skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just ran a quick query and it looks like 57% of the managers who sign up for our service track their own data alongside their teams. We consider this a best practice, and try to discourage the typical top down approach that you seem to be so familiar with. That's not to say their aren't plenty of other corporate spy-ware tools out there, but we do try not to be one of them.
Ask HN: Conversion rate increase with a Facebook sign-on?
I am considering implementing a Facebook sign on in addition to the usual registration and was wondering if any HNers could share their experience with doing so. Did you see a significant increase in sign-ups?
Interesting, thank for the info on that interface. F# doesn't use that though; it simply has syntax support for a user-defined dynamic operator. That is, I can do foo?bar and I'll get bar as a string and do what I please. The types you mention don't even appear in the F# compiler source.

As far as reading documentation, I shouldn't be forced to lookup tiny things here and there because an API decides to use object type for each parameter.
> Make "yes" the default answer.

This is really the key idea. I am blown away by how many parents make themselves and their children miserable by just saying "no" without thinking about.
This app was backed by their immense marketing machine that they built up over time. Not to say that this app wouldn't have made a lot of money but we have to take that advantage into consideration.
Do you do all your shopping in one store, buy all from one brand?

The cost of not using Google's services is very low.
Have you tried just toggling the GPS settings? I occasionally have issues with it, but toggling the setting has always worked for me.
Believe me, I understand what these one way hashing algorithms are, but you have to cut me a little slack for not knowing the exact proper terminology, since this is not my field. I know its not some magical "security function", actually I never used that term, but I did say "security hash", which I took to mean a hashing function used in security, like website authentication.

But its baffling that you are saying this is not something I should "learn on the job", since I'm doing exactly what the other alternative libraries are doing, except a few offer more configuration. Authlogic, Clearance and Devise all are doing what I'm doing, some a little better, by offering bcrypt, some much worse, by defaulting to SHA1. I hope that, although it looks like you are singling out my humble plugin for criticism, you are actually criticizing most existing plugins. If you want to do that, its your call, but I'm just offering an alternative.

In fact I was going to use bcrypt, but I discovered that it require some installation to use, and I didn't want to make a simple plugin more complicated. Why did I think this was ok? Because, as I mentioned before, I did a little digging and found almost nothing warning about using sha2 for hashing passwords, so I assumed it was still considered good enough.

I really sounds like you are criticizing auto_hash as some poorly attempted one way hashing function but its only a plugin with a single line, that does anything crypto.

Digest::SHA2.new.update(value + salt)

If I had found a single reference to sha2 not being secure enough for website passwords I would have simply replaced it with this line

BCrypt::Password.create(value + salt)

I would hardly call that that failing of somebody who shouldn't be "learning on the job".

AMENDMENT: Not a simple 1 line drop in, but I'm getting there :)

Thanks to everybody voting me down for no reason I can see.
There's confusion here between services being offered over IP and services offered via/from the Internet. Your access connection from $ISP, especially if it's DOCSIS or fiber, typically has more capacity than the bandwidth of the Internet connectivity they're selling you. It probably wouldn't be viable to offer you and everyone else that bandwidth to the Internet for business and technical reasons, but there is enough capacity between your house and $ISP's network to offer other services. As long as this doesn't affect your Internet connection, it shouldn't be a problem.

Any impingement on your network connection then becomes a truth-in-advertising issue -- getting what you've paid for -- as has been taken up in the FCC's National Broadband Plan and elsewhere regarding companies that label their connections as "up to" N Mbps. Holding providers to their promises here seems like a more serious issue than being concerned about VZ offering crappy video-on-demand via a separate bandwidth pool.

I agree that it would be nice to have a big, dumb pipe to the Internet by which we can all choose the 3D video services we want, but that's going to require serious competition in access or some sort of public utility for access provision, neither of which seem likely in the US.
They are creating a new line of smartphones using Palm's WebOS. It looks to be a great piece of software but can HP do any better then Palm did with it?

Maybe they can turn this IP/phone device and co-brand it with Nintendo (Nintend IP phone). Id buy that especially with Nintendo's exclusive titles and apps created exclusively for it.

A HP/Palm smartphone for me is not sexy; not comparative to iPhone 4 & HTC EVO/Droid X.
I think that Farmville players are the definitive example of people with too much time on their hands.
Agreed - Intellectual Property is usually overvalued by larger companies. However, it still makes sense for startups to protect their IP, without basing their success on the novelty of their IP.

Nice article.
I can still remember the first time I put together a vmware virtualcenter server with a few servers running the hypervisor. It was the first time I encountered software that left me speechless since it felt like it was built with magic, at the time since I simply couldnt comprehend how this could be done.

I ended up quitting the company I built it at because they didnt see the point of virtualization and werent going to implement it.
It's hard to explain. I spent about a year in my last job validating a code migration a different vendor had done for our client. It's not really the same as what I'd be doing at this new job, but there are similar principles at play.

