skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> pages don't get added dynamically when adding new content as easily as they do in a typesetting application.

InDesign will actually do this. I think it's called "Dynamic Flow" or something? It can automatically append new pages to fit the content.

In general, it's not very eager to do this because when you consider spreads (distinct left-hand and right-hand pages), inserting a new page will affect the layout of all subsequent pages. You could insert a new spread, but that may not be what the user wants.

In other words, if the user is laying out pages, actual pages matter. They aren't just an implementation detail derived from the length of the text.
LinkedIn Tips for Businesses
I agree with you.Today, IITs (best engineering universities in india) for example have fees no more than $1000 per semester. Many of my classmates who are from relatively poor background are able to study without worrying about loans and and many of them are doing very well in their careers.
The iOS Dev-for-hire experiment
> Why cannot the above be done in real-time as the user types?

This is what InDesign does.
Networking Tips
Happened to me too, lost about $350 on one client and $1100 on another. The first one was dissatisfied with my work and kept demanding more and more minute changes to reach even the first milestone (essentially a feature creep issue). The second paid initially but I made the mistake of finishing the work on the promise of a final payment which never came. I just ate it.

The truth of the matter is that loosing a grand and a half to learn the F U pay me principle is probably pretty cheap. What hurts more is the time I lost (6 weeks to the first client, maybe 2 weeks to the second). I was inexperienced and "just wanted to do a good job" and assumed that my contribution had little value and that the clients knew best.

Software development is not a handyman service. Clients can’t just drop someone else into a project and expect it to ever be finished. So a contractor that can actually deliver is rare and his or her skills are in such demand that clients really don’t have the leverage they think they have. I think the myth of the ninja programmer stems from this. An overachieving freelancer that doesn’t charge enough is the holy grail.

So in the end, I think the single biggest problem in contracting today is an information deficit on the part of developers. We forget just how much education we’ve acquired, how few of us are being considered for a contract, how much regular employees are getting paid for similar work, etc. Even now I am almost pathologically incapable of setting my rates correctly and charging the appropriate amount for the hours I’ve worked.

I’ve been thinking lately that we need a set of guidelines that all developers follow, for the good of the whole. Things like charging half up front, refusing to work for free beyond the hours agreed upon and charging say 75-150% of the going rate for the type of work performed. Freelancing sites like eLance and oDesk should track these at least as much as, say, how often a developer responds to job invites. As it stands, I think we are in a race to the bottom and losing our influence day by day until this mobile bubble implodes by decade’s end.

In other words, this nonpayment problem shouldn’t have happened in the first place, because our industry has serious issues that older professions have done a better job of addressing.
Most People with Addiction Simply Grow Out of It
WWStay - Bangalore, India - No remote (sorry), relocation within India

We are a travel company. We provide accomodation solutions to over 100 companies around the world. We are starting a new project that will reduce our cost of buying inventory. This will involve machine learning and analytics. We are open to using Haskell or Clojure for the project. We have ambitious plans on what features we want to build. This is a great opportunity for somebody to build a solution ground-up with very exciting problems. You will have freedom to make the technology choices.

We are looking for one or two experienced, passionate developers to join us for this project. Send us your github profile and resume to careers.hn@wwstay.com. Prior experience with Haskell/Clojure would be great.
Free API Access to Icon Library – Build Apps with Icons for Free
Working on Eve so far has been an incredible challenge that has taken us through everything from language design and query optimisation to high-dimensional geometry and cognitive science...how do you invite a billion people to program without them ever knowing about it? We're not sure yet, but we know finding out will certainly be fun.

I think what worries me about the hyperbole on this linked page is that it implies all problems software solves are fundamentally similar (they're not), or that all software shares certain fundamentals (it does of course, but at such a low level they are hard to abstract). The range of problems it says they want to tackle is huge:

They want to make a better excel

They want to make a powerful, intuitive, database UI

They want to make a tool scientists can use to crunch and visualise data

They want to make a game programming language for kids

They want to make hypercard with modern programming languages backing it

They want to make a tool for professional programmers to focus on the hard problems

Any one of those is an admirable and difficult goal - trying to make all of those things at once is a good recipe for starting something and never finishing it.

That's not a reason not to try to improve programming practice with something radically better, but I think they'd be far better to pull a Buchheit here and focus on one small set of customers and make them very happy, instead of over-promising and under-delivering.
Wow, congrats on your hard earned life! :)
I can report I'm earning a living (in San Francisco, no less) by working on an open source project, RailsApps [1], which is starter applications and a tool (Rails Composer) that generates starter applications. The business model is different from Mike's. Developers support the project by purchasing a monthly subscription at $19/mo. As an incentive to support the project, I write in-depth tutorials about Rails, which only the subscribers get. Some people subscribe because they want to keep the project going, and others subscribe just to get the tutorials. Either way, it's over 500 subscribers right now. I'm not sure how many other open source projects could use this business model (maybe you need to be a writer as well as a developer) but it's a route to consider if you want to make a living doing open source. And I'd say we definitely need more ways to sustain open source projects.

