skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One point that the article fails to highlight is, while there is a great demand for embedded programmer, that demand is concentrated in a smaller set of companies than say web development or enterprise systems. That coupled with a lot of the hardware companies moving more and more of their operations to China and Eastern Europe, does not paint a rose picture for heading into the embedded space. Unless you plan to design and market your own products. The mobility of an embedded development career is not as good as a web or enterprise developer and the returns (pay, benefits, security) on some occasions tend to be less than that of other development opportunities.
Ask HN: Online backup without a computer?
I'm going to be travelling for about 3 months, and won't be taking my laptop with me. My technology will largely be restricted to a camera with a 4GB SD card, an iPod touch, and a 250GB USB HD. My plan is to dump my photos from the camera to the HD at such times as I get access to a computer, but I don't like that being a SPOF, so I'd really like an online backup too.

I can, of course, carry software on the HD that could be installed temporarily on computers I'm using in order to manage this, but I'd like to minimise the amount of hoops I'll need to jump through at each location (i.e. installing Cygwin everywhere to run rsync isn't really an option!)

I have my own server that I can upload to, but I'm also open to software that stores data on S3 or wherever (this will hopefully be write once, read never!)

Suggestions?

(Alternatives also welcome, e.g. "Don't bother with online backup: just carry a couple of extra SD cards and backup to those", but online backup has the added benefit of being more resistant to everything getting stolen / destroyed when I fall into a lake / whatever)
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I mean, gosh. There weren't even any aliens!

I didn't find it anything like the ride his previous two were, but I'm not sure it was meant to be. That's not to defend the book; I definitely think character took a bit of a back seat to the technology, but in a sense, I think technology -- rampant and out of control -- is a character.

One thing, speculatively, along those lines: I think (or perhaps merely hope) Rabbit is another Pham Nuwen. Remember, Fire upon the Deep was written first; Deepness seven years later. When I read the former, I kept wondering what Vinge was on about with the crazy reanimated historical dude. Then I read the second.

Rabbit felt a little like Nuwen like that.
Should You Have a Mastectomy to Prevent Breast Cancer
Is the world completely reverting to an oral culture of assertions held around an electronic campfire?

No. Not "reverting". This is how culture has always been. It's just that, now that the campfire is electronic, it's easier to perceive the truth about how culture works. It's a lot more like Twitter than like an academic journal's letters page.

Kay's right that the web makes it easier than ever to interject cited facts into everyday conversation, and that is having an effect on the discourse. But he's got the arrow of time pointing the wrong way. Once, people were even more ignorant of the real answers to questions like "what's the history of Smalltalk"? They just didn't advertise that ignorance in a worldwide publishing medium.
I have no association at all with TechCrunch, but how about this? It's basically the same content, without the TC-hated terms. (Of course, it now has a lower advertising:information ratio, and the real point of press releases is advertising rather than information. Which is why they're usually full of the sort of weaselly preening TC is complaining about.)

"Delve Networks, a provider of video platforms, announces a collaboration with Akamai Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM), whose services power rich media, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, that will enable Delve to offer customers a comprehensive video publishing solution that includes video management and delivery including support of modern variable bit rate streaming technologies."

The only difficult bit was getting rid of the "the leader in powering X" language, which was difficult because it doesn't really mean very much. (With a less PR-speak description of what Akamai does, I think it would be quite reasonable for them to call themselves "the leader".)
SEM Business Blueprint
Best practices for software development projects
I don't know that the chart is misleading, as it states that the graph is indicating percent growth. It could probably be made clearer though.

I think it's the article that's misleading, especially with a title that declares something like that. Also, it's a durable goods chart. It says nothing about the non-durable exports, such as foodstuff. So the article is misleading because the US doesn't only export durable goods.

How come no one is deriding boingboing for their poor journalism, like the techcrunch article about google maps, sweden, and greenhouse gases?
3D video using same technology as Google streetview.
Before you get your knickers all twisted up, remember that you can sue for whatever you want in most countries. It doesn't have to be a valid claim or have some cultural significance.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/01/america-makes-nothin.ht...

Seems like Boingboing made the same mistake of mixing up the original function vs the first derivative.
Individual site mileage may vary. Areas of the world may vary. For example, some countries in Europe have 50% Firefox usage. I have one ecommerce site with very high IE6 usage because one of their main customers is one of those stupid large corporations that's fallen with Microsoft software and can't get up.
Operating in googles ecosystem is a very scary business model. One day you're making money, the next you are begging for scraps. It's like the farmers of old that had to deal with the weather without forecasts or even a basic understanding of the driving mechanisms.

