skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Job decision: Apple vs Amazon
Hi

I wish to take your help in deciding my employment. I have got job offers from Apple and Amazon. Work in Apple (Cupertino) is mostly in wireless (internal tool development) whereas in Amazon (Seattle) I am asked to choose a team (for SDE) by mid November. I understand that both are good reputed companies but not sure which one to prefer.

I think giving more insight into my profile would help you guide me better. I worked in Nokia for 2 years and interned at Apple this summer. I am presently doing my Masters in Computer Science. The work which I did as intern in Apple and will do as full time employee, is to build some tools for analyzing logs for internal purposes (in wireless team). In case of Amazon, I am yet to select the teams, for which I am called to Seattle by mid of November.

Pros of Apple: * Brand value

Cons of Apple: * Nature of work - only compsci guy amidst wireless brains.. (still good)

Pros of Amazon: * Good pay and work (hopefully, depending on my team selection)

Cons of Amazon: * Brand value lesser than Apple

Sorry about the big description. Hope I have made myself clear. Would appreciate if you can come up with some suggestions to help me come to a decision.

Thanks !
I remember when google groups was still called 'dejanews' and I used it just about every day.

Whatever I wanted to know, dejanews seemed to have the answer buried in its pages somewhere.

The google took over and promised all kinds of great things would happen to the content. Only it never did. Google groups was the ugly stepchild in the google family, first dropped from the google homepage links, then completely neglected and left to rot.

In a way it is surprising that it took this long for Google to make a decision on this, but it is a total waste of all the content in there.

Are there any attempts to archive this stuff ? Is there a way to get the data in bulk ?

I've seen first hand how important old data can be to people and I suspect this to be no different, the reocities.com project has been running for a bit under a year now and not a day goes by that I don't get notes from people that are insanely happy that their content was not lost.
Gold Beads Charms
Gold Beads CharmsGold Beads CharmsGold Beads CharmsGold Beads Charms
Cool, thanks. I know far too little about compiler optimizations, it's always nice to hear about them.
i was at meetup.com HQ tonight, and they kept saying that they have "startups within a startup" - to refer to teams that are working on various features/products.

i think a key to doing this is to encourage small and self-organizing teams. have teams that include a sales person, developer, product person, and qa person, and make them sit together, instead of having people sit and work by department.
Ahead Of Chrome Web Store, Mozilla's Open Web App Ecosystem
Could part of the issue be the ad? I don't mean to offend, but it didn't seem like it would inspire many clicks. You might want to give a better indication of what the game is about, and give a really strong CTA (call to action). Something like "CLICK HERE" usually does the trick.
It's not entirely dissimilar to the package management stuff found in lots of Linux distros -- or perhaps even Valve's Steam. Except Apple can wrap a payment system around it and monetize it.

If they provide the same kind of value through it like Steam has for gamers, it'll be big.
It's been a while since copyright lawsuits had anything to do with proving actual damages.
>That's nice, but they know that idea is not commonly held.

Only amongst those opposed to gay marriage. It is very much a human-rights issue for everyone I know, particularly those who are gay. As for the decisions reddit takes as a site (not the community), they are generally both popular with the community and the admins. Take, for example, the stance they took on running pro-prop 19 ads, or their decision not to run anti-gay marriage ads. The first was genuinely political, but it was also popular. The second was a matter of principle.
You need to make an interview process that reflects the work they will actually be doing.

You need to answer 4 questions:

- Are they smart?

- Can they get shit done?

- Are they passionate about their work?

- Are they an asshole?

