skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I share your frustration. Although I do live in the USA, not all regions of the USA are equally prosperous. Though patriotism leads people here to shut their eyes to it, the economy in the state I live in has more in common with third world countries than first world. Yet my wife refuses to move to any other state, so I'm forced to watch countless opportunities to advance my career slide by because they don't allow you to work remotely, while I plod along in a job much less technically interesting than what I'm capable of. It's not a case of fewer engineers competing for jobs at a smaller number of technology companies, it's a case of fewer engineers and exactly zero technology companies. It doesn't matter if there are also fewer skilled/educated workers to compete against, it's still division by zero.
It's not just Yahoo. Companies that think of engineers as anything but replaceable "resources" are very much an exception to the norm.
Handwriting has at least one advantage over a full qwerty keyboard: It's easier for one-handed text input. I remember taking notes on a small (almost netbook small) laptop years ago during a serious of walking tours of Rome and elsewhere in Italy. I ended up turning my backpack around and placing the laptop on it so that I could type. An actual pen and paper notebook would have been easier to use, but I wanted my notes on my computer. A tablet with good handwriting recognition would have been exactly what I needed then, and I can think of other instances where people might prefer it to a keyboard. It's exactly what would be useful for taking notes while standing or walking.
This has little to nothing to do with the current situation in ruby.

> That said, "convert everything to your native Unicode format at the edges and reconvert it back out at the edges" is at least a tolerable answer.

It obviously isn't for the ruby developers. If it were so they had chosen utf8 as internal encoding, which they didn't because they didn't consider this a tolerable answer. Even though you can get ruby 1.9 to work this way, this approach could still cause some headache.
Ruby Midwest 2-day Conf Early Bird ($75) ends Sat.
They gave her a large amount of stock so that she'd have a personal stake in making the company successful. It makes sense to have the people running the company personally intertwined with it. It's the same in startups, you don't want the founders shares to become so diluted that they no longer care about the company.
Clever "down for maintenance" page
The fact that Diaspora have gotten all that attention actually suggests that they have better odds to succeed - the biggest obstacles to a Facebook replacement aren't technical, after all, but social. They're starting by giving themselves a human face, just like MySpace did.
When Raising Money Makes Sense
I'll have to take your word for it, as there doesn't seem to be a way to take a casual look around the product. But thank you for explaining it to me.
When people say "get hit by the bus" in this context, it means "decide you don't wanna work here anymore and leave".
Work made for hire doctrine does not generally apply to software
Apple's engineering decisions have produced a platform that works pretty well and is enjoyable to develop for. They've sold a lot of handsets as a result. If it weren't for these decisions, then the sales wouldn't have happened and Adobe wouldn't be trying to strongarm their way onto the platform.

In short, decisions such as not supporting Flash are in fact part of the OS's appeal and this entire debate is bizarre.

Furthermore, Adobe's entire argument that developers and consumers should shun Apple's lock-in for Adobe's lock-in is absolutely absurd!

edit: In thinking about it, the danger of an Adobe (or any other vendor) monopoly on the write once, run anywhere application market is huge. It's several orders of magnitude greater in significance than that of Apple controlling the development environment for its own devices.

Apple will have a large market share in internet-connected devices for quite some time, but it probably won't ever command a majority of marketshare in any given segment (it will command an abnormally huge amount of revenue share though, the way it does with PCs and now phones). If you don't like what Apple offers you as a developer, there are plenty of other targets. If Adobe gets its way and controls the runtime everywhere, and even assuming it works and is fast everywhere (it won't be), then all developers are probably screwed.

Lastly, it's disappointing that Google in recent times has reneged on its relative commitment to HTML5 given its Android and Chrome development decisions to bundle flash into both platforms. This is a much more significant development, with much greater consequences, than changes to the iPhone dev agreement because Android and Chrome, in various forms, are likely to be run on the plurality of devices going forward. We need HTML5 to succeed flash, but this won't happen until the infrastucture is built: implementations need to get faster, dev tools need to be built, et cetera and Google's decisions have likely impeded this process by removing some of the incentive for these things to happen.
No one needs yet another facebook or yet another microsoft.
Of course, under the laws of asset forfeiture, carrying around large quantities of cash is a de facto crime in itself, even if you are not engaging in any criminal activities with the money. (Radley Balko has written a number of good articles about it. Here are two of them: http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/26/the-forfeiture-racket and http://www.slate.com/id/2243428.)
And in Clojure, all commas everywhere are whitespace. You can use them, or not use them, even on single line expressions.

(list a b c) == (list a, b, c) == (list a b, c)
IANAL, but I'd guess that for you guys it's like any other sort of technical advisor: the client should get the high-level information needed to make a good decision and not the implementation details you'll naturally focus on when structuring the deal.
1. Please show me a state with a per capta gdp that approaches one from the third world.

