skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are much less likely to work with an idiot

I can't stress this enough. I ask for code samples and you would be amazed how many people look good on paper, and even interview reasonably, and yet send in the most awful code.

Now it is true that even great programmers have some code in the closet (or even on github) that they are not totally proud of, but anybody who sends that kind of code to a hiring manager shows that not only they write bad code but that they don't know that it's bad.

Personally, I think code samples are the single most important factor on which to base a hiring decision. After all, good code is what you are hiring for, in most cases. It also levels the playing field with people who are really shy or don't interview well for other reasons, or who lack the right experience on paper.

Actually, I am boggled that anybody would see this negatively.
I think its great. If they don't like what they see, they don't waste my time interviewing further, and they know right away what they're going to get
Steve Jobs?
Johannesburg, South Africa
(Tele-commuting is fine if you're elsewhere in South Africa / neighbouring countries)

Rails developer wanted. I've been on the lookout for a while, but finding one around here is not the easiest. For that reason I'll also be happy to consider you if you have a proven track record in a different technology and are eager to get into Rails. Join me in bringing a fresh approach to a stale industry (payroll). As employee #1, you'll have the option of equity. E-mail is in profile. http://www.simplepay.co.za
Some more advice for someone trying to learn vim or emacs...

RTFM! ;-)

O'Reilly has good intro books on both of them that you can work through in a weekend.

Yes, I know it seems silly to have to read a book to use a text editor, but working through the book and doing the exercises the same way you would for a programming language or API makes the learning curve much, much easier.
Under Pressure: The Search for a Stress Vaccine
I think I miscommunicated if that's what it sounds like I was saying. I agree with you. You posed the hypothetical "If everybody stopped buying proprietary software…", and suggested that programmers would get by just fine. My suggestion is that they would indeed get by just fine, by becoming something else.

I don't think that will happen, though, for precisely the reason you state.
I'm in Edinburgh, Scotland, quite happy to work remotely, and while I have a good background in tech support and Linux sysadmin, I've also dabbled with HTML5-a-licious mobile webapps, social media toys, VoIP integration, and generally whatever looks interesting to me at the time.

Thing is, I've never done anything of the interesting stuff for money. And I'd quite like to.

My CV's on github: http://github.com/johnd/cv
thanks all. This has certainly cleared-up my view. I am going to work on having some presentable code for the future.

I agree, asking code is better than asking tricky questions or other irrelevant things.
I said "grassroots" consumer protection. He's suggesting that people that use software band together and collectively reject software under proprietary licenses. Because doing so creates a bigger market for free programs, and reduces the market for proprietary ones.

There are similar movements that advocate boycotting e.g. out of season fruit, or goods manufactured by oppressive countries.
Organisations like the Business Software Alliance (http://www.bsa.org/) are the closest I can think of to a pro-proprietary advocacy group.
I would love to see Google start directly and openly campaigning for the downfall of the Chinese one-party state and the introduction of democracy.

Not only is it about damn time somebody with deep pockets did, it's practically demanded by their obligation to maximise shareholder returns. If the servicing of one billion potential customers is incompatible with "Don't Be Evil" due to the existence of the Chinese Communist Party, then the Chinese Communist Party needs to be swept out of the way so they can reach those customers.

The US Government is too chickenshit to stand up for democratic principles when it comes to China, but Google has nothing to lose any more. I say go for it.
As there are starting to be more and more Linux systems that aren't GNU anymore (think of all the Android tablets, to start), I can see the GNU/Linux distinction becoming more important. Because, when you get down to it, I acutally do want a GNU system. I might very well install Debian GNU/kFreeBSD one of these days, but I want the GNU.
If I knew about it wouldn't build mine.
The fact of the matter though is that it is not financially viable in any way (or ever will be) for all software to be "free" in the sense of RMS "free".

How could a company like Google, built fundamentally on trade secrets, ever be developed. No one would invest the kind of money that was required to build Google into what it is today if Microsoft could go to Github and download "google-search".

It is pie in the sky stuff, unfortunately.
Either somebody picked up the telephone while you were online typing this out, or I need to take more math classes.
Maybe its just that Apples advertising team has just started to write the job descriptions too. Expect more job openings with "amazing", "magical" etc in the job descriptions.
I hate these non-stories. It's essentially a page of "yep, we're doing stuff", as if any company isn't.

It is a story when Microsoft ships something. It is a story if they ship something that makes a significant amount of money. Until then, it is a dream in Ballmer's head, and misleading, and hopefully no investor is swayed by such rhetoric.
Indeed, there aren't any manufacturing costs. So under a free software model you'd have to make money by continuing to make improved versions under contract, or offering support, hosting or other things like that.

