skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The recruiters in this article are hiring for "top law firms, consulting agencies and investment banks." In those jobs, your number one priority is selling to the wealthy and/or powerful, so this sort of selection makes perfect sense. The recruiters are looking for a set of social skills and connections, not hard skills.

This has been going on forever, and there really isn't any way to "fix the problem." People - including the wealthy - are simply more comfortable with others who share a cultural background. Sales jobs have always sought people with preexisting connections to potential clients.
Picnic in Kosovo [no comment..]
You can say that again. Reminds me of having to reinstall Windows 95 and swapping out 13-ish floppy disks. The good old days!
The main pro for storing data in the cloud. Let's say on Amazon S3 is that you also get a web server that is able to serve those same files (public or secure). Even if you need them served to millions of users. You don't have to care about scaling this thing. Good luck doing this with a NAS.
I'm in my early twenties, and one of my earliest memories of computers was my Dad trying to get a book of stamps out of the floppy drive on his Amiga. Plus, who could forget installing Windows 95 from, what was it, 20 floppies? And now we buy 1Tb drives like it's nothing...
Hugh Herr
mark cuban ran/runs sharesleuth.com. Lots of interesting research into very uninteresting "companies".
I'd rather have the common case be gorgeous and have the uncommon case require a some workaround, than have every case look like crap.
T-Mobile caps smartphone users' data at 500 MB/month
Interviewing 101: Being Ready for Intel
There's only a handful of apps on iOS that include a save button, and even of those that do include one, DocsToGo is the only one I can think of that uses a floppy for a save icon. It might be gone before you know it ... though I'd guess you'll still see it in Windows in 2020 or beyond ;)
I loved the TRS-80. We had some in my Jr High. We had an assignment to create some large ASCII art via hundreds of print statements and then print it out on the dot matrix printer.
كما هي اللغة العربية التي لا تقدر بثمن، مع انها لا تكلف قرشاً
To say nothing of personnel. A Netapp NAS box doesn't do you a whole lot of good unless you've got staff to manage it --- a lot of the justification for cloud offerings, particularly PaaS, is that some of those staff functions get effectively outsourced.
> Everyone questions Apple's agenda when they leave Flash out of iOS, , but somehow Google gets a pass?

One is not like the other. Apple didn't let other people provide Flash support for iOS. Google is merely choosing not to support something internally. No one expected Apple to write a Flash plugin and officially support it.

As for hypocrisy...

> Chrome currently bundles an embedded version of Adobe’s closed source and proprietary Flash Player plugin.

And I'm sure if Google had to implement Flash, they wouldn't.

> Android currently supports H.264. Will this support be removed from Android? If not, why not?

Different environments. The web is based on open standards. It's like asking why Android is written in C instead of HTML5 and JS.

He then goes on to ask other stupid questions equally baseless.

Essentially, he's demanding that Apple support Flash by building their own Flash player for their devices.

> Who is happy about this?

Anyone who cares about open standards and protocols.

> What part of his line of questions would you deem "obviously inappropriate" or lacking "good faith"?

Listen, I'm not anti-Gruber. I read his stuff and take it for what it's worth. But it's fairly clear his line of questioning isn't genuine. They are constructed to make a point: that a vendor should be required to support plugins even if they don't want to, except for Apple of course.
It seems like an easy solution - and it should be but the reality is that it is not.

There would have been deep-linking on the site years ago if it were not such a big undertaking. It had been on my own wish-list for many years but nothing something I decided to do my self actively until I met Kellan at OSCON in 2006(?) and he brought it up too.

Since then, a colleague of mine, Eitan and I started digging into the CMS side, as well as looking at some highly optimized code that outputs the article body. A combination of development time, risk, resources, and testing didn't justify the result - especially since we were trying this on our own time.

There more to it than that. But thats the main point.
Prior to Windows 95 the preponderance of Windows programs were 16bit. Seeing as 16bit programs are not compatible with recent versions of Windows one can be reasonably assured that they are not in that vast pool of legacy applications.

Hand in hand with 32bit Windows came the registry, which is where most applications stored configuration information until relatively recent times.

