skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’ll let you be the judge, but it sounds like developers enjoy being productive on their first day.

Actually, I'm not sure those conversations prove the conclusion that you're drawing from them. What I believe those quotes illustrate is that those particular developers told the boss (boss' boss?) who came up with the policy that they enjoy it. This is the way that conflicts of interest work, and even if Cheezburger has a well-established tradition and culture of telling the Emperor he has no clothes, newbie employees are not really the best source of that kind of information.
This should benefit anyone who is looking to use the awesome everyblock data in their local news/data/etc apps.
This is fantastic. Amazon is the leader, and having them drop prices is a boon to the market as a whole. Companies who resell or add services on top of Amazon's services see an immediate benefit, as do their customers. I can't imagine how much money this saves companies like DropBox who build on top of it [cperciva is right, it's exactly 15245/month, since they're in the 1PB+ range].

I'm definitely wondering if and when we'll see 10 cents/gb - prices like that (minus the data transfer charges - see: http://www.nasuni.com/news/nasuni-blog/whats-the-cost-of-a-g...) put it within striking range of high availability spinning disk in your local data center.

Disclaimer: I work for a company building on top of/reselling S3 in addition to other providers.
"Most people don't even know what a rootkit is"
The usual coin-change-making algorithm for X cents in the US is...

(1) pull ⌊X/25⌋ quarters; set X = X%25

(2) pull ⌊X/10⌋ dimes; set X = X%10

(3) pull ⌊X/5⌋ nickles; set X = X%5

(4) pull X pennies

No pennies means there's never a step 4 -- also the only step that might require pulling 4 coins. When dealing with a line of people during the morning coffee rush, fractions of a second count.
So what's the common superclass?

(Personally, I'd say that robbers are a subclass of thieves.)
Your position is called a 'lump of labor fallacy' by economists. A job filled by an immigrant still creates demand in the local economy (for housing, food, etc.) which in turn leads to more job creation. It's not a one-dimensional tug of war between jobs and unemployment statistics.
Rally4Sanity: Pictures, Signs
Remember this guy? http://www.toptechreviews.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Win... Same colors.
If you are an LLC, consider becoming a C corporation before year end
T-Mobile Comet sends $9.99 shot across the bow of dumbphones
I think that a mixed setup like you describe can allow you to get the best of both worlds, if all your servers don't need to be in the same place for latency reasons. "the cloud" is also awesome for backups. you can have a full backup cold spare system, test it once a week, and pay almost nothing for it. (this is what those 'micro' instances are for. you have a micro instance updating your DB on an EBS backend. when it comes time to fail over, shut down the micro instance and bring up the ebs mount on something beefy.)

my point was just that most systems are on most of the time, and for those systems, owning saves you a lot of money over using "the cloud"
Just launched: http://adventurecow.com

Make stories just like Choose Your Own Adventures!

HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857156
It's the Document Foundation, not "Documents" plural. Little details like the name of the company discussed in the article are important.
Texting on a number pad looked too hard to get used to initially, but now they hold competitions for speed on them.

I don't see this overtaking the entire industry, but it will at least make us think and try new things to come up with something better than a basic on screen keyboard.
Well, there's an idea for a startup — burn-up charts featuring a "Death Clock/Countdown". Could be useful for small teams getting started — and the site could gradually expand into other related services.

P.S. burnupcharts.com is still free...
> 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.

so what would your argument be against just an average programmer, say from japan, being hired to work at a company in the bay area?
sounds like a military bootcamp approach. It has been 200% proven to be successful in producing effective soldiers. It may also work for young hires, puppies, and it would serve as an effective way to filter out older ones who are much harder to mold.
That is against the law in Massachusetts. All prices must be pre-tax.
This looks great!

One suggestion I would have is to tell the users upfront about the affiliate links. I don't have a problem with them but the amazon links are minified.

