skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OPOWER is hiring in DC and SF: opowerjobs.com/engineering

(we're a Java shop)

Feel free to send me questions.
A friend had a client who purchased 1000 domains for his site. I've never even imagined buying this many - can you explain how you use them?

Do they all point to the same site? Is the reason simply to catch people who may mistype your real URL ie ycominator, ycombinator, ycombinates etc?

I find this fascinating, as even with these thoughts in mind I could only get up to about 10-20 domains for my current project! Thanks for any insight.
SF Bay Area

Location Labs is a fast growing start-up that's doing lots of interesting things around location-based services. The whole gamut of work: Ruby, Python, Obj-C, Java; both server-side and mobile (iPhone, Android)

http://location-labs.com/jobs.php

QA, UX design, and product management roles as well
I just get a blank page in between the top bar and bottom bar. This is in both Chrome & Firefox (on Linux).
Forensic, can you send me an email (in my profile)? I'm a fan of your comments and would like to chat.
Thanks for the great answer! It sounds very professional. I've read most of Steve Yegge's old blog posts, and was always struck by how Amazon's culture is one that values solid technical skills and experience.
Think of it this way:

Flash, Java, Javacript, et al are great for the web because they are "write once, run anywhere". The same source code runs everywhere. That is what the web is all about. HTML and CSS are not scripting languages and they are also "write once, run anywhere". That is how the web delivers your programs.

Now, what will your Native Client do?

It will have COMPILED code for ONE platform. Like in C++ where you "write once, compile everywhere". Except you probably won't be able to compile everywhere. The point of the web is that any platform should be able to run your app.

On the other hand, I can see Native Client as being useful for extension libraries. You know, like PhoneGap plugins. The Javascript can test if the object is there, and if it is, use some standard interface. You could build up a standard library of these. As long as it is available on a wide enough range of platforms. Certain APIs are already exposed by the browser, through HTML5, that were originally in Google Gears.

Look, I agree that it's more of a philosophical thing, and indeed you are welcome to make an extension for Mozilla and all the other browsers. But the security risks alone will make this a tough sell to INCLUDE in a browser -- harming the spirit of the web. Not only that, but the web is totally against "favoring one platform over another" ... it is BECAUSE of the web that the platforms are able to work better together.
The entire Brightbox team work remotely. UK company but hire from anywhere in the world. Ongoing job opportunities here: http://www.brightbox.co.uk/about/jobs

Currently specifically looking for top systems engineers who can help build new cloud services, as per: http://beta.brightbox.com/
The body is blank for me in both FF and Chrome.
Why are scripting languages not suitable as shell languages? (One Answer)
Has anything like this happened on Android? I'm an iPhone user, but there are some really facepalm-stupid bugs on iOS that takes away from the platform's image as something polished and perfected.
I bought the entry level 11" MacBook Air 4 weeks ago and now it is the system I use for over 90% of my work, writing,and web browsing.

Caveat: most of my work is straight-up Ruby development, Rails development (both using RubyMine 3.01), and Clojure with Emacs. All three of these development scenarios take up little in the way of CPU or memory. I use TexShop for writing.

I do sit at my desk with a large external monitor occasionally, but not often. The only thing I don't like is the tiny escape key and I'll probably end up remapping it. Otherwise this is my favorite home computer ever (and I have owned many, starting with a PDP 8 one board, then serial number 71 Apple II, etc.) Both the light weight and a SSD drive make for a great experience.

I am going to start next week helping a friend's company do some back end Java EE 6 development and I'll either use my MacBook Pro or my beefy Ubuntu laptop for that.
It's not clear from your comment that you have a good understanding of what Native Client is. You're making vague, barely technical objections to the browser getting "more indistinguishable … from its underlying operating system" and losing the minuscule amount of cross-platform capability it has now without explaining how a more open and potentially efficient platform for code execution than "Whatever text-based JavaScript interpreter the browser vendor decided to include" would necessarily do that.
I don't want to 'just need a programmer' anymore.
My first SSD will be the forthcoming Intel ("Gen3") if the 300GB one is reasonably priced. My storage needs aren't increasing; a few hundred GB is and will continue to be plenty.

Desktop users have it easier, because moving to SSD isn't an all or nothing choice like it is on laptops with only one drive bay (no, I don't fancy gutting my optical bay :))
Society is in a constant state of flux, that's normal. The Netherlands tends to be rather open about its societal problems. The relatively large immigration of workers from Turkey and Morocco allowed isolated communities to form within the Netherlands. The lack of social contact with natives or government training led them into a relatively poor economic position, either without opportunities that natives enjoy or unaware of them. Within these communities, this led to higher unemployment, lower wages, increased crime rates, and an increased appreciation of the strict religious and political doctrines from their country of origin that does not fit in a modern liberal democracy.

