skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I looked this up, and as it turns out, in addition to the NLRA, there are also state laws that prohibit contract terms restricting disclosure of wages.

These are dumb laws (unless you're trying to start a union, i guess).
I'm pretty sure the point of this post isn't to share nested variables with you guys (note: respective post titles), I think it's just for the terrifying function created towards the bottom of the highlighted response (and it's explanation).

Right, we knew about nested variables, but if the derivative of that function doesn't make you lol as you're reading along... well, then, I guess don't vote up.
How to get candid feedback on your product
I found I could describe this in 2 ways:

* Chat.StackOverflow without StackOverflow

* IRC-like chatrooms

Would be awesome if you offer to connect to some user feedback service like getsatisfaction or uservoice. I'm sure a lot of people would like to offer this as a kind of support channel for their services.

Some suggestions:

1.) decrease the width of the left sidebar

2.) signup form doesn't submit when i press enter (the one where i signup with invite code). have to submit by clicking the signup button.

3.) you could make a business by charging people for making bots. or charging for chatrooms with more than a specific number of people online at a time (if it's a business).

4.) allow people to choose different nicknames for each channel.

5.) facebook widgets on the group pages for group chat :)

These are just random ideas that occured to me. On the whole, it's a cool service with potential.
Completely agree - looking back at some of the code I wrote in PHP3 there were huge issues with the language but it was more that I had no idea what I was doing than an inherent problem in the language (granted, PHP5 is lightyears ahead of PHP3 and I'm certain that the improvements have made writing good code easier). Today, it has all the tools that if you learn better general coding practices (like MVC or at the very least separation of presentation from logic) it doesn't get in the way and you can just do what you want. I actually think the $$ syntax can be useful, but like anything it matters how you are using it.
I wish I was Apple's CFO. That strikes me as right up there with San Diego Weatherman as the easiest job in the world. Yesterday was sunny and 80 degrees, today is sunny and 80, and tomorrow is going to be sunny and 80.
Working fulltime for Powerset, how did you avert any potential IP issues with Powerset? Employee contracts for just about any big tech company includes provisions that automatically makes all types of IP (including inventions and copyrights) developed by the employee belong to the company. This applies even if the work is done completely on the sides and outside work hours.

California specifically has laws that allow employees to claim inventions of their own but still under terms that are more favorable to the employer (I can supply details). There's no help for copyrightable works, which would include software, or even a written plan for developing this software.

I certainly have this issue currently preventing me from doing any work to bootstrap while I am still employed. Most people I spoke to at SUS2010 who are working on side projects are completely unaware of the issue. Some are ignoring it thinking that it must somehow work out.

On the other hand, every successful founder I spoke to, either did not have this issue (founded right after school, etc.), or did not do any work before quitting (which they did either before or after securing funding).
It's not just Twitter - the language in their revised Terms of Service are also in the Terms of Service other similar web services; Facebook, WordPress.com, Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous, etc, etc.
http://garrickvanburen.com/archive/terms-of-services-kinda-l...
When I took an AI class at my university with AI: A Modern Approach (the book was good, if a little difficult to understand at times), we had a couple projects that we had to write in lisp.

First project:
Problem Solving Agent for Traveling Salesman Problem. 1. Depth First Search (function argument- DFS)
2. Iterative Depth First Search (function argument- IDFS)
3. A* - Heuristic: Path Cost Incurred (function argument- PATH)
4. A* - Heuristic: Minimum Spanning Tree heuristic (function argument- MST)
5. (Extra Credit 25 points ) Create and implement a heuristic equal to or better than MST

Second project:
In this project we implement a decision tree induction algorithm in Lisp.

I had played around with lisp before this point and found it fascinating. I approached these projects with excitement. But even with 8 years of serious programming experience, I could not for the life of me solve these problems in lisp. My problems included:

1. Knowing exactly what methods I wanted to call and use and either
a. Not being able to find them in any reference I found online, or
b. Finding out that they don't exist, and you have to write them yourself, or
c. Finding them and shaking my head at how ridiculously they were named.
2. Not being able to read the code I had just written.
3. Not being able to debug.
4. Finding that manipulating common data structures like hash tables is a total chore.