For example this is the link the user is shown:
http://amzn.to/bkB3gr
This is what it expands to:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0688014291?ie=UTF8&tag=...

By not mentioning the affiliate link and only showing an obfuscated link it gives the appearance that you are trying to pull something over on the user.

I think a statement on the front page saying that links are affiliate links, or just putting the actual links on the pages would help with gaining the user's trust.

Great site:)

edit I know see this on the site: external links to amazon are through their affiliate program

Great:) Back to reviewing books to buy!
Apple's next-gen iPhone rumored with RFID-enabled 'remote computing'
Javascript as back-end? Is Node.js already at a point where it can be used for commercial websites?
CoderStack | http://www.coderstack.co.uk (15 Nov)

Job board concentrating on the top 10% of software developers in the UK.

Currently busy getting companies interested in being listed for when we launch. Happy to give free job postings to companies on HN, just drop me an email.
for the free transfer

Just in case I'm not the only person who was confused by this at first: stellar678 is referring to the free bandwidth between EC2 and S3, not the free AWS upload bandwidth (which no longer exists).

Marginally related trivia: Thanks to said free EC2-S3 bandwidth, if you want to move more than 1 MB between EC2 nodes in different availability zones, it's cheaper to PUT the data to S3 from one node and then GET and DELETE it from the other node than it is to transfer it directly.
Adventure Cow | http://adventurecow.com (11/1/2010)

Just launched today. Read Choose Your Own Adventure-like books over email, or write your own.

(Looking for advice and signups!)
I'm sure they are joking about withholding bathroom access (you can get sued for that).

But it does seem to me that doing this seems to serve the author's interest more than the devs.

"How does it feel to commit on your first day?"

"So, why was it awesome to do that? There’s something about that which feels????"

It sounds like person would be excruciating to deal with.

I'm sure it's just me, but how much he glorifies his policy of first day commits speaks to some larger issue.

I hope this doesn't offend (but I'm not sure how it cant) and I intend no malice. But if my boss said that to me I would probably start looking for a new job that night.
Just remember this is durability not availability. Jeff states this clearly: "If you store 10,000 objects with us, on average we may lose one of them every 10 million years or so."

Eleven nines availability is the service not working/responding only 0.0003 seconds per year ... indistinguishable from perfect.
It's really just a matter of implementation to allow "soft" detection of gestures and make the estimate using the probability distribution of words and letters in the dictionary like swype. It seems that there are hard boundaries in the visual system, but I guess it's just gesture detection at heart, which makes it pretty robust and fast in practice.

I've been actually prototyping a pretty much similar system, but I'm not sure if it's a worthwhile venture. I guess it should be clearly better to have any competitive advantage.
Twitter’s In-Stream Targeted Tweet Ads Begin Today In HootSuite
Justin.tv, in SF. Design and Software Engineering.

I did a SE internship with them over the summer, currently continuing remotely to finish off college. You'll have a great time with some great people — and you'll do stuff thats interesting, not busywork. Feel free to shoot me an email if you have any questions.

http://www.justin.tv/p/jobs#designintern and http://www.justin.tv/p/jobs#se_intern for more info (and how to apply!)
Oh, there were some very talented people there. Some of them are friends of mine, but they're good because they're good, not because of the education provided by the university. Some have ended up doing game development, high performance computing, working at Amazon etc.
Angry Birds on MacBook Air
Why Young People Don't Fear the Lousy Job Market
How about BlindType? http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/07/21/video-blind-type-allo...
Ever Wondered What Would Happen if Your City was Nuked?
I'm not saying that VB is beneath me, I'm just saying it's ridiculous to expect fresh grads to have experience with it.
Windows XP falls under 60%, IE8 loses share for the first time
I can't imagine how much money this saves companies like DropBox who build on top of it.

Based on the (very safe, I think) assumption that DropBox uses at least 1 PB of S3 storage, it will save them exactly $15245 per month.
True, but it will take some time.

