skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why not to work at Google?
I think it's mostly self explanatory. For a software Engineer role.

It would be hard to resist because of their selectivity (Under 1% resume/hire rate), gaining read access to their code base, resume boost and talented colleagues. Any one of these things on their own, with the exception of the first one, are huge.

There are so many blog posts on applying to Google, almost none on why not to.
Of course, so long as it's in conjunction with a few direct sources.
he's also wrong about when to use continuations
It was actually simpler than that. Menu items were draggable.
Listen to Your Applications
6 Essential On-the-page Search Engine Optimization Factors
Russian Spammer Investigated by Russian Police
You know, with all these commodity tablets popping up, I wonder how you can actually trust the manufacturer. Each tablet appears to run a customized version of Android...how do you know that the manufacturer didn't modify it to send along all of your private data as you use it?
Am I the only one who remembers that the entire point of an e-reader is e-ink? Seems like the reader market is merging into the tablet market.
Weebly is hiring a Front-end Web Developer
As far as I'm concerned, net neutrality is always relevant. Limewire is merely a client built upon the gnutella network. It did nothing to promote illegal filesharing and actually did about as much to discourage it as it could (through warnings, mandatory checkboxes, popups, etc.) short of monitoring traffic.

This ruling is really only one or two steps away from a court mandating that all ISPs monitor network traffic for unlicensed content and restrict it accordingly (since they are enabling piracy just as much as Limewire was).

I know Limewire has been around for a long time and all the cool kids moved on to other filesharing networks and technologies long ago, but I think this news is significant and troubling.

The fact that the music industry has managed to shut them down is just one more lost battle in the net neutrality war.
Unfortunately, it won't run any of the most recent versions of Ubuntu because it's an ARM9 (ARMv5).

However, people have a minimal-esque Debian installation running on its other WM8505-based cousins fairly well: http://www.slatedroid.com/eken-m001-debian/
No arrange by penis?
Hmm, so who uses this? How is it better than just saying $3M?
A bit late to the party, but here's mine. It's an online shop list management web-app. It's not open to the public. You'll need to send me your email address for me to set you up an account.

http://shopsmart.lifeinlists.net

PS: ShopSmart needs a Google account to work. So, whatever email you send needs to be associated with a Google account.
I'm curious about this too - my rough-cut understanding of the evolution of color response is that it lives mostly in the basic risk / reward division (eg, what is good to eat, what is poisonous, etc). So there's bound to be a set that you can use to antagonize people =)
Groupon fix for furniture shoppers ends only in a bad trip
Language note: "Digixcard is a digital business card that IS connects everyone at your next event" should read "Digixcard is a digital business card that connects everyone at your next event."
No 'IS'.
It depends on where you live. Some people can pay a few bucks a month for netflix and put an AppleTV in every room giving them access to a tremendous amount of content without having to deal with physical media.

You mostly only pay for what you use and the clients (AppleTV's or other media players) are rarely much over $100 each.

Storage is incredibly cheap for the things you have yourself.

It's much like the movie Gran Torino where Walt has a garage filled with tools. He aquired them over time. That is the way I have aquired media that now resides on my server.
This might be last post you read
The voting ring is not only voting for Digg advertisers. There are a few blog-spam sites in there, and a few are CLEARLY spam (like buzzll.com).

It could be a voting ring that is also digging "top stories" to make their digg patterns appear more natural.
You can't just choose to neglect to connotations a word carries with it and expect everyone else to do the same, especially while those connotations are still culturally relevant.

Terrorism carries certain meanings in today's political climate, and by using it loosely, you're implicitly linking session hijacking as a means to spread awareness of a longstanding vulnerability to a religious, political and usually violent term. It's akin to calling someone a Nazi, even if there is a comparison to Nazism that could be made.

Feel free to use it as you want, but to expect any other reaction than the one you got is wishful thinking.
Apostrophe's and they're use's.
New York State Senate launches Developers Network
Ask HN: Feedback for my new graphic design product
I just launched a new service for graphic design students. It's an easy way to instantly build an online portfolio/website and get feedback from a design community. I'd love any comments on it (good and bad). www.orangeslyce.com/student is the URL just for students. I designed and programmed the entire site using RoR. Thanks!
I can't see how. You're not scraping, not stealing code, not doing anything. You're just checking them out (and they will likely check you out).

Auto companies tear down each others cars.
Tech companies tear down each others products.
Grocery stores check out each others prices.

and so and so on.

None of them steal. Just poke, prod, look, and learn. Then apply to their own if it's suitable.

I have never seen a Non-compete clause in any TOS.
Interesting! How much do you exercise in general? Carbs obviously pack a lot of calories and I have empirically observed that in mostly sedentary people cutting carbs seems generally more effective than dropping fat intake (hence the success of Atkins), whereas moving into the moderate exercise range the situation is reversed.
I used to do:

while true; do date; ls; sleep 2; clear; done

but got tired of it and searched apt for watch.

apt-get install procps
Here is the underlying issue.