If your business depends on ONE source of income only, and that source of income goes down the drain you are toast. If you currently have a good income stream from a single source then use all the spare time you've got to build a second one, sooner or later you will need it.

And yes, google support sucks. I've yet to get a real and to the point answer to any questions I've ever sent them. Customer service is definitely not their strong suit.
Final build of Windows Phone shown off
Lying With Statistics
The Techcrunch phenomenon was more groupthink than anything else.
I didn't know about the very last one about average annual returns being multiplied instead of added, but it makes sense, now that I think about it.
Ah, a Canadian ;) Those hockey players. Btw - those 2 Rails projects of yours are well done.
Oak == Java 1.0. The first Java runtime beta that I installed on a Solaris box in 96 or so was called Oak.
If Apple gets any more evil, they will become kind of parody found in a Mike Myers movie. Makes me regret buying my Cinema Display from them
IE is also free and more secure. Why would they want to switch?
akamaka, which browser do you use?
By then end of the article, I was convinced the "source code vs. object code" wasn't an analogy, but a sincere claim.
Those large corporations really don't care about one person's opinion on a browser.

EDIT: I am amazed that there are people that think their opinion is so important that a corporation would actually care what that person thinks.
Reminds me of a couple of anecdotes my father told me about his days as a physics undergrad. The first was about a time when he would get somewhat discouraged after studying for hours and making little progress. So at one point he asked some of his really talented classmates (more talented than him) how much they studied and how far they got. They all replied that after hours of studying, they would maybe get through 3-4 pages of the textbook. It was somewhat enlightening for him to learn that even the geniuses couldn't breeze through the material like one might breeze through a dime-store novel.

The second anecdote was about the time my father was getting letters of recommendation for grad school. He got the usual positive letters, each with a couple of paragraphs praising his abilities and intelligence. My father then asked one of his friends (a much more talented friend) if he could look at one of his letters. The friend's letter consisted of a single sentence which contained the words "Nobel prize material". It was at this point that my father gave up physics.

Anyhoo, I guess my point is that grit is of course important, but as other commenters have noted, talent can't be dismissed either. We all have upper bounds, which aren't always as high as we might like.
"The French company provides the same services for a fee and claims the Google strategy is aimed at undercutting competitors by temporarily swallowing the full cost until it gains control of the market."

That's going to be a tough one to prove, if that really is their assertion in the court documents they've basically killed themselves before it even gets started. Google has a track record of NOT charging for any of their services, why google maps - and then specifically for France - would be any different difficult to argue for.

The judge can now simply say, ok, let's wait until that happens, then you can claim your damages.

And in defense google could simply promise solemnly that they will never charge French users for access to google maps. (which I assume is their intention any way).

It's not illegal in France to allow access to a free service. Tough to compete with free. Adapt or die.
I don't understand the guy's attitude. Why is he doing a wait and see approach, instead of opening a Yahoo ads account and using those for a while?
They all replied that after hours of studying, they would maybe get through 3-4 pages of the textbook.

I think this may be the most important trait of those who succeed. Success requires hard work. I don't know of any other way to success.
Talent in athletic fields is much easier to determine, because the factors are often hard physical limitations: length of body, weight, muscle mass, balance.

Talent in intellectual endeavors is hard to define. In the liberal arts it's sort of an awareness for context, and recognizing unique ideas. In the sciences it's often a capability for symbolic manipulation and internal visualization. However, since the brain doesn't have hard physical limitations, much of this can be developed with extensive training, so that slight weaknesses can be overcome.
There was a bug in the Rails code he wrote, so he berates Google until the last couple of paragraphs when he explains it was his fault (he thinks?) Did I overlook something in the article?

I think that's exactly why Google sends out form letters as their first wave of defense.
I thought Google Maps is free only when publicly viewable. If you have a pay site or want to include it in pay software you have to buy it. So the French company has issue with Google's business strategy for Maps not that it is free (because it is only free to some).
As an organization, the question wasn't about switching the question was about allowing both. Individuals have numerous reasons to prefer one over the other.
Poll: Do recent events dissuade you from developing for the iPhone?
With the Google Voice fiasco (the official Google app gets rejected, then the third party apps get pulled, and now the third party companies are expected to pay for their customer refunds), have you been so put off by Apple that your development plans have changed?
Yes, I'm a current iPhone developer and now plan to switch to other platforms (Android, webOS, web apps)
Yes, I was planning to learn iPhone development, but now I'm going to develop on other mobile platforms
No, I'm developing for the iPhone now and plan to stick with it
No, I still plan to learn iPhone development and develop for it
No, I never planned to do iPhone development so nothing has changed
In what universe are content, forms and menus not part of the UI?
no, i did research to see what was out there in terms of heavy lifting for twitter and there wasnt a product that had the oomph to do it yet.

