skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It falls under contract law, and yes they're required to honour those orders as it fulfils all the requirements of a contract. A mistake is no defence in civil proceedings for contract violation. Once you've 'purchased' an item, regardless of whether the money has been deducted from your credit card yet (Amazon charges on dispatch, but has to honour the price made at the point-of-sale) or not, you've both agreed to a contract to exchange a product for currency. A company not delivering a product is just like a customer not paying, only it's much easier to file a lawsuit against a company than an individual.

Considering they could have had to pay $1.6m + class action legal fees means they saved a lot of money by simply taking the loss.
God those are ugly.
But isn't a focused private beta better than just a public launch?
When you become a member of some website, you look it over, you weigh the advantages and disadvantages, and maybe after reading their various policies (ok, probably the majority of the people doesn't read them) you decide to sign up.

You do that with the website as it is at that moment.

If at a later date the website owners decide to use the data that you gave them under your previous image of that website in new, creative and unexpected ways they are effectively breaking the unwritten contract between their users and themselves.

This will usually cause a backlash, but only in a small portion of the userbase because most sites are too small to get significant mainstream press coverage.

When sites like facebook get involved in this sort of thing the media will latch on to it immediately because of the potential audience for the information. This will then piss off more people that otherwise would not even have realized something has changed and so on.

It's a side-effect of the network effects that facebook profited from when they established themselves, I don't think it is possible to have the one without the other.
The periodic table of controllers
As others have already said, just thank you Mr Gardner.
I will use his books to (try to ) introduce my son in the magic kingdom of maths.
Having beat Nethack five times I can't say it's not a great game. That said, there are a lot better games, and even many better roguelikes. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is my recommendation. It's insanely difficult, but in a better way than Nethack (you get killed when you make tactical mistakes, not when you trip down stairways, get crushed by drawbridges, run into various insta-kill monsters, etc). Not that I want to discourage anyone from trying Nethack... it's just not the best introduction to the roguelike genre.
Other articles with discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1372045

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1371335
I'm semi-technical, in that I can't code anything functional from scratch, but I can do a bunch of development related tasks, including write CSS, manage the server (SSH, virtualmin, whatever), poke around the SQL database to add/edit fields and rows, create graphics/icons/logos, etc.

I also take care of most of the business, promotional, "everything else" issues. I would say part of my job is being the coder's lackey, if my partner needs php libraries installed, I'll ticket our server admin. If he needs a feature tested and broken in 5 browsers, that'll be me. I suppose my job is to help make it easier for him to put out code at a higher productivity rate.

A challenge I would say is not having anything to do while he hacks away, which is a lot of the time for early startups. Can't really start promoting or start new initiatives, but theres always something to do, its just a matter of figuring out what.
Sure. It'll be more transparent at least. And there might even be some due process eventually.
Technically, he did say "amazon.com" would never let that happen.
Can you do anything you want at someone else's startup when startups are supposed to be frugal and focus?
Pretty sure this is not true at all. If they take your money and do nothing, that's a problem. If they take your money, say "oh fuck, we don't have that item at that price anymore", and give you your money back, everything is fine. If they never take your money (as they don't charge you until they actually ship the order), then they have even less obligation.

What they probably can't do is ship you your stuff for $50, find the mistake a month later, and then silently charge your credit card the $500 difference. And they probably can't ask you to send the stuff back.
No, they simply regularly contain highly sensitive things. Not password reset verifications.
Wild guess would be they were using price limits to categorize. In other words, using "under $50" for various product or promotional listings.

It's hard to imagine how that would end up repricing items though. Without a total blanking out moment in the programmer's head, anyway, which I'm sure we've all been guilty of.
Redirecting Output From One Command To Another
And surprisingly, this is exactly how most bugs happen.
Pretty sure you can say "fuck" and "asshole" on the Internet.
Being versatile is prized. I don't expect your MS work to count against you.
I noticed the parallel between pipes and functions only a few weeks ago and it struck me that if you re-write lisp expressions left to right instead of 'inside out' I can suddenly understand much better what is going on.

so if I look at f(b(c(d(e))))) it is the same as 'cat e | d | c | b | f'

Where 'e' is the initial input data and the other letters are the functions transforming e in successive steps to the desired output.

The analogy probably breaks down pretty quickly, but for simple examples it seems to hold.

Is there a programming language that works in this left-to-right pipelined fashion?
Who does that website design appeal to? I found it hard to read. It looks like a one-page spread in a magazine that I'd have skipped over.
This depends on the country.

If I remember my law class in the UK, there is no legal reason to ship the goods in this situation. The price online is only one that is offered. The buyer giving money to the retailer is considered an acceptance of the offer, but the contract is not binding unless the retailer then displays that they still wish to go ahead with the transaction on those terms. My lecturer always referred to it as the courts wanting to see "a meeting of minds."

