skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To the contrary, I think the system is in tune with the laws of supply and demand. If your open salary range is so much lower than the industry average that you can't hire a new member, your existing employees will likely leave. That means you have to adjust your ranges periodically, to make sure they're in tune with industry numbers.

Of course the downside is that if one employee gets a raise, everybody gets a raise (unless the employee gets promoted to a higher position). From the POV of the employees this is a good thing, because that means everyone is fairly compensated.
PepsiCo Develops 'Designer Salt' to Chip Away at Sodium Intake
I couldn't imagine a better competition. I am utterly elated, as a junior developer, to have Stack Overflow as a resource as well as to see it knocking at Expert Exchanges' door.
Glad you like it. :)

when i was trying to get this to work a couple of nights ago, i would have gladly given you a hundred bucks for that code snippet, just to make the pain go away.

If you like, feel free to give a shout-out to @jjs in your game's credits. :)
I don't think NLP and AI are dead-ends, however, I agree with you that sentiment analysis is a crowded area.

Personally I find I need sophisticated domain-specific heuristics to evaluate consumer reviews in particular spaces. For instance, when I buy a lens for my camera, I'm going to look at reviews, but it's tricky because there are always good and bad reviews for any lens. Some of the people who get bad reviews had a camera with a screwed up AF or they never really understood how to use the lens or what its limitations were. Then you look at say, a Sigma lens for the Canon platform and you'll see that different people are having wildly different results and you'd better just forget about it.

Dashboards and stuff like that is a waste of time. What I really want is something that creates a super-expert opinion that's maybe 3 sentences to a paragraph wrong. A bit beyond the state of the art.

----

More generally, I think Doug Lenat had the right idea with Cyc, but he went about it the wrong way. Had Doug not been able to make a comfortable living doing work for the government, he would have been forced to produce a revolutionary product, but he wasn't.

I think that the linked data space around the semantic web is going to explode and ultimately produce the "commonsense" knowledgebase that it takes to build real NLP systems.

Most of the people I know in the knowledge-management space are trying to develop expensive projects for government, pharma, legal discovery and such. I think, however, they are in the "pay a lot, get a little" businesses that are going to be disrupted by the next wave. On one hand you've got Google, Microsoft and a few biggies that are going to develop large-scale but low-margin products. The other side is going to be a vast, largely low-margin market of operators who pull from and add to the great linked data pool... which is going to grow like a Katamari ball until we reach the Singularity, maybe around 2025 or so.
Good points. There's another relevant one - in Japan, parents are liable if their child defaults on a debt. How much risk would you be will to take if you knew your parents might lose their house if you failed?
I would agree with you when it comes to life and death situations, like in a war or something.

But in an office building, I don't see this being a problem. Having long meetings to discuss the virtue of different options is more often a waste of time and productivity.
Please give me a break! First, congratulations - your sensational headline got me to read the article. But, other than the "granular" problems you point out, the larger arguments are just silly.

The Act does not tip the power construct unfavorably towards investors. Any VC worth a damn is a partner not an adversary. If a VC uses conditions in the Act to exert leverage in negotiations, he is not worth having as a partner in the first place.

The Act does not increase entrepreneur risk. Every founder has to consider many different areas of risk to his business, to his family and to his lifestyle. Rather than increasing risk, the Act presents an opportunity. As with any opportunity to gain something, there is a chance that you will fail. The Act would only increase entrepreneur risk if it changed the law in that it reduced opportunity - it doesn't.

The Act is bad for (US) investors because good entrepreneurs will self-select away from the US? Come on! That is absurd and in fact the opposite should happen.

Sorry, but the article seemed for the most part insincere or misinformed.
I live in Seattle (except I am in Kuwait)

WA kind of sucks for tech businesses due to the B&O tax, which is a gross receipts tax. This doesn't hurt you until you have revenue, but if you're a low-margin business with huge revenue, it means you suffer, even if you're not profitable. (it's something like 0.5% on gross revenue).

NV is probably the best somewhat-viable-for-startup state (Las Vegas or Reno), but I'd rather live in Seattle, Portland, or SF if in the USA.

I kind of prefer Vancouver, WA for a tech startup, too, because then you can take advantage of the huge unemployed market of early-20s developers who moved to Portland, OR for lifestyle reasons, plus all the HP/Intel/etc. talent.

There are a lot of factors other than taxes which affect an individual startup, but taxes affect new business creation in aggregate.
This is great news -- I think Europe is fertile ground for doing startups.

Europe only has one fundamental disadvantage for startups -- that there aren't a lot of startups yet.

Three factors:
1) European employment regulations: which largely wouldn't apply in a tiny startup, or could be circumvented through use of contractors. This is the one area where government could have a positive impact.

