skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The big cost here is likely to be labor. When you give away free sodas you have to pay someone to keep sodas in stock. When you sell sodas you can even sell a contract to a 3rd party to restock the machines. This is why free sodas are fairly rare, because soda machines are a money maker for the company and involve fewer employees on the balance sheet, whereas free sodas rack up all of the costs of an employee (salary, taxes, benefits, etc.)

On the whole it's probably a silly tradeoff, since the benefits to employee retention of free sodas almost certainly far outweigh the comparatively minor costs, but if you just look at the balance sheet it can be awfully tempting to get rid of.
Is this a contradiction on Wolfram Alpha?
Consider the two following inputs to Wolfram Alpha:

10(0/0)

and:

x(y/y) where x=10,y=0

The result of the first, as expected, is indeterminate:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10(0/0)

But the second is 10:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x(y/y)+where+x+%3D+10,+y+%3D+0

Is this a bug?
If you worked managing a supermarket you would call them City17_shop5_aisle4_refridgerator2.

> The problem is that it simplifies things from an inventory perspective, not from a "I'm trying to visualize this so that it all works" perspective.

That depends - I'd much rather a firewall rule that told me that Glasgow Database Server 2 can talk to London Mail Server 3 for SMTP traffic than one that told me MissPiggy can talk to Kermit for χάρτης traffic.

Especially when it's not a system I deal with every day and I haven't cached the name/function mappings in my head.

On the other hand, the UK postal system works well with a mixture of numeric sequences (house and flat numbers), cutesy names (road names, city names) and arbitrary government assigned gibberish (Post Codes).
I wonder how much of this has to do with the financial collapse. There is no denying that the financial firms sucked up a ton of great talent during their boom years. Are those people (and the potentials) now turning to startups now that the finance firms are taking a breather with their high-salary and mind-numbing jobs?
Fantastic. What a quality-link-dense article.
8.6e12J is indeed comparable to 1.17e11J.

Thanks. I remembered that from a Robert Zubrin book.
It was never clear how more accounting and reporting regulations were supposed to squelch fraud.

Really? That one seems pretty obvious to me. Standardized accounting practices and more transparency via required reporting makes fraud harder to commit and easier to detect. The reductio ad absurdam almost writes itself.
Where Freedom includes the right to 'unlimited unpaid vacation time'. Sounds a lot like some sales jobs actually.
As of 6:45UK time on Sat BBC News has picked up this story. Interesting how mainstream this is.
I remember reading that StackOverflow was built on the .NET platform.

If that is correct, it is interesting that Google would not just give up on Google groups, but move to a solution that is built on top of Microsoft's platform
Is it really irrationality? If you are taking away a benefit, that is like a salary cut on something you were getting tax free.

The reality is that it is revealing of a CFO attitude, let's take away as much as we can from the employees to help the bottom line. CFO's should first focus on growing revenue, not cutting benefits.
I think the financial collapse has a role in what's happening in New York City. You're seeing a huge shift from people "thinking" about starting something to "doing" it. When you see most of your friends getting laid off from jobs, you realize nothing is guaranteed, so you might as well swing for the fences. This has a ripple effect through the community.
I find this really amusing and nostalgic because our original implementation of Objective-J was very similar to this while in college, you can see what one of the iterations looked like in my "Road to Cappuccino" Ajax Experience presentation: http://280slides.com/Viewer/?user=56&name=Ajax%20Experie...

Ultimately we decided to drop the Java-like syntax in favor of the Objective-C style syntax because we wanted the language to be both a strict superset of JavaScript and future-proof (in other words, if the class keyword or any other keyword later entered the JavaScript language, for our superset to continue working). That presentation has some more info on that, as does my abstractions post: http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2008/12/08/on-leaky-abstractio...

