skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My resume includes separate lists for technologies/languages I am "advanced" or "proficient" in and technologies/languages I have done some work with. To give an example, I can slowly and painfully write PL/SQL when it's necessary, but I would not feel comfortable deploying it without asking a PL/SQL guru to review it, so I don't describe myself as "proficient." I described my Java skills as "advanced" after doing a couple of years of professional Java development, but I downgraded my Java to "proficient" after spending several years away from it. I describe myself as "advanced" if I'm ready to do professional-quality work from day one.

If you go by the standards in the marketplace, well, there aren't any. We interviewed a candidate for a highly technical position only to find out that most of the technology experience listed on her resume was indirect exposure doing administrative and liaison work for technical teams. She was more technical than the typical corporate product manager or account manager position, but she wasn't remotely close to being qualified for the position we advertised. Strange thing was, she seemed to understand the position and clearly wanted it... not sure what that was about, but it proves you can't assume anything.
No, I'm comparing Apple today with MS today. What Apple did in 2007 was great. But the exclusivity that exists to this day, is not, IMO.

I never said that Apple damaged the market. Someone made this comment, "Apple is going to exert the power to control the carriers. Apple is about the only company that can, or will, exert this kind of power."

I said I thought the opposite. That the power to control the carriers will be stronger with Google and MS. Largely because they will be on all the carriers, and while imposing looser requirements on the carriers, capture the core requirements (again, MS in particular -- Google less so).

Lets be clear. I'm not saying Apple has done anything bad, but I do think that their impact has been weakened with their exclusivity for four years on ATT. I find it hard to believe that Apple couldn't have negotiated a shorter exclusivity deal, while losing almost nothing.
>what ethnicity does this character have: ☺ ? I bet it has the same ethnicity as you!

It has no ethnic origin beyond unicode. Just like it has no eye colour, no skin colour (no skin), etc.. Am I weird about this?

I really can't say I've ever thought of a stick figure as coming from a particular place or having a particular identity. But then I don't really identify with a particular location, I'm just happy to be in it in preference to other places.
Contest - Win $1,000 for your geo/mobile hacks
ZX Spectrum Implemented on an FPGA
I think that's the kind of hassle he was referring to. =)
Actually you can say "las juesas". :)

In Italian it is true that the last letter is not a perfect indication of gender... even for people's names (e.g. Andrea should be a male name). But it works pretty well. Not sure if Spanish is similar (i.e. there are exceptions) or not.
there would be a lot of startups and not a lot of Goldman Sachs.

There are a lot of startups and there is only 1 Goldman Sachs...
> there are lots of companies offering better salaries and options with serious value, with similar challenges, that are going places

Genuinely curious. What companies are you talking about?
GB and BG take up more area in probability space.

If you have a thousand paths in front of you, one leading to a fortune, one to a potion and the rest to a pit of death, you can't say the 998 paths are together equal to the other two just because they all end at the same place. It's much more likely you'll hit the pit of death.

It's much more likely to have boy/girl children even though BG and GB look the same at the end. You get as much probability current down each of the wires BG and GB you do down the GG and BB wires, making twice as much in total for BG/GB combined.

If there are four buildings, red, green, gray and gray, and you pick one at random you are more likely to end up in a gray building. You dont get to say there are three colours because I can class the two gray buildings as the same the chances are 1/3rd for each colour.
Bing overtakes Yahoo, and that's not a good thing
While really nice, this is more fine-grained pricing and not so much "slashing prices". Anyone that takes incoming calls and then makes a subsequent outgoing segment or anyone that sends/receives SMSs will pay the same as before.
Oh the other hand clueless people often don't realize that they're clueless. For instance when I was in high school I took a C++ class and never touched it again until much later, but I still had it on my resume for a long time because I didn't realize how little I had learned or how much I had forgotten until I was extremely embarrassed at a job interview.
The title of this article is a garden path sentence! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path
The users. I get the carriers to give me $300 for something I plan on doing anyways (using their service for the next two years).

It would be like Comcast subsidizing my purchase of a TV if I kept Comcast for two years. I'd jumpt on that deal now (assuming the subsidy was $300+ dollars), because I anticipate keeping Comcast for two years (even with the coming internet TV threats). And certainly for the past 10 years, it would have been an even bigger no brainer.
There will probably be a lot of people who will disagree with me on this, but here I go anyway: I think self control and discipline are overrated. Some of my best work has come out of me being distracted and unfocused.

I generally find that it's better to indulge my lack of focus in a controlled manner than it is to try fighting it.
Everything I've read about the "legitimate anti-censorship" efforts during the election suggests that no matter how well-intentioned, people sitting on their butts in front of computers in North America and Europe have minimal --- if any --- real world impact in the Islamic Republic.

