skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this might be appropriate for NASA level programs, which i suspect are heavily spec'd and designed before any code is written, and then they want the code to work, probably without much iteration. i'm not sure if this is completely wise, since iteration on implementation can be useful, but if the client's specs don't change and you have very experienced coders, then iteration may not be that useful. very correct code is.

on the other hand, for (young) programmers learning the latest web 2.0 tools andtweaking if not changing the product frequently, iteration, and thus speed is incredibly useful.

i think both approaches, heavily simplified here, could work--assuming the folks involved aren't just following a recipe but engaging with the process and committed to making it work for their particular circumstance.
This is empirical nonsense. Market-behavior is not normally distributed so basic statistics and even portfolio theory just puts you back in the same situation as Lehman Bros..

http://fora.tv/2008/02/04/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb_A_Crazier_Fu...
confused look

"What's 'free time'?"
I know for a fact it is not easy for Americans to immigrate into Brazil. I have a few American friends who've tried and failed... Brazilians call it reciprocity.
I don't know about music being level headed. It's not uncommon for parents who think their kid is a prodigy to have them in violin classes at age 3 or 4. I don't know if the music community itself thinks this is good or bad, though.
Tour And Travel
And you should have read more than the article.

The visa they give tech workers is the same one they have always given tech workers. There is nothing new there. Crucially, they can kick you out of the country whenever they please, which is usually when you are laid off. In Brasil you would have time to look for alternate employment, and a better chance of finding it.

Also, the job has to be pre-existing. What I mean is that, they want the foreign investment first, then they will allow in immigrants. As opposed to allowing in immigrants to start businesses, thereby attracting foreign investment. This was the model that early immigration to the United States operated under. Not that everyone should do things our way. Heck we don't even do it our way anymore. Just pointing out that this is not a program for increased immigration. The visa rules are the same, UNLESS you are an investor.
Google Everywhere: As the Search Giant Grows, How Much Is Too Much?
Don’t Break the Build: A Developer’s Guide to Care-Free Commits
Eric Raymond perhaps? - Programmer, Musician, Media personality, Martial artist, Economist, Mathematician, Mystic, Essayist, Author

The man does have a way of 'inflating' what he does but these are things he claims to be.
Pigs Defeating RFID-Enabled Feeding Systems
Hi everybody. I'm from Linkvive and we've actually been building such a service for the last few months. We're very excited to see interest in it on HN and look forward to sharing our service with you guys soon. Signup at our form (http://linkvive.com) and we'll send you a single e-mail when it's live in the next few months.
Cheers!
I stand with algorias here. I thought the same as you, but after talking to a lot of people in high-tech and IT not only here but in the US, I know there's absolutely no lack of talent or skills here in Chile.

Check this out: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=773581
Well, we started fingerprinting them on entry to the US, and Brasil said "OK, we'll go tit for tat". If you fly to Brasil you will find one set of rules at Customs for Americans, and another for everyone else. That's just payback. The fact remains that for the vast majority of global citizens, getting into Brasil is far less painless than getting into, say, the UK or the United States.
Well, are you a wombat? :D
It's a stopwatch that lets you save, organize and chart your times.

Some questions:

1. Is this useful?
2. How much functionality does a premium plan need before I can charge?
3. Any other feedback is appreciated.
have you heard of asana.com?
Having someone else do my laundry for about a dollar a pound. No more buying detergent, waiting around, having to find change if you don't have your own washer/dryer, loading/unloading, folding, etc.
I'm so happy about this news! sorry, but I can't help expressing my feelings here. I'm really proud, and I hope I can help on this Chilean "mission".

Taking advantage of this comment: I'm going to startup school and also to Traweln (http://www.traweln.org/), my contact info is in my profile.
http://stereopsis.com/flux/

"it makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day."
If you've read any of Ted's past stuff or followed his startups at all, you'd probably find plenty of evidence that he's a very skilled programmer.