Like i stated in the premise the goal is not to spam follow but to follow people who you follow are following. that way you are getting the same info that they are in your stream. thanks
Maybe there is no reason to use Firefox for the business?

IE actually saved me some time the other day. A client is using TinyMCE and wanted spell-check enabled. I thought this required a PHP script on the server (which is not going to happen, our infrastructure is not set up to run PHP), and that I was going to have to port that script to Perl. Turns out it can use IE's built-in spell-checker instead. Since the client only uses IE, the problem was solved.

This does not make up for the thousands of hours I've spent on things that work great in Firefox, Safari, and Opera, but immediately kill all scripts in IE. (The error messages are crap, and the debugging tools don't work. Nice!)
I've been using Java on and off since around then (first paying gig in '96) and even at 0.9 it was called Java.
This seems wrong, but Google kind of deserves it -- Google has been involved in antitrust and other actions against Microsoft (e.g. they have been actively involved in the recent case against Microsoft in Europe regarding the "browser ballot"). So they don't really have any right to complain when someone uses the same types of laws against them.
Django integration for serving FCKEditor's upload and file browse pages
It depends on the market he's working, Yahoo does not have the same volume that google has and chances are that he does not get the same returns on his time there because of that. Niches are tough. Once you have one it is a little cash cow but if anything bad happens then you find out fast that a niche is fragile. A single competitor that works a bit harder than you, a drop in your traffic... Chances are that somebody is simply outbidding him.

He's spent 12K on ads to date according to the piece, that means that he's had to sell at least 400 licenses to break even.

Apparently his market is to sell $30 software to create bingo cards, hardly a mainstream market.
Wow, when it rains it certainly pours. Here's a poll asking whether or not our development plans have actually changed due to recent events:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737511
The secretary in the video seems quite aware that the expense question may actually come out quite favorably for Firefox..
But it would also eliminate the possibility of astronauts leaving new iconic footprints on the Moon or Mars for a couple of decades.

Translated: manned extraterrestrial landings probably aren't happening in your lifetime (unless private industry gets in and reduces LEO cost by a thousand-fold somehow)

I've given up on NASA. I love those guys, really I do. But you can't keep changing missions every time a president takes office, you can't spread the pork out to every state you'd like to, and you can't run a serious manned spaceflight program on a shoestring budget. They're totally dependent on public opinion and don't have a clue in the world as to how to capitalize on it.

In short, NASA is a political animal masquerading as a science agency. As such, it's not much use for controlling/promoting spaceflight. If JFK were alive today he'd be dismayed.

Remember his words? We choose to do these things not because they are easy but because they are difficult. Big missions, big drama, big heroes, big goals for the nation. Now the article talks about sending astronauts to Langrange points! That's going to be as exciting as watching cars rust.

NASA needs to get out of spaceflight implementation altogether and become a spaceflight promoter.Write the checks (which it seems to be very good at) and let somebody else worry about breakthrough propulsion techniques. Farm out funding of the International Space Station to the State Department.

Time to hang it up guys. You were great back in the day, but back in the day you had a clear, steady,long-term mission. Those days are not going to return.
letters of recommendation

Sadly it's very true; there is hardly more damning praise in physics than "diligent hard worker".
All that help text is not really necessary. You could get rid of it. Nobody will read 3 paragraphs of small text to figure out how to use your site. Encourage people to just try it.

Make the form the center of attention. Don't be afraid to bump up the font size a bit more. You could move the language checkboxes down to a second line. The "Create" button could be bigger and more obvious. Make it say "Go" or "Search".
They are claims, but actual learners in real life find that the thing that helps language learning the most is opportunity to have much interaction with other people who know the language. (The single most important way that people around the world learn new languages is through migration and trade.) Empirically, if Esperanto were easy to learn, more people would be learning it. If a lot of Esperanto speakers were really at an A-level degree of proficiency, they would provide Esperanto parallel texts for their English-language posts in favor of Esperanto.
I'm a big fan. I am in the process of looking for a company name and this is really helping to give me some ideas.

My suggestion is a "buy domain" button. I feel like this would allow you to convert this to money quicker. In the list I am given no suggestion that clicking on the domain will take me to godaddy, if I was given a buy domain button I would be more likely to make money.

