skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is unfortunately not a great way to compare providers. After all, who are the people who will come to this site, and leave reviews? Mostly people who had a seriously negative experience, and are keen to fight back by smearing the provider. Perhaps obviously, larger providers will have more of these.

People with normal experiences -- e.g., "it just works" -- will have no reason to find a review site and leave a review, so even though the larger providers will also have lots more of these, you won't see them.

I'm not saying that GoDaddy etc. are wonderful; I left them a few years ago because I don't like the founder, but I never had a problem with the service; it just worked, and it was inexpensive.

A more valuable way to compare (if a representative survey isn't practical) would be to show a walk-through of the various common actions to take at a registrar -- and rate those for usability, price, etc.. I'd be interested to see how registrars vary not just for initial registration price, but also renewal price; for how difficult it is to transfer a domain to another registrar; etc..
That's definitely a more reasonable recommendation, although it's probably not the one I'd make myself. Some people take to meditation quite naturally; for some it's a real struggle. For the inexperienced but curious, about the most I'd generally recommend is stopping by some meditation group for a single sit.

As an example, the San Francisco Zen Center's farm, Green Gulch, has a Sunday program that's quite nice:

http://www.sfzc.org/ggf/display.asp?catid=3,123&pageid=239

Gentle instruction, a short lecture, and then the option of casual tea and conversation.

If people find themselves comfortable enough with a single sit that they're saying, "Gosh, I want 3 days of this," then more power to 'em. But that definitely wasn't my first experience. I needed a more gradual path.
Confessions of a Smartphone Thief
Most developers need 5-10 years to really get to be engineers and solid product makers. Until then work on teams that are better than you and get as much experience as possible.

Keep doing what you were doing in .NET or something you can take on. Maybe explore some new areas/platforms but only when you have some projects in them. You can learn to deliver product on any platform but change it up when you have the ability or in your free time. Start small in deliverable chunks always and build from there.

I feel that you need to slow down, write sentences into paragraphs, figure out what you want. Be concise.

You are focusing on the 30 year old thing, most developers are their best in their 30s+, so don't believe the hype. Think about it, graduate at 22 or 25/6 with masters if taking that route, 5-10 years of experience puts the best of their industry right at early to mid thirties as the starting point for good developers. Just because VCs want developers before you know your value doesn't mean good developers aren't needed. You need to focus on making yourself better in your eyes. You aren't there yet but you are on the journey and you are thinking about these things so that is a good sign.

Keep working at it, you have time. Right now though since you feel a little lost, just take on a .NET role, or something you can take on, and rebuild your confidence. You can make a product on any platform and you will learn many good patterns and anti-patterns even if that is not the platform you choose in your own projects. What you need right now is experience and some of it may suck but find the good/fun/learning in each adventure.
Be one of the first people to work for a blockchain (Bitshares)
Testing Legal Highs Would Save Lives
However, doing evil when you're young and following up by a moral awakening in your second act is very good strategy. You get the benefits (money, power) from your youthful ruthlessness and then when you're older and wiser you can disavow your prior acts while continuing to benefit from it.
Great feedback - Thanks. We'll work on updating our landing page to explain our offerings better. Keep an eye on over the next few weeks if you're not yet convinced into moving.
Edison lost the War of the Currents, which is what he killed the elephant for. The whole episode was bizarre, and I'd file it under "unhinged" instead of "mean." Was he born like that, or did his early successes turn him into a stubborn, crazy old man?
To me, there are two more issues with that demon paradox.

First, that it is assumed that its answer has a physical representation in reality. The fact that solving a non-trivial maze from the inside is impossible without moving through the maze doesn't mean the maze cannot be solved without moving. It can be solved from above the maze. Similarly, assuming quantum mechanics is accurate in that every particle has a random nudge in its position and velocity, if we had access to the random generator, we could create that demon; otherwise, the solution would be expressed in terms of what that generator produces: a solution which doesn't have a physical representation, but is merely a probability distribution.

Second, there is this assumption that its answer be crystal clear for us to understand. Any amount of work with symbolic computation gives the intuition that sometimes, the answer isn't atomic. In that case, the demon's answer could be "if I say that you listen to the radio, what you will do is watch TV. Otherwise, you will listen to the radio".
Ask HN: OS projects looking for contributors?
Hey HN!

I want to contribute more to Open Source projects, but feel like there are tons of projects that don't even want anyone to contribute (e.g. because they still want their name to show up on a "git blame").

So if you have an open source project (preferably JS, but doesn't matter, I'm happy to learn whatever language you use) and you're looking for contributors, have a long TODO.md or just have a couple of bugs, dirty code etc. Let me know! I want to help.