For programmers we solve this with the following:

- Phone Screen

- Coding Challenge (offline, on their time, reviewed by team)

- Design Challenge (take loose requirements, build UI, models, and project plan)

- Project Presentation (talk about an awesome project you did in detail)

- Pair Programming (Work directly with an engineer to solve a simple coding challenge)
He makes a huge deal about how he killed MySpaceSupport.com by rewiring the URLs, etc and how this eliminated all his revenue, permanently, so that he sold it off in 2008. I'm sure it was a major factor, but I think the changes in the economy, the popularity and demographics of MySpace, and the rise of more popular social networks may have also mattered.
I don't get why a dynamically typed language would be for beginners. We're usually picky about typing because it's so easy to lose track of what you're doing and make subtle errors. Dynamic typing is very powerful but requires a new programmer to mentally juggle more information about the program. It's not easy keeping track of values and control flow. Adding types is like tightening the belt after lunch.

Ada seems difficult at first until you realize that the crazy typing saved you subtle logic errors. Python seems easy at first because you can use dynamic typing. Then you have to debug.

Why does a beginner language have to be robust? Doesn't bit torrent run in python? If I wanna run test scripts on my programs Python is a great tool. Beginners don't run test scripts.
1 New Weight Loss Diet Tip
Today Apple announced the death of the optical drive in its laptops
Google Docs Adds Drag-and-Drop Image Upload
My parents are totally opposite, I have only visited two states of my country (excluding the state where I live i.e. the awesomest gujarat). So now I totally lack any enthusiasm for traveling.

But I hadn't realized it till you pointed your enthusiasm out. Umm... don't know whether to thank you or hate you from my guts.
If you try to declare that all the money you pulled from your LLC was dividends and not a salary, the IRS will bust you. Once you declare a 'fair' amount as salary (and pay FICA), the rest you can pull without paying FICA.
He's going to need a ghost writer if he plans to write that book...
Have you tried/looked into Redmine (http://www.redmine.org/)? I've heard it's quite good.
Except without the crashes...and more transitions between stuff.

I wish they'd let me resize windows from any corner.
Yeah the writing was terrible, no doubt about that. I definitely feel there was a great lesson there in his simplicity of execution - he saw people using myspace sites so he built one. The massively introspective and precious process of coming up with "ideas" that I can't help be a little obsessed with seems ridiculous compared with just seeing and doing.
Perhaps you are using a microcontroller with memory-mapped control registers?
Maybe it's time to step away from the metaphor. Just so we're clear I'm referring to the operating system -- the thing on which the store is built. It is, quite literally, owned by Apple.
I could really see them converging in the not too distant future when Lion is released, bringing more touch friendly concepts like the Launchpad to OS X.
AIIDE 2010 Conference Summary (Game AI)
I think there's some real merit to this comment. In reading the original post, I didn't realize the image embedded in it was the ad itself and not just a screen from the game. You might consider consulting someone experienced in creating ads next time around, if only to factor that out as a consideration.
I'm a big fan of ads from the 50s and 60s what if this technology existed then?

It'd have been as little used as this will eventually be with no significant effect to the advertising industry.

(I mean this in a non-derogatory sense. It might eventually be used on even a lot of TV programmes, but in the grand scheme of things, we're not going to be wiping the record of advertising from the face of the earth forthwith with this.)
Apple always disses a feature its competitors have, until they start offering it and suddenly act like they invented it. I'm sure plenty of people would love to have a touch screen on their MacBook.
Andrew, thanks for sharing your numbers man. Raw numbers are one of the most valuable things for learning.

3% ROI isn't great from a cash perspective, but there's other benefits you're getting - those 100,000 impressions are potentially worth something for people recognizing your product later, then there's getting more reviews, potential word of mouth, etc. Also, someone that checked it out first from the ad might buy later, especially if they get repeated exposure.

The danger with such a low return is that if you're not watching carefully, you could run in the red pretty quickly and lose money. But as long as you're above break even and paying attention, your real ROI is probably a bit higher than that 3% considering the other positive effects.

Edit: Wait a minute, you got 4 sales... do you mean you spent $100 and got $3 in return? I was thinking you got $103 in return... if you're in the hole $97, that's utterly abysmal and discard the rest of my comment. No positive secondary effects gonna make up for that.
Yeah well, they never wanted to do full screen apps, phones, tablets or netbook form factors either.
You probably paid for a lot of clicks from people who were curious but don't have devices, and of course you might lose people on your page in the app store.