This leaves online retailers (and brick and mortar that sticker an item wrong) the time to change anything before the item is placed in the buyer's hands, and the court will look particularly down on a transaction where the buyer could not have reasonably expected the transaction to be valid (like buying a TV for 1 GBP).

My understanding was that much of contract law in the US was based on UK law, but I am by no means a lawyer in either jurisdiction :)
I know it's kind of a spiritual successor, but Dwarf Fortress might just take the cake...
Yeah, I was wondering if they actually made a mistake by buying it for that 49.99.
Let's play regular expressions!
Here's how my startup is growing (I think this applies to many):

1 - user finds my site and signs up. >> Transactional email <<

2 - repeat step 1 enough times.

3 - send out newsletter. This will now start happening every 2 weeks. >> Newsletter email <<

Why should I be paying/configing/templating/testing/managing 2 mail services (mailchimp && sendgrid/critsend)? I don't have sophisticated newsletter tracking needs. I just need to be able to manage a list and use the same/similar API I use for transaction emails, but instead of plugging in an email address in the "to" field, I reference the name of a list stored on the sendgrid server. Doing this, I only have to sync my lists. I don't have to write code to handle sending 5000 emails, taking into account limits on how many addresses will fit into the "to" field on each API call.

Both sendgrid and critsend are working on these features. Its just not there yet.
Yep - we did a Zappos tour last week and judging from their culture they would view this as a great marketing expense in addition to "the right thing to do".

Also it's not fair to judge it by major media exposure because:

1. The people who got those deals will generate word of mouth

2. If they hadn't honored it it would have generated negative word of mouth

Gotta factor those two in.
Pretty sure I don't care to do that.

Anyway, downvoters, the quotes were an actual answer. It was probably some very minor detail that escaped notice until downstream effects (low price cap) made it evident. Without more information it's a waste of time to try guessing what that minor detail may have been.
Thank you for the links! In terms of embedding, he wants to actually embed the videos on his site so that they are playable there. The Limewire case is hugely intimidating, that is exactly the type of situation I want to avoid.
We are rushing headlong into robotic automation. Civilian and military uses will abound. The day when hiding our head from technology was a solution is long past. Responsibility is the only option left that doesn't involve war. Our "leaders" will only be as insane as we allow them. People don't get the government they deserve; we get the one we'll tolerate.
In clojure, there's the thrush operators: -> and ->>

user=> (->> 10 (+ 2) (* 5))
60
user=> (* 5 (+ 2 10))
60

http://debasishg.blogspot.com/2010/04/thrush-in-clojure.html
creating a situation where users are separated into two different groups and then making a single variable different for each groups can indicate the effects of the variable given a large enough group size

but taking that experience and applying it to history where many things are changing and where you cannot separate everyone into 2 different groups will not necessarily tell you anything about one arbitrarily selected variable.
Thank you for the kind words. Yes, there are two ways to take this post. I'm hoping most people will take #2, as that is the reality we live in. We live in a time where we can do anything we want, at the lowest level of risk in history. The older structures of society will continue to come down as we evolve at an ever greater pace.
Sounds like that's great to put on your resume, anybody that would not hire you based on it being microsoft where you worked before is probably best avoided anyway.

Be proud of what you achieved in such a short time, not ashamed.
That's true, chances are pretty slim that it will get very big. I may just end up hashing it out over the weekend anyways, so I guess I have until then to decide whether to make it public or not.
People who like fancy graphics and typography?
There are several attack angles I tackle in semi-random order:

1. What problem am I really trying to solve? The point is to think about the users. I draw boxes that walk through the user sessions I want to support. For example, "user wants to do X lands on the site, they find the link that says Do X, they click on it, which shows them a screen with UI elements 1, 2, and 3....". They're called storyboards, and you don't need to be very detailed.

2. Knowing what I want to serve to the user, I think about the data that needs to be stored, how I'm going to obtain it, how to store it (database choice + schema), and other backend plumbing bits. This step is critical as I'm a firm believer that your database schema is a competitive advantage of a business. Get it right and you'll be able to serve your users better. However, it's important to realize that you won't get it right first time, and even if you do, it will need to evolve with your app. This is why I love schema-less databases.

3. With all this sorted, I tie up with a web framework I've written. It handles the routing, has data validation/sanitization helpers, handles user authentication, and all the other functions a web app needs. I just copy/paste these standard files into the new project's folder and I'm well on my way into the project because I can start focusing on the business logic.

