skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I'm sure that the changes to the partner program make sense from the MS side, they were a case of too much too fast for our company.
Agreed. Diaspora looks like it'd be more of a privacy nightmare than Facebook, not less. With Facebook (or something similar), your concern is do you trust 1 entity (ie, the Facebook company) with your data. From what I can tell, with Diaspora the question becomes do you trust every peer than any of your friends might be using?
Wolfram Alpha Pioneer Grant
http://products.wolframalpha.com/api/pricing.html

Has anyone here ever applied for this? Have you been successful? Please share your experience.
Yes, I've run into this many times as well. Personally I'd love to get into some type of programming job (esp. at a startup), but I didn't major in CS or Computer Engineering nor have I had any professional experience in the field (read: haven't had a job programming professionally, therefore not qualified for a senior position). Maybe it's just the current economic climate but I've found this true of many startups as well (looking on job boards like Startuply, for instance).
I find it interesting how these pictures almost automatically bring up the topic of religion.
A YC startup enabled the organization of a national rally? -I think it is of note.
The company was originally named Cadabra, Inc., but the name was changed when it was discovered that people sometimes heard the name as "Cadaver." The name Amazon.com was chosen because the Amazon River is the largest river in the world, and so the name suggests large size, and also in part because it starts with 'A' and therefore would show up near the beginning of alphabetical lists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com
TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts reflects on entrepreneurship
I don't get your complaint.

You posted a trivial question you knew the answer to, and then posted your trivial solution, at which point you were told that it was preferred if people asked genuine questions they didn't know the answer to.

If anything, people knocked you for not providing enough substance-- and I don't see anything "social" about the interaction at all.

There's a lot of things wrong with StackOverflow-- but you're not offering much of a critique.
Might be a nice 'to-have,' but it was so easy to sign up I wouldn't really mind either way. It would take almost exactly as long to use connect / oauth as to put in info, since no email authentication or anything is needed. Especially since that way, no one else's servers can mess up your login scheme...
On the other hand, I hate social stuff. I write notes in Tumblr for myself, because it looks simple. Occasionally show them to my friends when I want to. I don't want to follow ar be followed by anyone. I don't write in Posterous... why, really?

But I guess, I'm irreleveant.
The Twitter link on your blog has a mis-spelling.

i.e., the Twitter logo links to "http://twitter.com/neautralthoughts when your username is neutralthoughts - See the extra 'a'?
Coasting / running on momentum is not enough to defend the future prospects - stock prices are based on future expectations, not present success!
I'm dealing with this exact same scenario right now. I wish I had some answers for you on how to juggle it. I'm curious how you got your wife to help with customer support (I've been trying to pitch that for a few weeks now, with little success).
Microsoft absolutely needs to completely drop the whole "do it our way, or hit the highway" attitude. It may have worked to build MS into the giant it is, but it will absolutely be their eventual undoing. It is because of this attitude that Microsoft has already lost the mindahare of today's young developers. I have never met anybody under 25 years old that is a Windows software developer. At the very least Microsoft needs an internal hippie movement.

Here's some steps that could right a sinking ship:

1) Stop integrating IE deep into the operating system, port IE to Mac, and Linux -- non Windows developers need to develop and test IE, period

2) Stop leveraging your operating system as the sole way to compete and crush competitors (you should know this already)

3) Develop non-Windows software (you need to hire software engineers that aren't drinking your own Kool-aid, ones that are willing to stand up and say "hold on maybe we shouldn't be such assholes")

4) Learn from Apple's OSX strategy -- start developing a "clean-room" Linux or BSD-based mobile operating system, make it a skunkworks project, make the sole aim of the project to one day entirely replace the Windows OS

5) Embrace altruism - provide funding for open source projects that directly conflict with your business model (something like fund development of the Hurd kernel)

A more radical strategy would be to consider breaking the company up into 3 or more separate companies. OS & Mobile, Software & Web, Xbox & Hardware. This would allow each group to innovate without the Windows-only and MS culture hamstrings.
I love Linux as much as the next guy, but this is off base. A good deal of Microsoft's strength lies in backward compatibility and entrenchment. Serving up a brand new OS could potentially destroy that competitive advantage.

A better strategy might be to incorporate better support for open protocols and document formats into their products and allow easier interoperability with the outside world. My biggest beef with Windows has always been that it's difficult to interact with its products using third party tools.
If all you ever look at is raw bottom line numbers, life is going to be one surprise after another for you.
I'll give a "me too" for not understanding what to do when I got to the site. You should keep in mind the 2 min test - If I can't understand how it works before that, I'll move on.

It looks great, but IMHO, you should consider simplifying.

