skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At least you're honest, I honestly think bad managers and bad working environments have a way of breaking even the best individuals. At a certain point everyone snaps or breaks.
Same on Mac Safari. Webkit bug?
Bingo, thanks.
Was the target a normal missile, or was it equipped with a "here I am!" beacon to make it easier to hit?
Actually the linked item is an unlocked phone with a 3.7" screen. The parent comparison is invalid. Gruber is actually comparing it to an unlocked iPhone for $599/$699 as he should be, he is not comparing it to an iPad.
That's awesome that everyone got a response.

Years ago I interviewed for a company once that was probably a stretch for me, but I was totally honest up front about my c++ skills and experience. I wasn't an expert, but could get around and mainly lacked the things that come along with more experience. I landed a phone interview that I did fine on and was given a multiple choice c++ test from one of the testing sites. After taking the test the site showed me my score, a solid B+. I was actually kind of surprised how high I scored given the numerous 'did you memorize the STL api' questions there were.

After taking the test I wait a few days for a response. Nothing. So the next week I emailed the HR lady and received no response. I called and left a message, nothing. I'm guessing they wanted an absolute expert at C++ which is fine by me, but the complete lack of response was the most unprofessional thing I've ever experienced.
These articles go to an extreme; just because I don't want to rent everything I've got, doesn't mean I am a stuff-o-holic. I have a very hefty anchor back home- a ~50lb toolbox. By the wisdom of HN articles, that should be the first thing out my door, but it enables me to maintain my motorcycles. Why do I maintain my own motorcycles? Because an oil change costs $20 and 20 minutes when I do it, but $100 and an hour or three when the dealer does it.
various quotes:

Now, even putting quality aside, competitors can’t match Apple’s prices.

no one else can afford to match the iPad’s price with a comparably sized touchscreen display

iPods, iPhones, iPads. Across all of them, Apple’s prices are either comparable, or lower, than their competition.
Please consider cropping the number out of the title: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
VALIS was a trilogy? What were the other two books (aside from the obvious VALIS)?
How hackers can help defeat Wall Street
Cost isn't everything, even in 1984. The PC wasn't the price leader of the era, check the market share and price of a C64.
"Uncrackable" G2 Android Phone Successfully and Permanently Rooted
But unlike Ribbit, Twilio has traction and a business model.
Which of course explains the WP theme markets ability to function.
Clipper card's dirty little secret (Bay Area Transit)
Ditto that. http://gdgt.com/jobs
I think this is what should happen, or at least the duplication should be noted to the poster before they commit their new entry.
Perhaps, right now I'm in a condo so I still don't have to worry about most of those things. But I still think just having a choice between hiring someone competent and doing it myself is a nice one.

I stress competent because my previous landlord(s) were less than able to fix things beyond the superficial problems. Their goal is to strike a balance somewhere between quality and ability to stop complaints. Usually the choice fell one one side of the ability to stop complaints side. (Fix it so it works, not so it works well, i.e. replace broken washing machine with cheap almost broken washing machine.)
Don’t Get Socialmired. How to regulate The Fire Hose
Getting too many insights on Bundt cake recipes? Too many friends still using Twitter for their daily diary? You may be caught in the social mire.
I had my dad start using Ask Jeeves some time back in the 90's. Altavista had gone south and the online search space was very fluid, I thought that Ask was pretty decent, and Jeeves was kind of cool back then. I was surprised when visiting him a few months back to see the site come up as his home page, he said it always did what he wanted so he never changed.
Accessibility myths in 2010
It Looks Like Sendible Just Got Hacked And Compromised Some Huge Facebook Pages
The Kno, is it worth it at $599?
Well, not shipping and the resolution on the screen is worse (1024 x 600).
I use evince on Windows and Linux.
Yes I think the name Hipmunk and cutesy positioning works in a sense that it seems small and relatable, a counterpoint to a lot of their competitors branding.