A lot of people are doing this sort of thing already, so you can make a living off it.
WebTiming API support in boomerang.
Disclaimer: I work at Cloudkick

In case there's any ambiguity, Cloudkick isn't giving a cloud server instance to everyone for free. The developer plan lets you monitor and manage one server for free. It has all the other features of paid accounts though: SMS alerts, custom plugins for monitoring, etc. I use it for my one EC2 instance that acts as my personal web server/IRC bouncer/VPN server/whatever.
What is the advantage here?
> What do you propose as an alternative?

Something useful that uses recursion, perhaps. A DFS comes to mind, or countless other common real-world algorithms.

When do you ever care about recursion performance in the context of a function that does nothing but one addition? You might as well compare languages on how well a billion iterations of an empty loop performs.
You selected a single sentence out of a multi-paragraph response. Why not look at the whole thing, which is a lot more nuanced (for Stallman) and kind of interesting?

Tax software can and should be released by the state under a free license. But when the state fails to do its duty, the community do the job.

In Brazil, FSF Latin America releases free software for filing tax returns, and this year managed to release the free program before the state released its nonfree program. So don't say it's impossible.

I don't like to talk about "consumption" of these programs because that term adopts the narrow mindset of economics. It tends to judge everything only in terms of practical costs and benefits and doesn't value freedom.

The reason I don't use nonfree software is that it would take away my freedom. I don't want to let that happen. So I don't consider installing nonfree program, even as an possible option. I treat them as poison. I hope that you will too.

I don't know whether our community will make a "high end video game" which is free software, but I am sure that if you try, you can stretch your taste for games so that you will enjoy the free games that we have developed.
I like getting the best of both worlds. Most IDEs have a vi plugin of varying quality. Netbean's vi plugin has worked excellently for me in the past (http://jvi.sourceforge.net/). I've heard Intellij's is also pretty good. I've found the Eclipse one to be very buggy but still worth using (http://www.viplugin.com/). I've never spent time in the Microsoft developer world but have heard that historically there has even been a commercial plugin available for Visual Studio.
Too true! I can't believe those answers. Cash is king. Longevity rules :)
I personally put a link to my github account on my resume. One thing to bear in mind if you take this approach is that as long as you have a couple of good projects, quantity is more important than quality especially if you're new. It shows that you like what you do, and if nothing else shows that you've at least gotten some of your crappy code out of the way.
Super impressed. In 20 minutes I was able to hook up my personal Linode with a level of monitoring that probably would have taken a few hours to pull off manually.

I don't think I would have considered using the paid service before, but this free account offers a compelling experience. I bet it'll pay off in conversions.
"chilphol's manager claimed that "spillage" was down 80% once the flies were added. That, of course, saves a lot of money on bathroom maintenance costs."

1) I don't know about you but I've had my penis for a while now and know how to aim. What the fuck is wrong with the rest of you! ...and don't say it's not you because at my office, the fucking urinal always has serious spillage and we are all in our mid twenties, early 30's. That's 30 years to get it right!

2) What the heck were they paying to clean up urine around the stalls that makes it such a huge savings?

3) To get that huge savings, do they now clean less often? EWWW!
I'm pretty much entirely lost in a vanilla emacs installation.

This is actually one of the things which stops me from going too crazy with my emacs customizations. I have a lot (and long ago disabled toolbars, menus, etc.) but occasionally using coworkers' emacs, and using 'zile' on my OpenWRT routers and the like, means that I like to be able to remember the emacs defaults for most of the common things. :)
I haven't read the case against "private" and "public", but I also think that it is good to support private/public qualifiers.

That said, it is unfortunate that the blogger tries to get his point across through a title that gratuitously insults Steve. It is even more sad that these titles turn out to be the best way to capture people's attention. I'm assuming that the post would have gotten a fraction of the page views (and upvotes) if it had used a more reasonable title.
Mobile Advertising and the Rise of Coupons (Infographic)
Ah RMS, same fundamentalist as always!

One thing I would suggest, for those not familiar with RMS's history, is to take a moment to read the Wikipedia page on Lisp Machines. Specifically, this passage:

Symbolics still had the major advantage that while 3 or 4 of the AI Lab hackers had gone to work for Greenblatt, a solid 14 other hackers had signed onto Symbolics. There were two AI Lab people who did not get hired by either: Richard Stallman and Marvin Minsky. Stallman, however, blamed Symbolics for the decline of the hacker community that had centered around the AI lab. For two years, from 1982 to the end of 1983, Stallman worked by himself to clone the output of the Symbolics programmers, with the aim of preventing them from gaining a monopoly on the lab's computers

