skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I changed jobs regularly about every 18 months for the first 10 years of my career, for mainly the same reasons as you do. What I found was that I would start a new job with a lot of hopeful optimism, immediately making huge amounts of progress, impressing my co-workers and managers with my hard work and new and improved approaches to problem solving. After 90% of the low hanging fruit improvements had been implemented, the last 10% would be hung up by red tape, unflexible co-workers, bad management, and the general suckitude that almost every company has.

I would get frustrated and start looking for greener pastures. After doing this for the first several years, I realized this approach was better as a contractor than a full time employee. I did contracting for several more years, until I found a company that just "sucked less" than the others I'd worked for.

One thing you will learn as you have more experience: All companies suck to work for (unless you started it yourself). Some just suck less than others. Try to find one that you can at least tolerate the suckage. When I get bummed out about idiotic co-workers, management that doesn't know what the hell they're doing (example: no backup generators for a data center with $millions in equipment), I just close my eyes and try to meditate on the six figure salary and five figure annual bonus. That usually makes me forget how much it might suck at the time. Oh, and the fact that I still get to play architect and design some cool systems.

Good luck!
Why People Don’t Upgrade Their Browser – Part IV
Isn't that the problem with any testing of Android apps? This is just one more different Android "subplatform".
Hmmm, that's not my impression. The data reevaluation that resulted in 1934 being declared the hottest year in the 20th century, the "hide the decline" games, the fierce debate over the existence of the Medieval Warm Period and its extent (I think the alarmists now admit its existence, but debate its scope, e.g. there's a lack of data in the Southern Hemisphere and the oceans), they all suggest to me that the science here is not settled.

The only way you're going to convince "skeptics" like myself (I only deny that the science is settled) will be to retrieve the original data sets the CRU lost and then do the science again in a totally open manner. Share the data, publish the code and methods, etc.
TextEdit is worth mentioning then too.
Video Decode Acceleration framework available on Mac OS X 10.6.3
The people who were demonstrably wrong, you mean?
I've tackled one of ITA's puzzles (word rectangle, I think I found a 7x7 in 60-ish seconds). I got through a phone screen and interview, but was ultimately turned down for 'lack of experience.'

If you're trying to get hired at ITA by solving one of these puzzles, here's something to keep in mind: the point of solving a puzzle is to GET A PHONE SCREEN. That's all. Many of these puzzles have no 'perfect solution.' I'd be surprised if any of them do. Instead, they're a proving-ground for your coding chops. So write tests, write comments, and make the code as clear as you can. Provide your best solution, but remember: the point is to write something good enough that they'll pick up the phone and CALL YOU. I spent much too long on my solution before I realized it was already good enough to clear this bar.

If you do get an interview, plan for a full day. You'll get another problem of this nature (though much simpler) at the end of the day, plus the usual salvo of whiteboard coding exercises.
This story has been updated with a video from Fox12 Oregon, with an actual interview with the lady who has glaucoma and seems really happy about being able to read again.

She mentions that she could write, but she couldn't see what she had written.
Oracle also uses Mercurial a lot (through Sun).
extend does not create any kind of hierarchy, there's no subclassing going on here.

if you try to set a final field you'll get an exception as expected.

protected members when everything is immutable is pointless. Clojure cleanly separates values and identities.
Legal spying via the cell phone system
Names Of Volcanoes In Iceland
Linux on the iPhone: Android running on the iPhone
> Is your average citizen just dying to be worried over the next catastrophe and willing to throw money at whomever can scare them the most?

If you doubt this, I'd like to introduce you to the Department of Homeland Security.
you know what the funniest thing was about that post? this comment...

"This is one of the things that makes me hesitate to get a Mac when I get my first laptop next year. Spec-wise a Macbook would fit my needs perfectly, but I'm just not sure I want to become part of the Mac demographic. Unfortunately, said demographic tends to intersect with the irritating-smug-people demographic and I don't want anything to do with that. I like Macs, but I wish the company was secure enough in its betterness to present itself simply as creating great products, not as a creating products that are better than everything else."

its like saying i prefer bsod over a pic of bsod. ha ha
We're going in circles now.

I can claim that 60% of US citizens believe in angels and cite surveys to back that claim up. You can argue about whether that fact is correct with or without a personal belief in angels.

If someone (perhaps someone with an axe to grind for or against the existence of angels) simply refused to accept that evidence of 60% belief and provided nothing in return, then that alone would make them a dubious source to me.

This whole thread started with your confusion of a list of prominant subscribers to global warming which was offered as proof of consensus with it being proof of the consensus position itself. Let's not end in the same place we started.
Islam has a very special kind of Crazy though: http://www.inquisitr.com/wp-content/this-is-an-outrage.jpg

This guy looks like he just might get all worked up about South Park too.
Yeah, if I were Google, I probably wouldn't be saying "Google is new Redhat, while Apple is new MS." to my shareholders.
This sounds rather more sane than using microwaves to gently cook people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System

The fundamental problem with less-than-lethal / non-lethal weapons is that if you use them incompetently for crowd control, you end up with a lot of people crushed and trampled to death.
Watch Live Races
Jason Calacanis at his finest.
protected members when everything is immutable is pointless.

