skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think JN's choice of the Yale photo was a bad example. It shows a collegial, multi-ethnic, communal environment that probably was meant to convey an image. By contrast, I've been to software sites where the stock photos of smiling people all gazing at a single laptop screen look positively asinine. Even worse are the glass and steel building photos that are meant to convey "business". Those types of images are worthless and ignored.
Apple has stated that they don't see a need to support Blu-ray on Macs, that USB3 isn't ready for prime-time, and that they're stopping their releases of their version of Java.
Amazon - Seattle WA

We are looking for a strong Systems Support Engineer. No remote. We like to describe our team as a 'Startup' within Amazon, as our part of the business is still growing rapidly and our engineers can have a lot of influence on where the product goes.

Job description below. Contact me at ${hn_username}@gmail.com if you have any questions.

The Amazon Services team is looking for a great Systems Support Engineer to keep our systems running. You should be comfortable in a Linux environment, be able to automate everything you did yesterday, and willing to troubleshoot and solve new problems on a daily basis. Come join one of the fastest growing teams within Amazon.

Responsibilities:

-Maintain stability and performance of our systems via tickets during oncall shifts

-Diagnose and troubleshoot new production issues that affect our customers

-Create and maintain standard operating procedure documents for new issues identified

-Automate operational tasks to assist with our scaling needs

Requirements:

-Proficiency in a scripting language (Ruby, Perl, Python, Shell)

-Familiar with SQL databases

-Comfortable navigating a Linux environment

-Basic understanding of web application architectures

Bonus points:

-Written a Rails application

-Deep knowledge of Oracle databases

-Troubleshooting experience

-Ticketing experience
Google speeds its new Web video software
How a Self-Employed Person Can Curb Isolation
I'm not a user, but have friends who do. If you do as well, encourage them to play safe, and test the material:
http://dancesafe.org/health-and-safety/adulterant-screening-...
It's be so great if we didn't turn HN into "Hot or Not". Especially for the women who read it.
It was a question of KoZeN, not about the article.
Funny thing is the people that they show you before signing up are pretty decent looking.
And what about the time and money spent by people developing skills for the Apple ecosystem — Objective-C, XCode, iTunes partnerships, etc? There's a network effect in play here and the more territories that Apple dominates, the easier it becomes to parlay with inertia...
As difficult as it is to implement time correctly in the OS, I imagine the timer/alarm apps that Apple wrote don't use any OS features (beyond the "what time is it?" API) so all of the issues usually arise in application code.
Aerotropolis
1- True, but if you are ugly and have little else to offer than you will settle for ugly.

2- I think we will see lots of decent looking people signing up because they think "in a pool of ugliness I will beauty queen", and that will help. For example in the latest members section, the girl on the top right is not ugly.
9 years back, I took a group of Shanghai government officials on a tour of U.S. tech companies. In attempts to appease their stomaches we went to Chinatown in D.C., NYC, SF. They were all terribly disappointed with the food. Why so? Well, it turns out the Chinatowns in the U.S. aren't quite a fair representation of all of China. Be careful about transferring your knowledge of one to the other.

As to your assertion that if you did move to China you would immerse yourself, well, perhaps you should go give it a try. I did it for 10 years. I'm not your typical American and I needed to come up for air every now and then and re-assimilate with my Western brethren.
What's the "old Atom wiki"?
Putting your intelligence to the ultimate test
I think Apple's not going to "win" the battle with Flash. They're simply going to drive a portion of their customers to Android in the interim due to fighting it. Like many actual wars, everyone involved will lose.

When I use my iPad, the #1 reason I put it down and pick up my laptop is that I want to watch a video (quite frequently one I found here in fact) or play a game that I can't. It's to the point where I now just dig out the laptop if I want to read Hacker News as a result. I made the mistake of taking the iPad on a trip without my laptop, only to find I couldn't view the website of any good restaurant. (Granted there's no reason those websites should be one giant SWF, but they are.)