To the best of my recollection, I have not seen an application or utility hard coded to C: since Windows 95. But I would be interested to learn of the actual examples which support your assumptions.
Luckily this is a self-correcting problem. When the grads from all the "second tier" schools, ranging from MIT to the various community colleges, start their own firms and ultimately eat these guys' lunch, it'll become a moot point.
I think perhaps you are jaded by location? I can make that 150k a year in Cali, Seattle, and a few other popular locations... (I've been offered a few) but you've got to understand that the 75k a year folks are making in the middle of the country provides a very similar standard of living for the location that the 150k does elsewhere...
Confessions of a Disney World castmember
Agreed. And it seems like "professional world" only involves the United States. Last I heard, we have more than 1 country in this world. Pretty sure many other actual world-class firms would take these grads.
A sign of things to come.
First of possibly many states raising income tax rates.
While the standard isn't yet finished, a recent survey indicated around 50% of web users are on a browser that supports HTML5: http://j.mp/HTML5_50
My problem is that Gruber is being hypocritical. Apple apparently can decide what to support in their browser and on their devices, but Google is required to support things in their browser based on other's demands?
I'm pretty sure that if you took that approach to American football, you'd wind up with a greater chance for injury on the short side. Physical contact is nearly ubiquitous in American football, and a team with an extra body to throw around is far more likely to produce dangerous contact than otherwise.

I like the idea behind sending a player off or even suspending them from the next game if they start behaving dangerously. The NFL's current crackdown on dangerous hits is only sending a lot of extra money to charity (where all fines go) and not really modifying player behavior.
It's good to try out different ideas, but be careful not to give up on one and switch to something else too easily. Every project is going to have a period where it sucks, nobody's using it, and you don't want to work on it anymore. If you give up and switch to another project every time that happens, you're probably never going to succeed. When I've been working on too many things, I find it way too easy to switch over to another unstarted project rather than develop something that's out but not succeeding. See Seth Godin's book The Dip for more about it.

Where this gets difficult is being able to tell the difference between a failure that isn't worth more effort and a failure that needs more work to become a success. ;)
That's good to hear -- and sounds like an improvement.

I was having dinner with a coordinator of university job fairs about a year ago and she commented that Google and Facebook were among the worst companies she's ever dealt with respect to hiring practices due to a very large school bias. Many of the schools she works with complains that their students don't even get their resumes looked at. She also note that Microsoft used to be one of those as well, but with Google and FB vacuuming up everybody else they've had to cast their net a bit wider.

Perhaps times are changing?

Anecdotally, the most brilliant people I've ever worked with came from either state schools or CMU or Stanford or MIT (specifically). I've had very little success finding top-notch folks from other established Ivies. Not sure why that is.

I think pg's essay on schools really helps bring some data to that though. It really is the individuals that count.
My first stab at being an entrepreneur was buying up used floppies for pennies slapping a blank label on them and selling them for $1 a piece. But I was a pushover so most people could bargain me down to $2-3 for a pack of five.
I like to think that its a decision that self-moderates. If its an improvement, it contributes to the success of the app and it may persist. If not, it may contribute to the failure of the app and will eventually disappear. We're so early in the evolution of mobile/touch-based applications, and personally I welcome developers trying new things and stretching the boundaries to see where there's room for improvement.
They used to be used for floppy disks and other such things! In fact they started in DOS. Ah, remember the days? I do... b because I'm 27.

Anyone here started programming with QBasic?
> GNU Mono

I see Miguel finally caved!
You'll also spend money on the legal fees required to have your lawyer (or paralegal) review your diaries / journals to see what parts must be produced to the other side and what parts can be withheld.

Here's an example of what can happen if you don't screen your document production. I once took the deposition of a guy who was suing my client, his former employer, claiming that he owned an invention he'd made for them. The guy kept a diary. Instead of giving me only the diary entries that had to do with the invention, his lawyer just turned over the entire diary for the relevant period -- including entries about feeding live mice to his pet snake. Needless to say, in the deposition I asked the guy about that. Snake-feeding was completely irrelevant to the case, but if we'd gone to trial, I imagine I would have tried to find some way to put that testimony and those diary entries in front of the jury. (We didn't go to trial because the judge granted summary judgment for my client.) My guess is that the lawyer wished he'd screened the diary before producing it to me.
It does not seem all that unreasonable to assume (in library code for dealing with 64-bit floating point numbers) that your 64-bit floating point numbers are actually 64-bit floating point numbers.
Nice parodi, but besides the (huge) costs of switching, Esperanto (with an Ascii character set rather than the the current (Polish?) letters) would properly be better by far than English.

At least we would have no more grammar fights - the entirety of Esperanto grammar is significantly shorter than the linked article.

And don't worry, you would still have Wikipedia [http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/].

As for Klingon, well I guess that remains a pipedream.
Did you watch the video? That particular incident had nothing to do with illegal hits or an opposing team member causing endangerment. The player was trying to tackle someone, came in hard, and ran into one of his own team member's thighs.

