skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Want to noticeably reduce the world's energy usage?

Austin-based Green Revolution Cooling (my friend's startup) is looking for a software engineer. They have created a very efficient cooling system for data centers. The startup has two mechanical engineers that have built a prototype that is getting awesome results. You'd be the main software person.
http://grcooling.com/ Feel free to email me at drew@overt.org or christiaan.best@grcooling.com
When Wal-Mart needs to make a big decision they don't ask the door greeters for their thoughts. Door greeters know nothing of running a giant corporation (at least most of them). The results certainly have major impacts on the door greeters' livelihoods, but they're not qualified to make decisions like who should be the COO, or should the stock split 2:1, or how many stores they should open in China next year.

It's much the same with science. If you let the hoi polloi decide what we should do about the global warming issue (or lack thereof) you're going to get a result not based on science or economics, but based on whether more people believe Hollywood actors or radio talk show hosts, neither of whom know the slightest thing about it either.

As a concerned tax-payer that is exactly what I'd like to avoid. All of that is, of course, way off-topic, which is ironic in a thread where I initially exclaimed that these sorts of posts are off-topic :)
Ok. I can accept that. Thanks for the advice. I was already leaning towards 99designs, but posted the original question to see if there were any alternatives or any other successes that others have had with other possibilities. Thanks again.
Also why stored procedures are often recommended since you can apply access controls around them.
Drat! I'll no longer be able to watch 320px-wide video on my 40" TV! Do people really watch YouTube on their televisions? It seems like a terrible waste to me.
> The larger point is if Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Google, Cisco, EMC/VMware, or Oracle/Sun offer a simple and supported cloud service for running MySQL, Tomcat, JBoss, Mule, or Apache HTTP instances, what reason do customers have to acquire "enterprise subscriptions" from the vendors developing these open source projects?

Well, that's simple: Not everybody wants to host their stuff with supported cloud services. This is the exact same issue with every other 'hosted' open source package, from PHP to Apache and the linux kernels underneath it. Microsoft has nothing to do with it.

There will always be a demand for paid support from those using those services, and I'm pretty sure that if you run into mysql issues on your 'hosted' service that you are not going to get support unless you pay for it.

Who you pay is less of an issue, whether you pay the hosting party or the vendor directly is up to you.

Mysql is a pretty weird example anyway, since it was bought by sun and is not a property of Oracle (or it will be if the EU lifts the barrier).
On Meetings: A Note On Dreaded Corporate Etiquette
To my mind, NLP engineer and computational linguist are synonymous terms. Code'em, Train'em, tweak'em, hand-tune'em: the more of that one can do, the more value one can provide us.
I don't plan on applying but I'm curious as to why you would hire a great developer without security experience over someone who knows app security.

Is it because you offer a lot of training or simply because you figure he'll pick up what he needs fairly quickly and eventually surpass the app security expert? Or is there a different reason?

I asked a similar question to Zed Shaw at CUSEC last year. Something along the lines what do you think about Joel Spolsky saying you should only hire the very best. He said he prefers someone who's willing and able to learn because he'll just teach them and they'll become a very valuable person.
I have a Macbook and after about a week of continuous, heavy, use (I do web development on it so I may have Netbeans, Terminal, a billing app, Safari, Firefox, a Virtual Windows XP environment, vim, Mail, iTunes, iChat and an assortment of taskbar apps all running full time) I find it gets quite annoyingly slugish. A reboot refreshes things. I have only 2GB of RAM so that is probably part of the problem as I end up with more paging out I probably should.
Stop Wasting Time on Voicemail
There's already a 'jobs' section.
I'd say you've gone wrong twice, here.

You have included problems (with unusual "solutions") with probabilities on hugely different magnitudes on the same list, and presumed that every problem is equally soluble.

