skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Competing with Greyhound: My NYC/Chicago Bus Venture
Well sure it kills you, but did they know to pull the tooth in 4000BC?
> For example, iBooks provides a slider UI element to control the brightness level. This puts Apple in an unfair competitive position because other apps — such as the Kindle or even non-competing apps such as Instapaper2 — can’t offer this functionality to their users.

GoodReader has a brightness control built in. Are they not supposed to? Why not?
I've looked into this.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1476718
Indeed, but sometimes having flexibility ends up costing real dollars.
Stop complaining and pay programmers more
It seems like every time I check HN someone is bitching and moaning about how difficult it is to find competent programmers. Newsflash: competent programmers apparently have a skill that is extremely rare. Rare commodities are expensive.

It strikes me as senseless to complain endlessly about how 199 out of 200 candidates who are interviewed for a programming position are literally incompetent. No competent hiring manager should put out more than one ad posting which attracts a horde of unqualified candidates. Why not? Because the second time around he will offer a much more attractive salary.

And that's really the end of it. Enough of this nonsense.
So iTex is apparently a joke... Anyone know what the actual announcement is? Or was he joking about that too?
BlackHole Servers
It might be worth it to survey your users. Maybe popup a link to a quick survey to ask them if they would prefer another payment option. I would have gone with PayPal, personally, because you know everyone who has used eBay has an account. Then it's an easy jump to Website Payments Pro if your users really would prefer you to have their credit card information.
epic acquisition email. The density of so many cultural references and sarcastic reflections made by the leader of an organization sent me into a fan-boyish world wind.

I could only reply, "where do I sign up?"
I can relive in my mind photos made by somebody else accompanied by a story.

I feel that history is just one of possible fictions. The fact that it actually happened (even to me personally) poses little significance to me. Physics on the other hand is something real, very distinct and intrinsically interesting.
Even if it allowed interpreters the iOS doesn't allow just in time compiling - you can't dynamically generate and execute code. This means V8 can't be used since it doesn't have an interpreter and Trace Monkey would do no tracing.
Does anyone use AppEngine in production? I am not trying to troll but we've have had pretty poor performance getting data out of their datastore. We only have a couple operations apps running on it and I could not imagine running anything that need to perform on GAE. BTW - We've had slowness in both Java and Python...
Here ya go!

;; Linear Search
(defun find-a-grade (grades)
(loop for grade in grades
when (char= grade #\a)
return grade))

;; Guarded Linear Search
; should use condition system to signal exhaustion
(defun surely-find-a-grade (grades)
(loop for grade in grades
when (char= grade #\a)
return grade
finally (return "not found")))

;; Definate process all items
; fn is a unary function that gets applied to each element in sequence
(defmethod search-all ((objects sequence) fn)
(loop for item in objects do
(funcall fn item)))

;fn is a BINARY function that gets applied to each key/value pair
(defmethod search-all ((objects hash-table) fn)
(maphash fn objects))

;; Polling loop
(defun amy-poller (eof question)
(loop for answer = (yes-or-no-p question)
when answer
return "bye"))

;; extreme values
(defun maximum (values)
(loop for val in values
maximize val))

(defun minimum (values)
(loop for val in values
minimize val))
Home - DONZ WORKS
I personally found that doing my own accounting was a terrible waste of my time. I hired an extremely competent person for $20-25/hour (in Canada). Time was my most valuable asset as a founder, so I think outsourcing such a non-critical part of the business for so little money makes total sense.

EDIT: $25/hour was for day-to-day accounting. Year end taxes were obviously more expensive (~$500). The company was a Delaware C Corp.
47 minutes past the scheduled 5:30 pm, pacific announcement time. Earth still stable.
... so live it, be present in it, forget it, make up a story about it, tell the story many times to same people ...
It may be hard to value, but you can back out the assumptions required to justify its current price and evaluate their probability of actually happening. The bar is very, very high for TSLA.
Pretty clever way to make sure that the app actually gets approved by Apple.
Well, I know that much. Did you mean that Redis just persists when you ask it to?

(I was counting that under "you have to do it yourself" and thought it might do something more automatic but still infrequent.)
How Research 2000 Could Make Its Life Easy
Yet again, Microsoft attempts to target the cheapy market and ends up with lame results, while Apple goes for the high end and continues to create magic. What is that quote about the definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1472271

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1474202
And what happens when things align such that sexual incentives occur which are contrary to relevant covenants? If we can't trust a politician to be loyal to his wife when faced with another attractive woman, why should we trust him to be loyal to political or employment covenants, by all accounts much less intimate and involved than a marriage covenant, if such a condition was presented?