I would suggest a better creative and more importantly, since you're PPC put the app's price on it so casual browsers and people who don't buy apps won't click thru - "ON SALE!! $normalprice" in one of those red starry-circle things might help a lot.
Maybe I'm being naive (as I'm not a programmer), but the brand value in this case is negligible. The type of work supersedes anything and if you feel that you'll develop yourself more and embrace the work at Amazon, then that's an easy choice.
I've always wondered by YC-application-waiting chat never ends up on #startups. My first winter paying attention it was on #candyisdandy. Then somewhere else random. Is there a specific reason for this?
Getting clicks is not his issue if they are happy to drain a hundred bucks in a day. The issue is that he needs to convert about 20 - 30% of the clicks to purchasers to make the math work at his price point. That is extraordinarily high.
His link to the Pinch Media APP store secrets is broken and it's a great presentation, here it is in full glory:

http://www.slideshare.net/pinchmedia/iphone-appstore-secrets...
At a place I used to work at, this small group mentality was pretty successful, though it was usually a selection of top tier designers/developers/project managers. It just meant that if you were a part of it, it was amazingly fun. But if you weren't...
This is not your kind of start-up (I have found HN to mostly work on SaaS applications), its more manufacturing based.

Right now working with another guy to make cheap mobile chargers to export to the USA. So, any cheap charger you may purchase 4-6 months from now may be from my design. But that's just helping a friend, I do not have any monetary gain from it. Apart from that, whenever I will get time I a company is ready to hire me as employee # 1 in there education department (its a software dev + CS education startup).

But on my own home front I am finally starting to work towards my own idea which has been appreciated by some industry people and entrepreneurs I have met. Its a localized hobby kits shop. I provide them with hobby kits which are cheap and have manuals which are in the customer's native language (right now just english, hindi and gujarati as my target right now is gujarat). I know its not that fancy, but hey you people gave me the bug to at least try something before giving up on it (i.e. if its not obviously stupid). Anyways, working on MVP kits for electronics, computer programming, robotics and (if I can manage it) maths.

I have a few slides prepared if anyone wants to see.

EDIT: And btw, I am in second year of engineering
35k of 2mil is 1.75%. Not an unreasonable amount to throw away on entertainment. Money is not an end itself. At some point you gotta spend it or why bother getting it in the first place.

All the expensive cars are much more of an issue. Fun is fun, "status" is a total waste.
.NET’s Platform Divergence Problem
A little styling to spice up the chat room:

document.getElement('head').innerHTML=document.getElement('head').innerHTML+'<style>\n.hyperlink-whois{font-weight:bold;}\n.qwebirc-qui .lines{background:#f0f7ff url("http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/6644/thewatcher.png") no-repeat scroll center bottom;font-size:12px;line-height:1.6em;}\n.qwebirc-qui .ircwindow{font-family:Verdana,sans-serif,"sans serif";}\n</style>';
Interesting data here, I don't have any apps out for sale but anybody that does should take a look.

A couple of observations:

- price elasticity, the non-linear relationship
between price and consumption is something anybody
that sells products on-line should study

- that's not the same as the difference between free and
paid, for people to pay for something you have to cross
a barrier, and even $0.99 is a barrier strong enough
to stop a large number of people to download your app

- this article is from May, I'd be interested to see how
it turned out in the longer term and what the total take
on this app was versus what it cost to develop it

- even the most trivial stuff can make you money if you
market it right

- timing is everything

Isn't OMB a quote from the movie 'idiocracy' ?
Obvious 'features' such as cameras often disappear from Apple products for first iterations only to reappear later (even when the tech-goss blogs reveal the chassis has engineered space from the outset)... iPod Touch, iPad etc...
Ask HN: Successful Non-Founders, was it worth it?
I've been asked if I would join a startup with as a non-founding, but critical hire. I've been offered a great amount of equity according to my research. I like the company a lot and think they're on to something. I can figure out most of the pros and cons of joining them, but don't have a sense of what it could be like assuming a really positive outcome. For those who ended up at really successful companies as non-founders, was it worth it? Were you happy with your equity when the company sold or had an IPO? Did the final outcome fall short of your expectations in any way?