Babies, burnout, and budget cuts are lurking assassins for almost any open source project. Most developers do diddly-squat to ensure their projects can survive and grow, even for key bits of infrastructure we use every day. Mike Perham's built a piece of infrastructure for us Rails developers, and he's built a business to sustain it. I wish more developers would take on that responsibility.

[1] RailsApps: http://railsapps.github.io/
From http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/feature-germa... it's clear that tuition fees had only been around for a few years in Germany, were relatively low, and most states had already dropped them.

Edit: I think we'll change the url to this article, because it's more substantive and not behind a paywall like http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/europe/article42135... is.
But not in America.

America even has a law giving that notion teeth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPEECH_Act

> The Securing the Protection of our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage (SPEECH) Act is a federal statutory law in the United States that makes foreign libel judgments unenforceable in U.S. courts, unless either the legislation applied offers at least as much protection as the U.S. First Amendment (concerning free speech), or the defendant would have been found liable even if the case had been heard under U.S. law.
It's main purpose is to get feedback on what you're working on as you're working on it. I realize now that I never mention that on the site. Thanks for pointing that out!
Calling it a "fraudulent war" is a political view, and quite the minority view at that.
Inbucket: Open Source email testing application in Go
Coinbase Checkouts, New and Improved
Does that mean the inability to think for the long term is a fundamental limitation of modern democracies?
Up vote, this seems like a great idea to me. I'd love to see companies get beat up publicly when terms of service are obviously bad. Would also love to see some standardization of privacy/content/other sub polices.

If we're all supposed to push our data from an internet of things into the cloud the community needs to hold companies accountable as nobody else is going to. I shudder to think what facebook would be doing right now if it hadn't been for public outcry over things like their "Beacon" program.
Do you mean the monthly payments or the total payment? They offer salary-adjusted monthly payments (in the U.S. at least), but obviously you pay (a lot) more in interest that way and usually end up indentured to the loan for nearly your entire working life.
Right on the money! It's for getting feedback on projects that are in progress or not launch ready.
Bugs is (are? heh) written in PHP.
So, in this case, you already know the requirements, right? Does that ease the blow of being told what to do? I mean, also I assure you that I'm not trying to tell you what to do. I presume that more or less the same items would appear on the TODO list if you told me what to do.

I can and will give up on this whole idea if it's truly a bad idea.

But, lets look at some alternative timelines here. Suppose that I'd immediately hunkered down and started writing an uninstaller in isolation. Note: this is not something I'd finish today. Thus: by the time I had a working or semi-working uninstaller, the world would have moved on.

By starting the work in public, I hoped to avoid that eventuality not just for myself but also for anyone else who might otherwise have walked that path. (Experts who could finish the software quickly don't need the suggestion, of course.)

And, by starting the work in public, I hoped to reduce the cost-of-entry for others. I mean, I don't know about you, but I'd rather start with a couple of kb of skeleton than an empty repo.
SEEKING FREELANCER - San Francisco Bay Area, REMOTE is acceptable

Windows Python programmer with focus on creating Windows Services

https://www.scalyr.com

We are an early stage startup building a log management, monitoring, and alerting service based on our experience running cloud services at Google. We are seeking a freelancer to adapt the agent program that our customers run on their servers to collect system metrics and server logs. It is written in Python and currently runs on Linux so we are looking to adapt it for Windows.

This is a great opportunity to work with a small, very engineering-focused company at an early stage of development working with very interesting technologies. The project will have a big impact on our customers. Plus, the agent is open sourced so this work benefits the community and will give the developer something they can point at for future employers. Finally, this project could result in more ongoing work in the months / years to come.

The main tasks will include:

* Create a build process that will bundle the Python agent as a Windows executable and run it as a Windows service (using something like py2exe)

* Create an installer

* Develop a mechanism to allow our users to easily update the agent when new releases are made

* Write code to collect relevant system metrics from the Windows server

We are looking for candidates who meet the following requirements:

* Windows expert, focusing on Window Services and best practices

* Have built Windows executables from Python on previous projects

* Have created installers for Windows

* Must be willing to provide ongoing support (which we will pay for as needed)

Interested? Email contact@scalyr.com with resume and brief description of how your background matches our candidate requirements.
I think you've completely missed the point of what university is for. University is to study something you're passionate about at a high level, it isn't neccesstily a gateway to a job. There are plenty of people who study something such as art or history but then never go into careers in any way related to those. Dictating people's university choices is a terrible idea.
Game Saves Are Messing Up Our Drives
The Glasgow Haskell Compiler Haskell Compiler? Never heard of that one :P
And how long before we see price drops from both EC2 and Azure I wonder?
I'm not a physics grad, but I'm curious: can one predict the Raman response of a molecule? For example: suppose I'm interested in detecting molecule X. I have a laser of frequency f. Given these two, can I predict that the reflected light (after Raman effect) will definitely be of frequency f' ?
Dragons, Bootstrapping, and Women in Tech: Lindsay Nelson
Very strange!
I have opened a issue for review that strange behavior. Seems something related to graphics.

