skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worry about the startup whose CEO cares a single second on what kind of fridge they have. Wrong priorities. Spent that extra 20 minutes on hiring, product planning, sales or coding.
It seems like it used to mean more to be published. Somehow, the mere existence of your book on the shelf made it clear that a high standard for quality had been met. In recent years, especially in technical books, this doesn't seem to be true anymore.

One problem is that there's 40 books on any given subject. Each time a new language or tech comes along, there are lots of publishers wanting to be the ones to sell millions of copies. From the point of view of revenue, each publisher has about the same chance of making a sale to an unsuspecting buyer, so it almost doesn't "matter" (to them) if a book has errors everywhere.

Another problem is that the industry moves so quickly. Who cares what was published even 5 years ago in tech, in most cases? The problem is, any true experts in a new field won't be working at publishing companies, they'll be doing the high-paying jobs building the actual products. So unless the author sees an error, no one else will, before the book goes to print.

The responsibility then falls to the consumers of books. If you want accuracy, you need a more peer-reviewed model; or, simply, peers, for asking questions. Something like Wikipedia has both the immediacy of the web and the accuracy of a huge number of eyeballs (minus a contingent of vandals that seems insignificant in practice).
The author is rather confused about what's going on here.

> Things are starting to finally come together. Flash and huge performance gains, all in the same release. Flash is CPU hungry, so Android makes everything about the environment more efficient.

Adding JIT improves the speed of the Dalvik VM. But unless Adobe threw away their existing Flash codebase for the Android port, Flash is going to run as native code on the device, which is entirely outside the Dalvik VM. So these speed improvements will not affect Flash performance at all.
I worry about the startup CEO that thinks it's beneath him to order a fridge. He may be aloof and think his job doesn't involve grunt work.
You're making some very well reasoned points here too, and got my upvote. I'm not sure if it's just being accustomed to Apache and GIMP as long-standing products, or what exactly, but I don't get quite the same visceral negative response to those names as Diaspora (or Jew filesystem or Tutsi browser).

I'm not out to be overly politically correct either, for the same reason - I don't fall into the category of anyone who could actually relate personally to the notion of diaspora. My personal reaction was negative, others here seem to like the name plenty enough. To each their own in this regard.
It's interesting that he considers testing to be a normal part of CI - "Once I'm done I carry out an automated build on my development machine. Only if it all builds and tests without errors is the overall build considered to be good." I have worked on projects of 30+ programmers where the dev process was called "continuous integration", but what that meant was "check in your code as often as possible, regardless of if it works". There were no automated tests to check your code beforehand, and most programmers didn't even bother to see if their code compiled before adding changes to source control.

I have also worked on projects where we had a "preflight" process. This meant that all potential changes were uploaded to a build machine and tested with the head branch to see if they compiled. Only if they successfully compiled were the changes actually added to source control. This sounds a lot like what they call 'pending head' - http://martinfowler.com/bliki/PendingHead.html . It's interesting that Fowler doesn't consider pending head/preflight a necessary part of CI or of good development; IME it dramatically cuts down on broken builds because it keeps developers honest. Didn't check to see if your code compiles? Too bad for you, it's not going in.

Fowler mentions several problems with CI builds still breaking. "One reason is discipline, people not doing an update and build before they commit". So maybe he would agree that preflight/pending head is beneficial. It also helps because you can go home on time - you don't have to stick around and babysit a build process if you commit code late in the day. That saves dev time and makes things progress faster.

Very good article; thanks for posting.
As a counter-example, the previous startup I worked at was a medium-sized perl shop in SV. They had an incredibly hard time recruiting high-quality engineers. Finding good coders who were proficient in perl was a rarity and it seemed as though all of the various perl shops were fighting over these people when they hit the market; finding interns and recent college grads who either knew perl or were willing to spend the time to learn it was almost impossible. From what I saw the pool of perl talent was just not as broad as people claim.
But then again a lot of the game code is similar pretty much to such benchmarking code - for example skinning, physics, collision detection, FFT.
"guns don't kill people, the pauli exclusion principle kills people"
Please remind those of us reading this thread who are less familiar with the reliable books on the subject what books are good books about C. I know about K & R, but what else do busy C programmers recommend?

After edit: when you know a book is crap, do you say so in reviews on Amazon.com? That's helpful for people browsing books by subject.
When I was in high school in the late '90s, I found an old discarded TRS-80 Model 4 that apparently still worked. I wanted to tinker with it, but it had no hard drive, and I had no software, so I walked into the local Radio Shack store, and asked the manager if they still supported the TRS-80.

The manager special ordered a copy of TRS-DOS on 5.25" floppies from the Tandy warehouse at no charge, gave me a catalog of the software and peripherals still available, and told me to come back whenever I needed support or information about the system.

