skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> in Lisp and C++ I miss dictionary literals

So roll your own. Or use mine:

http://flownet.com/ron/lisp/dictionary.lisp
I was thinking about doing something like this and now I don't have to. Nice work, will definitely check it out!
Microsoft's E&D division not only includes xbox et al it also includes Windows Mobile development (coughkincough) and Live and a bunch of other crap. The xbox part of E&D is doing very, very well, and making a tidy sum for the company.
Things I regret:
- Not getting more involved in startups earlier (I should have gotten started in the early 1990s somehow when I first got on the Internet)
- MIT vs. Stanford; being closer to startup ground-zero would have been worth it
- Sticking around various jobs (vs. startups) longer than absolutely necessary; I could have spent maybe 4 years more from 2002-now working on startups vs. contracting and consulting, if I had been more willing to take risks.

I think I've spent maybe 12 months total on startups after I should have left them; sometimes it is clear that for team/market (vs. product) reasons, a given startup is doomed. Until that point, it's still a worthwhile experience, as there is a lot to learn, and it's impossible to know it won't be successful -- after, it is a lot harder to stay motivated, even if the day to day tasks can still be educational.
Pretty cool. The only goof I found was that it thinks that Emacs is plural for 'Emac'.
Since we don't have set work hours, there's a lot of variety to my daily routine. If I'm in SF, I'll usually get out of bed around 9am, roll over to my desk and deal with email and catch up on tech news. I'll head into the office around 11am and do any of a million different things there. Between 6pm and 8pm I'll think about heading home. Maybe a few of us will hit a bar first or grab dinner at a close restaurant. Right now it's 10:15pm and I'm coordinating with vendors via email and talking with some of the GitHub guys in Campfire.

It's rare that a day will go by that I don't work on GitHub in some fashion. I like to get out into nature on weekends to refresh my creative energy and get some exercise, but I'll still be checking email and maybe writing some code or jotting down ideas I had on the ride.
Nothing new in that sense (diet was more than meat). Of course hunter gatherers also gathered, and used whatever food was available to them. In the source study [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/10/08/1006993107.full...] the discuss nine different plants that were found ground to flour, while they use the term "grain" all over the place, only one is actually a seed and it's not wheat, others are mostly roots. Nothing wrong with that.

Here's another [http://www.springerlink.com/content/n2871q7u63170045/] that uses isotope data to state "evidence indicates that animal, not plant, protein was the dominant protein source for all of the humans measured". Doesn't negate use of plants, just that they were not a "dominant" source of protein. And really, before mechanical processes, how much grinding and collecting of grains did one have to do for one meal? If there's no other source of food, yeah sure, but otherwise, the payoff is a lot bigger for hunting, or nuts, and fruit, maybe even honey.
Why do you miss dictionary literals? Syntax similar to arc's seems to do it for me:

(obj a 1 b 2 c 3)
Apple is not known for affordable products, nor can they magic a phone carrier towards reliability.

AT&T is a massive company that cannot "relaunch" due to contractual obligations. Even if they did, carriers already offer "kid friendly" plans - unlimited data/text that Mommy and Daddy can pay for.

So the kids transition toward adulthood and iAT&T transitions back towards their successful business model of offering plans for everyone?
It "feels" wrong, but that's the way it's set up.

I used to work for UCOP (it's in the list), and about 5 years ago there was a big issue around "total compensation" for the high-level employees. That was the event that really sparked the level of transparency that you see in this database. Around that time, I recall my manager basically telling us that our salaries were all printed out in some book in Sacramento, and that people could look them up if they really wanted to. I guess the online database just makes it seem a bit too easy.

