skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not that I disagree with your opinion; if I found a bug and I reported, all I'd really want to know is that they were taking it seriously. So a personal note would be great. And I love that this guy was, in the midst of dysfunction, just buying the t-shirts and sending them out because it was The Right Thing.

However, it is a little much for a for-profit, publicly traded company with $4 billion in annual revenue (mostly made from manipulating how their users spend money) to think that other people should do things for them for free.

I certainly miss the long-ago days when the Internet was an academic community, mainly free of commercial influence. And I love it when people rise above base commercial motives to do something more beautiful. But if we line people up based on their right to complain that the Internet is all crass and money-oriented these days, Yahoo, who led the first wave of Internet commercialization, surely must be near the back.
The fact that she achieved her goal is just amazing enough...but this quote from the OP leaves me even more awestruck:

> Keep coding! The end of my 180 websites in 180 days project marks the beginning of the rest of my life as a coder. The project certainly hasn’t given me a comprehensive understanding of software development, but it has laid a broad foundation for me to jump off of. I plan to work on a couple of more complex websites that take more than a day to complete.

I know people who've taken a semester basic web dev class, built a few sites, and already think they've got a handle on things. Jennifer made so many things, in so many ways, that she's learned not just how to build websites, but that she still has a lot to learn.

A really stellar example for web devs of all skill levels.
Looks really nice. Please open source it and let the community improve it! I would love to add simple comments :)
Message to the site owner: Congratulations on fail

I tried to think of something positive to say, but really... if you're marketing yourself as something that doesn't suck and within 2 seconds I think "this site sucks due to lack of understanding about car research", you've failed.

Now you have the challenge of recouping credibility. You launched too soon, you didn't say beta, or even better, alpha which could have saved you.
Whoever decided to play that music at that volume over the entire video needs to have their computer taken away.

Overall, from the marketing, that's all I can smell here, marketing. If this is targeting developers, there is a major branding error all over the site.
She's certainly publicized her project well, but so do lots of people. I think the attention that she's garnered from this is mostly because what she's done is really cool and shows incredible initiative and dedication.
> I have a shelf of unfinished projects and directories full of thousands of lines of unfinished code.

You should complete the good projects and release them.

Maybe it should be "Make and share."
Fair point, but server side apps are really where most Smalltalk is these days.
That's pretty elitist. You seem to confuse "coder" with "computer scientist" or "software engineer".

As the ecosystem of toolsets, frameworks and libraries mature, the number of opportunities for well-informed "commoners" with the right motivation to make computers do what they want them to increases violently.

Lemma 1: Simple CRUD-style web-apps and scripts can be very useful.

Lemma 2: Before-mentioned tools can be build to a perfectly serviceable standard without a comprehensive understanding of computer science.

These two combined suggests that the author can indeed be a perfectly productive and effective creator of computer programs. I see no reason "coder" isn't a perfectly good title for such a person.
Model/Price/Mileage is practically useless.

Give me a comparison site that allows me compare pricing with similar common options. I don't care if the car is priced "from $20k" if adding an automatic and A/C means $25k.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this; are you suggesting that the packaging for it is wrong, or that the it would not be commercialisable, or that I haven't done a good job of explaining it, or something else? If this is a feature, what would the product be?

I have been intending this as a commercial product. What would you do differently? (I'd like to learn more so I can get it right or if it really is fundamentally wrong work on something else instead—I still have a few other ideas of things that I want to do.)
Isn't Apple about to release comparable native functionality into 10.9 in a few weeks?
I have to be honest: as an IT professional, I'm extremely impressed with how well designed https://www.healthcare.gov/ is. I understand its having some problems under load, but I think we're all a bit forgiving here about traffic problems when you're receiving 5 million visitors/day in traffic.
> If the person on whom the hit is called is fictional the agreed to end can't be realised.

Yes, that's the impossibility issue, which, as I've noted, is not generally in US law (and similar, but for a 3-4 year window ending in 1981, English law) relevant to whether the crime of conspiracy has been committed. The fact that it can't be realized is irrelevant to whether it would be a crime if it was realized.

> it still appears to me to lack an actus reus which AFAICT is a cornerstone of criminal law based on the English tradition.

The actus reus in conspiracy (both under the common law and the generally applicable modern English and American statutory provisions) is comprised of two things: an agreement among multiple people, and a concrete action directed toward putting the agreement into effect. Those are both acts, not mental states.

> Your postscript on USA federal narcotics law is interesting - doesn't this mean that if you plan something with no intent that you'd be considered guilty.