Eventually I gave up. I had spent about two hours trying to implement the project I had already solved in my head into common lisp and was making little or no progress. So I fired up another vim terminal, solved the project in Python in about 30 minutes, including debugging, and then manually translated the code into lisp.

When project 2 rolled around, I decided to give it another go, but I quickly became frustrated again. Maybe my mind just isn't able to grok lisp? Maybe I'm just not smart enough?

All I'm claiming is that I am an example of a student who was already very knowledgeable about programming and completely unable to adapt to lisp.
I honestly look quite fondly on trending, and yes, xbox is trending in the right direction. But I still think calling it "wildly profitable" is silly.

Having conceded that its trending positively, in this specific business, you're only as good as your last console. Nintendo is probably the only company that can lean heavily on its brand to get it through a poor hardware iteration (its brand and its so-far good-as-gold portable product).
It seems like anytime I see someone disputing Microsoft's declining relevance, they are always talking about some rainbow that is JUST around the corner.

XBox has been a money pit, but WAIT, they are start to eek back some of the billions in losses.

The Kin died on the vine, WinCE phones were blah, but WAIT, they have a new mobile strategy.

Various search and online presence initiatives got their numbers only by being embedded as the default home page on millions of new PC's, but WAIT, Bing is taking off.

Microsoft is a HUGE ship, and it's sinking slowly. It likely has decades left, but overall it's going down, not up.
I hate reading reddit comments on things like these (because, really, PHP is not insane, crazy, ass-backwards, etc. nor are the contributors lazy or homicidal). There are some good comments, yes, but you can spend a year making fun of ANY language if you want it hard enough.
Thanks! Will definitely do it soon
I haven't started anything that's really successful, but I'm pretty good at failing. I guess I can tell you what dun work and what you can avoid it in your local city.

- I failed to address the supply and demand issue. When I first my biz, I know I have a pretty decent products, I'm sure your local business has too. The issue just no one is buying it from me, either it is because I'm not working close enough with my regional partners/government, etc.. or I'm not exactly talking to the people who need my products.
Idea: You can start a simple directory listing the local business, products and contacts, much like Angie's List. make it available in print-on-demand, pdf format, etc.

- I failed to act swiftly. It is a cut throat business really, if you see a business opportunities, you really need to act now and monetize it. If not, someone bigger and larger will come in and take it from you. You probably need a well tined process to get things out quickly.

- I failed to create the market. If things dun quite work out, it is important than to create a market in itself. Develop value business opportunities for regional/international companies to drop by your city to do business. What can your local community provide better than others out there?
They (and the MACH kernel) were new-ish when Jobs picked them in the 80s.

He kept them because they work well.
Does anyone else find it to be odd timing for this move? Ozzie just started blogging again on the 14th (http://ozzie.net/2010/10/14/hello/), and here 4 days later it's announced that he's leaving Microsoft. Maybe that's why he was trying to build his own unique audience again...
That definitely was happening to some degree. To me it implied that there was a problem in this whole "ladder" idea when they had to keep invoking Zeno's dichotomy and adding more intermediate steps between Major Title 1 and Major Title 2 to keep people around salary-wise.
Thank you very much for the awesome feedback! Very helpful! Yes we'll make sure that signup will submit on enter.

Definitely Facebook App is on our roadmap!
The number is actually "For every $1 of new revenue it generates, it spends $1 in traffic acquisition costs." (FTA) The 150/500 number you have includes all internet businesses.

The problem is here, where he compares $2 bill for internet business, and then talks about a 4% increase in search.

"Over the past year, despite losing more than $2 billion in its Internet business, Microsoft has gained about 4 search share points."

