skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't mind pay-for-what-you-use services... "unlimited" plans of anything rarely reflect the economic realities of providing the service. Paying by usage seems intuitively fair to me.

I do mind that companies try to make money by forcing you to predict your usage in a given month. I never understood why it would be so difficult to dynamically adjust pricing as usage goes up.
Thanks for the advise. I'll try that.
Its good (s)he put this up. It does clarify things, and many people have missed it.

For example, I only saw these guidelines for first time 11hrs ago, and I've been here for 39 days.
I still don't get it how spelling error = bad hire. I probably might have small gramatical lapses, but that doesn't make me a bad engineer.

Keep in mind that not everybody knows English natively. I was born in a different country, and know three other languages, and it is common to say a word, and the real meaning is something different from what I think it is.

I always spell behaviour, with the U, and word always get is a misspelling, which obviously is not.

As I said, I hope a that a future employer is able to look past superficialities, and get to the core if I am a good engineer, and fit for their culture.

At my previous Coorporate Job (big finance company), everybody had to dress well (collared Shirts all the time), and your resume had to look good, be formated right, yet the engineers that worked there were two notches down, both in quality and quantity of the work, from the current company where I work now, where everybody dresses casually, people have less formalities and have the "Less b.s. and let's get things done" attitude.

Obviously people that care about "looks", and appearances, would not be comfortable at this place.

Plus, at work I have both word, and Automatic spellcheck on emails. Yet gramatical errors are almost inevitable for a foreign born, still this doesn't make me a lesser engineer, or a lesser hacker.
Possibly, though it seems somewhat more complex than that.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/F/foo.html
Who pulled the plug on Weezer's "Pork and Beans" YouTube video?
Judging by the fact that until they came under open and public criticism they had 3 mysql servers running and a very small development team the only thing twitter was doing wrong was not spending their money.
it's slow, Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /var/www/taggl.net/www.taggl.net/_data/all.api.inc on line 223
Edward Deming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming) is probably the original proponent of this idea. He believed that the best motivator is essentially pride - a job well done is its own reward - and that good management means eliminating anything that gets in the way of that, including incentive programs.
I think that's exactly what we'll have to do - design the save files to fit in 100k. This wasn't by design - this was 1 day from release, where we discovered that amazingly enough there's no way to tell if a save was successful or not in Flash, so we couldn't ask people to up their storage only when needed (which should be rarely).
Django 1.0 is coming in early September
True. The author does not draw the line between using getters/setters and other methods to access data. I guess this is the motivation for ideas such as "leaky abstractions."
Definitely true for natural languages. English is very pragmatic and "dry" to my ear, perfect for engineering.

But I feel like all mainstream programming languages aren't truly "languages", they're mostly dialects of X, where "X" is a fusion of Lisp and C, i.e. same old ideas repackaged in different syntactic packaging.

This is why I am always skeptical about dramatic increases in productivity due to a language switch. Good editor and decent chair produce similar boosts: noticeable? Sometimes. Dramatic? No.

In my opinion two most important characteristics of programming languages are recruiting and maintainability. The former is important because certain languages attract better quality engineers and some are impossible to find experts for. Maintainability speaks for itself: the code should be easy to transform indefinitely, beat into shape, keep improving upon, etc.
We could, but that ends up being a lot of traffic. We'd expect the average person to save a lot more than once (in Robokill it's automatic), so you're looking at at least 100tb of traffic - a pretty big hassle.

If the game routes through rocksolidarcade.com (which is probably a good idea) to save/load things, traffic ends up being 38 cents a gb - 10 for upstream/downstream at Softlayer, and 18 at S3. I think that's pretty close to being impractical.

I'm going to design the next game around the 100k limitation and explicit saves, so this problem will go away anyway.
Dorma,bedding soft and bedroom accessories from Dunelm
For some reason the CPU usage is very high and sometimes controls stop responding on my system (Athlon 3200+), which is annoying in big fights / when you fall off a cliff. Great game though!
From their product blog in May 2008:

"Each of the 37 Signals products comes with a free trial and depending on the size of your organization and project needs, some of the solutions are free. You just have to give them a try."

http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2008/05/4-great-tools-t....
Depends on your involvement and how far along the companies are. From your description, my guess is that all the companies are at an early/fragile stage.

