skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But can you give me an example that actually can't official API wise? Google Sky Map can be implemented on the iPhone with official APIs. Other than apps that edit system settings (like Locale) what can't you really do?

Well, the very first thing that I wanted to implement was something like this:

http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

1. Interpreter/VM with arbitrary code.

2. Open Source

Until recently, VOIP was banned, as well.

Aside from decent notifications and real background tasks (and the aforementioned Locale, which was also on the list), the biggest blockers are the App Store and its restrictive policies.
this is what I got: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/40059300
But in a competitive job market you’re less likely to get the chance to tell me your sob story.

That may be a little delusional (might be his MBA showing) in light of the recent reports of major hiring drives from the big names: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230462870457518...
Would the equivalent for employees be: never work for a "serial entrepreneur"?
I've actually found play to be indispensable at being the best you can be at work. Because the end result really doesn't matter, play lets you experiment more than you would otherwise. This experimentation allows you to discover possibilities that you otherwise would have been too risky. Normally this applies to playing around in the same domain as your work (I make stupid/playful websites to practice my web programming skills, for example.)

This is just a video game, but there are still a lot of transferable skills that are practiced: concentration, planning, forethought, logical thinking, multi-variable problem solving, persistence, etc. These habits would serve him well on a programming job, for instance.
"If you’re 30 and have had 6 jobs since college you’re 98% likely to be a job hopper."

If you have had lots of employees leave your company during a recession, you’re 98% likely to be an ineffective employer.
Thoughts on Leadership from Colin Powell
Simplest DSL tutorial written
Anyways, while in the grips of some cold medicine (which never lets me sleep right), I figured I might as well make some proper use of my time and wrote a small stats DSL to learn how to create a DSL.
You're right. It will be fixed whenever pquerna gets back from the Cassandra get-together.
Task of  Writing Term Paper
Students have an important task of writing term paper in their academic career which can bring them excellent grades. Hence, they need practicing in English language,
Particularly since this seems to be precipitated by a Calacanis tweet, the guy who fires people for any or no reason. Not exactly an example of loyalty.

I'm guessing the reason for the entire post is actually that while Calacanis is okay firing someone, he gets angry if anyone leaves his company for a better position. There was a kerfluffle over that yesterday in various parts of the net (someone from his company sent a 2-weeks notice, and he blew up, firing them and telling them they had their last day and never set foot in the office or email his staff again). I'm guessing his tweet of 23 hours ago is due to him still being pissed at someone jumping ship from Mahalo.

Edit: It came to mind that there's a perfectly capitalist way of solving the problem, for companies that really do hate the idea of someone leaving: sign an employment contract with time terms, rather than hiring at-will employees. :)
As someone with a computer science degree and several years working experience in software development, I feel an urge to play devil's advocate here.

In terms of "getting things done in the world," how is making iPhone fart apps any more of a contribution than, say, publishing a screed in a tabloid? I'm trying not to set up a straw man here, so I'm deliberately choosing lowest common denominator activities.

I don't think it's fair for us technical folk to rest on our laurels simply because we have mastery over some very specific kind of knowledge that has a great deal of useful applications. We have to get out there and get real things done, too.
So this essay is an expansion of http://twitter.com/Jason/status/12621363849 which is almost certainly a response to http://pastebin.com/PSY4iYZ0

If you can't keep your talent as an employer, that's your fault. Berating them for taking care of themselves is immature. Welcome to capitalism, you make money off them and they're free to take the best offer on the table.

As an employer, I prefer have people with many job experiences - so when they show up here they can tell they're respected and fairly compensated!
Thanks, his advice was very surprising to me as well coming from the upper echelons of the US military machinery.

I've posted it to the front page to see if others are interested as well.
From Wikipedia: "Andres Guadamuz, a lecturer in law at the University of Edinburgh discovered that the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) representing the U.S. media industry is urging the United States government to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India to be put on the Special 301 watchlist because of them mandating or suggesting the use of open source software, somehow considering it as a harmful act roughly equivalent to not combating piracy, and not taking into account that also many of the U.S. companies that the IIPA represents depend on using open source software in their own business"
I hope that India will always stay on top of 301 list
... and people working in CEO roles in dream jobs have no incentive to quit. In today's world most companies award loyal employees with nothing. When you're the CEO of a struggling company and you have reached a point where the pile of pink slips is just around the corner, how can you expect your best and brightest not to look around?

I think Mark is right, that chronic switching is a leading indicator of selfishness. But the days when employees are kept around while they fill out their pensions are gone. Most employers are signaling that it's every man for himself.
I haven't actually tried one, but anecdotally, I have been hearing a lot of people say that the zune is at least as good as the iPod, many say it's better.
It's a good article, but there's a flip side to not having titles: You risk confusing people who don't know much about your company yet.

