skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>>Over the years, I've personally fixed bugs. And sent in fixes. (Stop complaining -- I promise to send tests too, next time!)
>>If I run into one that I am unable to grok in a reasonable time, there are always job boards and money.

That's fine for a smaller shop, or even a medium-sized shop. But when you enter a true corporate behemoth type company, you don't have the option of posting an ad on the 37signals job board and hoping a dev cowboy will show up the very next morning and fix your problem. There's HR hoops to jump through, budgets to watch, schedules to keep, managers and colleagues to keep appeased--that's the kind of red-tape stuff that makes hiring anyone, even a short-term freelancer, enough of a PITA to not bother.

And as a corporate dev, you have better things to do than waste time hunting, fixing, merging, and patching a piece of software that should really only be a black-box cog in your greater machine.
Maybe trolls are over-riding the suggest improved translation feature...
The easiest mechanic to point out is movement, and the synchronization of movement. At every step in the game, I'm moving along what would traditionally be game tiles, in a given orientation at a given velocity. While the 'world' is rendered around me on my PC, the movement and orientation changes all have to be upstreamed to the server and calculated for normalcy (to detect speed hacks, cheats, mountain climbing, etc).
Setting Windows 7 to God-Mode
Ha! Thanks, that made my morning :-)

Seriously though, he was willing to pay me, but I wasn't comfortable taking money for something I had zero experience with (this was my first time using a Web API). And I could tell he didn't want to feel like he was ripping me off by getting my work (all 45 minutes of it) for free, so we met in the middle and both parties were happy.
I think the kernel could copy the un-page-aligned head and tail while remapping the body.
There's no Hulu in Canada. Until this week (or was it last week?) there was no Netflix either. Now that we have netflix, I doubt Blockbuster Canada has long to live.

You might not believe it, but Canada is way behind the USA when it comes to the Internet, media, movies, mobile communication, and all of that. As we slowly catch up, traditional stores like Blockbuster will fail.
How about one person? I recently had an issue with VS 2010 and long hangs in the editor for a specific type of file. I got a series of minidumps for them... we narrowed it down to an issue with type resolution.

They sent me a QFE drop and then incorporated the fix into a tools release they were doing.

I was acting as single dev, not even on a support contract.
JQuery Tags Input
What facebook is really worth we'll know when they IPO and they sell off a majority portion of the stock. Until then it's anybody's guess.

I wouldn't buy their stock at any valuation, there are much more solid ways of investing than speculating on something that already feels over valued. And if I would want more risk then I'd rather put my money in start-ups than facebook.

The next bubble is here, and it will go the same way as the previous ones.

Remember what netscape was supposed to be worth.

edit: sorry, that 'majority' was meant to be 'major'.
Does anyone with knowledge of japanese have a clew what was actually being asked, and what went wrong?
"Facebook has been around for seven years. It has 500 million users. If you can’t figure out how to make money off half a billion people in seven years, I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re unlikely to ever do."

This is a strawman. If they wanted to make money right now they would. But they also observed many examples of turning-the-faucet-on gone wrong, especially with the whole privacy issues, that they are moving very carefully in that space. But they will make a lot of money if they decide to start.
There's a lot of room in the gap between marginally profitable and exponential growth. Not every startup is necessarily going to end up making millions - not within 3 years, 10 years, maybe ever. That doesn't make it a "busyness," nor does it make it not worth doing.
Ruby in particular is hot right now and they're fetching higher salaries relative to other OS languages, you're correct about that. I clumped them all together in my query, and PHP (and Java to a lesser extent) pulled the average down.

Also, notice that I didn't specify junior developers on the salary scale - they're all over the place in terms of salary.

Government contract work is always the exception in any industry. I think that's a given.
The problem I have is that a contractor should not be allowed to bring in a USB dongle to plug into a machine onside. Hell the machines shouldn't have accessible USB ports at all. My other problem is that even if they are allowed to plug their personal USB stick into a machine, control computers should be completely isolated from the machines a random contractor would have access to. I mean seriously? Why would they even be able to talk to one another?
"In other words, the evaluation is resting on the flawed assumption that Facebook could actually ever get 33 times as much money to change hands if they wanted to. There’s just no way, no how that’s happening right now. If it could, they’d IPO tomorrow."

This is simply not true. There are many reasons why a company may want to stay private.
You have an error on your link building website:

We never buy links or use links farms. We find relevant, diverse links and build them nauturally.

nauturally -> naturally
It's never too early to educate your employees about social engineering. My startup is small but has been targeted a few times by people trying to social engineer their way into more information.

An employee of one of our direct competitors even called one of my developers to try and extract information - good thing she caught on quick. We eventually tracked a number of attack vectors to either him or his company. They weren't the brightest attacks though (calling her from his work #, emailing her and other employees from email addresses which he'd used online, running port scanners and SQL Injection tests (etc) on our servers from company IP addresses).