Thanks,
Alex
I'd like to see examples of the converse -- good ideas that were killed by bad naming. Not quite an objective measure, but I feel this might be quite enlightening.
Yes, and the same is true with other OSen. So it'd be nice to know some generally well supported laptops that aren't picky about the OS you want to run. I might want to run more than one OS...
First off, thank you for the excellent reply. I think I'll be saying this a lot in this thread, but I don't know how to express my gratitude for your response--it's shed some light on things for me.

I'm a college student, and I haven't had a single programming course. I'm interested in full-stack, including front-end design and dev. I've learned my shit with that, and can hold my own with it pretty well. However, I do have plenty of free time to do what I want with programming, and I've taken on a massive load.

Every day I'm hopping between frameworks. I did half of the Ember.js course at CodeSchool, realized I didn't like how the project was being handled and decided to try React. That's just the latest, though--I've been trying to learn Node, Express, Gulp, Slush, and a bunch of others. I've got about 10 projects with just a bit of work done on them, and no more because I got stuck, didn't know what to do, and moved on. I see now that I really need to pick my tool and learn it.

Right now, that's going to be Node + Express for me. I don't think I have the gusto or interest to get into the nitty-gritty of Node core dev, but I could definitely do that with Express. Thank you for the excellent guide on how to really focus with it. I'll definitely be doing that immediately.

Thanks for your help, and I'll definitely sign on to Freenode to chat and get some help/ideas some time.
still facebook will know where you have been. "Anonymous" and "Facebook" do not really fit together ;)
Sony E-ink Watch Aims to Make Low–Power Screens
Whatever they call the person who handles the IT contracts then.
GAFAnomics: New Economy, New Rules
I am kind of speechless at this assertion. I'd ask if Mr. Graham is serious, but he clearly is.

I think instead of the assertion "mean people fail" being true, I think instead we can more truthfully say:

People who lack the interpersonal skills to hide their meanness when it can be damaging fail.

Mr. Graham, you are a well known millionaire investor. Of course start up founders are going to be on their best behavior around you. And the ones who aren't, are going to fail because not only will you not be interested in helping them, but none of your friends will either. If someone lacks the self control to behave around you, then they probably lack the self control to behave around others.

But knowing how to behave is not the same as being a nice person.

Someone can act very nice to everyone and still be a cold hearted son of a bitch. You can be really polite and friendly while you are destroying someone's life.
The problem with his description of his achievements is that he is probably underplaying them. Obviously without knowing what he has actually produced (seen the site, reviewed the code etc) I was hoping to make him see what he has done in a better light. "Spent two years converting a static website to something more modern" sounds really lame and could indicate a lack of confidence in what he is capable of or perhaps he is failing to recognise what he has actually done.

His CV needs to get him an interview and I think he is selling himself short.

Personally 'junior' means 'trainee'. Anyone who after five years is still a trainee would have their CV thrown straight into the bin. But I have always worked in environments with very flat hierarchies. Juniors need supervision and mentoring, I expect anyone who been employed for more than a year to be capable of unsupervised work.

Disclaimer: I am the IT manager, I review all the CVs, I get to say who gets employed. I've yet to regret any hiring decision so I am reasonably confident in the methods I employ.

I've employed people with much less experience than the poster and they were up to speed in no time. In 5 years you could get a degree in almost any subject and complete a masters on top of it - at least in the UK.

I would expect competence in a programming language in weeks or months, not years. Note I require competence not expertise.
Thanks for taking the time to feedback justfane. We'll work on getting that information clearer for you. We've worked a great deal on providing clear pricing but we'll look at communicating that better on our landing page.
on mobile ... play with a running program like wget, step through nginx request, debug a python script. wget is by far the richest playground. setup a site on local host for wget to spider, modify bandwidth, wait time and kinds of links to follow.
It partially comes back to what you mean by mean, but I'd argue that for Gates for instance directing a company engaging in illegal practices for years is objectively mean. Zuckerberg also had to settle lawsuit at great loss.

On the other hand, a personal first hand account on how BG was a super nice guy would be a lot less relevant in my opinion.
Nice work overall. That was fun.

Just a heads-up though: There are some typos and grammar mistakes in your explanations, so if you plan to share professionally, you might want to have someone proofread it. Also, your Facebook OAuth window that pops up upon page load is being caught by Chrome's built-in popup blocker. Either way though, I'm always disappointed when Facebook OAuth is the only login method. I get that it's easy to implement, but I can't imagine this is a very security-sensitive app in terms of user-accounts. I would like to save my progress, but it's not worth the risk or analysis required to hook up my Facebook.
I was also expecting it to advance me automatically to the next level.

