skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I asked again, saying we had over 100,000 albums, already ripped as lossless WAV files, with all of the info carefully entered by the artist themselves, ready to send to their servers with their exact specifications. They said sorry - you need to use this software - there is no other way.

Ugh. That means we have to pull each one of those CDs off of the shelf again, stick it in a Mac, then cut-and-paste every song title into that Mac software. But so be it. If that's what Apple needs, OK."

It would take about a day for a competent programmer to figure out how to automate this process.
And at the same time, test with absolute certainty your worth to Google. Your offer might turn out to be.. ummm somewhat less than millions.

The engineer who wanted to leave had a combination of skill and institutional knowledge that Google decided would cost more than $3.5M to replace. How many engineers could possibly be in this position at Google?
You skipped #4.
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How did this article provide any new or useful information?
Yeah, nobody has ever done that before.
Google's free Wi-Fi extends to the sky, on planes
Apple fixes broken IPv6 by breaking it some more
Did we read the same article? It wasn't about challenge nor was it a tirade against making things easy.
Love Robinson's insights about creativity being a process, not an event, and it being available in different formats to everyone.

Also, the notion that we each tend toward certain creative roles, using the example of Keith Richards creating opening riffs, then handing off the melody, speaks to the sometimes highly-compartmentalized nature of the process and maybe even the existence of certain innate creative preferences. Very cool interview.

Robinson's book is a great read, too.
Are people really worth this much money? I can't help but think "$3.5m gets me 15 really good developers for a year, and a swimming pool filled with chocolate pudding, just for fun."
"Does white text on white background become more readable if you add some black to the outside of the text?"

Shocking results!
New research provides effective battle planning for supercomputer war
Also note that this means that from Apple's perspective, music isn't "worth" being on iTunes unless they already have a deal with a "respectable" record label, "respectable" of course being up to Apple.
It would surprise me if this was true because C interop and embeddability was part of the reason for the creation of Lua. I don't believe you could say the same was true for Python.

Wikipedia: "Lua is intended to be embedded into other applications, and accordingly it provides a robust, easy to use C API. The API is divided into two parts: the Lua core and the Lua auxiliary library."
1 - Develop a typesetting language based on markdown + css which can be so good as LaTeX.

2 - Learn Python, Haskell, Lisp, Lua, Ruby and build you own f*cking good language.

3 - Discover what is a monad.

4 - Play with Arduino.

5 - Write a basic kernel from scratch.

6 - Forget about Vim and Emacs. Learn how to capture brainwaves, plug an usb cable on it and do an text editor based on thougths.
The ethical robot (w/ Video)
Most companies wouldn't give you anything. I think 3% is a fair amount.
To all those who question,"Why would you build such a thing?"

A. Because we can.
We had already automated it. But Apple was insisting we not use our own software or ripped files. That they had to come directly from the master audio CD.
Pros and cons aside, something in your gut is telling you that he's just not "up to snuff." These kinds of relationship just suck all around (in work as in romance and friendships, etc).

So it sounds like you've already made a decision. And the only thing to do at this point is to be as humane as possible about it. Being as it was your decision to hire him. And he's not incompetent (or a jerk) from what you're saying -- just not your long-term ideal.
"The payback pattern might work but it escalates violence."

Not all violence is payback. Defending against a Bully is one example of this. Defending yourself physically in an altercation is a violent behaviour but it is not retaliation or revenge. And as the personal anecdotes on this page reveal frequently stems the cycle of violence.

Now if you wait for days after and take revenge against the Bully then yes the violence will likely escalate. But self-defense is an entirely different thing.

My kids have been taught basic self-defense and should they ever be forced into a physical altercation have my full blessing to take whatever means are necessary to ensure they come out of the experience the victor.

Bullies thrive on the easy victim not defending yourself won't change this.
WSJ Tablet Edition for Android -- 7" means single column on a single page
Faint praise.
A variant on 4 that I've been meaning to get to for a little while now is to implement the same network protocol in several languages.
The social security crisis
Instead of reading in static files yourself, you can just use connect (or s/connect/express/g and it'll also work):

var connect = require('connect');
var server = connect.createServer(connect.staticProvider(__dirname + '/static')).listen(4000);

Pow, that was easy! Plus, since connect (and express) are just up the prototype chain from http.Server, it works great with socket.io.
I like how this article is suggesting new hires at Facebook get .1% of the company, or over 25 million dollars worth of stock at the current valuation.

I have a feeling if we actually knew the truth, and not this sensationalism, the whole situation would probably end up being pretty logical. Google is actually a pretty smart company.
No,

I have had quite a bit of trouble with rejection at different times.