I think anyone who works on JS on large systems ultimately reaches these conclusions. That's why so many JS frameworks invent some sort of class model. I hope you find those links useful in your own endeavors. I would recommend not bothering with ECMA and just releasing something for people to play with today. You will get more actual useful feedback in one week than anything some committee that never actually tries using it will tell you.
Because the managers all learned in MBA school that results are measurable,
Removing sodas saves a measurable few $K/year, and the only downside is the unmeasurable loss of all your good people.
It's the same with banning personal web use, flexi-time etc - the downside isn't measured, therefore there is no downside.
“I’m not a businessman
I’m a business, man
Let me handle my business, damn”

That has to be one of the best lines of all-time from Jay-Z. Great post. Thanks for sharing.
You put x(y/y) so if y is ever 0, it should be indeterminate, I believe. Both equations appear to equal the same thing which is indeterminate.
Regulatory or consumer pressure. The desire to not have the appearance of anti-competitive actions.
I think Google (and companies like Google) has learned this lesson well.

As an organization, it appears to be focusing on keeping as flat of an organization as possible. In addition they just simply cut to the chase, and hire middle-managers purely to act as liaisons rather than drivers, and save themselves the couple years of failure they are bound to endure while a new division gets organized "properly" (as in the old way).

This has bad sides too, I've heard from numerous people that, when compared to other organizations, most of the engineers in Google have a very hard time understanding what their managers actually do. Additionally, it also can prevent unified visions from flowing down from the top in as structured a process as you might see in a traditional organization.

But we now have more than a decade to observe companies like Google applying this sort of obvious management philosophy and now have lots of lessons learned we can apply going forward.

I don't know enough about the internal organizational structure at Apple and Oracle, but I'd wager they are much more like the traditional management model than Google's semi-flat structure. Apple in particular is likely a very hierarchical organization (just a guess) due to the necessity in carrying out Jobs' vision.
So for you there is a different breaking point.

Like when you have to clock in and out at lunch time, but work unpaid overtime and weekends.

Or when you lose admin rights on your own PC

Or you have to start wearing a tie.

For me it was when we had to start signing in and out with a time. Supposedly this was for fire safety, but never seemed to apply to VPs.

We worked on banking systems and often had to work all nighters while the bank was offline. The time tracking system couldn't cope with the concept of being on shift for >24hours - the HR people treated us like it was our fault. Their solution was that we all went out at 23:59 and signed back in at 00:01 and that would solve the problem WE had created.
The pain of doing something new: "Me: Never mind, I guess I have to make it first."
The 2010 Tech IPOs would (provided they occur, which isn't quite a given) all be years in the making and coming from profitable companies with hundreds of millions in revenue. That's quite a change from the nineties tech boom.
Ford to open Sync API for in-car computers
The only course my high school offered was "web design" and "programming". Both classes were jokes, the teachers were those who were "familiar" with the subjects, which meant that they may have designed their own myspace page or read a book on visual basic. As the commenter below me said, these classes were nothing more than study halls. In some situations I was so far ahead of the class that I was doing the teaching or expanding on the projects with so many design changes/features that the teacher had to give me an A because they could not understand what I did.
I have no idea what any of that means :)
Well, Google isn't hosting SO inhouse. They're just using the main website for support. Also, this isn't all of Google, it's the Android team, which mainly develops using Sun's technology :)
Racial Bias Broadcast from TV Character to Viewer
> Oil is a transportation fuel, we can find away around that, maybe expensive, but its solvable.

Wouldn't raising transportation costs "raise the cost of everything" too?
Aliens more likely to live on moons than planets
Can we please lay off the social-networking-as-grief-counseling thing?
Yeah, thats what I'm thinking too. I think its so great, society as a whole will fare better with these people swinging for the fences, instead of being in a soulless job.
A minor flaw in the metaphor: Middle Earth doesn't have to compete with whatever the elves create in Valinor. Talented employees leaving is both a loss for the company and a gain for competitors.
Is it Ballmer's fault?
Why would it matter what stack the platform is using?