Edit: Forgot to say +1 for the idea, it looks like it could make my bookmarking useful again. Save me from delicious!
Can I have a WP7 dev phone? Pleeeeaase!
I don't get it. Given your self-proclaimed skillset (below) you are trying to tell us you genuinely don't know how to increment a number in Lisp?

Expertise:

Computer, Video, and Mobile Games (PC/Mac/Consoles/iPhone/Android)
Real-time physics simulation
Game-logic and character AI
3DS Max scripts and plug-ins
Unity game engine
OpenGL/OpenGL ES/Cg Shaders
C/C++/Objective-C/Java/Python/Lua/Common Lisp
What is "good"?

> Too hard for most people

I wonder if (I consider it a possibility without searching for evidence or thinking too much about it) good developers are not common for same reason good singers or artists or athletes are not common. Talent. Development is an art honed by science and experience. But without talent no amount of training or experience will ever get you out of the minor leagues.
Oops. I was an Atari kid and I didn't know much about Amiga. Except, obviously, that we had midi and you didn't.
That Apple store has the highest percent of "come in to play with / look at Apple products" customers that I have seen in any Apple store. They do make a lot of sales still, of course...
To be picky, my understanding is even if this worked it isn't a 'perfect' copy of the source -- you would be getting a raw uncompressed HD video stream, which is great, but would need to be recompressed to be manageable.

You are not getting the original bits as they came off the BluRay disk.
Maybe it's just the current economic climate

For advertised jobs, the "Sr." requirement has been true for years. Everyone has their own way of judging economic growth and decline. Me, I like to look at job ads - esp. engineers and programmers. Both of those areas have senioritis.
What's trivial to one is not trivial to all.

The reason I posted the question (and answer) is that I saw someone else was confused about these operators in a different Stack Overflow question.

The "social" complaint was because the first commenter down-voted me because he though I was trying to get a badge, not because he thought there was something incorrect about the information (maybe he just didn't say so explicitly).

A lot of people coming to Lisp are new, and need small little code snippets.

Although my answer may seem trivial, it had a few carefully-thought-out properties:
1) A very specific title.
2) A specific answer, with alternatives, and references to the language spec. Many Lisp newbs won't know to go to the Hyperspec.

So, maybe I just posted this in the wrong place. What is the right place for standard techniques or snippets that can improve the code-quality of a cut-and-paste beginner?
Mobile: MS screwed up by getting too late to buy core Danger staff and thus missed the OS team..

Buy RIM..all-of-it especially the OS staff. That OS-Services-hardware combo plus staff is enough to pivot if MS lets the incoming new ideas float to top pas the Political Fiefdoms that are so much an obstacle at MS..

Or the cheaper solution Wall-off-a-building at MS Campus..raise a pirate flag and put 100 software developers there..some MS Mobile hardware some OS dev tools and leave them be for 10 months with no Management interference..

And SB you have had things in the Research Labs that should have seen a product release..it was that good of ideas..

The whole MS Management structure is not working..

Might be a time to give out $150,000 startup scholarships to developers to start new companies..

Do not get me wrong I think you are smart enough to know, SB, that its not working..you have smart people bu the management infrastructure and political fiefdom culture at MS is in the way..
No, because good developers aren't strictly segmented by price. Bad developers are just as willing to take a high salary, and there are much fewer good developers.

At my last corporate job, we had a hard time finding good developers, even before the topic of compensation came up. That can be attributed to the unsexiness of the industry (fiber channel / SAN).

We went through a round of resume screening and applicants. We filtered > 100 resumes, and interviewed maybe 3. Our intern, an undergrad, was a better programmer than any applicant we saw.

One guy, with maybe 10 years experience, was coding on the whiteboard. We asked him to write something. He said "It can't be done!". I was seriously tempted to grab the intern and have code it up.
Wait a minute. The email from a satisfied customer that Groupon features in this blog post is quite misleading.

It was sent only a few days after the advertisement, and the writer is gushing about web stats. Given that Posie's didn't seem to realize the mistake they made until the Groupons coming in started to drain at their finances, this doesn't really prove anything.

The writer is excited about the spike in traffic and assumes that the "web-savvy" customer will be good for business, speculating about viral, positive word of mouth. But none of that could possibly have happened in three days.

This customer hasn't been satisfied by the effects of Groupon. They've bought into the marketing of Groupon. Now, maybe they'll be satisfied once they see how those 505 coupons they sold turn out, but theres no way to know at the time of writing.
I have no idea what anyone thinks about matters like those outside the HN hivemind. How do you?