These are high velocity impacts to the head, generally caused by the nature of the game. The equipment needs to evolve to help these players minimize the damage to their bodies.
You've [luckily] never seen internally written software then. I see stuff referencing hardcoded paths to "C:\winnt\system32\" dlls all the time.
The Future of Facebook and the World as We Know It
I was really looking for Silverlight Charting lib for my WP7 app. Thank you so much...
Punny Name, Serious Distro.
Still got mine, and a box of cartridges. Hacked the paddles into an some electronics experiment years ago, and the RF modulator's given up the ghost, but other than that still all good. Even still got the book, minus the back cover
Multitouch remote for a robot: 200 lines of JavaScript & Python
A bit ot, but is there a standard way to measure things? (I'm thinking about inches vs cm, or gallons vs liters).
Graceless Degradation: WordPress Uglification for Outmoded Browsers
You'd probably have to have a trusted human-in-the-loop. I.e., if a site gets enough down votes, it would trip some internal procedure to review the site.

I think also if you didn't generate public feedback (i.e., you didn't list the most down voted sites for example) you'd avoid the kind of Beiber-to-DPRK stunt that 4chan would be interested in.
I'm not yet done high school , and it makes me feel old too.
Like you I also suspect that people haven't been any different in the past.

But there are two key points I'd like out:

1. I have only seen nowadays,
2. I have met (maybe most?) really smart, able and ambitious people who tend to get little but important details wrong. They view power struggle as zero sum game. They fail to see that to make it you need not only look after your own best interest but of those people around you also. That top is not a singular point, but it is an area of larger structure - a pyramid if you will. And to get to the top of a pyramid you need a strong fundament and if you want to stay at the top you absolutely must hone and take care of your wider base.

Nowadays it's way easier to check the validity of your strategy. It is easier to check historical references for similar contexts as ones own. And these smart people just decide that they will replay the history. And this is the ultimate risk in my opinion - repeating same thing over and over (definition of insanity by Einstein I believe?) and expecting different results. While believing that alternative strategies that are counterintuitive at first are too risky.
I only ever had drives with write locks. I must have gotten into USB drives late because I've never heard of read lock.
The units are given in inches, so I'm not sure. People do use inches in Canada, but in weather reports, one usually sees centimetres.
I think the key thing to note is that, even if you don't personally like some of Pixar's films you cannot deny the quality of filmmaking, which increases with each film in every quantifiable way.

There is a lot about film (as with any art) that is subjective but there are specific and measurable qualities of a film that can be measured and in each of these Pixar struggles (I say struggle because they set themselves a very high bar) to exceed the qualities of their previous work. In this way they are very different from the Disney of the 1980's/1990's where quality was liquidated as a way to increase the revenue of films who's value lies solely in brand and character recognition.

I agree that the level of merchandising associated with these films is absurd, but I don't know how much the filmmakers have to do with this and we could point to plenty of examples in the software sector who have a hard time saying no when a few million dollars are waved in front of their faces.

If you want to learn more about how Pixar will bleed for quality, research the story behind Toy Story 2; if you can find me another company willing to risk everything for the sake of preventing even one low-grade product from reaching the market, I'll be impressed.
I really tried to make something useful to people on the iPhone, hopefully I succeeded. But now I'm not sure what to do.

Do any iPhone veterans here have some good advice for how to promote it?
From Gladwell's Outliers:

In the 1940s and 1950s the old-line law firms of New York operated like a private club. They were all headquartered in downtown Manhattan, in and around Wall Street, in somber, granite-faced buildings. The partners at the top firms graduated from the same Ivy League schools, attended the same churches, and summered in the same oceanside towns on Long Island. They wore conservative gray suits. Their partnerships were known as "white-shoe" firms – in apparent reference to the white bucks favored at the country club or a cocktail party, and they were very particular in who they hired. As Erwin Smigel wrote in The Wall Street Lawyer, his study of the New York legal establishment of that era, they were looking for:

"lawyers who are Nordic, have pleasing personalities and ‘clean-cut’ appearances, are graduates of the ‘right schools’, have the ‘right’ social background and experience in the affairs of the world, and are endowed with tremendous stamina. A former law school dean, in discussing the qualities students need to obtain a job, offers a somewhat more realistic picture. ‘To get a job [students] should be long enough on family connections, long enough on ability or long enough on personality, or a combination of these. Something called acceptability is made up of the sum of its parts. If a man has any of these things, he could get a job. If he has two of them, he can have a choice of jobs; if he has three, he could go anywhere.’"

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. At least nowadays you don't necessarily have to be white, male, or non-Jewish, and the definition of Ivy League has broadened a bit, but this clubbishness is how it's been for a century and more. What, you thought people battled each other to get into Harvard because Harvard's graduate TAs were such talented and dedicated teachers relative to the competition?
I'm not from the US either but the answer seems rather obvious.