(Which reminds me, does Hotmail still run on Solaris?)
Links to those two queries:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10(0/0)

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x(y/y)+where+x+%3D+10,+...
I bet I could save many times more than 10,000 a year by eliminating a CFO.
What a circle jerk.
I think the bottom one would look much better on a dead-tree letterhead, and this is what makes it look professional even if you aren't ever going to do this.
Nintendo DS already has games like this. They already use the same principles for motivation.

http://amzn.com/B001BZ691C
http://amzn.com/B000SQ5LOG
Its really not that hard to grow location based apps
Follow what businesses are doing with facebook
that was me. thanks :)
Still doesn't handle multiple monitors as elegantly as Win7 though, unfortunately. The Win7 windows management is so intuitive, most of the features I discovered accidentally, as I went about the process of manually doing what windows should have done for ages.
AOSP = Android Open Source Project. He's suggesting that forceclose is more to help people modify the Android operating system than to help people write Android applications.
Top VC Recipients of 2009
My wife, who has graduate degrees in Mathematics and Creative Writing, wrote for Demand Media while we were in a transition period between traditional employment and passive income. She knocked out advanced math articles 2, sometimes 3 per hour, making around $300 a day, which roughly works out to $72,000 a year.

That's twice the money she could've made as a full time academic starting out, for example.

It's not all roses, but for someone who can write and needs to make ends meet for a while, it's a hell of an opportunity to make a bunch of money pretty much on your own terms. It beats the hell out of flipping burgers.
User interfaces should be inaccessible to the colorblind?
Could the problem possibly be solved in a different way, for example a different kind of market or with different transactions (or by publishing information differently)? I have a feeling that the existing stock exchanges deliberately leave the system as it is, because they earn money from the high frequency traders.

As an example for what I mean: if there was only one stock exchange, there would be no arbitrage between different stock exchanges. Or maybe transactions could come with a delay. Or buyers and sellers could be more open about their prices. Essentially, what would the market look like if the high frequency traders were 100% efficient - couldn't it be constructed to be like that without the high frequency trader's involvement?

The one example where the high frequency traders can determine the exact price by ordering and canceling within milliseconds certainly does not sound very fair.
This is quite possibly the best thing I have done to my mac.

Set it up like this and you will never forget the configuration:

http://zacharypinter.com/2009/06/15/keyboard-driven-window-m...

The only thing I changed is that I have the center window mapped to cmd+opt+ctrl+k. This is so you can quickly do a left side keyboard command and then center the narrower window. I do this because sometimes windows look funny open all the way on a wide screen monitor and you only want one window open in the think app.
was going to crack that three spelling/grammatical mistakes/omissions in five words is pretty impressive :)
What's interesting is that despite the consevatism, the space shuttle program, I think, has the worst mission success record. They've had what--14 deaths in the past 20 years?

From what I learned on my recent trip to Kennedy Space Center, the Space shuttle program is actually incredibly risky compared to other and past rocket designs. It's got solid rocket boosters that once lit, cannot be turned off. It's got no abort sequence until those SRBs are finished firing. Hell, the rocket itself is asymmetrical and rocks back and forth before liftoff.

Contrast all this with the Soyuz and our very own Saturn V designs. Saturn V I believe had 100% mission success during all our trips to the moon. It's liquid engines could be shutoff almost instantaneously during an abort sequence AND it had a blasting cap on top that would fire if the crew needed to abort during launch. Oh and the rocket did all this while being something like 95% efficient.

Why NASA abandoned this program is beyond me.
FYI to other readers, Cinch won't trigger itself if you drag a window to the "seam" between monitors on your desktop if you're using multi-monitors. It only appears to trigger if you drag to an edge on your desktop.

But pxlpshr's fix above appears to work fine. :)
Given that you've anonymized the company, can you share the theme from which the 'whimsical' names were drawn?

(I'm curious as to what seemed so out-of-place in a serious action report. Mythological gods seem like they'd be OK... but maybe Seven Dwarves or Deadly Sins or Slang Drug Terms would be embarrassing?)
I agree that 8.6e12J is comparable to 1.17e11J, but the energy required to flying a 747 in real life is not comparable to the potential + kinetic energy of a shuttle, neglecting all losses required to achieve that potential + kinetic energy.