And, yes, much of what you wrote is anecdotal.
I think that, regardless of whether the hypothetical correlation applies to Ted, it could survive weakening to eliminate his complaint and still be useful: "Good coders have coded outside of work at some point, or used coding to solve non-work-or-school-related problems." it doesn't mean you're still doing it now when you have -5 hours to spare a day, but it means you would be if it wasn't a matter of prioitizing. Bad coders don't assign "coding as a hobby" a priority value--they simply never consider doing it at all.
Keeping a notepad by me at all times (I use a pencil sketch pad). Great for jotting down ideas, scratch area, doodle, design, plan. End of day, I quickly write down what I want to get done the next day. Productivity++
He begins with an argument for redundancy in such a general sense that it's almost a truism. One way or another, since you don't know for certain that your code works, you should add code (ie checks) to make sure that it does.

BUT, that general argument, in and of itself, doesn't say testing or strong-typing or asserts whatever is the answer. It seems to me that what is needed is checks that are highly tuned to the situation at hand. Just as simple unit tests are limited, Strong typing is limited to catching a small portion of bugs. I want a language in which I can add only verifications that I need, when I need them and skip the rest. I've never tried it myself but the automatic typing of some functional languages seems like the appropriate next step (and I'm currently programming in a strongly-typed language that is generally a pain in that way).
Is it because he thinks that Obama didn't deserve the peace prize, or because he thinks that white racial guilt is a factor in the President's incredible popularity?

I guess this is another example of why keeping your political opinions to yourself if you disagree with the majority is good for your career.
Neat. I'd buy one for a couple hundred dollars...3950GBP!!!
I wish this kind of service was available in the UK. It doesn't seem to be a popular thing to offer, at least not in my town.
I didn't know Rob Hubbard scored the Bourne trilogy.
How do you automate the writing of a script that copies data across 5 servers? Or an Excel macro for some business thing? Or porting an app to another platform

You need developers for many things that cannot be automated.
To be quite honest, I don't find it useful at all. For the past several minutes I've been trying to come up with a use case for it, but can't because I don't find myself needing a stopwatch whilst using my computer, unless you're in a research facility. Maybe if you can automate the stop watch and start/stop it according to certain actions, along the lines of RescueTime, then it could be a bit more useful. As far as premium plan, you have quite a ways to go to convince me to pay for your service. My iPhone stopwatch is sufficient for my needs and I don't see a reason to use your service.

Maybe you were going for a specific use case that I'm not aware of, and if that's the case, let me know.
I agree, but I'd say in Chile is about the same for everybody though (pretty easy).

For example, my business partner is Colombian, he's been living here for 5 years now with no problems at all. First he had a Visa subject to work contract, but then when we decided to start our company he only had to go change his Visa status and apply for residence. Bear in mind Colombians don't have such a good reputation, in fact in Chile they are the only ones who have to present a Colombian police report of themselves together with their Visa application :S
Eproject (for emacs). Basically, lets me do things like "find file in current project" or "switch to buffer in current project".

http://github.com/jrockway/eproject/

Projects are found automatically by searching parent directories for _darcs or .hg. (This requires some additional configuration to make it work with anything.el, email me if interested, can't post since I'm not at my home computer right now.)
Glad you enjoyed the presentation, and I hope your experimentation goes well.

Re: HTTP Stack: "Performance" is such a slippery word here. If what an application is most sensitive to is the time it takes to fulfill one request, then yes, the HTTP stack may be an important component to keep track of, as it plays a role in defining the lower bound of request fulfillment time.

However, since all HTTP requests are handled in parallel, and since any node can handle any request, applications whose main sensitivity is not latency, but is instead throughput or availability, are less likely to find the HTTP stack to be a performance bottleneck.

