skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that a Kindle is a tool for readers. But iPad is a more general-purpose tool: While usable by readers, it also serves up color rendering of web pages, TV, movies, and whatever else there is an app for, not the least of which is interactive games.

So iPad is going to swamp Kindle in the press, just as the audience, gross profit, PR, and media for the typical movie dwarfs that of the book or comic from which it was derived.

Amazon can't realistically have expected more from Kindle. The product remains successful, it continues (as we can see) to drive interest in Amazon ebooks on other hardware platforms, and most likely the hardware (or similar e-Ink hardware) will remain available in one form or another for the relatively small number of buyers who fit its use case. But it will never out-hype the iPad. The potential market is just too small.
It _is_ a comic.
I think I'm happy about that. Block away, dear leaders.
An "obfuscation" wall, if you will.

The rule is, if you come from Google, the answer is hidden at the bottom of the page, behind a bunch of things that say you need to sign in. But if you don't come from Google, the answer is hidden unless you're a member, so you can't e-mail the URL with an answer around to pals, for example. It's a similar policy that the WSJ has for articles, built to keep the Google benefit while encouraging subscriptions.
Good post. I agree with almost everything he says.

> For example, Scala is great, but I don’t use it much because there’re not enough cases where its features are required

IMO with languages like Scala, JRuby, Clojure etc. that are built on a stable platform, its easy to switch to them. You don't necessarily need to use every feature, even a subset will make you more productive. The use case would be anywhere you use Java.

> I know Python, Ruby, Scala, and Groovy (...) but when I need to actually get things done, I still get them done more efficiently in Java, as long as "more efficiently" doesn’t mean lines of code.

I totally agree with this. Recently I picked up Ruby and really like the language and would love to use it. However, I am very comfortable with Python (and its libs, docs, django etc.) and am not really as productive with Ruby. If I would have picked up Ruby first it would have probably been the other way round.
It just means that Google is getting better at serving correct A's for common Q's, and so there is less need for visiting specialized sites as these two.
"It will be interesting to see how the markets react to this."

The markets reacted to this long ago, which is why we're not seeing much of a reaction to it now (the market is now up by about the amount it was down when the parent posted that link) - nobody had any real doubt as to whether this would ultimately pass or not, the only question was exactly what provisions would be taken out or put in to ensure that it did.

No comment on our debt problems, however - I'd tend to agree that eventually someone needs to pay the piper, though I think single-digit weeks might be underestimating it.
Several teams who were interviewed for the Winter 2010 Session stopped by at the HackerDojo. A meetup can actually be held there.
If the actual job involved solving random problems in an instant, then these tests would make sense. As they are, they're really just statements of power: I have a job, you want a job, so I can make you jump through this hoop. I am great! Look at my little fiefdom.
This is something I really, really want to succeed. A simple tweak to the job market (seekers pay a nominal fee, reviewers must provide feedback) plus a slick fast UI.

Although hopefully I won't need to search for jobs after my startup launches and takes off :)
President's veto power over Internet removed in amended bill
Which would imply SO's traffic is dramatically under-reported. In fact, August they had a blog post that indicates Compete's data is off by a factor of 15, and this was 7 months ago! http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/08/one-year-of-stack-over...
Just because he's done a lot of interviews doesn't mean he has actually learned anything or become good at conducting them. I'd argue the opposite. He's become entrenched in methods that do nothing.
Whether or not it's approved, it seems this may well "pay" for itself in terms of PR.

The article notes:

You can adjust "paper" color

I wish that Safari Online offered this feature. Reading extensively from a transmissive (or strongly lighted reflective) white background is tiring. I'd welcome the ability to tint the background to something more tolerable (preferably a user-defined setting).
> So, whatever Palm's mistakes, it doesn't look like this was one of them.

Having a GSM phone would, if not help selling them abroad, at least not prevent them from doing so.

As for the Nexus One, why would Google want to pose a threat to its licensees? The Nexus One is not meant to compete with Motorola's or HTC's offerings: it's there to show what a pure Android phone is. It's a showcase.
I am pretty sure at this point in time Apple care more about getting this device off the shelves. They said themselves that the app store doesn't actually make them any money and I can't see the iBook store making them much either. The money really comes in when they shift the hardware.
I think that the idea that Amazon is selling hardware is missing the point entirely. A lot of the time companies lose money selling hardware (ex. the price to produce a PC is more than the selling price... they make up for it by being paid to put 'trial' software on the windows install).

So, in parallel, amazon doesn't really give a crap about whether they sell a ton of kindles. What they care about is that the amazon kindle store makes a crap-ton of money. If everyone goes out and buys an ipad, and "kindle on ipad" is a killer app for ipad, amazon ends up making way more money than they would trying to match their own hardware against Apple's.