Also you could give me a choice of registrars. It seems you can only make money off of godaddy customers. I would be very likely to click your affiliate link to 1and1.com and purchase, but for now I will navigate their myself to make purchases.
Anatomy of an Entrepreneur | Trends, entrepreneurship, startups, survey
"The United States remains primarily a civilian economy. The military now takes about 8 percent of all durable goods, up from 3 percent in 2000."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/business/economy/01charts....
How to save money by embracing free, open technology
We can pickup the mic after the fat lady has sung.

Yeah, that's the problem here -- you may need to be very patient.

For six months the iPhone platform looked like a gold mine for indie developers. Then the gold mine tapped out. Now we still don't know what the long-term prospects for indie developers are, because the data we have to date was tainted by the presence of the gold rush. The platform was too successful too soon:

http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/04/validated-...

If the market really is non-viable for indie developers, it will take time to figure it out and take steps. Apple won't fix something if it doesn't seem to be broken.

In the meantime, the iPhone app market may be dominated by major players with deep pockets, the way software marketing used to be before the Web. You might want to band together with some peers. Read up on the early history of personal computer software -- in which new companies like Broderbund, Sierra On-Line, and Electronic Arts recruited teams of formerly independent developers who wanted more marketing and sales clout than they could get from placing classified ads in the backs of computer-hobbyist magazines.
Consider using Dropbox (A YC startup).

https://www.getdropbox.com/

You can get 2gb for free, or pay for more if you need it. If you need more than you're able to pay for, you could have a home PC syncing the stuff to another location and removing the original to free up the space.
True enough. He has a point though: customer support does not scale. On a relationship that has spent $12K in advertising you could easily afford the little bit of work to work with this customer and get his problem sorted out. The fact that google sends out just a form letter does not help their image, and in the long term may be bad for their business. Personally I don't even try to get a reasonable answer out of google if there are issues (and yes, there have been issues in the past, most notably in the click fraud domain).
> And in defense google could simply promise solemnly that they will never charge French users for access to google maps.

They can't start charging for it easily.
They would have to agree on "going commercial" with MS - otherwise everyone would just jump over to the competitor. And both MS and Google pulling free maps at the same time would be something that lawyers would like to look into... ;)
But it didn't "start" that way. It came to us not from the Hindus, but from the Arabs, through Al-Andalus and the cultural exchanges at Córdoba and Toledo. The Arabs read right to left, so the most significant digit is at the end, not the beginning of the number. At the time Arabic numbers were adopted in the West, we were ignorant of the Hindu practice.
Exactly. I really don't think this will fly. They are free to try though, you can sue anybody for anything as tumult already noted above, even when you're only telling all of your current customers that there is a free alternative that they may not even be aware of. Well done :)
At the risk of sounding like an asshole, it's nice to see one's views validated. Some of us have been getting downmodded for bad-mouthing Apple's App Store and warning against this kind of stuff since its launch.

It's important to note that none of Apple's written or implicit policies have changed - it is only people's perceptions that are now changing.

The good part is of this debacle is that, either they will change their horrible attitude and policies, or people will abandon them for greener pastures.
Agreed. If you are interested just read the original: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/business/economy/01charts....
Could you edit the poll? If so, could you add an answer for those who plan to keep developing for the iPhone but now are also looking into other platforms?
So then there is no reason for any type of sort beyond bubble. After all it is data in data out right? The human body is a bit more complicated than sorting algorithms. When you eat a no carb. diet interesting things happen the least interesting of which is that protein takes more processing to turn into energy than sugar does. One of the most interesting,(from a dieter's perspective) is that the body enters a state called ketosis in which excess protein is expelled from the body instead of being stored as fat. This makes your body self regulate its weight. Second eliminating sugar from your diet makes you less hungry since your body experiences less blood sugar variation.
Not entirely, while I still plan to develop for the iPhone, I'm now looking at other platforms as well
Your comment only seems to apply to the manned space program, which is a very small piece of what NASA does.
I notice that if you select multiple languages and give it a startswith "word", it does not translate the given word and attempt the lingual variations.

For instance I gave it the word "life" and was expecting variations of "vida" "vie" "vita" "life" but only got words generated from the last stem.
He didn't say his account was suspended, right? It's just that he screwed up how the conversions work and therefore google stopped showing ads because they weren't converting. Sounds like adwords is working perfectly.

Am I the only who checks my adwords account almost daily when I have a campaign running? A month seems like a long time to wait, plus you'd expect to see regular charges in your bank/credit account.
I've been using witopia.net - you can choose between servers in the UK and US depending on the package you get and it's pretty cheap as I travel to places like China a lot. The upside is that because you can choose servers in the US you can also watch shows on Hulu.