To put it another way, titles aren't just about establishing a pecking order -- they are also about helping others identify who in your organization is responsible for what.

A journalist who wants to talk about your innovative technical solution wants to talk to the CTO (or VP engineering or whatever.) But if they instead unknowingly send an email to the person in the CEO role, that message might sit in the CEO's inbox for a while before getting redirected to the right person.

Or a legal threat could end up in a junior staff member's inbox, where the staff member might take the threat less seriously than a CFO would.

And the problem isn't just about where to send emails. What happens when you grow to a staff of six, three of whom are working on website development? Who is ultimately responsible for the application? The UI? The servers? Someone could ask questions and ultimately figure it out -- but it'd be a lot easier if they could just contact the "sysadmin", the "designer," and the "developer".

To be fair, the article does mention using "role based" titles when talking to the media. And I think that the author's real issue is with the "pecking order" aspect of titles. But forgoing titles altogether isn't the right solution.

Likewise, choosing something that completely obscures your role, like Mad Hatter, is like choosing random names for the variables in your code. You might think it's humorous to have $foo and $bar and $number in your code, but it doesn't help anyone who has to read your code later.
List comprehensions are wonderful, but in his example it's not being used to generate an actual list (each .append() will return None), just as a strange alternate format for a for loop.

It would be really strange to do

[random.choice(boxes).append(apple) for apple in range(100)]

when even if you wanted to do it on one line the normal syntax works and would be less likely to confuse:

for apple in range(100): random.choice(boxes).append(apple)
If they tell you and everyone else trying to game the system and find loopholes then the policy becomes much more complicated than it needs to be. There is a reason laws are written in a specific sort of legal jargon, and most stores would probably like to avoid this situation. The general policy of most stores in my experience has been "don't be a dick", but for some reason people seem to think they are entitled to get a written copy of the policy (usually so they can see if there are any loopholes they can take advantage of...)
Was Jason Calacanis' original comment a swipe at Evan Culver?
"oh my beautiful mind is too good to read this pointless article"

Perhaps it's just that time and attention are limited...
There are often 3 or 4 items on the frontpage that I know are awesome because I read them somewhere else already. I don't need to read it again to share that - I'm certain that happens pretty regularly at every social aggregation site.
"Look at some of the uber-successful icons of Silicon Valley / Technology: Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry/Sergey, Eric Schmidt, Andy Groves, John Doerr. Not job hoppers."

That's because they're founders and CEO's. If you're hiring me, by definition I'm not the founder (but if I have lots of equity and am treated as an equal partner maybe we'll split the difference on that one). Are you hiring me to be CEO, then? If not, find a better example to compare me against.
And if I feel like I'm getting bored here, I'll leave and we both win. I'm no longer bored, you don't have an unproductive worker. I don't see what's taboo about this. While leaving at the first sign of boring work or bad situations / pay / etc is a little iffy, if this is becoming the trend I'm going to leave. Loyalty doesn't come from nothing. It can't be expected by default, it's won. Besides, 2 years is a lot of time when you're a twenty-something.
Microsoft doing well means improving tech sector.
Most of us here have probably heard of one of Zappos' unique offers to their new employees: $1000 to quit right after training. At least in Zappos case that would help minimize #1 and #3 listed at the bottom of the post.
One of my bosses told me, "People who have been at their current company for more than four years probably do not have enough thirst for challenge to be a good fit at a startup."

That seemed to work for him. And I think Mark Suster has had success with his preferences in the opposite direction. So maybe this is an example of hiring to our biases that don't matter as much as we think.
I'd really like to know why I'm being repeatedly downvoted here, just so I know what to improve on in the future. Thanks!
Sounds like you are a contractor, not an early startup employee.
Useless Legacies
As comic book guy would say... Worse example EVER!
Thermopylae Sciences and Technologies is looking for summer interns and full hires. We're a DC-area company working with Google Earth to create a platform for developing geospatial apps that take customers pre-existing data storage and make it relevant to them and their users. We recently hit 100 employees, but it still feels like working at a startup (for better or for worse).

One of our main projects is a data fusion project for the Haiti disaster: http://www.3dudop.org/haiti. It allows users to upload all of their relief data in one place, and it has the most heavily used relief data repository for relief efforts since 7 days after the earthquake.

We use PostGreSQL, PHP, and Javascript for our web portals, and we have Android and iPhone apps as well. We're looking for anybody with interest -- we can teach you the programming languages.

If you're interested, send me an email at trjordan@t-sciences.com.
A Convenient, Mysterious Service From Cable Companies
I'm ambivalent about this. A few times in the article the author suggests that only in a small percentage of cases is job-hopping justified, but I think it's actually justified in far more than a small percentage of cases.