Global warming has a reasonable probability distribution and a very feasible solution. Compare that to hostile aliens with the ability to travel from the far reaches of undetectability to Earth- the technology gulf would be impossible to overcome.
As a technical translator who does some patent and patent litigation work, I marvel every time I see this process in action. Sometimes the outright misconstrual is so blatant I have to jump up and tell somebody - I get why it's done, because you just throw anything at the claim that the panel might allow to stick, but it's jaw-dropping at times.

Fun stuff!
Is this true of evolutionary biologists? After all, they too have had to behave in a highly non-objective manner due to attacks from external enemies...
I understand what you're saying, and perhaps I came off as not wanting anything to do with my childrens education, which is definitely not what I meant.

I guess what I was getting at with the irritated part is that without my signature on the homework, it's deemed 'incorrect/incomplete'. This is teaching my children that they must rely on me for their own success. It's not that the school is not teaching responsibility (agreed that's my job), but that it's teaching dependence.

I also suspect that in many cases the work itself isn't looked at, a signature from me is looked for and that's it. If that's the case, it's a situation where the school is giving homework for the sake of giving homework, which I don't think is correct.
Chrome OS: Internet failing at PC  PC failing at Internet
It ain't me doing the hiring but just this morning I did a post of 5 jobs that are going in the Ruby and Rails worlds at http://www.rubyinside.com/5-top-ruby-and-rails-jobs-for-nove... - the jobs are in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Massachusetts mostly.
Okay, copy and paste from previous threads:

We're hiring here at Cloudera.

We're especially interested in web developers who have built and deployed large, extensible applications into production environments. An interest in data visualization and analysis doesn't hurt. We also have some deep distributed storage system hacking problems.

We have a strong preference for open source experience: our team (see http://cloudera.com/about) includes core contributors from the Berkeley DB, Ganglia, Lucene/Nutch, Hadoop, and MooTools projects.

We expect you to communicate ideas clearly, exhibit preternatural intellectual curiosity across a variety of domains, write quality code, and have a consistent focus on improving yourself and the team around you.

If you're interested, drop your CV and a cover letter to jobs@cloudera.com.
Announcing the Ning Appathon Winners
"If you have the luxury to be worrying about rising sea levels 100 years from now, you haven't seen someone trying to scrape together a buck in change to buy a cheeseburger at McDonalds recently."

OK, in a single sentence you've managed to:

-understate the extent of the climate risk

-play the "what about the poor working class?" card, which is the Rust Belt, recession-era sequel to "but what about the children?"

-intimate, without actually proving, that reducing climate emissions will hurt the poor

-systemically dismiss any and all long-term concerns, implying that there's no point tackling larger problems if someone, somewhere, has trouble affording a cheeseburger.

None of what you've said anywhere else in this thread seems to overcome the essential weaknesses of that argument.
Words of advice on 99designs:

* Don't expect HTML/CSS from them (you wouldn't want what you ended up with); just go with mockups and ask for color palettes and font/font size to go with them.

* Be very careful about any custom imagery/iconography you get. There are definitely plagiarists on the site; seen it happen to a friend.
SSD?
Macbook C2D 2GHz ca. december '06. Upgraded to 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD. Used mostly for Firefox, Virtualbox (OpenBSD and Ubuntu), iTunes. I only power it off when it locks up. That happens anywhere from every few days to every three weeks. Most lock-ups occur when I'm trying to tether via BlueTooth. Other than that, I just close it, wait for the LED on front to indicate that it's done storing RAM to the hard drive (it does that just in case the battery fails) and then I go.

Current uptime: 9 days, 8:23. About par for the course, I suppose.
I always have money and small projects for solid designers --- I mean, pretty much year round, budget getting progressively more stale --- and HN has never helped me find one. I'd love to know your secret.
Bridge Worldwide (based in Cincinnati, OH) is hiring

top 25 in best places to work for 4 years running

http://www.bridgeworldwide.com/digital-agency-jobs
From the article: "Something I’ve realised and have to admit is that while obviously the absolute pool of talent is smaller here in the UK/Europe than it is in the U.S. (and that cannot be disputed nor is it anything more than a function of population) another factor."

