skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Firefox on the Mac is a decidedly second-class experience. I still use it from time-to-time because of extensions, but Chrome, and especially Safari, are far more pleasant out-of-the-box experiences.
Tell HN: I have another idea. Looking for a cofounder in SF this time.
A few weeks ago I inquired about finding a technical cofounder (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1625791) for an idea that is now www.crushtease.com. Everything has gone well, but my cofounder lives on the east coast and I'm hoping to make some connections out here in the valley.

I have another idea, similar in caliber I believe (and also relatively simple), and would like to work with someone local this time. I'm in San Francisco as a USF student.

If you are interested, please feel free to email me.
A few other items I expected to see:

1. Help each laid off employee land on their feet, whatever that means for them. This must NOT be lip service, but a legitimate effort. Hire an outsourcing firm, provide resume/career counseling, provide reference letters, or find job opportunities with vendors, customers, or industry contacts.

2. Make a clean transition. Give laid off people an opportunity to share what they were working on and debrief others. Even though they are leaving, many people value the work they have done and want to know that it's in good hands. If you don't do this, you might as well be saying, "We can figure out what you were working on without you." Nothing else you say or do will offset the damage this will do.

3. Find a way whenever possible for people to keep contributing as contractors or part-time employees.

4. Find a way for people to keep their health insurance.

5. Offer severance whenever possible.

As uncomfortable as a layoff can be, it's also an opportunity to show how well you can do the tough stuff. People will be watching and remembering; count on it.
The article to which this one is a response, has exactly the opposite point of view:

http://perl-yarg.blogspot.com/2009/06/darkpan-schmarkpan-sto...

As, to some extent, does a followup from another developer:

http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/39228?from=rss

I suggest an alternative title for this post: "Some Perl Developers Care About Backwards Compatibility (While Some Don't Give A Hoot And Others Just Try To Keep Up With Conflicting Needs)".
This is an interesting article but even more interesting is the series of articles that the author links to. I've been involved in several high profile products with different locations on the too much or too little debt axis. It always felt like economics could bring a more level headed viewpoint to the discussion instead of just relying on cargo cult mantras. I've skimmed and read the articles and they look like a good intro to the discussion.

As an example, I've found that most successful project have an extremely uneven distribution of debt with most of the code being glued together with bubblegum but a few critical regions having the polish of a high quality gem. Problematic projects tend to have an even quality with all parts having an equal level of 'cleanliness'. This article has some good discussion on why maintaining a similar level of quality across the system might not be a good idea:
http://www.alphaitjournal.com/2009/06/cross-discovering-asse...
Matlab-Mathematica-R and GPU Computing
"Perhaps you would stop by the ditch an lecture the dying person on the futility of it all, how you knew many people who also died this way, and how painful it was"

I happily pay my taxes, try to vote with my conscience for those engaged in healthcare reform, and contribute freely to causes to help prevent people dying of cancer in a ditch. It's not self-righteousness or soliciting thanks from poor, sick people or anything else that drives me to do that; it's my belief that we're more than just the successes we've made in this life -- the actions we've managed to perform to get a positive result. There is community outside of the self.

Sometimes people are frozen into a rut because they've never seen what it's like at the top (except for watching those that succeed in nearly impossible scenarios, like sports athletes or heiresses-turned-celebrities), and they likely never will. So, platitudes that "there is a there there" is cold comfort for them. Working hard and still not being able to pass the "first-month rent + last-month rent + security deposit + credit/background check" gauntlet put forth for anyone wanting to break that cycle is oppressive to the psyche.

And, before anyone in this thread ever decides to veer off into blaming "degenerate cultures", I'll cut it off at the pass and say there is about a nickel's worth of difference between being poor in W. Virginia and being poor in Harlem, NYC. It's the same down, with very little upside (aside from working for the mines or for the state, respectively). Makes the sentiment "been down so long, it looks like up to me" even more resonant.
Is anybody using Google's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_%28programming_language%29
grep uranium | grep -v U238 > /dev/reactor

"according to screen shots of the plant posted by UPI, it uses the Windows-based Siemens PLC software targeted by Stuxnet."

Windows in embedded systems. For nuclear reactors. Sounds promising.
I develop software for a drive-by-wire system for impaired people. Drive-by-wire is not a complex thing (specially compared to a jet) and for impaired people the safety regulations are a little bit lower. The first non-secure prototype with no safety features was done in some months.
After that it needed several years of talking with the regulatory body and making prototypes until we were able to sell the first device.

So I think that a lot of this 20 years are needed for a this regulatory stuff.
Becoming a Doctor: A Journey of Initiation in Medical School is a great read about getting through medical school.
Point is that there are 3 extensions to that system I can name right now that should be put in place though prior to it being considered adequate to the region, never mind going beyond.