There is also the option of doing away with the HTTP stack completely, and speaking Erlang straight to Riak.
Agreed. There's definitely more important things in life. As long as one can demonstrate that software is a passion for him/her, there's no issue, even if that person hasn't been able to find the time to scrape much code together for their own pet projects over the last six months or the last year or whatever.

This concept of only hiring hobbyist programmers exists because we've all worked with the complacent "career programmer" -- people who don't really care and went into the field because someone told them it was a good living and they needed a major. These people are usually bad programmers. Coding as a hobby demonstrates that you're not one of these people, but arbitrary standards like "Wrote at least six muffin-fulls of code last week", like most arbitrary standards, are much too restrictive and unforgiving.
It's like he has never heard of MVC.
or you just need smarter programs

I mean, I get the point, but making mundane tasks easy to do or removing the need to do them at all is kinda what we do as programmers.
seems like a very good deal to me if your willing to move and learn a new language. After reading the article Chile is really giving allot of good incentives for people to move and start companies. One thing that worries me is that with these incentives seems like their will be allot of wasteful spending and failed ventures.
The problem I've noticed with hiring people based on whether or not they code on their free time is that whether they do so is often dependent on how much their work/coursework sucks. If it sucks pretty badly (which it usually does), then the folks who enjoy programming will tend to do as little work as they possibly can, and save their energy for their side projects.

One interesting thing you can infer from this is, if you're running a shitty shop, you actually want bad programmers, not good ones. Bad programmers with a high degree of discipline. I don't mean for this to get sucked into that other discussion about immigration and employment, but I've long thought that this is why the big employers like IBM like to hire foreign talent (it's not for the same reason why we want to keep foreign talent here).
I think it's just an optimized combination of pre-existing control methods. Keys with aftertouch, breath control and some touch surfaces. Evolutionary, not revolutionary.

what we needed was a way to control the gamut of sounds that can be produced by a computer in a unified way

That's a bit like asking for a way to control the gamut of images that can be produced on a canvas in a unified way.
There are 1445068800 possible 1-second-long CD quality recordings. Most sound like white noise. I think what they're going for is not to span the whole range of sounds, but the whole range of familiar music, plus-or-minus a little.
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
You might want give some example uses, I hardly use a timer (if I am it's a countdown for quick reminders). I can see runners using this to track their progress over time.

I doubt this is something people would pay to use.
I find this debate insulting.

I have written web apps and low level networking code and plenty of stuff in between, aka a web server. I have worked with computers that have less than 1kb of RAM and distributed networks. I have written code 100x faster than a coworker who was still better than average (30 min vs 7 days). I remember spending a few days coding something so so our customers did not have to the post office website to find zip+4 addresses and realizing using them as a backup was almost pointless because I had a better solution. I love solving hard problems, and most of the time I don't code at home.

PS: Ok, I did just start working on an iPhone app, but that's mostly because I stopped coding at work. There is a life outside a compiler and going snowboarding, watching amine, reading, or any number of other things are just more fun.
Crucially, they can kick you out of the country whenever they please, which is usually when you are laid off. In Brasil you would have time to look for alternate employment, and a better chance of finding it.

They could (just like in the US), but they don't. Check my comment about my Colombian partner above. He also switched jobs several times before, with a couple months in between, before we met and started our company.

What's the point in putting Brasil above Chile anyway? Maybe Brasil is a great country to go start a company, I wouldn't know. But the article, and this thread, are about Chile and the conditions the country has created (on purpose or not) for high tech companies.
> "You know what's more awesome than spending my Saturday afternoon learning Haskell by hacking away at a few Project Euler problems? Fuck, ANYTHING."

This is pretty depressing since last weekend I was learning Haskell by working on Project Euler problems.
How much is corporate tax in the US? in Chile it's 17%
I'm not really familiar with business jargon - what does it mean to cash in leave every year and why is it a good thing?
Agreed. I'd buy one for $400, maybe, but for ~$5500? That's a bit too much.