Yes I plan on open sourcing this framework when I get a chance. It's constantly evolving though and there a few things I need to fix before releasing.
Why do women leave science and engineering?
If I surrender data to a big corporate server like Facebook, Amazon, or Google, even when they promise you privacy, I'd better assume it's public. There, privacy is dead, and information will leak. I think everyone on this thread will agree with that.

Now don't forget that the internet is not limited to the web of cloud computerized big servers. E-mail, file sharing and social networking are not that, for instance. They are decentralized by nature. They do not require Gmail or Mega Upload or Facebook. Such services can't last. They are a fad that will fade…

…If we do things right. We just need ubiquitous, easy to use personal internet servers. They are technically and economically possible right now. We have cheap hardware, and cheap software. We just need to wrap that up together, and massively sell them.

With a suitable propaganda about privacy and independence on the internet, the dream of a mostly decentralized internet may come true in less than 3 decades. And at that point, privacy on the internet won't be a problem any more.
100% right. Get something working on the screen as soon as possible. Then show it to your designer and product people, and get immediate feedback about whether it looks like it's going to work for the audience or not.
I'm largely non-technical. Written maybe a total of 50 lines of PHP and consider myself knowledgeable about but unable to personally execute 90%+ of engineering/development work.

The challenge was primarily that I had an underperforming technical/engineering team until we hired a professional, experienced VP of Engineering last year (which has made a huge difference).

My advice - get a technical co-founder or early CTO/VP Eng that is immensely technical and totally dedicated. Many on here have described the weakness of having great code and great software with no marketing channel - the other side is just as painful.
I last had this discussion sometime last year when Argos did much the same mistake here in the UK - but cancelled the orders. At the time a contract lawyer weighed in and explained there were various caveats and so forth that allowed them to do this.

(certainly prior to taking the money then they are able to simply cancel the order at any time. After that I suppose it depends on the country/contract law involved)
Dow Theorist Mr. Russell: Sell Everything, You Won't Recognize USA By Year's End
That's exactly it!

Neat, never knew that was in there. I really should do more reading before diving in to using something. Bad habit.

It would be nice to see two fair sized chunks of code side by side, one in each style and then to ask a panel of programmers which is the more readable of the two.

I'm beginning to slowly 'grok' functional code, I can read it a bit easier now than two months ago (exposure), but I still feel like with olives that it is an acquired taste.

I hope I'll grow over that, it definitely doesn't feel natural yet, and it takes me much longer to understand a piece of functional code than it does when I look at 'imperative' code.
It's not that big companies, or big companies some of us love to mock are always bad, it's that it can be very easy for mediocre programmers to fly under the radar in those environments for years, and never accomplish or learn much of anything. As you've done in your question, focus on your project experience and what you learned and the company where you worked on those projects becomes inconsequential.
I spent most of yesterday playing this game. It's one of the most engaging games I've ever played. It's a lot of fun trying to come up with neat, elegant solutions. You need to use a lot of concepts that are used in programming, such as loops and recursions.

Some of the later levels are pretty brutal, especially the bonus levels, but in a good way.

(They're more like Turing machines by the way)
Approximately as valuable as 2 years at Microsoft.

No, it's not a negative, at all. Get out of the echo chamber. Mostly, the people with the loudest opinions about MSFT are the ones with the least influence over hiring.
I'm suddenly tempted to give SLASH'EM another go.
I really don't wanna be that developer or DBA whose lack of attention caused this. I work for an online retailer and obviously we live in fear of self-inflicted downtime. (That said, no business likes downtime)
You probably are never going to use the original code you put down, so its kind of irrelevant how you start designing your web app. The most important thing is to start working. By doing this you will know what works and what doesn't. This will help you in your next iteration.
> […] better and more secure privacy exists today than it did six months ago.

You sound like you're talking about something specific. Could you elaborate, please?
Steve Jobs on WWDC: "You won't be disappointed"
I just started picking up Clojure (coming from Python) a couple weeks ago. It's hard to understand at first, but I'm really starting to like it more than Python. Once you get over the mind-backflip that comes with the leap from imperative to functional, it really feels a lot more coherent.
I think "inspired" is a bit of a strong word for imitating one particular design element. The Android home screen remains an entirely different beast, with it's widget-oriented interface. Frankly, I think that the home screen is one of Android's biggest strengths over the iPhone. I love being able to glance (for example) at my upcoming calendar events or recent tweets without launching the respective apps.
I recently asked here about an intermediate language to use for compiling a domain specific language I use.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1361382

The language I'm compiling does this, but with non-linear "pipe" systems. It's a bizarre mongrel of functional, dataflow, OO and declarative (as per Prolog), and revisits Alan Kay's idea that OO is about the messages, not the objects. On steroids.