Other times people call pretending to be customers, but they don't pass the smell test. We've had a few people call with tons of questions about our tech, capabilities, existing customers, etc, but won't divulge much of their own information or can't properly answer some of the basic questions that our real customers would know.

Early customers are kind of like a job interview, it has to feel right for both sides.
No, man. I was studying math at NYU. Now I do web development.

It's just a coincidence that these guys are also from NYU.
The funniest part is that Nate's response is almost equally bad Japanese.
I was recently typing in some phrases from a 19th century book in French (which I'd found on Google Books), and it was interesting to watch the translation morph as I typed and provided more context. It wasn't perfect translation in the end, but I was still pretty impressed.
You should be most paranoid when you see/hear nothing
I like site.com because the url is shorter. Just a preference. In these days of browsers on phones and url shorteners, it makes sense to keep the base domain as short as possible. If you redirect from the www, it takes care of everything.
30+ Beautiful Designed Free Downloadable PSD Templates
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Distributing software always sucks, on every OS. It wasn't the language he had a problem with, it was the platform quirks.
I hate to leap in with what seems like an ad-hominem attack on the 37 signals, but their utter and complete misunderstanding of all the basics of business is starting to grate on me, and I'm wondering if it has anything to do with Chicago. Is the problem that they're sitting there in a city without any other Internet industry, stewing in their own witty ideas, listening only to the adoring comments they get from the groupies? How else could you explain just how far they seem to have drifted away from basic reality?

First of all, David: The word is VALUATION, not evaluation. KTHX.

Secondly, EVERY SINGLE COMPANY IN THE WORLD that has shares that trade is valued by taking the last share traded and multiplying by the number of shares outstanding. It's just the DEFINITION of valuation. It's TAUTOLOGICAL.

The whole section "Minority investment evaluations aren’t real" is so economically bizarre and incorrect that I don't even know where to start. It's like you wrote a blog post arguing that it is incorrect to refer to a 5' tall boy as 5' tall because he's often sitting down. Every single day every single public company in the world is valued by the last share traded, usually for a tiny fraction of the company.

Finally, to the main point. Facebook has certainly figured out how to make money off of 500,000,000 users. And as they optimize, they will make a lot more money. When they figure out how to make another DIME off of every user, they will instantly be making another $50,000,000 a year... in pure profit. How much profit will 37signals make if you figure out how to make another dime off of every customer? Eh David? Facebook works on the theory that when you have a lot of people, you don't have to make as much per person, because the amount of money you make is the number of customers times the amount of money you make off of each one. Again, that pesky multiplication.

It's weird, it's like in Chicago they don't have multiplication or something.
I think most people will regret not saving more money when they're 80. It's possibly worse for those in supposedly "stable" jobs with "good" pensions who retire only to find the pension fund is woefully underfunded. I think those people might regret the decades of corporate employment.
Wait, is Beck the guy who calls anything drawn on his blackboard "facts" and Krugman the guy who won that Nobel thingy?
Thanks. I took a tour of a lumber mill one time that was all automated. It was pretty cool. To be honest, the way these nuke plants are described is less secure than the lumber mill. I really, really hope that's just really terrible reporting.
Dog-owner prevented from finding microchipped pet under Data Protection Act
> Says something about how they value technical people.

I don't know much about Oracle but I have heard, FWIW, that they are one of the few remaining companies that really does and did whatever they could to not lay droves of folks off during the slow down. It's kind of hard to get a job there but they'll keep you forever if you do. I'm not sure how true that is or isn't.

Maybe not the sexiest titles but if that's true it shows that they do value employees.
I am nowhere close to being even an architect, forget a CTO but I'd love to know if this is being streamed online. It'd be a very nice lesson for anyone who might end up wearing different hats sometime in the near future.
Visual Studio is excellent. I have my doubts about MSBuild, but the actual code-wrangling side is very good.

Doubly so if you plump for ReSharper.
There are a lot of movies that are rent only or even watch it only if I see it on TV. But good movies (for some definition of good) are worth multiple viewings.
I don't know. Sometimes I just like to turn on my favorite movies as background noise. Maybe I'm just weird though.
That's not correct. There is a secondary market for Facebook stock which is plenty liquid (see Sharespost, et. al).
I use VS 2010 at home and 2008 at work. The only difference I have noticed is that VS 2010 uses more memory.

I don't plan on using XAML, WCF, WPF, or Silverlight. I have seen .NET transform over the years. All of these technologies feel like another layer of abstraction that I don't need. I'd rather use remoting than WCF. I like that my layouts are declared in code rather than in XAML. I also don't think many users are fond of Silverlight. Who wants to install another plugin? HTML5 + SVG may prove to be a better solution in the future.