No, removing one of the required acts doesn't change the mens rea requirements, nor does it change the other required act; one person planning is not conspiracy (even under the federal narcotics provision that remove the second element.) Two or more people agreeing to some end whose realization would be another crime is the element that is required.
> How can we be sure that the package that's being installed is the one that you intended to be installed?
We will give "checksums" with our agents in our upcoming releases.

> How can I be sure that the install will be identical across all of my servers?
Whenever you install SeaLion Agent, the most latest binary is installed. The agents in other servers are also updated, hence making them identical always.

> How can I pin a version that I've vetted for security holes?
SeaLion agents are released after rigorous testing, to ensure we do not leave any security holes and features, currently SeaLion Agent is designed for auto update.

> How can I distribute this to servers that don't have arbitrary internet access?
SeaLion agent requires Internet access to send data to its server. Hence internet access is mandatory.

> How do I configure selinux/apparmor to work with your tool?
SeaLion agent works fine with SELinux in enforcing mode without any specific configuration.

> How can I uninstall this cleanly?
sudo /usr/local/sealion-agent/uninstall.sh
Cool project, but all the warnings on that page about the edge cases make me concerned about trying to exuberantly move to ES5, and so I just stick with Underscore and the same level of JavaScript syntax I've been writing since 2005. (sigh)
Why can i not buy your game? :/
To argue the other side, I think it is wrong because you can't know that the good you do will outweigh the harm you do. But everything, even seemingly beneficial things, have both good and bad effects and morality seems to be the art of balancing them. However, if somehow you had knowledge that the long-term good far outweighed the short-term harm, it seems like it becomes the ethical thing to do. In real-life you don't usually get that kind of certainty though.
Yahoo! did much the same, and, like Lavabit, did much of the fighting in secret. Well, except for the "shutting down" part -- although I think you can defensibly argue that the harm to privacy done by Yahoo! effectively sending its users to other random webmail services would be worse than the harm to privacy from keeping operating. Lavabit's users have more capability to fend for themselves or just stop using electronic communications.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/yahoo-fight-for-users-...
For side projects you should checkout http://www.thinkero.us, they love seeing new ideas or hearing about issues you see around you that you wish could be fixed. It's more of a community for open innovation and collaboration with less of the pressures than some of the more financially incentivized sites listed above.
I don't usually comment...
...but man, you are a jerk.

She's becoming a coder, not a computer scientist.

And calling her work 'niche', then linking to a guy raving about Datomic, something that is even MORE niche?

Man... I'm wasting my time calling you out.
£1.49 for a very basic HN reader is a bit premature. I like that it is iOS7 designed though.

A couple of suggestions:

- Comments
- Instapaper or similar
This is an anonymous account so I wont list them, but a couple of them that you probably know of.
p.s. Hello menage! Nice to see you commenting here :)
Another example of validating the idea/market before building the product. You don't even need to register a domain name. No CPC cost, just post on HN.

Chris, how much email sign ups are you looking for to go forward with the idea?
Techies who golf may appreciate this.
I think in this post this is with respect to the learning process.

At times you don't need to learn something which you probably might not implement ever, but its good to know it anyway along the way.

I don't really like how its framed 'Make for the sake of making' but I think that was the idea.
Agreed on exceeding expectations! I wasn't self-aware enough to parse my expectations the way you have, but I was very cynical when I clicked through and very pleasantly surprised.
Hey there, developer of the app here.

The app doesn't support comments for now, but we're working on implementing it. I wasn't personally expecting this much response, it was meant to be a read-only, simple app but I ended up missing comments in my own personal usage too. Don't worry, they're in the works! :)

Sorry for the confusion! If you don't want to wait, news:yc (http://newsyc.me/) is an awesome app that does comments already!
I think you answered your own question. Making stuff is not constantly fun. It is more like hours upon hours of confusion and drudgery sprinkled with minutes of elation "wow that worked!" (Try making something in hardware to see this with maximal prominence).

The point is that if you are only looking to have fun once the going gets hard you'll just stop and shelve the project. On the other hand, if your goal is to make something ie if you are Making For the Sake of Making (tm) you'll be more likely to actually cross the thresholds of difficulty at which you learn significant lessons.
I had not seen it! Thank you for sharing. This is pretty awesome.
The Role of the Team Lead
How about Designer News? http://news.layervault.com
It sure seems like it to me. However, considering the climate of business ethics in this country, it's no surprise that businesses themselves would be treated poorly by customers/individuals. Businesses these days mostly seem to sacrifice all for the bottom line. If something has negative affects (to customers, the environment, their employees, etc.) they run the actuary tables and the most profitable solution wins. It's tit-for-tat.
I'd say codeschool.com is much better since it actually explains what is going on.