Though the details are sparse, I used a throwaway to not upset the founders.
Bridging Transactions from Java EE to .NET
Check out this book by Rand Fishkin (he posts here) and others - it's probably the best place to start - http://www.amazon.com/Art-SEO-Mastering-Optimization-Practic...
Yes, math is one tool in a tool chest.

Tool ... good. Tool with two thousand years of history behind it, very good!

However, I haven't notice a similar degree of correlation between programming and Egyptian history... Knuth was about literate programming, so maybe English literature could be good tool too.
Anyone who is ADHD, clinically obsessive, and does nothing but chase success.
I read it as a senior, when the bulk of my school related angst was behind me. It was still awesome, though. I felt less alone – less like I was nuts or something for seeing school the way I had.
Do you think that maybe your desire for tablets to not be "the next big thing" is shading your assessment of iPad sales? The iPad outsold ALL Macs this quarter, so no, Apple is not likely cooling its heels on the tablet thing.
This is nothing to be proud of. The American disaster with dirivitives can be traced to ultra fast automated trading.
SEO for big money terms is difficult, time consuming, and expensive.

I would only use something like this for trivially competitive terms.

Blueglass' product is worth looking into (I believe it's called SecondStep) as is Optify.

I don't really know what you mean by crowdsourced SEO - if you're crowdsourcing your onsite stuff, you're probably making a bad decision.

If you're crowdsourcing your link building, you're paying someone else to spam for you.
Regarding full-screen apps, I'd like to bring this old thread back up http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721650
(1240) watts (24 * 365) hours * 10 cents per kilowatt hour

That comes out to about 420USD per year just to run this thing. And that's at 10 cents per kilowatt hour. In areas which I suspect this sort of thing would be more popular (California, the new england area, New York, etc) it's going to cost you nearly twice as much.

Sure at 90000USD you might break even after 5 years, but you'll still actually be more than 2000USD in the hole at that point that's to power consumption.

That's not even starting to take into consideration the amount of money you'll pay in wages having your employees waste time with this thing.
If I had 2.5 million spare extra dollars, I would probably use it to live the way I live now, without having to work ever again.
APPLE

And work the employee stock purchase plan...

E-commerce sucks nuts. Only do Amazon if it pays $50K more than the Apple offer. And even then it's probably not worth it.
>People that think analytically can really piss people off that aren't as obsessed with detail.

It goes both ways - I find it very frustrating when it feels like someone is refusing to answer a simple, specific question. (Of course, he may think I'm nitpicking, or not even understand what I'm saying...)
You should check out Tapzilla - http://tapzilla.com (YC S2010) - you only pay for actual app installs rather than paying $100 for 994 clicks, which leads to 4 installs (I had no idea install rates per click were as low as 0.40%!). They just launched on Techcrunch last week (http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/13/tapzilla-offers-daily-deals...).

Edit: I can't claim to be an expert on mobile advertising, but it doesn't seem like traditional CPC/CPMs really work in this space. I'm on a mobile device, which means lots of accidental taps, and if I randomly click on an ad that catches my eye, chances are I'm not going to want to install the app from the app store right then and there (although I guess this also means your 4 installs could be a low stat since users might return to install the app later without going through the Linkshare affiliate link).
But a good boss would have turned that around in to a shared lesson where both parties came out ahead, instead of leaving one side insecure enough to ask about it online.

Compliments work so much better than rebukes in situations like this.

Wow George that was really clever of you, why don't we have lunch together.

And informally:

What do you think could have happened ?

What do you think would have been the consequences if your attempt had led to a system crash or worse ?

How should we deal with this next time you have a burning urge to try something like this ?

