skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bing Maps requires Silverlight for some features. I found that out when I tried Bing recently, but found that Microsoft is more interested in pushing their own technology than pushing their search engine.

Microsoft also recently did a project with NASA that requires Silverlight. Thanks, Microsoft.
I've been a developer for a third of the time you have, and I earn £17k a year, which is roughly $26,858 a year.

Stop being a whiny bitch, you already get paid more than most people.
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Left it running for days on short samples? (also 1.5 weeks for 60 seconds would be ~6 seconds per day, not one).
Martial arts analogies too. Someone who uses "kung fu" metaphors has seen The Matrix one too many times; I never hear it from people who actually do do a martial art.
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arubin is that you ?
4 Super-Groups (That Weren’t So Super)
Many of these groups are forgettable at best, and many more catch the express train to suckville.
In the US, these discussions are pretty much always about gross pay. People also don't include the value of benefits other than bonuses, and as you see, bonuses are explicitly stated. I gather that in other countries it makes more sense to talk about net.
Interestingly, all of those platforms are locked down by the companies that manufacture them. A case of the cure being worse than the disease.
It's not just VCs, but also the whole startup environment. I don't know any place in EU that has as good environment for starting up a web/mobile based business as SV :)
tl;dr - You need to produce something of value, not something that only has technical merit, if you want people to like it.
What article?

Anyway, I've thought about it back when I tried Second Life. Their currency could have been used for micropayments. I think they even have an API to their money system? Eventually the virtual currency will be taxed, though. Ultimately, what is the advantage of the virtual currency?

Most virtual worlds also don't really like you taking the currency outside. Otherwise it would be fun to create an exchange market for virtual currencies.

Second Life came to mind because unlike most other virtual worlds, they allow you to script things.

For example, you could program an automated bank teller in SL. To exchange currency with World Of Warcraft, you would (presumably) need a real person acting as a bank (receiving money, notifying the exchange market to create a transaction, and vice versa). Plus, that person would probably be banned from WoW after a while.

Come to think about it, I am not sure if becoming a bank in WoW is actually illegal, as long as you don't take the money outside of WoW. Might be a fun thing to try.
I do not like to hire minorities or women. 
About two years ago my company had two candidates for a very large and important promotion.

1. An African American male from a prestigious college that had been with the company for eight years.

2. A white male that went to a community college that had been with the company for three years.

We choose the number #2. This caused #1 to immediately threaten to sue the company for racial discrimination. Why did we choose #1? Besides having never been late or used a sick day in the three years that he had worked for the company #1 had taken six voluntary workshops (#2 had only taken one), and on his own time had learned German. The position that opened up would have required frequent interactions with our German branch. When we explained to #2 why he was passed over he screamed racism and stormed out of my office. He then sued the company and the company settled.

I have worked at my company for twenty-seven years and I handle most of the hiring and firings in our Eastern US offices. I do not like to hire minorities or women. Minorities and women have an excuse. Get passed for a promotion? Racism/Sexism. Didn't get the raise that they believe they deserve? Racism/Sexism. Just don't like something? Racism/Sexism.

The reason that I don't want to hire minorities or women is because they cause more headaches. In fact, I shouldn't say minorities. East Indian and Asian males do not cause more than normal amount of problems. I know that this sounds like a stereotype but I am speaking from personal experiences. There are plenty of good female, black, and latino workers. In fact, I am one of them.

I am black. I've been black all of my life. I have had to deal with a few racial discriminations incidents in my life. I've been harassed by police officers and I've been followed by clerks as I shopped in stores. Race is an issue but we African Americans need to stop thinking everything revolves around it.

I get so frustrated by this. To be honest, I want to root for my fellow African Americans but the average black (or latino) worker will be late or sick or something more than the whites and when you reprimand them for this this they say it’s racism. I’ve had multiple incidents where a black employee has called me an Uncle Tom for forcing them to follow the rules.

I'm going to be called an Uncle Tom just for writing this. Any time a black man tries to speak about these things he gets treated harshly by those in the black community. Just ask Bill Cosby. The fact remains though, until those of us with darker skins stop making excuses for our failures we will never succeed.
The second and third questions are particularly mean in an average interview environment, whereas they are incredibly easy in a relaxed environment.

It's really really hard to think of stuff like that off the bat, sure in an hour long friendly chat I'll probably complain about many things in languages, thus answering your question. But if you straight ask my mind goes blank thinking "Huh ... well I could complain about a lot of stuff, but what is THE thing that bugs me ..." see, ordering by priority is very difficult to do. First one has to decide what their favourite language is (very difficult for programming polyglots) and then what the most annoying thing is.