You don't realize how much Flash stuff is on the web until you use an iPad.
It is not unheard of for an outsider to clearly see the structural problems that an insider can not.

Though, if this is a Google that can not Get Things Done I'd love (or possibly hate) to see one that can. Shutting down Wave, which was an interesting idea backed by what appeared to be horrifying code and a horrifying protocol, doesn't exactly strike me as proof of an inability to get things done. They did it, it "sucked" (for suitable values of sucked), and they got the decision to pull it down after a reasonable market testing period done, from what I saw.
I wonder what Iridium could have done better, if they used more agile methods and followed the market. Sure, they could have discovered it wouldn't work half way though, given the remaining money back to investors and closed down. But what company does that?

I cannot really see a good "minimum viable product" to test the market for Iridium either. Nobody would buy a phone that only works for an hour each day, when the first satellite in orbit is overhead.
This coupled with the emergence of storing data online will make phones and their OSes completely non-sticky, and therefore very competitive. I think there are probably 20 apps that every phone needs to have, but beyond that its long tail.

Virtually nobody I know goes to get the same phone they currently have due to any type of lockin. In fact, I've seen more often than not, that people want a different kind of phone. Because its almost like a toy for adults.

Apple is dominant today, but I fully expect that in two years there will be some new company that everyone will be watching, who today no one really takes seriously (or may have even heard of).
> I've never heard of allowances for alternate types of examination being made for this before...

Most (maybe all?) US universities will make similar allowances for students with mental illness. The student and teacher usually work out alternatives for assignments if necessary.

> Seems like it would be something that's hard to draw the line between a legitimate psychological issue and normal behavior. I'd venture that nearly everyone experiences some sort of "exam anxiety".

This is exactly the problem with a number of different psychiatric disorders. The bad cases, those are easy to diagnose. The closer you get to the "average" end of the spectrum is where it gets harder to distinguish. In these cases, I think it's always a good idea to get a second opinion.

Personally, I think this is just some kind of university political coup. It's my impression that (in the States) getting a PhD isn't really about exams. Instead, one focuses on doing research and choosing something to specialize on in their field. Research stuff, publish stuff, pass classes, propose thesis, write thesis.

Unless it's different in Canada, who cares if this kid didn't take an exam? If he has done some research, published something, and written a thesis, I'm pretty okay with him having earned a PhD.

I'm sure there's about a million different things I don't know about this particular incident, though. It does seem really weird that this professor would take the issue to the legal system. Wouldn't that jeopardize his future in academia? Doesn't seem worth it.
I think what you say is very true. I know one fellow from Electrical Engineering, who was very much like Gabi. Insanely smart (did the 5-year degree in 4 years, with an A+ in every course except two), utter balls at tact and diplomacy. He actually quit his masters because he couldn't deal with the politics at that level.
F/W 2010 Collection from Guiseppe Zanotti | Shoes Blog
Where are you looking for jobs ?

There are at least a couple of hundred companies recruiting for graduate level developers in the UK.

I'm guessing location might be the primary thing holding you back if you're only looking for jobs locally, have you considered looking for jobs elsewhere in the country ?
In discussions with friends, they've asked me why I tend to defend Apple and dislike Microsoft, when it seems that they both do the same things. Why is FairPlay okay, but PlaysForSure wrong?

For me, it primarily comes down to the fact that Apple has tended to impose restrictions within its own little empire, and not outside of it; for the large part, Apple seems to follow the Principle of Least Aggression. Even with the latest Flash shenanigans, Apple isn't making deals with partners to kill Flash. They're not trying to ruin support on Android or anything. They're just not including it by default on the new Airs anymore, and sort of publicly saying that they think it sucks.