Their internet business is far more than Bing.
Tom, I would like to thank you for giving us this opportunity (in addition to the beautiful talk you delivered at the school). While I am not fully confident that I'll be ABLE to optimize for happiness, I certainly got the message. Thanks again.
The sum of Base & Overtime is $78,355.20... which is really close to Other. I don't know why the total is the sum, though.
This is especially true internationally from my understanding.
And make sure that register_globals is off for all that is holy.
I really miss the Logical Awesome page. I wish you guys didn't rename the company.
To your points above:

a) In Microsoft's 2010 fiscal year (which has ended), its Entertainment and Devices Division (which includes the Xbox 360) generated $8.5 billion in revenues and just $679 million in operating income. Considering Microsoft's consolidated operating income in 2010 was $24 billion, this $679 million only accounts for about 3% of Microsoft's profits. And in any event the Xbox 360, the PS3, and the Wii may be irrelevant given the emergence of connected televisions, thin devices, and cloud-based gaming.

b) I am moderately pessimistic about Microsoft's prospects with its Windows Phone 7 OS. There are definitely some promising signs, such as WP7’s distinctive and innovative user interface and Microsoft’s extensive partnerships with smartphone OEMs, application developers, and carriers. But there are also some definite warning signs: WP7 isn’t market ready, and it’s already mid-October; Microsoft is making it difficult for developers to convert existing iOS and Android applications over to WP7; Microsoft’s brand is weak with consumers and the developer community, especially in the smartphone market; and WP7 comes with a price tag, while the competition is free, at least on a variable cost basis. There’s also the fundamental issue of competition, which includes several ambitious and innovative companies, especially Google and Apple, that have established platforms and abundant application markets. Here are some more thoughts on WP7: http://www.fernstrategy.com/2010/10/13/the-windows-phone-7-c....

c) Bing has made some inroads in search, but laregely at the expense of Yahoo. For the year, I don't believe Bing has gained at all on Google. There are powerful network effects and learning curves in search, and tremendous scale economies. It will be very difficult for Bing to grow its share in search, much less overtake Google, unless Bing releases a game changing protectable innovation, or Google makes some kind of fatal mistake.
Yeah, in fact as soon as I read "I just learned about variable variables yesterday" at the top of the post, I immediately thought about the article that I read yesterday right here on HN that specifically mentioned variable variables. It sounds probable that's where he found it.
I agree that you can't put that explanation into a comment and that a changelog would be fine, but the documentation of the project should also describe what's needed and what not. I guess this is one more reason for the built-in wiki from the Fossil SCM.
"What about the Nintendo Office Suite, the Apple SQL Server or the Google Zune ?"

They're smart enough not to invest billions into markets where they have no particular expertise, but make bets that play to their strengths, instead.

Apple in particular. It's easy to forget it wasn't long ago that the Mac was the lion's share of their revenue. iPod, iPhone, iPad have all added revenue and profits from day one.

The same can't be said for Microsoft's attempts to expand into new markets. Which is why Apple surpassed them in market cap, which still sounds ridiculous to me remembering what the situation in the 90s.
I have little respect for the company he created, but a lot of respect for what he's doing with his money.
The biggest threat to Microsoft is their lack of a clear vision and message about where Office is going. I guess there's some strange service at officelive.com where I can maybe store, maybe edit documents online, but possibly I need a license for Office to do so, and I still get the impression that its meant to be supplementary to the desktop offering. The lack of an actual full-on web-based product - whether Silverlight or HTML - seems like a huge failure on their part. They need to create something real here and then market it in a clear and direct way.
And the same with this guy, who looks like the highest paid officer (ie not chief/sergent/etc):

http://www.sacbee.com/statepay/salary-details/?firstname=Wil...

Base pay: $103,819.29, Overtime: $3,954.89, Other:$127,385.25

Total pay: $235,159.43

I'd love to know what OTHER includes. I'm guessing pension contribution but what else?
For whatever anyone says about variable variables I would have loved to have had them when using VB.NET. Turned out the only way you can replicate the functionality is to have a whole heap of reflection code.
"what if they maintain that growth rate?"