Also, while others on this thread seem to think it's very Star-Wars-y and ugly, I personally think it looks rather cool. Nothing wrong with the looks.

Wonder how hard it would be to learn though.
Why does that matter? It's just politics and bullshit, a bit OT I guess.
http://www.autohotkey.com/
This is a great tool. You can easily configure short cut keys to do every day stuff, which would need several steps.
Reminds me of a JL Borges piece in which he writes of a fictive Chinese encyclopedia in which animals are categorized as:

1. belonging to the Emperor
2. embalmed
3. trained
4. piglets
5. sirens
6. fabulous
7. stray dogs
8. included in this classification
9. trembling like crazy
10. innumerables
11. drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
12. et cetera
13. just broke the vase
14. from a distance look like flies
PowerPro (http://powerpro.webeddie.com/) and ClipX Clipboard Manager (http://bluemars.org/clipx/), hands down. I've even donated to the fella who developed ClipX. The regex-based automatic navigation feature in ClipX is worth the price of admission.
Service wash at a laundrette. They're still reasonably commonplace I think.
Is this just a neat toy, or does it really help you sleep, concentrate & prevent eye strain? Anyone else here use it? Does it use brightness values that you'd expect, or is it sometimes too bright when it ought to be dim, or vice-versa?
"The circumstantial evidence Wrangham gathers is, if anything, even more compelling. His review of the anthropological literature, for instance, shows that no one, ancient or modern, settled or nomadic, has ever survived for more than a couple of seasons on an exclusively raw diet. Humans, Wrangham says, are as adapted to cooked food as cows are to grass."

The review communicates much about what is interesting about this new book. I've read an earlier book (a collection of articles) that included some of Wrangham's writings, and this whole topic of the evolution of human eating is full of implications for life today, with Wrangham definitely acknowledged as one of the leading authors on the topic.
I think it's a Moby song, not sure though.
My only point was that the article is presenting a program for increasing foreign investment, as though it were a program for increasing immigration.

The title is, "Chile Wants Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses..."

With such a title it appeared to me that the article was about immigration as well. This title invited me to research the issue. What I found was a program to increase foreign investment, which I admitted was laudable. What I did not find was a program to increase immigration, and intellectual honesty demands that we point out this inconsistency in the article.

Brasil was simply a convenient 'case in point' of what a reasonable immigration system would look like. Though I think the Brasilians could go further as well. As could our own country.
you have to be good at those things to count
Thanks for the honesty. Most people don't use stopwatch at their computer.

I created a mobile version of the website for use on your phone. It's better than your other stopwatch if you want to keep track of your times.
http://www.eigenlabs.com/pico/ is their smaller and less intimidating version for £349.
1. Evernote, the best notetaking software I know of - it starts to serve me as an universal "external memory". The most undervalued software in 2009.

2. Live Mesh - something similar to dropbox, for syncing files between computers, while also provides online backup for up to 5GB of data

3. Executor - application launcher for Windows, combines best stuff from Launchy and AutoHotKey. You can quickly start app by starting to write it's name or by assigned hotkey.
This might be useful for joggers, walkers, or anyone in athletics who has a mobile phone.
Your comment, while interesting in other respects, easily misleads someone to think that there isn't an immigration element available, which there clearly is.

Okay, so it's not Brazil: "Imma let you finish, but Brazil has the best visa program of all time". Heheh.
Poll: Do you use a case/bug/feature tracking software?
We don't like the various bug tracking software we have used. Bug tracking with them is a chore.
So, we are making some software which will track bugs/features/inquiries with MINIMUM effort. We aren't certain if a lot of developers use such software. We need your help to determine if there is a viable market for such a product.