As a challenger brand I think 'hipmunk' works better than a generic non-emotive name would.
"Mostly compatible" (at the source code level) would be good enough for quite a few applications. For example, take a look at a lot of the C and C++ applications out there, which use OS APIs that often vary widely. Despite that, C and C++ applications are still written, and very popular.
I strongly suspect there's a 'Ballmer Peak' involved in billiards.

http://xkcd.com/323/
I think the author's definition of "passion" is "blind love" whereas the HN definition of "passion" is "drive to do." Sure, if you're terrible and tasteless at something, be passionate about it on the weekends. If you're in the top 50th percentile in terms of ability--and passionate about it--it will work as a job.
Cool. I look forward to meeting you.
Heh, sure it's optional but if you stack it up next to the TERRIBLE Web Forms syntax...
Good idea - just sent Jason a note.
Every time a component in seaside is rendered there is an opportunity to set the url. It can be useful for some apps to not have to worry about this either during some phases of dev or ever. seaside is continuation centric. You have to fight the system to get around for those occasions when it really won't suit. It would be nice to see a next-gen seaside like framework that gave the programmer flexibility in when continuations are used. There are aspects of the framework that show a wear and cruft and would benefit from a clean-room rewrite a la rails3/merb2.

That said, Smalltalk and the latest Pharo is a joy to work with.
iPad aside, the tablet form factor has been tried and failed before. The original 7" EEE, which retailed for $400 bore a whole new 'netbook' segment. That was a multi-million dollar gamble which ultimately paid off. Give the previous failures of tablets, that no one is stepping up to the plate to try again at that price, even given Apple's success (hey, they're Apple) isn't surprising.
The company (Sendible) is claiming they weren't hacked -
"Just to clarify, Sendible was not hacked. One of our users has discovered a major flaw in Facebook's security."

http://twitter.com/Sendible/status/2111569047588865
There are many best seller laptops on Amazon in the $500-600 range, so I'd have to disagree.

If you want a midrange or high end laptop then Apple's don't look bad, most people don't though - but then they don't care about the OS either.
I think Pike's point about "thousands of needless lines of code" is that people do this:

#include "foo.h"

instead of this:

#ifndef __FOO_H__

#include "foo.h"

#endif

where "foo.h" looks like this:

#ifndef __FOO_H__

#define __FOO_H__

/* contents /

#endif / __FOO_H__ */

which in the former case results in having to lex foo.h in order to skip the contents.

However, as pointed out below, modern compilers will effectively do the same thing for you automatically.

[Edited to make the code readable]
Well if you were using Spark already, you can go to v3 without changing your templates
You mean Facebook, the company that has had a pretty rough PR year thanks to its deceptive privacy policies and practices?
I wonder if it's worth it at $5.99.

What are the chances that this will take off and become the predominant education tablet device over the iPad or large-screen Kindle?

Seems kind of destined to mediocrity.
He's talking about cost of actually building the device. A big part of the iPhone's consumer price ($700 for 32gig) is markup, as he points out in comparing it to the price of the iPod touch, which is $300 for a comprable model.

In other words, he's claiming that Apple could undercut the A8181 Desire or the Galaxy S on price, but keeping the customer choose between "FREE* shiny new phone" or "$200* shiny new phone" reinforces the perception of Apple as a premium brand.

* with 2 year contract
I hope they invest a lot of that in innovating and not just marketing/scaling. They've had a decent pace so far but there are still some large holes to fill. I'd like to see:

* Conferences that support more than 10 people.

* Flash RTMP streaming (even just for outbound)

* SIP support

There's a lot of cool business stuff that is almost within reach of twilio. Keep innovating guys.
"Many astronauts come back from long-durations stays on the ISS with a deep new sense of citizenship not of just their country, but of their planet."

watched "Independence Day" yesterday again. I don't think there is another way short of that to make majority of human species on Earth to feel as "citizens of planet". Things like ecology/green movement doesn't seem to be a way to do it as it is subject to tragedy of commons... at least until it will be out weighted by an order of magnitude bigger tragedy
Ask.com is not shutting down. They are ending their in-house general crawling & search system to focus on the Q&A aspect. These articles[1],[2] have better details. They will be continuing to offer general search results on ask.com, but outsourced through an unknown provider.

