skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your [sic] okay with sometimes not getting the credit you deserve because you know most people just aren’t capable of seeing what you do. Your contribution is less visible because you’re constantly playing defense, fixing problems before they happen.

I'm ok with a lot of people not giving me credit because I know I do a good job. But it's important that some people value what I do. For example, am I going to be paid more or less than a salesman? Is that role really seen from within the company as the mission-critical everything-depends-on-you role you're painting, or is winning new clients considered more important? Is that reflected in remuneration?

Also, please spell and grammar check your job postings. I do so for my CV.
http://twitter.com/ev still works though so its kind of a non-issue
I'll let someone else cite sophisticated and powerful JS uses.

On the language evolution front: the http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:proposals features are very likely to be in the next edition, by end of 2013. Some are already implemented in Firefox.

http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:strawman contains the full laundry list of possible additions, but among those, http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:simple_modul... is worth calling out. The module system is likely to be a major feature of the next version of the standard.

JavaScript's standard stalled after ECMA-262 3rd Edition, but that was pretty much because of the IE monopoly and the death of Netscape. All web standards stalled, or went off to XML la-la land.

That was then (1999-2004). Since Firefox restarted browser competition in 2004; then with Safari, the iPhone, etc.; and since 2008 with Google Chrome, which clearly provoked major work in IE9; things are moving again, and standards bodies (still dysfunctional in some hard-to-fix ways) are more balanced than ever in terms vendor representation.

So yeah, the next ten years seem likely to be be different from the last ten.

Not only due to browser competition, but also from the Bell's Law device shift to always-connected, instant-on mobile and away from desktop, indicated above via "Safari, the iPhone, etc."

Some fear this shift means non-interoperable, siloed apps and closed app-stores will dominate, but my money is still on the Web. The Web can evolve to have better apps and stores too, provided browser and Web platform markets remain competitive.
Thanks all, this is good feedback. The intent behind this was to innovate in this area by making the posting stick out so that the posting gets more visibility but also helps weed out candidates. We are looking for one person and we want to set the bar high for this position.

I'm surprised that each requirement/attribute was taken so literally, but I can see how people could view it like that after reading it again.

To be honest, if we could find someone that met most of this criteria I think we would be very happy. I wouldn't say they need 8 years of experience in each area, however my hope is that they would have worked with these technologies over the last period of time in varying capacities.

It will be very interesting to see how people take this and who applies. Maybe I'll post the results up so people can see after the search.

Thanks for the candid feedback.

Matt
Some of the comments are particularly amusing and/or prescient:

That sign looks like a disabled person sign

Stuff White People Like

This is perfect for people who are terrified of a little moderate exercise and don’t mind looking like a fat lazy dork with bad posture.

I particularly like the part in their promo-vid (toward the end) where the guy is riding his SBU alongside a jogger, who is going just as fast as he, but obviously the better for it. It seems to beg the question of "why doesn't he run alongside her?" (she'd probably appreciate it more too).

I would imagine that for many of the readers of this site, a little moderate exercise is not something to be terrified of, but practically a necessity. I'm thankful for every opportunity that I get to walk/run outside, as I spend most of my time indoors on the computer, and that's a very unhealthy way to spend most of one's day. I wouldn't buy one of these, only because my body has little interest in extending the amount of time it remains stationary, and legs are a pretty remarkable and versatile invention that technology has yet to top.

In fact, looking at this SBU makes me appreciate my legs more. They can, for example, go up stairs. And jump over things. They can even be used as a weapon. I don't have to worry about locking them up somewhere because they're with me all the time, and although they're not particularly fancy, they don't make me look especially uncool either. ;-)
What happens if they don't have a laptop?
Coping makes sense and celebration can be a wonderful way to cope.

My grandma’s brothers and sisters, kids and grandkids came spontaneously together in her living room shortly after she died at the age of 85. We told each other stories about her life, how she fought her illness late in life, about pranks her kids played on her, how she, as the oldest, had to take care of her brothers and sisters after her parents died early. It was absolutely wonderful and we laughed a lot. Not for her benefit but for us. Much better than the phony consolation and rigid structure of the funeral that followed.

