skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't think that companies like these are going to place the fate of their best-selling software in Apple's hands for the relatively small gains the Mac App Store will provide them

Let's hope so.

> I think the Mac App Store is going to be an absolutely enormous runaway success.

Can't disagree with that.
Your induction bureaucracy might take half an hour. The process hopefully takes a bit longer, a week or so.
What do you mean by "bringing systems programming game"? What kind of experience would qualify?
This argument would be more compelling if Microsoft sold open source software.
Intel and Achronix Get Engaged
My girlfriend is Japanese on an H1 visa for a Big-4 accounting firm Japanese practice. We've had a couple of scares that she might not get the H1-B due to quota limits (fortunately, last year nobody was hiring so there was no lottery). They run a straight-out lottery every year, and back in '08, they ran a lottery, and over 150,000 people applied, and through random selection, only 65,000 people from the 150K pool would be selected. But the H1-B program is by no means as easy as you think it is.

And you know what? H1-B labor isn't cheap. My girlfriend is paid $10K more because she speaks Japanese and can communicate with Japanese clients. You actually have to prove to USCIS that you are paying at least market rate, if not more than market rate because of a shortage of labor. I hire people on a regular basis, and I am very familiar with the H1-B process, having seen two of my team members being forced back home because they failed to proceed with the process from the quota lottery.

Again, it's not a binary problem. There are obviously abuser of the H1-B program, and there are businesses, even industries, that benefit from immigrants. You know what really pushed US innovation forward in the last 50 years? I believe immigrants pushed US innovation more than any thing else. Charles K. Kao, a naturalized American, made the US his home and won a Nobel last year for his work in optics during the 70s. Sun Microsystems founder is German, and so is Peter Thiel. William Boyle of Bell Labs. Londoner, now American, Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School. Taiwan immigrant David Ho for his work in AIDS. Hell, Einstein was a US immigrant.
Germans have to endure 1 and 2 cent pricing.
I admire the gusto of these guys
There was a documentary on CH4 about just such a website, sugardaddy.com I think it was called (not going to check from the office!).
Wordpress Custom excerpt length
The homepage look nice!
What matters isn't so much how often we make mistakes, but how we react to them - which includes making prompt fixes just as much as admitting to the team that we actually made a mistake.

Especially if it's a "silly" mistake.

In a development context, I'll often find that a problem that seems to just generate pure static in my mind for the first 5-10 min that I think about it will often "solve itself" in the course of the next coffee break, subway ride, or (if the company I'm working for has enough common sense about human nature to allow for it), mid-day nap.

By contrast, it's those alpha-geek types who basically seem to be -never- able to readily admit a mistake of their own (yet continually grate on others for their, like as not far lesser mistakes) that I find far more intractable to work with that those who are just a bit inexperienced, or absent-minded.
We will be making a full-on push for our personal finance app Can I Afford it Now? http://www.caniafforditnow.com

If you missed giving us feedback, please do so at
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1843748

Thanks
Yes, if you do this and it gives you a date in the past, then it's time to re-think your business model.
It is the same mechanism that that TV show Ugly Betty wouldn't work if the actress playing her wasn't actually quite cute.
DeskMetrics Wants To Be A Google Analytics For Desktop Software
A call tracking and intelligence app. It is still being polished, but I think another full force week and we will be up there. Live, but still got some polishing to do.

http://contexium.com

Edit: The long description: You know how a business receives 100 phone calls per day but noone can tell listen to every call for feedback? We not only track each call, but we mine each call and score them so you get a snapshot of what customers are saying.
I sympathize with the immigrants. I don't have an interest in artificially reducing the availability of skill labor. I have a really big problem with leaving our own people out of a job because corporations would prefer to hire immigrants for less.

Really, though, my overall complaint was that this fluff piece tried to say "Immigrants create more jobs" when statistically speaking, they often take more jobs than they save, and only on very rare occasions actually create brand new shiny jobs that help the unemployment situation.

