skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After reading the stack overflow discussion, it's clear there are some reasonable arguments, particularly that it is not good for interoperating with other languages on the CLR.

However, it also appears that most people on that discussion would disagree with my point #2 (code using this becomes more readable). That's probably where the interesting things come in to play.

For me, I don't care about abuse of syntax, etc. as long as code does what a casual observer would guess it does. Perhaps I'm spoiled by working somewhere where people actually write readable code, and if I worked somewhere else, I would want to forbid any syntax magic whatsoever, but more likely I would just be updating my resume :)
Ask HN: Looking for work?
Hi. I'm looking for people to developers/designers to join my next startup fashion.ad. We're basically combining many revenue streams into one ad stream for fashion/personal bloggers.

Interested can mail me at hajrice@gmail.com
Git + github = Open source game changer
SCALE 8x Call for Papers Closes in December
SCALE, the Southern California Linux Expo, has a call for papers open for their Feb 2010 conference. The all for papers will close on December 15, 2010. If you are working on an interesting open-source project please consider submitting a proposal.
True Religion Jeans
Jeans SuperStore:True Religion brand Jeans,Evisu Jeans,rock & republic jeans,Artful Dodger Jeans,Affliction Jeans,Ed Hardy Jeans,Red Monkey Jeans,Bape Jeans,BBC Jeans,true religion jeans on sale,discount true religion jeans
To me the biggest roadblock to widespread adoption is the fact that many small merchants want cash & not plastic, not because a card-reading device is expensive, or complicated, or what, but because cash is off the books.
Consider talking to marketing professors for recommendations. I've found that professors in general are pretty receptive to giving free advice and help though the obvious caveat is that book smart doesn't always translate (try meeting with them during office hours - they may even provide you with some free advice).

If you're really lucky you'll find a prof who is willing to use you as an example for a case/class in which case you'd have exposure to a number of business students who might end up being interested in working with you after.

I would also clearly define whether you're looking for someone who is strong at sales vs marketing as the skill sets are different. You may find better and more driven candidates in sales at a technical college.
Classified sites gain a regional dominance. Craigslist in canada for example, is only really dominant in vancouver, one of their biggest foreign markets. Kijiji is dominant in other towns.
Courtney Love does the math
They've grown beyond their intended purpose
Detroit Cremation Services
Detroit Cremation Services is a full service funeral home offering cremation, earth burial, mausoleum entombment and over all Funeral Arrangements.
Hype!
Ok, well then it's reasonable.
Seems to be down sporadically. Here's a mirror.

http://www.toomuchjoy.com.nyud.net/?p=1397
Here is Steve Albini's famous article on the generalized situation between labels and bands:

http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
Maybe just show the best deals, no matter if they're close to me or not ? :)
Mr. Simpson, I didn't get rich writing a lot of checks.
What I don't understand about investing in criminal activities is what's stopping them from taking the money and running. It seems to me that once you've done one job, you'll have plenty of money to continue your activities. Is it that other pirates will come after you, or is there just an insane amount of overhead that I don't see?
Suck the RSS to a VPS and read it via Pipes through that.
Short answer, yes.

Slightly longer answer, it depends.

What you're looking for can basically be done by any "good" programmer. Most are actually jack-of-all-trades kind of guys. The things they don't know, they learn. The things they can't learn well enough, they pay someone else to do it.

If you can hire someone, then that's great. If not, I would look into freelancers.

Freelancers are not born equal. Use your gut instinct, and don't bother trying to judge him/her on the technical skills.

I used to do this for a living(programming and consulting), and I'd always explain to my customers that I am not a server administrator, for example, but I'd do it to help them out if they can't find anybody else. And I think of this as just being helpful. I try to make sure that they understand the risks. Most people will react favourably to this.

I'll keep this short. If you'd like any more help, I'll be happy to answer a fellow HN'er questions via email.
"...and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone."

Hopefully they'll keep the more granular privacy settings, e.g., "Allow everyone except these people", e.g., "View your profile as Person X".
Economics is not physics, and quality of life is not a zero sum game.
Why don’t more producers sell on-line?
Report a Deceased Person's Profile on Facebook
Loan sharks exist and make money too. "It works."
Read further:

That’s how much they spent on us, and we don’t see any royalty checks until it’s paid back, but it doesn’t get paid back out of the full price of every album sold. It gets paid back out of the band’s share of every album sold, which is roughly 10% of the retail price. So, using round numbers to make the math as easy as possible to understand, let’s say Warner Bros. spent something like $450,000 total on TMJ. If Warner sold 15,000 copies of each of the three TMJ records they released at a wholesale price of $10 each, they would have earned back the $450,000. But if those records were retailing for $15, TMJ would have only paid back $67,500, and our statement would show an unrecouped balance of $382,500.