My grandma should never have died. Nobody should ever have to die. But I have become convinced that if someone does celebration is the right way to say goodbye. The mourning will come anyway, be sure to celebrate a little.
What I'd like to see tried is to debut ebooks at $20. Then, every month, depreciate them by 5%, down to a floor of $5 or thereabouts. (Maybe even lower.)

Unfortunately for a publisher to try this would require (a) all new contractual boilerplate (which will be a whole barrel of laughs as they try to get the authors and their agents to accept it) and (b) new accounting procedures to calculate royalties based not on the net volume of sales but on the time from publication date of those sales.

And even then, this is only going to work out if customers are willing to wait until the book meets their criteria for affordability rather than going in search of a pirate copy of the text.
There was a folding bike design that had full-sized parallel wheels. I thought this was eminently practical, since it could be wheeled around indoors easily. This uni has the same utility.

Found it. It's the IF Mode, which actually costs quite a bit more than this uni!

http://www.nycewheels.com/if-mode-folding-bike.html
You're right, mixed that up. However, I'd be willing to bet that by the time Facebook IPOs their P/E will be lower or equal to Google's P/E at the time of IPO.
There is a perfectly adequate section for notes on Youtube videos ;)

Edit
For everyone else that wants to get to the point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DVz3wJadfM#t=23m51s
This is the year of the Linux tablet!
"AJAX Crawling" is great, but the hash trick has been used with AJAX long before this to provide back button support in AJAX-heavy websites.

Before this technique was widespread, it was all too common to hit "Back" and be taken to the previous website you'd viewed, even if you'd viewed more than one page on the original site.

By changing the URL's fragment the website can add entries to the browser's history. That way when the user clicks Back the website can react appropriately, changing its state back one iteration. This preserves the expected behavior for the end user, while allowing the website to leverage the benefits of AJAX.

The shebang (#!) is merely a way to distinguish AJAX links from bookmarks, for the purpose of crawling.
You don't have to roll your own, do you?
That isn't necessary. This does the same thing:

var d = $('#elm');
d.color('red');
// do some stuff here.
d.text('new text');
No waterfall process at Netscape, or anywhere near me since the '80s. I designed and coded at the same time. That, plus lack of sleep, show in some of the gaffes.

But arguably (Doug Crockford may have argued this) the whole process required JS to make more out of fewer, stronger primitives (first-class functions, prototypes). I know I didn't have time for much else, as I said at the ICFP 2005 keynote.

As I told Peter Seibel in "Coders at Work", besides lack of time, I couldn't add anything like (Pythonic, dynamic) classes. That would have encroached on Batman-Java; can't have JS-Robin-the-boy-hostage getting too big for the Netscape/Sun-1995-era-batcave.
Right.

By the way, the whole idea of Ajax Crawling as defined per Google struck me as wholly unnecessary. If you are using unobtrusive JavaScript, and HTML like so:

<a href="http://twitter.com/ev">@ev</a>

with JavaScript adding a click handler such that a user’s click on the above link actually only triggers an AJAX deal (FWIW, jQuery stub:)

jQuery('a[href^=http://twitter.com/]').live('click', function(){
// Do AJAXy thing instead, then
return false;
});

Then, assuming you serve up essentially the same content at /ev that you would display via AJAX, you have simultaneously just enabled your site for not only modern browsers, but also robots and dumb phone / JS-avoiding users. (And middle-clickers.) No goofy API required.

Edit I just realized, if you have links to `http://twitter.com/#!ev` in the wild, then the AJAX crawler thing becomes actually pretty useful.
Show HN: Correlation between number of facebook likes and winner of an election
A quick weekend side project. I am curious if the like count of a candidate for office can predict if they will win. For the past month or so I have been tracking the likes of several campaigns. Today I put a prettier face on it.

http://cmpgns.net/

After the election I will do a quick analysis of the races and see if anything interesting turns up. If anyone adds a candidate I'm missing, I'll go in and add their opponent
Javascript can't capture the user's microphone directly. So Phono uses a tiny Flash or Java widget to do that part. The rest is all JS.