Different political streams have different viewpoints on how to deal with cultural frictions caused by immigration. The right-wing populist stream that includes Wilders and Fortuyn has, as can be expected, rather simplistic views on the matter, directly linking increased crime rates to religious affiliation. Their views are supported by around 15% of the electorate, far from a majority. Wilders' party is currently playing a role in government, but the immigration measures it is responsible for are either symbolic or were already planned by previous governments. More importantly, their rhetoric or public debate does not match the reality of public affairs. Immigration is as high as ever and cannot be restricted due to EU policies. However, the general public cares more about cheap construction than about new cultural frictions that will inevitably arise from this.
I adore your use of a homey saying, it reminds me of Lord of the Rings.
Two things that really bug me:

1. No cleartype. I.e. although there is subpixel antialiasing, fonts aren't optimized for the pixel grid. Thus, the fonts are much clearer when I boot to Windows and so I feel like everything is fuzzy when I boot back to Mac OS. This isn't a problem for the web, but for coding and SSH it's terrible. I can't use Windows full time though because Spaces is so outstanding and I don't get trackpad options under Windows.

2. Excel on Mac lacks my most used feature: web data import. Windows Excel lets me choose a table inside a web browser, and the data in that table (stock quotes/currency rates/etc) are imported into Excel (and re-retrieved just by pushing F9).

Excel on Mac does allow you to manually create text files that describe web data import which would be a possible workaround except that the sites I use require a login, and Windows Excel can save cookie state because of its tight integration with IE, but Mac Excel can't.
Well, I meant you were literally asking for critique, as opposed to just sitting down and fishing for empty compliments.

Happy 2011, I just woke up and laughed at the thought of a VC with a rocket-propelled grenade.
Out of curiosity, how many of you depend on an alarm to wake you up? I don't think I've used one in over 2 years.
Aww $13 shipping. That's harsh :'(
The full Stack Overflow thread is at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3637668/why-are-scripting.... I particularly liked this guys exposition on Microsoft's PowerShell (about the last three quarters of the answer).
It's really surprising to me that there is another alarm bug. This isn't exactly a tricky subject and should be easy testable.
The solar system in a glass of wine
Yes, but that ratio is fairly useless, no?
Ignoring the damage of incentivized false-positives in searching our highly-connected global compendium of human knowledge and activity is at least as stupid as major producers of low cost consumer information goods and services failing to capitalize on the on-demand delivery and storage capacities of said compendium. Avoid both, please.

This is like writing stuff for the Voyager's Golden Record.
It solves the only problem you brought up in the comment he was responding to, AFAIK. If you meant to point to others, I think you need to be more explicit or people will miss them.
I would bet most do on a normal day, and nearly all do when they have to wake up at 3:30am after going to sleep at 2am.
While I do use my mobile's alarm app often, I've always been hesitant to use it as my -only- alarm. There are too many things that could go wrong when compared to a good ol' alarm clock.

When I need to catch those 6am flights, I set multiple alarms on my alarm clock, as well as my phone. Always have a backup.
I think this a great idea. Needs a bit of refinement, but the fact you pumped this out in a day is remarkable.
When was this? Atlantis? I don't remember any point in history where this was simple and commonplace.
My alternative: Put a 256GB Crucial RealSSD 300 in a 13" Macbook and max-out the RAM. It will be bigger and heavier, with less battery life, but if you already have a Macbook, this is a much cheaper move. The RealSSD has background garbage collection, so you don't have to worry about TRIM. You only need to do two things: 1) noatime and 2) make sure you're using less than 220GB.

I did this, and the performance is fantastic. (Original 13" unibody Macbook with RAM upgraded to 6GB.) Everything happens instantly. I had journalling off, because it increases disk writes by 12%, but OS X compensates by cranking up its RAM cache. Keep journalling on, as it helps boot-up and shut-down happen quickly and things just seem to run faster without the system managing the really large RAM cache to disk. (Another factor: The nasty bug in XCode 3.1 requiring you to reboot your machine to unfreeze the simulator. This makes fast reboots a big win for me. Otherwise, I'd use sleep and only reboot occasionally.)

For increased battery life on the plane, I have a Tekkeon myPower All, which I also sometimes use to power a mobile 4G hotspot. You can find a $14 Magsafe cord on eBay, and solder it to a male Adaptaplug from Radioshack to make yourself an adapter.

EDIT: If you have an older Core Duo plastic Macbook capable of supporting more than 4GB of RAM, then I'd recommend slapping a RealSSD into it. You'll have something lighter than a 13" aluminum with great performance.
This issue in a roundabout kind of way touches on Facebook.

The issue of social search has a lot of mindshare. Some think it is the future of search. I disagree.

One of the things that made search successful anduseful early on was scale. Instead of having to go to the librar or ask your friends you can effectively canvas the connected world.