My anger doesn't even remotely apply to the cream of the crop, the genuine masterminds who come here to work their magic. Whether they're founders or very senior level hackers. Most of them aren't being underpaid here, and they're not contributing to the problem. They're not par for the course, either.
There’s a Service in Your Future
The RFQ was for Microsoft's cloud based offering called "Business Productivity Online Suite".

http://www.microsoft.com/online/business-productivity.aspx

"Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite is a set of messaging and collaboration tools, delivered as a subscription service, that gives your business rich capabilities without the need to deploy and maintain software and hardware on-premise."

Google's argument is that it wasn't a real RFQ if it was required to be from MS. Perhaps they already decided on Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite but legally had to put up an RFQ and worded it as such that their chosen package was the de-facto winner. I guess we'll find out.
I just launched http://socialpicly.com 3 minutes ago. Add your support for tomorrows elections to your facebook profile picture.
I can speak from my experience, coming to SF from Europe and finding a design job at a corporation:
As long as you are not here, or about to come here, you are exponentially less interesting to companies. If they like your email, resume, portfolio, whatever, they want to invite you, talk to you, see whether you are a cool person. And they want to do it fast. This must especially be true to small companies.
Also: You will be able to make so many new PERSONAL connections here, which will make the job search much easier. It's not unlikely to fire off 100 emails to every potential employer and not get much back. But meet one person that you get along with well on a personal level, and you might get your interview right there. Everybody here knows someone who knows someone who wants to hire somebody like you.

(if you need someone to sponsor a visa though, it's a completely different story)

Good luck!
Tea for iPhone, a tool for optimizing the taste of your loose leaf teas, statistically.

http://www.twitter.com/teaapp

http://www.facebook.com/teaapp
It will be interesting to see if the same thing holds this time next year with an iPhone on Verizon.
We work in a lot of different application domains; the common denominator is "low level". So:

* If you're interested in web security, you'd want to be conversant in protocol-level HTTP; a good acid test might be "could quickly implement chunked encoding".

* If you're interested in OS security, you'd want to be conversant in virtual memory management and system call interfaces; a good acid test might be "could implement the userland side of a system call without using the library stubs".

* If you're interested in software security, you'd want to be conversant in C/C++.

If you're interested in security research at all, feel free to email me. You can't waste my time. The only reason any of these technical items are here is that we hope they'll be attractive to the people we want to hire; we're not trying to disqualify anyone.
For me it's like checking the news
Excellent article. I think the best thing to take away from it is this little, innocent sounding line:

"No matter what the reason, don’t ever write..."

This says it all. If we must fear our government when engaging in innocent activity, then we have given our government too much power.

Schneier addressed this in one of his many posts on privacy:

"How many of us have paused during conversation in the past four-and-a-half years, suddenly aware that we might be eavesdropped on? Probably it was a phone conversation, although maybe it was an e-mail or instant-message exchange or a conversation in a public place. Maybe the topic was terrorism, or politics, or Islam. We stop suddenly, momentarily afraid that our words might be taken out of context, then we laugh at our paranoia and go on. But our demeanor has changed, and our words are subtly altered." - http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_p...
Don't you think you're reading too much into the "opaque" intentions of Apple? Apple is fairly tight-lipped about what they do, so to assign words like "moral superiority" feels more like your feeling than some larger truth.

Take flash. When the iPhone came out, Apple and Adobe had discussions. Apple said, show us what you have. My guess is that it was shitty, didn't respect new iOS touch-based metaphors, made for bad UX and poor battery life. Apple passed. Now according to other reports about Flash, Apple gave them chances, but Adobe COULD. NOT. DELIVER. So when the iPad came to fruition and it began to seriously dawn on Adobe management that they were being left behind, they had only one option: try to garner public sympathy for something that Apple had originally intended be an option: flash on iOS. Apple realized, early on, that Adobe didn't care enough to solve what Apple saw as a true problem. Adobe completely whiffed their chances. So here we are today. Is that "moral superiority" or true pragmatism in dealing with someone who can't or won't deal?