That's a terrible argument structure. You might as well cut straight to "What if we just assume I'm right?" and be more honest about it.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/04/23/xbox-division-posts-165-mi... says $165 million in profits on $1,670 million (1.67 billion) in revenue for the division. Saying "doubled their profits" sounds impressive, but it's not sustainable; say rather instead "increased their quarterly revenue by 5%" (or so, give or take a bit depending on the real numbers) for a better view of what that really represents. Still nothing to sneeze at (I'd take it), but not the same picture at all.
PHP is a language (just like Ruby and Python are to Rails and Django).

Here are some PHP frameworks (that handle URL => resource instead of URL => file): http://www.phpframeworks.com/
For what it's worth, I used variable variables when making a DB class for a project I was working on last year.

It isn't something you can easily debug and it is complicated. That said, it isn't the gates to hell that it is represented as. It's a tool, and it can make code cleaner if you want it to.

function __tostring(){
$items = ['title','header','comment']
foreach($items as $item){
echo $this->$item;
}
}

Make that list of class variables much longer and you start to see the benefits in certain cases.

There are times when I do miss variable variables.
The feature isn't bad, but there are several warts. The '$' is not a prefix operator on strings. The following is a syntax error:

$"test";

It turns out that '$' can only operate on an identifier or another '$' expression. The '${...}' syntax, aside from being more readable and less likely to be accidentally encountered, is more like an operator:

${"test"}; // equivalent to $test

The decision to keep (and only warn against) unescaped strings past the introduction of an incompatible feature (constants) is inexcusable. It creates oddities:

$test = 'foo';
$foo = 42;
echo $test . " ${test} " . ${test} . " " . $$test . "\n";

This generates a notice and prints, "foo foo foo 42". But then:

$test = 'foo';
$foo = 42;
define('test', 'foo');
echo $test . " ${test} " . ${test} . " " . $$test . "\n";

This will print, "foo foo 42 42". (Note also the difference between the meaning of ${...} within string interpolation versus outside of it.) Is this all understandable? Sure. Is it good? No.
You're correct, at least with why I posted this here. Metaprogramming is awesome, but I had no idea that PHP worked this way... it's simultaneously awesome and horrifying.
Over the past decade, Microsoft's problem (imo as a former employee) is that they tried to do too many things and grew too fast at a time when they were not able to attract the best employees.

This creates a situation for the (hiring) quality bar to go down and for politicians to thrive.
I just lost billions of potential dollars, because some college kid couldn't see the practical applications and published. What would your response be?

What if you were sleeping in someone else's garage, it was less than freezing temperature outside, someone had stolen your car a few weeks ago, and you had put your own kneecaps on the line as collateral? What would it be then?

Frankly, I think I'm holding together rather well given my circumstances.
It'd be interesting to get comment from the highway patrol about what the "other" category is. Looking at the individual officers per-year, "other" was around $4,000 in 2007 and 2008, but jumped to about $140,000 in 2009. Kind of makes me want to become a California Highway Patrolman.
Fair points, counters:

a) "may be irrelevant given the emergence of connected televisions" - Don't dismiss the millions of gamers that will buy in next generation for MSFT exlusives like Halo which popped off $200m in sale in a day, bringing net total Halo copies to ~34m sold.

b) I argued for #3 which I think is in the bank with RIMM falling all over themselves. And the competition definitely isn't free, not even Android - http://www.businessinsider.com/android-costs - I believe we'll see a trend towards Win7 adoption from companies that aren't going for vertical integration.

c) I believe this is the point that holds the most water. But to continue my contrarian rant I'd say that I put some credit into the argument that MSFT is fighting this war explicitly to distract Google's attention from desktop / mobile / etc.
The Foundry Group’s Brad Feld Launches Personal Groupon Clone
Great site, a successor to the defunct Programming-Books.com. /bookmarked.

Question: What's the source of your book info?
"... Ray has played a critical role in helping us to assume the leadership position in the cloud ..."