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

I find, knowing a bit of the backstory, that RMS is a more sympathetic character. Honestly, I can't say that, put in the same position, I might not have arrived at the same world view he did.
Sounds like a finance quant to me... except the "immediately useful to humanity" part, maybe ;)
NYC Taxi Commission Wants High-Mileage Hybrid Taxis; Judge Says It's Illegal
I'm in Mountain View and will probably move to SF in October when my lease is up. I dabble in web and iPhone design, program in C/C++/objective on a limited basis, and have some experience in marketing. I'm much stronger in video work and would probably be interested in some video gigs to bring in a little money.
I normally have the same sentiment about RMS, but one of his responses here really ticked me off in the 'clarity of purpose' department: The bit about the microwaves (#23)

'Installing software' is a fairly abstract concept, especially given how liberally RMS likes to see the GPL used beyond normal software. To that end, I think that if he were truly logically pure, the same logic would apply to the iPhone. But, he would never agree that allowing something like an iPhone to be OK with free software (rightfully so), and so I think that should have demanded that every bit of that microwave be free. And everything else in his life.

Also, his comments on co-op food "Thus, food co-ops
are not useful for me. I like them in principle." GPL-encumbered libraries are not useful for me. I like them in principle. Good day sir.
Thanks for the comments everyone.

I added the ability to switch to Kilometers as many have suggested as well as a some getting started text.

I will be improving this over the next several weeks I hope you all will continue to check it out.
For certain types of positions I think its a really great litmus test. It tests a applicant's personal discipline in coding as well as whether they have a passion for the field outside of the standard 9-5.

The largest issue with this is you can lose out on really good engineers who view technology as their work, but not their hobby. There is a great number of awesome engineers who only do work within their employment, and therefore won't have a good repository of code to show potential employers.

A good alternative to this is to simply present a coding challenge to solve during an alloted time period (day/week).
strange, I'd always thought that everyone already knew this. It's mentioned in "Mastering Regular Expressions" and also in "Sed and Awk".
Running on a treadmill is significantly easier due to lack of wind resistance.

Although you probably know this already it bit me pretty hard training for run without doing much outdoor running!
Ask HN: Free versions of 37Signals Products
I use Basecamp and Highrise extensively for my business. However, I have a number of non-profits that I work in and would like to use Basecamp and Highrse there too, but it is too expensive. 24$ for the first Highrise plan seems excessive.

Does anyone know of equivalent products that are open-source or free?

Thanks.
New York City
http://www.zocdoc.com/careers

We are like open table, but for doctors. Need to see a doctor in NY, SF, DC, or Chicago? Find your appointment on ZocDoc and save yourself a 3 week wait.

We're looking for super-smart engineers that can get stuff done.
He was "privileged", it's just that the term has a particular meaning when used here that is different from "rich" or "wealthy" which you and it seems every other poster in the thread so far has missed.

There's a fairly comprehensive introduction to it here:

http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/faq-what-...

"Since social status is conferred in many different ways — everything from race to geography to class — all people are both privileged and non-privileged in certain aspects of their life. Furthermore, since dynamics of social status are highly dependent on situation, a person can benefit from privilege in one situation while not benefiting from it in another. It is also possible to have a situation in which a person simultaneously is the beneficiary of privilege while also being the recipient of discrimination in an area which they do not benefit from privilege.

Male privilege is a set of privileges that are given to men as a class due to their institutional power in relation to women as a class. While every man experiences privilege differently due to his own individual position in the social hierarchy, every man, by virtue of being read as male by society, benefits from male privilege."

That's just male privilege, you get others from class, sexuality, religion, health etc.
That was to be my last point in the discussion, which ended 11 hours before your post.

I get it now, people will pay their own money to help their career, it's technically B2C but if they didn't have that job, they wouldn't buy the product. Most B2C products are independent of the customer's career, but this type of product is not. Similar products would be suits, some networking events, travel costs, smart shoes, working lunches, coffee, smartphones etc.
Thank you -- with this comment I finally realized that I have no need to read HN.
He had no permanent residence, no salary, and lived out of his office at MIT for years before he got either of those awards.
The Flickering Mind is a great book to read on this subject. http://www.amazon.com/Flickering-Mind-Technology-Classroom-L...

Oppenheimer does a great job of citing actual studies. And it turns out despite thousands of different efforts, there's little evidence to say computer technology makes a bit positive impact on education.

This isn't to say it's completely useless or that it doesn't provide overwhelming value in other industries. But I think our problems in education need to be solved in different ways. Key among them is challenging the philosophy of John Dewey.
Ok, what if Baidu started openly campaigning against the predominantly two-party system in the US? Is that going to change a thing?

There's actually a way to affect change in China, believe it or not. Unfortunately, it's not by the usual methods Americans believe to be effective (protests, marches, general upheaval, etc).

IMO, the best way to engage China is by using back-channels to express concerns while helping the Chinese government save face in public.
Wait a second. Why do you think the world is better, having Google, than it would be if "google-search" was on Github and hosted by a bunch of people? That sounds worse to me.

