skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> ...to do whatever you need

I think that's a distinction that the author's language made. Most programming problems have been solved. The head of the Zipf-curve of your work, no matter the domain, will be reusing old-hat knowledge. Every program, even HFT, needs proper data structures, algorithms, task scheduling, etc. Hopefully this stuff is mostly already provided by your platform, but a great majority of every developer's time is basically "bringing the platform up-to-snuff" with everything it really should have had to begin with.

Once that's done, the code that's actually business-domain specific (whether the domain is ERP, trading, games, graphics, AI, simulation, etc.) will likely be novel, because it's a codification/automation of a business process which is itself novel. (And business processes being novel is sort of the Anthropic argument of capitalism: a perfectly non-novel process means there's already a company doing it somewhere with lead-time on you, which means you have no advantages and won't survive in the market. So every new business that survives must have some sort of mutation, for better or worse.)
There seems to be a recent fad of these sort of "experiments".

Much like "drop 15 americans on a tropical island" life is pretty easy for the experienced locals, pretty tough for a guy with only two days experience. What I'm getting at is poor people tend to get pretty good at a poverty lifestyle. It has a lot more to do with priorities than with the contents of a wallet.

For example, I was a little disturbed by the guys description of putting himself into low-grade hypothermia; little food and no heat tends to do that after awhile. I am well aware its a social faux pas to wear a sweater or two, and maybe warm sweatpants instead of designer jeans. Or a hoodie. But given the choice of death by hypothermia or wearing two sweaters at the same time, I think the average poor dude would wear two sweaters, regardless of what a temporary tourist would do. I live in a cold climate, and I've been poor, and I thought it was super creepy reading how he slipped into hypothermia, mental effects and all. I expected it to end in an ambulance or lost toes from frostbite or something.
GroupTalent (http://grouptalent.com) maintains some personal checks on their talent pool. Not sure if they'd be into smaller applications like OP's, though.
That is a cop-out answer.

Consider what's being advertised to people who have the aforementioned mental disorders:

Eating disorder = fast foods of all sorts, Mcdonald's, KFC, Burger King, etc. ice cream, chips, candies. None of this is extremely "healthy". Conversely on the other side, in which people avoid food, there is diet pills, weight loss through questionable means, etc.

Drug addiction = alcohol, tobacco (though there is less of this now)

Depression, impulse control disorder, and poor memory are conditions that affect buying decisions on a wide array of things, sort of catch-all conditions.

A lot of people have these disorders. But there's been no effort made to do anything about this, with respect to how advertisements affect these folk. I would also like to point out something about the power of the two types of things sold here -- things that are definitely bad for you (alcohol, unhealthy food, expensive toys (because they leave you with less money to buy good food)), and dolls. I think one can reasonably defend the point that things being marketed to adults with poor decision-making skills harm them more than little girls being shown advertisements of dolls or whatever.
C'mon, everyone. Our [deepest felt] opinions just have to be valid, or else where will all that humanity go?
Bingo Card Creator will probably come in at about $30k profit for the year, which is a disappointment, but not enough of one to justify working on it. (Sales are down due to Google sending less organic and AdWords traffic, though costs are down impressively too, due to less AdWords.)

I don't talk numbers about Appointment Reminder, but suffice it to say that it's both modestly successful and on the Long Slow SaaS Ramp of Death.

I get about $1.5k in monthly royalties from book sales and in residual sales of the course on Lifecycle emails that I did last year. Hoping to launch another project like that in the near future and plow some of the profits back into AR - people are expensive.
> To me it looks like he is just trying to nickel and dime for everything little change.

For $800 you bet your ass the developer will nickel-and-dime. After all, he was nickel-and-dimed.
I thought this would be tuned to hackers. Should be able to choose your programming language / framework of choice. This is would pepper the vocabulary with words would typically see in those the selected programming environments.