Thanks!
How does this compare to vessyl[0]? Is building one of these harder than building a radio kit?

[0] https://www.myvessyl.com/
Ask HN: Intermittent EC2 DNS failures at 1 minute past the hour
For about the past 72 hours, our EC2 instances have been encountering intermittent DNS resolution failures when talking to the default AWS DNS server, 172.16.0.23.

These failures pretty much always occur at around one minute after the hour (i.e., between 12:01 and 12:02, between 1:01 and 1:02, etc.), and the form the failures take is that the AWS nameserver returns SERVFAIL.

I have attempted to isolate the problem to AWS's name servers, as opposed to the DNS servers that AWS is speaking to, by running code outside of AWS that looks up exactly the same DNS records at the same time. I have a script which runs out of cron at 1 minute one minute after the hour and spends about 60 seconds repeatedly looking up host names that doesn't exist and reporting if the lookups return SERVFAIL instead of NXDOMAIN. The script returns occasional errors when run in AWS, but returns absolutely no errors when run outside of AWS.

The domain I'm looking up records in is hosted by Dyn through their DynECT service, but I'm not sure that's relevant since I've confirmed that the errors only occur when the AWS nameserver is in the loop.

Amazon's DNS servers are notoriously unreliable, but we've never seen this particular failure mode before; the usual failure more is that DNS simply doesn't work at all on a particular instance and we have to terminate and replace it. Certainly, we've never seen a failure mode where the all the errors occur on an hourly cycle like this.

What I'm looking for from HN is:

1) Are you seeing similar behavior in your AWS deployments?

2) Would you be able to run a script similar to the one I'm running to find out if you can reproduce the issue?

If I can collect evidence that this is happening to lots of people rather than just us, I have a better chance of convincing Amazon to pay attention to it.

Thanks!
The End of the Data Scientist Bubble
It looks interesting. Loading really slowly though (firefox).
I'll use logmein or vnc on anyones machine and of my own accord click "I agree" for them for a small fee.
24 hours.
Evolution of Multimedia Fiefdoms
Simple answer: because they think it's silly (or think it's too much of a privacy violation)

Germans are "very serious" even when they're having fun.
Yes, this is the correct metaphor. It leaves users vulnerable to things the cops are supposed to be trying to protect users from.

What's unclear is, do the cops get access to the keylogged information? Then the metaphor gets silly. It's like... firefighters giving you a smoke detector so they can spy on you in case you're setting fires, which also happens to sometimes cause fires independently.
I'm not trying to make a point. I just got the impression that upwards of 200,000 people were incinerated in the bombings, but I was skeptical of that number. I investigated a bit and just wanted to leave a note that the number was incorrect.

I don't think 120,000 lives qualifies as splitting hairs. I thought I was delivering good news, but judging by my karma, it has not been well received.
Intel XDK vs Native Android
Hello.

Someone recommended that I use the Intel XDK as an alternative to learning native Android app development using ADT or Android Studio.

What are your thoughts on this?

- Nicholas Brown.
Why do you offer only cloud based?
> Amongst the different kinds of GRBs, long ones are most dangerous.

So what effect would a long, direct GRB have on earth? Are we talking scorched, molten earth and boiled seas, or put extra sunscreen on for a week?
Citing a single anecdote doesn't do much to support the insinuation that those who support firearm regulation (in general) lack a basic understanding of the issues. It doesn't make any kind of a point at all, really.
If you want my personal opinion, offering to work isn't enough. You need to have stuff done already. How am I to know that I'm not being suckered into working for you for free? I'd say that to volunteer 10m, I'd need to see 10h of work already done.

Secondly, a small project like this doesn't need a full-time gardener/manager, especially for an objective goal like this (unlike, say, a videogame). If and when a project reaches that need, someone who has contributed important code is preferred. Code talks.
FWIW, I've mentioned in a few comments below that our first in-road here is just building websites. You can think of it as a replacement for VB6: something a normal person could use to draw out your application and then describe what happens when you interact with it.

