skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Decision to use Linux for the kernel and Java as a language for user space programs was therefore made in 2002 and at the time it was a very sensible decision".

And when they failed to come to terms with Sun to license JavaME, they could have revisited that decision, especially considering that they essentially threw out the Android UI when iPhone came out and changed everyone's notion of what a smartphone should like. Android post-iPhone looks and acts nothing like Android pre-iPhone.

Even if they kept their code in Java, they could have made it so that the official way to write third-party applications was to write native code. That would have given them the flexibility of migrating away from Java without impacting third parties in the case of future problems over Java intellectual property.

"As such JavaScript is not capable enough to write many kinds of programs one would like to write. Not today and definitely not in 2002".

What kind of program for a mobile device would Javascript today not be capable of?
>44. Conferences are generally a waste of time

What is the community's take on this? I kind of agree, but sometimes I feel that I feel so because I haven't learned "networking" skills completely yet.
Google Tech Talk on Integrating R and C++: video and slides
> there are many ways in which the question may be unclear and the interviewer is mislead that the applicant can't answer.

yeah, when I was interviewed for my university, they asked me to design an algorithm to work out the n'th term of the fibonnacci sequence. They repeatedly said I didn't need to use recursion or loops.

When I finally gave up, they said: well here's one way:

f(n) = f(n-1)+f(n-2)

I just looked at them and quietly said "well... yeah... I mean... obviously". By that point I was too depressed to say "but that's frickin' recursive, wtf?!?" but that's what I was screaming in my head.

Amazingly I still got offered a place.

edit: still bugs the crap out of me. Did I mis-hear them? Were they being deliberately misleading? Was it some kind of test to see how I reacted to an impossible problem[1]? Were they really expecting me to come up with some mathematical algorithm to calculate the nth term without recursion or looping? Argh!!!

[1]: actually it's not impossible: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BinetsFibonacciNumberFormula.ht...

but I don't have a background in mathematics and they knew that.
“Panama is the only country in the world run by entrepreneurs.”
Offering HN something relevant (e.g. design, programming, business advice) is really cool.

Offering something irrelevant (e.g. your apartment, your bike, your girlfriend for a night) isn't so cool.
WildUtah made the main point I had (that Apache Harmony represents this very concept), but I also can't help but address the concept of a "Linux moment"

GNU is the real project to talk about here. It was started in the mid 1980s in response to proprietary Unix tools. It was created for the explicit purpose of freeing users from AT&T's licensing restrictions.

Linux was started in 1991 as a side project, not from any ideological reason and not to be "big and professional like gnu"[1]. Although the source was always available, it was not until a year later that it was GPL licensed and became what RMS would call "free software".

Not trying to be a RMS fanboi here, obviously both pieces of software have evolved into something very different in the past 19+ years. However, the root "moment" was the reason for GNU, not for Linux.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux
We're still some way off from seeing who they are pitching it to. Its more a question of having your ears to the ground and trying to understand who this can be sold to. I think that applies for any business. I am sure they'll pitch it to whoever it makes the most sense to pitch to.
Hilarious...I wrote almost the exact same thing as a GazeHawk visualization about a week ago.

Interesting how he uses the same canvas element to track opacity and display the colorization. You can split out the opacity into its own (hidden) canvas so that the opacity is only bound to the color mapping, not the actual display.
Awww. What a nice offer! I love to see this sort of thing! Good on you, I hope you have some amazing people come to stay!
Now that was more detailed: thanks, I got what you mean.

I promise you, that you would have a <strike>great</strike> awesome time with my friends and me in Vienna. I choose my surrounding wisely: racists have no place in my friendships.

Also: let me know if your friends and/or colleagues in Vienna have trouble finding friends/nice-people. I can hook them up!
I'm disappointed. I'd hoped he'd listened to my advice on the other news post: START PROGRAMMING A GAME.

That's all you need. Your first game is going to suck anyhow. And probably your second and third.

But with enough experience, you'll start to get the hang of it and have a sale-able game.