1. Extension to UBC
2. Evergreen Extension
3. Surrey Extension

If you look a Toronto, they're desperate for a complete conversion - New York style - to a subway/mass transit only system. There is so much they should be doing, but aren't.

I don't need the transit to be owned by government, but both Federal and Provincial levels should be regular contributors, like they are in every other nation.
http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-...

Towards the end of the article

>> Suprising Results

40-60% of Yahoo!’s users have an empty cache experience and ~20% of all page views are done with an empty cache. To my knowledge, there’s no other research that shows this kind of information...

<<
I do that in the readable config file format I wrote for another web backend, and it is hella useful.
Have you found that it is worth learning Clojure in order to write a crawler? I am doing a side project which requires a crawler and I've tried to figure out if this is a good application of Clojure... or if I should just do a bunch of Perl scripts...
Organize your Gmail and have fun while doing it
Well done. In my opinion, this is a much better list than the linked article.
This is very cute! What a nice cat.
Ask HN: "Interesting" Job Contract
This question comes from an unexperienced young hacker who is at the beginning of his professional career. Recently I had an interview with a local software firm and was offered a developer position. But there's a little quirk: The employer told me that the developers were entitled to half of their salaries and had to earn the other half by turning in coding assignments throughout the month. He made his point by saying "This way slackers and hardworkers get what they deserve, and it is possible for a hardworking developer to earn twice his salary".

Also there's another important condition in the job contract: If I sign it, I'll have to work for a year. If I ever try to leave the job before that I'll have to pay a compensation to the company for every month that I won't be working.

So here's the question: Is this a "normal" kind of contract that software firms generally offer? Or is this a sign of danger?

TL;DR:

Job offer with half normal salary, must earn the other half by creating code. Can't quit for a year when started. Is it a Trap?
No, it's not symptomatic.

The problem is that about 80% of packages in distributions could be compiled against older versions of dependencies, but never do. Be default, distributions mark in the packages the dependency of their currently installed libraries, ignoring the fact that the software could have been compiled against an older version of the library too.

There's no mechanism for identifying such minimum possible dependencies.
I'm appreciative of the author's efforts in nailing this guy, as it makes the bay area a little safer for everybody.

I'm rather tired of reading about these career criminals on parole victimizing hardworking citizens, while others who haven't harmed anyone or stolen anything sit in prison.
yap}p
This post is the result of lots of conversation and brain-racking around getting metrics. I think we've gotten pretty far and wanted to share our progress (and maybe get some reality checks).
Instead check how rich are you http://www.globalrichlist.com/
The entrepreneurial spirit isn't very welcome in health care. In fact, in some areas of the country you cannot open a new hospital with the permission of the existing hospitals. Expect medical devices to get more expensive with some of the provisions of the new health care bill.

I still think the US missed the boat by not properly looking at input costs and risks in the health care system.

It is far too expensive to certify a drug or device. Even with all the testing, the company is going to get sued.
Medical training costs a lot of money - spend some of the Government money on scholarships for high GPA students
Do a flood style insurance by the government for cases of over $100K
Allow real medical saving accounts that can be inherited
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 69
I'm waiting. Targeting Webkit is no better than targeting IE.
Vidoop was bought up by Confident Technologies, which is still doing the image-based captcha as well as image-based authentication for Web and mobile: www.ConfidentTechnologies.com. The free MyVidoop service is still around too.
If you peel back the bitterness from the article, there is still an important point that has been discussed elsewhere, but not all that widely, that Mark Zuckerberg is really an unknown variable with past behavior that suggests his values are not really in line with the public good. It's a simple message, and perhaps widely recognized in tech circles, but many more people need to understand why at least some caution is warranted when putting their lives online, particularly through facebook.
> I consider it deeply offensive and am baffled that anyone would consider it germane in 2010.

What exactly do you find "deeply offensive"? Because I think your tone isn't helping your cause. If you wish to argue that race and/or genetics are not significantly correlated with innate ability, please feel free to do so. If this is an established fact that you can document, I would love to see links to research supporting that position (your citations establishing certain biases are much weaker). Your righteous indignation that someone would even bring this up (in 2010!!) is anti-intellectual and needs to go.

In my opinion, based mostly on common sense (and racism, no doubt you will claim), I don't think any of the assorted biases you cite are a major cause of performance differences. My intuition is that the major causes are much less subtle: genetics and family life (particularly early family life). I do agree that there is likely a snowball effect that causes early labels of "not good at school" to compound.

BTW. Your citation [4] looks deeply suspicious. Asking them to check which race they are cut performance in half? HALF? As in, they were able to, on average, supply 50% fewer correct answers if asked to check a box indicating their race?
Does this illustrate the value of contingency planning, though?