I started using Tumblr to jot down my notes because it looked cool and simple. To my regret, a couple times I found new "social" features on my dashboard, but that's it. I was actually afraid that this hobby project will fade away and shut down, unneeded. I was surprised to find it is not so!
Google Serfdom
A funny comic about life at Google.
Maybe not, but that is still 384MB\s sustained write speed to your disk which is 22GB\minute so you'd need a 2TB disk for the average movie.

Maybe in a couple of years when 2TB SSDs are cheaply available...
It's not the money I'm thinking about, it's freedom with my time. The more money I make now, the less I have to worry about making later. The things I'm really interested in no one is going to pay me to do (research, but I don't have a PhD), so the only solution is to make enough to take big blocks of time off every few years.
You're right, I knew the answer. I wanted to create a canonical answer that others could find, since I could not find one, and since I have evidence that some other programmers don't know this.
It was Citrix, not VMWare, that bought XenSource.
This is probably the smallest nitpick ever, but thought you'd like to know there's a typo in the header - "Guaranteed minumum" instead of minimum.
Ruby AMF on Rack
I find my time highly fragmented across several projects. Some are highly viable business related projects while others are purely for my own enjoyment. I find myself pulled in many directions and have to combat the urge to start something new. At times I feel guilty working on a hobby project when I have unfinished work on a true project. I have to remind myself that it is OK to spend some time on hobby tasks as long as it doesn’t become all consuming. Keeping sanity is critical to productivity
Is 480x360 a hardware imposed limit, or was that your guy's decision?
Free Website information Analyzer
Maybe not an entire book but might you not read/write a large requirements or design document, set of test scripts before it goes into Quality centre for example. Write-up a lessons learned document or review a threat model for a security push before the new version gets launched?
Meetup.com and the Philippine Tech Groups for WebGeeks
ad 5): heartily agree.

To make people stop thinking "cheap beige box loaded with crapware" when they hear Windows, MS should reinforce the "PCs at Mac pricepoint are just as nice as Macs" image. They did have a "recommend me a nice Windows notebook/desktop" page at some time, but it was kind of half-hearted and hard to find.

For example, they could create some "Windows Experience" (i.e. solid usable box) and "Windows Ultimate Experience" (i.e., reassuringly expensive and stylish) badges for notebooks and desktops that:

* have decent build quality and conform to current ergonomic standards (wrt. fan noise, panel brightness etc.)

* don't include crapware (for some definition of software-that-the-user-doesn't-actually-want; maybe just something like "the OEM does not accept third party influence on the choice of applications", although most PC vendors include software that is simply superfluous.)

* have enough RAM/bandwith/CPU to run the current version of MS office

The "Ultimate Experience" could carry a further requirement to:

* include a current version of MS Office (seriously!) and one of the reassuringly expensive versions of Windows 7

* have nicer-than-usual design and feel (i.e., Thinkpad-quality keyboard on notebooks, desktop PCs that are recognizable and don't look like a beige box).
I think it's trivial to exactly 100% of people that "Ask A Question" means "Ask A Question" and not "Cut-and-paste standard techniques or snippets that can improve the code-quality of a cut-and-paste beginner".
It isn't a matter of whether he genuinely doesn't know it or not. Joel Spolsky knows how to move the turtle in LOGO, but it is a valid question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the...

The goal of Stackoverflow is to become a wiki for programming questions. If you look in the faq, it clearly states:

> It's also perfectly fine to ask and answer your own question, as long as you pretend you're on Jeopardy: phrase it in the form of a question.
Yeah, registration is a mess.

I got surprised by the big number of people with multiple email addresses.

So much for the email address as a single login id....

I have a similar issue on the thing I work on regarding logins.

Should users be able to register with Facebook or Twitter (and later forget which one they used), or just one of these (which one, Facebook or Twitter), or both somehow (to link their accounts)...

So far, I picked Twitter. But this is alpha software. http://simpliwiki.com
This is a really cool idea!

Especially, if you have justin.tv sponsor an event, and get the majority of users to download the app and start broadcasting.

The app should be able to send approx. GPS position, and the server can create an event "channel" with all the related streams (based on GPS).

App should have a location-disable option too.
"Some of our employees have kids and leave earlier, put the kids to bed, and hop on IRC to help out if/when they can."

"separated work from personal life."

Sorry, but this whole defense is just making me angry. The issue for me is less that the long hours are worked (everyone there is there voluntarily, etc), the issue is that posts defending it in such a way that glorifies it. When you are throwing out statements that imply if you love what you do you will work 12 hours and if you work 8 hours you are watch the clock.. That indicates you a building a company culture of heroics that looks down on lesser people who choose to work with a reasonable life/work balance.