I would just have one universal "Hacker at Large" sort of card for now. That option will ALWAYS come in handy.
FOIL implementation with Haskell, Lisp, Erlang, OCAML, others ?
Hello guys,
I've the opportunity to write a parallel version of the FOIL algorithm for an ILP system. I've the options to choose whichever functional language I want, what would you guys choose and why ? It's seems that erlang would be a good fit due to it's support for concurrency, Lisp with integration with PVM or MPI would also be a good option I think, but how about the others ?
We haven't had many people show up in suits to interviews at Justin.tv, but it's a reasonably accurate indicator of failure. I try not to prejudge, but there's only so many times you can see a correlation and not start to stereotype.
HN's karma system is a sort of "incentive superficiality", yet it seems to work well enough. Perhaps a similar model of collective peer review could be applied to the work place. It might address some of the injustices that Joel mentioned, such as the strategic thinker whose insights weren't recognized by management, but valued by his peers. Would you be willing to "up vote" your colleagues?
A spelling error can be a superficiality, but it can also be a symptom of an underlying problem: sloppy thinking.

And sloppy thinkers generally make for for poor programmers, because they keep making the same trivial mistakes, keep breaking the build, and so forth.

There are, of course, many people who are careful programmers but sloppy writers. The question is, should the company take that risk? A large company probably can afford to take that risk, smaller companies probably can't.

And if programmers make spelling mistakes in function/variable names, then yes, I'm afraid that makes them lesser engineers.
Two hints, guys:

-9 != -10

-11 != -10
Then how do you explain your (as in 37signal's) own lapses?
When you phone them up to arrange an interview time, ask them about the dress code. Problem solved.
wtop: "top" for Apache, plus powerful log grepping
What would YOU ask the RedHat ExecVP? or the ExecDir of the Linux Foundation?
If you had a half hour with Jim Zemlin or Paul Cormier, what would YOU ask?

I'll be interviewing both these dudes later in the week. I could ask the "usual" set of softball questions, but I'd prefer to ask questions that come from the community.
Never mind - I just noticed your reply on 37signals.com to someone else, which I felt was a bit of a cop-out given the emphasis you placed on the company name. If it was that important, I would have thought you would get it right on things like your incorporated company name or public blog.

JF 16 Jun 08

Ben, we’re all about making mistakes. We make them all the time. But making a spelling mistake on a job application is the one place you shouldn’t be making a spelling mistake. And I can promise you this opinion isn’t unique to 37signals, we’ve just chosen to talk about it publicly.

We will likely be sharing part of the designer hiring process once we’ve successfully hired someone. It wouldn’t make sense to share a resume with someone we’re considering if we haven’t hired them yet. Someone could lose their current job that way. Or we might be setting unfair expectations for someone.
The rule I typically follow is to go one level of dress beyond whatever the typical dress for the company is. So if it is a startup where people would normally wear geeky black shirts with witty sayings on them, wear jeans and a polo shirt or a dress shirt, or even no-tie business casual at your discretion.

If the dress is normally no-tie business casual, wear business casual with a tie or a suit if that makes you feel comfortable. You definitely don't have to wear a suit for an engineering interview, you can wear a shirt and tie and no jacket.

So I would ask the HR person who scheduled your interview what people/the boss normally wear to work, then go one level higher in dressiness where one level higher is a fluid concept based on your personal comfort level.
Certainly speed requires fast servers, but if there's not much demand, there's a good chance that it will be faster than a popular service on a single machine.

For example, I bet twitter on a VPS had better uptime than the current version.
Cook like an engineer
Electro-Shock Therapy: How GM is acting like a start-up
Whoever you are, notakarmawhore, thanks for registering a dummy account to do this. Personally, I am far less annoyed by down-voting, trolling and bias, than I am by the people who are increasingly using "community" posts to bump their karma.

In particular, the "Ask YC/Ask PG" posts ("Ask PG: what color is your belly button lint?") were cool at first, but lately, they're contributing less signal, and more noise.
References to high school after any time in college is suspect; at the adult stage you should be referencing adult accomplishments and activities.
I think the majority of people disagree (in face to face communications). Although passive aggressive is not good, its far more common to behave that way face to face then outright aggression.

And the guidelines talk about making it more like face to face and less like traditional online forums.
The clothing is just a facade, what really counts is how you act. As such, going fully suited is the best policy, but feel free to customize it a bit.. a slightly informal tie, a quirky jacket, perhaps. You need to look like you've made an effort.

Once you're in and they get a good first impression, then lead with your personality. If you're an interesting person but you don't get the job because you're dressed too formally, you clearly didn't use your personality.. because while first impressions can be made by dress, the impression made ten minutes into an interview should have been driven 99% by the PERSONALITY of the interviewee.

Use the suit to get the first impression, use your personality for the rest.
I think that counts corporate developers, and corporations are not switching to Vista yet. And anything you write for XP will port to Vista, so there is no reason to target Vista specifically. To port to Vista, you may have to add a manifest file to your software and possibly rewrite some parts like installer scripts, rethink some of the flow of the program due to user prompts that might popup and scare the user, and update documentation to warn users. But developers had the same problem of having to test in Windows XP separately from Windows 2000 and Windows 98 when XP came out.