"Ask will continue to use its web crawling technology, but far more selectively. Rather than trying to find everything from across the web, the crawling will be much more focused around sites that provide answers to questions people search for at the service. Ask will also continue to maintain its own news search service, both through crawling and pulling in news feeds.

Of course, Ask doesn’t want to be in a position where if someone does a search, they come up empty if Ask’s own database of answers has nothing. So the company will outsource for the comprehensive web search matches that it used to gather itself.

Which company will provide those results? Leeds said he’s not allowed to say. Almost certainly, it’s Google."

[1]: http://searchengineland.com/ask-com-to-focus-on-qa-search-en...
[2]: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-09/iac-s-diller-surren...
Employee of the month is stupid. It limits recognition to a single person in a timeframe, even if there are two who deserve it, and falsely creates recognition when maybe nobody deserves it, watering down legitimate recognition potential. Having been in jobs like that before, they're also usually based off metrics that are easy to game or dominate.

Also, for other "big" recognitions, you'd better be damn sure the person deserves it. I've seen people who did one thing at the right time in front of the right people that earned corporate recognition and a bonus while the rest of us were doing equally valuable stuff at a less visible level and got nothing. Nothing kills productivity faster than that.
>It gives you a zip file with all your contact info, photos, video, status updates, wall posts, etc. If somebody would like to write an importer for Diaspora, or Google Me, or even a non-vaporware competitor, they are well within Facebook's ToS, imho.

If I'm trying to write an importer for this Facebook data, how can I differentiate John Smith (my friend) from the thousand other John Smiths? It's easy to do if I have John's email.
But if you move up to Dells and Lenovo's "premiere" laptops (Latitudes and Thinkpads), then the price difference narrows considerably. Bare bottom T410 (14") is ~1200 (granted, its currently on sale for like 700-800 dollars... Lenovo has a lot of sales actually).

I think it's fair to say that MBPs compete with all of the other brands "one step up" or business lines. MBP build quality alone lets it fight in that category.
They say Google isn't "sticky" but that's a good counter-example (albeit a small sample size).
In 1989, external symbols were (possibly) only unique wrt the first 6 letters. Trying to guess if anybody else would name a variable MaxPhy* isn't a fun game...
I think any company with 20,000 developers who spend money on its platform is worth (arbitrarily) 100M.
Gadget teardown company iFixit pushes self-repair manifesto
Cogenra solar power for electricity and hot water and more efficiency
Denali... or Denial?
Yeah, I definitely have to take my portion of the blame (I wasn't exactly a model employee, at least when I was working for that manager), but I really do think that manager and the environment he cultivated really affected me. I had actually been on a couple of two-week stress leaves about six months prior to my leaving the company.

I used to dream about leaving that job, and I guess I just finally reacted in a way that got me out of it, even if it wasn't ideal. After I lost the job, my girlfriend explained that "for as much as you bitched about that job, you were never actually going to quit." and she was absolutely right. The fear of quitting and having to find a new job was too much for me.

I've been out of a job for a bit more than a year now. I see ads all the time that maybe I could do, but I don't always apply because I don't feel qualified for them. It's really starting to get to me.
Given how close to land it was and the time it was fired (just approaching the peak of the news cycle) certainly points to a publicity stunt of some sort.
If you've not read it, a classic Joel article: Fire And Motion http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
Advice is to contribute to Chromium, fixing 50 bugs over the course of a year or so. Might not be an easy path though, personally when I tried to compile Chromium, it took my PC 8 hours compiling before coming up with a fatal error. Been thinking about getting EC2 instances to compile it, has anyone tried that? Software license costs for Visual Studio put me off a bit.
Understanding Code Visually: Three Ways that Work
Another way to look at Apple's initial 1.0 tablet and phone are that they got it right.

This will be more obvious in about three years, but at the time of the 1.0 release other phones and tablets looked like a lot of things but nothing like the iPhone 1.0 and the iPad 1.0. Already, the competing phones look a lot like the iPhone 1.0 and the competing tablets will look a lot like the iPad 1.0.

