skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interestingly, very few Canadian schools still offer _iron_ rings, most of them nowadays are made out of stainless steel.

I believe Camp one (i.e. University of Toronto and Ryerson) are the only schools left who offer real _iron_ rings (they're actually often rings returned by people who have retired/passed away, since it is asked that upon retiring from the Engineering profession you return your ring)... I'm not sure it's possible, but if you're a Canadian Engineer I'd highly recommend to drop by the Engineering Alumni office at UofT and getting yourself a real iron ring if you can, they're absolutely amazing.
If they had started 3 years ago maybe. HP is not a software company in any significant way. Look at how many years of development Apple & Google, both very good software companies, needed to build their platforms. WebOS is at least a legitimate competitor today.
What if I want a new and large challenge every two years? Your efficient is my stagnation? Just asking.
Permission marketing is good when the potential customers know they have a problem and solutions exist. patio11 can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the biggest hurdle in his customer acquisition pipeline is creating awareness. Teachers don't go online and ask "What is the best software to create bingo cards?" because they don't even know this kind of software exists; but if one colleague sends them an email saying there is this nice site where they can print a handful of bingo cards and save a day of work, now they are probably not only aware, but also interested.
what does that word mean?
You can keep asking the question in other ways:

"How long was the person before me here?"
"What's the average length of time someone stays here?"
"How long have *you* been here?"

If you really want to know the answer, you just have to keep asking. Turnover rate is the first real question I ask. (Also: the lack of an answer is an answer on its own.)
While I don't have enough Django experience to give suggestions on that front, you can use BigTable if you want to move to Google App Engine, though the drawbacks may outweigh the benefits when dealing with an established app.

That said, I did recently make this choice for a Ruby/Sinatra app I'm working on, and ended up going with MongoDB due to conveniences like MongoMapper more than anything else (I wanted to enforce a partial schema without having to resort to silliness like customField1, customField2, etc.) I'm pleased with this choice so far, though plan to look at Redis again in the future when I need something lighter in weight for storage.
Except for the one thing that makes apple products special: Steve Jobs
as in a Scottsman?
I guess you could get a decent answer at places that take pride in their (high) turnover rate.
You're wrong. You must have a reasonable expectation that your warrant will lead to evidence that will lead to a conviction. That's the whole point of justifying a warrant to a judge.

You can't say "we want a warrant because this person might be guilty of some crime". There has to be a specific crime you are investigating.

What that means is that the D.A. should already think Gizmodo is guilty of theft before they raid a house looking for evidence of that theft. But they already had plenty of evidence of theft in the form of a public confession. So if they already believed that then there was no reason not to charge them.

The fact that neither Chen nor anyone from Gizmodo has been charged with theft leads me to believe the warrant was unjustified regardless of the shield laws.
When a big company throws $100,000,000.00 at something it tends to attract a lot of people (either internally or externally) who are more interested in figuring out how to acquire as much of the $100,000,000.00 as possible without worrying too much about delivering a final product in any kind of time frame.

By buying Palm HP knows that it's getting a modern mobile OS that's already in use on shipping products. For a company like HP a known quantity is better than spending money on R&D it may not be able to pull off.
HP On Palm Acquisition: “Our Intent Is To Double Down On WebOS”
One of the people at Gizmodo (Nick Denton? memory fails right now) even admitted it was stolen

Brian Lam, Editorial Director for Gizmodo, in reply to Bruce Sewell, Apple General Counsel:

Bruce, thanks.
Here's Jason Chen, who has the iPhone. And here's his address. You two should coordinate a time.
[Blah Blah Blah Address]
Happy to have you pick this thing up. Was burning a hole in our pockets. Just so you know, we didn't know this was stolen [as they might have claimed. meaning, real and truly from Apple. It was found, and to be of unproven origin] when we bought it. Now that we definitely know it's not some knockoff, and it really is Apple's, I'm happy to see it returned to its rightful owner.
P.S. I hope you take it easy on the kid who lost it. I don't think he loves anything more than Apple.

-- http://gizmodo.com/5520479/a-letter-apple-wants-its-secret-i...

The after-the-fact editing was the insertion of the portion in brackets, inclusive.
Is there more information about the next OS version publicly available? It sounds pretty awesome.
How not to talk to your kids (2007)
I don't wear the ring because it has undertones of being a status symbol. "I'm a smart engineer, with a ring to prove it."
Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, a Harvard social psychologist who is an expert in stereotyping, told me, "Carol Dweck is a flat-out genius. I hope the work is taken seriously. It scares people when they see these results."

Ironic that a so-called "expert in stereotyping" attributes successful research to "genius". Doubly so considering the content of the rest of the article.
Flakes are often Job Hoppers. Not all Job Hoppers are Flakes.

Finally, someone taking a shot at that misconception. Just because some people advance their career and improve their conditions by changing employers doesn't mean they're unreliable or incompetent.