If you care more about the UCOP stuff google for "UCOP Compensation SFGate" you'll get plenty of info. Here are a couple links to get you started on what was going down:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/11/13/...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/11/13/...
Oh, too interesting. So because Steve holds the keys to the kingdom, incentives align in such a way that competition within Apple surrounds capturing his interest. Every system has an exploit – Apple's would then depend upon hacking Steve, or his circle, for maximum personal gain. Steve ends up being the filter for ambition that doesn't match Apple's long term agenda, while amplifying ambition that does. He's sitting at a loom, weaving all the stuff he likes into the long term vision and squashing everything else.

Thank you for posting and describing it this way – it's interesting and not how I originally thought of it, but of course it makes perfect sense.

The basic kernel of replicable process here seems to be:

*Create a single point of accountability for product
*Exercise restraint and focus
*Have uncompromising taste

It doesn't necessarily scale well, but Apple's numbers suggest it doesn't really need to.

(aside: Putting it this way, Jobs reminds me of the Illusive Man.)
Something tells me that this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of absurd California state spending. Check out the proposed budget for 2010-11 at http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/pdf/BudgetSummary/SummaryCharts.pd... . The Department of Business, Transportation, and Housing will spend $12.5 billion or 10.5% of the total budget. The CHP is included in this amount, spending around $2.5 billion. If CHP comprises such a small percentage of the total budget and yet their salaries are so out of whack with their peers in other states or the people of similar skill-sets in the private sector, surely there must be abuses/distortions in the other line items of the budget.

My last sentence is not necessarily a logical conclusion, but it makes me wonder how much of CA's budget crisis could be solved by normalizing expenditures with those of the 49 other states (which would probably entail pissing a lot of public employees off, fighting with some powerful unions, and cutting a few public works projects). I don't presume to know the answer, but once you give a mouse a cookie and a glass of milk and the mouse forms a union with all the other mice to get cookies and glasses of milk, and then the birds, bugs, and other critters form their unions to get similar deals, can you ever take the perks away and return things to their natural state?
Sorry, that wasn't my attention. I tried to research Azure online, looking for hard numbers on its performance in the cloud computing market (e.g., # of companies using Azure, adoption rates, etc.), but I was unable to find any concrete data. In fact, I struggled to even find a thorough review of Azure. Can you please point me to some data and/or reviews so I can incorporate this information properly into any future posts? Thanks!
Yeah, static friction is very strong and kinetic friction is very weak. Several levels I had to wait quite a while for a pig or rock to verrry slowwwly roll off an edge.
The Blofeld option: wait until they have $100B, buy Verizon, cancel Droid. =)

What they will do: start buying web/cloud companies so that they can offer a credible set of online services to complement the iOS devices. Apple prides itself on an 'integrated experience', but right now that implies an iOS device paired with a PC. I expect them to eventually offer a broader, more Googlian set of online services with tight iOS integration.
It appears this sort of salary inflation is happening at many levels of government. Salaries for the city of San Luis Obispo, Ca. posted by the local paper here:

http://slonews.thetribunenews.com/city_salaries/slo/
Yup, first thing I thought of afterward was friction. But, alas, let me not continue reading too much into one of a few things in the middle of the day that actually keeps me from thinking. Gotta have a refuge at your desk somehow...(besides just getting up and leaving for the day).
http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/02/joy-of-iterators.html

This lets you write things like:

(for var in form do ...

or

(for var in form collect ...

where form can be anything that has an iterator method defined on it.

There's also a macro I use called BINDING-BLOCK (BB for short) which subsumes a bunch of binding forms. So you can write things like:

(bb

x (...)

y (...)

:db (q r s) (...) ; Destructuring-bind

:mv (p q) (...) ; Multiple-value-bind

...