2. Your wife may be forcing you to stay in state to be with her. Either celebrate your marriage and don't bitch about how it's bringing you down or move on.
I love this very tongue in cheek, over-engineered solution to a real problem. It seems the authors are well aware that there are more cost-effective ways of dealing with the problem. But shooting the critters out of the air, one by one speaks to the geek in all of us. This would be a great "give one get one" device, but then again, giving to more conventional causes for malaria prevention is probably more useful.
Re: characters not covered by Unicode (or BMP). Yes, they exist, but they are red herrings. Unregistered characters will always be with us. I fully guarantee that. But for vast range of applications, Unicode does work.

I am from Korea, and one of the treasure of this country is Tripitaka Koreana, compilation of Buddhist texts carved in the 13th century. It is 52,382,960 characters long, Wikipedia tells me. There is a whole institute devoted to this document. This institute started to encode it in machine readable form from 1993 and completed the first draft in 2000. In the process they discovered 23,385 new letterforms not registered anywhere. There are many such encoding projects yet to be completed. So yeah, Unicode won't cover everything. That is given. And that's okay.
It has to be enabled from the Gadgets preferneces for a logged in user:

> Navigation popups, article previews and editing functions popup when hovering over links

for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_popu...
Silver is probably better for day to day zombie apocalypse transactions.
Steve Blank is My Hero
I'm aware of that. My point was that rather than just look at the potential problems it should be viewed as a tradeoff. Hiring a larger group of people is less risky but will cost you more.
You're probably right, but everything is relative. Maybe he's deathly afraid of phones. Maybe the other guy feels very at home yelling at strangers.

Que Dr. Jules Hilbert "if you pause to think, you'd realize that that answer is inextricably contingent upon the type of life being led... and, of course, the quality of the pancakes."
Adobe's new campaign as seen in my browser
Human brains excel at detecting cheaters
This study is broken in multiple ways, so you should not take it seriously. Why can't people (= medical "researchers") learn their statistics?
Many developers use automatic translation tools - some built by Adobe - to convert Flash code so their apps can run on Apple gadgets.

Is anyone actually doing this? My impression was that the only way to convert Flash to something iPhone-compatible was the compiler in CS5, and Apple killed that route before it was even shipped.
That depends on why he is out in the street yelling. If really is as angry as he sounds, it's probably not his faith per se that is prompting him to yell at strangers but his own disillusionment with either his faith or society at large. In this case, his beliefs merely give him cause to vent. I've known people like this.

Then again, maybe he's not really angry and the whole 'fire an brimstone' thing is just his shtick.
From Please Review My App to Success
Thank you to Hacker News readers. You helped us take an idea 428 days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510656) to market and ink the biggest deal in our space (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Farmers-Insurance-Deploys-prnews-2031715293.html?x=0&.v=1). You rock.
HTML 5 and CSS3 should be the next chapter of the Web and not Flash - - Flash is hopefully a closing chapter.
Did anyone read that metaphorically as 'US recovery has moved to the clouds and became an un-attainable dream' ?
Doing so would likely be illegal under the DMCA
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510656

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Farmers-Insurance-Deploys-prne...
Apple vs. Adobe - Opinion Poll
> Not having software available at all on an OS platform isn't choice.

You choose the OS platform. And if this is the argument, why aren't people complaining that Windows doesn't run OSX apps, or that the PS3 doesn't run Xbox 360 games?

I think reasonable people understand the platform is the place they make a choice.

> A supermarket is not an OS platform, but to continue abusing the analogy, Whole Foods bananas refusing to work in the same meal as Tesco milk would be Strange and Wrong.

A supermarket absolutely is a platform, an architecture and framework for food distribution, distinguished from competing platforms by philosophy, branding, and positioning.

We're talking about the goods a store offers for sale, and the store's right to decide what goods to carry. We've established that production methodology is a widely accepted criterion for a store carrying or rejecting a good. The platform determines the goods offered, and the consumer chooses the platform.
"We publish the specifications for Flash — meaning anyone can make their own Flash player. Yet, Adobe Flash technology remains the market leader because of the constant creativity and technical innovation of our employees."

Read: our player remains the only viable one because we keep moving the goalposts on everyone else.
http://www.savvis.net/_layouts/SavvisUtilities/Video.aspx?id...

Reminds me of those Ruby guys.
I enjoy reading Max's posts, but find it odd how secretive he is about what his actual business is.
I don't really follow what they're trying to say here.

