mekarpeles

Howdy Maascamp, I hope you're having a nice week. Here's a post from earlier which explains the concept (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4710470)

My co-founder (sabalaba) and I have been working on Hackerlist (http://hackerlist.net) - a selective network of great freelance engineers. This seems like something many of you have been looking for as there are a shocking number of "freelance" posts (from both clients and programmers) on HN each month -- HN ids: 4596379, 4463692, 4323612, 4214767, 4184757, 4053078, 3914001 3783658, 2539892, etc. We admit, at this stage Hackerlist is an experiment. We're only asking for your time and patience -- we'll help you land contracts with top companies, handle the logistics, and you'll keep 100% of your earnings. No catch. We'll handle the vetting process, source contracts, and continuously work one-on-one with you to improve our tech until it serves your needs. Unfortunately, to preserve high quality, we're unable to accept more than 32 candidates and 6 of these spots are already filled. If you'd like to be considered for Hackerlist, email me at michael.karpeles@gmail.com or submit your github username on http://hackerlist.net Our long-term vision is to create a realtime system (think the intersection of mechanical turk, stackoverflow, oDesk) where trusted freelance engineers can immediately clone a git repo, start hacking on a technical problem, and upon completion, get paid what they're worth. P.S. Suggestions and feedback are appreciated -- we don't want to build something you don't need.

My co-founder (sabalaba) and I have been working on Hackerlist (http://hackerlist.net) - a selective network of great freelance engineers.

This seems like something many of you have been looking for as there are a shocking number of "freelance" posts (from both clients and programmers) on HN each month -- HN ids: 4596379, 4463692, 4323612, 4214767, 4184757, 4053078, 3914001 3783658, 2539892, etc.

We admit, at this stage Hackerlist is an experiment. We're only asking for your time and patience -- we'll help you land contracts with top companies, handle the logistics, and you'll keep 100% of your earnings. No catch. We'll handle the vetting process, source contracts, and continuously work one-on-one with you to improve our tech until it serves your needs. Unfortunately, to preserve high quality, we're unable to accept more than 32 candidates and 6 of these spots are already filled.

If you'd like to be considered for Hackerlist, email me at michael.karpeles@gmail.com or submit your github username on http://hackerlist.net

Our long-term vision is to create a realtime system (think the intersection of mechanical turk, stackoverflow, oDesk) where trusted freelance engineers can immediately clone a git repo, start hacking on a technical problem, and upon completion, get paid what they're worth.

P.S. Suggestions and feedback are appreciated -- we don't want to build something you don't need.

Nice work Mike!

I've been using lambda labs' face detect api for a few weeks now. The API calls essentially return the same structured JSON as face.com which has been a huge plus (considering I'm using this as a face.com replacement and I didn't have to change much code to get my old code up and running).

Stephen (sabalaba) was nice enough to give me a sneak-peak of some of his team's upcoming facial recognition features. I can't speak to how the underlying algos compare to face.com's but their APIs have been accurate enough for my needs and they have some really cool ideas in development.

Franzus, isn't this statement a little arbitrary? While I wouldn't claim to be a huge visual basic fan, I think (at least from my experience reading Jeff's book) there's a lot more one can get out of this resource than insight into programming languages.

For instance, Jeff has a great section on protecting users' data, writing test cases, and building community (like that of stackexchange).

I wouldn't be so arrogant as to presume I know what information you're interested in learning, I just wonder if not reading a resource by a smart programmer due to a programming language bias might actually work to your disadvantage?

Cheers either way!

Thanks for sharing this reference, lmm. Pretty solid guide. I'm pretty new to scala so I'm looking forward to reading through this.

This is great, I didn't know this existed. Thanks Hates_!

I'd also be very interested in hearing how different companies have come to develop their own style guides and what special cases necessitated said changes. If anyone has a style guide they've written and would like to share it, I'd love to take a look.

In case other Python enthusiasts are seeking additional resources (besides reading PEP 8) Bhadra and others on stack overflow suggest:

Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python (http://python.net/~goodger/projects/pycon/2007/idiomatic/)

Common mistakes and Warts (http://learnpython.pbwiki.com/PythonTricks)

How not to write Python code (http://eikke.com/how-not-to-write-python-code/)

Python gotcha (http://eikke.com/python-gotcha/)

Here's the stack overflow thread I was looking at: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/356161/python-coding-stan...

Have you guys seen Aaron Swartz' jottit (http://www.jottit.com)?

Same idea - all it takes is a text area to produce a version controlled, markdown website.

