skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bytecode obfuscation is a speed bump. We do more raw X86 than .NET, and compared to X86 --- which every security consultancy worth its bill rate can handle now --- obfuscated .NET bytecode is a dream. And that's as mature as we get now.
Yes, and both a .class and a .pyc file are completely equivalent to source code. Why bother?
LinkedIn: We're Selling Ads For $75 CPM
I yearn for the day when my cell phone runs git and has a single namespace for my data (including that maximum-length WEP2 key that I've typed into my iPhone twice).
Ask YC:  What are starting salaries for CS grads this year?
I'm curious to find out what grads from CS programs are getting offered. The last post by Spolsky seemed to say that MSFT is offering starting salaries close to 6 figures.

s this accurate? Can anyone corroborate? If you're graduating and have offers on the table, would you mind posting a ball-park figure of what you're getting offered? I'd love to hear it.
Music T-Shirts
Astrosauce, for the coolest, most unique tee shirts on the net. Music t's, Graffiti tee's, and more! Music is our foundation because music brings the world together.
A friend of mine just took a menial enterprise programming job (in Pittsburgh) that is paying 55k. And I mean menial, it's converting legacy systems from Cobol to Java.
just remote into your dtop with your lappy. if thats not enough, use SVN.
8 Outdated notions of entrepreneurship
Howto: Install VirtualBox in Ubuntu Hardy Heron with USB Support in 5 easy Steps
I think you have brought up an important point. More bloggers need to address this issue. People keep discussing about balance in startup, startup life, aspects of startup (tech, pr, marketing) etc.. Though people fail to think about the issue of having a balance in the industry. Women obviously an important part of the startup ecosystem. I fail to believe that in this are we have come to a saturation point. I think women need to take initiative and and make the leap. I would personally like to see more women founders.
The reason I am passionate about this topic is because of my girlfriend. In the past few years she has been really passionate about the tech scene and doing a startup. She currently works for Fotoflexer.com and loves it.
How Nokia Users Drive Innovation
that's because no one's made it really easy/reliable. our users (esp business users) love the easy folder sharing and many have stopped windows file servers as a result
I think it's easier than that. Just make consistently superior products, with a consistent, recognizable brand design, and charge 2x for them. Good examples are A&F, BMW, and Starbucks.

You are right to point out that religion and sports are related - they are also examples of a kind of "brand identity", based in our tribal instincts.
Excellent if they can provide hosting and don't just become overrun with gambling, pirate and porn sites.
The Essentials of Guerrilla Marketing
Simon Peyton-Jones and his work on Haskell is very interesting.
Ev Williams talks about how this book (Tom Demarco's _Slack_) sets the tone for his companies. And it was on his recommendation that I read it.

Ironically, he mentioned that his experience at Google did NOT typify the mentality of leaving space to maneuver. My experience there corroborates.
Thanks, was looking for that.

For the record, I am not sure if I could build a safe bike shed over a weekend.
30,000 is probably not much; after the lawyers got done arranging their financing, there are probably tens of millions of shares outstanding.

Just bear in mind, you can't really evaluate the deal even knowing the number of shares outstanding; the shares will be valued as a percentage of a multiple of forward revenue (unknowable) less liquidation preferences (which they won't tell you, but will be skimmed off the top of any liquidity event by the VCs), presuming no further dilution.
I've seen offers from 75k to 95k (though the 95k was an outlier). Most were in the 80-85k for first tier companies.
If you want fanboys make sure your product confers social status. Concentrate on aesthetics and make sure you're almost always more expensive than the competition. Good aesthetics make your product desirable, an expensive price point means your product will keep its social status.
Well, I'm starting in the near future, albeit with the traditional characters, rather than simplified (U.N. be damned). China is undoubtedly an economic powerhouse, and learning new languages is fun, so I might as well pick up something useful.