That is what Apple is doing that no one seems to be able to, getting 1.0 so on-the-money right that competitors have no choice but to follow as best they can.
Twitterfeed (a betaworks company) is looking for a lead dev to help re-architect our content distribution system pushing > 3million pieces of content between services every day. Exciting time to be here especially if you're passionate about using intelligence to help find and distribute interesting content (being on HN probably qualifies :-)

More here: http://twitterfeed.com/careers - and hit me up if you have questions (email in profile)
Good point - that's exactly the type of answer I was hoping to get. I guess I forgot the value in being close to the metal. Twilio's customers aren't necessarily end customers but companies who, themselves, are attempting to make serious money from Twilio's products and will be forking over huge amounts of cash on a regular basis ;-)
Youtube's Answer to Video Exploration
Thank you for your advice. I thought about that. I'm trying to get out in another way - I'm starting a Master's (MBA) :) and reducing my debt at the same time.

The thing is, here in Uruguay job security is king - if you switch jobs you're a kind of pariah for a couple of years (OTOH if I get fired it's like winning the lottery, about 6 to 8 salaries plus benefits plus 6 months unemployment which for my sector is very good).

So I have to endure another 2 years while I do the MBA - and it's very likely that I'll get a significantly better job offer while I'm doing the MBA due to connections - I'll try to network heavily on the MBA, it's my number one goal from it.

Ironically I haven't been labeled a slacker (and I used to be a top student and respected worker) - my boss is too incompetent to even realize I'm slacking. My projects can't get any crappier though (ever heard of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forte_4GL ? Not a marketable skill ).

I hope to either get into a project management / CTO position, or start my own company.
Openness also doesn't mean being a sucker. Share and share-alike provides an optimal solution to the iterated prisoner's dilemma of openness.
Scientists identify one cause of damage in Alzheimer's, find a way to stop it
The goal is to find a newspaper who will swing for the fences. In year two, the cost savings for a typical daily newspaper will be significant. In some cases, we believe it will double profit margins.

Since this went up on Hacker News we've had interest from two newspapers. We'll see how it goes.
I think it's simpler than that: when you have arrays, linked lists and hash tables there aren't _that_ many cases when you need a binary tree, so I guess the designers felt they weren't worth baking into the language at a syntax level. I agree it would have been nice to have in the standard library though.
Been thinking about getting EC2 instances to compile it, has anyone tried that?

Sounds like a good idea to me, esp. for people working on a laptop.
The claim of the article is that apple can price their mobile devices lower than the competition because they benefit from superior supply chains and manufacturing. The fact that google chooses to restrict the market application to OHA member devices with SIM cards doesn't change the fact that archos is delivering products in the same basic hardware class for less money.
German Authorities Crack Forgery Ring That Infiltrated Museums Worldwide
That's a shame. I found them better/more-interesting than Google for a number of queries. Not on average certainly, but on enough queries that I was pretty interested in their technology.
That looks really interesting, though it seems a bit dangerous -- greenlet feels like a bit of a hack.

I wish I'd found diesel before twisted; it seems a lot more elegant if you don't need any of the built-in protocols. The twisted model is good, there's just too much of it.
True. I didn't really understand the Ribbit purchase myself, but my point was, the sky is quite high for telco companies.
If the solution only covers part of what you need, then that is indeed a problem that should be fixed ... by covering all of what you need.

On the other hand, I'll leave it up to your judgement whether the lines in the address plugin are necessary. You can compare implementations here:

https://github.com/asual/jquery-address/blob/master/src/jque...

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/docs/backbone.html#...

If 90% of Backbone apps end up using Controllers, it's better to include a concise implementation than a heavy dependency, I think.
Strange Loop 2010: "Machine Learning: A Love Story" by Hilary Mason
I shudder for the personal productivity of someone who needs a realtime version Hacker News.
How is that a counter-example?

It sounds like his dad never tried Google, thus there was nothing to "stick".

I think the lesson here is that while the search engine switching cost is $0, people are creatures of habit and may continue using something long past its expiration date if it is returning expected results.