I agree with David, though: Apple's cultural position of power means that if they want to keep our hearts and minds, they have some responsibility to play nice.
I am surprised there is a problem with CS grads not finding jobs. Granted, I am in VT, but we can't fill programmer positions for anything here; though, I wouldn't hire a Java-only recent CS grad unless s/he could find a way to really show they were fantastic problem solvers. (as we don't do Java or much OO in general)
Sorry, Blekko Is Doomed
I imagine most people want the pre-IPO stock. That's the only reason I could honestly conceive. It's the sad truth of the world we live in. Facebook is, like MySpace, always at risk of being overwhelmed by the next social go-to website. Application developers follow the users, not the platform.
This smells like churnalism to me, particularly when you take into account the history of the author : http://www.cmswire.com/author/josette-rigsby/ (see 1. the PR notice and 2. that most of their recent articles are quite obviously rehashed press releases.)
Look at the context of my question. I wasn't asking about the University in the article.
Ronja, open-source freespace optic communication
Freespace optics has the potential of providing orders of magnitude improvements over microwave links. So far, Ronja offers a 10MB package that is extremely affordable to build: <$100. Commercial equivalents can go easily into the thousands of dollars.
The first thing I ever did with my HN account was make a submission that made it to the front page. There will be some false positives from banning noob submissions.
WRT the student with exam anxiety: I can sympathize, as I have some pretty crippling anxiety (albiet in other areas). However what I have to wonder is this. If you've got exam anxiety, what happens when you get your PhD, and your university is pressuring you to publish. "You haven't put out a paper in over a year. We're giving you 2 months to get on that, if you don't, we'll find someone who will". What do you do about your 'paper anxiety' then? It really sucks that you have to deal with this, but the thing is that that's life. If you can't deal with it now, you're not going to be any better dealing with it later.
Looking at his qualifications, I think he'll have no problem getting a similar role in another university.
The Semantic Web utopia suffered from pretty bad chicken-or-egg problem: why would anybody publish semantic data when nobody used it, and why would anybody consume it when none was available. Instead of the utopia, I'm seeing technologies of the Semantic Web stack pop up in different places... CMSs publish RDFa for SEO purposes (see Google's Rich Snippets), and for example MeeGo's Tracker data handling layer is actually an RDF triplestore, with SparQL provided as the main API for app developers.

Apart from these, I see the big potential for these technologies in integration: if you publish your content with RDFa annotations, your site has an API 'for free'.
Cloud Throw Down:  Part 1
The clouds available from Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, Rackspace and others have a few things in common. They’re all providing storage, APIs, and other bits around the premise of the cloud. They all also run on virtualized operating systems. This blog entry I’m going to focus on some key features and considerations I’ve run into over the last year or so working with these two cloud stacks. I’ll discuss a specific feature and then will rate it declaring a winner.
Its not feasible to "test" knowledge always. Many degrees, are the qualification to practice a particular profession.

Think about how bad it would be, if medical degree holders do not know how to treat people, pilot license holder do not know how to fly airplanes or civil engineer degree holder not knowing what alleviation is safe for the suspension bridge. The only way patients/flying authorities/ government authorities etc. would know if a doctor/pilot/engineer is qualified to carryout the assigned task, if the degree actually reflect a reasonable level of proficiency in the particular field.
They are not and a comparable Android phones costs around 27 k( 520$). But here we are talking of pervasiveness of the platforms rather then capabilities of the phones.
Misleading title: GTD generally refers to a productivity management system; the article doesn't actually refer to the system in any way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done
FB treats friendship like its bimodal when in fact its not. People have many levels of friendship and FB does not take that into account. IMHO that is the main weakness w/ their site right now.
"the diner that pays staff less than minimum wage"

It seems this is customary for most restaurants in the US, Chinese or otherwise.
It depends on the internship. Lots of internships seem to be of the "do all the shitty jobs that nobody else wants to do because you are free labor" variety, and not the "trade the salary you deserve for lots of mentoring and training while we help prepare you for your career" variety. If the internship is Google's Summer of Code, that's one thing, if it is fetching Mountain Dew's and snacks for the guy that's actually building something, that is something else entirely.
This may be a tiny blip in a larger trend, actually. Jonathan Harris wrote an essay sometime back called World Building in a Crazy World (http://www.number27.org/worldbuilding.html) where he argues, approximately, that social connection over the Internet has been moving towards the short and superficial for some time now, and has found an end-point in Twitter.