That's hard.

Same goes for the third question. Well if I have a week to learn something, what on earth should I pick!? There's so many options, how many are really viable for a single week. And what would I like not to learn because I'm learning this. Again, prioritisation is hard here.

I think it all boils down to the fact that those two are BS questions.
Apparently so, since I've seen people talk about MVPs that didn't function. How is that an MVP? I even saw one comment that said someone had produced an MVP without a product at all.
I think the author is missing an important point: You should also contribute to Open Source projects because you are using them.

This is the most natural motivation for contribution. You care about the project not just because it's cool and Free Software and you want to exercise. You mainly care because you're using it everyday - be it your favorite game or an important library (like jQuery, Qt) you use at work.

It is often most sensible to fix the bug where it appears, instead of working around it in your application. And with Free Software (aka Open Source) you can simply do that, without having to ask anyone for permission.

Getting this bugfix/improvement into the official version is a separate step. But it is worth the effort, because the alternative is to maintain your patches separately from new versions of the library. Or, worse, to maintain workarounds for bugs in the library that might or might not be fixed in future versions.
thx for this, its not about affiliate marketing though
This could be very helpful for those who have not already sorted out where to get rent money to get the job they want.
It's not about the piece of paper, but about the theoretical background. You can't even have a conversation with someone about algorithms, performance tuning, optimization etc if they don't know Big-O for example.

Incidentally that's why CS undergrads "waste" their time learning all the sorts, not 'cos you'll ever need to write one from scratch ever, it's just a good way to introduce ideas about time and space complexity.
understood. im not sure how we could scrape twitter for peoples likes. we don't have that semantic capability.

so are you using as it requires active participation it will be impossible to get traction?
Well we have G.W. gone to Yale, FWIW.
It's the "why" that makes it funny for me. I have no idea why I mind Flash less than Silverlight. It certainly has nothing to do with Microsoft.

Maybe it's that there's already a Flash. And I already downloaded it and installed it. If you want to give me Flash-like content, go nuts, but do it with the Flash that I already have. There's no real reason to have built a second one, so I don't see any reason why I should have to install it. So I don't.
Wow, no landing page and loads directly to Oauth page? F that.
I'm the same.. I like to think of a silly project and start making it. Making a simple game is a pretty good way to learn the basics of a new language pretty quickly
I don't see the harm in it, it actually was built with JavaScript and then they decided to move away from that after version 1.

I think the reality is that the kind of support you can get through it for certain applications is unlikely to eventuate in HTML5 any time soon and for .net developers that want any of this functionality it makes much more sense to use it than flash.
No, they have a special case for not installed...you just need silverlight to display it.
Its an app I made for my-self. So it's sort of incomplete.

Just wanted to have some initial reviews about it.
Yo. http://github.com/jcsalomon/constitution/tree/
Internet Explorer Drops Below 60% Market Share
Realistically the Steam survey is likely to be better & more accurate than anything else out there. (Thats aside from the obvious gamer bias)
Uncle Bob is a well-known snake-oil, ermm I mean methodology salesman. That's all you need to know about this article.
For a .net developer, using silverlight to tie into things they already have makes a lot more sense than flash which would result in a somewhat parallel code base in something completely different.

I guess if silverlight was the accepted plugin and flash was the newer player your feelings would be reversed.
I live in a relatively small city - of 40,000. It simply can't support a Barnes & Noble. If there were no Amazon I would have been at the mercy of the whims and capabilities of the very small local book shops in town to get books. Or drive 1 hour to go to the nearest Barnes & Noble.

But, even Barnes & Noble can't stock all the books that Amazon makes available. With Amazon, if I need, I can get it the next day.

I have a very small company that I run off my regular job hours. I wanted to do some marketing, get some paper, some other supplies, print stuff in the middle of the night and post some flyers around town. If Walmart weren't open and didn't have the supplies, I would have been limited to what I could work out during the regular hours of the small businesses there. The horror is, I don't know why, many of them simply shut off at 5, books shops and some others. Thats crazy.

There was this printing I used to get done at a local business, to be honest they were incredibly sweet to deal with. But their lead time was 3 days at best for printing some 1500 flyers. With OfficeMax in the same city, 2-3 hours, sometimes 30 minutes. It gave me incredible flexibility to change things on the fly - typos, content or whatever.