Bonus points for using Sublime short cuts to "type" some standard words.
> please do not submit unmodified (or trivially modified) versions of this application to the App Store

I wonder how common this is for mobile applications.

Considering desktop applications, I've heard that many of the media conversion programs you find on sketchy websites are just reskins of Handbrake.
Maybe, but the point of my hypothetical isn't to prove that prisoners can be good programmers. It's to show that lobbying for more prisoners doesn't necessarily mean that you are exploiting said prisoners. It simply means they are helpful to you.
Implementations of common algorithms are even worse.

The Java binary search implementation had a bug that eluded detection for 9 years, and it was based on a implementation from the 1986 book "Programming Pearls" that also contained the same bug (TL;RD: it's an overflow error that computers in 1986 would probably never have run into - who could imagine having an array with more than 2^30 elements?!).

Even worse: While the first binary search was published in 1946, the first binary search that works correctly for all values of n did not appear until 1962. - and this bug shows it is likely this 1962 version would have failed the same way.

See http://googleresearch.blogspot.com.au/2006/06/extra-extra-re...
On top of that, this seems a little bit too abstract. If bitcoin flops, all of this effort will have been expended for no net benefit to society.

Unless this hardware can be repurposed.
TIL people still use a USB cable to sync their calendar and contacts. The last time I did that was with a palm pilot. :)
Part of the reason it's huge is that it's a body-modification. That's an aesthetic choice. It could be made smaller, but then people don't see it, and so what's the point of having it? With a huge lump under your arm people say "What's that huge lump?" and you can then talk about how you're a cyborg.

In the UK getting someone else to help you is putting that person at risk of serious legal problems. Probably around the assault or grievous bodily harm.

Gibson said something like 30 years ago (about implantable watches) "Why don't they just carry it around in a pocket?". I forget which book, and what the exact quote is, and I don't have them at this house to check. But if I want to know my temperature I'll use an infra-red thermometer in my ear.
Windows 8.1 and SlimDX errors
I'd go with a simple Rails or Sinatra app.
> Did you know, that if you make a control loop running basically newton's method of approximation (more or less), it can be statically stable in continuous analysis but when you run it on real world discrete math with short-ish rounded floating point it can get squirrely and oscillatey (are those even words?) so that's why you ram the output thru a low pass filter to damp out the oscillations. Or at least that's one way to fix it.

I encourage anyone who wants to get an intuitive grasp of simulations to just write a simple little 2D game engine, and try to work up toward a simple two-player realtime LAN system with predictive physics for expected network input. Seeing sprites shudder and vibrate against their integer pixel positions, jump instead of smoothly curving when a correction is issued, etc., is a visceral learning experience.
The most unequal place in America
Bootstrap it on top of an existing CMS, such as WordPress or Drupal. It'll save you heaps of time. Hell, you may even be able to do it alone, with all the time you'll be saving.
Your approach would definitely work with me. (Side note: very off-put on Ash Maurya's page by the autoplaying video, so I immediately closed it. But I'm guessing it converts better for him.)

Your approach answers the following questions in the recipients mind:

* why is this person contacting me?

* what is it going to cost me (time/money/etc.)?

* what's in it for me?

* is this some sort of scam?

[edit: formatting]
what do you mean by donate?
I feel like the actual medical community is almost certainly working on technology like this that will actually be:

1) Useful.

2) Safe.

That'll be cool. As for what this guy's actually contributing... Not really sure.

(Other projects on their site also kind of sound like bullshit. For example:

"The idea is to stimulate your brain with direct current (in the case of tDCS) or with square waves of current (in the case of CES) which can either raise or lower the potential energy of the stimulated neurons, depending on the orientation of electrodes. This allows them to fire more or less easily, and activates or deactivates a given region, thus engaging certain brain states." -http://www.grindhousewetware.com/thinkingcap.html

Sounds like either pseudo-science or wishful thinking to me.)
Most likely, yes. It's extremely common, not sure you can draw any conclusions from that.
It told me to go fuck myself when I put in Mephistopheles Stout by Avery. I think it's broken
Are you kidding? Have you ever been inside a prison? No good can come of this idea.