This whole "slippery slope" things is pure FUD. Apple makes pragmatic decisions, not vengeful or hateful ones. Java for every other platform is maintained by Sun/Oracle. Apple has little need to spend precious engineering time maintaining a runtime that sees little use by end-users. Interested parties (Sun/Oracle) can certainly continue to maintain a runtime if needed and will probably have less overhead than Apple doing it.
For me it's like checking the news every day
and I as well. it's frustrating when waiting in line and someone's ahead of you waiting on change. just swipe your debit card and keep the line moving!
Sure, I totally agree.

I was mostly self taught in programming before starting the advanced degree.

There isn't any teaching instruction with regard to the actual 'doing' of programming. The article states that CS majors should be able to 'do' things that arts majors can't do. Mostly, they can think about things that arts majors haven't learned about.

But imagine if you are an English major. You want to be a great writer. Sure, you will be writing outside of class. But also, you will be writing a inside of class.
Maybe an art major painting would be a better example, but the analogy stands; you should have rigorous practice in addition to the stuff that you do for the major, which should be fairly intensive in and of itself.

I don't see programming being treated seriously as a craft in CS. It seems like something that Professors get research assistants to do for them. (In fact, I'm pretty sure a lot of professors wouldn't know a good program if it smacked them in the face).

It is in this way much different from other college level disciplines, where the graduates are supposed to have gained some sort of skill. (liberal arts majors should know how to write, painters should paint, physicists and chemists, etc).
This is a cool idea, but if I consider the speed at which I can touch type versus the speed of my handwriting, this may turn out too slow in the long run.
It's too bad the video didn't show an actual person using this system, that should have given a better impression. Also, Fitt's Law may become relevant whenever you try to go back to the circle in the middle without crossing one more line accidentally . The Swype guys seem to have figured that out quite well by predicting which word you're likely to have meant - I wonder if there's anything like this included in the8pen, too?

(P.S.: Justin Timberlake says: "Drop the article in the URL")
It certainly would have if Apple had let Adobe do it. Adobe's been wanting to put Flash on the iPhone since before anyone actually had an Android unit.
Hey Wes. As I understand it, they've now setup a "test" hosted service for anyone to use... the wordpress.com equivalent i guess
Ruby Lane is looking for a software engineer in CA, FL, GA, IL, OK, PA, TN, TX (where we already have tax nexus) or UK.
https://jobs.github.com/positions/3f32d3da-d6e6-11df-9745-71...

Our 12 year old codebase is mostly in TCL/AOLServer. TCL isn't that bad and can be learned in a couple of days. Big plus if we find someone strong in Javascript/jQuery and front-end design.

Almost all of Ruby Lane's staff is distributed with just a couple of regular workers in our SF office.

Code samples, Github URLs, or a good cover letter are just as important as a nice resume.
Kernel vulnerabilities: old or new?
I think they are really testing the ability for a new developer to get a build machine set up and running so that they can check out, modify, test, and check in code. This is as much of a test of Cheeseburger as it is of the new hire (or their bladder).

In the past I have worked at or consulted for places where doing so was a black art that could easily occupy a week or more of a new hire's time. Most small companies had a single "expert" and the rest of the developers would copy code, libraries, and settings from one machine to another in cargo-cult fashion.
I've never used these in hiring. Assuming the candidate doesn't have the questions beforehand, seems you're mostly testing someone's ability to BS/improv and promote themselves on the spot. For coders, I don't find this skill to be closely tied to job performance. Possibly an inverse correlation.