The job is basically entry-level testing (0-2 years experience, the ad - which was otherwise inaccurate -said). The technical interviewer did mention that experience wasn't necessary and that they regularly interview people with literally no experience - they just look for people with the right mindset.

She seemed to indicate that my technical background was a plus, and I definitely showed that I understood what the job required.

Still, in the first interview, the HR woman noticeably hesitated before giving a salary range, indicating that she was probably aware that it would be a pay cut for me (also, if HR feels the need to give a number first, that's probably a bad sign in terms of expectations of overqualification). As I said above though, going into the technical interview I really didn't care if I got the job or not, and it wouldn't kill me if I didn't get it, especially since it would be very obvious that the reason wasn't underqualification.
Funny how so many of these upcoming readers are now cancelled since they can no longer rip consumers off for eink displays. Thank you ipad (and I guess now kindle) !
It's a non-binding, non-changing bullshit agreement.
If I Ran Microsoft's Developer Division
That's the danger in reading taptaptap blog posts. Alot of app devs say there is no money in the appstore except for big names like EA, Gameloft, or brands like Tetris and Monopoly; or that success is flash-in-the-pan and cannot be replicated.

Taptaptap, tapulous, and even HNers like Spreadsong prove that if you have a sound and stable functionality, a decent value proposition, and focus on presentation and polish almost to a certifiable degree, you can pretty much succeed on every outing.

The ones who doubt these companies' commitment to quality are the ones who, let's face it, are strictly in it for the "gold rush" and turn out bad product or blatant "me-too" knock-offs. People still make loads of money in the App Store, but there's a difference between "I'm going to get rich on fart apps" and "I aim to be rewarded for making the highest possible quality products I can for my chosen platform".
WeePlaces: a visualization of your foursquare check-ins
Our design was finalized months ago, imagine our surprise when we saw their redesign :) Good for them for making their job board not hideous, though.
I think our hiring problems revolve around artificial constraints. We want to go through recruiters, and we want people with experience "in finance".

Obviously there are plenty of great programmers with no finance experience, and going through recruiters does not work for recruiting programmers.

If you are hiring an HR person, you get too many applications, and you need someone in the middle to weed out obviously unqualified people. But for programmers, there are not nearly enough candidates that reviewing each resume would be too onerous, and recruiters can't ask the right questions to separate excellent candidates from mediocre candidates. If I saw a resume that said "experience writing Haskell and QuickCheck tests", I would call the person that instant. When a recruiter sees that, though, the resume goes in the garbage because "it doesn't say TDD", or "we need 10 years of experience with Java", or something. While it's true that we aren't hiring for a Haskell position (though we do use Haskell), it's also true that someone who's good at Haskell will pick up Scala pretty quickly. (They might not want to switch languages, which I completely understand, but it's nice to give them the option.)

Anyway, industry still doesn't "get" programming, but we are getting closer. Some day. Some day.

(We also do some weird things, like find great candidates and then say, "oh yeah, we can only give you a four month contracting position with no benefits, and also, we can't pay for your relocation". I'm sad that we can't hire people, but happy that good programmers won't take such an obviously shitty deal.)
Important Tips for Input Validation
Can you explain why, which current act of congress enshrines the requirement that the US mint produce dollar notes?
That doesn't mean anything. Are you saying in team mode that everyone has equal access to everyone's data? Or do managers still get special controls? I would love to be proven wrong, but I sincerely doubt it's as democratic as you suggest.
It's true that one need to keep that in mind (meaning that somebody building the exact same app probably wouldn't have met the same success), however they've always backed it up with well designed, ultra-polished apps.

Their marketing machine is one multiplier, the quality of their apps is another.
Logic.ly Digital Logic Simulator
Why Google Became A Carrier-Humping, Net Neutrality Surrender Monkey
FlyByChat = IRC + Web 2.0. Feedback appreciated.
Here is an example. Fred Wilson's visualization - http://weeplaces.com/fred-wilson/

Or Harj's - http://weeplaces.com/harj-taggar/ - he checks into YCombinator a lot.
Do you mean http://www.service-now.com/ ?

If so, I really can't see how you see any connection, unless you simply mean web based and for IT service support.

SupportBreeze is clearly aimed at the small business with a handful of service desk staff, that takes the majority of it's calls by email or the web. Service-now, on the other hand, attempts to be an ITIL-supporting IT Service lifecycle management suite.
I'd be interested in hearing more about your reasoning!
What is the difference between taking part in the scheme and being 'for it', exactly? Google was perfectly free not to participate, but they made the call that the growth potential of China was worth being in partnership with a repressive regime.