Settled law (settled in the 1800s with mail order catalogs) says the following:

- States may levy whatever taxes they want on their residents.

- States may require companies within the state to collect those taxes for them.

- States do not have jurisdiction over interstate commerce, meaning that they cannot impose requirements on companies in other states. Even if those companies are doing business with customers in that state.

The result is that sales tax is owed for out of state purchases, but is rarely collected. Amazon likes it that way, because it makes their goods cheaper. State governments hate it, because their tax revenues are hit.

North Carolina tried the trick of getting Amazon's sales records. With that, they can go to their private citizens and collect owed but unpaid taxes directly. Amazon is fighting it because they want to remain an artificially cheap alternative. The First Amendment issue was a red herring that they managed to make a good legal argument from.
I used to do:

while true; do date; ls; sleep 2; clear; done

but got tired of that and installed procps via apt.
Ask HN: What is a better way of weighing up pros and cons?
I frequently have the problem, almost exclusively on mailing lists or in e-mail, where the pros and cons of an argument are sidetracked or waylaid or lost.

What are some better ways for weighing up pros and cons. I'm leaning towards a customised wiki of some kind with a points system led by a moderator. Important is that the flow of ideas and points does not get lost. Thoughts?
"Axioms" has a nice, mathy ring of solidity to it, but I'm pretty sure that, along with the axioms you are analyzing there are others you are barely thinking about but which also form the foundation of Arc. For example, the notion of code and data being the same in Lisp: strings of text. Is that an axiom? That's certainly one of the keys to the unusual power and flexibility of Lisp. Yet text data these days is a very rich construct. A typical string might be an entry in a Thai-Japanese dictionary. To accommodate general text data for the next hundred years, you must use Unicode (axiomatic, whether you realize it or not), which implies that the code itself (being data) must be in Unicode, which has implications for the semantics of code and how you walk through a string-as-list "character by character". Are you planning to have macros? Of course you are, which means that macros will be designed based on the assumption that what they parse is Unicode. What implications does that assumption have for the design of macro syntax? I don't know, but if you start by designing macros on the basis of ASCII assumptions, your macros will become a mess when you eventually try to retrofit Unicode. Most languages don't have to deal with this, because code and data are assumed separate.

I don't know how Lisp-style strings-as-lists should be designed when the strings are Unicode, and how, therefore, macros should be designed, but it seems pretty darned fundamental, not something to tack on later. And this is just the first example that comes to mind. Fundamental decisions have implications for ease of learning the language, ease of evolving code, for performance, for ability to run in parallel, for difficulty of implementation, for portability, for security, and for so many issues that I'm not even aware of, all of which have implications for one another.

No group of half-dozen friends, no matter how smart, knows enough to get these axioms right. Too many lessons have been learned by the rest of the world to ignore what they've found and hope to do well by reasoning from some incomplete set of first principles.

Of course, if you're just trying to solve a fun math problem by eliminating the parts of the real world you don't feel like thinking about, then fine. Those of us who need real tools will look elsewhere. You can publish the solution to your math puzzle. You may just not have the time or inclination to do more, and who could blame you? You're obviously very busy. But if it is intended as a tool for real programming, then carefully designing only the parts you care about will produce yet another mess of poorly integrated retrofits and kludges as the lessons long learned by the rest of the world (post-McCarthy) are belatedly rediscovered. Without project management that includes leveraging the expertise of a large community, Arc probably won't be usable as anything more than a source of ideas for the real 100-year language.
Another one with much limited scope:

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/
make sure you use tabs to format all of your Python code

I disagree. Idiomatic Python uses 4 spaces per indent.

Either solely use tabs or solely use spaces, they don’t work well together, at least in my experience

Mixing tabs and spaces is indeed very unwise. You can run Python with the -tt option to make sure you're consistent.

Read Style Guide for Python Code for more advice on this front

I agree ;-) The author probably refers to PEP8, http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/
Many (most?) states don't have both. They only have one or the other.

At least one state (New Hampshire) has neither. Instead they have little government, high license fees, and the state runs the liquor stores at a profit. (Said stores sell liquor much cheaper than surrounding states. NH takes advantage of this by putting big stores right on the Interstate as close to Boston as they can.)
I wouldn't be surprised if they did a second round of these for Android developers when the Market becomes available for Google TV as well.

They're really going to have to push hard to get developers to make good 10-foot interfaces. Increasing app quality has got to be front and center. Given some of the recent posts on the Android dev blog they've begun trying hard to get developers to make better design decisions in terms of supporting various device form factors.