Providing them beforehand would possibly be more useful, but in this case there's no real need to "practice" so I don't think that's what the link you provided is referring to.
BIG NEWS: Google BLEND is HERE
Put those two facts together and they don't even know that a bunch of their favorite websites won't even work.
The great iPhone serial port hack
Direct (paper) mail?
StarCraft 2 has tastefully upgraded the UI so that you can do lots of things with less clicks than before in SC 1. (Of course, that means at the higher end, people will just do more now than they did. But it's quite a nice feeling on the beginner level, too. E.g. you can get a worker to work right after it's build. And there's also a button for finding idle workers.)
Theo still makes his own wheels with a hammer and a chisel. Rubber, store-bought tires are for pansies... only joking... I buy CDs and t-shirts and no matter what free Unix you use, do buy CDs because the CD sales also support OpenSSH and we all use that!
It must depend upon your subject and university in the UK. As a physicist, I have never known a student to obtain a PhD in less than 3 years. My students have taken 3.5 years minimum. There's one guy in our department who should get his PhD soon, after 8 years.

What you're describing is maybe how they are funded - but not the reality in my experience.
Does anyone else have tablet note-taking experience?

I don't think that current computing devices will ever be able to capture the utility and aesthetic of pen on paper. Though I am a bit of a writing snob. Taking a stylus to a screen feels a little like trying to take a sports car on a frozen lake to me.
I really hope Libre Office gets some momentum going and completely kills off Open Office. Oracle has a knack of screwing things up... OpenSolaris, Java, OpenOffice... I honestly think Oracle's motto is now the opposite of Google's and more in line with Microsoft's: "How evil do you want to be today?"
For those who care to read about this interesting history, I can paraphrase it something like this:

1. Google buys Android and plans to make cell phone. First cell phone prototypes look/feel like then-current-day Blackberries (aka, key pads, small screens, no touch).
2. Apple makes iPhone. Touch-only. Changes world.
3. Google then remakes Android in mold of iPhone, copying its new touch-based metaphors and more.
4. Apple understandably does not take the imitator kindly.

Enter present day.
Aww hell.

I'm committing to launching DuctDo.com, a companion webapp to DuctMail. DuctDo: Do stuff! (Where as DuctMail was "Remember Stuff").

DuctDo will be about forming habits, and about setting goals for yourself. For example, let's say you procrastinate a lot, and you want to have some form of public reminder system in place, you tell DuctDo what you want to do. DuctDo then sends you an email every morning telling you to do it, and then at the end of the day, it asks you for an update. Will link into things like Twitter and Facebook and update people with your progress... or lack of progress.

DuctDo will be the second part of the Ductivity suite of web apps.
This is the best thing that could happen for the software, it will continue, as FOSS and innovate. This is a good thing.
Next year, how about NOT running a promotion at Halloween to see if you actually get the exact same number of purchases, and make even more money.

My guess is that people who need Bingo card software at Halloween will just pay whatever your price is because they are buying the time they are saving.

How much time is $5 really?
Australia, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't even have a denomination smaller than the nickel.
I'm fully aware that you didn't reach substantial part of your total market yet.

One suggestion: a means for your customer to tell or email a friend to get a discount for both of them (by Dropbox example).
Your tech stack is right in my alley. Sending resume over now.
Australia doesn't even HAVE a one cent coin any more; smallest coin is 5 cents. This is inflation at work, my friends. This is not a good thing.
A set of highly reusable iOS UI libraries. UIKit is nice, but a bit limited. In the process of building iPhone/iPad apps, I've created a bunch of controls that I think other iOS developers might find useful. Hoping to get the first 3 launched this week, with another 7 or so to follow.
What comes to mind: How is what Adobe does with Flash different from what Apple tried to do with Quicktime? If Apple had its way a few years back, all the video on the net would be Quicktime Sorenson encoded. Would they be pushing for open standards then?
So just always use the after-tax prices, and make that a multiple of $0.05. Show that price on the display boards, on the receipts, etc. I know they do this in Switzerland, for example.

In Canada (and the US?) that's what happens with gasoline, but not with anything else. I think that's strange.
Lucene.Net needs your help (or it will die)
"He doesn't produce much, and all of it's crap, but at least he's sweating."?
The mailing start tomorrow, Nov 2?
VC Funds Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place
You'd be surprised. I think a lot of times new employee set up could be streamlined by emailing a list of questions to the new hire ahead of time (prefer osx/windows? this tool or that? etc).