I hope that Oracle donates the name, as it will cut the time it takes down.
So, make the sane price after-tax, and display the pre-tax price to 100 decimal places (or whatever).

Honestly, even if this is only done for the "critical path", it can still make life easier. I pay $4.16 for a large latte at Starbucks. It would be easier if it was $4 or $5. I don't care if the price is easy for two lattes or if I get a half-caf skim extra hot latte with 94 extra espresso shots. Just make the basics simple, and you will save a lot of effort.

(Profile, then fix the slow parts.)
Don’t have blind faith in your Chef
http://exceptionalasp.net/

Early version is already live, this month is about filling out features and content and starting to sell it.
It will be interesting to see if the same thing holds this time next year with Windows Phone 7 on the same phones as Android.
I love both stories. Mike's job is to inform and entertain and he does that just that, but I also enjoyed Robert's article quite a bit too. Thanks for posting.
What's the hiring timeline? Do you send courtesy decline notices because I've sent in my resume a couple times now.
Maybe you'll get luck and they'll release a version for computers with touchpads.
Know the Local Holidays
salvia has a reverse tolerance -- you might as well switch to sniffing paint if you consume it regularly.
How We Got Sal (KhanAcademy.org) His Dot Com
Does Better Technology Guarantee Victory?
The iPad is selling in huge numbers and people seem to be really happy with them. So I think most people are either finding an app to replace Flash sites they can't view or just doing without that particular site on that device.

I'd expected there to be more "backlash" or at least disappointment with the iPad when people ended up realizing that some sites they may want don't work. I've been surprised to hear nearly none of that. Maybe it's just a matter of it being such a different device that people accept that not all the things from the device they're used to (a traditional computer) work on it?
You hit the nail on the head - I've been thinking about it for a while and I still can't decide if it's for adults or children.
VLC for iPhone may get pulled from App Store--by the developer
I worry that this will be the biggest obstacle for 8pen to overcome. I'm planning on trying it out, for sure. I think the learning curve will be steep, but if you can delay gratification it'll be a pretty nifty tool.
The company behind the Cheezburger network is very real (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pet-holdings-inc). They run some very popular content sites. For example, I Can has Cheezburger is being visited by 3.6 million people per month. Their network as a whole is being visited by 12.1 million people per month, according to Quantcast (http://www.quantcast.com/p-75z9nhQwNH4Ek). How exactly is this business not "real" ?

Now, to the point at hand. Having a new hire show up on the first day, get their work station setup, and complete a round trip of checking out code, fixing something real, and getting it back into the repository is a very real milestone. You might take it as being flippant or process-ignorant, but by getting that new-hire through that hurdle on day one can be seen as a major accomplishment. It may not be right for some businesses, but if you instead got your new hires to submit a change for review rather than for integration into a production build you'd achieve the same effect.
I just want to know how his mom figured out the FBI tapped her phone.
They need to include a game like tutorial. Where you get emotional rewards for speed and accuracy.
> a shiny, unused bullet fell out of the front pocket.

I'm assuming here that the author is refering to what is more accurately known as a cartridge. A bullet is the projectile, a hunk of lead, possibly with a jacket of copper or steel covering it. A cartridge is a bullet, a case, a primer and propellent. It's very easy to leave a catridge in a pocket and not notice it.

Is there an english word for the practice of commonly refering to an entity by a subset of that entity?
Popular Science: Every issue from May 1872 to March 2009 online
You forgot the implied "...and then cross an international border while carrying said journal entry."
US Customer, Homeland security and similar worry me for the primary reason that I don't think there are any 'checks' on their power that have any influence from citizens. When even the most famous of US Senators are even harassed by security personel (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17073-2004Aug...) then we're in a tricky place. An average citizen has zero recourse and can't just call the President asking for Homeland Security to stop bothering them.
I think it's the difference between learning curve vs. optimal speed.