A bit of customisation of the default bootstrap look would have been nice too.
Change "apologize to 10 people" to "save 10 African children from starvation" and I don't see how you can possibly argue this hypothetical person is "bad". If you honestly think this then you also think Ghandi and MLK are bad people, because they both did "bad" things to people who they didn't directly help. If I kill someone to save 1000 others I'm pretty obviously a good person, but I can never apologize to that person specifically or make it up to them. Your moral philosophy makes no sense.
Show HN: PyTodoist – A Python Wrapper for the Todoist API
TaiG releases iOS 8.1.1 jailbreak for iOS 8.0 – 8.1.1 Devices
Did he do or say anything mean to you?
Yeah, it's important to know where your service provider is, both physically and judicially. The majority of hosting providers are surely located in just one country. Amazon, Google, Microsoft are the exceptions here.

Mainly because of http://www.rte.ie/news/business/2014/0904/641416-us-microsof... - I wonder whether this is still being fought?
Don't you still need a facebook login for that?
Wish there were an offline open source version.

With the exception of DHH, do they believe in Open Source in Denmark? (jk)
Not "identical personality traits" plural, one common personality trait, singular. And it's not everyone, merely enough to keep effective problem solvers out of government.
If there was anything worth starting a KickStarter for, it would be to raise money to buy as many of these homes as possible, and give the deeds outright to the people who already live there. That'd be a really great thing.
So you have truth or evidence otherwise, or are you just waving your hands and implying that you do? I mean if we really want to talk about truth or evidence, the correlation between sociopathic behaviors and business success is very well studied and documented, and lies in absolute contrast with this rather odd essay by PG.
Six sigma is actually alive and well, and in my experience refers to a well-defined set of methodologies for production efficiency. There are certification bodies that run programs dedicated to it[2]. It might not be necessarily intelligent (akin to the ISO 9000 quality standards), but it is a real deal.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Six_Sigma_certification...
The problem with getting rid of software patents is that you have to do it retroactively, invalidating the existing patents. The patent holders would sue the government for destroying their property, and would likely win it even if those patents collectively destroy more value than they represent (something which I strongly believe). So, even if you had a government willing to get rid of software patents, they're not likely to get away with it. The only practical way to do it would be to reduce the life of a new patent by one year every year, so that all software patents, current and future end up exiring at the same time. But that still takes 20 years before it actually takes effect.
Hi mauricesvay - Our pricing is available in the purchase steps under "Get started". We'll work on getting this moved closer to the landing page. Thanks for the feedback!
Propositions as Types, with Howard on Curry-Howard
As a Canadian tech worker who graduated in 2008, I've thought to myself that a sizable chunk of my university cohort dipped our toes in the US and then decided permanent immigration wasn't worth it. It's great to see an analysis using a dataset the size of LinkedIn's.

I'd also like to see if net emigration has changed, i.e. are more people staying in their native country. Google, Amazon and Microsoft are expanding aggressively in Canada. The startup scene still lags, but is growing.

IMO, Canadians no longer have to leave home to have access to interesting tech work. The main benefit the US offers me is its climate, which doesn't outweigh the horrible immigration experience if you have a non-US spouse who wants to pursue their own career. If you're single, I'd still consider the US very competitive.
How to host a million dollar campaign on your own website
I don't think it's fair to tell a story like that without strong evidence to back it up.

Actually, telling it might be fine. Believing it, not so much.

I know how fashionable it is to hate on <company>, but is this what it's come to? An unsubstantiated story about how someone felt "vibes"? When the CEO didn't actually do anything?
It is quite depressing. The other day I've been reading an article about MRAP vehicle program - Wiki said the cost was estimated to be 50 BILLION
- The Cloud
3 essential design trends, November 2014
Almost certainly due to the prevalence of fake DVDs. I had a high school buddy who would rent DVDs from Blockbuster, rip them, and sell duplicates on eBay. There's also a steady flow of high quality copies from East Asia which you can find all over New York. I can totally understand why Amazon would want to restrict sales of this specific category.
You're welcome. I'm glad that you found my write up helpful.
Fair point - and I actually do agree with almost all of those. However, I think some of these are inevitable biases that any sort of reviews will face - I think xkcd puts it very well http://xkcd.com/937/ :D

I started the review section as a counter point to the main page, which is purely about comparing prices. For the points in your last paragraph, I fully intend to blog about them where possible. For the time being, I hope that at least some people would share some of those experiences in the review description!
According to that article a lot of these people already have paid off the mortgage and have the deeds to the house. It's that they can't keep up with the taxes. If you raised money to pay their back taxes, what would they do the following year? This kind of stuff really is sad, there has to be some solution to not kicking people that have lived in these houses for 30+ years because they can't afford the taxes.
Not the parent, but willing to answer.