There's no more magic to being a 'game programmer' than being any other kind of programmer.
Good riddance. I'd say two-thirds of the last few computers I've had to fix for friends or relatives involved malware from LimeWire.
Palin e-mail snoop asks court for leniency
Wireshark won't ARP poison either, afaik.
I will be next week.
The Production of Cannabis Cigarettes
Welcome to Medi-Cone, a cannabis factory and garden in Marin County.
Shifted to the valley? Advantages?
Are you a start-up that shifted to the valley (or, the founders shifted to the valley to do a startup)? Although a lot has been said about why one should do a startup in the valley, how has your experience been?

A few points you can touch upon:

- Getting early adopters for your startup
- Getting angel investor interest in your startup
- Bumping into other programmers who are doing good stuff and having a good discussion with them
- Acceptance of valley 'natives' to 'outsiders'
- How quickly can one settle down and become productive (coding, meeting the 'right' people, selling)

Being a startup in India, and seriously considering moving to the valley, these inputs can be very valuable to us.
Offer HN: I'll photograph anything in Europe
Two weeks ago, I started traveling around the world. I'll be in Europe for ~2 months, and plan to visit Asia, Australia and South America afterwards.

I'm traveling with my photography gear, and would be happy to shoot anything you need photographed - your team, your office, a prototype, etc. For free, of course!

I'll be visiting most major cities, so let me know if you're interested!
Bug report: nicks and channels are supposed to be compared case-insensitively (and there's some oddities due to IRC's Scandinavian origin, like '{' is uppercase '[').
Strangely, even though your pre-launch copy is an absolute and obvious lie (it can't be the top choice, it hasn't even launched yet) I still feel attracted to sign-up. So, um, well played. I guess it's a sign of how bad the tech recruitment market is that people are keen to throw themselves at vapourware. Anyway, good luck!
Does the world need its Linux moment?
The USPTO is a real mess for anybody believing in open source technologies, everybody knows that..

Java cant have a bright future within Ellison's hands, who is only trying to beat Google by buying up revenue streams:
Market cap Oracle: $144.28 Billion
Market cap Google: $196.24 Billion

There is also news that Oracle might be invloved in large scale fraud: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870357810457539...

Keep your head up Java, you'll never walk alone..
lol, since I started on maternity leave I have in fact alternating hacky type stuff with watching Buffy! (which I'd somehow managed to never watch, and should keep me going for a while) Thanks for the tips too!
I never knew that before the dot com bubble he actually had a net worth of over 100 billion
Google.com is my homepage in Chrome and it has a convenient link to gmail which allows me to click to go there instead of typing. Much more convenient. Then when I open a new tab, I get a page with some of my most used sites showing. (BTW: They stole the idea of having little pics as the menu from me -- I swear I had it first but never managed to implement it! :-P)
I realised that throwing more of my time at a task is an O(n) solution to the problem of not having enough time. There must be a better way...
A junior programmer does not make less because of his title.
BlackBerry Bold 9780 chimes in though T-Mobile
Unofficial pictures of the BlackBerry Bold 9780 had been previously glimpsed. Now, the Bold gets bolder with an official nod, the all new handset is coming through T-Mobile.
If he typically writes long posts like that that don't have any real content, I'm not surprised that he can't get anyone to engage him in conversation any more.

More words isn't necessarily better!

I see plenty of intellectual discussion online. Here, Slashdot, private forums and groups... It's out there. But you'll never find it sitting on your own blog.
Wanaa solve a problem u deeply care deeply about?
I see, thanks. I shall steer clear of this sort of thing from now on.
I would say that having "interrogation techniques" crossed out is a pretty good indication that the author's state of mind in an interview situation is aggressive and domineering.
I'd kill for 40 hours a week to work on my project, but between the day job and family commitments (4 month old son!), I'm lucky if I can get 10 hours in!