Just because the artist is unrecouped doesn't mean the record company isn't making money.
It's entirely possible that all of the numbers are being moved around by hand through various large Excel spreadsheets rather than in an actual accounting system. You might think this unlikely for a large corporation, but it happens. In this case, shuffling around the numbers for the 80% would be extra time and money.

edit: Maybe I should mention that I'm not defending them, just pointing out that there could be a plausible explanation. In this case, the plausible explanation is that their accounting people are idiots (they probably think that their system is more reliable because an accountant is looking at all of the numbers instead of some automated process, not taking into account that MS Excel isn't exactly bullet-proof software).
I always thought Mario was a bad copy of Giana Sisters. Seems like Giana Sisters was a clone with minor improvements...
appeal to authority.
I think that men view most eligible women as potential dating material. If women find that being viewed as dating material at tech events is keeping theｍ from being involved in tech, they must be avoiding much of the other parts of society where they are exposed to men of breeding age.
Yes, I've been very motivated by balsamiq - but another big reason is because we talk about it weekly on our tech podcast http://techzinglive.com - the main reason is because this is exactly the kind of data I wish I had been able to see when starting my earlier one man businesses
That's what's great about the internet. Fuck the distributors.

Want to be a journalist? Start a blog or a site.

Sell shit nationwide? Make a website, ebay, Amazon, etc.

Be famous across the world? Youtube.

Distribute an indie movie? Video sites and online stores.

The important feature of the internet here is that it allows anyone to be a distributor. Survival of the fittest can work more ideally. No more people/companies being there simply because they were there first.
ClimateGate - Crime of the Century ?
You should post some contact info and Im sure you'll get some good response.
I want to add something to this discussion. Something I certainly did not expect would happen. Since I released the revenue figures publicly I have had three angels contact me saying "what are your plans, are you looking for any investment". Imagine that! Angels perusing me!!

As I say it wasn't intended - but it's a nice side note.
How to achieve greater productivity of teams
I'm just looking at the numbers made available under this "full disclosure" thing, which basically just shows November signups, and if you just look at that you can def see the decline.
Good attention to class names, but terrible use of markup. He should be using paragraphs instead of divs.
Edit: Span for the name.
The great iPhone death watch
Interesting article, but if you were after just the details on how fucked over artists are, check out the Steve Albini article listed below.
Terrible. The assumption that powerpoint or any other slideware is an effective way of transmitting information is flawed. See Edward Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" for a good analysis of the problems this brings (http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint ).
> That's what's great about the internet. Fuck the distributors.

> ebay, Amazon, etc.

> Youtube.

> Video sites and online stores.

Unless you are selling directly from your site there is still a middle-man/distributor. As a content-creator, 'distributors' are a middle-man between you and the retailers, but the retailers are middle-men between the distributors and the end-user/customer.

The internet is really for reducing costs, but doing something like selling streaming HD video (or just HD video downloads) is not something you can economically accomplish on your own with just a hosting service. You need a framework (iTunes, YouTube, etc) and they become the new distributor. They may be a better distributor (or just more 'barebones'), but they are still a distributor.
Thank you for this. I've a friend who passed away earlier this year and had been wondering if something like this existed.
Getting from the first line of code to $1000 revenue is the hardest part of ANY business. Think about it. Google. Facebook. Twitter.

TweetMiner did that in 98 days. That's VERY rare for a web startup, especially for a part time project in a space that everyone says is not monetizeable.

Sometimes it's not about the amount of revenue - it's more about what the business proves. After that it's just a question of scaling and not f*ing up...
31 Awesome Examples of Typography Art for Inspiration
In this post I'm presenting some beautiful pieces of Typography Art which I have collected from across the web. These all Typography Arts are for inspiration purpose only to help creative designers.
The charts in the demo section look uglier than Excel charts.
The latter was just from my framework of choice until now, Tornado.
Oops! There's a slight bug in the customers by plan stats code. The real number of customers is 51 (2.8%) -- listed on the customers line -- (bug fixed now)
"No more people/companies being there simply because they were there first."

Except for those there first with huge network effects...
Flot is capable of this: http://people.iola.dk/olau/flot/examples/dual-axis.html
FYI - First sale was on Oct 17th which probably accounts for the variance :)
I guess if you have no experience running a large site it might seem non-obvious, but this is not exactly rocket science. Every c10k article will talk about using a reverse proxy and why nginx is the best choice out there right now (varnish can sometimes deliver better throughput but it is finicky and for some reason certain configs will just cause it to explode, it also does not support some compression schemes that you might want to use.) Five years ago a scheme like this would have seemed obscure and a cool discovery, now it is just how things are done.

I am not sure when you last got your hands dirty at the pointy-end of the operations stick, but this is up there with tuning tcp buffers and keeping static content on another server in terms of being par for the course.