My suspicion is that everyone who doesn't have some up-front, obvious fear of rejection has some other kind of fear buried somewhere in their psyche.
My vote is probably not. The plausibility of these things is pretty important. With the aspirin heart attack prevention example mentioned in the text, we have a plausible biological mechanism to give us reason to expect an effect, so we can be satisfied with more equivocal data. I'm not aware of a plausible mechanism for precognition - in fact, it seems like precognition would probably require a bunch of other things we think true to be false to work - so I'll need much stronger evidence than this to accept it.

Also, a thought - if precognition is possible, why don't we see more of it? Being able to improve recall of words is nifty and all, but it seems like it'd give you a huge advantage catching prey or evading predators so I'd expect to see evidence of it all over the place.
In the spirit of the topic...

0001: Learn a functional language well enough to write something of some complexity
0010: Create a product with 100+ users
0011: Sell 100+ products (doesn't have to be the same as 0010)
0100: Get married!
0101: Learn either vim or emacs
0110: Learn Mandarin
0111: Become an expert at something tech *and* something non-tech
1000: Contribute to an OSS project
1001: edit: learned binary. thanks for pointing out my stupidity lol
Could you define what you mean by a great engineer, please?
This posts proves something that I feel many seem to forget at times. Despite great products, Apple is human after all.
At least part of the "fun" on a loosely modern operating system is learning the nuts and bolts of the executable format and loading conventions.

I've never spent much time there, but some of the ideas are laid out well in this two part post:
http://blog.ksplice.com/2010/04/libc-free-world-2/

Doing it with _just_ a hex editor (ie writing out the ELF headers and sections yourself) may not be exactly what the commenter did, though. Cos that sounds really tedious.

I imagine that even writing "Hello, World" in the simpler way that you describe, on a simpler system (Apple IIe or so), would probably teach me something. I remember trying to write 6502 machine code in hex (no assembler) on my IIe when I was about 10 years old. It never worked then, I wonder if it would work now?
Wi-Fi networks less private than ever
you are worth what someone will pay.
Talk Trash About Yelpers and You Will Pay (On Yelp)
The Instapaper Default.png dilemma
That person works for Google and got Google stocks, not Facebook.
Looked at any clojure, erlang, javascript, scala, etc. postings lately? Objects and classes are out. Functional programming is in so I'm in good company and you don't have to pray for me at night.
Trying to import Gmail contacts information into Facebook (PIC)
This is how I feel about it. Mercury is an elegant language but I think the applicable domain is restricted to a very narrow subset of the industry. As a [primarily] web programmer I will generally only become more "cultured" by studying esoteric languages (Scheme, Haskell, Mercury, Curry) - that acculturation does diffuse into my day-to-day practice, though. I find myself structuring code in a novel manner (often times it's more clean, cogent, and effective too) that I would not normally have done with my narrower knowledge space, pre-saturation. I also see myself creating logic and using data structures that weren't historically typical of me.

I think every programmer should study esoteric languages. It's akin to the contrast of arithmetic and mathematical logic - you have the opportunity to appreciate and experience the ideal rather than the mundane. Not that beauty can't be found in building a web application (or any other application for that matter) using a framework and one's own set of libraries; I do everyday because I pour the expression of who I am into my practice - the thing is, it's [esoteric languages] the same sort of joy one derives from contemplating deep philosophical questions or from deliberately cultivating character through introspection.

I felt like whipping out the PhilosoRaptor tonight I guess...
Also :We maxed out wind tunnels. We jumped out of airplanes. We´ve done just about anything to make sure our storm umbrella withstands winds up to 100 km/h.

Gee, if they'd have just given me a call, they could have stood in the back of my pickup and saved a bunch of money on wind tunnels and airplanes...
I think the most important point that the article leaves out is that 99% of people don't want to put in those 10000 hours anyhow. Most people can get really good at most things if they really want it enough.

That said, it's ridiculous to suggest that anyone can be the next Beethoven or Einstein (or even Bobby Fischer) just from hard work.
How Baidu Beat Google and Won China
It seems like asking this question without ever nailing down what the author means by "worth" is inviting fuzzy thinking. There are plenty of definitions of "worth" whereby a single programmer may be worth 3.5 million, though it is certainly a tall bar to leap. A programmer who is one of a small set of programmers on a project that will make the company many, many millions and whose leaving will at the very least cause an inevitable and significant delay in the rollout may indeed be in a position to negotiate such a payout, but it's an awfully narrow set of circumstances. (Even somebody twice as genius as the first guy will require spin-up time.)

(Everyone's replaceable, but not equally, and not necessarily quickly.)
I listened to a Mixergy podcast earlier this week where the founder (a "business founder") started by doing some customer development, getting a prototype developed (paying to get it done, raising a round and then going to find co founders. Andrew (interviewer) assumed this meant a higher equity portion, but Rafael said it was close to an even split. The logic seemed to be that he could get better co founders this way.