As for your other point, Google was the most prominent company supporting net neutrality. Three years ago they were prepared to spend billions buying spectrum to prevent exactly the kind of deal they're pimping today.
Hugo Chávez's Twitter habit proves a popular success
Hmmmmmm.... Any chance of a google chrome extension button? I dont have a bookmarks bar!
The lesson taught in almost every movie is that your problems are only permanently solved by the death of your action antagonist. Even kids' movies have this lesson, e.g. A Bug's Life where the bad-guy grasshopper is eaten by a bird. There are few movies where the action antagonist does not die, and these invariably involve morally ambiguous lead characters (e.g. The Dark Knight).

It's shame that more conciliatory outcomes are not considered. And you wonder about youth violence, but if this is the message taught by every film what do you expect?

P.S. counter examples please!
Support for gowalla coming?
I'm not going to respond to your personal attacks; just the factual content of you post(s).

I understand that you perceived my posting of the benchmark link to be inappropriate and I agree with you to an extent. It remains to say that the link represents my proof within the context of the conversation chain from earlier.

You seem to be a long-term contributor here and I'm sure it's appreciated. I would be interested if you addressed the flaws or issues with the benchmark results. I do make mistakes just like anybody but own up to them at the end.

Let me know if you have any question and I'll be happy to discuss.

Regards
Joe
Stats Show iPhone Owners Get More Sex
We're definitely thinking about this. Stay tuned.
Hotmail still not working? Use Chrome to fix it, says MS
I'm obscurely famous
I would suggest taking a brief vacation (1-2 weeks) but go totally unjacked, no laptop, no Internet. Relax, think about life and appreciate life in general, eat healthy. This will recharge you nothing else. Then, come back and find a good job. With your experience this shouldn't be too hard.
I think I'll allow this statement.

He mentioned he's a "developer", and from his point of view, (and mine), the field of practical programming knowledge is pretty limited. So he could roll up to a Barnes and Noble, pick up most any book and learn the concepts in it no problem.

But on the other hand, couldn't P=NP be considered "programming concept" itself? But on the third hand, maybe
once its figured out, it will be a concept he could learn in a day.
> The original source is a parody site for goodness sakes, and a poorly done one at that.

Everyone seems to forget this, but if the story is faking (which it likely is) it is pretty much completely pointless and without humor.
Water Jug coolers simply don't cut it, even filled with ice cubes you'll only get until noon. I freeze 3 bottles of water, use ice packs and still my water can start getting warm on a hot sunny day.

I don't understand this at all. Why can't you freeze a bunch of reusable bottles with tap water? Are you saying that the thermal properties of tap water differ significantly from those of bottled water?

it doesn't even contain trace amounts of lead or mercury

How do you know that? Did you hire an independent testing lab to verify that?
My point is that, whatever it is he's looking for, he's been looking for a year and a half, and hasn't yet found it. By the laws of supply-and-demand (the basis of the free-market economy) he's not offering a high enough wage.

Of course, it could be that his business is marginal enough that it wouldn't be profitable at a higher wage, in which case it's likely that the days of his business are numbered.
The best part, my google alerts that normally would remind me of kind mentions failed due to it being an image reference.

I found out only from a friend on AVC.com
Boldy-free WordPress Themes
Boldy is the free wordpress 3.0 theme from wordpress.site5.net This is a cool theme with an attractive color combination and design style.
> actual murders per capita is not significantly higher now than it was in the 1960's

As of 2010, US murder rates are significantly higher than they were in 1960. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States

Violent crime increased significantly in the 60s, 70s and 80s, peaking about 1990. Since then they've dropped somewhat, but we're still at somewhere around 1975 levels.
To answer your questions, yes and yes. It's clearly possible to walk into a shop without killing anyone, and the analogy to Sutcliffe holds: it's possible to believe that God wants you to rape and murder prostitutes, without actually doing it.

Condoning rape and murder only comes into play if you also answer that God is the source of all morality. In that case, doing God's will is by definition moral, and if he wants you to rape and murder, well, you bite the bullet.
Cool little trick and interesting to see how little I actually check in! I've heard a few privacy concerns, but if I wanted my location to be private, I wouldn't check in on foursquare.
South Korean Police Raid Google Office
iOS4 makes the 3G nigh unusable because the phone is constantly forced to flush memory to swap causing the UI to hang while the OS waits to write to disk. So, no, do not upgrade a 3G to iOS4 for improved anything. (Well, the icons are a little prettier.)
Ask HN: What's the fair amount of equity for a VP of Engineering in a startup?
I am offered a position in a medical technology startup in exchange for 5% of equity. Is this a fair amount?

Are there any points of reference on how to make this evaluation?
What state would you lose exactly?
Performable: http://www.performable.com/

David Cancel and crew are top notch. Great product, easy to use. Give it a whirl.
That's why I only work up to the perceived worth of my salary. Want more work done? Pay more. But I won't tell you this, it's up to you to notice.