CodeLearn just gives you a bunch of commands to type on a remote server to give you the illusion that you made an app, moreover it doesn't explain anything other than just giving you the commands/instructions on how to get a scaffold running.

I'd also say that Rails is terrible to learn for new comers to programming since it abstracts so much out. CodeSchool, Codecademy and Zed Shaw's awesome LPTHW makes more sense than the aforementioned site.

Start with Python and once you're familiar/comfortable with it look at microframeworks such as Flask and later on move to Django and stuff.

Get the fundamentals right, that's all you need to understand all the programming languages under the sun.
Dunno how good a coder she is, but she has it locked down as a marketer. How many HN #1s this woman has?!
If daringfireball upvoters never got banned, I doubt you have anything to worry about.
If there is a better method for prediction, and a prediction market exists, you can arbitrage the difference to make money and bring accuracy to the market.
This is very true.

I firmly believe that a person can learn anything other fellow human can. Mastering is a different beast. But you can definitely get started. This is the also the reason, why I don't criticize 'Learn programming in X hours' or 'Programming for dummies' kind of books. They get people started, and that is all you need at times.

In fact one must always have a hobby and 180 day cycle seems to be a good enough cycle for a new hobby. New hobbies keep you excited and on the edge. Most importantly they keep boredom from setting in and keep you going.
No one has purchased this (yet).

https://blockchain.info/address/1t4k5Y4NFFkvEAqBPymW2PDA5pZq...
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Lesson learned on the tagline. We've killed the "doesn't suck" part. Thanks, HN!
Even if they gave lead time, how many hosts will update it? Especially the fly-by-night budget VPS providers
Okay, please excuse my ignorance if there's something I'm missing here.

I understand the problem when it comes to saving, and the issue of dipping into savings when you shouldn't. But I really don't see the point in a service like this, at least not personally.

There's three main issues I have with it:

1. Why should I let some random company I don't know or trust keep my savings for me? I would assume you're not a actual bank, so should you go bankrupt there's no government insurance that'd ensure I don't loose my money. And not saying you would, but from my point of view, what's there to stop you from taking the money and run?

2. A charge of 3%. So to save £100 I'd loose £3. If I was saving for a Retina MBP of around £2,500 I'd lose £75.

3. Interest. Ok, sure, banks pay pretty horrible interest, but still, I'm loosing out of money I would otherwise have gotten. I saw your response about working on providing interest somehow in the future, but I'm focusing on the now here :)

When you add it all up, the increased risk of losing all the savings, combined with the loss of money in the 3% charge and lack of interest, personally I really see no point in using your service compared to my bank's savings account.

And ok, it's easy to move money out of my savings account, but it's supposedly easy moving it out your service too. If you were to change that, there might just possibly be some point to it compared to a savings account. Except then you're treading on dangerous legal and/or moral ground if you deny people access to their money, even if they've previously agreed to the terms.

On a final note, I believe the only valuable feature you have to offer is the fact that friends can chip in. If I were you, I'd focus on that feature instead of holding people's cash. Let people set up some kinda campaign page for their new phone/laptop purchase and let family and friends chip in, wiring the money back to the user, rather than you holding on to it. Think of it like a personalized kickstarter mashed with amazon wishlists or something.

<rant>Let little Jimmy Neutron setup a campaign for his wish to get an Xbox One. He's got £200 cash already, which the campaign reflects, then he sends the campaign page to his grand parents, uncles, aunts, etc, and maybe they'll chip in enough so he can get his new console.</rant>
I don't know why she has never mentioned someone she worked with at all. I commented about this about her 70 days ago.

---

So let's see her repository (https://github.com/jendewalt/jennifer_dewalt).

This girl not only became a competent front end developer in 100 days, but looking at the Gemfile, she knows how to use capistrano, redis, capistrano, paperclip, omniauth and devise?

She knows the best practices for Rails perfectly. She not only grasped to use MVC perfectly, but also organized asset codes perfectly in like 50 days.

I forgot to mention that she knew Rails from like day 1.

Additionally, she knew better to hide sensitive information about secret tokens for maybe AWS in the config folder and other Rails environment info.

Really? Is Hacker News this gullible? If you really want to see what actual beginner struggle with for 10 hours a day, go take a look at StackOverflow. Beginners are struggling for hours to create hoverover effects and persistent footer.

---

Edit 1.