These were the real situations I faced. Without them, my business might not have been impossible, but definitely quite a bit more complicated.

And, of course, everything has its pros and cons.
Well, I for one am not going to try it until I have a better idea of what it is supposed to do, and how it will be using my authorization.
I think you've mixed up your #1 and #2 here.

We choose the number #2. This caused #1 to immediately threaten to sue
the company for racial discrimination. Why did we choose #1? Besides
having never been late or used a sick day in the three years that he
had worked for the company #1 had taken six voluntary workshops (#2
had only taken one), and on his own time had learned German. The
position that opened up would have required frequent interactions with
our German branch. When we explained to #2 why he was passed over he

You mean you passed #1 over.

screamed racism and stormed out of my office. He then sued the company
and the company settled.
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It is better to plan your retirement by the time you reach 40.
“Fact engine” Wolfram Alpha to ship Android version and new APIs/widgets
I'd have a great deal of difficulty in taking anyone seriously who called their office their "dojo". Or liked their direct reports to call them "master".
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I see you work for Mozilla. (Hey!) I work on Mozilla too, I certainly didn't feel like I needed to learn "the ins and outs of how everything works". I work in mailnews and I really have no idea how layout/ etc work. I don't think I know how most of mailnews works, either. I tend to think in terms of abstractions and trust the underlying system, and it's worked really well 90% of the time.
Thanks for the link. One very notable part of the Facebook dilution is that Eduardo signed on to a shareholder agreement authorizing it, at least in part. We unfortunately don't have the agreement in question to see how it worked, though it seems that, by way of the agreement, Eduardo was not invested in the new entity as fully as he should have been.

The interesting question is if he ended up with roughly the same share he would have if Facebook had simply taken on the new investors and not tried any "dirty tricks."

IANYL, but I'd say this: if you're at the point where you have more than a basic agreement with co-founders, you want a thorough, diligent lawyer working with you on these issues.
I don't know. Taking in the context of this discussion, it would mean someone with vigor and no understanding of basic CS concepts can come up with breakthrough in distributed computing. This is in spite of tens of thousands smart people who actually know the stuff and been researching it for years standing where they are now.

Just does not sound very probable.

EIDT: OK it's not quite what you've been arguing about. Yes, not everyone familiar with the field is going to ever push the envelope. My point was that the chance of an outsider there is quite small.
There are, in Paris, London or Milan, though of course not as good as the Valley.
An MVP without a product? That's called a Dry Test.
Those people will leave in anger. Why would they ever use his service again?
I've noticed a trend. When people sit around and talk about forking a project, it doesn't happen.

When someone forks a project, there's a chance it'll take off.

You can't convince someone else to fork something. If they had the drive to fork it, they wouldn't need convincing in the first place.
That's certainly true in "the Valley". In Europe, it's nigh to impossible to attract really qualified people in a small company/startup. They all work in safe, warm places :)
I'm confused. What do you disagree with?
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I agree that open source contributions is a great way to show what you can do. I don't really have the time to make significant contributions to open source projects on my free time. A four hour programming contest, that I can do. I put a lot of effort into the follow up assignment though, but I'm pretty sure that if I'd had a similar sized project that I could show, that would have been fine too. I don't think you will find a single company that will pay you for time spent on tests or assignments during the recruitment process. It's not like you go in and create production code for them.
Here is the article
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/number_of_virtual_world...

My thoughts have been to build a bridge between numerous virtual-goods marketplaces that exist today that require money to buy virutual currency/goods and folks that can earn credits to pay for by working parttime or running errands.
Exactly, what's the threat model? If I were a terrorist with a ground-to-air missile, would it matter to me whether I blew up a specific plane or just the first Jumbo-class plane of $country's airline to take off? Would it matter to society at large whether a plane had been randomly or specifically targeted?
I'm not saying impossible, just hard. If I feel the need to share, I'm probably going to use the channel that gives me the widest exposure, and the most relevant. This is likely to be facebook or twitter.

Edit: if you could identify semantically likes on twitter, that would be a neat little app. Aggregating likes would be valuable I'd have thought.
Yes, you are correct. Last time I was sick for a few days I had to bring in the doctors note, which was handed over to the bookkeeper. I assumed, wrongly, they turned it into the state to recover costs. Which is what happens when I buy things for work, travel for work, or use a hotel for work.