The fact of the matter is that contemporary work culture is (for better or worse) progressing towards lower job security, and more job hopping is an inevitable consequence of this. When job security goes down in the economic community, the propensity for job hopping goes up--even when employee's jobs are not directly at risk. This is a natural and rational response to low job security.

Judging workers who have job hopped in the past can be unfair to those workers, especially when many companies are decreasing their own loyalty to their employees. Why shouldn't workers chase higher paychecks outside of their current companies, if those companies don't adequately value their worth? If an employer has not demonstrated a commitment to retaining its employees, it shouldn't expect any commitment in return.

That said, I do agree with the fundamental sentiment behind the article--that companies who are loyal to their employees should prefer employees that will be loyal to them in return.
Apple, Please Fix These Problems Before the New iPhone Comes Out
I'm an independent recruiter, and I see resumes all the time of people who probably look like "flakes", but here's how you differentiate a flake from a person who hasn't found their niche:

Flakes lack accolades. They leave jobs at the sign of trouble, or they get fired. It really is that cut and dry.

On the other hand, you have individuals (like me, prior to striking out on my own) who consistently find jobs they excel at, and produce results. What any hiring manager, and any recruiter who is worth the salary they are paid should look for are results. Is the candidate simply listing job duties that they are expected to accomplish, or do they go into detail and educate you on the accomplishments and success they've experienced at each job?

There is a difference, and if you're unable to make that distinction, I won't be sending anyone to work for you because that indicates to me you're looking for grunts. Not team members.
FireEye (http://www.fireeye.com/company/management.html)

I took a quick look at the company's products, and I don't really see how he stands to benefit by convincing people Microsoft is more secure than its competitors.

Fill me in if you see something I missed.
I'm not sure I'd want to hire someone who hadn't switched jobs several times in their careers so far -- especially if they worked in tech over the past 10 to 15 years.

In my experience, people who have worked at various companies bring a more diverse set of experiences to the table. They know that there's more than one way to do something.

On the other hand, people who have stayed at one job for a long time (in a non-executive role) while everything around them was changing probably aren't as good as identifying opportunities or accepting change.
They could, if authorities wanted it, authorities seem happy giving them a long leash.
I'm using Ubuntu but this should still apply to OS X. SimCity 4 works nearly perfectly (both software & hardware rendering) under Wine. There used to be a problem with the installer but based on test results on the Wine AppDB that works now too. Also you can set a custom resolution using "-CustomResolution:enabled" and using eg. "-r1440x900x32" which helps make the game more playable on widescreen monitors. I used to run SimCity under VirtualBox but with larger populations it's much faster under wine.
Can you explain how security does not lead to safety in this case?
possibly, but I think wanting to "win" and "make money," while providing a decent service is often a decent enough goal. After all, we are talking about group coupons, deals and lead generation -- not a cure for cancer.
I'm 24 years old. I've had 6 employers since I was 19. I've doubled my salary every year for the past four years. And I think this article is bullshit.

Am I wrong for choosing the path that brings me personal success at the cost of "company loyalty"? The depiction of an ideal employee painted by this author sounds a lot like the Japanese Salaryman - diligent and loyal to the company. Isn't that model considered totally broken? Company loyalty as a top priority comes at the cost of ineffectiveness and lower morale. It just doesn't seem right.

If your employees are being scalped away at salary+15, maybe you're not paying them enough. If your employees are working 12 months and switching jobs, maybe you don't offer enough internal growth. If your are rejecting applications of "job hoppers", maybe you're leaving major value on the table.

In Silicon Valley, it's an employee's market. The employer has to work to retain, support, and fairly compensate your employees. Otherwise, you shouldn't be surprised when they up and leave.
I think it's more accurate to say they are pulling off products nobody has been able to pull off before.
Fucking asshole. Almost no one wants to change jobs every 12 months. Looking for work is a pain in the ass and changing jobs is inherently risky. Everyone goes into a job hoping they will work out so well at the company as to have no incentive to leave... at least for 5-10 years. All this is even more true for the best employees, because the number of desirable employers drops off faster than the number of talented people. (The best people, who want only to work at the best companies, have what is in a way the most difficult kind of job search.)

Job hopping is almost always involuntary-- not in the sense of a person getting fired, but in the sense of a person being wise enough to realize that he's in a position that his wasting his time, and moving on-- the rational response.

The "job hopper" stigma originally came into existence because people who did so would rise rapidly in salary through iterated negotiations; in times such as the late 1990s, it's possible to get to a very high salary level this way. Pursued inflexibly, it's a terrible strategy in the long term, because it makes you less likely to end up as someone's protege (rolling stone, no moss) and eventually compensation will reflect the resulting stagnation. But most "job hoppers" do not fall into this category; they change jobs not because they are trying to game the system, but because they realize they are wasting time.