I'm an avid reader and I got the DX when it came out (it is freaking sweet). I'd probably be too distracted/eye-strained reading on a tablet PC for the number of hours that I do. (I realize that I am an outlier, however).

My one complaint is that there are actually a lot of books that I cannot get for the kindle, and it is hard to take notes in the margin so I end up reading certain books on dead trees. (Maybe the ipad touch screen will make it easier to do margin notes?)
I would say no, because when 2-3 browsers implement the functionality and there is common agreement on the syntax, then the vendor prefix can be dropped.

My opinion is that the only problem is that the vendor prefix for border-radius was dropped too late.
That's exactly my point. It seems like his time would be more productive spent somewhere else besides going to amazon, searching for the book, getting his affiliate code in t.... on and on
Thanks for the response. Perhaps I don't understand how search engines work: If I search for a programming term and EE is the top result, what do Google lose if they kill or seriously de-prioritize the EE link? Wouldn't Google just show me the rest of the links?

It's not like EE pages are the only result for searches...
Genocide and Jedi: Why the Sith may be Right
I don't know many people who takes that into consideration when buying a phone.
Big Brother Has the Power to Turn Off Your Car
The author of the article
Very, very useful. I got used to having 10+ sass partials and it's becoming an inconvenience to track specific declarations in firebug. (Here's an interestin post about how to structure a sass project http://wiseheartdesign.com/articles/2010/01/22/structuring-a...)
The thing is, iterating on the legislation may not be possible.

If you are a smart, clued-in high tech founder who isn't completely in love with your initial vision, then it's possible to iterate from a potentially disastrous idea into something people will pay for.

With the Startup Visa Act, if the initial flawed piece of legislation doesn't produce some notable successes, then unimaginative lawmen who didn't like the idea in the first place will point to the initial lack of results and kill off any hope of iteration number two or three - which may be what in fact is necessary for the Act to succeed in achieving it's original aims.
It probably works in reverse too - if you've done a bad deed it will be easier to trick you into doing something "good".
CMS Review: SquareSpace - The powerful, hosted CMS for designers
Well, I don't mean that competence is 10% of a hire, more that attitude is 90% of competence, especially in our field where things change so quickly. Your hires should be competent to perform the job.

Still, the analogue to doctors or lawyers is quite different. Most programming languages are pretty similar and once you get the basic concepts down you don't need to radically modify it to switch from one context to another. Information and manuals about programming languages, troubleshooting, etc., is available plentifully online, and someone with a basic grasp and an attitude of teachibility and eagerness to learn can make a lot of progress very quickly.

Things don't work the same way with lawyering or medicine, but probably the most important difference is that someone isn't going to be sent to the jail or the morgue because your programmer wrote a naive implementation of something (generally).

I agree with the basic idea of reasonable testing, which is why I said that it "sounds good on paper". It's just that most places don't do it right, so I don't get excited anymore about workplaces that claim to test for competence.
The existing system favors those who are good at hiking in the desert, as well as a few who are good at jumping through a long series of bureaucratic hoops. Even if this improvement is not perfect it should help, but I agree it should be constructed as intelligently as possible.

A good change should error on the side of being overly accepting.
High-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain than sugar
"You can usually identify affiliate links pretty easily just by scanning the URL."

The problem is that most people barely know what an affiliate link is, let alone spot one. This fact makes producing biased reviews attractive and that's why I think the answer to nate's question should be: generally they are.

Personally I don't trust a review when I see an affiliate link. A 'sponsored link' disclaimer would reestablish my trust though.
I feel about Apple quite similarly to how I feel about Google: they're a ginormous megacorp with a much better PR team than my insurance company and precisely as much soul. That doesn't mean we can't do business, it just means I go into business dealings with both eyes open.

Mobile development doesn't play to my skill set as a programmer, but that is easy enough to fix. (One copy of Objective C for Dummies, please.) The graphical design I'd have to contract out. The (limited, to my understanding) ability to extract usage metrics from iPhone apps and multi-week wait time between re-releases effectively neutralizes my main strength (testing and iteration) and the app store's discovery mechanism neutralizes the marketing channel I understand best (search and search ads).