I believe he's right - when you've hit Twitter, the only way to go is to swing right back to intimacy - to meaningful, private digital connections. The whole essay is well worth a read.

Edit: Also, isn't the things that McClure is arguing for essentially what http://www.frid.ge/ is doing?
I'd have to disagree regarding rushes in high level play. I most enjoy 4v4 random and a key move is decimating one opponent's economy to the point that they become a non-factor in the game. With this build order in a 4v4 one player can neutralize a Protoss or Zerg player and then pivot to mutas or continue with roach/hydra. Since your economy isn't in shambles like a traditional 6 pool zergling rush, even if you fail with the roaches you are still left in acceptable shape to assist your teammates.

I specify this being useful in 4v4 against Protoss/Zerg as Terran traditionally wall and the few seconds it takes to burst through the wall may give their teammates time to mobilize.

Note- I wrote this under the impression that your mentioning "all-in rushes" didn't include sending your drones in to act as meat shields. In a 4v4 that would be suicide and invalidate my point.
Optimizely (YC W10): Ditching Politics for Entrepreneurship
Don't Let DNS be Your Single Point of Failure
And wouldn't that have been a huge improvement over the actual outcome? Shutting down early and saving 3 Billion dollars is 125X what they ended up selling for in bankruptcy.
We're hiring nothing but remote developers from around the globe here at deviantART. We also have flexible schedules. I'm probably biased, but I think we have some of the best web developers in the world because of this.

Our existing development team is already distributed, so all of our systems and workflow are already setup to handle remote development and different timezones. We have a lot of technical challenges to solve and interesting projects, so if you think you have what it takes: http://deviantart.theresumator.com/apply/eR4wR2/
I agree, especially since one is passive and one is active :) The entire nature of passive is you don't have to do very much :P

However, I think the question is a bit deeper. What method seems to be best, or better yet, what method seems to get the best results/hires?
Cringely has a rambling thesis here. Too many loose ends to properly critique.

I will give him this: looking up functional diaspora in the big G yields equally rambling results.

1 - first 2 entries are Cringely's own

2 - third entry is a Google book excerpt on "Hitler's black victims" which has no use of the word diaspora

3 - fourth is the Facebook open source "competitor"
> When Google decided that cellphones needed an open option to keep carriers and developers honest

Not only is this not what happened (they made a cell phone OS to make money), I'm not even sure it makes sense. What do you mean "honest"?
IIRC they didn't ban him - rather, they told him that if he kept competing they'd just cancel the competition. This was not out of spite, but because he was so dominant that it was discouraging the other players from even trying.
I agree, to me it has to be the pre-IPO stock. At least for me, it seems like Google has much cooler problem sets to work on. I don't know what is in the queue for Facebook but Google tends to get into a lot of interesting technologies. They remind me of Bell Labs.
I don't think Apple is deliberately treating non-US customers as second-class customers. If it wasn't for the Energy Policy Act of 2005 [1], the US would have changed their clocks yesterday as well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005#Chang...
The author is a headhunter and wrote a great guide to getting a quant job (www.ieor.columbia.edu/pdf-files/Paul_Dominic.pdf [PDF]). I guess that skews his perspective a bit in what he's looking for (numerical algorithms and C++). I'm guessing the situation isn't that bad for companies looking for plain old Java programmers. Finding graduates experienced with C++ and numerical algorithms is substantially harder!
Also available as a toy - look for Fly pen.
I think his point is they don't need to be comparable. Apple "over-delivers" because of its core demographic and commitment to a small product range. This naturally limits adoption outside that demographic. Though Apple perhaps doesn't care because they're targeting the richest consumers in the richest nations.
I was under the impression that VT as a whole was having a very hard time filling jobs... I just can't see myself moving to Burlington and having to survive those winters (though I bet you get a lot of coding done when it is -100* outside). I have a hard enough time with Connecticut winters.
But then the trouble is that you broke into someone's house, not that you were on heroin.