Quite often it's the competent people who get sick and tired of a crappy job, widespread incompetence, excessive office politics and stuff like that and they decide to move on. They tie the loose ends, dot the i's, cross the t's and start looking for a better opportunity.

It's not just the startups that mislead people, either. It's just that a big company will lie to you about other kinds of stuff.
As a developer, HP coming out with their own OS makes me want to do about anything else with my time rather than write an app for it. There are already too damn many mobile OSes. But, buying Palm makes WebOS seem that much more relevant, and makes me consider it much more than I was.
So, have you sold any yet?
Which I always find amusing, because its intent couldn't be farther from a status symbol. I feel as though the actions of a few arrogant engineers have ruined what is a very good tradition.
My Thank You to Hacker News Lover
I've been using the Palm Pre for the last month after using an iPhone for more than a year. I feel the Pre is as polished from hardware to software as iPhone. They are two different animals, but webOS and the Pre are fine examples of good design.
Beef is ideal to sear just before SVing, not only does it seal in the moisture, but the most dangerous bacteria on beef is on the surface, and just slapping the beef down in a very hot pan, flipping and removing is enough. This is why you can have a blue steak that is cold on the inside (not in many restaurants however) and cooked on the outside.

Searing your steak before cooking would likely aid in the hacked SV as a lack of vacuum sealing means some moisture may be lost, but searing prevents this. It also protects the average, less experienced, cook from giving themselves a wicked case of food poisoning.
It is Time to Think About Books as Applications
Actually, my coworkers who are Java programmers complained of the opposite - they felt the Scala books didn't link in Java enough and assumed experience in things like Ruby and the like.

I found Venkat's book to be a good solid, terse start which gives you the bulk of what you need to start poking around.

After that, the O'Reilly book is solid for really building meat. It's also available for free online if you want to really look at how usable it is for you:

http://programming-scala.labs.oreilly.com/
HP's recent track record of purchase and lay-off has to be at least as good (bad?) as those three. And actually, having recently worked there and having kept in touch former co-workers, getting laid off from HP with some severance isn't so bad, compared to the alternatives.
So Apple is banking on AutoDesk tools 'coming to an iPad near you?'
Anand's victory was one of the best games in world championship history, at least in my opinion. Also, in my opinion, the best sites for chess news are chessvibes.com and "The Week in Chess" at www.chess.co.uk/twic/twic.html.
So, Apple is going to push iPhone/iPad development onto Windows/Linux? Or onto iPhones/iPads?
Nasa: Evidence of life on mars
Unless I'm misreading something, it would be far more accurate to say: "Some FB employee jokes that Zuck doesn't believe in privacy"
I looked into it and it's definitely interesting. It's just a pity NetBeans doesn't use it (and given the current situation, probably never will). Anyway, thanks for the tip.
Uranium 235 / 238 supply's are finite so Plutonium is finite. I used it as an example because of it's decay rate forcing the issue also, using depleted uranium in ammunition is "sustainable" even if there are limits on it's use as a fuel. More specifically Plutonium-238 has a half-life of 88 years and emits alpha particles. It is a heat source in radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which are used to power some spacecraft.

Anyway, Man made production of Helium is no where near our current usage levels. Granted, if the world total energy supply was generated by fusion the numbers would be closer.

Meanwhile, by 2000, the consumption of helium within the U.S. had risen to above 15 million kg per year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium#Extraction_and_use

Energy density by mass (MJ/kg) Deuterium-tritium fusion = 337,000,000 MJ /kg, total worldwide energy consumption was 474 exajoules (474×10^18 J) = 1,406,528.19 kilograms / extraction efficiency.
I've thought about this for the last hour or so, and after thinking about it, I think arguing about the hardware is a red herring.

Suppose the hardware wasn't there in 2008 (which I don't think is strictly true, but OK). Are you really saying that Steve Jobs, with all his secret meetings with Samsung and random manufacturers, isn't aware that it will be available soon?

To put it another way, if the hardware is hard, wouldn't it have taken Apple quite some time to build the stuff? Wouldn't they be working on the iPad, say, two years out, when Jobs was making those statements about $500 tablets?

But I think even that argument in a sense is a red herring. The real issue is "can Jobs change his mind?" Of course he can. But he's notoriously cryptic about what Apple's working on. It's not like he's out talking to industry analysts and is making off-the-cuff comments about Apple's strategy. His statements are calculated and controlled. In fact, I would argue that he is more often "wrong" or "misleading" about new products than he is "accurate", because lots (by percentage) of his forward-looking statements turn out to be inaccurate, at least according to the plain meaning of them. To say that he is changing his mind is to imply that he's really inept his job: figuring out what to build.