Imagine, just as every other time it has ever been tried, the cheap labor underbids the free-world companies that have to air-condition their offices, and control/prevent worker-worker violence, (raping, killing, and stealing) in order to attract talent. Imagine what that will do to the job market for programmers.

Also, isn't the gov't kind of forbidden to compete with private enterprise, especially the skilled labor markets?
PHP, given that's what you know. Also PHP developers are easier to find and cheaper.

As for scale, It doesn't really matter which you choose, because if you reach scale, the difficult bottlenecks will all be around the database anyway.
The death toll due to TSA is undoubtedly large, but the bigger loss of life component of it is likely from people dying in an auto accident after they choose to drive rather than fly.
> really make me wonder how much faith we can put in the reviews on Elance

Pretty much the same faith we can put in LinkedIn recommendations, I suppose.
Not if you know linq.
Launched my first SaaS app a little over 2 years ago. Monthly recurring revenue is currently a little over $4000. 506 paying customers to date, growing around 1.5 paying customers per day and working off ~2.7% conversion rate (freemium business model). Single person "team".
Yes, I think "proof" is a better word for what I was trying to describe.
Be interesting to see how he gets through a variety of different security scanning processes.
Instead of bringing the conversation down to a question of pretty-woman-duped-the-gullible-man, which isn't productive for anyone, I'm sure this could have been achieved many other ways, e.g 'Leaked new Tesla car' or "Cupcakes downstairs now!". The issue at hand is the security failure, not how the person in question was duped.
Here's how popular Emily Williams proved within just 24 hours of her birth:

She had 60 Facebook connections.
She garnered 55 LinkedIn connections with employees from
the targeted organization and its contractors.
She had three job offers from other companies.

The 3x job offers seems a bit rich...wtf
> I wonder if it's now worth it to quickly adopt all new crypto currencies for a disposable amount, even if 90% of them fail.

Nope. They're all get-rich schemes by the creators, and nothing more than just Bitcoin with the name and some variables changed. Ask yourself, why would HackerNewsCoin be any better than Bitcoin?
Shedding Light on the Dark Wallet
High tech turning work/life balance obsolete
> So your arbitrary code is running as admin - what more could a security flaw in the bundled installshield get you?

In the days of Antivirus products and executable whitelists, the "elevation of privilege" may be getting arbitrary execution as any user. Of course trustedinstaller.exe or whatever that has a valid Microsoft signature can run, why shouldn't it? No need to ship that file back home either for further analysis (as AV products like to do with unknown files), its a standard OS thing. Therefore my rootkit isn't burned either.
I am a big fan of Go, but why not python or even ruby? Seems either python/ruby would be a better fit for this kind of project than node/php, and easier to hire for than Go (since that was kind of alluded to as a requirement).
Hosting SHOULD NOT cost that much with GAE. What's the bulk of your cost (I'm guessing DB writes)?
Why doesn't he just use a basis band or a bodymedia device? It measures temps & more and you don't have to risk an infection.
That just looks like a "standard" camera box. Probably some kind of little NVR in it, along with a wireless network node of some sort (mesh, 4G, etc.).

There isn't any single company that supplies those, but there are a handful of security dealers that essentially assemble them.

That one looks like it might be old, the PTZ on the bottom looks like a really old Pelco unit.
Very common, and even worse apple can only give two shits about what the original developer thinks.
It is a sad day for this country when that loophole is exploited on a wide scale.
We've excluded most websites which contain user generated content because of the false positives they give off like this. We've added twitter.com to that list.
The Higgs Fake: Who Is Telling and Selling the Nonsense
There is already a few:
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1azr7w/why_isnt_t...
Same developers and much of the same source. What's the story behind this?
"The other side is that it's not a life worth living if you spend 40 hours a week doing something you avoid the other 128 hours." - Its not that you hate it. But you should not fill your life with just one activity.