- Last time I looked there was 300M people in the US and 500M in the EU.
Outsource it. Odesk.com or Elance.com.
Can have a good unique design for about $250-500 or so.
Academia.edu is hiring. We're looking to hire a developer who is really passionate about building great products. They will be the 4th member of the team.

Our jobs page is here http://www.academia.edu/jobs and the job description is here http://www.academia.edu/jobs/software_engineer
Visualizing Commodore 64 memory in real-time...
I started seriously hacking with my first Commodore 64, so this video brought me some really huge grins. Really gorgeous app for visualization.
Union Square Ventures has a portfolio full of companies that are hiring. This query at Indeed.com will show openings across our entire portfolio. If you have any questions about any of these roles, I'm to either answer them or point you in the right direction: andrew@unionsquareventures.com

Jobs at portfolio cos: http://bit.ly/8ueLw8
The article writer claims:

"obviously the absolute pool of talent is smaller here in the UK/Europe than it is in the U.S. (and that cannot be disputed nor is it anything more than a function of population)"

It can be disputed. I am disputing it. The writer needs to check his population statistics.

Population of the US: 304 million

Population of the Euro area (therefore not including UK, Poland, and several other countries): 329 million

Source:
Eurostat
U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division
Interesting! I just posted a 5 line item along the lines of "hey if one of you designers doesn't want to go to sleep tonight and make some money drop me an email". Four guys responded, the first one to respond got the job and did it half decent too.

No secret to it.
Yeah, the same story with me. Though I don't own a macbook and not using Netbeans(I use GEdit for most web development stuff and Eclipse for C-programming), have 3GB of RAM, I still reboot it about every four days.
There has to be a way to get a command prompt. It might be commented out in this build, has anyone looked through the source?

http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os
Actually, I'd consider changing world opinion about the future of the US overnight quite an accomplishment all by itself; that is doing something.
I've only had to hire two people so far, but based on that limited experience, I'd definitely prefer someone with passion, interest, and willingness to learn, over someone with experience (and without the rest).

For one thing, even though everyone always goes around arguing that there's only one right way to do things, the fact is that any given organization has their own habits and methods and reasons, and very experienced people may be more reluctant to "fit in".
With the exception of Mr. Ptacek, a noticeable lack of openings in Chicago. Worries me about our local high-tech market.
(Speaking of, I think I'm speaking at CUSEC this year, and anyone who's got any advice for me, I would pretty much kill to get it.)

It's simple. The best security researchers are people who have (or at least could) ship software. There is a big swath of high-end work that you simply can't deliver if you can't code. That's where Matasano plays. I suppose you could be a very strong Payment Card Industry certification consultant just by getting very good with WebInspect, but to reverse an embedded kernel, isolate the code that handles a protocol you caught on the wire, and then code a fuzzer for that protocol, you need to be able to read code in a bunch of languages and write code very well in at least one of them.

As a consultancy, there are fringe benefits to our clients from us staffing projects with former devs:

* Devs know how to talk to other devs without sounding like morons or bureaucratic checklist-checkers, and sounding like that is a big problem in my industry. For instance, devs don't tell clients that single-line changes to shipping codebases are "trivial" and should only take minutes to roll out.

* Devs can provide remediation advice that is better than "switch to parameterized prepared statements" or "check input better".

But the reality is, we like working with devs because they are on the whole better at breaking software. They read faster, they don't balk at writing complicated test programs, and they know how pieces fit together --- and those junctions are where software usually fails worst.
I'm reposting this comment by "by" that got lost in the comments below. While all this seems pretty damming, it could be misinformation.

Examiner.com seems to be owned by Clarity Digital Group who are in turn owned by the Anschutz Company. The primary business of the Anschutz Company appears to be "Support Activities for Oil and Gas Operations".
http://dnb.powerprofiles.com/profile/874831126/ANSCHUTZ+COMP.... http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/sn.... http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/The-Anschut...
More sage advice. Thanks. This is really the first app I've ever built where I didn't have a design to work with from the beginning so I feel flustered on how to improve things. My design abilities are pretty much limited to making nice action alerts using Javascript and the color #ff9;

Thanks for the great responses.
So, do you want some extra traffic on that site ?
Are there any pure JS implementations of something like Sass/Compass?
In case it's not clear, Naughty Dog made Uncharted 2, which is GOTY.
What behavior are you referring to?