Alexis also had a great AMA on reddit a few days ago!

"IAmAlexis Ohanian, startup founder, internet activist, and cat owner - AMA"

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...

I appreciate and respect what your comment is trying to accomplish, in terms of associating ownership with the sum of its parts. I think this can also lead to an 'escapist' mentality though, where no one takes ownership for mistakes. Perhaps when many own one, many are to blame, instead of the one?

In general, I tend to think of startups as children, in or around their creative prime. They are still leaning, often naïve, and are expected to make a lot of mistakes (and also expected to handle them well). It seems reasonable to apologize often to potential customers because they are taking a risk and experimenting with you and your service/product. You're not so much apologizing as you are thanking them for helping you determine your target customer and their needs.

There are a lot of reasons why mistakes happen, but for many reasons the startup stage is a good time to make mistakes.Especially before reaching critical mass, at least from a business perspective, I believe it's easier to justify upsetting a few thousand people if it means obtaining learnings which can impact tens or hundreds of thousands of the _right_ customers (and help you serve them better) down the road. I think the smartest startups are able to minimize their mistakes by practicing due dilligence and learning from others who have made similar mistakes.

Large, public corporations, in many ways, face a different set of challenges.They are expected to understand their target customer, deliver product(s), maintain revenue growth, all in the face of one other interesting challenge. When you take your company public, a core group of your customers changes roles from consumer to investor. Different customers have different needs and expect different things. Some need fault tolerance, some crave features, some need speed. Because you don't necessarily choose your 'investors' at this stage, there's no saying your expectations will be aligned.

One challenge of running a company is, not all 'ethical' strategies (such as apologizing, if it can be considered as such) result in either maximizing revenue or maximizing customer happiness. When you have millions of customers, I imagine every important decision can be construed as a mistake by some subset of customers.

We live in a Peter Pan world where many startups wants to stay young forever and never sacrifice their ideals. The truth is, a company is about serving customers well, making a promise, and delivering on it. In order to do that, you need to grow with your customer base and respond to the challenges this entails.

Special thanks to zephyrp for editing.

I appreciate your perspective. I can only speak from personal experience. I am a PhD dropout passionate about entrepreneurship and computer science (I must admit I gravitate more to hacker culture than valley subculture).

I think graduate school is actually a pretty good selector since many people attend graduate school because they are passionate about academia. I think Stanford is a good example of a source where graduate students have gone on to lead successful ventures in the valley.

Sometimes it's not about opportunism. I live in a 4 bedroom hacker house with 11 entrepreneurs/programmers. It's cramped, we have bunk beds and sleeping bags. I've personally never been happier.

Despite many of us being (second time) founders of companies, contractors, or having jobs, we hack together several times a week, work 14+ hour days (including weekends), manage CodeSF events monthly, find time to attend hackathons together, and learn + share knowledge together at our local hackerspace, Noisebridge.

Yes, there are opportunists in the world who want to make a quick buck.

There are also a lot of people who are genuinely enthused (obsessed) with computer science and who devote their lives to knowledge... Who learn how to implement JK flip flops on a breadboard, build languages entirely from lambda calculus, and study convex optimization in their free time. More importantly, they do so because they love hacking, not because they love being a hacker (though I admit hacker culture and community is something I value).

At this stage in my life, getting married and having a family would rob me of my youth more-so than any weekend hackathon -- but I'm sure this mindset will change sooner or later.

There are plenty of great hacker meetups and hackathons (Super Happy Dev House SHDH, for instance) and SF hackerspaces (Noisebridge, Hacker Dojo) which provide non-opportunistic methods for furthering your hacker-foo.

Ryan, I am not sure how many hackathons you've attended or possibly even hosted at "Treehouse Mansion", but it seems like you, especially, would understand the importance of hacker meetups and how to host one effectively. It's also possible you hire great engineers and not hackers, which is fine too.

Here is the _real_ problem: More people want to be hackers than are hackers. Many people only want the stigmas that comes along with being a 'hacker', a term whose meaning has been diluted and whose definition perpetually misrepresented and obfuscated by media.

In San Francisco, for instance, the terms entrepreneur and hacker have been squished uncomfortably close for my liking, partly as a result of media like Hacker News (who I'd argue contributes to the conflation of the term 'hacker' by catering primarily to a general technical startup audience).

I enjoy hacker news, admire Paul Graham and the rest of YC, and believe that anyone can launch a successful startup, with enough hard work and dedication. One problem is, great hackers are not always great entrepreneurs. Great entrepreneurs understand where there's demand for a hack, where many hackers simply want to work on the most exciting and technically challenging problems. Sometimes these two overlap beautifully (I think Stripe is a good example).