In your Font example (which I think demonstrates your point great), it's easier to jump in to, but your "top speed" is a bit lower than if they grouped it like 8pen chose to.
> Is it worth it?

No. Health is far more important.

> Are the long hours required to deliver a good piece of software?

Be suspicious of anyone who tells you they are/are not required. You have to put in a certain amount of time in order to really understand what's needed. Whether you put that in over the course of the project, or all at the end is up to you.

When implementing, I put pressure on myself to find insights that greatly simplify the code. It can be as simple as a unified way to organize code, or a messaging subsystem. This isn't terribly surprising, but it requires thinking very clearly about the problem and reflecting on it often. You're not going to be in this state of mind if you're developing in a purely reactive, omg-deadline-in-one-hour style. You may not arrive at these insights quickly, however. So you need to be willing to invest time at the offset, working on the hard parts, and be open to tweaking the program's structure until it feels solid to work with.
Sort of like NANOWRIMO? Nice idea. I may try!
With the job market the way it is, you might consider advertising in more populated areas (like MA and CT) targetting people who might relocate for the right position.
Rapleaf Agrees to Leave Facebook Alone
Microsoft Fla^W^W Silverlight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche is probably the term, although the context in which "synecdoche" is used is generally analysis of literature / "English class."
Two sentence version: What do you do when you have better technology, but the competition has other advantages? Find a space with photoelectric effect properties. Where 94% performance corresponds to 1, and 86% goes to 0.
> Is there an english word for the practice of commonly refering to an entity by a subset of that entity?

A metonymy.

[edit: swolchok is right, it's a synecdoche]
Dvorak didn't catch on? I haven't seen an operating system in years that didn't have Dvorak available as an optional keyboard layout, and I know several people (self included) that use it.

It's not the default, sure, but there's still a critical mass of people using it. There's value in that, much like there's value in a good keyboard-alternative for touchscreens.
I'm in a test org in MS and we try to get new hires to check in test code sometime their first week. As others have said here, it's a multi-purpose task: Get the new hire up to speed on how to work with our internal tools, work out any kinks that they would run into anyway, and give them a feeling of having accomplished something for the team.

The actual quality of their check-in shouldn't be terribly important, as what they're checking in is usually something very simple.

Doing it all in a single day is aggressive, but doable. I suppose you'd find holes in the new-hire documentation pretty quickly.
C coders manage easily enough.
I think this says more about your college/university than CS education in general. I have a BS in comp sci, and I had to write functioning code in almost every computer class I took. (The only exception being one A.I. course that was cross-listed with philosophy, and even there I used automata in my final paper.)
San Francisco, CA

PlayHaven is hiring smart Python developers to help disrupt the mobile app discovery space by providing game developers a set of tools to effectively promote their titles for free. In doing so, we provide game players with an effective way to discover the next game they'd love to experience.

PlayHaven was founded by a small, fast-moving group of engineers who iterated their way to a product that started gaining traction quickly and hasn't stopped. We're smart, experienced, ambitious, videogame-loving entrepreneurs, who sometimes spend an unhealthy amount of time analyzing various TV shows. We are backed by some of the best investors on both the East and West coasts.

Here are some links detailing the different roles we're hiring:

http://github.com/playhaven/jobs/tree/master/core-software-e...

http://github.com/playhaven/jobs/tree/master/operations-engi...

http://github.com/playhaven/jobs/tree/master/mobile-software...

http://github.com/playhaven/jobs/tree/master/mobile-software...
Trust me, it's VERY easy to have negative cash flow, for any business
Seems to be similar to Quikwriting.
http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/projects/quikwriting/
(which is patent-infested, too, http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6031525.html )
This back-story on this is going to make an interesting case study on social trends with respect to PR management. Two factors, the absence of significant Silverlight content at the PDC conference and a misinterpretation of one tech reporters (@MaryJoFoley) work led to Silverlight dying at the hands of HTML5.