It's extensible so you can add your own clauses. Code is here:

http://www.flownet.com/ron/lisp/rg-utils.lisp

(It's a little out of date. If you want the latest let me know and I'll update it.)
thanks for the clarification... hope i didn't come across as snarky. i think i did on re-reading.
Building a Traffic Radar System To Catch Reckless Drivers?
Obviously, entrepreneurship and showbiz is not the only road to riches in the sunshine state! Maybe, and if they are good at it, the cops can make a better contribution than some CEOs do. Then again, many CEOs of startups (like me) won't take $200K home in 2010.
As a Kohana user, I can corroborate the claim that Kohana-land is miles above the world of complete garbage PHP, but the community, the libraries, the robustness of the framework itself, and support from hosting providers, etc., is still far behind (say) Rails in every case.
You are an artist. You think of ideas, and you turn them into software others can interact with. You are always in the process of creation. There is not one second wasted, so long as your goal is to create. Painters do not look back at the last 100 canvases and ask "How many hours have I wasted?". They just paint. So paint, or should I say "Code".
Okay. I went to the front of your site though and still found it a sub-optimal web-experience. If it's any consolation, I also hate the iPad optimized version of gmail. The iPad has a full browser, give me the full web.
That was profit-taking. The sell-off wasn't because the news was bad.
Francisco Tolmasky (of 280 North / Cappuccino fame) had an insightful blog post about this subject:

But let’s get to the real issue here, because this is once again a misunderstanding of design vs. programming. HTML, JS, and CSS do not magically create wonderful experiences on every platform they are run. As you can see from the above screenshot, they certainly have the nice side effect of working on said platforms, but if you’re expecting HTML to somehow handle the subtle and explicit differences between a handheld multitouch peripheral and a desktop application, well then you’re doing it wrong. These are completely different environments and they require completely different designs and often implementations.

http://www.alertdebugging.com/2009/11/04/mockingbird-cappucc...
Biggest flaw of eye tracking like this is that it's hard to get ppl in the 200k yr to participate.

With mouse tracking just need to bring them to my web site.

Of course, I understand how better eye tracking is. But I'm not talking about that here.
- It is far better to release a crappy implementation of something awesome than it is to release an awesome implementation of something crappy. Awesomeness in the idea is easier and more valuable than awesomeness in the implementation.

Doesn't this conflict with the general sentiment that ideas are near-worthless unless implemented well? Can you elaborate? Are you referring to rapid iterations (i.e. have a 'good idea' for feature x, and launch a crappy implementation, AND THEN iterate until the implementation has evolved to maturity)?
A head football coach who does well at a school like Cal can bring in revenue many multiples of $2 million per year. Unfortunately for Cal, that's not the case currently...
Here on HN everyone seems to like a good story (despite that maxim about anecdotes and data).

This year, I had to maintain legacy PHP code powering a custom calendar & training-session signup app. Notable horrors I encountered:

- Despite being written by a programmer in the employ of a major Californian company providing security solutions to corporate customers, all passwords were stored in plaintext in the database. The database itself was password-protected by a guessable variation on the company’s name (seriously).

- The ancient register_globals directive was on — not just on, but relied upon. As in, when I moved the code to a server with the directive off (e.g. any modern hosts), all the forms broke. For those who haven’t heard of this, er, “feature,” it means that any variable in the request, be it a cookie name, a GET parameter, or a POST key (that is, the name of an input field on a web form, typically) automatically becomes a global variable in the PHP script set to the provided value. So I could manipulate my DOM, add an <input> field named, say, "is_admin", set its contents to "1", and voilà! $is_admin is now truthy.

- Nothing was ever properly escaped. Not the database, not email headers, not page output.

- And of course, code and HTML were strewn together willy-nilly, with lots of repetition and insane spaghetti-code execution. Let’s just say it was non-trivial to skin all the pages in the app.

I know and you know PHP doesn’t force anyone to commit these sins. But for backwards-compatibility reasons, it still permits them… and I find it hard to believe absolute stinking dangerous messes like this are more common in other modern platforms.
Unintelligible rise in pay between 2008 and 2009.

Stunning.
only in an angry vacuum
Have been doings tons and tons of side-projects hoping them to fly. I will tell you a story. When I was in college, I got an offer from Cambridge University for paid internship (800 pounds per month + travel -- that's a lot for a student). But I was so enthusiastic about startups (thanks to HN!) that I declined that offer and started a so-called startup of recruiting people through social networks. We had a fancy tag-line "infiltrating social networks' and I distinctly remember having day-dreams of dominating the recruiting space with that idea. Needless to say, two months of summer and lot of naivety doesn't translate into success.