Except when used to mark the boundary between a stable public API and an internal API that is free to change between releases.
The injunction against pictures of him is part of a wider injunction against idols. Muslims don't generally create realistic art for fear that the representation could lead to temptation to worship a false idol, which IS against the book. Because of the source of the rule, pictures of Mohammed are especially forbidden, because they pose an extra risk of being worshiped.
Google is relentless...
This is a Unix system! I know this!
Unfortunately, it isn't exactly a fair competition for overseas Americans due to the long reach of US financial laws. Aside from having to file taxes to both the country of residence and the US, there are a number of financial reporting rules about even fairly modest sums of money (>$10k) in foreign bank accounts. Most troubling is that the failure to keep up with the ever-changing accounting regulations results in draconian penalties which are often more than the person's entire net worth.

I find the threat of being completely wiped out financially or even being put in prison simply for not keeping track of whether a paycheck has put my bank account over $10k or not far more worrying than owing a bit of money in taxes.

This gives Americans a modest disincentive to move abroad and compete with the people from Japan/Canada/UK etc... who don't face those dangers.
There are a couple of ways to address the virus problem besides installing anti-virus on Windows.

Here's a few things I'd consider if I wanted to run an office with minimal computer support:

- run the LTS Ubuntu instead of Windows
- maybe run OS X, on Mac Minis if buying new hardware
- install one Windows terminal server for critical Windows-only software
- lock down firewall to permit only whitelisted web-sites
- run locally hosted (I believe this is possible) Google Docs as office software

Windows virus problems, people surfing Facebook, porn, you-tube, Twitter etc., will suck away time in an office if you don't get some kind of a handle on it. I hate offices where stuff is super locked-down, but put in charge, I'd want to screw things down pretty tight.

Obviously developers, salespeople might be somewhat of an exception... it's a hard call to make.
His argument basically boils down to that Google docs will always lag behind the desktop version of Office and, therefore, will always suck. On the other hand, Microsoft "clearly ... will have better editing features."

"I guess Google could just give Docs away" (they do already)

"Google's efforts with Docs seems like such a competitive joke" (even though they satisfy the needs of most basic document/spreadsheet authors, which is to say a huge market).

The author conflates feature-parity with the market leader with product quality.
How to make great teachers
So who is this guy, and why are his views on Entrepreneurship (one word) relevant? His "About Me" page is blank. Has this guy done anything? He was asked to speak on this topic? Why?

I agree with jim_dot, below. Yeah, some cliches and well-known truths with which I'm quite familiar -- nothing new or compelling here.

"If two experts disagree in a room on something then no one really knows the right answer – take a step back, its time to find your own path." Really?

I can't resist: if they disagree outdoors instead of in a room, what does that mean? :-)
This seems more like a complaint from ivy league college grads about lack of wealth in the technology sector compared to the finance sector. Color me unimpressed.
I'm slightly torn about this. This does appear to be theft, however, but Gruber also seems to imply that Apple is a bit of a victim. This reminds me of the relationship between celebrities and the paparazzi. Celebrities hate the downside when they are stalked trying to live their normal lives, but need all of the attention to continue making the ridiculous amounts of money they do. Similarly, Apple lives by creating the obscene levels of hype around their product launches. I can't help but think Apple has created this environment where people would freak out about a prototype leak and do anything to get early details about it.
It's more sockpuppet than kool-aid.

(See this [dead]ed submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1118734)
Good to know his online reputation is an accurate portrait of the guy... What a tool.
Not a good example, unless you don't believe jihadists killed 3,000 on 9/11, aren't trying to get their hands on nuclear warheads, etc.

I think we can argue structure (e.g. DHS vs. the old, FBI vs. MI5), means, competence, etc. while still accepting the reality of a threat.
There is one gem in here:

"If two experts disagree in a room on something then no one really knows the right answer – take a step back, its time to find your own path."