2) Lack of investors -- there are a few great ones (Index, Atomico, Seedcamp) but there isn't a huge pool of medium-good firms to pitch, or to syndicate on deals. Even bigger, there aren't anywhere near as many tech angels as NYC or Austin, to say nothing of SFBA. The solution is to have more successful exits like Skype.

3) Lack of entrepreneurial education in colleges or programs -- Founder Institute, Seedcamp, and a few others are changing these. I'd love to see European universities focus on startups.

I'm planning to go full-time on a startup this summer, and would definitely do it in Europe (Berlin, Scandinavia, Netherlands, Poland, or the Baltics) or Canada if I could get financing and visas, rather than the US. It's going to be a lot easier to recruit top talent from India/China based on easier visas, and even though it might be easier in SFBA, I think the marginal extra startup in SF will have a harder time getting the top 5 people than the marginal extra startup in Europe, since there's less competition.
What's interesting about these numbers is not that SO has finally surpassed EE... but that it has only just happened. Seriously, I'd assumed SO had beaten them into the ground a year ago!
That's exactly right. Just let them in. America's all about freedom. Indentured servitude does not need a revival.
I really don't like the way Experts Exchange cheats the Google indexer. You can still scroll down to the bottom of their pages now and/or just read what's in the Google cache ... but it's always seemed disingenuous. Either than or give me the option to search for non-paid content. I don't believe stackoverflow has ever user-agent-sniff-cheated.
Supermassive black holes: hinting at the nature of dark matter?
I discovered last week that their Chai is made by this company:

http://davidrio.com/

I haven't tried making it on my own without an espresso machine yet, but it definitely is the best chai out there at least the way they make it.
That isn't the only option though. I would prefer that the person closest to the problem make the decision, which isn't usually the person most willing to make a decision.
Yeah, I tend not to post articles I haven't already read. What I meant was, I wonder what was in that particular comment/article that resulted in a disproportionately large amount of user attention. I suspect it wasn't just the recency effect.
No kidding. I'm at 5.1 kb/s. This is exactly the [legal] sort of thing that torrents were designed for. Once my download is complete (~8 hours from now), I'll make a torrent of it.
I think pg, bfeld, ericries, etc would all agree with these complaints about the Startup Visa as presently constituted. The people that wrote the bill structured it so that it would be easy to implement as a first step. It's not meant to be comprehensive, it is a tweak to an existing visa class that's not being fully utilized. But it will give immediate, positive results that can be used to push a more effective, fair, etc version later.

Hacking Washington isn't the same as hacking computers.
Border-radius has no unified syntax.

Exactly. Here is a table that illustrates this well. I didn't know there were so many optional arguments in the standard. This page is worth viewing both in webkit and gecko based browsers, so that you can see the "your browser" column. (Firefox does much better than Safari).

http://muddledramblings.com/table-of-css3-border-radius-comp...
I wonder what their respective profits and revenues are. If they were publicly traded companies, wolframalpha would be nice to use.

Also keep in mind that with SO, Spolsky and crew have proven out a highly successful platform that can be extended to almost any subject. SO makes money and the StackExchange platform makes money.

ExpertExchange seems like a forum with just a paywall. So on the other hand, I give props to anyone who can turn a plain vanilla web forum with zero envelope-pushing technology into a profitable business.
But only when you follow a Google search result link. If you bookmark it and come back, or follow any other link, then the result does not appear.

Edit: I meant to say, the replies do not appear.
We did, by any reasonable measurement. Compete undercounts us ridiculously. Alexa and Quantcast showed us passing them months ago.
While I agree companies with "tough, formal interview[s]" sound better on paper, after interviewing at many companies who esteem themselves such interviewers, I now believe that it mostly all comes out in the wash.

I'm all for vetting technical candidates, but I haven't experienced many places that perform this process intelligently.

There's a web shop around here. I had a great interview with the owner, he was excited to hire me, even making overtures about how I was going to have a job in the next couple of weeks, etc. I just needed to do this one little formality, which was a "real-world" code test that was about three-five days of work. This is pretty excessive imo, and the place definitely didn't warrant that kind of effort for the atmosphere or the pay, so I gave up on it.

There's another company around here that makes niche software. The first step of interviewing there is a written test more than thirty pages long, covering C, C++, Java, and C#. The only people you see the whole time are the secretaries, never meet anyone from HR or IT or anything else. After the test, if you get called back, there are several interviews before a final hire.

The problem isn't that they're attempting to vet for competency, it's that the ways in which they vet are silly and arrogant. They think that theirs is the only company out there, that we should feel so privileged to get a job there that we're willing to dedicate weeks to their "quality control" measures.