The rest comes later, though we do believe it all flows out of a common model for programming in the same way that all of those things could come from any general purpose language.
Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellows – Mozilla Advocacy
What an abysmal website UX for comparing typefaces. I've got to scroll through oceans of whitespace to move between type samples -- no chance of having them on the screen at the same time without opening multiple browser windows -- and the actual type samples are different from each other, making them hard to compare.

After mentioning the importance of distinguishing O/0, l/1, etc., the subsequent samples don't all include these characters. Some of the samples don't even include any numerals!

The author points out how programmers prefer monospace fonts for their clarity and legibility, then, ironically, shows some of the samples in a washed-out low contrast color scheme, quite contrary to the typical high-contrast colors the typical coder uses, again, for the sake of clarity and legibility.

Would it have been too much to ask to put consistent samples, in a consistently-readable color scheme, on the screen simultaneously? Why does a website ostensibly devoted to design itself have such awful design?
Please enjoy this comment from a user 2k days old with 11k karma:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6165385

> Rape has meanings other than non-consensual sex.
GP: Please use the word rape to the full extent provided by the english language, and let those who don't like the word deal with it.

Hat tip:

https://twitter.com/AaronM/status/517372417233002496
You can socialize and mature on the job too. I dislike this idea of University being some theme park for young adults where they can pretend they need some more maturing before they will become real adults.

Nobody is giving slack to kids who did not managed to get to college. They are expected to be mature. I'm pretty sure college students are as capable as them.
Last time I was in Germany I talked to a Thai gentleman who was an international student there. He said all of his tuition was covered, and that it was standard policy. Some Googling seems to confirm thats the case, but someone from Germany should really clarify.
Australia? You're in luck. Australia has a "Civil and Administrative Tribunal" system for disputes up to $25,000. It can be used entirely on line and by phone. See "http://www.qcat.qld.gov.au/matter-types/debt-disputes/applic.... If there's a hearing, you can request that it be by phone.

I used this once after a problem with freelancer.com. They paid up within hours after filing.
just having free universities is different than good free universities ! I can't imagine a good graduate starve !
they will create job !
but teaching just math and history and memorizing them and saying these people are well educated is just big lie !

education should be free (and with financial fund for all students) but should be very very competitive (not for money , money should be available for all, good grade should be very competitive ) !
In this case many people will drop universities ! because they cannot afford such efforts ! and educated one will be really educated !
Envolve has shut down, anybody have competitors to recommend?
They point to ChatCat, which is not inspiring much confidence.

Anybody have suggestions?
I thought these headlines were about ongoing automation, a still huge uneducated workforce that becomes more obsolete over time, about how humanity is not only about economy but also about culture and arts, and what we can do so that everybody can freely contribute to humanity without acting as a braindead worker drone all life long.
> The best evidence from international studies suggests the policy announced by Germany is not the best policy for ensuring access to higher education.

That's not true. The report you linked to is trying to "strike the right balance between keeping student charges reasonable and finding sufficient funding for their higher education systems." The goal is to simply reduce government spending on education by transferring costs to individuals.
Ebola Overwhelming West Africa Communities
If you want to do this in Ruby try Chronic. https://github.com/mojombo/chronic
We're seeing these as well.
Windows 10 Preview Terms of Use
Is this standard practice when opening a product up to feedback from users? It seems like they get full ownership of everything.

From their TOS when registering for the "Insider" program:

You may provide code, content, comments, feedback, suggestions, information or materials via the Program Services ("Submission"). By providing a Submission, you are irrevocably granting Microsoft and its affiliated companies the right to make, use, modify, distribute and otherwise commercialize the Submission in any way and for any purpose. You also give to third parties, without charge, any patent rights needed for their products, technologies and services to use or interface with any specific parts of a Microsoft software or service that includes the Submission.

From:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/preview
I likely can make one in a few hours, if I made it I'd put it on my blog. What is your contribution to the project? Why do you even need to be involved?
They are not only cloud based. They have a link to download the code (https://github.com/taigaio) and let you host it yourself.
> Things would be different if your repo had a well-thought-out skeleton consisting of some (even if completely no-op) units and a (failing but thorough) test suite, tied up to Travis CI and what not.

Absolutely.

Here's the thing.. I can do that in Java, but not Go. I don't know how to do it in Go. Maybe that's really where I went wrong on this. (And wrong I went indeed! The downvote rate increased when I attempted to defend the idea.)
So more like a better web-based hypercard then?

Will be great to see what you come up with, but I think the sales pitch here is overstating what you can reasonably achieve. Everyone has had dreams of revolutionising their discipline by inventing new tools, but it's very rare for tools alone to lead to a new paradigm.
That ship is in the Guinness Book of Records under, "Longest distance sailed." These days, practically every university student is there to better their job prospects.
Softlayer today, also.