I find the notion that friends' recommendations will replace that as nothing short of bizarre. It's like a huge step backwards. The argument is that you can filter out the garbage as your social graph will provide a level of curation.

Let me give you a concrete example. If I wanted t buy a camera I'd stil need t go to dpreview and other sites. It's highly likely that my friends don't really know a lot about this (but some will have an opinion anyway).

This same idea of human curation is behind such sites ad Mahalo and the garbage sites themselves to a degree. Of course at some point computers will be powerful enough to generate this garbage content.

Blekko's idea of slash tags s interesting (to a degree) but if it's successful its easily reproducible. Google is still in the box seat here but of course that's no barrier to a link-baiting TC title.

Personally I'm an optimist. I believe that, much like email spam, the garbage from AC, DM and others I'd a transitional problem (email spam is basically a solved problem now if you use a half-decent email provider). If they succeed we won't be able to find anything. I don't believe that'll happen so these services are therefore doomed.

So betting on Demand Media is (to quote Tyler) like betting on the Mayans (meaning betting they're right about the world ending in 2012: it doesnt really matter if you're right).

So my money is on Google being the better Google.
He did have a backup, but it was another iPhone. Lesson learned I suppose.
I wish I could say I knew of some interesting result, but I did it only out of fascination. However, if you look closely at the two triangles, you can see some interesting pattens. For example, they each have a triangle of 0's on the right side of them, bordered by 2's. I think I remember reading about this occurrence (which I'm pretty sure appears in more places than just these two triangles I happened to choose), but I can't seem to remember where.

4 2 2 2 2 2

2 0 0 0 0

2 0 0 0

2 0 0

2 0

0 2 2 2 2

2 0 0 0

2 0 0

2 0
Hey, I did. In the cockpit.

Well, OK, it wasnt a full-blown Concorde. It was an engine flight simulator at Rolls Royce in Bristol, England. (They made the engines.) Two of us from Control Data were installing software for a month at Rolls Royce. They let us stand in the simulator cockpit while the flight engineer controlled the engines. He had a flameout but recovered nicely.

Our office was at the en of the runway. Every day at noon, a Concorde would take off right over our office. Noisy beasties.
AudaxHealth is hiring Software Engineers: http://audaxhealth.com/?page_id=16

Washington, D.C.

Corporate is boring. Startups = fun!

jobs@audaxhealth.com
You are welcome. Will you be applying?
Thanks for the tip. I saw that article on HN the other day, but the wording is designed to encourage people to leave adblock disabled to see relevant, sleep-related ads. You might be right though, it's always better safe than sorry; I'll look into clarifying the wording there. Wouldn't want to offend my Google overlords!
Yeah, it is obviously the owners fault for not checking blog posts and tweets about the faulty product.
Yes, and the iPhone version is better than the Android one. The search field is always there and it remembers your history. The Android app defaults to some adlike "BLOCKBUSTERS THIS WEEK" list that gives me that "I'm afraid to click on anything" feeling and you have to go to the menu in order to search, which is a button press and a screen tap minimum.
i use vim a lot and i got the 11". i simply remap capslock to esc, which i would do anyways.
How does filtering based on a trust network imply that the network will only include your friends?
ive been remapping 'esc' to be triggered by rapidly hitting 'jj' and havent really run into this problem. jj is also more convenient than a fullsized esc key.
Overconfigured for sure.
Facebook and Twitter help spread the message to new users, as well as a nice daily referral from StumbleUpon.

A few people have posted my URL to social news sites like Reddit and Digg, but even when those gain traction it's usually just a few thousand and quite short-lived.
To give a specific example: many preservatives and industrial techniques can alter the flavor of a dish in unpleasant ways, so industrialized food just covers up those flavors with salt. The worst examples would be the "flavor packet" that comes with ramen noodles: some of these deliver a full gram of sodium. But most frozen meals have unreasonably high levels of sodium as well. If you prepare your food from raw ingredients, you at least have the option of using less salt, to the betterment of your blood pressure.
This is why the iPhone still dominates the market more than any other Android phone does.

"Sure, I’m more accustomed to the iPhone, but I could switch [to the Nexus S] anytime I wanted to. But that’s the thing, I don’t want to. The iPhone experience is still overall a better one in my mind. It’s that simple."
I grew up on Galaxy Invasion and SubLogic's Flight Simulator. (Too bad they don't have that one available on the emulator page.)

I'm interested to see what changes with the 4.2 OS soon to be released.