It uses the left to right version, so function application is (args).(func) although that's not the syntax. In particular, using Lisp-like notation, addition is written similarly to (3 4 +) where 3 is sent to the tail of the list. the tail of the list is 4 sent to +, which creates a function that adds 4 to its argument. Thus (4 +) is a function in its own right.

There are interesting parallels with continuations and the like, but we've found some problems with the underlying theoretical basis and are re-working some of the ideas.

Of course it's probably isomorphic to an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp, but there you go.
Seriously? Thank you for letting me know; I was going to get an Evo on the 4th but not after learning this. I'm glad I didn't find this out after purchasing.
5 years at Microsoft is boring. But you say: I pioneered the use of data semantics within Bing. That will get you a job interview anywhere where people care about search or semantics.

You are now branded :-)
Just typing out loud here: I usually just define a function called Tag which returns a jquery handle to said tag i.e.

function tag(name) {
return $('<' + name +'></' + name + '>');
}

tag('div').append(
tag('ul').append(
tag('li').html('a'),
tag('li').html('b')))

which would become:

['div',
['ul',
['li', 'a'],
['li', 'b']]]

That seems substantially nicer to look at - but lacks the ability to easily add event handlers etc. that I get w/ the jquery approach. There is no reason it could not be inter-operable though:

['div', tag('span').html('click me').click(function(){alert('clicked')})];
"All this has happened before. All this will happen again" -- Pythia, BSG.

The first thing I do is research the daylights out of every competitive product I can find and compile a super set of features of all of them, noting pricing, positioning, messaging, etc.

Then I circle the features that matter to me and I add my own secret sauce features. Then I turn the computer off and start sketching.

Sketching isn't the act of coding or even designing. It's the act of thinking. Look at Leonardo's sketches -- particularly the ones of the human body. http://www.drawingsofleonardo.org He isn't documenting in so much as he's working out what he thinks about how something will work, not just on the outside but on the inside as well. This is particularly true for his anatomy sketches. IMHO he would have been an awesome software designer.

I believe that coding is the art of thinking clearly. Lack of clarity in what you're building almost always results in bad code, the kind that no amount of tweeking can fix.

IMHO the absolute best prototyping tool out there is graph paper and pencil. Personally I like the marbled notebooks because they can take a beating and you can write on them reclining.

Once you've got all the screens of your site drawn out and even some copy written in the margins then you can turn the computer back on and revisit each of those competitive sites and see if your idea still hunts. If it still does then start coding.
Facebook. The privacy controls are leaps and bounds better than last year. Also they are generally respected better (i.e. if you lock it down it is respected).

The problems, currently, are mostly to do with a) when privacy options are not being respected properly (by accident or design) and b) Facebook not making privacy options clear to "noob" users.

Irrespective; from the view of a security researcher with an interest in social media (like myself) it is a lot harder today to see someones private details than it was last year.
jquery-haml is a very similar project whose syntax is based on Haml: http://github.com/creationix/jquery-haml.

I'm working on a templating extension to it, which'll be at http://github.com/Sidnicious/jquery-haml-templater.
Good point about the echo chamber :)

I think my purpose for posting this question was to provide myself with a reality check as I get more serious about my next career move.

Do people just like to be negative about Microsoft because it's the cool thing to do or are there legitimate concerns that I will need to mitigate?

Thanks for your perspective.
JavaScript rapid function definition
Yes, concatenative languages. Check out Factor[1] or Forth[2], for example.

[1] http://www.factorcode.org/

[2] http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/
you should try out sense, many people consider it an improvement over stock android.
Under "misuse" I would include things like:

Use of robots for the purpose of prosecuting a war crime

Use of robots to carry out an act of terrorism

Indiscriminate use of deadly force by autonomous robots

Use of autonomous robots in a military context without proper supervision (for example, not being able to deactivate them once deployed).
Entrepreneurs, Say No to (Poorly Run, Unnecessary) Meetings
Two "valid" concerns people will have about MSFT employees:

* MSFT is a huge company, and is run nothing like a startup or a small software company. They'll be worried that you're processbound.

* There's a perception that Microsoft is massive and loaded with middle management and that anyone with a "do-ing" role is pigeonholed very specifically, so you'll want to stake very specific and aggressive claims about the breadth of your get-shit-done experience.

These concerns would also apply to anyone from IBM, Sun, or Cisco.

Generally, compared to a recent CS grad, multiple years at MSFT doing real work is a huge win. My only big caveat is that 5 years is a long time to be at a BigCo.
I've ran across a couple ex-MSFTers that were way too expensive for their skill set. But I still wish I could have hired them, they were smart guys.

Aside from that, if you are being interviewed by real tech people, not an HR machine, there's no way MSFT could ever count against you.

Way more damning is if you only have experience with .NET or something like that.