> Why is it then that we see this argument only used against systemd

WIth systemd we see the changes against Unix design, whereas your other examples already exist.
Why? These houses are getting foreclosured due to owed taxes. If they got the deed back, they'd just get foreclosured again to pay the rest, no?
i don't know how to solve beginner 4?
shouldn't you be able to put anything into it?
Great post. I think good teams with talented, and most importantly disciplined, people can still extract the meaning behind these terms. For the mediocre companies and teams, these acronyms and terms are just lip service to attract and fool employees.

Oh, and who could forget... The consultants! Consultants love love love these words.
Settling a lawsuit proves that you're a mean person. Ok. I guess I'm a mean person too.

You're right though that it comes down to definitions. I think the prevailing definition here is some closer to villain.
> The south used to be Democratic --I think it flipped Republican in the 1970s.

That's right. And why did it flip? It's because Democrats passed the Civil Rights Act, and Republicans under Richard Nixon's leadership very cynically seized on the South's entrenched racism in order to capture power. See:

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

Kansas used to be Democratic too. If flipped after Roe v. Wade, and they are only now starting to pay the economic price. There are many other examples, but Kansas is the most obvious. I don't have a reference handy, just Google for "Kansas economy". Things are worse in Appalachia because this has been going since before the Civil War.
Using Go for Anomaly Detection
Being nice is not antithetical to being competitive or being a pushover. I'd argue that being nice is crucial to being a strong good leader.
Sounds like pg needs to become an undercover employee to see the other side. Try being an Uber driver.
The old man in me screams: It's not that travel has become narcissistic, it's that everything has. Narcissists make everything about them, and there seem to be more narcissists now than ever before (if there aren't more, the existing ones are certainly more prominent).

We're all one of the crowd, like the author says. Technology has made it very easy to forget that.
Art of entrepreneurship
In this context, willing to cause harm to others for your own gain.
Business is where friends meet each other and help each other out.

Now _big_ business? Different story entirely.

I've been privileged enough to work with lots of different businesses, of all types and sizes. I find that as a business grows, it becomes easy for managers and planners to become distanced from the "friends" they are trying to help.

It's no wonder PG sees mean people fail at startups: startups are supposed to be extremely emotionally close to problems or inefficiences that huge numbers of people face.
Actually, in England, "mean" can also.. er, mean "miserly" or "not generous".
More than that, we have a lot of narcissism-enhancing, or at least narcissism-displaying, tools. In the form of social networks.
They are savvy but they don't know what they don't know.
Thank you very, very much for your main comment. I am actually a member of both academia and the realm of "regular people/programmers/hackers/whatever." I'm a college student, so a lot of my work is for the most part free (despite what most people think about academia). However, I also want to do programming for a living, and know I will have to conform eventually.

That said, you're absolutely right in saying that I want to "solve problems" (that's just the best term I could come up with after months of trying to convey my meaning to many people--I have no attachment to it) for the intellectual satisfaction and joy of doing so. I really just love what I have done with writing code. It's really fulfilling and the structure of it resonates with me at a deep level.

So, your comment is very helpful. There's no end to the small problems or ideas that I have, especially within my work writing code. You may have answered this and I didn't understand, but the main thing I'm getting at with my OP is that I don't have the skill set to actually solve the problems. I know it probably sounds completely ridiculous, but I've approached many small problems and have always produced the absolute barest skeleton of the program which solves the problem I have. I then draw a blank on what I need to do next to continue solving the problem--the structure and the logic don't exist in my brain yet. That's what I really want to get from this thread, and I think there are some excellent responses that help with that, including yours.
I wonder what Paul would think if he was interacting with these "not mean" people in a capacity other than super successful rich guy that these people need in order to make money.

Seems like a bit of a lack of self awareness to say "welp, these guys are nice to me, the person they most need to be nice to, so they must be nice guys".
My main problem with this is telling the difference between O and 0, the clue O's look more like 0 so I have to copy paste them. (Although I don't think I've had any numbers required for solutions yet).
Knowing someone personally is obviously not the necessary standard to judge a person's character; I doubt it is the one you yourself use.
This thing has Apple so far up its ass, systemd can't even come out the other end.
> I am 30yr old software developer with 2 yrs experience as a ASP.net C# developer.

That's it? Your only development experience is that? No school or anything of that sort?

There is a backstory missing: how did you get that ASP.net C# job with zero experience?
One of the first times I've seen that property tax really does read like serfdom.
What sort of evidence would convince you that someone isn't mean? I've know and worked with some of those people and not found them to be mean, but as other commenters have said, that makes no difference, because stories.
People just want to make (even more) money.
There's a reason Steve removed "easter eggs" and lists of people that worked on projects at Apple: there's no reason to give other companies a list to poach from. I don't know why GitHub is making this so easy.