In particular, two million pounds of SRB propellant
plus more than 500,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen is not comparable to 64,225 U.S. gallons of jet fuel.
Removing an option in one search box?

In what court?
Providing exclusive image licensing WORLDWIDE
Why the HTML5 ‘Video’ Element Is Effectively Unusable
The pain of not knowing what you're doing, such that you can't even explain it to a willing listener.
hell, the "web design" course i took in college was a joke! this was late 90's, but still, we used netscape composer for most of the work. i taught myself everything i know about web design/development today, and i've been in the industry since 2000.
No offense, but I doubt that McCarthy found any communists. He may have found some Communist-sympathizers, but that's hardly the same crime that you're talking about (killing real people by the thousands). Name me one Communist that McCarthy took off the street that would have murdered thousands of people.

McCarthy used Communism as an excuse to attack people's political leanings. If you think that people that have Socialist/Communist political leanings are in favor mass murder, then you have a really distorted view of reality. Do you really think that when the Beatles wrote "Back in the USSR" that they were condoning mass murder and a 'report your neighbor to the secret police' culture?

Most people have those political leanings because they believe in the 'hope' that humanity will work together to solve their problems (join hands and sing "Kumbaya" or something). Whether or not their beliefs are reasonable or even possible is irrelevant. You don't throw someone in prison or ruin their life just because they have impossible dreams.

> Meanwhile, communists were killing real people by the thousands.
> Yup, McCarthyism was the big problem.

I challenge you to find me one instance where McCarthyism 'saved the day.' Even if you are able to find one instance, I challenge you to weight that against the number of people that were jailed/lives ruined over this. McCarthyism wasn't a way to "save us from the evils of Communism," it was a modern-day witch-hunt that one man started to earn political brownie points. If you see McCarthy as an altruist, then I have a bridge to sell you...

Let's not also forget that Communism in the forms that we have seen in implemented in real life is far from "Marxist ideology."
At the moment, no, but CACert is working on it. Certificates issued by CACert are still more valuable than self-signed because the owner's identity has been verified and, if the user installs the CACert root once, they can all be checked against it.
But does NYC have the startup culture like the valley? Isn't more startup-like tech in Boston than NYC?
Seems only Facebook has the potential for a Netscape-like IPO, and even then I don't think it'll be in 2010 nor that it would lead to a dot-com bubble (although if it does, I'll make sure to get in early)
That's like saying that SSH host keys add no additional security. If I add the self-signed cert to my certificate store, if anyone ever tries to present me a fake one, I'll know.

Doesn't help with public sites, but does with personal administrative ones.
Just from a writing perspective, you gotta love the opening lines:

.The dumbest government policies are almost always the fruit of the bipartisanship that sets Beltway hearts beating with patriotic arrhythmia. Think the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind, the authorization of force in Iraq and the TARP....

To me it's the right mix of colloquial and editorial writing. Very nicely done lead.
Well, there goes the work day.
three (or two-point-something) words:

"management by managers"
Rule 1: Find subject matter that actually is interesting.

Rule 2: Find subject matter that the reader doesn't already know about.

There. Your job just got 300% easier.
What is startup culture? Free sodas? Working 90-hour weeks and thinking you're awesome? I guess I never really understood what people refer to as startup culture and more importantly how it relates to geography, and I really want to know.
And thats why I'm using clojure.
And how many possible combination were there to try? Even then this would cover just one class of errors.

Automated tests are great (I use them all the time). But not all situations can be covered in a test - specially when there is concurrency involved.
Behind the scenes: NORAD's Santa tracker
Split-Testing Ads Will Greatly Improve Google Ad Performance
Pragmatist engineers will say that y/y is always equal to 1, so x(y/y) will always equal x.

