot of sense in a multiscreen environment - I personally like it.
Obama takes aim at "patent trolls"
It's a well-known issue in Chrome for Windows. The latest version of Chrome's rendering library (Skia) now supports DirectWrite and they intend to include it in their Blink engine.

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692
Isn't founder/co-founder a good enough indication that you do everything? and if its not implicit enough maybe I can just make my title CXO to get the point across :)
iPhone 5 cuts them off as well
Unfortunately this approach does not work in HTTPS world. See https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-15.1.3

Clients SHOULD NOT include a Referer header field
in a (non-secure) HTTP request if the referring page
was transferred with a secure protocol.
Meet Tonido, the Company Dedicated to Making “Personal Cloud” a Reality
Somalia: Pray before, during and after your flight
That depends on how you class "for free". Most people think free = not being paid money.

I'm actually looking into working for the whole of July for no monetary compensation. But in return, I expect to learn something from whoever I work with/for.

Most of the time money is good. You can exchange that for many things in life. But sometimes, knowledge is better to have as you can exchange that for (even more) money.

And from an employer point of view, you should not be judged by the size of your pay cheque, but by how much value you actually add to a company.
Decide which cloud to go for next project
Yesterday, I posted twice about Windows Azure ( http://azuredev.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/windows-azure-spot-challenge-chance-to-win-a-surface-rt ) but no hacker turned up to read it.

It was to spread awareness about to get yourself acquainted with Windows Azure by signing up for trial subscription and get incentive for doing so as well. So that people can make well informed decision about their next project cloud deployment. Most of us might have already tried Amazon AWS, Google app engine and Heroku etc.

So the intent was that to help people to get to Azure and let them try it. I was thinking what could be the reason people didn't even bothered to read the blog post.

Is it hacker news user don't like Windows Azure? Or this is not the right place? or time was wrong? or something else?

If you feel - you should try Windows Azure once, let's give it try and help me to spread the word. I will appreciate your comments.

(Note: I'm no way affiliated with Microsoft, I just use their products/frameworks)
Great signs! This is a better way to invoke the "feel good" attitude for visitors. When people see signs that say no loitering, no littering, and the like, it actually does put the idea in the back of that persons head. No one actually likes to be told what to do and that is why these signs get ignored.
David Mackay covers MCMC in his exhaustive book titled "Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms" available for free here: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.html

They are covered near the end of the book. It should be enough to familarize yourself with and understand the basic concepts of MCMC. Anything more in-depth will require a strong mathematical background.

BTW : There are probably a ton of books that cover MCMC out there - that's just one I liked and which is freely downloadable.
RPI has a very mature version of XBMC working on it, so you are much better off with that for your home media center.

BUT god this is a nice hacking project and i would love to see this being the start of an XBMC alternative open source project that is built upon web technology! Awesome!
Gotta love that Infant Mortality graph... if that's not direct proof of a systematic effect and success then I don't know what is.
Yep, feels like early stage dementia to me. Quite a sad story.
The technical reputation definitely comes from

Does Nintendo count for anything?
Ain't it great how "trusted computing" is never about trusting you? And how the applications of trusted computing are never about, say, preventing your medical records from being spread around to people you don't know about?
What you say is true. However the often overlooked issue with science reporting is that it is watered down to a point that even basic facts are conveyed wrong
> so we can just pay for these things with savings if we want to.

Uh, who's "we"? You mean the 60% of Americans with more than $500 in savings? Are those the people who can "just" pay for it out of savings?
Servlet security with Spring AOP and annotations: Authorization
Worth observing that for all the excitement about the recent crop of billion-dollar Silicon Valley startups, SoftLayer is based in Dallas, TX (and founded only in 2005).

I suspect, and this will be easy enough to prove one way or the other after a few years so feel free to call me on it, that we'll see a disproportionate number of successful exits come from /outside/ the valley.

My gut tells me that high-cost of living and inter-company cannibalization are going to make it difficult for companies to sustain long-term growth in the Bay Area (once the data-skewing, one-off, billion-dollar Instagram-esque deals are factored out over time).

Whereas talent will tend to stick to the one or two success stories in less saturated geographies, adding a natural doubling down effect when something is working out well. Sort of a healthy survivorship bias, in a good way.

Edit: And while two anecdotes are still hardly data, I just now noticed that Indianapolis, Indiana based ExactTarget sold today for $2.5B.
I don't think jesting is allowed here.
CSRF Token Disclosure in Coinbase
I love this. I know I'm hanging out on the right site when people post comments and followups to articles with data collected and statistics analyzed.
IBM is buying SoftLayer to try to go head up with AWS. It's not going to work.

Personally I won't buy an IBM product because I know it's just like Oracle: software entrapment. Nothing wrong with that business model it's just not one I want to be involved with.

In other news, great job by SoftLayer to exit as pricing pressure from AWS and GoogleAppEngine was going to steadily erode their margins over time. I feel the same way about Rackspace which I think has to be in the sights for Oracle now.

So my opinion is: great job SoftLayer; questionable play by IBM.