In my opinion, companies should focus on the "smart and gets things done" prescribed by Joel, not thirty pages of trivia about Cs and Java. Such tests generally test memorization abilities and not practical thinking abilities; one can sit in class and memorize syntax and data structure implementations in hundreds of programming languages, but still write crappy code in the real world.

They should also realize that most of these guys who are walking CS textbooks are completely dysfunctional socially. I don't mean that these people are awkward or have bad hygiene or any thing like that, I mean that they can't work together with the other engineers on their team, they're focused on proving that their solution is right, and generally just lead to lots of in-fighting and drama. They think that their intelligence or above-average competence is a license to ignore decorum and be cruelly rude and blunt to those around them. We see this attitude in open-source a lot; how much worse is it when the mailing list is private?

Honestly I think the key to a good hire is getting to know the candidate. Attitude is 90%. One should also control for competence, but should be reasonable about it. Again, Joel's couplet "smart and gets things done" is a great motto for the technical recruiter.
from my understanding, its a fake paywall!
The thing I hate about Experts Exchange is that it utterly hates users. Trying to use their site is an exercise in repeatedly irritated.

Stack Overflow on the other hand, is a delight, although I still find myself using Google to search their site, as I think their search engine stinks when you're trying to find answers ;)

Although to be fair, EE hasn't been the same since they inserted the hyphen into their URL ;)
I would strongly recommend against using aquamacs as it uses non-standard config locations which can be a giant headache. It writes saved configs into the ~/Library folder verses .emacs and it's very easy to create conflicting configs where .emacs is overridden. They may have fixed this, but that's how it behaved the last time I used it. This also seems to be the general consensus in #emacs on freenode. I'd recommend using Carbon Emacs on OS X instead. http://homepage.mac.com/zenitani/emacs-e.html
My first job was at a reasonably large CAD company. One of the reasons I went there was because they were the only company where I felt the interview process wasn't fundamentally broken. They had the usual interview rounds, but they also had a round where the candidate had to come in and work there for a full day on a given task. The task has been the same for every interviewee for a long time. It was to write an add-on for the company's CAD product which would take a polygon and a directed line and split the polygon along the line, keeping the right side. Sounds simple enough, but given the peculiarities of the data representation of the software, pressure, etc. it took at least a day to get it right, even though the problem is stated beforehand and the candidates can think about it at home. The code also has to handle "tricky" cases like spiral shaped polygons, edges lying on the line, several consecutive vertices lying on the line, floating point issues, etc. The interviewer, who was in the meantime working on his own workstation, would eventually give the interviewee a test file with these tricky polygons to make sure the program worked.

While working there, when they were interviewing, I would always go over to the interviewee to see how they were doing, and maybe give them pointers.

My conclusion was that this task is too hard for a significant % of programmers. Here are two memorable cases:

Guy was a mathematician in his last year. I went over, and saw some odd looking code. Turns out he was trying to first rotate the entire problem so that the line was the x-axis, because then presumably it's easier to solve. Unfortunately, he couldn't get the rotation right.

This other guy was a CS major in this last year. I went over, and he was looking at the MSDN docs and it was obvious he was searching for polygon related functions. Turns out he thought there must be a function somewhere in the MSDN docs that solves this problem, there's no point in writing it!
It's interesting that the sum of their traffic is relatively constant.

That implies SO really is eating at their traffic specifically. But it also implies SO isn't encouraging new traffic, and that the general market for Q&A isn't growing.
It's the only non-5-or-1 star review (it's a 3).
The problem is that unless two properties are actually going to work the same way, we can't use the same prefix. We have to be able to target individual, misbehaving browsers.

Its not just IE that's quirky - Firefox, Chrome, and Safari all have CSS bugs that have to be accounted for. Its hard enough to target them individually now, but under your proposal it would be nearly impossible.

But of course, this is not what the author is discussing at all. He doesn't have a problem with vendor specific prefixes in general, but rather feels they should be deprecated more aggressively once widespread adoption occurs.
I have been biting my tongue on other venues regarding this bill, which is a good sign it's probably not a good idea to discuss here.

Having said that, I'll put on my business hat and begin adapting. What's this mean for my startup?

1) Those of you who say the country is waiting for affordable insurance until startups take off are smoking crack. It's a great benefit, sure, but young folks don't need health insurance and startups are lucky to keep the lights on, much less pay fines to have everybody insured. The process of getting new employees may greatly be enhanced, but we need a thousand pre-employee startups for every one looking for employees, so that's where to look for impact, not with insurance. Not sure there is any impact at all for dirt-poor young startups. It should be interesting how the income requirements work -- can you get 15K in investments and keep that for operating? Or does that make you rich enough to start having to pay fines? Having said all of that (which you might hate), it's a great thing to keep your insurance.

