skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is terribly bitter, with a contrived, unsupported sense of superiority.

I'm a pretty well-rounded developer, but I know there are innumerable things that I don't know. I also know that I research enough that the things I'm not comfortable with aren't particularly important for me or my projects.

I've never developed anything real in a functional language, for instance, aside from doing some tutorial tests and realizing that the friction (with coworkers trying to maintain, for instance) overwhelmingly demolished any potential advantage.

I will say one thing though -- the most mediocre developers I've ever worked with tended to have the widest "range" of "skills".

It's a way to compensate for never being able to provide solutions. Instead they always weaved, always sure that if you just embraced the latest thing and did things entirely differently it would be so much better (which they never actually do themselves because their role is more "OMG, you don't know about {X}? OMG!")
Amazon is better at negotiating with publishers or has more bargaining chips?

I don’t really know whether Apple’s heart is in all this book stuff (Steve Jobs famously said that Americans don’t read anymore), they might not care all that much at the moment. iBooks might just be a fallback solution in case Amazon tries funny stuff (or some other competitor emerges which doesn’t want to play ball with Apple).
TechCrunch Europe Summer Pitch Slam
I think this will become Google's problem, too (though they seem to have the sort of culture described in the article).
BioWare Austin is still hiring local Drupal/PHP developers to help build the game/web integration for Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO.

Imagine 1-2 million players feeding game events real-time into your web site from day one. There won't be any "grow slowly, scale gracefully" here. We need to be big out of the gate.

We've had something of a hard time finding people, so we're considering training up junior people, now, too.

We're also still looking for a front-end HTML/CSS/JS person, too.

The openings are here, under "Marketing:" http://www.bioware.com/bioware_info/jobs/austin_jobs/

They're contract jobs, so no relocation is provided for, but they're a year long, so you wouldn't have to look for something new right away.

If you apply, email me (vmiliano at that domain name) with your resume so I can it in the hiring manager's hands.
Now that the ipad and other ebook readers are good enough to read on comfortably, I don't see myself buying a technical book made out of dead trees ever again. I might for fiction because I am a bit of a romantic..
> Apple is too late to stop that train.

All the more reason for them to get violent.

In the end, it would be much better if they just competed by making better phones.
11. Avoid using names like crowdSPRING.
Is software development tax deductible if you don't pay yourself a salary?
New businesses don't become profitable over night. There is a period of time where you're making money, but you don't have enough money to quit your day job and start paying yourself a salary. In this case, what exactly can be written off at tax time?

Off the top of my head, I'm thinking development involved in creating new features and/or products is tax deductible. Also, the software product itself must hold some kind of value.
IPhone 4 Delivery – Unbox Video – Initial Review
> amortizing is unavoidable, but Walmart has more regulatory burden than a corner shop

Why should walmart have more regulatory burden? It's not like workplace injuries are less severe in a corner shop. It's not like food safety is less important.

> who knows what the ratio is?

Walmart does. It pushes regulations as competitive advantage.

> The only way I can see you going from here is hardcore Libertarianism, and I don't bother debating that.

Of course not. You think that intentions matter. Me, I'm pissed that you insist on giving my money to the politically well connected and think that that somehow makes you a good person.
That's funny, the last time I bought anything on iTunes was several years ago, and I had the opposite problem. I had bought some episodes of Law and Order, and once I was done watching them I deleted them. Every time I started up iTunes it kept automatically trying to redownload the files I had deletes, which was ~1GB of data.

Maybe it was different for music, though...
Our college educated counterparts in China
Client Fragmentation: Apps are making software (development) more expensive
Actually, if you buy an app when it's on sale and then try to download it again after it goes off sale, it won't let you.

I once caught a an app that was temporarily free and got it in iTunes with my account it in one of my computers, expecting it to show up as an available download when I got back to the one I sync my phone with. It doesn't appear and I had to copy the .ipa file there.

I have no experience trying to redownload paid apps that are still the same price, but first thing I did was to add .ipa files to my daily mozy backup.
I've heard before that EA forces employees to work long hours and for low pay but this part got me:

"The current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm -- seven days a week -- with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30pm)"

Saturday evening off for good behavior....
Chrome seems to have had quite a few issues lately. Had a few reports of it not working with Mibbit.
The Chrome developer channel build seems better, so hopefully that'll solve some things.
There are far more distressing things in C programming, specially on the Windows platform, than semantic whitespace.

I would find debugging makefiles... enjoyable compared to writing Windows C++ code.
The last one had some London jobs:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438505
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned.
http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2002/08/nipple.html
For some reason your link was cut. Here it is, in shortened version : http://nyti.ms/bejeg0
If one looks at the interfaces that really are intuitive, one often finds that the bandwidth -- amount of data presented to the user -- is limited. Creating contexts that are limited to a particular specific task is very powerful and helps avoid confusion.