That said, this is not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, maybe it's a good chance for the U.S. to get back to its economic roots and actually start producing something again, with an exchange rate that favors exports and a skilled local labor pool.
Propose to YC: Wiki quizzes
Here's a project idea: a sister site to wikipedia which provides quizzes or exercises to test your knowledge of what's in a certain wikipedia article. They are structured in a directed acyclic graph representing suggested prerequisites, and your answers/scores are recorded.
My grade school had Macs, and they sucked. We used Macs of the same vintage when I was a freshman in high school, because they ran some stupid graphing software my teacher liked. They sucked. When my little sister was in middle school, they started a program to give each kid a laptop (that they couldn't bring home). They were iBooks that ran 10.2 or 10.3. Sucked.

Never had an Apple, had nothing but bad/mediocre experiences with them, had no particular affinity for the company, don't own an iPod. But I bought a PowerBook G4 when I started college in ought-five. Why? Tiger. And it has a good keyboard, no blinking lights, and the hw/sw combo is just ridiculously stable. I've been running this same boot for, like, weeks. It weirds me out when I see someone booting up their laptop. Wait, let me open a new file in TextMate... Yeah, Untitled 135. If Windows 7 and any hardware vendor can top that, I'll switch.
$85k +/- 5k seems to be the average here out on the West Coast. I'm curious as to what the difference is for people with masters degrees or doctorates, though.
Good luck grokking the four tones of Mandarin, it's tough, but doable. I was lucky enough to have been raised speaking Mandarin, though my skill isn't great and I probably have a thick American accent. donw, the traditional characters are beautiful, and easier to remember (though harder to write). But when it comes to China in specific, I've been told that the traditional/simplified character thing strikes up the Taiwan/PROC tension. It's a beautiful language, and there are plenty of movies that will get you to understand that. A girl I dated improved her Mandarin tonalities after we watched "Crouching Tiger," of all movies. However, many of the "mainstream" Chinese actors we're aware of here in the US do NOT speak Mandarin as a first language, and their accents aren't very good in roles where they're forced to speak Mandarin.
A side note, completely off-topic. In Japan, if the customer has stopped talking, you need to shut up as well. One of the reasons a lot of Western salespeople get toasted over there is that they don't appreciate the value of silence. When you're negotiating a deal, and your client sits there silently, he is thinking, and watching you to see how you act.

If you patiently wait and show that you are engaged in thought, this is good. If you keep offering more and more, just to close the deal, you will get taken to the cleaners. And, if you press things too hard, you will be shown the door, ever so politely.

Just my two cents; seemed to fit, a little. grin
In Virginia, I've used the website for the Office of the Clerk to look up the number of shares in a particular private company. I assume that companies in all states have to register the total number of shares, and that this information is public if you know who to ask. For CA, you might try something like http://kepler.sos.ca.gov/list.html . That said, if they really won't tell you the total number outstanding, you might want to be concerned :)
I've seen it vary greatly here in the SF bay area. I've seen offers as low as 65k and as high as 95k. The two most important factors that decide where in the range you fall are the company making the offer, and the school you graduated from. You probably have a lot more leverage in asking for 5-10k extra if you are graduating from a place like stanford/berkeley as opposed to sjsu. But then again, 5-10k is nothing to a company if you are an impressive candidate.
Actually, not only do you want to know the number of outstanding shares, you also want to find out what kind of liquidation preferences exist for the VC's. Depending on the liquidation preferences you could end up making $0 even if the company sells for 2-3X their series A funding.

It is absolutely unreasonable for the company to not specify the number of outstanding shares.
In my experience (largely on the CS theory, math, and physics side of things), a large portion of the cream of the crop just wants to do research -- at least coming out of their undergrad, anyway. The numbers change fairly quickly after a few years of grad school.
I did something like this a few years ago but couldn't get the traction to help with the creation of the quizzes. Redeveloping and relaunching the site is still on my to do list since I really like the idea but it will probably be months at the earliest.
Synchronization is going to be really useful when the majority of applications moves online and there are no files to synchronize anymore. ;-)

Just another example of Microsoft denying the future. If they could sue the Internet for jeopardizing their current business model, they would have probably tried by now.
Eh. Even if China gains economic supremacy, they won't have as much cultural significance as a single hollywood B-lister.
Isn't this just like 20 years ago when everyone thought the Japanese were going to take over?
Good read. My take would be that Apple is like Nike. In grad school, one of my professors said that Nike isn't actually in the business of making shoes; it's in the business of marketing. Makes sense. Advertising and celebrity athlete endorsements don't really add any value to a pair of sneakers, but paying a celebrity athlete millions of dollars for their endorsement certainly adds to the cost, and ultimately the price, of the final product.