While rereading this blog post, I found that she made the first simple Rails app on day 69. So who was it that set up all the Rails dev environment for her starting day 1. I don't understand why she still wouldn't disclose how someone else helped her.
The device intercepts a copy of the whole datastream and then sorts thru it.

This is sufficient to monitor all the users if the connection is unencrypted, or if the Feds can MITM it with help from a CA. If PFS or a private cert setup is in use, then such an interception device cannot get any plaintext unless the spies also obtain the secret keys from the server owner. That is what the FBI demanded from Leveson.
Good comment. Reminded me of something I'm really hoping to see come out of the arduino/raspberryPi/Beaglebone movement is a fresh look at a LISP machine. Given how cheap a computer is now, what's stopping the existence of a simarlarly size and priced Alpha-based chipset that can run OpenGenera or other LISP machine?
WWW-Talk Jan-Mar 1993 by date
However you'd get it done, you'd get it done. That's the point.
I was once at a busy bar. The guy in front of me, his order came to $9.75. He gave the bartender $10; she gave him a quarter back as she delivered the last of his drinks.

He tried to leave the $0.25 as a tip. She said, "Oh, no, you must need this," and gave it back to him. Her clear view was that no tip was better than $0.25. I congratulated her, and made up for his idiocy with my tip.

If you don't tip at all, you're either clueless or an asshole. Tipping a quarter is more insulting: you're acknowledging the need to tip, but making it clear you don't think much of the bartender.
I hate the argument that you have to dive into some complex language to really "understand" programming --

Some people just like to build stuff; much akin to someone who might just want to change the oil in their car. You would never ask them to build an entire transmission for their first project.
You are getting work done ;). Getting used to tools is what you are both doing. Just differently. But yes, dig in now!
I appreciate that Jason here refines some of the key things about Jennifer's approach that helped her be successful. I find I am most effective when I use similar things (like well defined steps with a start, middle, end definition) and least effective when my goal is more amorphous. An example might be "Learn Clojure" versus "Build 5 apps in Clojure."

Usually when I'm stuck on something its because I don't have a concrete enough definition.
Unfortunately making this site really, genuinely useful for the typical car shopper is going to be something of a monumental task.

The ultimate tool in this space, which would be an absolute bitch to make and keep up to date, would probably replicate, in a generic way, all the custom "build & price" apps that are on various car manufacturers' websites. It would let you save custom builds of vehicles, each potentially from a completely different vendor, so you could review and compare side-by-side your own custom builds, with pictures, packages, pricing, etc., all arranged in ways that are conducive to comparison. It would be great if you could simply share URLs with friends so they can see exactly what you're considering and give you feedback. Popular builds could be saved publicly and ranked and discussed by the site's community and more.

That is what I would personally envision as a sort of revolutionary tool in this space, but there's probably a reason it doesn't exist. It would be pretty hard to maintain a custom build & price tool that generalizes basically all the custom ones out there--and to then keep it up to date at that.
Cuzzy_finn give litle details about him self.
As a bug hunter, I think initial problem is bullshit. There is NO POLICY about rewards in Yahoo. Nobody has right to "beg" a reward. Especially for "yet another XSS". Don't like the policy? Go sell that "XSS" if you can (nobody buys it btw).
if(typeof i[p] === typeof 3){//it's an int

sum += i[p];

}else if(typeof i[p] === typeof [3]){//it's an array

recursion(i[p]);

}

pretty simple no?
IBM Acquires Xtify, A Mobile Messaging Company
A terrific fork of oh-my-zsh is Prezto.

https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto
I know that a certain group of people find this story inspiring. I find it to be a huge turn off. It seems more like the story of how easy it has become to google search for code snippets and copy paste them and tweak them until they work.

Is this actually a good way to learn how to program? I really doubt it.
Huh. I never knew that - thanks for pointing it out.

Equally interesting is that his successor [0] as governor was Rod Blagojevich, who also went to prison for corruption. That wikipedia article mentions that in the last 40+ years, 4 Illinois governors were charged, convicted, sentenced, and sent to prison for corruption or (in one case) fraud.

Quite a tradition they have there. Pat Quinn must be nervous.

----------

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Ryan
Hey there, I'm the developer of the app.

Firstly, thanks for buying the app! I wasn't personally expecting this much response, it was meant to be a read-only app, but I personally ended up missing comments as well. I understand your concern. I've good news though : we started the work on implementing comments :)
I thought it was obvious at first glance he'd be promoting his own site anyway; his username is 'sideproject'.

Personally I think it beats Show HN: Sideprojectors, which was his alternative. I saved the list in my notes. Thread was useful to me and good advertising for him. Win-Win.