If a task is complex, it takes a good amount of insight to be able to divide it into such specific contexts without unduly getting in the way of the user.
The other day I was browsing through computer books. One, on LINQ for VB, seemed very enthusiastic on this radical new technology Microsoft had brought out -- and the example they used to illustrate this was something Smalltalk had 30 years ago.

Incidently, Smalltalk isn't normally considered a functional programming language (do doubt because object orientation overshadowed it) but with its closures (called blocks) and select:, collect:, reject:, inject: etc methods it seems (to me) as much so as Scheme.
And that guy had/has a Maserati Problem too!
I don't understand this mentality. He is focuses on hours worked not on results. Are research grants given based on number of hours spent researching by grad students?
In April of 2010, Forbes magazine named Patterson fourth on their annual list of "America's Best-Performing Bosses" based on a formula for calculating which executives delivered the best shareholder value relative to their total compensation. Factors included stock performance relative to industry peers over the past six years, annualized stock performance during the leader's total tenure and performance relative to the S&P 500 over that time, and total compensation over the past six years.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/27/best-performing-chief-execu...
Membase a new NoSQL
Is there a way to opt-out of Apple's location tracking altogether? I know apps usually request express user permission for it on a case by case basis, but the way I'm reading the new T&C, Apple and/or it's partners no longer need it in iOS 4. Is this correct?

It seems like the opt-out link mentioned in the article is just for iAds and relative to cookies, etc, and not location tracking.
There's a C(rework) term in C(AFTF) as well because the "in advance" work never actually "just works" for the future that shows up.
On the account of nightmares. My first prolonged exposure to violent video games did result in nightmares. I was round 6 at the time and have spent two hours playing Battle Chess.

However, many other events result in nightmares. And I reckon that gaming is a worthwhile cause.
I just played around with this last night, and it seems like SipSorcery, through the Ruby dial plans, have hacked up a way to make the sip call appear to come from your GV number.

It works for me (though I used Sipgate since you can't sign up for gizmo5 anymore). The only problem I had was that when people call my GV number, the Caller ID when sipdroid rings says that it's from my own Sipgate number, which the original number displayed in brackets. (And perhaps that when you have both a sim number and the sipdroid one, both the normal phone app and sipdroid rings at the same time, so you have to make sure you answer the right way...)
I dont know about the others who are upvoting him/her. But I went to grad school and my upvote was a very informed upvote. Its sad, its true.
This sure makes me want to buy an N8. It's deprecated from the start!
Product, Ambition, Leverage: How Y Combinator companies raise money
At my university every single lab/research group is named after the professor directing it. It's the standard in Japan. The name simply changes when a new professor joins or takes over.

I find the practice a bit in bad taste, but it's not exceptional.
I had heard of R, but I didn't really know anything about it. I knew it was a statistical package, and I knew it had its own language, but I didn't really care about learning how to use it; I wanted to learn to use Clojure, Scala, Ocaml, or Haskell.

One of the reasons I picked Clojure over the other languages is that I knew that I could use code from the Incanter project if I needed some statistical functions.

A link to my content-complete thesis is:
https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1kOKjY265a3F5SbN25d...

The thesis is long and boring to read. Let me save you some time. Here it is in a nutshell:
Genetic algorithms (GAs) can be used, somewhat successfully, to identify good parameter-sets for technical trading strategies; however, even the "best" GA-identified parameter-sets in my research failed to outperform the buy and hold strategy when trading, with EOD prices, over the course of a randomly picked 1-year period taken from the interval starting January 1, 1985 and ending May 1, 2010.

My code is not available yet because according to the university it belongs to them (ridiculous, I know). I'll have to ask my advisor whether or not I can make it publicly available.
Can you tell a programmer/language inventor from a killer?
Many people do. Spoken language rarely transcribes to good written language.
Dressing well, shaving, etc. takes lots and lots of time. Best programmers spend all their time programming or thinking/dreaming about programming ;)
I wonder how long before everyone gets the message: Just say no to DRM.
Circuit Could Swap Ultracapacitors for Batteries
I'd guess that more than 5% are extended (maybe 6-8%), but that more than 95% are not extended as expected.