The reason I (we?) don't want flash in the iPhone/etc web browser is because it performs poorly, eats battery and is unstable.
Ellison is an arrogant douche but he's absolutely right about Schwartz. Schwartz's high-level corporate strategy, as near as I could determine it, was to try to get people to like him by giving everything his company used to sell away for free and by doing "cool" things like blogging. The problems started before his stewardship, but he greatly accelerated them. Schwartz and his fellow execs should be ashamed at how much money they lost sitting atop one of the world's most valuable repositories of technical talent and intellectual property. An Ellison enema is exactly what Sun needs, or needed. Unfortunately it's about 5 years too late.
For me, no question. I spent over $1000 to upgrade to a newer MBP just a few weeks before the iPad was announced. Beautiful machine, does just what I wanted; I still regret it. Since getting my iPad, most evenings it doesn't even get opened.
> Well, "rm -r" when run as root does warn.

No it doesn't, but perhaps you're using a distro (like RedHat) where "rm -r" is actually aliased to "rm -ri".
Is there something in what they said that you disagree with?
But saving money won't create as many jawbs!
Food, water, ammo, medical supplies: not only what you need to survive; also the only things worth trading.

...maybe booze and sex. Supposing anyone lasts long enough to let their guard down.
This exactly parallels Canada'a elimination of the $1000 note, except that the largest denomination now in circulation is the $100 note. Adding an order of magnitude to the weight, bulk and inconvenience of cash transactions (along with requiring paperwork concerning bank transactions involving $10000 or more in cash) may not have done much about large-scale organised crime, but it certainly did make it more difficult to skirt the goods and services tax.
If you have to learn just one programming language
yup..definitely an illegal hiring practice (age discrimination); but confirms my suspicion that this is not a totally legitimate company anyways.
It's not like Adobe is the only tech company guilty of that.
Is there a job site targeted at skilled international workers like you? How do you look for work, and how would people find you?
I concur. Typing on my iPad right now. The main feature request I have is being addressed in OS 4 and will allow other music players to play in the background.

Flash is not needed for probably 90% of the use cases I browse past. It has a place until something else (like plain old code) takes it's place.
This seems to be a trend with GoDaddy: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=godaddy+hack
I recall the Nexus One being very simple to root. As in confirming a prompt and agreeing to void your warranty.
So if the primary use of the €500 note in the UK is for money laundering... doesn't that make it easier for law enforcement, too? If they track down the movements of the notes, they should have few false positives.
The main goal is probably just to annoy them.

The main goal is probably to force them out of the UK and into someone else's jurisdiction.

It's similar to the situation that occurred when the Irish Government set up the Criminal Assets Bureau in 1996 (the only real achievement of theirs in my lifetime), all of our major drug dealers and major bank robbers who were operating with impunity up to that point immediately started to flee the country.

They went to Holland, Portugal and Spain mainly. All CAB had to do was produce evidence in a civil case (beyond reasonable doubt, much easier to prosecute than criminal law) that the person had no visible source of income to own the assets that they had (houses, cars, champion racehorses, yachts). CAB could then simply freeze their bank accounts and confiscate their assets. It was the first organisation of it's kind in the world, and there are plans to implement similar models elsewhere due to it's unprecedented success. If all of Europe did this it would make drug trafficker's lives much more difficult - they simply couldn't enjoy the proceeds of their ill-gotten gains, or it would be confiscated before long.
Also: because they're lying — they don't publish the full Flash spec. Any alternate Flash implementation simply doesn't work on video sites with encrypted streams, which means it will never gain traction.
Frankly I'm confused why this has 8 votes. I like Crowdspring but I really wish they'd stop vote spamming HN with posts about links that they've linked to.
As I understand it, Ruby 1.8 strings are simply treated as non-encoded sequences of bytes. It has some support for UTF-8, so as long as you can use UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 (latin1, since the mapping is the same), just think about it as passing around byte sequences and don't need to do a lot of string manipulation, it's not horrible to work with. However, you do need to jump through hoops to use a number of the standard string methods like #length with multibyte characters (often, this means running the the string through #scan(/./mu) before working with it: http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/bytes_and_character...). Rails also has a UTF-8 handler to help with manipulation of UTF-8 strings with multibyte characters, and I think it's on by default (http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Multibyte/H...)
Jack Dorsey: The 3 Keys to Twitter's Success [video]
"I expect to need exactly the same level of knowledge to work with a DVCS, because I'm editing files."

From Git's point of view, you're not editing files; you're creating patches.

Git is fundamentally a tool for constructing, sharing and storing patches. You may disagree that this is the best way to approach version control, but if you accept this philosophy, then Git is remarkably simple and logical.

Personally, I feel that treating a version control system like a filesystem is the wrong approach. I'm primarily interested in managing changes to the code, not in tracking chronological changes in individual files.
While native apps are amazing and performs real well on iPhone and iPad,performance of web apps is a disaster on these devices. iPhone struggles to render even the basic javascript effects properly. Having said that i am not disappointed by this. I do not expect the iPhone to provide a full blown internet experience. Its a freaking phone! I still dont get why Adobe tries so hard to provide Flash on Iphone.