Quote: ". . . if they’re lucky maybe one day they’ll graduate into paying double for their computers."

Interesting commentary about "the club." Indeed does it seem that Apple packages and target-markets in such a way that those who are lulled into paying the premium for the "final product" ultimately end up doing so in order to be part of it (as in "the club").

Then, of course, are there those who are just too poor to pay membership dues to the iCool club.

Also are there those of us who maybe can, but don't necessarily want to pay double for the branded plastic, given the fact that hardware is cheap and operating systems can be free. Even legally free. I think a bunch of us use Linux, or some open-source variation thereof.
That is funny. In my defense, I think that's Wordpress's default. My theme generates the "filed under".
Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008
Still, I feel like there are a lot of companies that do this and still don't get fanboys. Maybe they just don't do it well enough.
I used to regularly run 5-minute long searches in my inbox to find a particular attachment that I needed. It was hell compared to, say, GMail. I haven't tried Xobni, but the search and attachment features are the right ones to tackle.
The kinds of people that could do something meaningful with this (i.e. raise revenues/profits) are likely also the type of people that have their own ideas and the ability to pursue them.

Rob seems like a good guy, but this is a tough sell. I wish him luck.
You know, I think I have to grant you that on BMW. They've got some fanboyishness going on too. Not sure as much about the other two. (Starbucks has a number of haters exceeded only by Wal-Mart).
Masters is +10 in my experience.
GotAPI - nice site that combines APIs for loads of languages
This should really have a lot more upvotes; this is pretty enormous. Maybe Kurzweil is right after all...

Slashdot comments are decent.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?threshold=3&mod...

Here is the Nature paper: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2764516/nature06932
Adobe to Publish Flash File Format Specs
Yeah I don't think its necessarily easy. Other people have to know that the product you're buying is 'impressive' for it confer some status. Its also about building a brand identity that people want to associate themselves with. So Apple spends a lot of money making sure people know they are the cool Californian company.
Yep. Exactly like it. People don't seem to understand that China's success is dependant on the US buying products from them.
$80K +/- 5K at GOOG for Stanford grads and $85K at Amazon for a Berkeley grad.
There is a kind of obsession here, one concerned with fabricating narratives and strategies for their own sake.

Bill Gates used every CES keynote in recent memory to go on about the "digital decade" and pose "in the year 2000" scenarios. Of course, this was all after The Road Ahead, a vision book which famously had a shorter shelf life than a bag of potato chips.

Apparently he's not the only one at Microsoft who suffers from this peculiar affliction. All these strategies for a digital millennium and manifestos for an online services marketplace or whatever are laughable. Particularly amusing is how they always find a way to drag every Microsoft business group into their vision. Suddenly, you're supposed to believe that Halo 3 is an embodiment of Microsoft's comprehensive cloud computing paradigm.

Kudos to Joel on calling them on it so entertainingly.
A long rant about why Apple has a fanatical following, and the word "design" is only mentioned once?

Good design is strangely lacking in the tech industry. Sony has it (sometimes). In the mp3 player area, IRiver had it (briefly), but it wasn't enough. When looking for a laptop recently, I was dismayed at how plain bad most Windows laptops look (for the record, I ended up choosing between a Dell and a Sony, and went with the Sony because I didn't want to wait 2 weeks). Microsoft is a consistent case study of how NOT to do design. Whatever else Apple might do wrong, design isn't one of them.