I think we forget this far too often. People try to act as though person X's way of running startups is the One True Way even when lots of others have valid reasons to argue against it.
Name brand sites (NewYorkTimes.com, ESPN.com, CNN.com) are rumored to get CPM rates much higher than that. I agree, however, that Gizmodo is probably not getting those rates. In addition, publishers usually get high rates on their direct media sales, but bursts like this aren't accounted for in those budgets, so they end up placing remnant tags that get substantially lower rates.
Consider so-called Windows Server (NT, 200x) vs Linux.
I had several sites on Media Temple's "grid" service before cloud options were in vogue. The reliability and performance were terrible. Media Temple blamed Expression Engine CMS and Mint tracking scripts, which seemed odd given that they are quite popular and well written. I moved those same sites to Joyent and have never been disappointed.
And so it begins.... http://arnab.org/blog/deceiving-users-facebook-button
You should be able to throw up even if it sucks the fluid out of your stomach. The muscles would still work, and the stuff should be slimy enough that it's not going to scratch up your esophagus.
If you hang around these gadget blogs enough, you'll notice that anything new will get a few comments saying "Ooooh this looks hot, it's just what I've been waiting for! I'm gonna replace my xxx device with this as soon as it comes out." ... Good for them, but it doesn't correlate at all with actual market success.
In my experience, most middle-class parents who "flee" a city on the way down do so in order to put their children into a better school. I don't know the exact situation in the US, but I'm willing to bet that it's a fairly universal trend.
> His interviewers were hiring him for expertise in his field that they themselves did not have. Pretty much it was bureaucrats and administrators hiring somebody for a particular skill requirement.

This is what keeps me coming back to small companies and startups. Any company with an HR department big enough that they hire using a series of bullet points pretty much guarantees I will have brain-dead coworkers.
"If you are like most, you kill more time hopping around on Facebook than you do exploring the Net."

Uhhh...not even remotely applicable to me, unless by "the Net" he is referring to a Sandra Bullock movie.
Money is one motivator. Fame or the crusade itself may be others. Actually believing in the disaster and wanting to save people's lives is another motivator. It depends on the person.

The money argument is a pretty easy one. We are at a potential shift point in how we power ourselves. The problem is that the "new" power sources are not economical yet. Political pressure with subsides can make it economical (for the companies involved). Several politicians in the US are heavily invested in wind or solar. Fear works in spending public money.

The natural progression will happen when oil prices are too high and newer sources become economical or some breakthrough happens (think the progression of aluminum). Disaster / Fear means the change needs to happen before the market would normally change on its own.

I really wish media and politics had stayed out of the science. I mourn the loss of objectivity, testing, and discovery.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8637978.stm
This in chapter 11.
I don't think Facebook is buyable right now. Consider how wide the PDF of its future values is. There is a chance that Facebook will be bigger than Google. I'm sure many of you have reasons why it won't happen, but it is plausible. It's certainly what Facebook management is shooting for.

Alternatively, Facebook could be out of fashion in 2 years. Don't forget that we work in a fashion industry. It wouldn't even be worth its last post-money valuation.

So the expected value of Facebook lies somewhere in between and that expected value is radically short of management's dreams. They don't need cash and they seem to be executing well. This is not a recipe for strategic acquisition.

I think Facebook will remain private and independent for as long as it can. If they are on a path to success and need more cash, they'll IPO (remember those?). If they keep their user base, but can't scale their monetization, they'll be bought by somebody who can (a search engine). The worst case isn't pretty because they don't have the backstop that has been supporting MySpace through its troubles (music).
He still spends plenty of time taking credit for it, I'm sure.
"The state of the Twitter ecosystem: a developer's perspective"
@jjs, The contract is functions not members, and Clojure has a way to declare public and private fns, so what's your argument?
New Google Tool Maps Government Requests
I think this has been posted here multiple times.
The first part of the operation involves getting a target's cell phone number from a public database that links names to numbers for caller ID purposes. DePetrillo used open-source PBX software to spoof the outgoing caller ID and then automated phone calls to himself, triggering the system to force a name lookup.

Uh, oh. And the rest does not look good either - the attack looks credible (the tracking bit looks legally iffy).

the hands of GSM providers in the U.S. are tied.

Just today was talking with a lawyer who's reviewing data protection legislation, vs. mandated (by EU regulations) information disclosure requirements. There may not be a way of reconciling both ...
HN doesn't filter duplicate url's? They don't have a search function that I am aware of. Is there a way to check before submitting?
It's a fun project! I built one several years ago, after playing around with a bunch of different approaches. I wound up with a human-guided tool that seems to work pretty well for coming up with interesting ones:

http://anagramlogic.com/
Just to be clear: the point is that wild speculative hype is rampant. The fact that they are occasionally correct is probably more a function of probabilities than legwork or rational thought.
Some of the previous ones were deleted, and I think it might not filter against deleted posts?
Well, you didn't identify what I said that you think is a strawman, but I'll point out yours.

Fine, nobody's saying HN/YC should be allowed to overuse resources. I didn't say anybody was saying that.

Not giving a warning probably doesn't count as great customer service, but then again, once the problem had been identified by Pair, and once they knew of the negative impact HN was having on every other paying customer on that server, what kind of customer service to those other customers would it have been for Pair to fire off an email to HN then wait an hour, or thirty minutes, or ten minutes, before shutting it down?