Luckily, we're moving house next month and I'll finally have my own space where I can go, sit at a desk and code - even if it's in short bursts. Trying to work on the sofa while my wife watches TV just doesn't work for me.
Monitoring Opened TCP/IP network ports / connections
We will be posting a video of the talk that Salvatore gave in the next few days.
Thanks. I really, really dislike the offers showing up by default, but at least this gives me a way out of seeing them.
yes - go build this!
Could they be deliberately holding back the white iPhone because there's nothing else due for 2011? Seems they could afford to skip an iteration and keep the same model for a while longer - it's now got most of the features that people thought were 'lacking' in earlier iPhones. I remember Nintendo or Sony shifting a ridiculous number of units just by releasing a white DS or PSP, a big release that was purely cosmetic.
Do you really think FizzBuzz is too easy?

Hmm.

OK, here's one. Tell them to find out what a Bloom Filter is, and then implement it. Ask what decisions they had to make on the way, and why they made the choices they did.
I wish there were a hacker specific couch surfing type site. I don't think posting here can scale, but this is about the best right now. Maybe a way to support arbitrary affinity groups?
OFFER HN: Rooms in ...
Let's make a collection of rooms available in various cities for easier browsing.
To start off: I'm offering a room in Sarajevo. Feel free to mail me at hajrice@gmail.com
Being more entrepreneurial at your job
I've sailed the open oceans with a blind man at the helm. Which sounds like a line from PoTC but really: he used an audio compass that played a tone at different points of the compass, higher or lower so he knew how to correct. The rest was done by feeling the way the boat handled through the deck and the wheel.
I 100% Agree. There is a difference between "it all started with a revenge stunt" (the lawyer say something like this at the end of the movie) and "I worked all these years motivated by a revenge stunt".
It depends on 'libiconv', which is not part of master.
Ask them to show you something they have coded and ask questions about their implementation. If you can't do it yourself, invite one of your senior devs to join the interview.
I code a custom CMS when I can't find a CMS that does 99% of my required features out of the box. Otherwise it's simply not worth my time.

A CMS is lost if tries to dictate the HTML output, sadly most of them do.

My best bet is to use frameworks/libraries to achieve the needed features. I look at his as a Lego building project.
If the above is correct, then under Oracle rules re-writing an API would be copyright infringement?

Not only would this restrict the ability to write alternatives to an API, but would effectively disallow code which is 100% yours from being run against an '''invalid''' "API". (I guess this is the Java trap RS defined?)

Some one should copyright println()or sprintf().

I have wanted to like the JVM for 10+ years, and now that technically it's in a good place for server-side code, looks like there is a battle over whether it is going to be "open" or not.

My opinion (without knowing enough about this situation in particular I'm afraid):

API's are "public" interfaces and an instrument for free speech. To restrict the use of an API goes beyond protecting the author of the API.

Many coders may not know Google wrote its own implementation, (or modified the original) and the "Java" brand and Java marketplace has been complicated. However, complexity is unavoidable and necessary when working with complex systems.

Company A makes bolt X (a patented bolt). Any company can make nuts. Company B makes a very different size bolt (Y) that is designed to use some of the nuts that fit bolt X. The bolt was not copied, but the diameter and threading is the same, by design.

Is this illegal?
Offer HN: Free Sandwich this Friday in Berkeley
How about this Friday at 1:30PM at Cafe Panini?

http://www.yelp.com/biz/cafe-panini-berkeley

I'll buy a sandwich+drink+cookie for someone. Post here if you're interested.
Code belongs/copyright to the programmer or client.
I have programmed for a client, and no contract exists, does the code belong to me or do I hold the copyrights for the code, or does the client own the code, because he has paid me for the work I have done.

Thanks
Fermilab is building a "Holometer" to test theory of holographic universe
"with a well-known framework you have thousands of other developers available to help you if you should run into a problem"

Not always true - I'd say often not true.

1. I have to learn where to get support from these thousands of other developers.

2. I have to read through dozens of posts from others asking the same questions I have, but often phrased inconsistently.