If your career is not improving-- you're not learning, inadequately mentored, and no one is looking out for your advancement-- then you should change jobs as soon as you can do so with minimal harm to the company. (If you're in a small company, it might be right to stay on for a couple months, at least to train someone else.) Since most people are not and cannot be "protege", this means that it's good to shift around a few times until finding a fit.

Likewise, everyone has to do some grunt work and deal with some unpleasantness, and recognizing this is just being a mature person, but anyone who finds out his job is mostly or entirely grunt work, or work unrelated to his career (e.g. the programmer who gets put full-time on office tasks) is wasting time and should leave.

Sorry, but I have to say all this because I am sick and fucking tired of people ripping on my generation for not playing by someone else's shitty rules. Are the older people really so damn entitled as to not understand all this? And how can they expect loyalty to companies when layoffs happen all the time?
You are not randomly placing apples in crates. You are putting sequential groups of 10 in crates. 10 is the average number of apples that will be in each crate, but it is possible no crate has 10 apples in it.
In Age of Globalism, Pardon My French
If you REALLY want to compete with Apple–quit trying. Don’t copy what they do, but show some gumption and identify untapped market needs and solve them. Then you too can be a market leader instead of simply trying to compete with Apple on their own turf.

This advice should also be heeded by Linux and other FOSS projects.

Another thing about Apple (under Steve Jobs) is that they are both ahead of and behind the rest of the industry. In this, I suspect they are modeling themselves after Mercedes.

Mercedes once had R&D that was years ahead of the competition, yet they also had a bit of a "stodgy" reputation because they often waited to implement certain features. The Mercedes-Benz of old had a view way out ahead, yet they would patiently wait until technology was truly, solidly ready before releasing.

The Steve Jobs formulation of Apple has this patience as well. There were keyboard-less 10" 1024x768 slate form factor PCs dating from 2001. (They were trying to do Magazine subscriptions on the platform back then too. Not sure if that will ever work like they want it to.) I know, because I own one of these slate form factor PCs. Such a machine was possible in 2001, nifty seeming to us propeller-heads, but the technology wasn't yet ready for something really polished.

Release a device when it's possible, and you sell toys to a a few propeller-heads. Release a device when it can be truly slick, and you sell to the propeller-heads and everyone else as well.
I agree with the general concept, but how on earth is 3 years "short-term"? That's enough time to see certain medium-sized software projects through the full development cycle from conception through v1, with plenty of time left over to follow up with v2 and v3. I get that it's nothing like being a lifer, but I think its a significant period of time for an engineer. Also, your use of phrases like "buh bye" make me think you're trolling for controversy a bit too hard.
"'The truth,' Mr. Diouf said the other morning, 'is that the future of the French language is now in Africa.'"
That's because you've happened to grow accustomed to the misdesigned concept of "minimizing applications to tray". The fact that it's been part of graphical user interfaces for some time and mostly gone unquestioned doesn't mean it's good design.
It probably matters to the extent that it helps form the company's culture. It might not be that one is better than the other, but picking one side might matter for its own sake.
Job hopping for a founder or CEO would be an entirely different thing. If you take someone's money, you take on responsibility to them. If you personally hire people into a position that won't exist if you abdicate, the same is true. If you hit a patch of shitty or painful work for a few months, you stick through it because other people are depending on you.

Someone who tries a corporate job for four months, realizes that he isn't getting good projects, and leaves, is (a) doing what he should do, since he's undervalued in his current role, and (b) not really hurting anyone.
I'm right at the age he was talking about. Does 3.5 years at my first job sticking through two short-term paycuts to be laid off make up for the now (6 employers) that have followed?

* 1.5 years, left after the group was split in half and I was forced into full time testing (I enjoyed part time testing and the first year in that role was outstanding, the new position and team was not a good match).

* 1 year, taken over, got J2EE experience and worked with a great team, too bad the office was scheduled to be closed and that we were given no work to do.

* 6 months, layoff, worked with the full cutting edge J2EE JBoss (Seam) stack but was let go as one of the newest employees and the only one that didn't know C# (15% of IT laid off) when the budget was shifted.

* Short stint at a failed startup, learned some PHP

* New stint at a promising startup

Technically, with the take over, that's now 7 employers.
I think the new job looks quite promising, and I don't regret any of those experiences, as I now have a lot of breadth.

I freely admit that I had to work to avoid appearing as a job hopper, and that hurt in the recently ended job hunt. I still think (hope?) that I've ended up at my best work place since that year learning J2EE.

*editted for clarity and inserting some more details in the first few minutes