I think it'd be reasonable to make the penalty for crimes committed under the influence to be equivalent to conciously choosing to commit the crime. This seems to solve that issue to me.
I like this article because I see examples of this mistake all the time.

There is a startup (forget the name) who is seeking to bring smartphone like features to the much larger feature phone segment of the market (~80% of the market). It's a big idea and the potential market is huge... on paper.

The problem? Technology is ever changing. Today what are $500-1000 devices (and thus the top 20% of the market) will in 2 years cost half that and be 50% of the market. So they're betting on a business that by the nature of pretty much anything to do with silicon, is a dying business. Basically all phones will be smartphones in the next 5 years.

In the digital camera market, Olympus and some others designed the FourThirds sensor format for digital DSLRs some years ago. They did this at the time when Canon and Nikon were making larger sensors and putting them in $1200-2000 bodies. Their idea? Reduce the cost of the sensor and have something that is compelling both in terms of price but in body and (in particular) lens size.

The problems? APS-C sized sensors became basically a commodity item. So FourThirds has only a size advantage and not really a cost advantage. Canon and Nikon (in particular) have much larger markets and the economies of scale that really matter when it comes to lenses.

So the lesson of the article is don't bet your business in what is a transitory problem.
Apple's never really had power outside of its empire before. This is a pretty new position they're in now.

With that said, the difference between MS and Apple is that Apple builds the full stack. Apple blocking Psystar from creating clones effectively blocks anyone else from creating Apple products, thus Apple has a lot fewer people to have to bully. The just keep everyone off their block. With that said, within the industry, Apple's bullying of Intel is rather legendary, given their small market position.

Where Apple does dominate they certainly don't mind pushing people around.

MS works with a lot more partners therefore there is a lot more opportunity for bullying.

My concern with Apple is that while Steve Jobs is brilliant, he also rules with what seems to be a larger degree of malice. With MS its obvious where they're going -- where the money is. With Apple that's usually the case, but sometimes its where Steve is just really mad. There's no single person, including Bill, at MS who wields that type of power.
If you realize your market is niche, would you build different satellites than what they did? Change the economics of it somehow (cheaper phones, lower cost per minute, longer life on the sattelites etc) ? Make a satellite/ground station hybrid that can work through most walls? Shrink the phone size?
Descriptive Essay Writing Guide for Quality
Descriptive essay writing is assigned to students to help them improve their ability to relay information and to be observant. These two traits are vital to enable students to write a quality descriptive essay which will get them a high grade.
Paul & Dominic's Guide to Getting a Job in Quantitative Finance [PDF]
My friend is preparing to enter a mathematics masters (actually the suspended prof was going to be his advisor), and he's already stressing out. He tells me that at that level of study (in mathematics), it's not uncommon for over half the grad student body to be illegally taking ritalin or something, pulling 20-hour days every day and still freaking out that they can't take it.

Higher education at that level is very stressful, and a part of me is offended that certain anxieties are given exceptions since they're 'health disorders', while other, just-as-crippling anxieties are ignored.
Starcraft has always struck me as a game of compound interest, and the optimal early builds always seem to be just that: maximizing an instantaneous rate-of-production, which will correlate to maximizing your instantaneous rates-of-doing-damage

It's always seemed like more of an economic strategy game than an actual "fronts of battle" kind of strategy.
Most of those developers hadn't heard of Objective-C just a few years ago. If something compelling enough comes around, they'll switch again.