No, I don't regret having dropped Cambridge Univ. internship for a failed startup because at that time it seemed perfectly rational thing to do. I'm happy about the lessons I learnt from that stint and it made for a great groundwork for my future startups.
>Doesn't this conflict with the general sentiment that ideas are near-worthless unless implemented well?

Scratch the "well." Ideas are near worthless unless implemented. "well" helps.
Ask HN: How do you validate new hire candidates (especially senior leaders)?
All throughout life, but especially recently, I've seen a ton of people who suck at planning, suck at getting things done, and suck at critical thinking. However, these people are often great at personal relationships, so whatever their track record, they know how to navigate organizational politics and snag amazing referrals. I was disappointed to see this also happen at senior levels, after getting senior management positions myself (before, I'd always given benefit of the doubt, maybe I'm not seeing the whole picture).

The result I see over and over is people building amazing resumes, but leaving a train wreck of a situation at every position where they get hired. But on the resume, each train wreck only looks like an amazing company and an amazing job well done, with some nice referrals about the person's leadership skills. It seems once you get one senior position, everyone automatically believes you're qualified to be a heavy duty leader, and nobody questions whether you need to be sent to the minors again first! Especially if you have an MBA.

So my buddy and I are building something to try to fix this problem, but I'm curious. Do you guys also agree it's a big problem that needs fixing? In especially difficult projects/environments, is it just a situation where anyone would have failed, or is it usually that the person actually is that bad? What are your experiences and what do you do now to make sure these people don't slip through the interview process into your companies and startups?

Me, for example, I once came onto a project as the #2 guy; this project was in the red zone, high visibility, and couldn't be cancelled. I took one look and realized the #1 had done the architecture all wrong so that the requirements could not be fulfilled. I spent 2 months with the team redesigning everything, and I mean everything. Furthermore, the schedule could never be dependable because the #1 could not foresee whether certain activities were dependant on other activities, and so never planned for the details to happen in sequence. The #1 guy of course took all the credit for a successful delivery and went on to make other glorious mistakes for other things. I believe this is a classic story, and one that needs to be fixed. What say you?

As for what I do to prevent such people from coming into my organization/project/etc, I tend to only rely on referrals from people I trust in my innermost circle (which contains only 4 people). Any other referral carries no weight in my mind and should be treated the same as any candidate off the street, no matter what the credentials or recruiters say.
World's Largest Illegal Gun Market (video)
Nope. Flawed tests gets you weird results.

How is showing words before a image not affecting the out come?
You still need to know what your library's performance is like under various conditions - large or small numbers of items, whether comparisons are cheap or expensive, how much extra memory it takes up, etc. If you don't understand the library, how are you going to be able to use it, except in relatively trivial cases?
NP. It seems something like this would be especially handy on phone if you're out and about and looking for a place to work.

Now I just need coworking places in north Scottsdale :).
ah, you edited your post since i was about to reply (and HN crapped out on me). here was my original response:

Finance-related articles: I read several. Margins are depressed[1]. iPad sales were lower than expected[2]. Revenue was above expectations, but profits were below [3].

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/technology/19apple.html

[2] http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20101018-713881.html

[3] http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2010/10/18/apple-fy...
Despite you saying "backward compatibility", the only one of those things that has anything whatsoever to do with php is register globals. All the other ones are programmer choice, and have nothing to do with "backward compatibility". But it does sound like quite a horror story.
I guarantee in a generation or so we will look back and do case studies of Apple and Steve Jobs. What made them so successful, etc. Things like to how to develop amazing products, create compelling user experiences, create new markets, market to customers, etc, etc.