So, do you use a case/bug/feature tracking software?
Yes, I do and I love what I use - I'll tell you which one it is in the comments below
Yes, I do. What I use sucks and here is why...
If you want to learn correct JavaScript the only choice is "JavaScript: The Best Parts" by Douglas Crockford on O'Reilly.
How about bigot? Does that count?
I'll say 1Password and The Hit List (both OSX software). They are totally worth the money.
I am sorry, that was "JavaScript: The Good Parts", http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748
Screen: started using it because of this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848821

Now I really cannot imagine working without it. The ability to detach and re-attach to named sessions is fan-tas-tic. Add the ability to run multiple named processes within each session and it makes working on multiple tasks during the day really pleasant. You can switch tasks and simply drop right back to the exact point you were working on whenever you continue.
Unless I'm mistaken, kuro5hin had a voting mechanism to determine what appeared on the front page. And delicious had it's "popular" page. Anyway my argument is:

a. "connections" are a scarce commodity, and probably the primary thing that a startup needs.

b. A market mechanism is replacing influencers. That's most likely a good thing.

and an additional remark - the first people who do this are obviously going to price high. The prices will get driven down by the same supply/demand mechanism that created the market in the first place.
The demonstration was something that three regular keyboardists could have done. nothing extraordinary, but it does have a coolness factor.
Actually, I was careful not to say that he isn't a skilled programmer. I have no way of knowing whether he is or isn't. What I said is that his piece does a good job of making a case against his own argument.
Ask HN: When or if do you think the dollar will collapse?
What are you doing to prepare for it if you think it will happen?
15-40% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_Sta...), plus state taxes as applicable.
And the second, and large parts of the third, going by our own versioning. It was 3 years of my life.
Man, you made my day with that last comment!! I almost pissed my pants, hahaha.
Neither of these are "show up in an office at 9am, work for 8 hours, go home at 5, not think about anything work-related for 16 hours, repeat", however.
I second Evernote :-) The free version is good enough but I felt it was worth shelling out the $45 for the premium upgrade.
yes, i believe its a nomination program and then google sends out invites randomly
I used JIRA quite a bit and Fogbugz too. JIRA is just to cumbersome, cluttered and has do much clicking.

Fogbugz is nicer but the whole effort still feels like a chore and its expensive.
Looks like it's lower in Chile then (17% flat).
Another consideration may be failure on one's own terms, versus being fired on a whim:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_economics
This guy is just bad at twittering. He should have said, "LOL, just murdered two people!!" That conveys the entire message and fits into 140 characters with plenty of room to spare. He could have even added a reason and some "!!11!"s; "because THEY HATE ME!!!111!".
I can't believe people are agreeing with you. I'm not even sure you've ever written software professionally. C script? C is compiled. Nobody says "C script". One developer commenting other developers code? That's ridiculous. You're either a highly effective troll or totally clueless.
I wasn't able to listen to the audio unfortunately, but visually I instantly thought of a guitar equivalent of the Ondes Martenot:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ondes_Martenot

An instrument you've heard dozens of times. Also used by Varese, Messiaen and other 20th century composers
Well, uh... there is a price admission. To get something you've got to give something.

Considering stackoverflow provides tremendous resources once you get a few points AND it is not that hard to get the points, stackoverflow seems like far less of a pain than expertexchange or the various link-popup-polluted archives.

It's kind of a way out of the whole total-leaching thing. I'd imagine the hn news community would be excited.
What if the escalators were removed, the shorter one.
I was teaching undergrads as a graduate student TA.
C graffiti
This quote ends with a summation of Crawford's _Shop Craft As Soulcraft_, a so-so book from a guy who left a directorship at a DC think-tank to start a shop fixing old motorcycles. The way Catmull phrased it, I'd be surprised if he hadn't read the book.

One of Crawford's points is that as we differentiate and specialize manual labor out of our economy, we lose an aptitude (mechanical literacy, self-sufficiency, the inclination to tinker before giving up on objects) that is subtly important to all the non-manual things in the economy.
I just used it to time myself writing a bunch of emails...I find I work better when I'm under some kind of time crunch or competition, so this may be useful...