It's a pity they're no longer like this. They can't really compete against Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City, and all of the online consumer electronics stores, and now they no longer really serve the niche that was the basis of their original success. I'll miss Radio Shack.
If I leave MSFT, this is the one person I'll sorely miss. An admin at a large company is a life saver for so many reasons.
Pretty sure they don't charge 30% - I know the guys behind half the list.

Facebook are starting from scratch with credits, these companies and others have millions of existing users who have existing money in their accounts. Facebook on the other hand have hundreds of millions of facebook users, not people topping up their credits to buy stuff in games. Most of their users don't even play games.

That doesn't make Facebook ubiquitous and it will leave people wondering why they can't use the balance of their other account in the games they play like previously, and it will leave developers eating a fee that is up to 22% higher than it was through 3rd parties.

Although some will 'win' and make assloads of money overall it's not a 'win' anymore than it would be if you could only accept Visa.
Despite the title, there's not much here about "ugly" sites ... perhaps it a bad choice of words. In the examples he gives, I wouldn't consider all of them ugly.

Plus, some of them (Drudge and MySpace) don't have ecommerce "conversions" which is what the rest of the article appears to talk about.
The primary purpose of the N1 and its successors is to make sure there's a high-quality Android device that uses the latest OS. If not for the N1, there would have been nothing running Android 2.1 for months after its release and the phone manufacturers would have been even less motivated to provide updates. Breaking the carrier stranglehold is a secondary and longer term goal.
The Information Continuum - Three Types of Subtly Semi-Structured Information
Will Google’s Nexus One hit Australia?
Both come from Lockheed's 'Skunk Works' and they applied a lot of what they learned on the U2 to the SR71, so you're not so far off.
Calacanis should hang out with Mark Cuban. They're both getting less relevant.
If you're interested in the strange working relationship between guards and prisoners, I highly recommend Newjack:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newjack:_Guarding_Sing_Sing?w...

The author is a journalist who was refused access to Sing Sing, so he joined the prison service as a guard there for a year.
The hydrostatic pressure can not push the water higher than the level of the top of the water.

The cup experiment is showing gravity, not hydrostatic pressure. There is more water in the lower tube, so it's heavier than the water on the other side.
Wow.. i knew that many people cried for JIT, but now seeing numbers.. i hope the update will be released soon! Hopefully at Google I/O?
touché. So we agree, shouldn't care about the kind of fridge and it's not beneath them to order it. Btw, hopefully the people in the company care more about the quality of the people, the work and the direction that what is IN the fridge.
I'm going to post this here because I can't find anywhere else to have a dialogue about the seemingly universal fondness for, and unqualified recommendation of, Dropbox. I'm someone who takes contracts seriously when I sign them, even when they're just meant to be boilerplate fluff, and I was really unhappy to read the following in Dropbox's ToS:

> You agree not to do any of the following while using the Site, Content, Files or Services:

> o Post, publish or transmit any text, graphics, or material that: (i) is false or misleading; (ii) is defamatory; (iii) invades another's privacy; (iv) is obscene, pornographic, or offensive; (v) promotes bigotry, racism, hatred or harm against any individual or group; (vi) infringes another's rights, including any intellectual property rights; or (vii) violates, or encourages any conduct that would violate, any applicable law or regulation or would give rise to civil liability;

I sent a mail to Dropbox saying the following:

> I'm used to seeing such passages in the ToS for bulletin boards and other public-facing chat forums, but it seems to be incredibly limiting to say that I cannot post, to a dropbox that is meant for my use only, information unless I know for a fact that it is true. (The ToS make no provision about belief; I simply cannot transmit text that is false.) This restriction seems already draconian enough; but requiring further that the true text be not misleading seems well nigh impossible.

but never received a reply. I understand that it's easy, and natural, to say "Oh, they'll never enforce that"; but should one really be willing to enter into a contractual relationship based entirely on the understanding that the actual contract will be ignored?
It's more likely than you think
The six is to treat him while more vials are obtained.

It's cheaper to spread out the vials, see which hospital needs it, then re-collect them when you have an actual patient.

If they would see a patient every day, I'm sure they would stock more.
I just finished reading that book, and it doesn't sound like the relationship that this blog post implies at all. He said he sympathized with the inmates a bit (and let them break minor rules), but he didn't bring any contraband in.