But I think even that's not the central issue. Let's say Jobs is just a really whimsical guy, who doesn't know he's working on an iPad until it slaps him in the face on launch day. So all of the quoted statements are just him running his mouth and he really has no product vision years out.

Wouldn't that imply, then, that today Jobs has no idea whether he'll be making a Mac app store or not? So his statement has no real information content?

tl;dr It doesn't matter whether the hardware is hard or what his intent is--to mislead or if he simply doesn't know he's going to make a product. His track record shows that claiming he's not going to do something is a good indicator that he'll do it a few years later.
What are they going to do with their development platform then? I can see how it makes sense for Apple to drop 'computers' and focus on 'devices,' but they are currently restricting their development platform to Macs. Do you feel that they will be able to create a competent development platform for Windows or Linux? Or do you think that we will all be coding on iPhones/iPads in 10 years?
http://glassdoor.com
Onto whatever makes sense at the time. iPhone OS development will work like game console development does now, where the dev tools are (again, for now) all hosted on Windows.

It makes as much sense for Apple to have their own line of proprietary PCs as it does for Sony. Even Sony understands that.
Palm shot video of everything at the Developer Day, and should be posting it online soon at http://developer.palm.com.

If you're interested in taking a look, the Webkit/V8 MVC bits are all there today. The upcoming part is the ability to create event-driven javascript services of your own. At the moment, you're limited to the ones that Palm provides.

They've also got a lot of other really net web tech in the pipeline, including things like a pluggable data service on the device that automagically syncs to CouchDB servers in the cloud.

Also check out their Ares web-based development environment, which reached 1.0 recently. Very, very cool.
I have to agree with this. One of the only reasons I stayed with Zynga after being acquired was an intelligent answer from a VP about turnover rate.
A New Law Could Change the Way You Build Database Applications
I would put both Android and iPhone OS 'way out in front of the pack' in terms of 3rd party development, if the 'pack' is Windows Phone 7 and WebOS
The ad delusion
Buying another company "instantly" transfer their assets/resources to you. The knowledgeable people, the patents, the deals with suppliers and clients, the brand.

Even with what could be considered infinite money, it takes time to build a Palm (and then there's the risk).
"doesn't mean they're unreliable"
Well, from the point of view of an employer, it kind of does. They never know when you will leave for a new job.
Dear Steve Jobs,

Are you going to be Open-Sourcing the iPhoneOS...
This is actually one of the use cases we're most proud about on Unvarnished ( Community-powered professional reviews http://www.getunvarnished.com ): the ability for information about hiring managers to float as well as information about employees.

So if a boss has high turnover rates under him, the idea would be that the reason why could float on his Unvarnished profile, such that would-be employees can get this information from the market before signing up to work for him.

Awesome hiring managers should get credit for being awesome. Bad hiring managers should not be able to hide behind information asymmetries. So too with employees.

Information liquidity is a powerful thing!
CMU Alum.
Turnover is the effect of one of a number of causes, and not all of them are indications of bad management or a bad company.

It's possible the organization encourages people not to linger in the sense Alex Papadimoulis discusses in http://thedailywtf.com/articles/up-or-out-solving-the-it-tur...

Of course, getting the why of a turnover rate is hard; an employer with a culture that encourages negative turnover probably won't be willing to fess up. That probably involves contacting enough former employees to get a non-biased sample, and convincing each of them to be honest. That is, if they are willing to talk to you at all.
HN NYC: RSVP for Hackers & Founders #11, Tomorrow (4/29) at Shake Shack - 6 PM
I can't see using a tablet as a coding platform, but who knows what kind of wacky stuff will happen by the time they get around to retiring the Mac platform.

As mentioned above, though, Windows-hosted development is the rule and not the exception in other industries like game development, which are just as technically demanding (if not far more so) than iPhone OS app development.
I am not familiar with the validation koolaid (can you summarize it?), but from my experience, you want great constraints in your database because there may be more than one entry point to your database. If your software layers outside the database are your only entry point, then you might be able to do away with constraints...

But also in my experience with multiple developers working on changing the schema and adding new features that result in new data, we are often very glad the database has the constraints in order to keep people honest and not screw up the data during release transitions and even during development. If the software layers below that business logic do a super great job of handling the constraints, then this is not an issue.
Being an atheist in a strong community like you describe just sucked for me. I would prefer to pick my community rather than have it forced upon me by geography. For instance when I entered college I joined an engineering fraternity which was filled with plenty of people as bizarre as me.

I think most people would rather pick their communities than have it selected by default hence the fences popped up once it became feasible to do without your physical neighbors.
I actually agree with this - the brilliant part of it was giving away more storage (as opposed to money), not that double sided part.
Timely post - because I actually just did the same thing on UniversityTutor.com after seeing the Dropbox slides from the conference :)

http://www.startbreakingfree.com/1504/how-to-get-your-custom...