But either way: a better team would almost certainly not have produced a tool that the Islamic Republic couldn't have turned against its innocent users, because no team we can conceive of can match Iran's ability to fund countermeasures.

People are inherently captive to the narrative fallacy. They adhere to stories of "us" against "them", and what a great "them" they find in Iran, which stones women and hangs people for writing blog posts! But in the real world, the narrative is irrelevant. The person who figures out how to turn Haystack^2 into a dissident marker and arrest warrant generator isn't going to be a Muslim, and almost certainly will never have set foot in Iran --- based on how governments currently acquire exploits, they probably won't even know they're working for Iran. There are many hundreds of very, very smart people who will write security tools for $1MM (their handlers will probably take the other $9MM for themselves).
".. reducing them to what they should be: regulated pipe providers just like your gas and electric company."

I come from India, the second largest mobile market in the world. (Its a complete mystery why we got 3G just a few months back, but atleast we re getting there). The key in India is that the providers are just that, regulated pipe providers and one only pays for service. I m free to go buy whichever phone I want and do whatever the hell I want with it. I dont have to be in "contract" and I dont have to keep going near windows to make phone calls.
Still pretty expensive for out-of-US destinations.
Eric Ries: The Superbowl ad test
I find it more interesting that the female models you see on billboards and such in Japan are distinctly more caucasian looking than the population: rounder eyes, narrower face.

The popularity of actual caucasian models in advertisements is also interesting.
Working on this project with a friend. Any suggestions?
Cloud Staffing and IT Outsourcing Evolution
The article describes the new notion of cloud staffing as well as clarifies the principal difference between cloud staffing and conventional outsourcing.
I've been thinking along these same lines for years now. Much of America's civic and business institutions are/were built and financed assuming eternal growth economics to support them.

It isn't the recession itself destroying these budgets. It's the recession causing an honest assessment of recent and future growth and calling into question the feasibility of old debts, old promises, ways of life taken for granted, assumptions that drive the very basis of our society. (growth=success, bigger=better)

Granted, I live in Michigan, where we've been given a free preview of waking up to the cold realities of sprawl economics juxtaposed with a debt load based on eternal-growth expectations.

So I can understand why most people will experience a few years of denial, cherry-picking 'evidence' from an ever-shrinking number of still-growing cities to prop up their pre-existing world view. I did the same thing. I get it.

But when the evidence is finally at your door-step, utterly unavoidable, you'll realize it isn't a left vs right issue, or a government vs business issue. But an American lifestyle vs reality issue.
Aquisitions are not about buying ideas or talent. They are about buying decisions. Decisions are some of the most expensive thing a large company can make in terms of time. A large company aquiring a startup is purchasing a set of decisions, both internally and in their customer's mind, that has moved that startup to the point they are at aquisition. If the acquisition is made when the startup is moving into a repeatable business model then the aquiring company can transition the startup into a mature business using the operational and finance expertice that a large company brings. If the startup has not yet found a model then the startup's normal pace of decision making will hit the corporate wall and it will fail.

(I added this comment to the svn comments too)
Why We're Teaching 'The Wire' at Harvard
Having to apply a mental filter like that is tiresome. I'd rather just skip it.
I've previously setup Elastix (Asterisk/FreePBX distro) on a VPS for another business - price was right on the DIDs and minutes, but making it work nicely on VPS, learning Asterisk+FreePBX quirks, and keeping everything up to date quickly became a time-waster.

Twilio/OpenVBX looks like it might be a comparative breeze to setup and use - and let us focus on our core competencies rather than burn time becoming Asterisk/VOIP gurus - but the fact that they aren't built on open standards like SIP makes me a bit nervous. Anyone have any experience with OpenVBX, thoughts, alternatives I'm missing?

Edit: Twilio has somewhat confusing statements inre: Canadian toll-free numbers at http://www.twilio.com/faq/international. Anyone know if they provide US toll-free numbers that accept calls originating from both the US and Canada?
Feel sorry for the people paying $400/oz, getting ripped off.

EDIT: ... don't be mad at me, be mad at your dealer.
Popular Django Apps from DjangoCon 2010
This was my impression when I interviewed with them. I passed two phone screens and interviewed on-site, but my resume died in committee. The on-site interview was pretty brutal for me, because it was very heavy on CS theory and I interviewed "cold" (meaning I did no preparation beforehand).

I subsequently read Steve Yegge's tips on getting hired there:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...

His post made me feel simultaneously better (he also failed in his first attempt) and stupid (how could I think I would breeze through the Google hiring process without first boning up on CS theory?)