To anyone who sees themselves in David's (the poster) position: How would you feel about coming on board at this stage? How would you feel about coming on board at this stage minus the investors?
I wonder what the ratio of new people signing up to people leaving facebook is.

I personally think it's more than just slightly higher than 1 to 1.
The old version, when you clicked an image it would take you to the page that contained the image and give you some controls at the top like 'view full size'. The page it took you to was fully functional. Now, when you click on the image it takes you to the containing page but it puts the image in an overlay on top of the page blocking the actual page. You can't see the page unless you close the overlay which takes you out of google image search altogether.

I don't think this is better for most people, and it certainly isn't better for me.

The scrolling instead of paging is a u no no in my book. For example I can look at 8 pages of images then quickly jump back to page 2 if I want to. I can't send a link to page 8, or bookmark it, and it breaks other u expectations. Maybe that's ok, but I don't see what gain overcomes those negatives.
The effects he recorded were small but statistically significant.

And this, ladies and gentlebeings, is why you should be very wary of ever believing studies with small but statistically significant effects.

Psi is the control group for modern science: they use the same methods in a case where no actual phenomena exists, and yet it looks like a regular field of scientific study, dealing with "small but statistically significant effects", and the larger the sample size, the smaller the effect, but it remains "statistically significant".

And not only that, if a psi study finds that someone can guess which cards someone else has drawn from a deck, using telepathy, you will next find that someone can predict cards before they are taken from the deck, using precognition, and then that subjects can influence which cards are taken from the deck, using telekinesis, and then you will discover that they can influence which cards are taken from the deck, two weeks later going backward in time.

With small effect sizes that are statistically significant, of course.

Not because people can actually control which cards are taken from the deck two weeks after the fact.

But because bad statistics are symmetrical in the directions of time and causation, and it makes no difference to bad statistics whether the temporal distance is two seconds or two weeks.
Who's paying $500,000 for rock stars??
The Donald's thoughts on raising successful kids
In disagreement. Google's revenue per person employee is $1.34 million[1]. Variation between individual engineers (according to Brooks et al) can be as high as 10x (leading to the famous "10x engineer" meme). This 3.5 mm is (most likely) vested over four years. Google doesn't hire from the bottom end, but given he's risen to staff (or is it senior staff?) level we can safely assume he's at least 2x more productive than an average engineer at Google.

So the "naive" numbers mean that over the course of ten years, they could make up to $10mm from this person.

Obviously, we don't know his marginal value (how much would Google lose if he was let go and no replacement was found?), but it's safe to assume Google will make money if he takes their offer and stays vs. if he leaves (even if wasn't going to a competitor): why would an engineering/metrics driven (sometimes to the point of "41 shades of blue") company make this offer, if they didn't think the bargain was theirs?

He could also easily be worth more than $10mm (imagine if his contribution was an algorithm to increase CTR on ads but a few percent!) and I imagine Google does make an effort to measure a) how much money a product makes b) how much do various engineers contribute to various projects. This is likely a highly rational decision.

[1] Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-google-reven...
The other features are there from the start and the description in the App Store states that these two features cost extra. I don't see the big problem. Hell, you have to fork out $39.95 for the Mac app for one of these to even be useful. What's another $15?
It is possible for a person to have enough institutional knowledge and skills that make them essentially irreplaceable (possibly someone that is a prominent head of some team who holds enormous control over the future direction of a product). It is the same rational for why CEO's routinely make such amounts of money per year.

It's because the decisions that they make have far reaching consequences, and if the CEO of a company is just a little better, it can snowball into a huge return. It is possible that a person in a position of power could easily represent a change in more than 3.5 million dollars in revenue in a year.

That said, from the personal perspective, I agree completely, no one could possibly ever make better use of so much capital as compared to what it could do when put towards some community venture. But in our system, this is something that the person receiving the money must come to terms with.
Yep, Unbounce does have some pretty great templates. I'm working on a system for templates. If all goes well, I'll get some "whoa, those look great" sorts of templates soon enough.

And thanks for pointing out the Chrome overflow problem. I just fixed it.
Also see the enlightening, entertaining discussion previously on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1878160

Patio11's comment there is particularly trenchant.
I think a more important question than the definition of "worth" might be the definition of "we".
"Facebook makes almost no money. That's not going to change."

I doubt that you honestly believe that, but if you do -- want to make a longbet? I bet Facebook will 5x their revenues in the next 2 years. Loser pays $5,000 to a charity of the winner's choice. I'm 100% serious.
Lord of the Flies is what we have now. The adults take what they need and otherwise leave children to make a fairly brutal society for themselves. They are just a natural resource, after all.