And the big killer is that the hit- and fad-focused sales lists mean that if I don't hit a homerun immediately at launch I'm probably going to end up taking a bath on the development costs. I sold $25 of my software my first month and sell ~$4,000 a month now. That is a rare trajectory for iPhone apps: typically, they get released at whatever and then start immediately declining.
Amazon has this nice feature where you get commissions on everything the person buys on your click. If someone buys a copy of Rework and happens to pick up a new high-end DSLR at the same time, you just made a few hundred bucks.
Yes, how dare a user point out a flow in the product! Right?
Information Week: FlightCaster(YC S09) Leverages Big Data
Entrepreneur: "a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, esp. a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk."

from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/entrepreneur

I'd said that the founder of any small business is definitely an entrepreneur.
Thanks! I launched on February 1st. I released my second screencast two days ago.
Again, the "rounds" do not indicate execution time, thus execution time is not a good determination of how "secure" a hashing function is.

There is inherent mathematical reasons why the combinations of the functions should be strong. It's why s-boxes are accepted practice.

Agreed, cryptography is a tricky field. All the more reason to stick to systems that are carefully reviewed by experts smarter them myself and you.
I agree. Compete numbers are just random. Just pure fiction.
I'd say WebOS's weaknesses are 100% hardware. App store, sure, but that's because no one has a Pre or Pixi because they are cheap pieces of plastic crap. Put WebOS on the HTC Supersonic and just try to keep that thing in stock.
For what it's worth, we do an intense but informal interview though we supplement it sometimes with a difficult take-home problem set. It seems to be working very well: in front of our VCs we're being praised above all for the team we've grown.
What if we had 10 browsers or more?

Nightmare!

I am against vendor prefixes, but if they are needed we should do the opposite we are doing today, let me explain:

use border-radius everywhere

browsers that don't support it just ignore it (like html5 tags)

browsers that do, just show them

browsers with special implementation of it, THEN use vendor prefixes

So we only write one border-radius and if we care about that rogue vendor, then we just add an extra -?-border-radius

Personally I wouldn't care about rogue vendors.

Believe me, I am sick of writing five times the same style, testing, changing it five times again, and some time in the future, my code will be polluting a already established standard, so I am going to have to come back to change it again.

I got sick of it, so what I do right now is to have a second stylesheet only for vendor specific styles, so all I will need to do is just remove that stylesheet when the dust settles.

Still retarded...
Listen to your Twitter Timeline! Turn your volume up!
"I knew that I was going to be spending the next hour talking about red-black trees and low level language trivia."

I know what you are talking about. Not too long ago, I was "that guy" - the guy whose heart sank at such interviews and couldn't get what the focus on "trivia" was all about. I know how to write software dammit why ask me all these stupid questions about the fine detail of Red Black Tree implementations and language edge cases?

"There has been a point in my life where I knew the implementation details for various sorting algorithms and exotic data structures. That was called 'college'. More than a decade into my career, I simply don't remember most of it. "

I had to learn CS from scratch (because I quit working on enterprise sw after 10 years and started working on projects where such knowledge was important), without a formal degree, mentors, or any guidance whatsoever. So in a sense I have traversed the opposite arc from most college educated developers.

I first became a "in the trenches" programmer and then get a CS and math education (entirely self taught). I was an "architect" at ThoughtWorks (At TW, "architects" code every day) ar at least they used to when I was there) , working on large enterprise systems, when I stopped doing outsourced enterprise sw and started working on Machine Learning/AI projects and found myself neck deep in hairy math with no clue what was going on. I have sat in 3 hour meetings not comprehending a single sentence because the other guys were speaking "math-y programming" and I knew only "hands on programming". It is a terrible, sinking feeling.

Which is all just away of saying, there are projects on which deep algorithmic/data structure knowledge (and other hard things) is important. And if a company's success or failure in such a project depended on finding people with that knowledge they would be foolish to ask "abstract" questions at interviews.

Whether this is important enough to be probed in an interview or not depends on what the company is doing. If you are building simple db backed websites you can get by with understanding lists and hashtables. If you are building databases (like rethinkdb) is, then being very thorough the nuances of RB trees, networking, OS internals etc becomes significant.

I agree that the interview should test for what the skills the job would need in real life, if that is what you are saying. I was just irritated at the stereotyping of programmers with deep CS knowledge as lacking team work and being too abstract and so on. I know from personal experience how hard that stuff is. And it is orthogonal to "in the trenches " knowledge and experience. You can be very good at both.
Still, I'm not swayed. I would rather have the current mechanism, which allows me to deal with the syntactic and semantic differences on a browser by browser basis.

The current situation is an escape valve for the inevitable flux & lag between the standards process and implementation compliance.