For instance, if a company promises lots of pre-paid escort time in exchange for a given change to a given bill, why should we expect that an adulterer would be any more loyal to the right regarding the political establishment than his own wife and family?

And the reality is that these people don't even need an explicit sexual offer to betray their associates, there are many other bribes that appeal to the same basic desires (like money, power, status, etc.) that can be exploited to the same ultimate end.

An adulterer is a proven liability. Why should we trust him and invest a bunch of time and money and trust and secrets into him, only to betrayed when an adversarial entity lures him with money and sex? Obviously repentant people should be given another chance at some point, but I would never trust a known adulterer that wasn't completely repentant.
Excellent points. Point #1 would be especially interesting.

Also: It'd be great if the print version was available in other countries (such as Australia).
This is going to sound dumb, but why do you use the word senescence here rather than maturity? They both seem to mean the same thing. Does it have some specific business meaning, or is it just another way of saying the same thing?
Interesting how political language today often uses phrases like "it's time act".

What this doesn't say is "act how?". Finally eliminate software patents? Shore them up?

The announcement is remarkably opaque on either what he thinks of the issue of software patents or what he intends to do about it.
How will offering a higher salary deter less qualified people? It seems like it will attract more of all kinds of programmers.
Are the Conficker masters really as cryptographically sophisticated as the article describes? They implemented an encryption algorithm that had been submitted as a SHA-3 candidate, complete with its flaws, then updated it to patch the flaw only after the author of the algorithm corrected his own work.

Similarly, they exploited a flaw in Windows only after Microsoft released a security update describing the bug.

The Conficker creators are certainly paying attention and taking advantage of the right opportunities, but they're not quite the super-genius polymaths that the article is making them out to be.
Follow the money:
http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N0000...

He gets lots of money from those that would benefit from broader patents.
I talked to someone who was at Motorola when the Kin was out for hardware bid. They repeatedly asked what the strategy was, why was a separate O/S needed, and eventually turned it down.

I believe Panasonic eventually got the bid, but pretty much stole Motorola's design according to my friend.
Maybe it was ignored in the rush to ship? The development process could have been quite far along by the time they could have done such testing.
This is sad. Microsoft is now a late to market type company. They don't want to invent anymore. They just want to see a market thrive and then jump into it. They invest a lot of money and then can rule all. By last months quote that Apple is now worth more, it seems like Microsoft is losing its edge fast. I wouldn't be surprised in the next 20 years, Microsoft loses on a lot of other areas they try to jump into.
I always thought it was really stupid and soul-numbing to do have the "right" activities to impress someone too, so I mostly ignored all the advice and did what I wanted during high school. Then I applied to one of the elite colleges mentioned in the article (mostly because my parents threatened to kick me out of the house if I didn't at least apply to college, and if you're gonna go through the trouble, might as well go for the top) and got in anyway.

Same thing with Google: I always figured that I wouldn't want to work at any place that cared where I went to college. But then I applied anyway, as an experiment, got in, and it turned out I loved it.

If I had to give some unsolicited advice (yeah, modulo luck and all that), I'd say to live your life the way that makes you happy, but if it happens to make some elite institution happy too, why not give it a try? There are some very real benefits to a college like Amherst or an employer like Google. While they're not worth making yourself miserable over, they can be a pretty nice perk if your interests lay in that direction anyway.

Also, I've found that what high-caliber institutions really want are people whose passions make them come alive. For exactly the reasons the article mentioned. There are lots of sheep that want to get into Google for the six-figure salaries and 3 meals a day and resume boost. There are comparatively fewer who want to get in because it's like being a kid in a data-mining candy shop. Organizations want the latter kind, who're usually the ones with the clearest ideas of what they want to get out of life.

And if they don't, fuck 'em.
We may have to disagree, then. Here is our common ground from my first post: "Your footprint on the world is a culmination of your actions, so in a sense, your actions mark you in the perceptions of others." But clinging to what you think you are based upon actions you have performed will hold you back from living. The distinctions may be subtle, but there is a kind of freedom involved here.
Yep, same here waiting. To spice things up I decided to twiddle my thumbs backwards and count in multiples of 14.
https://bespin.mozillalabs.com/
Inspiration & Motivational Videos for Startups
Consumer Payments Are Just the Start for an Ambitious FaceCash
There is a slight problem with one of the examples:

void findMinMax(istream & input, double & min, double & max)
// postcondition: min is the minimal value in stream input,
// max is the maximal value in stream input
{
double min = DBL_MAX; // #include <float.h> for DBL_MAX
double max = DBL_MIN;
double current;
while (input >> current) {
if (current <= min) min = current;
if (current >= max) max = current;
}
}

The DBL_MIN should be -DBL_MAX if non-positive numbers should be found, as DBL_MIN is the positive double value closest to zero, not the most-negative double value.
Yeah, I can't believe another company that makes a competing product hasn't thought of publicly announcing when they submitted their mobile browser to the app store.
It should improve the ratio though.
Damn, did the founder(s) have full equity?
I thought they put alcohol before privacy? Maybe that was before money. After Google?
Microsoft does lots of things that no normal company can get away with (Vista, ME, Bob), and still survivies. Part of the problem is that Microsoft has so much cash, that they can do stupid projects like this, that fail, and they have no reason to learn.