3. I have to figure out which answers are correct, and which are wrong, and which were correct 2 years ago, but aren't right currently because 2 libraries are now deprecated.

4. I have to learn enough about the framework to be able to formulate coherent questions using the proper terms and express my specific problem.

5. I have to deal with 0 people responding after 4 days of posting.

6. I have to deal with responses just being "me too".

7. I have to deal with responses being "RTFM" or "LMGTFY".

8. I have to deal with well-intentioned people who ask me for help replicating my setup in their environment so they can help me.

And there's likely more variations I could think of that make the magic "there's thousands of developers to help" argument null and void in many situations.
As Alex said to me the other day "Node.js is not powered by Candyfloss and rainbows".
I'm also using Minefield 4.0b8pre as my primary browser and always look for new "nightly" update with hoping it solves the annoying bug: location bar doesn't synchronize with the displaying page/tab. Other than that, FF 4 has a very nice looking UI and it's fast.
I found this helpful, as I am not familiar with the term: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidity_trap
It's interesting how quickly the text to speech setup can be made to run. My dad's computer talks so quickly I can't understand without slowing it down.
One thing he neglects to consider is the difference between a desktop and a laptop - the effective DPI of a screen is dependent on how far away it is from your eyes.

This is why 1920x1200 is a great resolution for a 17" laptop, but only comfortable on a larger desktop screen.
I did this in three weeks:

http://bitbucket.org/rogueops/vinzclortho/wiki/Home

I worked on it on average two hours per day. It's not that ridiculous to believe that it would be (near) production quality in two weeks of fulltime work.
How To Integrate ClamAV Into ProFTPd For Virus Scanning On Ubuntu 10.04
Disaster Recovery Options in SharePoint 2010
I'm the technical lead at a small digital agency in the UK. I don't earn anywhere near what this says I should. sad face
How similar is this to using a line editor (ed/edlin/edit/teco) on a slow terminal? You have a model in your head, code in a buffer, and you use the edit commands to update both - with occasional listing sanity checks to check you are keeping the two in sync, or move to a new region.

I hear some guys wrote a pretty cool operating system like that!
What Is PayPal? - PayPal
Paid Survey Jobs
Survey Job Opportunities is the ultimate paid survey job site for legitimate paid surveys online. Find a list of the best online paid survey sites that offer simple and easy to do work.
At first I liked the idea of market value based taxes and clearly a bunch of HN readers agree with the idea.

The biggest issue I see though is the implication for small projects.

For example, maybe in 1994 you snapped up pizza.com. You could have been using it ever since for a pizza price search engine which gets 100,000 unique visitors per month and earns you $5,000 per month. That's decent income, except the taxes on the domain's market value of $2.6 million[1] would be crippling. So despite using the domain in what most would think of as good way, you couldn't afford to have such a good domain. Now extrapolate this example for the thousands of sites that have a good domain name for a small project.

[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9912380-7.html
Might be this guy, trespassing in the building is a lot different than accessing an open network from a public place.
Not sure why this was down voted - maybe it sounded snarky? That's not what I meant - my company built the site on a PHP framework and templating system I wrote. I guess I should learn not to comment at night when I'm tired.
I see, no doubt that's lot of money in Philippines. Even the typical smallest VPS (eg. from Linode) has so much power, that you can easily run multiple instances of various services on it (if we are speaking of hobby / small scale projects). Maybe you can share the costs with some friends?

Or deploy your apps on Google App Engine! It's free (within the free quota), supports WSGI apps, so you can run Django-nonrel, Tornado, Flask, Pylon, Tipfy, or whatever your favorite Python web stack is.
GWT 2.1 general release out
Corporate Art for offices.
Friedman would definitely support the Fed's actions. Bernanke is a loyal Friedman acolyte.

The "Helicopter Ben" reference comes from him quoting Friedman's term for creating money to prevent deflation: http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/SPEECHES/2002/200211...

He credits the Fed's failure to do what it is doing now with causing the Great Depression in this speech: http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/SPEECHES/2002/200211...