I'd like to see that, too. I wrote Peter an email to ask if he'd gotten a chance to do that.
Exclusive Interview, Passpad Co-Founder, Brandon Wang
The obvious come-from-behing strategy for Windows phones: Look at how is market leader (Apple) is beating everyone else (RIM/Android) and emulate their success. I think they're trying to do this: use tighter control over the platform to ensure superior UI/UX and seamless integration with their desktop products. If Microsoft can pull this off, they will take a big bite out of the 2nd/3rd place competitors and threaten Apple. If they can't, Windows Phone 7 will be an also-ran like Zune.
When would one use this?

When I install Fedora, it gives me the opportunity to encrypt any file system other than /boot. Since this requires you to enter the password at boot, that's good for a laptop, probably bad for a server.

You need root privilege to mount a loopback file system. Either (a) you've got the root password (b) the admin has given sufficient sudo privileges or (c) you use pam_mount to mount the encrypted filesystem (probably as your home directory). Am I missing other scenarios?

The trouble with the pam_mount scenario is that the key for the file system needs to be based on your login password. Either your account creation process involves telling the admin your password, or someone's built a collection of self service tools I'm unaware of. Changing your password also means building a new encrypted filesystem, which again involves giving the admin the new password, or invoking self service tools I'm unaware of.

If there are other scenarios in which to use this kind of encrypted file system, I'd appreciate hearing about them.
Hey, I'm a dev in Tokyo, looking to move to Shanghai. I would have preferred to email you, but the email in your profile is quite difficult to parse.
My email is in my profile ;-).
I hear you, ironically my "backup" was my wife's iPhone and mine is charging at night before trips so that it doesn't run out of juice.
Great article, these are exactly the principles behind our startup http://skinnyo.com - infact it was almost like I was reading my own words :-)

We encourage checking in your weight everyday and produce slick graphs automatically (which you can embed in a website or blog for that extra motivation to stop it from rising!).

If anyone signs up let me know how you get on and follow me:

http://skinnyo.com/people/tom
It's interesting that the way of "gaming" Google appears to be in having thousands of people generating SEO friendly content. I think Google's problem is that it's pushed SEO to the point where the definition of Spam depends either on a subjective view of what kind of site the user is looking for, or it's just mildly worse than something else that's out there (e.g. When I search for something coding related and get one of the stackoverflow scrapers).

Where do we go from here? Well, I don't think the answer is just a radically new way of indexing/ranking websites. That might work in the short term but the spammers will soon catch up. The answer probably lies in a combination of better language interpretation, context sensitivity using browsing history and location, and user profiling based on the social graph and search history. All of which google seems to be working on.
Why the preferential treatment of folks from large cities and "technology hubs"? Seems to miss the point.
I don't think of this as a difficult issue at all. What we have now is the Internet. Once you allow service discrimination, then it is a different service. It is no longer the Internet.

Thus, if a corporate wants to run a network with discriminatory services, then let them do it on their own network. Give us customers the option of another wire or both services on the same wire.

Then let the market decide.

Of course, no-one will want the discriminatory service, so what greedy corporate entities want to do is subvert the status quo. They want to steal the Internet.
Tell me, how exactly is writing a sensationalized article that targets one of the Internet's oldest and largest communities to get fed by CPM advertising any different than what they decry? People have said this time and time again, but they never seem to debut let alone promise any sort of technology to address the issue. They just leave that end of the deal up in the air. As if to say that it's o.k. to spin topics as long as they strike a social nerve, but those who're less graceful at the craft are undeserving of the benefits which they themselves reap.

If the search giants had any balls they'd cut the "Internet Marketing" community off at the knees. Because the money making methods pushed by that community either don't work or are unsustainable, so they're entirely reliant on a steady stream of new recruits. If they want to promote gaming your system don't let them reap any benefits from it.
Heh, I barely missed the mark, but just launched Facto.me (http://facto.me)
My thought when I read the Kedrosky thing months ago was very similar. Many times the reason you aren't getting good Google results is that there isn't good indexable content. Consumer Reports is a leader in this space and they are behind a paywall. I started exploring the possibility of creating a site for appliance reviews as well.
It got better after I clicked the "alcohol" bar.
CMIIW, but is that the reason why Google acquired MetaWeb a few months ago? I'm expecting to see some improvement on that front.
Yep. Android 2.0 (I think) has a bug where alarms will be delayed while the phone's cpu is in sleep mode. This can mean they go off up to an hour late.
Android: We are all ready to win, just as we are born knowing only life. It is defeat that you must learn to prepare for.

iPhone: I don't waste my time with it. When it comes, I won't even notice.

Android: Oh? How so?

iPhone: I'll be too busy lookin' goood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeeqPod
Indeed. For such filtering to work, a significant portion of your friends should be searching the entire network and not just filtering through friends. But this might just work out to an early-adopter/follower divide. Friend network filtering will work better for the followers. The early-adopters/leaders will continue to use other means of search and will feed the friend-network.
All of us with sleep apnea do.
Does anyone else think Android phone desktops look vaguely like Windows 3.1?