This is why there market cap is falling, and Apples is rising. Microsoft does 100s of stupid things that fail, because they can, and nobody inside the company seems to care. Here, have $10 million for your project, if you fail, we will move you somewhere else.
Starbucks VIA Ready Brew Iced Coffee
Yeah, I was pretty sure that was incorrect, though I didn't try it myself. I figured you guys might want a chance to reply, and I saw that you did.
Maybe, maybe not. I think a better way to filter people would be something like Justin.tv or Facebook does where they have applicants write code as part of the application. I don't have any experience with hiring so i don't have any real data, but I'd love to know how effective those are.
Will Angel Crash And VC Have Its Revenge?
I was nowhere near close to these decisions, but I was working on phone related projects when I was at Microsoft (I quit very recently). What you say is basically my understanding of the situation.

A few other rumors/half-truths:

1) Kin Studio, the client software was the one thing reviewers (what customers?) liked about Kin. It was largely developed by the Zune client team.

2) The Kin team was formed from remaining members of the SideKick team acquired with Danger.

3) Dislike of Microsoft tech and Windows Phone politics caused many SideKick engineers to leave post acquisition because they were forced to build Kin on the Windows Phone OS, which was very much like building the plane while flying it. Those who left tended to be the talented ones who could get other jobs.

4) Many designers didn't share the Windows-hate, so the resulting team was very designer heavy.

5) The talented folks left on the Kin team were poached quite greedily by the Windows Phone 7 initiative.

6) Some bigwig was in charge of Kin and Microsoft lets CVPs piss away tons of money to keep them from going to competitors. I've never seen this strategy work out.
Most phones ship with similar epic fails. iPhone 4 actually performs better than iPhone 3GS in the case of low signal:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2
I'm not so sure. As far as I can see, they've still only fixed 1 of 3 security holes - which violate their own privacy policy - and yet have found the time to both push this funding through (not a small effort) and highly publicize it. Should they not be worrying more about their users' privacy than their PR? I know that these are different 'roles' in the company, so it's not as simple as pulling people off one thing and on to another, but it does feel a little slimy.
You have to understand: there's more to hiring programmers than paying lots of money. If that were the case, we wouldn't have had a dot-com bust and software companies would be dominated by MBAs.

That's the hard part of hiring programmers. How do you incentivize the good ones to work for you? If you have a solution to that problem, I suspect you'll be a very much in-demand person.
I never found Wesabe as compelling as Yodlee or Mint. Mint won in my mind because it did similar things and had similar atmosphere, but without making me do all of the work. That, and I could never keep straight if it was "Wesabi" or "Wasabi".

Still, it's a shame they couldn't find a way to make it work.
JWZ wants his HTML style sheet back. Ow, my eyes....
In software development, like most anything else, you really get what you pay for.

Being a non-technical co-founder, I did learn this the hard way a few times.

I totally agree that having a competent, hardworking and passionate programmer is probably the most important part of a startup.
May I ask what company you work for? I've never heard of HR supporting something like this at any of the companies I or my friends have worked for. Is it something they support but don't advertise? I'd love to have a setup like this in a few years.
Grep is a beautiful tool
Porn 2.0 - The State of Social Porn
The point is that the API Apple used to implement it isn't available to developers. GoodReader likely implemented a workaround, such as the one Instapaper has. It's not a native element, however.
I think my Instapaper and Kindle iPad app are broken.. they both have brightness sliders. Where can I buy the anti-competitive versions of these apps?
"with Apple’s prior written consent, an Application may use embedded interpreted code" - from the dev agreement.
A few games have been approved to host an interpreter. So it's just a matter of Apple deciding if they want fully featured Firefox, Chrome, Opera or not.
Thanks for the compliment. You're probably right about the DOJ, but I like to stay optimistic when it comes to our system of justice.
What do you guys think this means for the company? Would firing Steve Ballmer do anything for their feudal management structure?

This is a company with billions in cash, smart employees and profitable projects. It's sad that they can't get together and be seen as anything but the gang that sells software to my dad.
The point wasn't that those apps _don't_ have this functionality builtin, but rather that it's not an available API to developers. Marco had to implement a workaround in order to offer the brightness slider in Instapaper. It works, but it's not native functionality.