You should be networking, talking, going out, learning, traveling and filling your life with a wide variety of things. Yet the start up programmer lifestyle is programming 24/7. It's not healthy. I can guarantee you a lot of start up founders, don't work the hours their programmers do.
Thank you, that was a fascinating read. It is understandable that technical errors are given a pass, as they aren't the meat of the paper. In the case of the Booth paper, I really should state I do not mean to attack him. The idea of using the KMP preprocess to solve the problem is a wonderful approach and works very well despite the actual implementation being technically incorrect. If I recall, the bug had to do with the termination condition; the algorithm had to run twice as long to terminate correctly. I will say my understanding of the algorithm improved as a result of debugging it!
New Talent Out Of Harlem
Nothing pseudo-science about tDCS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_sti...
Show HN: WiseRadar: news for product builders
Once the author "learns to do it [him]self," maybe he'll appreciate how complicated even "simple" iOS apps are to develop, and maybe he'll realize his expectations were a bit unreasonable.

Also, this author's post is exactly why I will never ever work on Elance again. The clients have expectations far out of line with what they're willing to pay.
Some body modification enthusiasts currently get significantly large silicon implants placed under the skin. The most common one appears to be synthetic horns, but large symbols in relief and larger abstract forms placed along muscles/against bone are also feasible. Note, when I say "feasible" I mean that no apparent reduction in function is caused by the implant.
In this fellow's case, it might even be a good idea for him to encapsulate a wireless unit within a silicon sheath to avoid any kind contamination. That could increase the bulk of the unit considerably.
Ah yes, these can be quite useful. For most use-cases, however, I prefer the emacs keybindings as that's just how I learned (and the lack of a NORMAL-INSERT-VISUAL mode indicator can be a bit confusing).

I love CTRL-X CTRL-E!

Thanks for your feedback!
This is useful but it doesn't cover reserved or any IOPs which is unfortunately.

AWS in general makes pricing opaque and hard to reason about, more simple tools like this would be useful.
How about Go vs Java/Scala/Clojure?
I think part of the point there is not to pass effect estimates through a significance test filter first. Most studies are underpowered to detect a true effect at alpha = 0.05. That doesn't actually suggest that most studies are wrong as much as if a study is underpowered and doesn't find a significant finding, we assert its dull and uninteresting.

Ironically, the Ioannidis paper is in Epidemiology, which is a journal that is fairly anti-significance testing, but where I still get reviewers suggesting that an effect measure with a confidence interval that brushes against the null must mean nothing at all.
Would you prefer that Google gains a monopoly in operating systems as well as search?
I already know what I want my life's work to have been. I want to give teachers all over the world the same quality toolset that programmers have. I want the education world, to benefit from open source and open content in the way programmers have.

Programmers have been using vim and emacs for about 40 years, and engineers have been using CAD tools for just as long. These tools automate the repetetive and boring aspects of programming and engineering, so that professionals in these fields can focus on the difficult and interesting tasks in their work. Leaders in these fields recognized some common needs, and built high-quality open tools so that everyone in the field could do higher-level work. When I use emacs, it knows whether I'm writing a Python script or editing an html file, and it makes both tasks as easy as possible. When I go back to these files later, they are easier to work with because they have structure to them, and the tools I use recognize that structure.

When I write a math lesson in Word, it has no idea that I have just created a math lesson. If I want to share my work with someone else, there is no easy way to do that. If I want to pull in the best math standards in the world to base my work off of, there is no easy way to do that.

I am working on software to address some of these long-standing issues in the education world. I hope I take these projects far enough that they end up on my tombstone.
FWIW (to give a little context to this comment):

TJ is the author of Jade, Stylus, Express, Connect, Component, Kue, Mongoose, Knox, Cluster (before the bundled cluster module), Canvas, N, Commander, etc, etc.