Emphasis mine. Does this have any basis in fact?
What does a typical workday look like for you?
Wow this is weird, I went to elementary school with one of these guys and now I can look up his salary on the Internet. His 2009 pay is more than my base salary this year at Google, though I will probably make more with my bonus. However, he's on a very steep upward trend so his 2010 pay will probably be more than mine again.

I don't think I'd trade jobs, though, police work isn't for me. (Edit: also just noticed that his pay includes quite a bit of overtime...)
Sony VGP-BPS8 battery 
Sony VGP-BPS8 battery
Type:	Li-ion
Capacity:	5200 mAh,8800mAh,10400mAh
Volt:	11.1 V
Size:	209.90 x 47.50 x 20.40 mm
Color:	Silver
$88.33
http://www.daily-battery.com/sony-vgp-bps8.htm
http://www.laptopbattery-shop.co.uk/sony-vgp-bps8-battery.html
I have two brothers that are in the Highway Patrol. Both are listed in the database. I'm pretty surprised to see the size of the increase in base pay from year to year. In their two listings, the Other category was negligible.

I'm not sure what the Other category is, but it could be a calculation of the extra benefits they get that isn't paid directly to them. For example, it may be accrued time off that they save up for years (rollover) and then cash out. Maybe I'll ask my brothers if they have any idea.
Do I really want to read anything before using a phone? No. I won't say that Apple is immune to this either. iOS's increase in functionality means there's a fair number of Settings, and even the default applications (like Mail or Safari) aren't as simple as they could be. iTunes itself is a great example of an application that desperately needs to be refocused and streamlined.

Here's the kicker though, "Twitter client, Twitterdeck, recently launched their app for Android. They reported that they had to contend with more than 100 different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets. The multiple hardware and software iterations presents developers with a daunting challenge."

He does tend to get beat up a bit by the geek crowd, but even Jeff Atwood pointed this out, and how it was reminiscent of a Windows Mobile deja vu. This is why I won't develop for Android devices. If I want to develop for handheld iOS devices I could buy an iPhone4, and pick up a first-generation iPod touch as my "worst case" scenario. If I can cover both, I can run on anything. If I really want to be very paranoid, I can kick iOS back to 3.x on the older device. Android? I can only target specific OS versions, and only the most popular devices. Everyone else I can't guarantee a good user experience, or that it'll work properly at all. That's incredibly unfortunate to consumers in the marketplace.

There's not going to be any real "winner" between Android and Apple in terms of profit potential. There's plenty of room in the market for both platforms. However, this is a clear demonstration that having this level of control over the platform has very real benefits.
I'll even go so far as to say that coding in PHP is downright pleasant when you use a framework like CodeIgniter or Kohana.

At the same time, I have to use Joomla at work and I sometimes catch myself with a partially-tied-off noose around my neck.

It really comes down to what framework you choose.
It seems to me like you're about to compete with a much more polished product, Qwiki, that just won the TechCrunch disrupt event last week.

See http://vimeo.com/15444551, around 4:20.
But you are manipulating parse trees: surely you have to add new grammar rules to the parser, but then the macro itself does just that.

Furthermore, when adding syntax you are not limited to a Lisp-style grammar.
The interesting thing is how the real thing doesn't necessarily follow all the advice, yet worked anyway. I don't think it tells a story, which is the primary tip. Of course, maybe there isn't a story you can really tell in a sentence or less.

On a different meaning of 'story', writing a headline for your email and an opening that the blogger can more or less copy and paste is always welcomed by less diligent bloggers :)
Summary of useful tools and resources for working in Google App Engine
HN, you are one smug bunch. I, for one, thought the comment was great.
Isn't git, by default, federated in that you can add any remote source you want and merge/pull/push it? Callbacks seem like icing there.
Honestly, it doesn't matter. Pick something and stick with it for a little while when you first get started. Everything you learn will transfer to other languages in some way. In college you will generally have to use a number of languages. My recommendation would be Python:

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/