We're heading an HTML 5 working group on voice in the browser, and once HTML5 has mic support, Phono will use it.
We fixed an issue this morning where sometimes the Flash microphone permission window wasn't showing up. Try it again and it should work for you.
I don't understand why you're putting scare-quotes around '"premium"'. Apple do a lot of things very well, have a great brand, and unlike most of their competitors haven't been totally commoditized. That allows them to sell the iPhone and Macs at a high premium compared to the competitors. As a result they are ridiculously profitable while most other phone and PC manufacturers range from making a loss to making a modest profit.

(And actually Apple spends stunningly little on R&D compared to it's peers. There was a rather nice graph about this that I can't find, but e.g. Microsoft and Nokia spend an order of magnitude more on R&D than Apple does, while seemingly getting just a fraction of the results.)
Thanks! Let us know if you use Phono for anything. Would love to see what you come up with.
Wow, this is amazing, and to quote google, it's just the start. you can track the best converting keywords and user behavior on those pages, combined with the A/B testing tool, this is priceless...of course, a lot of work to do upfront but worth it, I can't wait to see what comes next from google in the metric sector. I love this.
Problems without safe answers are great. They are infinite fodder for discussion.

P.S. Let's assume, oh interviewer, that your answer to my question "what kind of numbers?" is "integers, for now".

sort(a,b,c) {
exchange(a,b) if a > b
exchange(b,c) if b > c
exchange(a,b) if a > b
return (a,b,c)
}

I think that's probably the stupidest thing that could possibly work, not counting:

<?php
$sorted = sort($unsorted);

Assuming it does work, of course. It may have a bug. Probably does, in fact.

Now you could ask me to find the bug and I'd write out some test cases in the margin. Or you could ask me what happens if a string gets in there, or how I'd generalize this algorithm to N numbers, or what kind of language I'm using with this exchange primitive in it (answer: my own highly arbitrary mental pseudocode!) or how I'd implement the exchange primitive, or how fast this algorithm will run on N numbers (not very; it looks to be O(N!), and that's not counting the fact that my exchange primitive is probably wicked slow).

Or, depending on the job, you might head in some other direction.
Isn't that something HN does automatically?

edit: Yes, it does: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799047
I would consider this to be a pretty fine-grained differentiator in who you want to hire however. The formal training aspect gives you the name of things, but it doesn't make you better at reasoning in general. Given the choice between the faster, smarter thinker and the guy with the more specific domain and terminology knowledge which would you hire?
Anyone is free to create an independent Java fork... well at least as long as Oracle doesn't sue. For this reason I find Java to be a highly unreliable technology in legal terms.
This works fine for me with sections of the site that are only visible to logged in users.
Tinkering with Google App Engine (March 2009)
jwz is a Lisp hacker, and he pretty clearly wants bignums, not explicit types.
Sub-$200 Android tablets:

http://www.kmart.com/shc/s/p_10151_10104_020W023705190001P?v...

http://www.amazon.com/Archos-Home-Tablet-Android-Black/dp/B0...
Given last.fms database of (user, (artist, track), datetime) plays, how would you quickly recommend me something to listen to? Now you have two problems. First, your code, in order to run, needs to load in and process this list, and you need to decide if it's a flat text file (the format of which you then need to define and parse) or if it is in a database (the connection to and schema of you will then have to deal with). That's boilerplate that's (a) easy to get around on the whiteboard (b) utterly irrelevant to the question asked. Second, you don't actually have such a list, so running your code isn't actually impressive. Mocking up a sample list takes time, and engineering it to create useful results even more.

