skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It depends...

If you are just looking for top 10 lists, it should be fine. If you want detailed reports like WikiTravel (http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page), you'll have a harder time finding people who can write well for a low price.

Mechanical Turk is like any other system of inputs and outputs: what you get out of it depends on what you put in. From my experience, if you give very detailed instructions and examples of what you want, and you pay a decent reward, you'll get good results. If you want people to write 500 word articles for $0.05, you'll get crap.
Remember this http://wetriffs.com/ ?
Seriously, if she's so insecure about being unemployed, she should maybe get a job, not try to control what you talk about. Am I missing something here?
Yes, but they go ahead and use the wrong homonym anyways. That's what I meant -- a criticism of too many erroneous posters. (But for some reason everyone took it as a criticism of the rule and voted me down.)
I write pseudocode on a notepad on the train, then translate it into Objective-C at my computer.
All he mentioned was that a few markers associated with cancer are elevated in marathon runners. The actual markers indicate inflammation and a leaky blood brain barrier, which could be caused by lots of things besides cancer.
"lacking"?
"Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!"
But the iPhone's is more useful, easier, and less prone to introduce UI stutter, heat, and battery drainage.
Freakonomics:  Alcohol 101
Shame, he's paywalled it. This interview on EconTalk gives a good overview:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/03/de_vany_on_ster.htm...

(Skip past the baseball/steroids bit for the EF stuff.)
the problem with

"If I feel that this is not the case, or become isolated, I'll jump ship on a dime. Also, if I'm ever passed over for a plum assignment that is within my capability, I'll launch my resumes that afternoon."

is not that you will leave if your needs aren't being met; that is expected in any relationship. The reason why that raises a red flag is that it implies that you won't take action to educate yourself, and to create new interesting projects for the company if they aren't fed to you, to go and make contact with other team members if you feel isolated.

Seriously, I don't want to hire someone who wants to be a passive vessel. I ain't your daddy. I want people who will go out and get cool shit done. Sure, I'm okay hiring someone who has potential but not experience, and helping them get that experience, but I want them to be an /active participant/ in the exercise, not some passive vessel.
The linked press release in that article is about QNX's home energy management system, not about any acquisition.
I'm sure replying is futile since there appears to be a dedicated anti-asnyder block here voting me down to oblivion.

Yes, really. Believe it or not we run into the 280north guys from time to time and building an app just for apps sake without it being a part of any comprehensive strategy is a waste of resources. Within a small company time is very valuable and if we take the time to build the 280Clone as we initially called it it would take resources away from adding new features, documentation and other demos.

What tlrobinson doesn't mention was that our conversation regarding the clone took place 2+ years ago, in his post it sounds like it was a short while ago.

We're getting customers because our platform fulfills what it says it does as you can see from some of our users blogs, take Gary's for example, http://geester.tumblr.com/.

Clearly you don't like me as an individual, maybe I'm too brash for your taste, but it's important to remember that NOLOH isn't me, we're a company with other members, other employees.

Please don't discount our platform because you don't like me.
That sort of shenanigans almost got a friend of mine hired at a shop -- until she revealed that she wasn't a coder and was applying for a clerical/support position.
1> Any compatibility layer is also forbidden by the agreement. So classes that make it easy to port (or c modules or whatever) would also be forbidden. They did more than ban flash here

2> C++ is a unreliable target on android still for fullscale development. C/C++ is really for computation heavy libraries, not end to end development. You're supposed to call into your C with JNI and do most of the app with Java
I'm no economist, and certainly no lawyer, but this does seem to me like it violates anti-trust law. Can anyone more informed about such issues comment on that?
Something similar. It didn't use Java Applets though and it had a nice layer for submitting the screenshot to the website's owner.
I think they could also be useful in creating little DSLs, building parser combinators, etc.
Suppose he had written a contract: would you support the use of "government bullies" to enforce it in that case? If not, and your tone suggests not, why do you suggest he learn how to write better contracts?

On the subject of copyright: I think the situation is a prisoner's dilemma, and one of the time-honored ways to bring such a dilemma to its Nash solution is indeed to shoot everyone who defects. Nash-equilibrium behavior when all constraints are removed is a mark of a prisoner's dilemma; for such behavior with copyright, look into what happened after the French Revolution overturned it, or at the quality of copies of _It's a Wonderful Life_ after it left copyright (in, IIRC, the early 1950s) and before a copyright was re-imposed. The second of these is sometimes used by the MPAA as an argument for the Mickey Mouse Protection Act; the first, not even they are familiar with yet.