Mathematicians will say that such reasoning has been known to lead to contradictory conclusions, and the form (y/y) is always equal to 1, except when y=0, inwhich case it is indeterminate.

You need to choose which universe you live in, and how paranoid you have to be.
This is a problem that I find to be systemic in the HTML specs. Even in a world where every browser was somehow 100% compliant with the spec (never going to happen), we web developers would still be hitting our heads against the wall with browser inconsistencies because the spec chooses to make important behavior optional or subject to the browser-vendor's unique implementation.

Another example of this is HTML5 drag and drop, where things like what exactly starts a drag is left completely up to the browser, resulting in major differences in behavior between browsers, to the point of almost being unusable.
Well, they do. They buy seats fairly regularly and when the space shuttle is discontinued next year the Soyuz will be the primary rocket for doing space missions. The problem is that the rocket has a very limited payload capacity compared to the shuttle and it can only carry 3 people at a time.
90 Degrees in the Cold Aisle ?
"Who Wants to Be An Astronaut?"

Hosted by William Shatner.
EZUnsecured.com - Unsecured Financing Review - Jade Rock Enterprises
If you need Unsecured Financing, go to EZUnsecured.com - They are the best Unsecured Financing Consultants still in Business and they helped me out big time last month when I needed a Loan. I was looking for Reviews on them and I found this one that explains it a little better since I don't have time to sit here and write a Press Release on them:<p>http://www.ezunsecured.com
NYC is the most innovative place on the planet right now if you measure by new value being created from scratch.
If you’re a C/C++ programmer where you’re already at 100/100 on the above chart, where is your motive to switch here?

Someone a little biased here? That scale doesn't even mention concurrency, compilation speed, and duck typing.

In other words: here's some attributes, all of which C++ is "good at." These are the only attributes against which we should measure systems programming.

I think assembly has C++ beat on a lot of those, yet C++ has the top score. Hmmm.
GM Taps Microsoft Executive for CFO
It took me a while to understand the title because of the mistakes.

Poor grammar makes you hard to understand.
Why would Google not pay as little tax as possible?
> Don't drink soda/juice

Juice in what form though? Whenever I buy fruit juices I avoid the ones that add sugar/HFCS in addition to the fruit juice. Does drinking orange juice with lots of pulp give you the added fiber to counter-act the fructose?

I always wonder when people mention 'juice' because the vast majority of the juices that you find in a supermarket are loaded with sugar on top of the juice itself (which may be 'from concentrate'). I always avoid these like the plague.
So Wolfram Alpha is erring on the side of the Engineers rather than the Mathematicians?
Redis -- with Ohm. Really great. Build a bunch of sites with it. A nice replacement for ActiveRecord in many use-cases.
Now ready to redo some BIG sites that we have using just Redis.

It has transformed my thinking about data (i'm a postgres guy), and just made Rails more fun now. The sites I did are also blazing fast.
I don't understand why they can't just point you at the MIT and Stanford lectures and let you work at your own pace. If you have to have a grade, you could present your work at some regular interval.
Intel's New Atom D510 Benchmark Tested
The Economist is up in arms with the new Britain "let's tax the rich too" , for instance -out of many articles- http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...
I find #2 and #3 to be contradictory. Being a "business, man" is what Jay-Z is all about. He's made himself into a brand. Kids buy HP computers simply because he endorses them. That brand and iconic status is quite separate from his "businessman" status as founder of Roc-a-fella, CEO of Def Jam, owner of the 40/40 club, New Jersey Nets, etc. He definitely stays out of the limelight while running his businesses. That would be the being in the "food and beverage" mode. As Jay-Z the rapper, however, he has to take on a gigantic public image. You can't really follow #2 while abiding by #3.

I also wouldn't say 2001 was when Jay-Z was a "young star." He was already incredibly mainstream in the late 90's.

Of course, I understand that this post was more for entertainment value :)
Thanks. I'm unfamiliar with the Android dev landscape and only posted it since I saw it on Twitter earlier and thought it was related.