Let me put it another way. If the auto world only gave you two choices - '88 Ford Taurus knock-offs and Lexus - I'm willing to bet Lexus owners would be a lot more fanatical.
Twitter Gaining Momentum But Still Niche
I don't understand why they would want to do this. What does it buy them? More seats of developer tools? The same question can be asked of Sun and Java.
There are pretty standard numbers for post series A equity compensation - these numbers are typically shared by VCs with their portfolio companies so they're not going to be too different from company to company.

For a mid level engineer that number is around .1 to .3% of shares outstanding.
Sorry, but Linux is the ultimate "me too". It has cost thousands and thousands of man-hours of labor, and the result is something that is, at best, almost as good as what already exists (and often, what has existed for a long time). See also the *BSD's.

The main effect of Linux is to keep the prices of its competitors low. For any given application, you will probably find a better alternative to it which is only slightly more expensive.
Developing Miniature Robots For The Military (MAST)
Apple does marketing right, like all the good premium brands. But that doesn't lead to fanboyism. In what other arena do you see people taking sides and insulting each other about stuff that pretty much does the same thing, no matter which they choose? American politics.

The fanboy thing happens cuz personal computing is a dual party system. You're either a Mac or a PC. Or you're one of those weird 3rd party candidates who use Linux.
"The "time cost" of refocusing your attention may be only a few seconds with each switch, but the researchers found that, over time, it reduced people's total efficiency by 20% to 40%."

So true. The average RescueTime user visits 40 different web domains (note: not PAGES-- domains!) and uses 15 different installable apps-- per day. Another tidbit-- the average RescueTime users alt-tabs to an IM window 70 times per day. Email is around 30. Toss in cell phones, meetings, coffee breaks, and (ahem) Hacker News, and it looks pretty grim.
sure, but the point is to choose sustainability because if we don't nature chooses war, famine, or disease for us.
Perhaps. I just think that design is the reason most people would attribute it to, and it's certainly a part, but it's only a part. There's clearly more to it than that, because lots of industries have only one company with good aesthetic sense, yet almost none have fanboys.

Agreed on iRiver. Their players were so much better than Apple's for one or two generations, and then they degraded rapidly. I can't imagine what went wrong there.
The logical evolution of web technology
'"The physiological effects of tiredness are well-known. You can turn a smart person into an idiot just by overworking him," notes Peter Capelli, a professor of management at Wharton.'

I've definitely felt this. I tried to explain it to my boos once. 'My brain feels dead, sir. I can't code any more. I need a break'.

That wasn't received so well, but I got out of there.
CAPTCHAs have become difficult and frustrating. They definitely discourage participation, regardless of how they are integrated into the system.
This sounds like something that might need to be boot-strapped before people be interested. I was thinking I'd probably be interested in adding questions for Algorithms, AI, and some math topics, just to make sure I have a solid understanding of the topics. Approaching university professors to use these as study guides for their students would be useful, and an API would be nice.
Where are they? (SETI)
New Relic to Monitor Performance of Rails Applications
50K downloads is not 50K users.
50,000 users? I've had customers that would buy my software, like it, never complain, and just never use it. Since they're paying for it, I could count them as users. But counting downloads as users is a bit of a stretch.
It’s Official: Meebo Raises $25 Million From Jafco, Time Warner and KTB
Thanks Malthus.
For anyone wondering the other question, what about salaries for experienced developers, keep in mind the numbers others are sharing here are just what was asked for, -starting- salaries. After a few years, the salaries are much higher, but still under $150K. $130K plus options is pretty standard in the West Coast for an experienced developer with or without any degree. Seems to have jumped up some in the last couple years along with gas prices. Google, though, pays less.
I thought Infogami merged with reddit.
I've read that adults are very loyal to brands they used when young; in the case of an article I'm thinking of, it was the manufacturer of a first car. So I have to agree.
I haven't seen anyone even suggest less than $100k for a newly minted doctorate in CS from a good university, and I've seen numbers in the $120k - $140k range thrown around. It sounds like East Coast hedge funds are even more generous.
New Relic is public now - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/30/new-relic-to-monitor-pe...