It doesn't seem as though the author had any prior experience tracking down a thief, or that she was executing a pre-existing plan when she eventually needed to.

Instead, she relied on her adaptability and her general base of knowledge to deal with a new contingency as it arose, without advance preparation.

If anything, the lesson here is to maintain your capacity to decide and act on the fly, and make use of whatever opportunities the situation affords, instead of trying to predict the unpredictable.
I think that it's a problem that we're still so infatuated with segregation and diversity. I look forward to the day when we all accept that there are some differences between races, but that the words segregation and diversity are no longer paired with the word "racial".
I've never seen anything like that and would be very wary. You have no idea what will happen during that year. It could turn out to be an awful place to work that people are dying to get away from. It certainly doesn't sound like a great shop. There are better ways to deal with slackers than not paying as much as hard workers ( like not paying them at all, not hiring them to start with, weeding them out as quickly as possible ).
I just finished reading The Time Traveler's Wife and this post gave me flashbacks.

Pseudorandomness or unalterable fate? Neither provides guaranteed success, so I wish you much luck with both ventures.
A little wave was upset at being so tiny and turned to a bigger wave to complain about his plight. "It just isn't fair that other waves are so much bigger than me, I want to be a tsunami!"

The bigger wave, feeling sorry for his smaller companion replied: "Why does your size matter? Don't you realize that we are all a part of the same ocean?"
So you are saying it is OK to steal from me if your motives are pure? That's BS. Expecting people to obey the law is not "personal justice", it is just justice.
sounds like a wtf.. turn and don't look back
Interesting idea. I definitely see this as something I might use on a more regular basis.

There's one annoyance, though: instant search generates a lot of "browsing history", so I couldn't get back to HN with just one click on the "back" button. At least that's what happens with Firefox 3.0.19 on Windows.
I've never heard of this. It could be a trap. Talk to others who are currently working at the company, and who might have been working there for over a year. Personally I wouldn't do that for a whole year, maybe 6 months though.
"This is what continuous builds and regression tests are for. You can automatically identify which check-in caused something to break."

That's only if you already have a test for it. The first time a checkin causes my machine to break, I don't know what caused it -- especially since there were 1,000 checkins since the last time I synced. I'm not even sure if it is a code change that messed up my system in some cases.

Once you have the regression test checked-in, that's great. But that's a small set of cases.

"How many people do you think Google has checking code in?"

Maybe a couple of thousand checkins per day? Not sure how many users are doing it though.

"That said, the rest of Google is a much more complex product which is under very rapid development."

The reason I called out Android and Chrome is that I think they're fundamentally different than the rest of Google and much more like Windows. Why? Several reasons:

1) Cloud services are in some ways easier to test. You can test them on the cloud configuration they get deployed to. There is no single configuration to test Windows on. There's not ten configuration. There's not 1000 configurations. That new SSD HD, that new video card, audio card, CPU, chipset, tuner card, and combination thereof, are places where things can go wrong that you won't catch in the lab.

2) Building on (1) is the fact that Windows/Android/Chrome are layered systems. If something breaks in the bottom layer, everyone above it is screwed. While I'm sure Google has some of that, like I would imagine a lot sits on GFS, the fact that it can be tested really well in isolation on a known configuration makes it a MUCH more tractable problem.

But the guy who makes a breaking change in the SSD HD layer just screwed up the day for a chunk of people. Now the key here isn't that he broke everybody. That would certainly get caught in testing. The problem is that he broke 1% of the company or fewer. And someone else had a checkin that broke another 1% or fewer. And someone else had a different checkin that broke a different 1%. Given the number of checkins, you suddenly have 10% of the company who is trying to figure out what broke what.

Android and Chrome would have the same problem, but at a smaller scale. The core of Google is probably pretty immune to this, as is Bing and the Bing Services team.

I just don't think you can a development model for cloud based web services and use it for a desktop product like Windows.
Music mixes, crowdsourcing and a free iTunes :)
Could you remind me where I claimed the poor were getting fat off WIC supplemental nutrition, rather than other sources of food?

I've edited my comment to reflect the fact that I'm only speculating about specific food items making the poor fat. But make no mistake, the poor are fat - their average BMI is 29, only one point short of obesity. If you ever live in a poor neighborhood, all you need to do is open your eyes to see that everyone has plenty to eat.
Do not accept this offer. Do you really want to work with someone who A) Doesn't trust you to work hard and B) Doesn't believe their work environment or product is good/fun/exciting enough to keep you around for only one year?