When something is not extended as expected, either you end up with something not as good as you'd have gotten by waiting or you have to rip out some of what you put in for the future without ever using it.
The Exobrain
I guess the person(s) who voted me down haven't read Tufte:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp

or Norvig:

http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/

and assumed I was making some random insult. I'm not.
I've also gotten the infinite redirect on occasion, when trying to log into GMail (firefox)
The ability to wear a button down shirt (and even a tie occasionally!) without being looked at sideways is one of the few things I miss about my old corporate job.
I was under the impression that he said that because he didn't have a book reading application yet and was downplaying the kindle until the iPad was out. Similar to how he downplayed the netbooks until the iPad came out. (Yes iPad and the netbooks are different but they are in the same field. I think it's harder to reinvent books compared to small portable computers. Hence why iBook is pretty much the same as all the ebook software).
I thought about putting the time limit in the title somehow but was looking to highlight the key info, you're right though, that would have been a better title
Eclipse helios is released
I have never seen the logo as he's usually holding it in such a way that it's not visible but it's clearly and iPad. They may have put a silver "sticker" over the Apple logo on the back.
> If his company doesn't pay him to develop Linux products, why on earth would he learn about developing for Linux?

If programming is just a job, and you don't care about it when you leave the workplace, that's a reasonable attitude.

If, OTOH, programming is something you care about and that actually interests you (which is true of nearly all good programmers), it's an attitude you won't have.
Amusingly, it doesn't work on actual frogs. People have tried, I think (though can't source).
Also worth checking out is mixpanel - an HN startup (see link at bottom).
So if I compiled my C# applications from the command line using a project file which I wrote from scratch in an XML editor, would that suddenly give me a better understanding of "how my code works?"

Oh wait, no it wouldn't.
except they have limitations on the amount of devices which can be authorized. And this is the rip mix burn company who didn't care in the past. Why would they care now, most users will just make a cd out of the music anyway to pass it to friends.
It is in the sense that nothing will be left, and the space-wide temperature will be arbitrarily close to zero K

I mean, the Universe wouldn't vanish or explode. We'd just all be dead, and it'd stop being interesting, the same way your magnesium strip is pretty boring and useless once it's finished burning.
Here's a meta-citation for you: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971708

In short, Henry Ford did experiments in his factory and decided that 40h/week was optimal. Unfortunately, this figure has stuck, even though newer research indicates that for knowledge work and creative work, less than 40 is more appropriate. (35-40 suggested by these slides: http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres... )
It's an eye opener that he mentioned that you shouldn't bootstrap and rely on advertising. I definitely want to maintain control over my project, but coming up with unconventional revenue may prove to be a challenge. I'll have to think a bit harder about it.
Unless you own the company or are a partner, never imagine you're anything other than work for hire. The worst part is if you're a good soldier and do your (unpaid) OT, there's no guarantee you'll see any kind of reward. Employers who mandate 40+ weeks are ususally the kind who are looking to screw their employees any way they can. It is, however, a perfect sign that you need to be looking for a new job immediately.
You might try:

http://www.clearancejobs.com/ [Advanced Search for countries]
Because... they like getting viruses instead of what they googled?
All that is required to transcribe that quote correctly (and a few others in the article) is to use a semicolon instead of a comma.
What's everyone's experience of Chef vs. Puppet? I've just started learning Puppet and I'm wondering how much of a benefit Chef would be in conjunction with Puppet.
Don't be silly. Symbian is simply moving down-market. It will become Nokia's main offering in the mid-range category, which is currently dominated by "featurephone" operating systems.

For a historical comparison, think of the old Symbian as Windows 3.1 and MeeGo as Windows NT.

In this analogy, the new Symbian is like Windows 95: it's a low-cost solution that catches up to the state of the art in the UI department while also providing API compatibility with the same vendor's high-end operating system.

(Symbian^3 and MeeGo are compatible on the API level because both use Qt. The next version of Symbian will throw away the old Symbian UI layer entirely in favour of a new one that's built entirely in Qt.)
Good read, but the ending is uninformed:

Lets say you want to create some new sort of database because Redis, Cassandra, TokyoTyrant, Postgres, MongoDB, DabbleDB, CouchDB, HBase, etc. just don’t serve your needs that well. You create an amazing in memory tree representation for your data and have a blazing fast indexer. Now all you need is some sort of messaging layer such that different clients can talk to your server. Preferably implemented in different programming language and with clustering capabilities. You could of course create such a messaging framework all by yourself, but that is a lot of hard work.

A simple solution is to just implement your database as a ZeroMQ server and pick a message protocol (fe JSON). As you have seen by now, implementing such functionality with ZeroMQ is really easy and on top of this you will get almost instant scalability because of the way ZeroMQ can route messages.

Interesting scalability and replication problems are not solved by (this kind of) routing. Putting it another way, problems that are solved at this level are also solved by running a bunch of Memcache servers where the standard client already includes a kind of sharding logic.
Watch various SPJ lecture videos for a take from the inside. He'll sometimes talk about working with collegues at MS to add things from FP to these mainstream languages.
I know the same numbers, but they are for programmers. There are jobs where number of hours worked is by far the best predictor of output. OP's work may or may not be among them - sometimes science is a lot more like picking cotton then creative design.
I agree, but just wanted to point out that the opposite approach (allowing the needs of your family to completely subjugate all of your own lifestyle/work dreams) is also an awful mistake that doesn't work either.