A more interesting explanation would have described some of the other options available and how and why you might choose one over the other, or maybe a useful trick or two: for example, if you need to track sessions by IP address using this basic setup you will need to drop the originating ip address into the header as it passes through nginx and then use mod_rpaf on the back-end apache server to reinject it so that your apache code does not even know that a reverse proxy is fronting its requests. I guess something a bit beyond "I used nginx to do what everyone claims it is good for and damn if it didn't work as advertised" would have been nice.
http://code.google.com/apis/chart/types.html#maps
How are these people a threat to Craigslist business? The more people use its data, the more valuable it becomes to post to Craigslist, and the more market share Craigslist gains. Craigslist does not lose a dime because of third-party mash-up sites.
They're a monopolist with a bad product, like Microsoft, but they have a crunchy image so bay area hackers love them, despite the fact that they are freezing a whole sector of business in the dark ages (again, like Microsoft).

Everything you wrote could have been used as a defense of Windows 98, or IE 6. You may be defending a shitty user experience with a monopolist position, but we love you Craig because at least you hate capitalism.
>Unless you are selling directly from your site there is still a middle-man/distributor
Right. And I said:

>The important feature of the internet here is that it allows anyone to be a distributor.

Anyone can be the distributor, so competition is fiercer. Monopolies/oligopolies are harder to maintain. Competition can be more ideal.

> doing something like selling streaming HD video (or just HD video downloads) is not something you can economically accomplish on your own with just a hosting service.

But more companies can jump into the space, even if one cannot do it individually. The barrier to entry to a lot of industries is reduced because of the internet.

My point was not that it makes everything accomplishable by one person, my point was that the internet lowers the barriers to entry and encourages more ideal capitalism.

> ...they are still a distributor.

Yes, and if you self-distribute, you become the distributor. There will be a distributor. My "fuck the distributors" statement was directed at the current distributors. It was a statement directed at all the inefficiencies of their current systems.

Distributors will always be there. Of course. But the internet will allow more distributors, because the internet gives all access to the world.
I've not read the essay (and, with no obvious way to purchase any version other than dead-tree, I likely will not), but the blurb concludes:

"What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?"

This seems to imply that the opposite assumption you seem to be making -- slides can never effectively transmit information -- is also flawed.
My point was that companies will have to be more legitimate. It will be harder to maintain their dominance by using their stature. Companies will need to stand more on their merit. I did not mean to imply that companies won't be able to use their stature to gain influence though.
Megan McArdle: Climategate - The Mystery of the Missing Data
Swiping is not obsolete. I don't know why you're trying to compare a virtual retailer like Amazon to shops that have an actual physical presence. The way they process payments is entirely different.

Not everyone has a smartphone. Why would Starbucks want to deal with accepting payments via mobile-geolocation and plastic for everyone else? It would just confuse the cashier. Swiping is uniform and only takes a few seconds.

Square fills the mobile payments processing niche where you need to be able to accept plastic when you're not in front of a register. Plumbers, repairmen of all sorts, traveling salesmen, people selling items at fairs/festivals, etc. These people aren't currently able to accept credit cards with real-time processing. That's the problem Square solves.
Computer science is as much about analyzing the properties of computation as it is about writing programs. Graph theory, computational complexity, data structures and algorithm design and analysis, etc. are all computer science topics.

Implementing solutions in code is programming.
I think this technology is awesome and has a lot of potential, but I don't know if it is easily defensible against the giants like motorola and verifone.

How easily can these companies come up with software and a headphone jack that does the same thing? Most importantly they got a huge distribution channel with all those nokia phone and point of payment device users currently using their existing product.

So if these companies do come out with a product that copies square they can quickly roll it out faster to a market they already have an establish presence in.

This device has huge potential in emerging markets FYI.

Also, in the end I think one of larger companies will buy Square out after a couple of years.
@jason_tko ... ya.. it is CRITICAL that we stick and learn with the Best... and compete.
This headline get first prize for CTR!
This is why artists don't care if you pirate their music. Their music was already stolen by the record company.

Albums basically amount to free advertising for the band.
http://housingmaps.com has been up for the last, what, three years? I guess some mashups are ok.
I don't think it is more than twitter. Recently the Twitter COO indicated twitter made more than $4 million from the Google and Microsoft deals.
Did you work alone?
So, the labels charge the bands for everything they do for them? So why do they then also take 90% of the income?