If anyone has a perch upon which to criticize Node, he's certainly amongst the most qualified.
This must have taken a few years to create. Why free and open source!?
To add to what you wrote about the fine line, slavery as punishment is permitted by the 13th amendment:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Saginaw, Michigan has been using the shotspotter for years. It's a huge joke in the community. It doesn't even work most of the time.

Allegedly there are plenty of ex-police chiefs and such involved with this company, and government grants pay for the installation of the product. It lets authorities know, i n theory, when and where gunshots occur. That's it.

It's not tied into some Hollywood satellite video system where two seconds after a gun is fired, the aftermath and fleeing suspects are caught on tape. It doesn't even produce any evidence that can be used in court.
Wireless charging, perhaps, but I have a bluetooth module with embedded CPU and GPIO pins that's not much larger than 2x2cm.

I'm pretty sure the reason for the size is aesthetics, rather than requirement.
Swisscom builds 'Swiss Cloud' as spying storm rages
What do you expect Apple to do?

These things are made open source under a permissive license. The whole point is that people can do what they want with the code.
Smoothed Analysis: Why the Simplex Algorithm Usually Takes Polynomial Time
I don't care where you live in this world. The cost of living is going up everywhere. If you pick up a cheap developer, expect the person is going to be hitting you up for payments regularly. At this rate, the person can't really save to get ahead, he is likely struggling from one payment to the next. Getting screwed over would probably be devastating to him, though I imagine he was more concerned about quick payments than getting screwed over. If you have someone doing cheap work and doing well, keep the payments flowing. If you are happy, then make the developer happy as well.
$250-350/month from App.net for an extension I spend very little time on anymore.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/succynct/hngjfhijh...

I just launched a new App.net project that I'm hoping will bring in a lot more.

https://polls.abrah.am
Any time you create an economic demand for more prisoners, you are exploiting people some of whom are not prisoners yet.
Conan O'Brien worked in Los Angeles, when he left The Tonight Show and NBC, and he had a non-compete, until he started his gig with TBS, so I'm sure it's not as clear-cut.
That must explain why men are outnumbered in science and business, right?
coworker: HOW 'BOUT THAT SAINTS GAME?

you: Sorry, I don't follow hockey.
Reading through this article reminds me of why I'm so critical of science journalism: it's in the attention business, not the science business, and directing undue scepticism about so-called "breakthroughs" would kill a lot of great "stories".
The monorail, if completed, would have been of dubious value to the city. I mean, c'mon, billions of dollars to transport people from Ballard to West Seattle?

At least the gigabit internet service offers a clear value proposition: 'gigabit internet service for less than you're paying for Comcast or (god forbid) Broadstripe.'

And while we're on the subject, I voted against the tunnel. I think the tunnel is a terrible idea.

All that said, I voted for McGinn and I still think he's going to lose terribly on Tuesday.
Ugh, that sounds terrible. During a previous internship at a HPC company[0] I implemented a computational electrodynamics FDTD algorithm as given in the Taflove book[1], and I made more than enough errors even without the book containing mistakes! Two fields, each with three components and subtly different equations for all. What a nightmare. Especially since it's impossible to tell what is wrong when watching the EM wave propagate in an impossible oblong fashion during your simulation.

[0] http://www.acceleware.com/

[1] http://www.amazon.ca/Computational-Electrodynamics-Finite-Di...
This was an interesting read, and had very similar experiences.

My current problem is an IOS developer who I have used on 2 projects without issue. I then started a new project 3 months ago which should have taken 2-3 weeks max. So far his mother, son have both died. He lost his house. His computer broke, and then another one. Finally his son died again!? Still nothing has been sent, and he has had 50% of the money.

I suspect the problem is that he has taken on too much work. I have paid him well in the past, been fair with spec changes etc. He saw me an easy touch to screw over on the 3rd project. No plans to work with him again. It's not the money that pisses me off, its the wasted time!