I've never heard any allegations of cooking data or data hiding by any respected evolutionary biologist.
I agree completely... The only thing is that since I've been using a colemak layout for some time now, when typing in qwerty on someone else computer I might look like a rather bad typist :-)

But yes, I think that someone who can't touch type can't concentrate as much on the code and is likely to make more typing mistake.
I understood that there is no Nobel prize for Mathematics, which computing is considered an extension of. Nobel deliberately committed Mathematics. Would it be wrong to add a Nobel award against Nobel's wishes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Lack_of_a_Nobel_Pri...
The best money I ever spent was on a touch typing course when I was a kid.
Classic touch typists are at increased risk for RSI. I'm fairly convinced of that fact. Even though I don't know if there's real research to back it up -- I'd rather not take the risk. For that reason alone, I do not wish to learn.

I never took a typing class, and I don't strictly touch-type according to the book (I might look down every six words or so), yet I still get about 55wpm. It's not 120, but then I don't have to wear wrist braces -- and I'm not in a race.
To be honest, I don't know if it's a bad thing to be running a laptop for months. I come from the background of using desktop PCs mostly and I must say, I had bad times with running them non-stop for months.
Yeah, but while I can justify the occasional surf to HN and some blog posts during downtime at work, it's hard to justify groveling over 130-ish MB of emails. I'm also ambivalent on the ethics of that; if bad stuff really is there then I guess it could be whistleblowing (there is a lot of public money at stake here), but if it all turns out to be squeaky clean it's not ethical to go pawing through these, just because they've gone public. Obviously, there's some chicken-and-egg problem here in the "so how do we tell if bad stuff was happening?"
Nice. Just thought I would point out that on Android, I can write applications in my language of choice, and I can use any construct I want. If I break something, I get to keep both pieces.

Why do you iPhone guys put up with arbitrary restrictions?
Android Scripting
Related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=950338
Time-lapse map of unemployment rates by U.S. county during recession
The scientists' job is specifically to do science and be impartial to the results.

How can that possibly be a controversial statement?
Here at Harvest, things are pretty exciting and we've got a few roles open in design, front-end dev, and sys admin: http://www.getharvest.com/jobs

We're based in New York City.
make sure it hibernates (stores ram to drive then powers off), or it uses significant battery while its in your bag.
My prediction is that this is the beginning of a new era for young hackers. I think we underestimate how powerful that "View Source" button in our browser is. All of us have learned a tremendous amount from each other by taking a peak at each other's browser-based code over the last decade. How many times a day do you look at source without even thinking?

The code to this game is very rough (which isn't necessarily bad, not every youngin' needs an abstracted OO-based framework), but give it a year or two and I think there will be a whole scene of people doing in-browser HTML5 games.

This is how we get a new generation interested in slinging code. I've been excitedly waiting for this moment. I created my first game like this when I was about that age and did it in Visual Basic 3!
Ask HN: Who is looking for jobs? (NYC edition)
A complement to the "Who is hiring?" thread: Anyone on HN looking for jobs? NYC edition. Post here with your skill set and what you are looking for and hopefully fellow HNers will help you out!

Fyi, GoodCrush is hiring (email josh@goodcrush.com)
Ten years! Amazing.
They document what you can do. If you are stepping outside those boundaries, why do you blame Apple for your grief and wasted time? You agreed not to do that when signing up in the first place.
Shoot. Thanks for the info. Anything you wish you'd done earlier if you only knew? (That is to say, things you could have done to forestall the rsi.)