I'm a much better programmer than the rest of the team, so I deserve a much better pay. If you pay me just a little above them, you get just a little more work. And I have more time to think about my startup.
I don't think it's far superior for the purpose of simply reading text, I was alluding to all the other capabilities it adds to the bargain. Colour, video, pinch-to-zoom etc.
I'm curious–is what you guys presented similar to what AdGrok (YC S10) is doing?

I wish you the best of luck, but personally I wouldn't stick around. Regardless of who owns the IP, you have some newfound knowledge/domain expertise. I would pack it up and head west.
It represents a very real change in position. Everyone thought, naively perhaps, that google was going to liberate the mobile phones of america whether the carriers liked it or not.

This then is a non-aggression pact with the carriers showing that carrier crippled phones and services are here to stay.
Private Eye also refer to outsourcing firm Capita as "Crapita", which is less funny but still makes me chuckle each time I see it
To the latter; the water is independently tested by a government agency, and as I said the mineral contents (including heavy metals) is posted on the label.

To the former, as you obviously read enough of my comment, I stated I fill the bottles on average 4 times a week (new bottles monday used until friday) with filtered water. Tap water here tastes disgusting and has huge amounts of chlorine, and in areas the municipal and house lines contain lead or are made of lead.
You can actually make your WeePlaces map private (click the little lock icon) or delete it entirely. We're introverted hackers and care about privacy too.
Nginx "has some performance penalty compared to Varnish"

The performance penalty comes the number of system calls needed to complete the request. According to the Varnish arch docs, it's 18 syscalls (http://varnish-cache.org/wiki/ArchitectNotes). Also, Varnish doesn't malloc for each new request/header. It mallocs once per workspace.

Unfortunately there's no such thing as Nginx vs Varnish benchmarks because Varnish is just a cache (apple to orange comparison).

Regards
Joe
39% of those accounts allow other people to see the manager's data. The rest only allow the employees to look at other peoples data in aggregate. There are also basic privacy controls available for all employees, for example, to flat out delete personal time from the system.
People who don't really want to work.
Wikipedia to the rescue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_justification

Basically, a belief is justified if there are good reasons for believing it. What are "good" reasons? It depends on your philosophy. But presumably the reasons are separate from the belief its self. If you cite certain reasons for believing one thing, but then refuse to believe something else on the same basis, you're being inconsistent.
> A 20mm lens is not an excellent portrait lens. It will make your face look fatter.

It depends on the sensor size. A 20mm lens in (35mm) full-frame is a very wide lens. A 20mm lens on a Canon/Nikon DSLR is the same as a 35mm lens on a (35mm) full-frame. A 20mm lens on a point-and-shoot is even "longer".
Cornell University's AVR Projects: Hobby Inspiration, Teaching Inspiration
in australia public sector is generally paid less then private (and state public paid more the commonwealth public). generally hours/conditions are reasonable... but i'm currently working 9+ hour days (with no overtime) in a public sector org, so as always YMMV.

i can't remember the last time any one just "jacked up my taxes" to pay public servants more. in fact the only tax increase was the introduction of the GST (by the conservative Liberals) and that was largely spent on middle class welfare.
I don't think cynicalkane was responding directly to you.
The actual article you linked to says, "Overall, the crime rate in the U.S. was the same in 2004 as in 1969, with the homicide rate being roughly the same as in 1966." As the subject is the homicide rate, that seems the most relevant datum.
the mineral contents (including heavy metals) is posted on the label.

Interesting. I didn't know that the Canadian government is responsible for claims made on label packaging.

Tap water here tastes disgusting and has huge amounts of chlorine, and in areas the municipal and house lines contain lead or are made of lead.

Ah, thanks for explaining. Your comment was filled with so much unnecessary detail that I failed to connect the dots. I imagine that you could replace most of it with just this sentence.
I'm with you on this so far as the agreements seem rather reasonable, and I kind of assumed that agreeing not to include wireless in the deal for the moment was a compromise with Verizon so they'd agree to the regulations in the first place.
Seems like a decent idea, but showing up to the site, I didn't really understand what the point of the site was. The hn title made sense, but the site doesn't seem to explain that well; nor does it explain to me why I should use it instead of IRC. (It also never finished "loading", I assume that's just a js error though).
Bumping apps between smartphones: note to Apple/Google et al
I am not sure I'd stop using Android if Google became too evil. I don't particularly depend on the proprietary Google apps for anything, and it's easy enough to fork, remove references to Google, and recompile. (And yes, I do run the AOSP version of Android on my phone, so I would lose nothing by doing this.)

If Google hate becomes something worth caring about, I'm sure CyanogenMod will have a non-Google Android build in about a day. That's what makes Android great; it's just software, not an ideology.