(My position is that culturally significant works should be copyrightable in perpetuity, perhaps by an act of Congress in a perfect world in which lobbyists don't exist and Congress acts for the good of the nation; for all other works, have a 20-year copyright, renewable for 10 years up to 5 times by mailing the relevant government office a dollar.)
It's an amusing take, but in practice I think "originally written" is intended to be interpreted just like the GPL's definition of source code:

"The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."

Just like Apple's SDK agreement, the GPL is written this way to prevent developers from claiming an intermediate representation is actually the "source code" when it's actually compiled or generated from the true source.
Sounds like a grea business decision
OK, I guess I was wrong about the dates. I must have glossed over that sentence.

The point about my boss is that the things he gets excited about, while they do sort of make sense, have been proven untrue by further science. A correlation test, sure. But still a useful test.

Further, memristors can do logic and memory, but we have things that can do those. They show no advantages over CPU/RAM. I think the only interesting part is the analogy to neurons, but neurons are able to form connections to other neurons and have other machinery as well. Memristors are wholly unimpressive to me.
ES5: Kangax details and browser info
Can you define "more useful" and "easier"? The rest is a known price for the functionality.

Especially - how is it "more useful" to have a stripped down version of multitasking -vs- multitasking? And what exactly is easier? For me it's a) tap the corner b) choose an app. For iPhone user it's a) tap the home button b) choose an app.
When talking about mutable strings, he says that Lua's immutable strings make reading a file "quadratic and [...] prohibitively slow for even files of a few kilobytes.", which is demonstrably false. Sure, if you read a byte, nondestructively append a byte to what you've read, looping through anything, then you're screwed, in any language.* Large files should be read a line, a block, a megabyte, etc. at a time, anyway, though - the IO call overhead will dominate otherwise, no matter what you do.

* Joel Spolsky calls this "Shlemiel the painter" behavior. Difference lists are another direct solution for this, but not many languages have them.

He notes that, "Lua offers a facility, table.concat, to alleviate this problem; but it still bites programmers on occasion.", but using table.concat for large strings is both 1) one of the first things mentioned about working with strings in PiL (including explaining why doing appends naively is quadratic), and 2) incredibly common, so it's really not an issue in practice.

In my experience, having immutable and interned strings is usually a net win, even if they're a second data type (Lisp and K call them symbols, Erlang and Prolog call them atoms, etc.). Lua merges string, atoms, and raw byte arrays into the same type (albeit with a cute trick for large strings), but it also has the C API as an easy escape hatch.
JavaScript Intellisense Improvements with VS 2010
I completely disagree with whole idea of intellectual property, so from my perspective Apple maybe wrong, but the argument given here against their actions is even "wronger".

Apple's actions here can at least be viewed as quality control, and since its their product and their app store etc. its their choice. This is no different to how games console manufacturers refuse to support third party hardware/software, and if you do want to produce software for them you need to most often use their tools and comply with their requirements. Historically this has worked for them very well.

The writer also negates to consider the real world difficulty of implementation - having a set of ideas about how something should work is a totally different concept from having a working implementation of a concept - except for that one case where the ideas are sufficiently concrete to describe an implementation in a single language. Translating ideas into C++ or whatever is not trivial so the implementation and the original concept can not realistically be considered the same thing unless it includes all of the implementation considerations as well. In which case there is no valid way to distinguish that set of ideas from the source code - mathematically they are identical descriptions of an algorithm, if they were not then one or other would lack sufficient information. The program would not produce the intended results or the idea would be missing information required to produce the implementation.

As a simple example consider the difference between the usual form of the Pythagoras theorem ( h^2 = a^2 + b^2 .: h = sqrt( a^2 + b^2 ) ) and some code to find the hypotenuse of a right triangle from the other two sides - there are lots of issues there that the original theorem has no need to consider, like whether to use floating point representation or fixed point, what square root algorithm to use and what order the operations should be performed in. All of these decisions can have a dramatic impact on the performance and accuracy of the implementation (i.e. produce detectably different results) and some of them may be language dependent, e.g. your language might provide a black box square root function but not specify how it must work, which could be left to the implementation to decide.

Even so, do I have ownership of my particular C++ implementation of this? No. Anyone else could have done the same without prior knowledge of my solution - because its already there encoded in the laws of nature waiting to be re-/discovered/ (not /invented/). Invention is a convenient label like "artificial" - it has no counterpart in reality but is a useful abstraction in daily life. But I digress...
"Programs that write programs are the happiest programs in the world."

-Tom Christiansen a.k.a. thoth, Perl contributor extraordinaire
No, Steve Jobs is not insane, this interpretation of the new rule is insane. Apple is merely (!) trying to control what tools people use to create software on their platform. I can understand why they want to do this, just as I can understand why I might, or might not want to comply. The legal terms used are to give Apple the tools it needs to get compliance. The only real issue is: do you want to develop for this platform or not. (I probably am, but mostly on the webkit/webapp side of things, which, so far, is still completely open.)