Because it means more money in their pockets, duh. Accounting in the entertainment industry is as crooked as it gets.
I'm curious as to how Square will handle chargebacks and disputes. Also, any details on their fee structure?
I bet the hidden math is in the accounting fees, administrative fees of dealing with the few dollars here and there.
What a perfect thing to read while on a break from work!
Training For IT
Tech Training Online is pleased to offer you a flexible, time-friendly, and cost-effective way to keep your technical skills up to date and ahead of the curve - helping you to improve your effectiveness, income, and employability options.
Thank you for that. She made far more coherent and intelligent points than what I would have previously given her credit for. Written in 2000, I wonder if we've made any progress for her:

"If you're going to start a company that deals with musicians, please do it because you like music. Offer some control and equity to the artists and try to give us some creative guidance. If music and art and passion are important to you, there are hundreds of artists who are ready to rewrite the rules."
Wordsworth.com, which started two years before Amazon
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000044.html
As well as production of valued concrete.
Should I be worried about piracy?
Thanks for the insights. Much appreciated.
Thankgiving.
I think the charts in the demo section look good, save for the unfortunate choices of bland yet mismatched colors (http://www.highcharts.com/demo/?example=area-stacked-percent...).

I would prefer bland but matched colors.
Then you will absolutely love Haskell's and Ocaml's standard libraries (if you can spare some CPU cycles). Paranoid static typing with easy genericness (more flexible than C++ templates), and they don't have the one show stopping flaw C++'s <algorithm> still have sometimes: lack of locality. Until C++ has closures, a loop will often look like this:

body(…){ code_of_body; }
fun(…)
{
// (Big) blob of code
std::loop(begin, end, body)
…
}

I have done it. Lack of locality kills readability, so I still use loops even when std::accumulate or std::foreach would do.
Yeah, other than google maps :)

Specifically: I want a JS map library that can read SVG maps and render in a canvas. I think I'm gonna have to build it myself.
Yep. It's pretty incredible.

Good thing startup founders are usually a little bit better at math. Seems like it'd be about like this:

"Advance" your startup $1M (really, advanced to yourself,
since you're hanging onto the money)

Sell the startup dubious services at outrageous prices,
force them to make your dumb cousin an SVP

"Pay back" the loan with %10 of the *profits*

When the profits top $10M, the founders *start* seeing
10% of what comes in (after expenses, of course)

I'm in the wrong line of work.

edit: As I read this, I'm realizing that there probably are termsheets out there that aren't far off from this.
Piracy is Progressive Taxation (Tim O'Reilly, 2002)
> They want to force users to register before viewing any articles, but they also want Google to index these same articles (and a forced registration would prevent that). Google wants the same thing (to index the pages), but seeks to avoid special exceptions in its algorithm (e.g., maintaining a whitelist of sites who are allowed to cloak).

Even if the cloaked-paywall-articles get indexed, couldn't that same fact - that they are behind a paywall and not easily accessible - be interpreted that they offer lower quality search results and thus should be listed further down the organic search result list?
In one page http://www.newsweek.com/id/224694/output/print
Most programming languages get namespaces wrong
Groupon Gets A Hefty $30 Million From Accel For Local Offers Service
Viagra Soft Tabs
Discreet Pharmacist offers discount online Soft Tabs, Generic Viagra Soft Tabs and cheap Viagra Soft Tabs 100 mg with No Prescription, Free Shipping and 100% Satisfaction.
Leadership Yoga: Innovation Advantages from Seeing Disadvantage
Health and Fitness Make the Difference Between Living Well and Living
What is your job/hobby's do-all "duct-tape equivalent"?
Getting the Best Out Of Online Dating Sites
Online dating sites need no introduction today; every single that wants to find a suitable dating partner would have at least thought of using a dating site even if they have not actually used a dating site. Even today, when online dating websites are popular, many people are hesitant to make use of this facility because of the wrong notions they have.Many people think that online dating is only for young people and for good-looking attractive men and women.
What are you talking about? Helping men improve is a great thing. I complimented feminism and took a position claiming it's had significant success. It didn't have the results it expected, but that doesn't make them less good.
As a rubyist who also programs in c#, i'd say that this is pretty gross. Internal DSLs are part of the ruby culture. In c#, the ability to look at code and understand its execution and its intent is the objective. With syntax manipulation like this, the underpinnings of the language that are normally hidden now must be considered... it is out of character.
I know a lot of blog posts that read like this, but they usually don't get modded up because there is apparently nothing exciting about learning something. Much better if you start some sort of flamewar...

I have personally observed that "Why I hate xxx" often gets many more views than "Why I like yyy". (They both attract the same amount of hate, however. When I say "I hate Java", I get comments like "DIE IN A FIRE RTARD". When I say "I like Perl", I am told that I am "the dumbest person alive".)
Monthly Roundup & Traffic Report November 2009
Hi jv2222, two questions if you don't mind me asking

a) Did you start selling paid accounts from day 1. Or was there a paid beta period? How many of your paid beta users converted?

b) For payments I see you use PayPal. Can you point to some resources to get the subscription based system with PayPal up and running?