Great minds think alike!
Here's a fun story about it: http://panic.com/extras/audionstory/
The true story of Audion
> There is far too much coal in the ground for it to run out in the near future

And "640K should be enough for anyone," right? The idea that something will never 'run out' is usually predicated on the assumption that consumption levels will remain the same (or at least only increase linearly rather than exponentially).
I would argue that most communities are self-selected, virtual or not.

>The difference between the physical and virtual is that physical ones must necessarily be inclusive, virtual ones are encouraged to be exclusive.

It depends on the community. I don't see how physicality is the determining factor of what is inclusive or exclusive. Look at country clubs, or Hollywood.

>Text on a screen is really difficult to anthropomorphize and sympathize with.

Have you ever read a novel or story that moved you? Empathized with a fictional character? It is very possible to connect with text, you just have to be creative.
HP Buys Palm: Why It's a Good Deal
I'm hopeful, but I'm expecting the worst. webOS seems to be a compelling technology, particularly because its SDK allows developers to use HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript which many more developers know and use than say Objective-C.

The reason I'm expecting the worst is that HP has never been a software company and not even Palm can change that.
lol, isn't the idea of the ring humbleness and humility in face of their roles and responsibilities?
Yay bad karma!
Ok, then how about you consider the following:

* A man publishes a watchdog paper on corruption in the police department.

* He has inside sources in the police department that he has on file; sources whose lives are at risk if their identity is revealed.

The point is, we can both construct hypothetical situations in which this law can protect the just and villainous alike.

However, these made up occurrences only distract from the situation at hand, and do nothing to add or subtract from the argument.

My original point still stands: The police were breaking the rules set upon them in accordance with the penal code; thus, this break in and seizure was unlawful, and Gizmodo is well in their rights, whatever decision they make.
This is why the iPad will win.
Keep in mind that Apple still needs to develop for the platform, and their engineers are going to want a good system to do it on.
The problem is that Apple has never shown any sort of competency in developing stable and/or usable Windows applications. They need their developer tools to stay friendly during such a transition, too. They can't just expect i{Phone,Pad} developers to walk barefoot over broken glass just for the privilege of creating an application for the platform.

{edit} Either that or they are banking on being so entrenched by the time they drop the Mac platform that developers will have no choice but to 'walk barefoot over broken glass' to develop for their mobile platform.
That's some pretty impressive FedEx service, too!
I'm not sure we should turn this thread into a farming lesson but I'm happy to explain. ;-) Burning straw causes a lot of nutrients to end up in the atmosphere (see http://www.topcropmanager.com/index.php?option=com_content&#...). It really is horrible practice but old habits die hard. It also reduces soil organic matter and the surface "trash" (broken up straw and chaff), making the top soil much more likely to be eroded by wind and rain.

In the 1930's drought (the dirty thirties, the Dust Bowl) soil drifted in the wind like snow. North America had a worse drought in the late 1980's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Drought_of_1988) but erosion was not really a problem due to much improved farming practices. Crop yield during the late 1980's drought were also much higher than in the 1930's because the new farming practice was much better at preserving soil moisture. That said, it was still not a fun time to be a farmer.
My thoughts based on years of representing such companies:

1. Non-funded startups typically don't have employees or, if they do, they are employee-founders. If the cash isn't there to support salaries, you won't have payroll. People can and do get misled in non-funded companies, though it is the rare exception and by no means the rule, since most of those involved understand they are taking a flyer and that nothing may come of their efforts unless and until the startup gains sufficient traction at least to get funding.

2. Most of the abuse involving outright misrepresentations concerns funded companies that hit hard times and then tell their employees that they must stick with a failing situation, and endure the accompanying hardships (missed paychecks, etc.), in the name of deferring their reward until the company can rebound. In such cases, employees are in effect being asked to take the risks of founders and yet are often given nothing more than their deferred pay in case the company does bounce back - that is, having taken on an indispensable role to enable the company to save itself, they get no additional equity or other reward for the hardships they undertook.

3. Funded companies also are more prone to mislead employees with tall talk about what the company will supposedly do and why the options held by employees will be worth so much. Yet, in doing so, they don't tell their employees anything about the capitalization of the company itself, thus leaving the employees with a sense their 50,000 options or whatever will make them rich while in reality they may represent only a miniscule percent of the company and have only a small upside even in a success case. At the same time, no one is ever told about VC liquidation preferences, which can easily be used in many cases to wipe out the interests of the employee-shareholders in an instant as soon as anything goes wobbly with the company.

4. Opportunities come and go rather quickly in the startup world and it may just be a simple fact of life that employee tenures will tend to be shorter in such an environment for reasons having nothing to do either with flakiness or opportunism on the part of employees or with deception or abuse on the part of employers. I think it is a mistake to overstate this in either direction in seeking to ascribe generalized motives to one side or the other.
my biggest weakness is my inability to acknowledge how truly great I am. :-)