(And interestingly, the book makes prison sound a lot nicer than I would have imagined. Less rules than the residential high school I went to, anyway...)
I just can't wrap my head around the photos. Like I said, I don't know them.
Ask HN: What sort of contract between two founders?
My friend and I want to bootstrap a startup as a nights-and-weekends effort. The first thing we want to do is to agree on a contract that will keep things fair if one of us doesn't contribute as much as the other, or bails out completely. After reading HN threads on founder disputes, we have so far come up with the following. Please critique, who knows what trouble you might save us down the road with your suggestions.<p>Our agreement so far:

1. 50/50 ownership (subject to vesting)

2. Four year vesting schedule (25% at 12 months, 50% at 24 months, so on...)

3. A commitment to work x hours per week.

4. Some rule where a founder who fails to meet that commitment for a prolonged period can be fired.

5. Eventual compensation, at some percentage of market consulting rate ($50/hr? $100/hr?) from revenue for the founder who worked more, if the other founder fell short of the commitment.

This may seem pretty complicated, but our goal is to set something up that will ease tension rather than create it. Any comments/ideas?
I didn't know. I actually have it on my shelf. My dad gave it to me when I was just starting C about a year ago. I guess this explains why some of the code didn't run.
I'll just leave this link here...

http://gizmodo.com/5511236/the-thrill-of-flying-the-sr+71-bl...
I read this article when it was first published, and it was what first sparked my interest in the exchange side of the equities world. There's a lot of junk information on the internet on these topics, and as a result they're difficult to read up on. A common error I've seen is articles that imply that flash orders and high-frequency-trading are the same thing, which is incorrect.

"Automatic programs began issuing and canceling tiny
orders within milliseconds to determine how much the
slower traders were willing to pay

I originally understood this to mean that parties were 'painting the tape' by causing trades to appear with prices different to what the actual market price is. But that's not it.

In the scenario described, it's not trades that are being issued and cancelled, but orders. As in, an opportunity to trade if the other party matches.

I don't think it would be possible to coordinate a situation of sniffing out the best price as described here. Markets have queues, and if you want your order to be filled then you put it in the queue where it sits until you cancel it or it gets filled. It can only be filled when it's at the front of the queue. So participants in the market compete for queue spots at each price point from the moment the market opens.

That would be exchange dependent, but that just emphasises the point. If one exchange did this and another didn't then the exchange that didn't would get more business because their prices would be better.

A couple of years ago if you entered a limit order for
$26.40 with the market at $26.10 odds are excellent that
most of your order would have filled down near where the
market was when you entered the order - $26.10. Today,
odds are excellent that most of your order will fill at
$26.39, and the HFT firms will claim this is an
"efficient market."

Citation required? I don't see how this can be true. If the market is at 26.10, then there will be orders in the queue at price points around that. If the market is scared, then the spread will be wide, but that's to be expected and accounted for by the fear, not by conspiracy.

Despite all these problems, the criticism of the flash order culture looks sound. A flash data stream could give a party the ability to cancel stuff they have in the queue earlier than they otherwise would, and to get to the queue faster on new information. It seems wrong that there should be a certain type of information to be available only to certain parties. I think the major exchanges have stopped doing flash orders now though. There was a lot of press about the SEC reviewing it after this article last year.
The rule of thumb with tools usde in internet marketing is do not start using a tool until you know and have done everything the tool does by hand first. That way you fully understand what you're doing and don't work only with the abstraction level.
I've heard that C Interfaces and Implementation is a good read after you've got an understanding of the language. I don't know any good encyclopedic references, though. I'm still learning the language myself.

I don't see what's wrong with saying that an educational book that has misinformation in it should be avoided on Amazon. With other things it might be more open to opinion, but if whole swathes of a reference book are filled with errors, I don't see what's wrong with writing a negative review.
polyvore.com?
$250000+ just from Linux users is hardly meaningless. And even if it is just a matter of novelty, the results of this experiment could still influence other developers to start porting their games, and break the chicken-and-egg problem that prevents Linux from being a good and popular gaming platform.
GMail: Drag images into messages
This brings up the notion of sex in the presence of the female, while making the inmate himself appear non-threatening. The way to nip this in the bud is for the female guard to say that any sexual talk in her presence is neither appreciated nor appropriate.

This sounds hilarious to me, in a "you can't fight in here! This is the War Room" sense. Are female guards common in prisons for males in the US?
I'm doing (2). 2 is actually good.

1 = good only if you trust that person with your life. You don't want the other guy giving up and dragging the rest of the company with him.

2 = Most fair option. It is same as 1 except makes sure ppl work for their shit.

3 = bad. an hr of work != shit got done.

4 = bad. expectation may be unreasonable hard to prove in court.

5. Gota own some of the company
Tree-ring patterns are intellectual property, not climate data
I never would've thought to use it as a PDF reader. Installing now :-)
Before I die I want to...
On that topic, I present Emily Chimpinson, a little project I've been playing with:

http://twitter.com/chimpinson

She's a Markov-based script inspired by the public domain works of a certain poet. All of her incantations are checked to make sure they don't repeat verbatim her model.