On the other hand, the choppy -almost unusable- HTML5 experience on iPad, makes me feel like these devices arent optimized to provide rich experience within the browser realm. Perhaps Apple wants us to depend more on the app store than the web based apps (Google's business).
I've noticed recently that writing a simple Twitter clone has become almost the new Hello World (or the next step). These all obviously have differing numbers of features and polish but that might be a good starting point also.
The biggest problem is that everything, after a clean install, seems to default to latin1 or ASCII, so the first thing you need to do is run around to every single piece of software your app touches (the db, web forms, the database, the OS, etc) and make it send and receive unicode. And God help you if you forget one.
Adobe targets Apple in ad campaign launched today
Well, These New Zuckerberg IMs Won't Help Facebook's Privacy Problems
We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs

That just doesn't jive with reality. Adobe is the sole gatekeeper of where Flash is available and how good the experience is. I don't see Flash Player 10 available for FreeBSD/PPC, NetBSD/anything, Solaris/SPARC, Linux/SPARC, Linux/MIPS, nothing for IA64, etc. Of course I don't blame Adobe for not supporting these platforms but the point is no one else can offer Flash support on them either.
Larry Ellison: "Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales."
I sorta see your point. But the word committed is being used properly. No one is this picky about the hyperbole Steve Jobs hands out in the form of fact.
Dear Adobe - please stop pretending to be a tools developer because you really suck at it.
You've selected one option where Perl looks sane, while leaving out cases like "[ [1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6] ]" or "( (1, 2, 3), (4, 5, 6) )". And of course there's other cases like lists containing hashes, and hashes containing lists. All of these are handled consistently in languages like Python and Ruby, and the programmer never needs to consider the interaction of the container and the objects it contains -- numbers and lists and strings and hashes are all objects and all act exactly the same with respect to containers.
As far as I knew the illusion was caused by light scattering and refraction:

"The distance from the surface to 300 mb averages 9,300 gpm. When the sun is directly overhead, radiation passes through 9,300 meters of atmosphere between the surface and 300 mb. When the sun is at an angle, it must pass through a greater length of the atmosphere before reaching the surface. When the sun is passing through the atmosphere at a 45 degree angle, the radiation must pass through 13,000 meters of atmosphere between the surface and 300 millibars. When the sun is passing through the atmosphere at a 5 degree angle, the radiation must pass through 107,000 meters of atmosphere between the surface and 300 millibars.

"The amount of scattering and refraction differential depends on how far the sun's radiation must pass through the atmosphere. As the length of passage of light through the atmosphere increases, the amount of scattering and the refraction differential increase. When the sun or moon are within about 10 degrees of the horizon, they have the illusion of looking much bigger than they do higher in the sky and the coloring looks different. This increase in scattering is also the cause of sun sets and sun rises giving a red color on the horizon. Although the size looks different when close to the horizon, it is mostly an illusion."

Taken from http://www.theweatherprediction.com/habyhints/215/
"Is there a job site targeted at skilled international workers like you?"

As far as I know there isn't. Most people are (rightly) trying to outsource just the grungy bits for which they (rightly) seek low cost folks through elance etc.

"How do you look for work, and how would people find you?"

I can't answer the general question but as for me specifically,

I have a bit of a unique skillset (AI/ML/compilers, reasonably strong math skills), which, while not in wide demand in Bangalore/India is sufficiently compelling for the few people who do want it (e.g some folks in the local Defence Research labs, telecom companies, financial trading folks and so on). More importantly, over the years I've made a bit of a reputation for straight dealing and delivery on time/below budget.

I have never actively looked for work since I left ThoughtWorks (6 years ago now , yikes! where did the time go?). And I left TW because I was tired of working on enterprise sw. The company and my co workers were great - the work was terrible.

I have enough work for the next five years. Research + coding projects tend to be like that. I constantly turn down projects.

So far so good. The problem is that the "rare skillset" bit cuts both ways - I've been working alone for the last 6 years and would love to work with great people (ideally much smarter than I am) again. That part doesn't seem to work out so well hereabouts. There are some interesting startups coming up but still very early days here. Bradford Cross (of FlightCaster) and I (along with a couple of others) wrote about this at http://measuringmeasures.blogspot.com/2010/02/globalization-... )

Nutshell: As of now I get work via word of mouth from satisfied customers. I don't use any websites etc.
Tim O'Reilly live on Inc.com/Justin.TV now
It Doesn’t Stop
IPad and iPhone make Cash Registers look obsolete
I agree, good company, good people, but this is total link spam. There is not real content, nothing to discuss, nothing. It's probably nothing but votes from people who work there too, which is sad.