You have to understand that people would not be so critical about this point if they didn't feel an emotional stake in it. Since they are (presumably) not employed and directly affected, my belief is this: the mentality is dangerous and it spreads. Your employees will one day spread out and take that culture with them.

I escaped from the digital games industry for this very reason. What might have started as a cultural thing for a few early core companies is now an INDUSTRY WIDE practice of overwork, mismanagement, and exploitation. The culture continues to be persisted through hero stories. I have many friends still in the industry who seem bipolar in their stance towards it: One day they are complaining how on the nicest weekend of the summer they were working towards TRC requirements due to an overly ambitious schedule, the next they are bragging about working that weekend as proof of how hardcore they are and how much they love their job.

It's psychotic.
Why don't we talk more about thinking frameworks?
Oh. Thank you. Need more sleep. ^_^
Connections and luck with modicum of social skills are sufficient. Cronyism is rampant.
I can't imagine that Microsoft doesn't use a Microsoft product wherever they can... surely they use Windows, IIS, etc?
> It's a drag on the whole Microsoft ecosystem and heavily rate-limits the cycle time for new products.

I don't see this as a problem; I like the stability of MS vs. Linux (having watched the rise and fall of devfs and hal now, along with the death of gnome-mount, gconf, gdm theming and xdmcp serving, etc.)

OTOH, I think IE6's 10+ year support guarantee was a bit extreme. But, comparing developing something on IE vs. Mozilla, IE would be the clear winner. I mean, Firefox extensions, which you would expect to be developer-friendly, aren't necessarily compatible between 3.5.x and 3.6.x of the product! Do I really want to be constantly fixing things that used to work every few months? Does the business want to pay for it?
If they already own a computer, then they don't need an alternate way to sync. (see ajleary's post that started this thread)
What do you want microsoft to do about number 4? Appears to me that short of going back in time and making it sooner so you'll learn it, they can't do much now...
Yeah, he seems to miss that insulting someone before you even talk to them is not a winning strategy. Unfortunately, that passes as rational discourse at this point.
Most insightful code comment ever
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I cannot for the life of me find the typo. Any page in particular?
That's true but the devs working on IIS probably aren't using all its features for their own homepages.
I am not convinced that Reddit was not played on this one.

It is easy to get anything to do with Colbert upvoted on Reddit. It was around 17 days ago that he seemed to start making personal appearances in the comments too.

All it would take is one Colbert/Stewart staffer to seed Reddit and it is off and running.

Not disparaging it. I think the rally is a great idea and the theme is brilliant. Reddit and other similar sites can be a powerful initial catalyst but it feels like this happened awfully fast to attribute the real genesis to the Reddit community.
If there is demand I will implement it and I guess I need those features too. Auto ignoring blogs you comment on sounds a bit too challenging but internal and static domains should be easy to ignore through a user cp. Thanks for the feedback
There is one typical Delicious feature that we don't support yet as we'd like to, which is exposing bookmark collections through simple URLs. The simple URL's are there, but we want to present the contents as "booklets", a bit like Flipboard navigation - we hope by next week to add a working version of public URLs.
I enjoy living in Canada too much- and after Canada, will enjoy living in many other countries in the world. I don't like the HN rule that you need to live in the US to qualify for funding. An HN International (with branches in a couple other countries : Canada, Mexico? & the UK) would appeal more to me.
Microsoft asks for Reddit's take on IE9
How To Go From Idea To Launching With Paying Customers In 8 Steps
The reason I posted the question (and answer) is that I saw someone else was confused about these operators in a different Stack Overflow question.

Then that was the right place to post your answer.

It's generally considered a good idea to lurk a little while in an online community, to see the local standards. If you had done so, you'd have seen that people don't post "standard techinques or code snippets" to StackOverflow-- they ask questions they don't know the answer to, and try to answer other's questions.

If you want to help folks on SO with Lisp, you can try to answer some of the genuine questions that have been asked.
yes, CEOs got huge wage increases, the bottom half was flat. That's how averages work. If Bill Gates walks into a homeless shelter the average net worth of the 10 homeless people and billyG is over a billion!
I'd argue that putting F# in VS2010 was pretty bold. Certainly that's the thing I'm most excited about, that any major vendor has done recently.
There's a timeshifting problem at work here. If Tumblr was indeed first to market, then it SHOULD be ahead. They are similar products with similar (viral) growth styles. A more interesting questions would be this: Is Posterous growing as fast as Tumblr when Tumblr was at this stage/age.

Similar articles were written about Facebook and Twitter and now Twitter is getting 370k new accounts per day. It just takes time.

Personally, I find the social network features of Tumblr really jumbled and confusing as an outsider. LiveJournal was a social network, too, and it plateaued.