We've been using it with http://dancejam.com and we are very happy. New Relic has a great product. I wish I had an account for userscripts.org as well :)
I believe I have the computer you recommended, a work T61, and a Macbook Pro. The keyboard on the MacBook Pro is much better, surprisingly. The idea to use a backlit keyboard is incredibly thoughtful. The screen is much, much better than the one on a T61. The operating system is much better and simpler, with not a single picture or theme of a blue sky that I know of. The T61 wins in... looking Windowish.

In this case, both Windows XP and Vista computers look as unrefined and ancient right now as old Apple computers with 5.25" drives do. When I think of Windows I think of those documentaries about the Silicon Valley from the late 90's.
I have. HR knows that CS PhDs will work for peanuts because they've had their financial self-esteem slowly beaten out of them over the past five years. East Coast hedge funds mostly hire physics and applied math PhDs. Masters +10 PhD -30 but YMMV.
http://gear.ign.com/articles/306/306414p1.html
That's very fishy. They should give you all of the information in the plan because the details do matter when push comes to shove. I.e., you want to know not just the currently outstanding shares but all of the authorized shares as well. This is important in judging whether or not they've boxed themselves in w.r.t. funding and valuation. I've been seeing more startups lately getting themselves into needlessly tough positions by not raising enough money early and so their pattern is set at too low a range for future rounds unless everything goes hockey stick.

If they give you any BS about you not needing that information then you should run away (and tell everybody about them).
EBay vs CraigsList Complaint Released
Funny that they appear to be alternating between docstoc and scribd for embedded documents.
Doesn't work for me. Win XP pro on a 32-bit machine.

I get an error called "NBack has encountered a problem and needs to close."

Edit: Same problem on a Vista system. I know this isn't a tech support forum, but I wanted to let other readers know that they aren't alone if they're encountering troubles.
Wow, just wow. I live in Moscow and earn about 30K a year. 25 years old, 10 of them coding for money. Maths degree.
Scientists Discover the 'Memristor'
Just write a cobol to java compiler and be done with it.
Configuring Linux Terminal to Work as a Transparent Wallpaper
We did that this cycle. It seems to have worked well.
I love rescue time :-). It's interesting to know the kind of meta info and intelligence you can gather and build recommendation systems or dating sites with it ;-)
On Adobe's new Open Screen Project
How many of those 40 domains is ad networks?

Second when are you guys going to make a linux version? It would be cool knowing what I spend my time doing.
80k to start in 2009 at MSFT. Makes me think I should've thought more about inflation before signing.
is that supposed to be +30? else that doesn't make sense?
Yeah, it's pretty embarrassing. The Reddit thread is full of people really interested in this idea but unable to run the program due to some incompatibility or another. I did this in Direct3D because I didn't know Flash and thought I could get it done faster in D3D. Well.. I could, and that was a big mistake. The end result is way worse than the time delay it would've taken me to learn Flash.

Hopefully someone finds the source code useful, or inspiring, or somehow some good can come out of this. It's just frustrating that I can't solve these issues for people.

You might want to try making sure you have the latest Direct3D components: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2da...
64-way chip gains Linux IDE, dev cards, design wins
If Apple's marketing relies so heavily on it being a niche, exclusive club rather than the market leader/product of the common man, how do you explain the iPod?
If they won't tell you the number of authorized shares, they're either inexperienced or dishonest. And if they've raised $6.1m, they're not inexperienced. So...
How much of this rings true for people here?

Most businesses succeed?

It's only now that the self-employed are happy because they have control over their work and they have a flexible lifestyle?

I see lists like this, generalized assertions with little or no backing evidence, and tend to think it's near fully bogus.
Moscow's supposed to be about as expensive to live in as the Bay Area or Manhattan from what I've read. Rents here in the Bay area are around $1400 for a 1 bedroom apartment. What are they in Moscow?