It's bad enough how some apps look pretty crappy on non-traditional phones like the Motorola Charm because the author didn't account for the fact that a device might have a default landscape orientation, for example.
The WM8505 Android 1.6 release has some custom hacks in the UI library layer to work with their video hardware.

Since VIA released Linux kernel source for this SoC a few months ago, some other people have successfully worked out more about the graphics driver and started developing an alternative kernel from scratch[1]. With this understanding, the possibility of the community porting Froyo is higher than it was before.

However, AFAIK noone has really put strong effort into it. One of the reasons I lost interest is that 128Mb of RAM is apparently not enough to run 2.2 decently regardless, and that's all most of the tablets have. If this one has 256Mb then it might actually be up to it.

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/vt8500-wm8505-linux-kernel
Thanks for note. Any idea how should i move this conversation under ASK HN category?
Hmm. Not quite any browser. Only those that run Flash, it seems.
Wouldn't it get that through the android OS?
I wouldn't consider it moot, but I wouldn't necessarily deduct points either. Open-source contribution is a good bonus in a developer; it shows that they have been able to cooperate others (among a group of people that are often unpleasant, ornery, or crotchety) and adhere to the requirements of the BFDLs, which shows adaptability. The big benefit of course if that you can go back and look up their interactions and the code they submitted and how they went about the whole thing, which is definitely useful in determining if the person would be a good hire. It also demonstrates a level of conscientiousness about their place in the community.

So, all that said, there are good reasons a developer may not have many open-source contributions, as you stated. So while I don't think it's good to necessarily detract from developers without that, I wouldn't exactly consider it moot, either; open-source dev is a very useful reference and a good demonstration of the candidate. If you can't contribute, you will miss out on some of those good vibe points, but that's the way things go sometimes I guess.
I think that a big part of it is that if we saw the 50%+ we actually pay in taxes * all at once, we would realize how little value we're getting in comparison to those "socialist" countries in Europe (and Canada) where they don't pay much more but get much better services.

* When you factor in gas taxes, sin taxes, vehicle registrations, etc., as well as sales and income tax
It's funny you say that because the version of Android developed for the WM8505 (the SoC in the Walgreens) silently phones home to a company in China for "license verification". Or, at least it did a few months ago.

http://projectgus.com/2010/07/eken-m001-phone-home/

(As I said in my blog post, nothing in the device indicated it was phoning home and the code was obfuscated to disguise these details. There's nothing particularly stopping any of these small companies from choosing to send other details if they wanted to.)
YABCT: Yet another business card thingamajig.

There are several out there already. All of them require traction to become serious contenders. Bump is probably the best known. Yet, the greatest downfall to any is that each party must be a member of that app.

Paper cards still rule the roost (and with digitizers have become a lot easier to manage). Google App has a business card reader on it. Very cool.

Still, the best way I've seen and used so far is twitter. You meet, like, and trade twitter handles becoming followers right away. Then later, follow up for more info. This is not for the more serious connections where paper cards rule.

Just my opinion
We are open to sharing the data.

I wasn't saying that the data directly is useful for people looking to plan fashion lines a year from now... I was simply saying that the old model of forecasting far off becomes harder to do when mass customization allows for people to have more options.
There's a difference between taking notes and transcribing, and people who benefit from and proselytize taking notes tend to be very far from the transcribing end of the spectrum. People who are the most effective note-takers tend to synthesize what they're hearing and only write down key points. While the synthesized notes are smaller and therefore faster to write, the real benefit comes from the act of synthesis itself. It forces a level of understanding that the listener wouldn't be forced to attain were it not for taking the notes.

Sadly, there's very little emphasis on what it means to take good notes, or how to go about doing it. I suspect that good note-takers don't even realize that there's a difference between notes and transcripts, so when they promote note-taking as a study tool they neglect to mention a critical step. You probably could become a good note-taker with some practice, and would benefit from it, but if you're not still in school I doubt it would be worth your time.
The short version: it was my very first private investment. I decided I should diversify, get out of tech and into something more traditional and relatively safe. So I decided to get into real estate. This was in 2006. You can guess how that turned out.
I have to say I disagree; their list provides some good, sufficient indicators of a good programmer. You appear to have read an assertion that these are necessary qualities into the article, but I'm not seeing that anywhere.

> Everyone has an opinion, assholes included.

Not true in my experience; there are plenty of apathetic floaters who don't care enough to form an opinion about anything. They use what they're told to use, don't look around at anything, don't form comparative opinions, and don't care. They all produced terrible work, because they didn't care enough to form opinions, or look around for better tools and techniques, and so never learned anything

> Many of the best programmers I know contribute nothing to open source because of confidentiality agreements.

Absolutely. But again, it's a good sufficient tell, not a necessary quality.