Next, I ask you to parallelise it, and you don't recall the pragma that OpenMP uses, so you just need to pull up the manpage, or you don't have the Actors library installed, so, uh, what's the password for wireless? Oh, and you still don't have that large file, so even if you get your parallel code running before I run out of patience, waiting for the answer "well, access to this counter would have to be synchronised, so that would create a bottleneck", running your program will still not have enough data to munch on to gain any insight in it's performance.

tl;dr: You will have to be very sure of yourself to pull this off. I want to know how you think, not how you handle your tools.
This is awesome. One of these, in combination with public transport, could honest-to-god replace my car.

The small profile makes it easy to carry inside with you, unlike a bike or a segway.

In my opinion this could actually come close to achieving what the Segway originally wanted to achieve. Segways are too bulky. This is just perfect. Price, profile, utility, everything. Amazing looking product I expect to own one.
We use a tiny Flash movie to capture the microphone, since Javascript can't do that part. We'll be adding an option for a Java applet later, and once HTML5 has microphone support, we'll get that in there, too.
Fortune 500 Founding Decades (see figure 2)
I like how this thread is next to my post.
The thing is, agree with most of this post (when it comes to interviewing and assessing ability)... except I don't buy that that explains it.

Take this part for example: 'Somehow though I don't reckon there are 99 working programmers sitting there reading those posts thinking "…yeah I am a bit of a failure, I wish I was one of those 1 in a 100 dudes"'.

Well, 99 out of 100 programmers don't read those posts. That's how they get by. They never confront themselves with what they don't know, don't read tech blogs, don't visit HN and never go to conferences, user groups etcetera.

I've been working in this business for over 20 years, I have no illusions about my own limited abilities, but yeah, 99 out of 100 doesn't seem that unreal to me. The vast majority of programmers I worked with are utterly incompetent.

BTW, in interviews I prefer to let the candidate talk about code rather than writing it. Conceptual understanding, and the ability to express that already tells me more than enough. Only when it comes to juniors fresh out of college I may want some confirmation that they can do more than talk a good game.
Personally, this would be just about perfect for me- it sort of emulates the way that I already buy books (i.e., a small number of hardcovers [usually bought at their time of release], a larger number of paperbacks, and an even larger number of used books).
To me, “IE9 is the IE6 of CSS3” means exactly what the article illustrates: “You will be unable to deploy cross-browser sites using exclusively CSS techniques like CSS gradients and text-shadows without fallbacks specially crafted for one browser.” IE9 will be holding CSS3 back from meaningful adoption and impact.

Others here are griping the author could have done more to approximate the Webkit rendering in IE9. This is true but is counter-productive to the point of the article: Using only new CSS3 tools is impossible thanks to, well, IE9 being the IE6 of CSS3!
Well spotted.

This may have been pointed out elsewhere, but it seems to have something in common with the if-by-whisky style of argument.

All that's missing is the "if by 'cult' what I mean is a slavish adherence to laws and dictates laid down without recourse to reasoned argument.., then I disagree."
GWT handles this out of the box.
Bing will never be a significant source of revenue if it has no users. Like it or not, browser defaults drive market share.

Besides, what's wrong with a large company trying to diversify streams of income?
This is one of the areas where government has distorted the market via regulations, namely around copyright, to benefit big publishers over authors. I'm not sure of the best solution to this, but if we had thousands of independant publishers or authors self-publishing, then there would be more competition, and pricing would be more in line with profitability.

EG: It is more profitable to produce and sell and ebook than a paperback, because paperback production is expensive. Therefore, the author would likely price the ebook lower and still make more profits on each sale. Further, he'd get more sales because the price was lower.

I think publishers don't quite understand he market here and are afraid to make a mistake, and so they are pricing ebooks defensively.
I haven't looked at your app yet, so I'm assuming it doesn't have this feature described below (I haven't seen it yet in any recipe app yet - if yours has it I'm buying it immediately! :) ).

Basically, whenever I want to cook something new, I look for a recipe in an app/online and find something that looks really good. Then I look at the recipe list, realize I'm missing like 3 or 4 things on the list, get disappointed since I don't have the time to go to the grocery store, and then go and cook something else.