Microsoft's own latest software remains compatible with Windows XP, and while Vista is one extra operating system you will have to test for, Virtual Machines let you run multiple operating systems on one computer.

That's not to say I miss my Vista system that I ditched for my mac. :)
The efficiency could be terrible and still save energy verses the parasitic draw of the multiple wall-warts I need to charge all of my stuff today.

This doesn't even take into account the energy needed to make and ship so many different adapters.
The point Joel is making is that it is hard to objectively quantify individual contributions to a group effort in software development. The points about the 'team glue' and the 'researcher' are especially poignant. It's hard to put a value on those soft skills.
At any startup I would want to work for, wearing a suit would at worst be neutral.
Some people might not like paypal but a vast majority of users will be hoping for this option (me for one). If you can add it as an option i'd recommend it.
http://ask.searchyc.com/
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive
Google’s Joe Kraus Speaks At Supernova Conference about Friend Connect and OpenID
Give it time. The computer manufacturers are no longer supporting XP. If you buy a Dell now, you have to get Vista. So before long everyone will port over to Vista.
The Browser Is The New Operating System
My recent experience with Vista has been hell.

It virtualizes c:\Program Files for "compatibility" so that you can see bizarre situations like writing to a file and then having it not exist where you thought it was.

To avoid these virtual store problems, you have to embed XML in your application's executable to get the infamous ALLOW or DENY window to bother the user. If you use Visual Studio 2005 to do it, watch out! There's a bug in a certain class of unpatched XP that blue screens the computer because of the way the XML is structured that Visual Studio's manifest tool spits out when it merges manifest fragments. It's all overly complicated.

I would never develop Windows software if there wasn't a market for it--it's exciting to see the underdogs picking up marketshare.
I also have this experience. I am a native English speaker who learned German quite young. I still think certain things in German, especially things that I learned either in German, or during that period of my life.

As noted, "ja, genau" still echoes in my mind for total agreement. There just doesn't seem as good an English equivalent!
Apple settles patent suit over iPhone visual voice mail
Ineligible AT&T Customers Need to Pay Full Price For iPhone 3G
i work at the same startup as tlrobinson and boucher. wearing a suit here would be neutral.
If you keep it secret, then I suppose that incentive pay is less harmful. The thing is, do you really want to go that way?

I think that the only way that incentives are not harmful is if they're spread evenly across teams and tied to product success in the market. Most people can grasp why the team behind a successful product is paid more. Even then, though, you risk alienating the teams that don't do quite as well for reasons that aren't in their control.
I have certainly disparaged the Oracle optimizer on occasion.

However, I don't believe it's appropriate to swear in code, and that any examples would be expected to come back and bite you on the bottom.
Pathetic: Google Finance Dies at night
I am a big fan of Google Finance. When the markets are closed, Google finance closes and it basically just times out. No Downtime message, just " Problem loading Page". I think it's pathetic coming from a Internet company like Google.

Has anyone else noticed it?
He doesn't anymore.. :)
It seems to me that most of the more compelling apps on these platforms will be heavily server dependent anyway (location data, etc).

If that's the case, then presumably a lot of the heavy lifting will be done on the back end and writing multiple front ends won't be a huge problem. (i.e. Loopt)
Agreed. Installed user base and brand recognition aren't to be underestimated with a service to which people have to entrust their payment information.
What isn't hard with a touchpad?

(besides Emacs)
Just wanted to add here something said many times in the comments on that page. Whenever possible avoid the usage of CSS hacks or browser specific CSS. If a design is making you pull your hair out, start fresh and see if you can come up with another way to contain your content while maintaining your target design. More often than not you will be able to make clean standard CSS code that is hack free and more maintainable moving forward.
Hackers are generally smart people. Smart people know to learn a bit about the company they're applying to BEFORE they apply.
Definitely. A good rule to follow is that almost everything that turns out to to be hard is something you never thought of before you started the game.

So my advice to anyone who wants to make a game is to just start, there's not really any other way to learn.
Potentially an important contribution to synthetic biology but quite frankly the article/blog post is appallingly written and very unclear on the scientific detail, so it's hard to assess the findings. I'm surprised Reuteurs published this, even if they do accompany it with a disclaimer distancing themselves from it. Very poor.
I love to cook and I'm a math nerd. That recipe framework is really awesome, extremely logical, and easy to follow. To bad I rarely use recipes, and when I do, I don't think they'll be in this format! :)
Goodbye to a Standup Brother
Lisp by Analogy: Macros=Kanji, Continuations=YouTube
Cooking for Engineers seems like it's in a nice market niche (underserved, high-income customers) with plenty of potential. A better design, some PR (maybe this 37signals post indicates that's happening) and I could see it doing very well.