Friedman explains this himself in the following clip from his television series: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V5OP-VmXgE
I think the biggest thing for me would be living without intellisense/autosuggest - I mean it'd be OK to code ifs and fors and whatnots without them, but I can't imagine how I'd quickly navigate the large, enterprise software libraries I deal with regularly...
The compass tones are ingenius, but aside from that I'm not surprised he was able to do this as sailing is one of those things where feeling plays a much larger role than one would expect. There are many forces at play that have nothing to do with sight. Having helmed in night storms of 20 foot seas where I could basically see nothing, the motion of the vessel and feedback force exerted on the wheel, I quickly got a sense of how the boat was moving. In fact in those situations I probably would have been much better off with your friends compass than the soaked one at the wheel. And dont even get me started on trying to read the windex in such conditions!

Coding blind would be much different. The input is physical but there is nothing tangible coming back. It is more or less all visual. Come to think of it, if I ever lost my vision I would probably become a full time sailor :)
Actually socialism is democratic control of the means of production, and is an economy without government control. What you are thinking about is what happened in the USSR and just because the USSR propaganda agency and the US propaganda both called what happened in the USSR socialism, doesn't make it true that it is socialism. You must remember, in the 1930's being Socialist was a trendy as being Green is today, so all sorts of folks wanted to co-opt that name into their own cause.
This is very nice. Good on you!
Well, someone told me it was his top choice, so I took his word for it ;-)! But thanks, I did about 8 iterations on that copy.
Nice job and congratulations on your progress.

Now, what would be really interesting is if you were to add a WebSocket layer into the server, so one could write a browser-based client that would directly interface with the IRC server without having to proxy like mibbit does.
How long does this offer stand? I've heard of a good music festival held in august at budapest. Can i make reservations for then?
Wow, really cool. I am very interested in the history of that part of the world. Looks like a lovely place to visit.
Check with the Apple store (if there's one near you; I'm in Toronto so I have three close-ish to where I live). I got mine (on Fido dollars) about four weeks ago by calling the Apple store at Sherway Gardens on a Friday and finding out they MIGHT have a shipment on Saturday (they did).
Are We In The Midst Of A Global Extinction Event?
I don't understand, as it stands the human genetic code can be written down as a string of letters and this can just be handled like any .txt file.
I would have said the same thing until I read the rest of the article. In context I think it's meant primarily to be funny.

The author clearly maintains some expectations about the level of response from the candidate, but overall it's designed to be interactive. Chances are that unless the candidate gives a really superior answer, it's not going to be the only question asked.
There is a whole category of apps like this for the BlackBerry -- apps that you deliberately install on a phone to spy on someone else who is using it. It is categorically different from conventional spyware because it doesn't misrepresent itself or do anything malicious to the user who installs it. If users are infiltrating each other's phones and spying on each other, that's between them. You may find it sleazy, but the developer isn't spying on anyone.
So, what exactly is the point of this article? "If you're on an insecure network, people can steal your data." ?? Not such a big surprise...
Microsoft to charge royalty fees to prevent Android in netbooks
BitZipper-English Standard License Volume Discount Table
I went to school with a blind CS student. He had no problem using a computer by himself but the normal classroom setting was vary difficult for him. Based on how he operated meetings would be far more difficult than actually writing code.

PS: Ok, his is not going to be building a GUI but text to speech works well. And a keyboard only interface works fine for both VI and visual studio.
try http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/
> Questions like these are typically signs of bad interviewing technique, but not always depending on how they are presented.

Given that the author presents the exact question and includes a moderately lengthy discussion on how he uses the question, what is your evaluation in this specific case, rather than the general one?

Consider, for example, this comment from the article:

I’m looking for quite a few things as we go through the question. The first is their opinion of “a terabyte of data” and “5000 lookups per second.” Do they consider this to be a lot of data, or a fairly boring amount, same with the lookups per second. Leaning either way isn’t a failure, it is just information gathering for me, and referencing it against how you represented yourself in your resume, cover letter, and phone screen.