If you invent a universal prefix you no longer have as much of an escape valve...you just have a namespace where you accept random non-compliance. And if you're ok with one such namespace, then why not one for each rendering engine, so that they're at least compartmentalized a bit?
On a Mac you can hit CTRL-OPTION-CMD 8 to invert your screen. I do this often when I want to read with a darker background. It inverts everything so images look awful, but it is a really easy way to make some things easier to read.
With no fixations on the number of stars or on the title of the review, the only two possibilities I can think of are the recency effect and a keyword the user was looking for. But if the user looked at but didn't fixate on stars/title (or other elements) we have only intuition to go on.
Curious to know if Dropbox intends to approach academic institutions in the near future to replace their current home directories/centralized file repositories.....
Ask HNers : what's your view on big consulting firms ? (accenture etc)
I'm currently finishing my Computer Science degree.
Lately there was a carreer fair at my university, apparently lots of consulting firms ( accenture / deloitte / etc ) seem to be interested in hiring Comp Sci grads.
I talked with them but I'd like to get some feedback from HNers. Personally it seems that I love writing -good- code too much to work for them, but then again it's just my general feeling, I might be completely wrong. Any insight would be appreciated.
Curious what people think about my new mashup!
Fireworks Alternatives (Acorn, Opacity, and DrawIt)
Also, use Readability: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

to customize your viewing experience.
I believe that everything is installed under /Library/Frameworks/GHC.framework and then symlinked. (At least, that's what I'm seeing on my system from the last version of the installer.)

See here for some details (may be out of date, in terms of SnowLeopard): http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Mac_OS_X

As that link mentions, the platform also comes with an uninstaller at /Library/Frameworks/GHC.framework/Tools/Uninstaller.
What it boils down to is that startups sometimes pay less than larger, established firms.

It doesn't matter how you break down the compensation into salary and perks.

So while it's true that someone with a preexisting condition might not be able to take a job IF the compensation wasn't high enough, it's irrelevant whether the compensation includes healthcare or if it doesn't.
Neither are oranges.

Both statements carry the same value, insight, and understanding.
That is sad news.

I guess the annual lecture at Edinburgh will be a memorial lecture now http://www.lfcs.inf.ed.ac.uk/events/milner-lecture.
check out localbacon - aka jibe.com - they seem to be doing the same thing as you want to do with emp.ly

i think they completely revamped their initial model and just publicly relaunched today.
That's certainly an interesting and relevant point. I would like to shift gears for a second and come back to why I don't think it should be particularly relevant here.

First of all, I think we focus way too often on the "average" or "median" behavior when trying to define how humans behave. In a lot of cases (optimizing a website or arranging a retail outlet), this makes perfect sense. In many areas, this is misapplied.

Imagine that a researcher did a study on dunking a basketball. They are very careful to take an appropriately-representative sample of a country's population, and they find that something like 0.5% (totally made up) of the people can dunk on a standard 10-foot basket. They find that lowering the basket to 9 feet allows about 5-10% to be able to dunk, and they provide arguments for why this 5-10% figure is an ideal number for maximal excitement of a basketball game. We can clearly see that this is a bad reason to use for lowering an NBA hoop to 9 feet. NBA players are extraordinary, and appealing to the average is silly.

In the same way, I think this could be regarded as a similar case. Clearly only a small percentage of the population is capable of writing good reviews. It is automatically narrowed to people who are capable of writing not only clearly, but also in a way that makes a somewhat dull topic more interesting. We should be able to further narrow "good reviewers" to that group of reviewers who are always honest in their review, those (perhaps rare) people whose reviews are not swayed by potential monetary gain. And there are certainly people like this.

Perhaps what we really need is a way to differentiate the best across all kinds of categories, something like an NBA of professionals. Currently we rely on various magazines and news sources to select the best reviewers, but this narrows the field too much and too arbitrarily, while irrelevant things like seniority and past results affect judgment of a person's abilities. Perhaps it's time for the business/information world to take something from the sports world.
Don't get a WebOS phone because the hardware blows. Plastic screens and tiny hardware keyboards are no fun at all. However, I agree that WebOS is hands down the best mobile OS out there. In terms of ease of use, multitasking interface, notifications system, and even development, it's not even close.
I've been waiting for _precisely_ this application for about 12+ months (I'm a K1, K2, and Kindle-on-iPhone User).

The Kindle E-Ink is _the_ platform to read books outdoors, by the beach, anywhere it's really sunny - you just can't do better (it outperforms paper - less glare).

But, for anywhere you need backlighting (Bed, Dark Trains) - The Kindle is a less than exciting performer. Even my little book lights are problematic - the sun works fine, but the little LED lights tend to put point glare on the Kindle screen. I always end up reading books on my iPhone, which is _almost_ acceptable - iPad will blow it all away.

My hope now is that people like Oreilly will start offering their kindle books at a reasonable price. I _already_ have all their books on paper, paying $30+ dollars for the Kindle Version is painful)