But I think the 80/20 split is still in effect for anything longer than a few weeks.
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I'm working on a podcast where I personally execute all the suggestions on the cards, then discuss the outcomes.

So yes, the suggestions on the cards will be made available without purchase, via the podcast.

Thanks for the valuable input Zach!
Ask HN: Why does my vote on posts not count sometimes?
I have observed that some times when I upvote a post I like, the vote does not change. Does that happen to anyone else too?
You have zero cakes. Can you give me one?
If you're a CTO, do you actually do the things you claim in your second sentence, or do you tell others to do those things? I would expect the latter unless you're in a very small company, in which case "CTO" is probably an exaggerated title. (Eg: it really means "the tech guy" but you're incorporated so CTO is technically accurate.)

One of my pet peeves has always been managers describing what they do in terms of the work done by their reports rather than what they actually do themselves. It's not like managing isn't a lot of work, at least not for good managers. Why do managers take credit for others work instead of saying that they manage a team who accomplished X, Y, and Z?
The thing is, your first example, the black candidate that was passed over for valid reasons wasn't racism. But when you extrapolate to say: "Therefore I won't hire minorities, because they cause extra hassles", you have just jumped straight into the racism pool.

You don't know that any individual is going to correspond to the racial stereotype that you have in your head. It is not fair to treat an individual on the basis of what you believe to be racial characteristics. For starters, your prejudice may be ill-informed, that is, it may not be true, but a result of faulty confirmation-bias on your part. This is extremely difficult to avoid without actually doing a scientific study. And secondly, even if your racial profile is 100% correct, you still can't use that to justify a hiring decision of a candidate, because the candidate is an individual, and may not correspond to the racial profile.
Employee Equity: Dilution
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Just a heads up...starting with Silverlight 4 there are apps now that run out of the browser and require SL installed.
Huh, this is true. I wonder where my math went, there.
I am, I'm in the UK. I know the DMCA safe-harbor laws don't apply, but neither does the DMCA. Copyright law is similar everywhere, however, so I just wanted to get an idea. I have a lawyer researching this right now, though. Thanks again!
What I imagine will be most annoying about programming on a mobile device is the amount of scrolling needed to move around the code. Sometimes I find my 17" laptop screen too small, so a phone seems unusably small.
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I answered no, but http://www.silverlightversion.com/ claims I have 4.0 installed. Which is strange, beacause I contantly see little "Install Silverlight to view this video" buttons when browsing Microsoft sites. Maybe most Silverlight content requires a newer version or something? Or it just doesn't work in Firefox.
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I agree, spending hours brushing up on topics that are unlikely to be asked in the actual interview seems like a total waste of time/rookie move, if interesting
How do I referee a paper?
Because perfection is boring.
(from an exUSSR, with sympathy)

It was hard in USSR to buy degrees and many USSR leaders actually have degrees. But our former leaders successfully exploited various loopholes in the education process and got good grades for social/political activities, not for education achievements.

So all in all, those looking for power will find their way through any system.
You say that like it's a bad thing. But it's Shakespeare at the Globe vs CGI teen gorefest 16: the splattering at the Megaplex.
Microsoft have created a situation where OEMs margin is coming from that crapware. The incentives are way off and the end user is the big loser.
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Ask HN: Exercises for Regular Expressions?
Apart from what is available in the books about Regular Expressions, are there any web sites / blogs series / etc. with a bunch of exercises that are somehow more "real world" that the ones in most of the books?

My specific problem is that currently I don't have specific needs / areas where I can exercise what I've learned about RegEx, and yet somehow I want to exercise more even with some other applications like other people's examples...
Or writing a simple program for processing some text that can be implemented by heavily using RegEx?

Thanks in advance
It doesn't work on any of my machines in active use, so no. I think I have Moonlight on one laptop, but I haven't had much success with it. At school where we have Windows, it is not deployed (still on IE6/7 and Flash 8, mind you).
Yeah, this is "Armchair forking" -- happens all the time.

As you see in this blogpost it starts with the most important thing -- naming the new fork and then goes into some politics and maybe even release schedule.

Of course, the second the "Post blog" button has been pressed it's all forgotten as nobody wants to actually spend time working on this.
Interesting to know viewpoint from other-side "If brain surgery can now be done remotely, why not maths teaching?"
I've found that thinking about the positive outcomes of solving current difficult problems is a great motivator. Don't dwell on how hard this is or how you are never going to make it. Imagine how awesome it will be once you've solved this problem you're facing now and can march forward to your goals.