How long should Pair have allowed HN to impact other customers to satisfy folks here? And what makes HN more important than any other paying customer on that server?

Oh right, it's because you read and like HN, which, ironically, so do I.

As for it being a sales screwup, maybe. I kinda doubt there is a great deal of overlap between HN readership and the average potential Pair customer. We could also suggest that Pair taking action to protect all those other customers on the server is an example of how they would provide good service to the many when they're being hammered by one overpowering fellow customer.
I know I'm in the wrong camp to ask this question, but reading article after article for over 2 years which all have this same theme, I have to just ask again: Why do you need for others to know what you "like"? Why is that so important to people?

The real feeders off all this are people's egos, and advertisers. Oh, I just answered my question, I'm afraid.
and dual boot. (Triple? maybe chromeOS?)
> Facebook knows more than all of us like to admit about its users. They have our personal information […]

People will eventually realize what a dystopia this is. So my guess is that Facebook (and similar services) will become obsolete soon (within a decade or two). Just sell easy to use personal web servers[1] that you just plug into the wall, and they are toast ($99 is much cheaper than my privacy).

[1] By "easy", I mean esier than Facebook itself. By "personal", I mean at home (virtual private hosting is not personal).
this is one of those things where not knowing the back story could radically change the context.
Quite a bit of discussion yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1280219
How I Saved the Gaming Industry Overnight By Being Awesome
@_delirium why would they be deleted? I think how a ceo treats outgoing employees would be highly relevant on HN...
Meet my girlfried
more pics http://porno.ghici.info
Linux has had decent success on servers, but that's not really relevant to the consumer market. I think desktops (or laptops) makes a better comparison to mobile phones.
While you recognize that so much of this is a pyramid scheme, it seems to me that you're saying I've got to keep paying just so that the pyramid can keep going. Is there ever a point where it's OK to say "this is wrong, we must stop"?

You're also assuming an extremely high degree of responsibility for neighbors. Now, I'm not going to go religiously Ayn Rand on you. I acknowledge that society is interdependent, and I couldn't have achieved as much as I have without neighbors that work together.

But I think you're going too far. There are things I'd like to do in my life, and for those that are most important, I'm consciously laying things out in a way that should allow me to get there. This isn't without some pain. There are plenty of things lower on my priority list that I must forgo in order to get to the high-priority ones.

I don't have an iPhone, I don't have an LCD TV, let alone HD. My wife and I each have a car: mine is 8 years old with 108,000 miles; hers is 7 with 130,000 miles. We rarely eat out. We don't have fancy furniture: much of it is from WalMart, as is much of my clothing. We use credit cards for convenience, and have never run a balance on them. This is not an extravagant lifestyle, this is thrift.

Yet I see every day people living extravagantly: leasing cars and turning them over every 2-3 years; huge houses, refinanced at 45 years old so they'll be paying until they're 75; cigarettes and expensive drinks; $900 purses and fancy shoes.

The result is that I have more assets. Yet I constantly hear complaints about how unfair it is that people have more in the bank, and those "lucky" few should have to shoulder the burdens that frequently result from the profligacy of the indebted.

So I make myself suffer to save. And it seems that I'm to be made to suffer later, too, as my savings are looted. But on the other side of the screen, those living high on the hog will, by virtue of their very wastefulness, get a claim on proceeds of my frugality, allowing them to continue their party.

How do you expect me to feel that I owe this to them?

You say that I should help the younger generation by helping them shoulder some of the tax burden. But isn't paying the debts of the grasshopper creating moral hazard, doing harm to the younger generation by showing them that the path to happiness is finding an ant to carry them along?
I suppose Mark Cuban thinks Facebook is going to turn into a 1991 AOL: a one-stop shop for all things internet, a lens through which you experience everything. This is the same Mark Cuban who said that Twitter will replace Google for searching... I think he's a little out of touch with how people use these services.

Facebook is attempting to expand in scope because they're ambitious, but at the end of the day, they're just a social networking site. As a matter of fact, they're really just a template for people who don't want to go to the trouble of designing their own webpage. Which is a great service, but that's all it is. Oh, and it's easy to link to other people's web pages.

Facebook and social networking are exciting today the same way EBay was in 2000: the medium is the message. You went to EBay because it was novel and fun. Soon enough, Facebook will have reached it's potential the way EBay has.
After wending
What do you think?

More funny pics from http://porno.ghici.info/view.php?filename=538my_wife.jpg
by allowing subclassing you have a larger contract you have to maintain when you want to make changes to the underlying class: rather than just the public interface, you also need to worry about the protected interface.

In other words, if you allow subclassing, then you also have to worry about the interface that you have explicitly marked visible to subclasses.

Normally a non-problem, by definition.

final is useful when sealing a class that inherits from a parent class with a protected interface, but even if "final" is reduced to an annotation (or even a comment), its presence explicitly limits your end of the API contract.