What we see from this case is also why IE has such a huge market share. Less computer literate people will start using whatever some more experienced entity tells them to, and will keep using it until/unless they are forcibly switched to a new platform.
iPad also has IPS screen that should cost some.
Thanks, I've changed the title to better reflect what's going on.
A bit out of subject but... the design of the overall Heroku website is just fantastic. For every new sections added, I'm always amazed by how the page looks great.
At some point, you're paying a few hundred extra for the aluminum body and glowy Apple logo - it's not just about "premium" versus "consumer" tiers of hardware.

A Latitude 5400 (again, same hardware loadout) prices on Dell's website right now at $849.00. A ThinkPad Edge 13", again, similar loadout, prices at $694.00.

Apple makes fantastic hardware, no doubt, but it's very difficult to consider them to be competitively priced. For the price I'd pay for a MBP, I can get a machine a generation ahead in terms of raw horsepower. I just got an HP Envy 17 (I wanted a portable workstation, rather than a ultralight) and it's a hell of a lot of hardware (Core i7, 8GB RAM, 750GB 7200 RPM HDD) for roughly half the price of an equivalent MBP.
So the singing is synthesized, but the band is real?

Backwards world :)
<pedant>
Heh...some of these things are "intro to IP networks and UNIX".
</pedant>
I cannot think of a less appropriate organization to declare this exact criticism.
960gs fluid can be altered to be 1140px wide. It just needs a max-width attribute on the container_12 class - http://goo.gl/2Jdla

*Edit: The gutters also scale with viewport size and the nested elements can be fluid too.
Hey, a failure to respect privacy is just direct evidence of openness, right?

(Disclaimer. I may be biased by working for Google. But I'm also not opposed to switching from a BSD to GPL strategy to encourage freedom.)
Actually, that's a 103 step program, but I agree with the advice. If you want to get a job, you need experience... And the internet is full of projects that need bugfixes. That stuff looks -great- on a resume. Take that from someone who interviews hirees.
I wasn't looking at it from a co-op or car sharing perspective. I was looking at it from a "how can a car cost $1000 a month perspective". The Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution and Subaru WRX STis are probably the best known examples of post-purchase sticker shock considering a transaction cost that is only 110-115% of that of the "average new car transaction cost". Especially the Mitsubishi, which was referred to by Jeremy Clarkson as "needs to be serviced every 300 yards".

The Yokohama Advan A046s had a 140 treadwear rating. High-output turbocharged engines (140HP/liter bone stock) tend to require frequent oil changes. High-output turbocharged engines also tend to run rich, basically using unspent fuel to help cool the turbo -- 14mpg is seriously what was observed under mostly rush-hour highway traffic. Premium fuel was required since it still had a near 12:1 compression ratio.

Those cars would never be offered via co-op, and I can't think of a car sharing service that even offers genuine bona-fide sports cars. They are rare, not mass market. They're incredibly noisy. Not very comfortable. They're "compacts" (in the US). They're only offered with manual transmissions (until recently). They'd be absolutely catastrophic loss leaders, especially with hooligans beating the piss out of them. They were engineered to be the most entertaining cars for the lowest transaction cost possible... but they very quickly compensate for their low sticker price with maintenance bills from a 911.

-----

What about those who purchase, say, a new Toyota V6 Camry, load it up to $30K, then put the minimum they'll allow down? Right there you're looking at a $550-$600/mo payment (and dealers won't care if they're getting paid and have the car off their floor plan). Add $100-150/mo in insurance. Assuming a 25mpg average, it's not hard to get right on the cusp of $1000/mo for the first 5 years, depending on how far people commute. That's with a vehicle that's around the average transaction price for a new car in this country.

My point remains that it's not hard to hit $1000/mo. I don't consider that prudent in the slightest, but a fair number of people experience just that.

As I said, I know how to not spend money on a car as well. I bought a Mazda MX-5 cash. Moved close enough to work to take mass transit. Negotiated secure garaging in my lease. Just use it as a toy. Between insurance ($120/mo), maintenance and fuel, $200/mo would be exceptional. I think I've spent $600 total on gasoline in the past 22 months, whereas 4 years ago, I remembered spending that every month on just fuel.