What would you have done if you were in my shoes and someone crashed a server on purpose ? (yes it was a dev box)

So, in closing George, I'm really happy that you brought this to my attention, but in the future the best way to deal with this sort of situation is to first talk it over with someone higher up before hitting 'go'.
I would think that there are more cities that are poorly planned not because of a concerted effort to allow it to grow organically, but because it's difficult to plan the expansion of entire cities, especially in the cases of those that are many centuries old.

For example, compare the streets around Wall Street (where New Amsterdam was largely first settled) with 'newer' areas North of it where it becomes slightly less tight and more gridded.
"Otherwise, while you have the code, your only choice is to fork, not collaborate"

If you look at this the right way, every checkin is a new fork. There's no such thing as a mainline branch. There's absolutely no reason you can't simply fork some branch of Android and start working on it and tell everyone to work from your branch. Each developer has the choice, including Google to use your branch or checkin to a different fork.

Again, AFAIK, Google is not preventing anyone from branching and checking into a new branch. This is fundamentally no different than Google allow public commits, but then branching after each of their checkins.

To put it another way, if you were to take the 2.2 branch of Android and you forked then contributed an incredible 7" tablet UI experience that Google nor Apple could ever match, you may have forced Google to begin picking up your branch.

There's is nothing stopping any of this from happening, except the apparent attitude that Google needs to bend over backwards to accomodate people who haven't shown any inclination nor aptitude to an interesting contribution.

Goodness, I can't believe I'm defending Google.
It's interesting -- I got an OptiBay mounting kit for my 17" MacBook Pro, and now I've replaced the optical drive with a 1TB extra hard drive, in addition to the 256GB SSD I've already got. It's awesome to be able to carry my entire iTunes library with me wherever I go. The few times I've needed the optical drive, OptiBay includes an enclsoure for you to put the SuperDrive into, so I just plug it in via USB and I'm good to go. Never been happier with my super-fast machine.
I guess you won't see much enterprise software being approved.
Why Can't Internet Ads Be Sold Like TV Commercials?
You know that this has been tried many times before, and was the original tablet form factor, and it failed.

Now, you can get the Air and an ipad for a lot cheaper than any of those tablets.
This is by far the dumbest thing I've ever seen here.

I don't think I believe any of this, other than that he wants to make money off of the internet because everyone wants to make money off of the internet. For one, he claims to be writing a book, despite having an apparent 5th grade reading level. I hope he spent about $100k of that $2.5 million on a ghost writer before he lost it. Also I'd bet he's telling the truth about being a high school dropout.

For another, he claims to be running bemodel.com, but that site does nothing but display stock photos.

I also find it hard to believe that anyone who would point out "The Secret" (and not the book version either, but the movie based on it) as their inspiration could ever scale a website to enough traffic to make $100k+/mo. I'm skeptical he could even spell PHP let alone use it.

I have to say, it's VERY tempting for me to buy his ebook about making women chase me. That has to be a non-stop laugh riot.
This is amazing. A good friend of mine was the dot com 1.0 version of this guy. He even had the same BMWs! It's eerie how similar the stories are...
It's not just the amount, it's the action, particularly when in context of some of the other waste. Gambling away the same amount of money that people get for doing a YC round is not the right sort of thinking for long-term success.

It's also the pervasive attitude of using money as a means to impress others. No amount of money will fix that, because there's always someone richer to impress. You mightn't think wasting 30k in vegas was fun, but I'd ask if he would do the same thing in a less 'glamorous' place.

Frankly I would see the cars as less of a waste because presumably they still have some resale value.

edit : I'll just add to that, think of any mentor you can. Now ask yourself : would that mentor suggest blowing that cash on gambling, strippers and expensive gifts for an (obviously) fair-weather girlfriend was a good idea?
OK, hard mode: use standards so that it works on more than one platform.
It's not clear whether he just made the basic mistake of not 301 redirecting the old Urls, or was it that he did but still lost places anyway? Perhaps there is more too it than just a new set of Urls (in terms of search engine rankings)