> You mean when it's fun specing something out or at 4 in the morning when everything is down?

Yes. You want them to fundamentally enjoy what they do. Dispassionate automatons may exist who nonetheless churn out solid work, but in my experience there are far fewer passionate, horrible developers than uncaring horrible developers, so it is again a good sufficient distinguisher to help find a good developer.

> And what does it cost to maintain or fix it? There are 2 ways to find out. a. Read the source. b. Wait a year. Which would you prefer?

c. Contact previous employers/coworkers, see what their reputation for shipping (and shipping quality) is.

> Who cares? What they do on their own time is their own business. This is an indicator of nothing.

It's an indicator of intellectual curiosity. Again, intellectually incurious developers who nonetheless do solid work and stay up to date may exist out there, somewhere, but I've never met one, so it's yet another good sufficient identifier.

> This is important for all people, for all things, so it doesn't even need to be on this list.

If you really believe that, you haven't met a lot of hiring managers who completely and utterly forget about it or think it is unimportant for technical positions. There are people who absolutely need this reminder.

> b. Hire a programmer to hire a programmer.

Turtles all the way down?
I wonder if Walgreens is complying with GPL by including a notice for source with the device, and some way for customers to access it. Certainly Maylon Group doesn't seem to have anything on their site.

(Sorry to sound like a broken record.)
We didn't specifically exclude negative words... But I'm sure we could dig in and look for specific negative words like Anger, Fear, Hate, etc. and see what colors are associated with those words...

Good idea for a larger color association specific post.
>What computing blogs / magazines do you read?

Someone asked me this fairly recently, but he said "what technical stuff do you read?", which I had a pretty hard time answering because I think my definition of technical was much stricter than his. He mentioned that I had written about Joel Spolsky, for instance, but Joel is not really a technical writer -- he writes about business, etc. within his technical company.

I ended up just saying "whatever's on Hacker News, basically", because I don't really follow any blogs regularly any more. I should have said Lambda the Ultimate, I guess; that used to be on my feed reader (still is, but I never use feed reader anymore).
Imo, their algorithms can be tested in developer environments (testing/development servers). And even if they absolutely HAD to do it on the live servers, then they could have easily removed their diggs after testing.

Their's just making an excuse for a mistake. Their way of handling this is understandable, but probably not the best way to handle that situation.
Yeah, I'd also like to see an analysis of this. I used to be an automatic 'switch to Firefox for debugging' user, but I find that the Chrome developer tools are now pretty sufficient.
That would be a pretty impressive exit.

The reason why it didn't sell reminds me of Dalton Caldwell's startup school talk, if you haven't seen it yet and intend to do a music startup (or are doing one) you probably should go and watch it:

http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272178844
I enjoy programming both when specing it out AND when things are down at 4am. I would prefer it not be 4am that they be down, but I still enjoy the challenge and feeling of accomplishment when I fix it.
Gas taxes, vehicle registration fees etc, actually make a lot of sense to me. Ideally it would be great if we could fund our roads entirely with gas taxes to internalize their cost.
His blog has a lot of gems. The functional retrogames series, in particular.

Even if it can be made configurable, adding all those knobs and dials may add a lot of complexity.
Thanks absolutely paper card still rules but for business people, we intend to generate a card on the fly using your Facebook, Twitter data. It is customizable and you can personalize it as you want. E.g. for business meeting just use business profile while in party go for flashy theme. Interesting part is anyone with Facebook account can use it.
They made people mad. What's not to get?
Let me guess, stop reading blogs and go sell something?
I tried it. The website said it was ringing before my phone rang, then it said connected before my phone rang. Then my phone rang and I picked up, but no voice was transmitted in either direction. Interesting concept but it doesn't work for me.
You're right there is a difference. But I have a problem taking in what I'm hearing unless I repeat it in my head a few times. I don't have enough real time computational power to physically write the stuff down and process what I'm hearing.

When I was forced to take notes I never actually transcribed, but in effect what I wrote down was practically transcribing because I could not keep the processing in real time to write down only the important points.
Took me forever (well 2 minutes, but still) to find the donate link: http://getfirebug.com/contribute

Granted, I really wanted to donate until I saw they used Paypal. Lots of other options now guys: https://www.wepay.com/ https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/index.htm

Maybe someone will read this and consider it for the future. I'd donate $50 today if I could do so via Amazon payments.
Thanks for your insight, David
I don't disagree, I'm just baffled that anyone would still use Limewire.
I get about 4-5 depending. I practice a version of Polyphasic sleep. I cannot get down past 4, but I have read people that do only 2 hours.....Yikes.
Tom Taylor's thoughts on Firesheep.
Yes I get that. But why are they still getting grilled? The screwed up, admitted as much and started fixing the things that were broken. What more can you do in that situation.