A feature I'm DYING to have is this:

1) Let me list every food item I have in my kitchen (e.g. select them (fruits/veggies), scanning bar-codes would be really nice but not 100% necessary).

2) Let me list what cooking equipment I have.

3) The app returns "ONLY" recipe's I can make given what I have in my kitchen.

Currently the recipe apps I've tried (Epicurious, Whole Foods's app) don't do this. Epicurious "kind-of" lets you select main ingredients, but you damn well have the kitchen of a chef, stocked up nicely with basil leaves and minced thyme to cook much of anything. Don't have a pressure cooker? Out of luck yet again...

Whole Food's app felt like a giant advertisement just to buy the most expensive ingredients at their store. ;)

For a single someone like me whose not a foodie, wants some variety in meals, and is rushed for time on occasion, a recipe app that listed only what I can make "right now" would be really really nice to have.

--------------------

Taking that idea a bit further, it would also be nice to have suggestions of food/equipment to buy in the near future, which would increase the number of recipe's one could prepare.

For example; "If you buy a rice steamer, you'll increase the number of "right now" recipe's by 25%, and you'll be able to cook things such as steamed asparagus and steamed salmon." Etc...

General advice for someone as ignorant as myself as to what to "always have" in the kitchen.
Stripped down, your above comment says "Diverse cultures are more innovative than monocultures."
I don't like this description for various reasons.

One of which is you're is not the same thing as your: "What if you’re servers go down?"
It still works, but now you have two URLs for one resource, and when you go to the original URL it redirects you to the #! path, which judging from my timeline, people notice.
The #! declares to crawlers that a crawlable version of the page is also available from the server by replacing "#!" with "?_escaped_fragment=".

This mapping is needed because the fragment string is never passed to the server, so it has to be encoded elsewhere and the query section is the only available place.

The "!" is needed because otherwise crawlers would start fruitlessly hammering all the existing sites that use '#' but don't support the '?escaped_fragment=" hack.
My 13 year old niece is within this range, maybe 1000 more or so. And her average monthly voice time is about 18 minutes. All to her parents.
SpiderMonkey (TraceMonkey in August 2008) was battling SquirrelFish (SquirrelFishExtreme in fall 2008) on untyped JS (Taramin did well only if you added type annotations). V8 was "first" only behind Google's firewall, until Chrome released in early September 2008.
Digg is more like Facebook and Twitter than StackOverflow. Each of Digg's logged in users gets their own "News Feed" based on the users they follow/friended/are most similar to.

StackOverflow on the other hand is much simpler - questions and responses, plus users and voting. AFAIK there's no collaborative filtering going on at SO, be it user or item based.

I don't know why Digg needs so many boxen, but I did find Spolsky's comparison disingenuous.
If I look at comparable high end smartphones, they are significantly cheaper than the iPhone whether subsidized or not. For example from Switzerland:

Locked,subsidized iPhone 4 16GB: 199 CHF + two year contract at 55 CHF / month
Locked,subsidized Galaxy S: 1 CHF + two year contract at 55 CHF /month, but with the monthly fee waived for 3 months (so basically 350 CHF cheaper)

Unlocked, unsubsidized iPhone 4 16GB: 769 CHF
Unlocked, unsubsidized Nokia N8: 519 CHF
Defying Predictions, Miners Kept Healthy (Thanks to Rescue Diet)
The iPhone is priced at a premium.

At best you could argue (like the standard Windows vs Apple arguments) that if you start with the iPhone and then try to match most of its features then you'll end up paying the same. More likely you're still paying up to a third more, though this may be mostly hidden by US carrier billing practices.

Of course if you start with a cheap Android phone like the ZTE Blade then you'll simply not be able to match it on price. Nor if you choose an Android phone with a 5" screen or hardware keyboard or HDMI out will you be able to match it on features.

Note the contradiction between the two common claims that a) the iPhone isn't more expensive than alternatives and b) Android is only gaining marketshare because of Buy-One-Get-One-Free deals.