Obviously I use and enjoy the site myself.
Reminds me of lisp.
Why women don't FLOSS
Why women quit technology careers
How to get the best employees? Hire above the Mean
Android has already gained the support of Samsung, Motorola, LG Electronics, T-Mobile, Sprint, and some other well-known companies: http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/oha_members.html

So it's looking pretty good so far, even if no phones are running it just yet heh.
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/finance.google.com

its up for me, with no timeout errors, and i've never had a problem with it at night which is where i have the most time to do my research.
Following closely on the heels of DNF!
Ask YC:  Six year old proposes new number
My son is six years old, and interested in Big Numbers.

We just read a book about big numbers, where we learned that a mathematician's nephew named the number "Googol" when the mathematician wrote out a number with 100 zeroes for him.

My son, inspired by this story, wants to propose his own number:

Quadrupillion

He has defined this number as "one hundred more than Googolplex."

I thought this forum might be a good place to get feedback for him. What do you think of his proposal?

Here is your chance to have an influence on a potential Hacker of the future. :)
Bubblesort isn't useless! (binpacking)
If I'm looking for stuff about a topic in general I could see this as being useful.

I sometimes use del.icio.us as a poor mans search engine to find interesting but somewhat more obscure stuff.
Nope. Any entrepreneur can get a solid business going if its a great idea and done right. Its just that the iPhone platform is going to be done first, so if people have apps done for that they can work on their Android stuff while they're selling on the iPhone. If you're in a crowded genre, you'll be fighting uphill for a bit, but if your idea stands on its own then take the time to do it right, no matter what platform you choose.
I'd like people to take note of the not complaining about being downvoted item. Though it only applies to the discussion of downvoting in general by extension, I'd really rather not see another thread about the evils of the downvote button. If fear of karma loss stops you from voicing an unpopular opinion then I'd rather not hear from you.
Well, duh... of course!

So is Google Analytics and every other bit of 'free' widgetry or serving (as with the recent 'AJAX Libraries API').
Hmm he disses video-search because it is expensive and that tagging is "just good enough".

Here is a really coll video-search-company:
http://viewdle.com/

I dont know about the revenue-possibilities and costs but if online-video continues to grow more detailed queries than what tags allow must be desired no?
Maybe you're right.

The reason I use YUI is that I suck at CSS, and, rather than spending a disproportionate amount of time figuring out floats and breaks and browser incompatibilities and whatnot, I can get going quickly.
Just to expand on my own point, his theories owe a lot to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs). You have to satisfy more "base" needs (shelter, salary, self-esteem) but the key motivator for intelligent people is opportunity for "self-actualization."
I'm surprised nobody has quoted Alan Kay yet:

"And a lot of, I think, our confusion with objects is the problem that in our Western culture, we have a language that has very hard nouns and verbs in it. So our process words stink. So it's much easier for us when we think of an object–I have apologized profusely over the last 20 years for making up the term "object-oriented", because as soon as it started to be misapplied, I realized that I should've used a much more process-oriented term for it. Now, the Japanese have an interesting word, which is called "ma", which spelled in English is M-A, "ma". And "ma" is the stuff in between what we call objects. It's the stuff we don't see, because we're focused on the noun-ness of things, rather than the process-ness of things, whereas Japanese has a more process/feel-oriented way of looking at how things relate to each other. You can always tell that by looking at the size of a word it takes to express something that is important. So "ma" is very short. We have to use words like "interstitial", or worse, to approximate what the Japanese are talking about."
Bubble sort is also useful when there is temporal coherence or when exact sorting is not necessary. For example, in graphics programming you typically need to sort transparent objects back-to-front. If things are out of order, there may be anywhere from no to huge artifacts. If things are mostly sorted and your objects are reasonably small, you can expect closer to no artifacts. You could run a few passes of bubble sort each frame, save the effort of doing a full sort, and then even if you get major artifacts they won't last more than a 1/30th of a second or so.
put it in wikipedia, get a few blogger pals to reference (preferrably with the definition tags) it in their blogs, and use it in daily conversation and you have yourself a number.
a couple blogs aren't enough for Wikipedia, you need a mainstream media hit... know any local newspaper writers?
Ask YC: Please give us feedback on Bookhuddle
Plastics unite to make unexpected 'metal'
Do you have a source for the typo thing? That would be very useful information.
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