I assume you think that the existence of Google has led to other good things, but I don't see any reason to believe that the people at Google are doing better or more valuable work there than they would be if Google didn't exist.
It's Thursday!
Here in the UK, you can also harm the environment and emit carbon by buying a windmill from the DIY store and sticking it on your roof. People are mostly doing it for the 'cool factor' since they tend not to generate much power at all.

I'm going to dub the coming DIY power generation "Cloud Power", remember you heard it here first.

You've got that the wrong way round. I already get my power from 'the cloud' rather than generating on premise :)
This is the type of attitude that got us into two huge wars and the reason why so many people hate us so much. You are probably one of those people that also believe in white supremacy and that would join the KKK in a heart beat. Stupid Moron.

The best way to deal with this is by the US blocking some of the chinese companies ability to do business here in the USA. Or something similar to that. But not by us getting involved in their political process. They have to solve their own problems.
Here is someone who really, really needs to read Saul Alinsky:

15. MendaSpain: Hi Richard. I love all GPL software, but I have a dilemma:

I'm writing a program which needs a lot of time to be coded but at the same time it's really easy to be used. I could license it as GPL and wait for donations, but from other people's experience just almost nobody make donations to free software projects. Support is not necessary because as I've said before, it's a really easy to use software and nobody would pay for a 3 page manual.

For "big" software it's easy to get money using any GNU license, but for "little" software the only option I see is selling it using the Apple App Store approach.

What can I do in this case?

RMS: You have a choice between deserving a reward and not getting a material reward, and getting one but not deserving it.

RMS: I faced the same question at the beginning of the GNU Project. I decided that I would rather do something good with no monetary reward than profit by mistreating people. I hope you will do the same, because that way your program will be a contribution to society instead of a social problem.

Yikes.
I do need a part-time job or remote projects. I live in Vilnius (Baltic States). I am comfortable with C++, PHP, Firebird, MySQL, enterprise software and Windows desktop.
I love making stable, shining software. My name is Glebas and I can be reached at info@ispc.lt
His opinions that were new to me:

"I value freedom more than technical progress."

"We need to make it so hard to move production from one country to another that each company will be stuck in one country, so that country will be able to regulate it.
The video “Better Means, Changing the World of Work” on the home page of your website has an incorrect aspect ratio. Everything is slightly horizontally stretched, so the text is wider than normal, all of the people look slightly fat, the proportions of people’s heads change when they tilt them, the Wikipedia logo isn’t circular as it should be, etc. You should fix that; it looks unprofessional.
Wolfram Weather Bias with Mathematica - Are Weekends Nicer?
You really can't follow "No offense" with "Stupid Moron" and calls of racism.

I thought the culture here was to disagree politely?
"My father, a good engineer with a university degree"

Are you sure you (and those who upvoted) know what social class is? To be fair there are many definitions, but having a university degree would be put your father as middle class in most of them.

"All it matters is to have good parents who really support and nurture education."

And that's in most cases parents who themselves are educated, which has been shown in countries with free education.

"That is simply not true."

Just because you have a different experience doesn't mean you're the norm or that the argument is invalid.
My route is basically - run to park, run around the park x times.

not sure how you can make a UI that easily allows creation of loops and exiting them at arbitrary points, but would be a useful feature to me...
I was just implying that a lack of vision generally reduces a project's value. The more something seems to accurately predict the direction of the web, the better the vision.

If a project looks spontaneous, it could indeed be a great idea, but often it can look like something created because it's what everyone else is doing.
I saw him speak, while I agree with some point of his argument, and disagree with others, and think that some points of his argument aren't fully developed and too clear cut. The worst part about it was hearing those stupid names.
I'm really excited to try this... 
sadly I'm getting time-out issues when trying to set up monitoring with my Linode API key but I'm guessing you guys might be under a lot of load with this promo?


It's working now. It looks as though it didn't want to add a node until I authenticated my email address even though it took me directly to an "add node" flow directly upon signup.

I also can see a lot of conversions from this.
Gates.
If you are applying for a coding position, you should be glad that they are predominantly interested in your coding skills. There is no substitute for real code to judge that.
How long will angel con be and is there a list of scheduled speakers?
Nice one Chris & Ivan! Love the simplicity also.
Sounds like you set up the Cloudkick agent. If you really want to take advantage of the agent, try out some custom plugins (https://support.cloudkick.com/Agent/Custom_Plugins). We've cleaned up a few that we use internally and made them available at http://github.com/cloudkick/agent-plugins
"Maybe GNU will finally see a rebranding"

I've taken on occasion to calling it LNU, not GNU. The L is for "Linux kernel", to give proper credit to the Linux kernel for turning GNU from just a set of third party tools you installed on your proprietary Unix system into a complete system.

If I want to be formal, I call it LNU/Linux.