Companies like this aren't created everyday.
Fun to speculate, maybe clearwire? Or enter a new market and buy whirlpool and make iMicrowaves?
Saigon...Shit.

(Sorry, just realized that was way too cryptic. the Illusive Man was a character in Mass Effect 2 voiced by Martin Sheen. Martin Sheen, of course, played the main character, Willard, in the eminently quotable Apocalypse Now. One of the best lines in the film, in addition to the oft-quoted "I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like...victory," as stated by Colonel Kilgore is Willard musing to himself: "Saigon...shit. I'm still only in Saigon."

Incidentally, Sheen was drunk during the filming of the opening scene, and really did cut his hand up. I highly recommend watching the making-of documentary Hearts of Darkness if you ever have the chance.)
http://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/how-to-hack-media.html
Yes, the way it's worded now is ugly and contrasts with the image Twitter seems to like to foster. It should have at least one limitation/stipulation, ideally in non-legalese.
This is so annoying. What a useful tool... I know it takes some bandwidth, but craigslist is pretty obnoxious for not only remaining so far behind in data searching, but for blocking anyone else from improving the site.

Craigslist is like Paypal or Facebook... they're far from the best implementation of their business, but it's just damned hard to compete with the customer base.
Those are more like concrete anti suggestions. They're things to not do, not things to do. They say what to get away from, which nearly anyone can agree on, but not on what to go towards, which few agree on, which is a big reason why they're not changing.
Japanese Department store Aeon expands into funeral business
For those wondering, I found this particularly interesting:

Last summer, nationwide retailer Aeon started advertising on its website funeral services that included a price menu for things such as wakes, funerals, cremation and even the dispensing of kaimyo (posthumous Buddhist names). The All-Japan Buddhist Association protested over the inclusion on Aeon's price list of ofuse, monetary offerings made to priests who carry out funeral rites. It objected because Aeon was basically merchandising a transaction that is private in nature.
Apple: More revenue in one quarter than Google will do in a year
It is difficult to resist the conclusion that unions exercise total capture of the Californian budgetmaking process. (100% payraises in the face of the financial collapse? For line officers? In only two years? After they're the best paid in the nation? Before you consider the pensions?!)
Somewhat coincidently, I just wrote a blog about UX and UI resources. Check it out at http://vikasvadlapatla.posterous.com/learn-usability-in-2-we...
If it was predictable it would not have happened. Markets are anti-inductive... oh, never mind.
turn on your javascript, an ajax table loads with the actual CHP salaries
Your religion is not serving you.
I second that thought.
Also, I would highly recommend watching the Ideo Shopping Cart video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUazVjvsMHs.
It'll help you understand the design process
Besides those 20M, MSFT recently announced 30 million active Windows Live Spaces users:

http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Microsoft-Windows-...
Yeah... I thought the bit about "read some articles" sounded snide :)

I guess I also agree it's up to debate, but I don't see how the results Apple posted are a cause for deflation, margins or no. 20 billion in revenue, nearly a quarter million devices a day, and Verizon yet to come.

Everything looks rosy for Apple, with only the Android dark horse to worry about (which has been worried about for some time).
They're worth every cent.

Teaching and research medicine improves patient outcomes and is ultimately for generations other than our own.
Could they get into the car industry?
Why women start biotech firms @ higher rates than other kinds of high-tech firms
Also, iPad sales are lower than "some" expected. Not everyone.
You mean cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors?
Look to the Patrick. All knowledge is contained therein:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/
Good idea! It's on the list.
Squareup doesn't provide the same functionality as PayPal.
You might laugh, but I genuinely thought this was going to be something about Twitter and the momentum caused by an avalanche of negative tweets - ie Gap logo, etc.

Turns out I couldn't be more wrong.
Cool. How do you find the related topics to a given topic? What api do you use for that? Google suggestions?
Except all of that revenue is funneled directly back into the Team. Go Football!
...and to the cynic these salaries secure notable individuals who can guarantee patent transfer (royalty stream) to big pharma.