Always be weary of new and shiny technologies. That being said, I didn't like LINQ until I found a really good use for it, so your mileage may vary.
Companies rarely "sell off a majority portion of the stock" when they IPO. More typically, they sell an additional 20% to 30% new shares to select investors.
Bless the 37signals guys. Always fun for a laugh.
That's like asking how many times you can read the same damn book.
Cheers! What I'd do would be to just write an extension for it and if people really want it, it's there and easily gettable.
You can resell them online easily.
"MM pageviews a day, you've probably heard of them) was a big MS proponent and an early adopter of some of their new stuff, like--at the time--Silverlight."

Yes, and that's about what it takes to get attention. Especially the "early adopter of Silverlight", you probably had a dedicated team back at MS.

And there are other large companies that also rise to this size. What confuses me is the 30-person ISV that believes that they can get magical super awesome support from Microsoft. They can't, or at least nothing better than they can get from open source. And typically, I find they know it too; they know better than to try to contact Microsoft, yet they still hold the mythical ability to do so in their hands like a security blanket. That's what confuses and to some extent annoys me; saying "I can get support from MS" when it's true makes sense, but using that as a reason to use MS when it's not is just silly.

It's a big selling point and that's legitimately true, but unless you're absolutely huge it doesn't apply to you.
JavaOne = javaone
likely some form of work-around for HPUX (which does/did suck)
I agree mostly, but it is true that in private equity, it's not always taken for granted that you can take a small stake's buy-in price and multiply it out to get a valuation. It depends on why that investor bought in, what the prospects for similar investors are, etc. It's taken with much bigger grains of salt than the standard (share price * shares outstanding) valuation for public companies is, anyway.
LINQ isn't the same as LINQ to SQL, which is an ORM written on top of the LINQ interfaces. Other ORMs like Entity Framework also use the LINQ interfaces.
This is really a great piece of analysis. I don't have anything to add at all.

Basically, becoming a platform is where both companies need to go, and start monetizing that platform. But unfortunately for Google, they are much further away from being that than FB is.

I would go so far as to say that Google has utterly failed to figure out a good diversification strategy -- at this point, they just dump something out there and slap some targeted ads on it. But outside of search and gmail, they don't really have much of interest they can monetize on.

Google Apps might be their next billion dollar product line,
if they can turn it into something decent. Enterprises are where lots of money is at, but their enterprise offerings are really rather lousy.

I'm actually sometimes flabberghasted at how much wasted potential Google has in terms of obvious monetize-able offerings they have in their basket, but all of them are treated like incomplete one-off projects done on employee's 20%...with vast stretches of time between obvious enhancements and/or some necessary things never getting built at all.

FB, on the other hand, has the platform but isn't doing anything with it that's readily monetize-able, and they can manage to keep people at the site, but there's really not a whole heck of a lot for people to actually spend money on. Once again, I don't understand why something like Ping or Pandora/last.fm isn't a central part of FB's strategy. It's like a videogame console with only 1 or 2 games.
Sorry, I meant to write major... apologies.
Like most MT engines, Google Translate quality varies wildly by language pair. When MT is used for pre-translation in professional translation settings, it's pretty common to cherry-pick particular engines for particular source and target locales.
Or bcache: http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/FrontPage
Making code reviews not suck
For now redis only perfectly run on Linux; I think that process is not heavyweight at all. As my recall, thread on Linux is just process with shared resource.
A dime per user is nice and all, but they need to make 20x that for a billion dollars in revenue. That's still only $2 per user, but a lot harder.
I agree, but as an aside, is it possible Netscape merited that valuation? Was Netscape's a squandered opportunity, or the most likely outcome.

I mean this in the sense of odds--was the valuation wrong because the odds of success were really so slim, or are we calling the die roll of a hard six inevitable after the fact?

I bring this up because I had a similar feeling to what you describe about Google around its second stock offering, but it has done extraordinarily well since then. I second guess these judgments because in hindsight everything seems inevitable.
The key insight is, shared memory on many core system doesn't work. Thus, share nothing is a better strategy than run 48 threads and have constantly conflict in cache invalidation etc.
Breaking Your Agile Addiction
I read Being Geek on a plane the week it came out. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I'd recommend it to anyone else who loves the blog.

Seriously, if this article doesn't motivate you to spend $10 on the Kindle version then you might not want to read the book: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/05/10/the_screwme...
Sure it is, it is called Speculation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculation Just because there is no real value going on for proper financial analysis behind it yet, doesn't mean prospective valuation couldn't be derived. Obviously, people that invested worked on a model that derived said valuation. Maybe it's a bubble, maybe it's not - but valuation is here. That's how speculative market works, without it there would be no investments.