The bottom line is, movies like, "Social Network", and media like TechCrunch have spotlighted mergers and acquisitions, high valuations, and a party life style as hacker/entrepreneurial culture. From my experience, this has impacted hackathons in that judges favor high impact web 2.0 viable products over "righteous hacks".

Thanks Jorge, I appreciate it :o)

Howdy hackers, thanks for the feedback! We worked hard with Jason to implement a custom pdf design for his book - the mobi and epub are incoming in the next couple of days. We'll be sure to post an update as soon as they're ready! Cheers and happy reading.

Is it intended behaviour for users to be able to access other people's files via /tmp/tmp, tmp/hacks, etc?

Congratulations guys, great work on Stripe and awesome + superb customer service

I won't see this sports footage this Thanksgiving because I will be programming and reading the hacker news articles related to hacking.

You should checkout Noisebridge and ask over their mailing list! I'm sure someone would be happy to put you up for a few nights and show you around.

Noisebridge is around 17 1/2 and Mission. More info on their website. I'd offer but our hacker house is currently overpacked as it is. If you have any questions, feel free to email me mek@babolabs.com

Thanks for the template Greg,

I've written the address a similar please. Good work!

We'll miss you, Ilya. Thanks for your guidance and friendship.

My vote goes for, "The Best Production Stack for your Startup" which would include red flags on tools to avoid/that you must use, comments on redundancy, hosting services, web servers, language comparisons, and some code to get you started.

Looks like Dan Cote https://github.com/terminationshok/Discern-for-Ubuntu-based-... forked and cleaned up the repository for a cleaner install. Isis gave a great lightning talk at Noisebridge hacker space (during Hack Meetup 2011) on the topic.

Code hero is pretty amazing (primerlabs.com). Alex has managed to leverage Unity to create a 3d game to teach programming.

I can understand your confusion if you were expecting an article which discussed the fundamentals of RESTful interfaces and how it pertains to server client relationships. The intention of the article wasn't as much to introduce the concept of representational state transfer as much as it was, 'how can one use a RESTful API', hence the title, "Using RESTful APIs". I can appreciate that the introduction lacked adequate explanation of REST, itself -- and it's more than reasonable to expect an article on RESTful APIs to cover, well, RESTful APIs.

That said, I am thankful for your constructive criticisms and will revise my post so that its content is more satisfactory.

Pak, thank you for the w3 resource. As it says in the reference, it does seem that 256 was the limit for prior implementations; however, it seems my understanding was indeed based on outdated material. In response to your other criticism, which example is never shown so I may add it?

If you have suggestions on topics I should include or other resources I should review before making changes, suggestions would be appreciated.

Cheers

Thanks so much for your feedback SupremumLimit! We're honoured you took the time to test out our platform. Currently, the system supports payment through Paypal (including credit card payments). We're working to expand this to offer more payment options.

Our main feature is being an all inclusive, free, one stop solution for selling and buying digital goods. We have several features in development which target several of your criticisms.

1. Our affiliate system enables our registered users to generate unique affiliate links for any product in our marketplace. If someone makes a purchase through this link, they will receive a fraction of the purchase price. Stephen and I have some elegant solutions in progress to make our affiliate system easier and more powerful to use.

2. I am glad that you shared your experience with our demo. Currently, the file upload for our demo is intentionally fake and does not perform an actual upload (to protect the privacy of our demo-ers). We'll change this immediately to make it more apparent to the user.

3. In the past few days we've done a lot to make Babolog more usable. We have a 'help page' which addresses frequently asked questions, an updates page, and we're redesigning our user interface.

I don't want to spoil our features-in progress but I will say we anticipate releasing version 2.0 of our beta system in the next week. This release will include a revamp of the marketplace and address much of the feedback we've received in past 13 days since we launched into beta.

Thank you again for your wonderful criticisms. We can't wait to show you our improvements!

The text on the home page is a bit difficult to read. I'd suggest a color with more contrast.

"Oh no, a Facebook app?!

    * We won't spam your wall (unless you ask)
    * Your profile starts out hidden"

That's great news! Hopefully you found the demo fairly intuitive. We're constantly working on making the interface easier to use.

Right now we're definitely in a demo / beta stage where we intend to develop features on a request basis from our users. However, we agree with you entirely that some core features and a redesign is required to really make the steps more clear. I look forward to hearing more of your feedback in the future! Please stay in touch Grepsy and thank you for your interest! :o)