None of this squared with reality yet it had legs because Microsoft failed in those first few hours (even minutes) to see the trend and make a full throated rebuttal of what the story was becoming.

There is no brain-to-keyboard filter enforced on internet message boards, blogs, twitter etc so the story grew to the point that Microsoft was now ditching a multi-billion dollar developer division investment and killing a technology it was banking heavily on in favor of HTML. Did not one stop so say this doesn't make sense? My favorite was the chorus of people saying this meant that Windows Phone 7 was dead too (ala kin) since Silverlight is the core runtime for the phone. Really?

There is also a large contingent of people from the generally anti-Microsoft who just want Microsoft to fail because it makes them feel good or something. Posts like John Gruber stating simply "It’s over" are laughable. As if the long technical nightmare that was Silverlight has finally faded into the night and we can all breathe easier.

In the end this was not really a story about technology though, it was one about public relations and how being asleep for just minutes in the internet age can spell disaster. No amount of press releases can repair the damage that has been done. Easily 100K influential tech personalities have read or heard the Silverlight is dead story, they will tell countless others and for years people will be staying away from Silverlight because Microsoft killed it. Muglia said there are 600K Silverlight developers - I think they probably lost 150K of them over this and hundreds of thousands of others who would have started Silverlight projects in the coming years who won’t now because 'Silverlight is dead'.

Great work Microsoft. Thanks.
I just took it to mean "we train our new hires on day one on how to commit into our version control system". Nothing more.

I mean, c'mon, it's not rocket science these days to get a devbox up and running and talking to a svn or git server.
Logitech Revue With Google TV: The Official TechCrunch Review
In the article, he says:

"Through a friend of the family who used to work for the FBI, I later learned that as soon as I had left the Customs interrogation room, the local FBI office in Savannah, Georgia (where I was headed to visit my mom) had been notified of my arrival. As a result, the FBI then tapped the home phone at my mom’s house."

So it sounds as though it was through this same "friend" he learned of the phone tap as well.
OkCupid already has a form of this stratification in place. I'm just not sure how obvious it is (or whether people should even know about it).

If people consistently rate your photos higher, after the ratings clear a certain threshold, the system considers you "attractive." The system sends you an email congratulating you and about how "you'll be shown more attractive matches from now on."
I think you're taking the less charitable interpretation of this quote:

>A CompSci grad is supposed to be able to do difficult things that arts grads simply can’t understand.

I would except a CS grad to be able to know when to use an array and when to use a linked list, but I wouldn't expect a comp lit grad to. However, the comp lit grad should be able to contrast Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which I (a CS grad) sure couldn't.
Google made cellphones to keep Apple from making web browsing a second-rate experience on the iPhone. Again, insider baseball here, but grumblings were that some at Apple really wanted to push the app store and begin to deemphasize web browsing.

With Android Google has made it clear that everyone needs to support the web, and that there will be a substantial portion of users that are hitting the web with mobile devices.

I think w/o Android we'd probably see slightly different positioning from Apple on the web with mobile devices. Of course, we won't know for sure now. Android is here and given its growth everyone has to support the web in a real way. And as long as you're browsing the web then Google wins -- if its with iPhones, EVOs, or HD7s.
Video Games Keep Tricking Us Into Doing Things We Loathe
LOL +1

(but strangely, I would choose them not, in diff situations...)
| situation permitting

Yep, that's good 'ol vim for you.
I didn't read niyazpk's comment as a slur against your business model, but as an observation that assumes Cheez code is simpler to write and maintain then other code bases. I can see Cheez's approach working for a web based environment, but for something more involved, say Photoshop, this would probably be a disaster.
> Are you really worried about low income households hijacking the national agenda?

I'd expect half of US households to have an effect on the national agenda.

> Don't forget we live in a representative democracy.

So? The question is whether something is a good idea, not whether it can get popular support.

Consider Justin Bieber.