As with most things, a balance is what's needed.
Yes, and the way to win people to your way of thinking is to tell them that it's because of "cool marketing" and that it is a "toy." Swell!

The OP's advice is sound: Stop making groundless rips on the other tool, and talk about why Ringo is better. Even "better" is totally subjective, because it depends on what you WANT from a tool.

But instead of saying "If you like x, you'll love Ringo!" you basically resorted to telling those of us who love node that we're stupid.

I frankly don't care. I've seen Ringo in action and I looked at the code, and I didn't like it at all. The points you gave it in its favor don't matter to me, either. I think node is vastly superior.

But, I'm not sniping about it in inflammatory blog posts. I just. don't. use. it. That's what you do when you don't like something: you don't use it.

Getting all aggro just makes you look childish, and causes people to ignore your message.
This breakeven point wasn't hit for solar cells until the 1990s.
Is that even possible? I don't use iTunes, but I thought there was some limit on the number of devices you have registered at a time.
I confess that I love spending on fashion. Why wear boring shoes when Vivienne Westwood has a men's line?
User interfaces my mother doesn't understand:

- Running multiple applications at the same time is too confusing. She doesn't understand/notice the taskbar. She always tries to close one thing before starting another. Also, she doesn't notice that she has four copies of gmail open in the same browser -- since she doesn't understand what tabs are either.

- Window geometry is never manipulated. She has never maximized, minimized, or resized a window.

- As a result of the first two problems, inter-window operations such as drag and drop, cut and paste are often impossible.

- She doesn't know when it's correct to left click, right click, or double left click to do what she wants. So she opts for double-clicking on everything: links, buttons, menus, credit card purchases...

- She used to have 10 different "toolbars" activated in word 2003 because she couldn't find the button she needed, and they are randomly positioned everywhere because of accidental dragging (probably from overzealous double-clicking). Then one day she accidentally dragged the main toolbar offscreen, and was no longer able to open, save, or print...

- Corollary to above -- she avoids menus, since they appear to her as a hierarchical wall of text full of jargon. Also, they are difficult to use when you tend to over-double-click, since they close themselves...

- Activating Chinese UI in i18n-enabled programs it is often detrimental, as she doesn't have the tech vocabulary in Chinese either, and it just makes it harder for me to help her remotely.

- She clicks on a word doc attachment in gmail, spends hours editing it, and can never find the file again, because it's really called "C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Temp\awq2a393.doc"

- She will click OK on any dialog box to make it go away, because she is trained to close dialog boxes that way. Even if the dialog box is a security popup warning for a sketchy activeX control.

- She calls firefox "the google" because it was installed by google pack, and opens to the google homepage. She doesn't know the difference between the browser and the internet.

- She doesn't understand why she can't print a web page and have it look nice, without all the extra columns of ad junk.

+ Okay, one thing that does work well for her -- hitting control key twice accesses google desktop search popup to find anything -- even those annoying files in TEMP. She can remember that shortcut.

Once ipad gets traditional chinese support -- I'm going to get her one, and cut my tech support calls by 90%...
“A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.”

This principle seems to have adapted by google as presented here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440685
Isn't the final "." supposed to be inside the quotes?

IIRC, that's one of the rules that I intentionally break. IMHO, the stuff inside quotes should have whatever punctuation it needs and there should be sentence-appropriate punctuation outside the quotes as well.
In my experience if you delete an app you have paid for you have to try and re-buy it and type your password in but just before it would normally do the transaction it tells you that you already have the application and its a free download. I imagine the same thing might have happened if you had tried to buy the app you got on sale again.
"This lab is what is known as a '40 hour lab'. You are not permitted to work here for more than 40 hours each week. Sign ins and sign outs will be rigorously monitored as well as periodic spot checks to make sure no research tasks associated with this lab have taken place outside official hours.

As you well know there are many, many qualified applicants who would gladly take your place if you feel that you are unable to follow these rules. The simple truth is that if you are unable to get results in the 40 hours provided each week, you will probably be unable to get results period and should look for different employment."

Go ahead, professor, post it. I dare you.
It doesn't matter what Apple is interested in, I was just quoting existing numbers. Apple is #3 and likely to become #4 in the next couple of years. Whether they enjoy that position or not is irrelevant to this discussion.

We're discussing market share, not revenues.

Besides, I'm pretty sure Apple would love to lead both in market share and in revenues.
Yes, I believe it's open to anyone. See the previous post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1434964
It’s all about the light: The Photographer’s Ephemeris
They're advertised as local posts here on HN. Here's the link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1434964

Sorry for the delay, hope I've given you enough time to sort out travel arrangements.