2) Those of you saying that it's the end of Western free civilization are completely overstating the case as well. It's going to add 16 thousand new IRS agents, sure, and there will undoubtedly be new regulatory burdens associated with hiring employees and growing. The key metric to watch here is public debt. We're in a debt explosion and, to some, this just pours gasoline on the fire. If that assumption is true, and I believe it is, then watching the national debt rating could be an early indicator that different business configurations might be better than locating and operating in the states. (That doesn't mean you can't start out here, just once in growth mode getting the hell out of Dodge might be worth it) If the country is going broke, sooner or later somebody is going to come looking for any profits you might be making. I'm not saying it is or it isn't. I'm saying that it looks like a legit concern to me -- you can do the math.

3) Medical and insurance discussions will now become political ones. In other words, somebody has to say "no" in order for any kind of health service plan to work without going broke. It used to be those people were the insurance companies. It was a lot of fun hating the insurance companies. Now that we're regulating the insurance companies like utilities, however, that person is going to be some bureaucrat somewhere. Your best access to him, if you have an employee with a complaint or are looking for some kind of change, is probably through your Congressman, giving your local Congressional weasel even more power than he currently has. This means all startups, from dollar one, need to have some face time with their Congressperson if at all possible. Increasingly he/she is the guy who influences more and more details of operating -- bandwidth availability, insurance standards (now), investment criteria, etc.

I hope that sounded reasonably neutral. I certainly didn't feel angry while writing it. While the immediate impacts are very low, over time I think this is a major change in the country's direction. Small business guys need to pay attention.
LT Capital Gains are taxed at 34.1% in California once this bill passes. 15% + 5% 2010 increase + 9.3% CA + 1% CA Mental Health + 3.8% Health Care capital gains.

ST Capital Gains will be taxed at 39.6% top income bracket + 5% surcharge + 9.3% + 1% + 3.8% once this bill passes. 58.7%. (A $20m sale of a startup in less than 12 months start to finish is kind of unrealistic, but you could easily be a mezzanine investor, or could have operated a business for a long time before formally doing stock, so it is possible, if not likely for an actual entrepreneur)

The correct thing in both of these cases is probably to hold and write options or something against stock, to avoid realizing the gain, and hope that somehow tax rates rationalize in the future.

20-25% all-in capital gains is probably the limit before it seriously disincents investment.
Yes. Those programs serve as a warning against what you might have to contort your short, sweet, clear programs into in order to get good performance without dropping down to C.
This is really cool! I'd second, third, whatever, the call for an import. It would also be neat if it was pluggable so when someone writes an emacs extension with custom faces, they could write a little snippet file to plugin to this to make those faces available.
This is an interesting update on Bartle's Taxonomy of Players (http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm) from back in the MUD days. Sadly, this article is a little dated if you check out the list of games used (Dark Ages of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies). I would love to see results from a survey like this that used players from Farmville, Mafia Wars and Restaurant City.
We need bigger tubes for all this Haskell!
Of course you can - you just have to bootstrap it in China or India.
Then when you are succesfull, and after having created lots of jobs in China or India, paid lots of taxes to China or India and earned lots of foreign currency for china or India.

The US will then allow you to come in and buy their companies - as long as they get a few % commission to Wall st.
Teambox launches Twitter for Teams
A project collaboration platform inspired by Twitter
Personally, I can think of a few advantages.

Duplicating 2 or 3 lines may seem like a minor problem, but having to change those 2 or 3 lines every time you make a change quickly becomes a maintainence burden, especially when they're littered throughout your CSS. The extra burden such prefixes brings is greater than the amount of extra characters they add.

Not having to alter your code every time a new browser comes along that is identical to existing implementation is useful, especially since most of the time browsers copy each other's features or implement standards unchanged. This is especially useful since most sites using bleeding-edge features are either tech demos or test-cases.

A non-universal prefix also favours large players and has the potential to squeeze out less popular browsers even if they support the same feature. Even if Opera supports the same standards as Firefox, you can can bet that more people will use the -moz prefix than -o.

The "risk" is that your code will break in unpredictable ways, but the upside is that risk is known (since it's part of the "contract" from the prefix), manageable, greppable, and can be worked-around.
It's because it's the comment at the end of a long column of comments.

I am pretty sure if you turned it around so that the most recent comment was at the top it would still be the same.
This reminds me of the line from The Cable Guy: He who hesitates, masturbates ;)

In non-critical situations, I think it holds true, be it for chatting up girls, starting a new code project, or when you're facing a pile of dirty dishes in your flat.
Not Supported - Why CSS vendor prefixes are still necessary
"Y'all" in the deepest, friendliest southern accent I can muster.
Things Nintendo and Sony Have Learned from Apple