I know when there are new hires at my company it usually takes them about 1/2 the day to get their new computer ready to go (without any dev software installed). I think it could definitely be faster simply by putting IT in touch with the person sooner.
This looks way too hard to get used to initially. The best thing about Swype (which is truly remarkable) is that you already know how to get to all of the letters. You dont have to relearn anything. You're able to rapidly type things out of the box, with relatively low error rates for a mobile keypad, without even thinking about it.
Please crop the number "11" out of the title. Thanks!

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yeah, the actual lessons start tomorrow morning and go out weekdays, so you'll get a total of 21 of them.
I have a negative experience with behavioral interview questions, both as an employer and employee.

There's a lot of room for embellishment and most behavioral questions don't properly summarize the candidate's qualifications. They're a snapshot of an hour or two when the candidate was faced with a problem, or had to exceed a goal, or had to wow someone with a presentation. Anyone can think of one or two things that they did extraordinarily well and one or two things that challenged them, but that doesn't qualify or disqualify anyone from a job.
echo '# John was here.' >> index.php && svn commit -m "I really have to pee"
This isn't really an absurd level. They're talking about minor bug fixes or simple error catches that no one has gotten to yet. They're not asking new hires to design and implement an entire new feature on a full bladder.
If you are having people check in code on the first day, are you really serious, or just making up silly rules that will blow up when you are actually a company, not just "profitable from inception" (Man, have I heard THAT one before)
I wonder what kinds of things people are using this for, that they even explicitly mention a tier for 5 Petabytes. Thats like $275,000/month, not counting transfers.
Should we have a demo day or launch day?
I won't be joining the FB group (privacy) but I will be committing to launching something by the end of the month. (I have a couple of ideas and will decide which by Wed.)
Nice one Ryan. I've been thinking of a few projects, but I've got one that I would really like to just get started on and get completed. I'll have a look at this and hopefully it can give me the incentive (kick!?) to get this done and get it out there :)
I work remote for Mozilla in Salem NH. When a company has 300 employees and thousands of active community members, it has to be effective at distributed collaboration. We live in IRC and we even conduct our weekly staff meeting Mondays at 11 PST through http://air.mozilla.com
The Cult of Real Estate: Why you can't afford to buy a house
The 100-year leap (radar on Babbage difference engine)
I don’t think the government is big fan of open source either. They mostly worry about support.
Heh. A 10 year old technology like HTML?
Samsung Galaxy Tab review
It needs to 'Pop'
Dangers of a Multilingual Domain Name System
Isn't DropBox in the 5 PB+ range? I have a vague recollection of concluding that they were in S3's top tier a few months ago, but I can't remember if it was based on them announcing how much data they were storing, based on an estimate from their burn rate, or based on an estimate from their number of users.
Everyblock.com releases an API
Not only that, if any of my managers or hiring personnel ever bring an idea this dumb to me, I will fire them on the spot.

Wow.

I can't believe how angry something this utterly nonsensical makes me, but at least I know it's being done by other companies, not by mine.
Only 7 + or - 2 websites
I can testify first-hand that the way the current H1B green card application process is structured actively discourages long-term investment in the US by H1B visa holders.

Given the possibility that you have to leave the US if you lose an H1B job (unless you can find a new one immediately), that makes you less likely to buy a house or a decent car that you will have trouble unloading if you have to leave on short notice. And I have deliberately shifted savings into cash vs. a 401k plan because I can take the cash with me when I leave.
"Cheezburger has been a profitable business since inception. We have been profitable every single quarter, and never had a quarter with negative cash flows. "

Oh come on now, how could you have negative cash flow? Your whole business model is based around publishing content on the web you didn't create, (and 99% of the time probably don't even own the rights to), this is not exactly an expensive business to run.