My take is that Facebook is transitioning into a phase where they will try to monetize their user base by a large factor. Vector of their approach is widely speculated in media (they'll take on google, they'll make phone, they'll do this, they'll do that). The fact is that we don't know for sure what and where will they hit, but certain fact is they must hit somewhere. Speculation is fed with that fact.

Google had a 5 year span before it hit Adsense. Amazon was in the gutter for quite some time... I really see no point in this article from the arguments perspective.

I see a point in subjective matter where one who understands only a traditional commerce model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce) would have trouble with speculative nature of business like this. From the tone of the post it looks like the message here is the messanger's emotions rather than fundamental aspect of point being made (since there isn't any to begin with).
what exactly are they waiting for? They have half a billion users. You know, that is more than America and Russia together, or comparable to the entire population of the geographical Europe. They can only go down hill from here I think. Therefore, personally I certainly would not wait.

The truth is really that they do not know how to monetize themselves effectively
1. Thanks for the word correction, updated.

2. Publicly traded companies have instant liquidity on many more shares, which makes using "last share sold" an meaningful metric.

3. When only 3% of the money a company is supposedly worth has been moved around, it's a poor indicator of what the other 97% would go for.

4. They haven't figured out how to make much profit yet. And it's still questionable whether they will. MySpace supposedly also just needed to turn on the faucet, but apparently the water ran out before they got to it.

5. Oh, and New York smells. (take that!)
> "There are many reasons why a company may want to stay private"

True. But there are a billion reasons to be looking for an exit - all those VC investors are eventually going to want to close out their funds and get real money for their institutional clients. Not to mention all the employees.

Most of these shareholders are going to want to cash out in the next few years, and $200 million in profits won't go far towards making that happen. They've got to exit eventually, and $33 billion is a lot for a major company to pay for Facebook when they don't have a clear monetization strategy. I mean, that's twenty times bigger than the YouTube sale. So IPO it is.
They're almost certainly making $2 per user. Another dime is gonna be easy.
I really think Amazon is going to rule them all. I recently received a Barnes & Noble gift card and it wasn't until I tried to use it online that I realized how reliant I had become on Amazon simply having everything . B&N has a more limited selection, more stuff is "ships in 2 weeks" as opposed to Amazon's "ships in 24 hours" and their recommendations are useless.

As a brick&mortar store, I love B&N even though the closest one is half hour away (and do I ever miss browsing the 17th st one in NYC after work!!), but I'm never going to buy online from them again.
Another interesting thing about Google Translate is that people sometimes successfully troll it by amusing the "submit a better translation" feature, which Google ostensibly uses without much checking.

I'd point out an example, but Google's engineers probably read this site, and the examples I have are too valuable for my personal amusement to give up :)
Facebook makes a sizeable amount of revenue now. Why does everyone talk about them like they don't make a dollar?
Not saying Facebook is worth $33B, but these justifications to why Facebook isn't worth $33B are at least as tenuous.
This is more a question for StackOverflow, but here goes...

Since Windows paths use backslashes, you should either escape all of them (not just the \U), or use raw strings:

filename = "c:\\Users\\foo.txt"
filename = r"c:\Users\foo.txt"

As it happens, Unix-style forward slashes usually work fine too on Windows:

filename = "c:/Users/foo.txt"

This way, you don't have to rename your files and directories. :-)

Also, if the contents of the line are delimited by spaces, consider the split() method:

"a b c".split()
=> ["a", "b", "c"]

If the format isn't actually as easy as that, take a look at the re and csv modules.
No hidden message - I just meant that from my perspective, the tools are really nice. I use Visual Studio 2010 with Resharper for .NET development. I use Red Gate's tools for database management.

There's plenty of great FOSS stuff. I didn't intend for my message to suggest otherwise.
A Startup’s Path to Profitabilty
37signals != Chicago
Doesn't Ubuntu have more users than Fedora? You really sound like you're trolling. Maybe you should have said "if it isn't backed by a major distro it's useless".
> ...hack together stuff that will be thrown away in 2 years

Hah! Just like those all those VB6 apps that have been thrown away?!
Ok, point taken, but compared to the total number of facebook shares I would imagine that is a relatively small amount traded? (the site requires registration for any data to be even visible)
Netflix embarrassed over actors exposed at Canada launch, apologizes
line[0:12].strip()

but see my other comment about str.split().
> Early customers are kind of like a job interview, it has to feel right for both sides.

So right. I consulted for a while as a programmer. It took a few times being burnt before I could distinguish between the good and the bad clients, but after that the difference was night and day.
More like pushers giving free dope out at grade schools. Get them while they're young and you'll have them till they die.