EDIT: Thanks for the reply in your EDIT. I've got mild symptoms that mostly only appear when I use a regular mouse or if I use my keyboard anywhere else besides the optimal height. Will start the stretching/exercises now. Hope it's not too late.
Evolution-related political activism, for example. Hardly "objective."

Edit to add another pertinent example: Choosing research subjects specifically to debunk their critics.
Global animators use Facebook to create a groundbreaking new short
Hi Todd,

Mind sending me an email at i (dot) shamiq (at) gmail (dot) com? I've got a bit of info for you.
Especially considering that, in practice, oars move quite a lot through water. It’s fluid, after all; rowing is not like ski-poling yourself along.
There's http://github.com/clr/sassijs

But it's not feature complete yet.
Fascinating, thanks for sharing your experience. Pixel perfection certainly is a tempting goal, but I've spent too much time and other people's money trying to preserve the illusion that IE is anything less than garbage. I've had enough. Now I'm more focused on usability and I find it far more rewarding.
From the Startup Marketing Guru to Modular Innovation Wars
And the two "PC" laptops could be running Linux! Who cares!
This position at Counsyl looks pretty interesting for any bioinformatics hackers here (like rms).

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/sof/1474239327.html

Steven Pinker cares about ending preventable genetic disease. So does the chair of Biostatistics at Harvard's Dana Farber Center, the director of Yale Fertility Clinic, and the former chair of Ob/Gyn at UCLA/Harbor.

They've joined our board because we have developed a diagnostic-grade genetic test which every single American of reproductive age needs to take before having a child. Our test is already covered by insurance and offered at 80+ hospitals across the United States (see counsyl.com/map).

We're growing like crazy and looking for talented hackers with a passion for applied math and computational biology. Learn more about us at www.counsyl.com.
I know it was a joke, but electrons don't really move with alternating current.

Well, ok, but if you're not going to let me be funny then we better at least clarify for future readers: Electrons are actually moving quite rapidly regardless of the type of current, it's just that they get scattered around a bit and don't make much average progress (called drift). We get a lot of charge moving per time (current) because there are a tremendous number of them moving, not because their average speed is great.

In direct current, the drift velocity (or drift speed) stays in the same direction. In alternating current, it switches direction with the frequency of the applied voltage.

Typical values of drift speed are, if I recall correctly, of the order of millimeters/hour.

[edit-- thanks for the link]
Mozilla is hiring: http://www.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Jobs.aspx?c=qpX9Vfwa

Lots of awesome jobs with millions of users and you get to help make the internet a better place :)
My new startup (Plato’s Forms) is an early-stage angel funded startup based out of South Park (SoMa), San Francisco, focused on solving the problem of rapid proliferation of misinformation in online media.

And we're hiring Ruby on Rails Developers and Senior Developers

We’re going to disrupt (in a good way) the way the worlds of news media and PR communicate. And kick ass.

As we're so early days this is a great opportunity get in at the ground floor NOW. We are able to offer early employees a significant equity package (along with a salary) that could generate meaningful wealth if we collectively achieve our goals. To that end we're looking for a few talented developers who can embrace the excitement and challenges of creating a company from scratch and be willing to make the commitment necessary to succeed.

If that sounds of interesting please check out http://platosforms.com/jobs or send resume + github urls/etc to jobs@platosforms.com
Women In Tech
Speaking of, I think I'm speaking at CUSEC this year

I sure hope you're speaking given that they just today announced it on the website
http://2010.cusec.net/11-20/thomas-ptacek-security-researche... =)

All the advice I can give you is be honest and be yourself. CUSEC has always been very informal compared to most other conferences, more of a discussion between students and people they respect more than anything else.

John Kopanas, the founder of CUSEC, mentions it every year. He created CUSEC simply because he wanted to talk to and hear from people in the software engineering community that he respected. It's always been that every since.

EDIT: I tried to bet one of my friends that you would have the most technical talk at CUSEC. He wouldn't take the bet. If your talk is anything like this post http://chargen.matasano.com/chargen/2009/7/22/if-youre-typin... though I can't wait to hear it!
Class War:A spat among professional networks