There are possibly some anti-competitive issues here, and if Adobe has any chance of getting around this rule, that's the way they will probably go. Good luck to them, but I'm not holding my breath.
Federal Agencies Use Just 7 Percent of Server Capacity
> The notion that lengthening copyright increases creativity is questionable

Really, I find it blatantly disingenuous. As "IP" owner I can sit on my ass milking my original creation for 90+ years or I can be "forced" to actually produce more works every 5-15 years.
I stopped reading when I saw "typography, one of Apple's most important differentiators". I may be living in a fantasy world, but it's clearly not the same world you're living in.
In all likelihood, Apple would argue—successfully—that the market should not be defined as the "iPhone software" market but as the "smartphone software" market, at which point they no longer have a monopoly and are no longer subject to anti-trust scrutiny.

What gets interesting is when/if Apple's dominance continues to grow to the point that the "iPhone software" market is effectively the "smartphone software" market. At that point, the DoJ and/or FTC will almost certainly decide that many of these policies are anticompetitive and initiate some sort of action to remedy the situation.

So in some sense, Apple needs to worry about becoming too successful: it is only because they haven't achieved total dominance that they can get away with being so ruthless.
Can we stop the FUD?

First, how is leaving a battery-intensive service on Android different from leaving a battery-intensive background task on iPhone? (The Flickr photo upload example)

Second, are you aware that data-roaming is off by default on Android and you have to explicitly turn it ON from the settings?
Apple has a history of innovation in new device classes, notable are the PC, laptop, PMP and Smartphone. You could also make the claim that the Newton was not on Steve Job's watch.

I see the iPad as a not fully baked iteration on the Smart Phone/Netbook. I personally do not see the virtual keyboard as a problem. There is room for improvements but I think people are not use to them yet. If the price and weight half and document management is worked through it could get some traction.

It is a little premature to see its failure. Utility is often seen in retrospect. 15 years ago neither the personal computer nor internet would have been seen as essential.
I agree. When it was Lawrence Lessig saying this, there was a certain note of the crank about the idea (very much increased by the performance of Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg in the lead-up to _Eldred v. Ashcroft_). But when the world's magazine of record says it, it's as mainstream as UNICEF. (Not that being as mainstream as UNICEF is necessarily a good thing.)

That's how changes to the world normally occur: not through a revolutionary minority, but through the development of a consensus which serves as a suitable powder keg. Look at British and French SF from the twenty years before WWI, for example.
i'd like to know why they thought it was worth the trouble of starting a new project instead of contributing to an existing one.
I'm not aware of a Clojure runtime that'll work on the iPhone, but I'm disappointed that apps written in Scheme (Gambit, etc.) won't be allowed in future. Or at least, it'll be a lottery whether or not they notice that the C code isn't human written, which means the risk is too high for anything serious.
Ask HN: What should I say to a colleague who just got laid off
So I got laid off y'day, and received amazing advice from the HN community, and been acting on it. I've spent all morning calling up colleagues that I worked closely with and realized that their responses varied with the amount of experience they had.

1) My younger inexperienced colleagues were pissed off with the company because they thought we'd just had our biggest qtr ever, so why I was being laid off. They were genuinely upset and felt bad for me.
2) My senior more experienced colleagues were polite, thanked me for the time we had worked together, and offered me contacts of recruiters who they know are hiring, and offered to help me with a recommendation.

I'm wondering if there is an ideal way to do this because I could be in a different boat at a different time.

Thx, Startup Sales Guy
I've yet to see a better implementation of multitasking on a mobile device than Palm's webOS. You have to see it in action to appreciate it.

As a developer you don't have to include more code to make multitasking happen. An event fires when the app becomes active and when it deactivates, but its your choice to handle them or not.
example in the studio
I feel the same way about W2 positions; but yeah, uh, if you are going for someone who is good (and who is recognised as good... not all good programmers are recognised as such.) they aren't desperate, and they are unlikely to take a contracting position if they want a W2 (and visa-versa) without a large premium.
I'm amazed at how consistently tone-deaf Sony is. It seems like they go out of their way to piss off their own customers and shoot themselves in the foot in public relations.

Can anyone (who is a lawyer, please!) comment on whether a similar claim can be made in the US? (I'm really not interested in keyboard lawyering or your opinion on what the law should be.)
apple is too restrictive!
This one seems to be the real deal: http://press.rim.com/release.jsp?id=3766
Is Gmail Giving Up on Tagging?
this interpretation of the new rule is insane

OK, I'll bite. What's the correct interpretation, according to you?
ah, but will you continue working there if/once you have options?
Yes, that's too bad... The prospects aren't good either, it seems that Webkit won't support it anytime soon and who knows about IE.