Not being little monsters should be a part of their education. Instead, they have to grow up and live in the adult world for several years before they actually learn to act like adults.
You have about as much chance of changing his behavior by taking a beating and then talking to him as you do of winning the lottery.

Talking alone does almost nothing. Now if you defend yourself and then treat the bully like a human being and even try to be a friend you might make some headway.
another option is cloudhead's node-static:

https://github.com/cloudhead/node-static
Unix didn't get "fixed" later.

When did Unix get fixed?
I'm from the United States, and I never appreciated this country until I spent a year in Denmark! Socialism seems to be working for the most part, but I don't like the conformist attitude and culture it encourages.
What do you mean "we", white man?
I think the problem is extrapolating from simple examples used to illustrate thing.

eg Rich Dad or similar: You have an idea for a company. You create the company and deposit $10k in it's account. You bring on a programmer to build the project paying him in equity. The company could be worth $100m in a few years, so his 10% is better than a salary.

I'm sure parallel toy ideas exist in people's minds about investors. If someone puts $1m into a company that's still mostly an idea and a prototype, it doesn't seem all that far fetched that the investor would expect to basically own the company. What have the founders contributed? An idea and 6 month work. What has the investor contributed? $1m.

In the absence of actual experience, people develop biases based one imagined experiences where they are the hero. I don't mean that in a bad way. Everyone does it. It's hard to see an outside perspective unless you encounter it.
First Photos of the Nexus S, The Next Google Phone Made by Samsung
Once its done, someone should start down the path of implementing minecraft on it :)
Web apps don't register, but actual silicon does:

http://www.suite101.com/content/top-us-imports--exports-2009...
What's the difference? We're substituting having superior intellect with having the willpower to work hard. It seems weird to say that at first. But the more I think about it, the more I think there must be a reason why some people do persevere enough to become "genius" level at something, and some people never do.

Personally, I think work ethic, along with intellect and charisma, is something you are partially born with. It's just silly to say that genetics play no factor: do those with severe mental disabilities just not work hard enough? Think about it as your genes defining a range: you can be between the 30th and 75th percentile of human prowess. Where you fall in that range is up to you.
Control over their world, as in their own lives. We could afford to give them a lot more of that than we do now.
1000: Learn binary!
You may have replied to the wrong comment of mine, as my above comment didn't suggest that talking is the only way to change his behavior. Legal threats work very well, too, as do messages from their parents.

When you suggest defending yourself, and then trying to be helpful in making the bully no longer a bully, that's a completely different strategy than what others are suggesting, one I wouldn't mind seeing tried out more! What others are suggesting is just beat the bully and now he's someone else's problem.
Why not? Especially HP, they're going heavy into the cloud infrastructure space. A lot of Google's scale expertise would probably come in handy. And Adobe being a software company... well, good software companies always want good programmers. Clearly, Google has those.
I used copy-and-paste, and had to be quite nimble, to be faster than the re-direct.
Similar:

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/09/16/most-startups-...
Hiring Great Developers: The Pre-Screening
The effects of your comment on me were small but statistically significant.
If the guy is really top 1% in the world, why not? How much do the top 1% athletes, musicians, etc, make? An argument can probably be made for a top 1% coder.
it's hard to pin down what "programming" is. there are a variety of things that "programmers" must do, from designing algorithms and system abstractions, to writing implementations in quirky languages under real-world constraints.

if programming was a single skill, being on team wouldn't be so awesome (and working with other programmers is definitely awesome).
The fact that people write tediously comprehensive imperative unit tests to verify their programs should be a warning sign that the use cases for logic programming may be more much general than you think. A hunch, nothing more. I'm just starting to dig into this stuff.
hmmm, no mention that Google actually had >50% search market share in China during 2001-2002.

Badiu' share only start to sky rocket after:

1) people in China having lag and latency issue surfing Google's website.
2) Baidu's deep linking of pirated mp3 music files. In effect Baidu acts like thepiratebay.com and the China's youths defected en mass to Baidu.
The easiest argument against your second point is precisely because we don't expect to find it. Frequently if findings disagree very strongly with our preconceptions (as one like this would), we are likely to dismiss them, not notice them, and/or chalk it up to some kind of error.

Not to say that I believe these results will hold up, I'm pretty sure they won't.
I think you're misreading him.

If you really had lossless wavs and data, you could have emulated a 'CD' and had the apple software rip it, then put in the tags. Probably would have saved thousands of man hours compared to putting physical CDs in the drives.
Ignore the haters and promote nano!
Scan a File for Virus before Downloading in Chrome
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thanks - good point
Is it on Android, or on an "Android-based operating system" as mentioned in the article?