We all have to start somewhere, but this sounds like a situation that will leave you feeling deflated, powerless and bored.
I thought this would be a nice experiment. I use it for all my parties. It would go great with guitar hero though :)

And yes the IE6 support could be better :P
It definitely took me longer than it would have had I just written the crawler in Ruby, but I'm enjoying learning Clojure (and thinking in Lisp), and it's becoming my new favorite language. I'd say go for it! The XML processing is really mature, and I used cgrand's enlive for scraping.
He specifically mentioned the binding process to keep it at one volume.
Sharp Skirts Launches A Quora-Like Community For Women Entrepreneurs
Simplest jQuery Templating
http://jsbin.com/owana3/6/edit

I am using jQuery just to user a flexibility to use any CSS selector for template.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.
You are SO right. The relationship with Mummy is about the only dicey thing right now. It's good right now, but there have been moments.

"You're constantly terrified that they're going to randomly die on you, but the rules for preventing that outcome are straightforward and hard to forget."

Amen, brother. Right again.
What's new in purely functional data structures since Okasaki
I wouldn't stress about your english skills; I would bet the vast majority of us have no problem following your ideas.
Please, can you share the name and location of this firm? Just curious, hahaha.
Or it could just be assumed that "it is unjust" means "I personally think it is unjust".
I enjoy reading posts like these for the perspective they give me on how differently some people do things. My wife and I by contrast are ridiculously over-prepared. Dated for a year before moving in together, lived together for two more years before deciding to get married, waited another two years to have a kid, and then invested enough time into learning about childbirth that every medical professional we talked to though the whole pregnancy and labor assumed that we were both in the medical field (seriously, I know way more about the anatomy of the female pelvic area than any other part of the human body because of this).

She's a month old today (coincidentally also named Zoe).
This strikes me as very odd. I have worked places where you got a bonus... that was contingent on performance or the company's performance. but i had a decent base salary.

i also worked at one place as a consultant where you had to give "6 months notice"... the spirit of the agreement was that you wouldn't work on a project and quit near the deadline. however, the only penalty was refunding your last bonus.

this deal seems pretty bad... unless the 1/2 the base salary is actual decent and i thin there would need to be very clear criteria for getting more money... it seems like that would be difficult.

the paying if you quit... that seems pretty crazy, how much would you have to pay?
OMG, this is funny!
Say Hello to CAPTCHAs as Advertising
Even more of a reason to use disposable email addresses.
Yeah, especially in context (discussing Newton getting sucked into the age-of-letters equivalent of flamewars), it seems to refer more to turning the other cheek when people attack your work, post unpleasant replies on an email thread, maybe even copy your startup ideas, etc., rather than turning the other cheek when someone burglarizes your house.
You're constantly terrified that they're going to randomly die on you, but the rules for preventing that outcome are straightforward and hard to forget.

Changing the recommendation from sleeping face-down to sleeping on the back has reduced the rate of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or something like that) in Sweden by roughly 80% since 1992. There was a peak at 1.1 per 1000 live births in 1991, and it's now at 0.25 or less (in 2008 it was down to 0.13)[1].

Some babies sleep better face down, but I prefer somewhat uneasy sleep for six to nine months (until they can turn over by themselves) to a tenfold higher risk of death.

[1]: (Swedish) http://www.internetmedicin.se/dyn_main.asp?page=1466
Know Your Enemy: Fast-Flux Service Networks
As Rule #5 of your own link states: "WARNING: Do not encode complete or relative URL's with URL encoding! URL's should be encoded based on the context of display like any other piece of data. For example, user driven URL's in HREF links should be attribute encoded."

URL encoding is for querystring parameters. The HTML escaping is for the inside of attributes. You need to do both, in the proper place; I assumed you already had a URL with the proper escaping at the time that I was discussing, again, for simplicity, because the full story doesn't really fit in an HN comment: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2548

That's also why I mention you need a separate phase specially for URLs, where you will for instance immediately reject any URL that does not start with one of your whitelisted protocols, which "javascript:" won't be on. "javascript:" is far from the only protocol that can get you in trouble, it's just the most obvious.
California Teens Getting Unapproved Weight Loss Surgery
Well, in the WW2 there was actually a war going on, so producing deadlier and deadlier types of weapons was a more urgent matter for all parties involved. Probably true of the early Cold War times too.
I don't know about this... I use tumblr and it usually seems pretty slow to me... normally more than the 3sec load time they quote... haven't tried posterous yet....
I think that he means getting print production in sufficient high dpi without getting e.g. unwanted moire patterns or blur of details. The postscript file might be conceptually simple, but there's a lot of weird problems when mass-printing in high quality, both dpi-wise and color-wise.

edit: typo.
It's a Turkish firm which creates hospital automation systems. Actually they just sell a basic program to all hospitals and tweak it a little bit for each case. It's been in the market for 20 years but I doubt it has many loyal developers.
I would have hoped for actual simulations instead of diagrams :-)