Good to know :)
The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made. -- Jean Giraudoux
Thanks byoung.

I am prepared to pay well for really interesting and refreshingly novel activity alternatives. I know that it will be hard to find good writers from MT, but I what I really want is just basic information like what, where, when, how much, and the website link or contact if available.

What I am not sure about is whether giving detailed description and parameters for the job, together with a reasonably good reward, will be likely to produce reasonably good results...

What about any alternatives to MT that you know of?
Any word on tail-call optimization? Clojure's recur macro is pretty clever but true compiler-level support for recursion would be nice.
Heh, I think a 301 redirect (like tr.im and bit.ly use) that passes on (some) Google juice is much more valuable than $2.20/CPM.
Watching Randall and moot at ROFLcon I felt the same thing. They both have quite the power over their audience. Randall just needs to draw it and moot just needs to say it.
storm in a teacup much ?
Presumably it's "as long as you're using the Cocoa Touch stack as your primary development environment, we don't care what other tools you use; however, if you want to use Flash, develop for a different phone."
Steve doesn't like Flash because he wants us all to use Quicktime
While this comparison does point out the major differences between the two, it is written by the MongoDB team and is definitely phrased in a way to favor MongoDB.
No. Everyone does not lie about those things.

If I were to be in a relationship with you and I found out you were lying about this sort of thing I would be highly pissed.
No, but it sucks to be OpenFeint at this moment, or so I imagine...
This seems like an extremely alarmist take on a VC's blog post. My read, which is also not authoritative, is that Wilson is just saying "stop writing URL shorteners and image uploaders".
"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains is often more improbable than your having made a mistake in one of your impossibility proofs." - The Black Belt Bayesian
So are storyboards and whiteboard diagrams allowed? UML diagrams? Pseudocode? Parser and state machine generators?
http://www-biba.inrialpes.fr/Jaynes/prob.html <-- the rest.
A major portion of almost all iPhone apps is "originally written" in XML -- specifically, the Interface Builder files for the UI and the Core Data schemas. I anticipate a flood of clarification requests to dev support from obsessively detail-oriented programmer/lawyers...
I find it hard to believe this is just about automotive. QNX makes a very well regarded embedded OS, people I know who've worked with it rave about it.

So I can't help wondering if RIM has just bought their next-gen mobile OS, especially given the widely held view that RIM's current platform is ancient and creaky.
Touch-screens can be a serious threat, even without directly replacing all things a traditional handheld is good at. It just needs to reduce the argument for a dedicated gaming device, by providing enough games that the DS' audience enjoys.

Touch Screens are no good for a MegaMan. But games on the order of Cooking Mama, Nintendogs, Brain Age, Pokemon, Final Fantasy, Harvest Moon, etc -- these make up a huge slice of the DS' most-popular titles. And they don't need buttons.
Campaign web site software is often poorly written. If you enter a negative number in the amount field you can usually transfer from money FROM the campaign TO your bank account.

Okay, not really. It's probably a refund. Not sure what the exact specifics of the transaction are. We get our data from OpenSecrets.org and they list the same negative contributions on their site.

http://transparencydata.com/filter/#Y3ljbGU9MjAwNiZjb250cmli...

http://www.opensecrets.org/indivs/search.php?name=garber,+do...
I really doubt that this particular rule is aimed at the masses. Steve Jobs could care less about things like PhoneGap and random IDEs.

In my opinion this is a strategic method to create optionality in case it needs to go into outright war against Adobe.
Ask HN: Review my web-publishing tool for Professional Photogs
blinded and deafened by the fanboyism much?
I was the owner of an iPhone. When I lost it, I bought a Nokia N900. Since then, I use my phone much more than before, and multitasking is one of the causes of this increase. Of course, my battery life is worse, as I use the phone much more.

And what I do is not running SETI@home. I download podcasts on the phone using gpodder. That's much better than any option available on the iPhone. When I'm at home, I like to read some mails while podcasts are downloading and answer a call if somebody calls me.

When my wife is driving, I like to be able to read e-mails while Sygic (the in-car gps application) tells her when to turn right or left (running on the background).

These two scenarios would be beneficial to iPhone users.
Summary:

If you need to "originally" write your code in Swahili, while listening to Milli Vanilli, while reclining in a patch of mud, and then you need fifty oompa loompas to translate the Swahili into C, that is none of Steve Jobs f#ck^ng business.