But those were just examples of a macro issue, so I really wouldn't focus on that too much.
Fung Wah, from Boston <-> NY for something like $15. For a while, it seemed like every week there was news of another Fung Wah accident, whether it be hitting the Mass Pike toll booths or tipping over on the on ramp. They should have advertised "$15 for an ADVENTURE"
I think you have it exactly backwards. The best programmers I know seem to be indifferent to cash. They work on the most interesting project they can find that pays them enough to live. Hiring people like that is really tough.
I'd imagine the incompetent ones wouldn't bother applying to jobs that are "way out of their league".

If you are "sucky" you might still apply for a $60K job, thinking that you might slide through. But you wouldn't bother applying to a $100K job, thinking that there'd be way more competent people applying so it'd be a waste of time
True — however that doesn't stop the DOJ from initiating an investigation or other third parties from requesting one. I think that Apple wants to avoid that kind of investigation. In any case: there are problems with the App Store, and I think that's the issue at hand here.
Money doesn't always attract people to a job. The purpose of good pay is to keep people from leaving! Nothing will destroy a code base like having its original designers leave; there has to be someone who can answer questions quickly.

I've never known the salary for a job at the time I applied. I'm not even sure I had a ballpark. It does come up in interviews, since companies tend to want to know what you're expecting. But why should I care? That's what an offer is: if I don't like the offer, I don't have to accept.

To attract good talent, you have to put your requirements right into your job posting. Ask for proof of work on open-source projects, for example; things that are hard to fake. A candidate that feels daunted by your application won't even make it to the interview.
Top 10 Beer Myths
Christian Louboutin Pumps on sale
Original title didn't misspell "lose".
OK: democracy was the wrong word to use here. However, the point still remains and you've quite nailed it — there needs to be clarity between Apple and the developers of their platform.
More like Smug Lisp Weenie.
http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?SmugLispWeenie
But clinging to what you think you are based upon actions you have performed will hold you back from living

Yes. And this is why "clinging to what you think you are based upon actions you have performed" is an exceptionally _bad_ way to make decisions and do things. Do not do this.

You are adding in a past-tense here where none is intended. You are alive this instant. You make decisions. This is your life. There is nothing in this advice about thinking you are the culmination of past decisions. You are alive now. You make decisions now. The decisions you make right now are your life.

The things you may or may not have not done in the past have nothing at all to do with it. In fact, as you point out, if you define yourself by your past actions? You've missed the point of what I was saying.

You are your decisions, but you are not the history of your decisions. You are your present-tense decisions. You exist now -- not as some trend, pattern, or tendency. People can worry about history when you are dead if they like. It's not worth your time now. Your life is the decision you make right this instant.

We are not disagreeing. I believe you misunderstand.
I'd imagine the incompetent ones wouldn't bother applying to jobs that are "way out of their league".

Never done hiring before, eh?
I don't really use GitHub, but the same issue comes around with BitBucket. The main obstacle to taking projects off BitBucket is their issue tracker (wiki is cloneable). You don't really want to lose issue history every time you take something off the site. I've been looking at distributed bug trackers such as Bugs Everywhere (http://bugseverywhere.org/be/show/HomePage) for this reason.
> How do you incentivize the good ones to work for you? If you have a solution to that problem, I suspect you'll be a very much in-demand person.

Bonuses, perks, and congrats on jobs well-done. If I spend 40 hours between Dec 31 and Jan 2 writing up a new wireless barcoding system because the powers that be decided at the last minute to begin the new year with a different process for warehousing, I better get a damn bonus, at least 1.5 x 40 hours of my rate. You know what I got upon successful completion of my last-minute project? "chime, if you had originally developed a flexible enough system to accommodate changing of bin/zone locations, you wouldn't have had to work in the last minute." I resigned from that job.
You'd imagine wrong, if my past experience is anything to go by.
Finland makes broadband a 'legal right'
I'm looking forward to One Click + Amazon Prime shipping on Woot items. Or actually... maybe not :)
"How will offering a higher salary deter less qualified people?"

You've got it exactly backwards: it's not intended to deter the unqualified, it's meant to attract the qualified.

And yes, high salaries do tend to attract good people. Maybe not exclusively, but it's an important factor. So, if the complaint is that "there are no good programmers" (and we assume that your screening process isn't totally arbitrary), there's a pretty good bet that you're not attracting good programmers from the places where they currently work. High salaries are a good way to do that.
Google to add pay to cover a tax that gays pay
Does the notion of a contractor exist in Sweden? If so, do they also get vacation?