The interview questions would have been better suited for me 12 years ago when I was a new graduate and sorting algorithms and low-level file structures were fresher for me.

I don't blame Google, though. These are important concepts for them and it's my fault I didn't freshen my knowledge (or keep those skills honed over the years).
"The iPad after all, is partly so successful simply due to the fact that "it's a big iPod Touch."

...and the speed!!! The A4 processor in the iPad makes the iPhone 4 seem slow, even though they both use A4 chips. Maybe its hard to compete with a great OS + good hardware...
I read your reply earlier and didn't quite get it, but I think now I see your point.

My response would be that it's okay to unequivocally declare a class of arguments as wrong. "Wrong" in the sense of a bad argument that doesn't hold up, it could still (coincidentally) reflect the correct position. What the author does is different though, he simply declares an entire side wrong on the assumption that they all must be using a certain class of arguments.

But the example you offered does demonstrate an equally important point: There are correct and incorrect reasons to rule out a class of arguments. Clearly "if this were true I'd be bad person, therefore this is false" is one of the bad reasons. The technical term is "argumentum ad consequentiam": appeal to consequeces.

So you're absolutely right to preach caution here.
Check out this article: http://spencerfry.com/whats-a-non-programmer-to-do
Profitably brings Fortune 500 analytics to small business
Goodbye Java GC, Hello BigMemory
We just launched today at DEMO, very exciting to get our MVP out there.
The notation (C(x): x is a context) actually means "C(x) is shorthand for the following sentence: 'x is a context'". C is not undefined, it is the template "___ is a context".

I guess the way the brackets are used may not be standard and could be confusing.
Waking up to this is going to be painful.
Oh, I definitely agree that their impact was weakened by the exclusivity... for a start because Android would have been less popular.

My guess (and it's purely that) is that the deal was extended (maybe one year... dunno) in exchange for the iPad deal. Not a great move, I agree.

Finally, I agree MS stands in a strong position too. But not Google. As long as Android is open, and as long as there are many manufacturers of Android phones, you have a situation where the very few phone companies have an oligopoly on demand and hence have the upperhand: if Motorola doesn't play along, they can go to Sony, or HTC, or Samsung, or LG... and others are coming up soon. Then Motorola can either lose a lucrative business without little harm to the carrier or is forced to oblige.

That said if one particular brand would become the most appealing for some reason, that company would definitely regain some bargaining power.
Outside the US we have the option of subsidised phones or pay-as-you go deals depending on what you actually need.
Understanding how things "should" be has nothing to do with being able to recognize improvements in the World That Is.

You can know that you should be able to load an arbitrary mp3 as a ringtone on an iPhone, and still prefer the current state of affairs to the state of things a mere three years ago. I do.
10 Suggestions for the Architect of an Agile Team
You can make outbound calls internationally but it's very expensive to call a mobile outside of US/Canada.

How many of their customers could afford to run their service when it costs so much to make a mobile phone call internationally (i.e. $0.32 - $0.493 for the UK)? Compare that to $0.02 for US/Canada.
Alexis' talk was still my favorite. His slides are here: http://www.slideshare.net/kn0thing/alexis-ohanian-at-mit-sta...

If you go through it enough there is a picture of pg's head photoshopped on to 2Pac :)
Lighter skin is universally more feminine. In any ethnicity the women are lighter skinned and usually have lighter hair. Observing women using skin whitening products and dying their hair does not necessarily lead to some class/race social analysis. It can be fundamentally the same thing as using lipstick to emphasize the natural female tendency of darker and fuller lips.
I think the preference for lighter-colored skin in China dates back to when they thought westerners were ugly, smelly barbarians. That isn't to say that modern perceptions of whites as modern and superior isn't a factor now, but it is a relatively late influence on the phenomenon.
Catch-22.

Credibility is less because it was posted anonymously as a dump of hex to paste-bin, therefore eliminating any authority that would come if this person was a well-known security researcher. If the author had credibility and wanted to use his/her reputation to make the post more credible, he'd have the pleasure of a herd of lawyers and law enforcement at his door, assuming that he lives in a country with anti-circumvention laws. So his only choice is to keep it to himself or post anonymously, taking away any credibility that comes with authority in a subject.

Regardless, someone will test this soon enough and determine if this non-credible post is credible or just a creative bunch of social engineering. That it's garnered this much attention this quickly (take a look at your major social news sites ... and tech blogs) should scare industry insiders. The mere HOPE that some random posting on pastebin would topple HDCP and bring a possible end to device interoperability would get this much attention truly highlights what a dismal mess HDCP is. If it's The Real Thing(tm), we'll know when the master key is used to generate a random device key and 80% of the time the signal is decrypted properly without having to turn both devices off and back on.