Leadership, teamwork, social skills etc...
While not built into drives, an add-on hardware solution exists, Wiebetech's USB Writeblocker:

http://www.wiebetech.com/products/USB-WriteBlocker.php
And its not even true for all top consulting agencies and investment banks (I can't speak for law firms). I know that Goldman Sachs recruits pretty heavily at MIT.
I've seen a few specialty Property-Casualty insurance/reinsurance companies that do better, but I don't know much about other industries, so I'm not sure if it's common or not (probably not).
Unfortunately the "compressiontest" folder mentioned in the article has been taken down. Does anyone have any insight into its contents?

Edit: nevermind, answered my own question: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022125.html
No mistake. A mistake would be to only read The Prince.

The key point I have taken from the Prince - notice how Niccolo keeps bringing about examples of successful tyrants? Have you noticed that none of this tyrants has died of old age?
How to ask a stranger for an interview
It's not nearly enough of an improvement over Rails or Django to displace them. I expect it to do much better over the next few years than any other functional programming framework but I don't expect it to escape that niche.

Pollak has realized, as I begrudgingly did, that Scala, like all the other type-inferencing static FP langs, is just too hard for the programming mainstream. Once you've decided to go polyglot you might as well just use a boring but safe core language like Java or C++ and build as much on top of that as you can in your dynamic language of choice.
Yes, the metric system.

Every country in the world uses it except for the US, Burma, and Liberia.
Clarium Loses 90% From Peak After Thiel Hedge Fund Has Third Losing Year
Great post. I sometimes (especially recently) get the impression that startups have been playing up overblown valuations as some sort of marketing tactic.
I think we pretty much agree: I think my writing is mostly to encourage younger people to think about building something rather than just going off into consulting.
Microsoft UI Design at its Finest
I think this highlights a problem. Localization _can_ be hard, but most of the time it's not. You shouldn't be scared to localize your app.

After all, there's a vast amount of open source software that has been localized with gettext without problems.

In my experience, most translation strings are straightforward, and the corner cases as mentioned in the article don't happen very often. If you can tolerate a few hacks in your code, or a few extra translation messages, you don't have to go all the way down the rabbit hole. The perfect is the enemy of the good in this case.
My personal impression, backed by no real data, is that Ruby adoption has tapered off somewhat. Python and PHP web frameworks have absorbed the innovations of Rails and the subjective advantages of Ruby as a language over either aren't enough to close the gap.

I wouldn't say that Ruby or Rails are dying but it also doesn't seem to me that they've achieved escape velocity either.
I'm working on something like that, actually. Using machine-learning and personalization around tags is a big part of my current project. Unfortunately it's not ready yet... Feel free to shoot me an email though, if you'd like to say informed on the progress.
Console.log() for Web Workers
You're quite right, but in all fairness, the following would be a saner interface in php:

italian_to_spanish("Ciao mondo");
You can have a hidden drive (with deniable encryption) inside an existing truecrypt partition.
Innovate while you can - A short talk on FOSS for Students
I was in the same boat. My son found an old disposable camera in a drawer, and I couldn't find a decent way to explain it to him with out the WTF? look on his face.
Green Car Updates from Detroit Auto Show
Not always appropriate, but what about simply not using proper sentances. What would be the implications of using this kind of form:

Directories scanned: %g

Files found: %g, Directories with files: %g
Here is a list of schools ranked by recruiters with an emphasis on engineering:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870455410457543...

MIT is on there, but the only Ivy on there is Cornell.
How to generate an awesome product vision
Hi Stu,

looking at your website gives me more convidence in your person then looking at your HN question. You seem to be veeery unsure about the way you want to walk the next months. From my experience the best way to find out is to follow people who do great what you want to do. That means reading blogs, HN but also working together with people you admire. Maybe you can find some great people on the net or around you in the UK to work with.

Btw. I really like the design of your websites! Did you do it yourself?
Luxury! I used to have to snip endless chads out of punched cards to represent the very zeroes and ones of the program i was writing! Thanks to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo
Vic20 here too. I think back like it was the golden years, but I vaguely recall some hanging during LOADING.
I've been doing Rails work at ThoughtWorks for more than three years now. Judging from the projects I've been on, Ruby has achieved a fair amount of penetration with the Fortune 500 crowd. Whether that's expanding, topped off, or contracting, I can't judge.
I think another key thing is in three years the price of storage will keep falling (as it has over the last X years), and with Amazon they are eating that cost (hopefully) and not sticking you with old outdated hardware.

Kind of like leasing a car, but the cars get 10x better every year
Do you have a website for it?

I've had some success using services like Tapjoy and AppRebates, but my experience on iTunes is mostly a crapshoot.