Every once in a while she comes up with something inspired.
The improved feature set and performance of 2.2 is great and all but let's not forget Android's real problem: most of the Android handsets on the market won't see 2.2 until way after release. The segmentation of the operating system among different devices really inhibits much of its potential.
Refer this: " Moreover, creating an OS is hardly a significant expense in a country's budget. After an event like 26/11 and given the fact that India is about to host multiple worldwide sporting events in next 1-2 years, this hardly looks like a waste."

That is one confused assessment of reality dude. Are you like saying guzzling down millions means nothing for a poor country like India?

And dude saying "TOI is world's largest bla bla" and then commenting The articles are badly written does really prove your mental state, is it?
Compare with the following phrases:
Prohibiting forgery strays dangerously close...
Prohibiting defamation strays dangerously close...
Prohibiting Ponzi schemes strays dangerously close...

I can accept that regulation of speech is inherently suspect, but not that it's inherently bad. The reasons for regulating this kind of advertising are pretty clear to me.
Google search market share down. Yahoo and Bing - up
You're right, but my point is that it's not rational to act against your interests, even if you think you're acting for them. Thinking it's worth it to play the lottery is almost certainly irrational except for individuals with a very strange utility curve...
Well he did say that the book is from 1981...
Truth is Google Docs is utterly broken and unusable.

Google Beta corp is fond of releasing promising but half-arsed products, indefinitely & conveniently labeled Beta, and they seldom demonstrate any urgency to fix and improve them.
Every other day, I get invited to join some "protest against Facebook's plans to introduce usage fees" group. I never got invited to a "protest against Facebook's privacy policies" group. (There may be such groups but none of my friends have ever mentioned it.)

Maybe positioning a competitor as "guaranteed to always be free" could be a better plan (even when FB will likely always be free).
The past few years seem to indicate that we're slipping up the slope, then, as what was once prohibited is now allowed, both in the case of prescription drug advertisements and corporate political speech.
I haven't ever had problems hiring good perl people for the startups I've founded. But that may just be the area (Vancouver has a bunch of really good perl people). Also I try to only do cool things and treat people well. ;-)

I see your point about talent though. There are quite a few really good perl programmers, and a lot of "I once wrote a script in that" types, but not many in the middle. In some ways this is a strength - if you're programming in perl these days, odds are you've stuck with it because you actually like the language, so you're probably pretty good at it. On the other hand, it's not taught in school, so unless folks learn it on their own or on the job, there might be a real lack of new talent coming up the ranks.

As a programmer for hire, I can't complain about the wages. As an entrepreneur, I know where to find the good people, so it's not really a problem for me.

(I would also point out that any good programmer or intern/recent college grad who wishes to become a good programmer should always be willing to learn a new language on the company's tab. If they aren't, that probably says more about them than the language).
So much for iPhone on Verizon :(
I see your point and I think I mostly agree with you.

However, I don't think crediting the FDA with all of the benefits of the rise of medicine as a scientific discipline through the late 19th and early 20th century is entirely warranted. Were snake oil salesmen sidelined because of the FDA or because doctor's started developing medicines that actually, and obviously, worked (such as aspirin, sulfa drugs, etc)?
Well, keep in mind that this is just an intermediary before the trades hit the rest of the market. If the HFT had not been allowed the advanced access, then the transaction would not have been filled in the local exchange and would (or would not) have been filled by the larger market.

If another participant besides the HFT algo on the local exchange had been willing to take the other side of the initial price offered, then the HFT firm would not benefit from "probing" for the price.

And, what's to stop the entity buying a large quantity of shares from strategizing to account for HFT strategies?

The core reason that exchanges offer an advanced look at trades is to try to pull liquidity out of parties that create no transaction fee overhead before passing it to the rest of the market. The price will never be worse than what would have occurred if the trade had been allowed to go out to the rest of the market.

The author of the article is essentially just complaining that his own crude algorithm has been outsmarted.
I'd be interested in seeing similar studies with relatively modern languages, though. The only ones I've seen have been comparing things like C, Pascal, and Cobol.
Given that the "$200" device requires an expensive monthly contract, it's really only a better deal for people who are bad at math.
Caught part of a MILT channel show from 2002 about the SR-71 / Lockheed Skunkworks.

One thing I hadn't seen before was this... an unmanned drone, launched from the back of an SR-71, at Mach 2. What a country!

http://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/d-21.php
True, but there are plenty of people yet to get an Android phone. These people will probably end up with a newer model that has all of these bells and whistles. I'm not really sure that Android has reached a 'critical mass' yet. Sure it's starting to out-pace the iPhone, but it still has huge potential for growth in the market. That these improvements are coming now, means that it will only help Android to grow (as the new handsets will come with v2.2 and all of the improvements).

That said, it would be nice if the carrier-branded Android handsets bothered to update more regularly...