And if it is true, I hope our friend that posted it took some pretty serious precautions to protect his own anonymity.
Jump on the Obscure & Fleeting, But Don't Forget the Low Hanging Fruit
Have you made use of any of the virtual desktop solutions out there? I've found Spaces on Mac to be useful when I'm on a single 15" screen.
The (evil) genius in the Blackwater rebranding is that they anti-SEO'd themselves by picking such an overused new name. Even if you followed the name change, searching for Xe didn't return any Blackwater-relevant results for quite awhile.
You think Firefox and Google Voice are "evil"? Apps that duplicate functionality are "evil"? One more fart app is "evil"?

Your positive regard for the App store may be partly based on ignorance of Apple's stated conditions.
Indeed. It was a great session.

And, I (@dharmesh) must not have bought Alexis dinner recently enough, because my head is photoshopped in on one of the slides too. But, I'm in good company -- @cdixon is there too.
They can't hold onto their people, have very high churn and dissatisfaction rates, etc.

Do you have citations for this?
Latest Adobe Flash exploit put Android Devices at risk
Darpa Wants You To Build An Anti-Secrecy App
ewjordan's Law of Irony: in any Internet discussion of sufficient length where the word "irony" is used, someone will call out the poster for using it incorrectly. This is true whether or not the original usage was proper or not, and with high probability the original complaint will be followed up by a comment on the irony of the critic not understanding the definition of the word "irony". Bonus points are awarded based on how many levels this back and forth continues.

Alanis Morissette will be brought up in at least 50% of these cases, though the precise frequency depends inversely on the level of sophistication of the forum members.
The load times on my Sony PS3 are not that bad... But, I once had a Blu-Ray ask me if I wanted to download an update to it, and I was forced to download the update before I was able to watch the movie.

I think the bottom line is that Sony and the Blu-Ray disk manufacturers are treating our player devices like they own them. This is the same kind of thinking that caused the Sony Rootkit fiasco. What would people do if they found out that a Blu-Ray update caused their player to start reporting every movie they watched to a server (it probably already does)?
They have changed. When I started reading them in 2000, their style was less extreme. Back then they said useful things about design and how people interact with interfaces. Check out their manifesto from 1999:

http://37signals.com/manifesto

I find myself in agreement with most of what they say. I do not need to filter. I do not need to internally think "Oh, there they go again, leaving it to me to translate their thoughts into something normal."

Their style has gotten more extreme over time. They have been bent out of shape by their success. They seem increasingly convinced that their experience allows them to speak with authority about everyone's startup experience.
Two Reasons You Shouldn't Use MongoDB
The upgrade experience is better - but you do that a lot less than making phone calls.

I had an iPhone and just switched to Android. After a couple of days Android is annoying me. With my iPhone, after unlocking my phone I hold the home button then click on a name to make a call.

On Android, I unlock the device, click Phone, click favorites, click the name, then click call. I went from 2 clicks to 6. Its just not as usable.

My fiance got a Palm Pre and despite the lack of "apps" I like the interface way more than Android phones.
there was probably more in that email?
But also not the kind of exit and FU money that entrepreneurs often seek.

This is just my understanding of their argument, though. Better to grow a company slowly and keep running it, than to grow a company and get bought. They think you should be in the game to keep running the company, not get rich. Getting rich while running the company is also possible, but that's a nice side-effect as far as they're concerned.
They were originally named after the area in Virginia where they were located, but what always struck me as odd (given that they are all ex navy) is that "black water" is the common nautical term for ship sewage. That's a rough brand association to overcome.
The closest thing I can think of is Zune, but Microsoft couldn't seem to get that right. They're the only company that could have, but they failed.

A big part of the appeal of the iPod Touch is that it runs apps from the App Store. It would be easy to make a media player that does most of what the iPod Touch does, but a real competitor would have a very tough time overcoming the app store barrier to entry. So your only real choice is Android as far as the apps go.

So the question is why haven't there been any Android versions of the iPod Touch? I don't have an answer for this one. It could be that only Apple is in a position to sell a product for the price of a smartphone (up to $400) without the phone part. In that same price range you can buy most Android phones without a contract (the Evo 4G is $449 no contract), so maybe anyone who would have bought an Android version of the iPod Touch just gets a phone.

Also, considering the price of the iPhone ($500-$700 without contract) vs iPod Touch ($230-$400), it could be that Apple sells the iPod Touch at a loss and makes up the difference with App Store sales and iAd revenue. A 3rd party would not be able to do this.
Hackers Target and Exploit Pirate Bay Ad Server