skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Toronto

WEB/MOBILE DEVELOPER (we have no titles, actually, but this is the best description we could figure)

About us: Small company, about 15 folks, with offices in Chicago, Toronto, and Hyderabad (India). We specialize in disruptive technologies and business models, and we bring that knowledge to companies and organizations that are established and need to adapt or perish. We grew 300% last year, expecting the same this year, and this is a really exciting time to be with the company. You can feel electricity in the air around our offices.

We work with a variety of systems - we build pretty advanced platforms on Drupal (we're one of the only Enterprise Drupal partners in Canada), we build things from scratch with PHP/CodeIgnter, we build apps with Objective-C, etc. If you want to learn how to build wicked stuff and want to start a company somewhere down the line, this is a great place to work. Hell, you're even encouraged to work on a potential startup in your 15% time.

About you: Background in computer/software engineering or computer science is preferred, but we're open if you can demonstrate you know your stuff and have a nonconventional degree. We're looking for 1-2yrs experience (if you're fresh out of school get in touch anyway). Double points if you have startup experience.

We mostly work in PHP, but diverse language experience is a plus. It's more important that you're smart and driven than that you're a PHP expert. If you've played around with iOS development, HTML5, Python, Android dev, Facebook app dev, etc., those are all positives.

About the position: You'll be tasked with building important systems for interesting clients, with plenty of technical challenges and opportunities to learn as you go. You'll work in a Scrum team, primarily in PHP to start - you'll also likely learn how to build complex systems in Drupal.

If you're a startup guy/gal, you'll learn a lot just by being in our environment. You'll collide with amazingly smart developers, designers, analysts, and business folk - all of whom are constantly formulating new business models and thinking radical thoughts about the future. Bonus points if you like to endlessly philosophize.

Perks: Benefits (drug, dental, massage, etc.), 15% time (take a half day a week to build awesome stuff), relocation (if you're not located in the GTA), technical books (if you want 'em, you can have 'em), conferences, training.

Pay: We have a saying that goes like this: "Hire 5 people who can do the work of 10 and get the pay of 8". We want smart, driven developers, and we pay what it takes to get them.

How to apply: Email dustin (at) myplanetdigital (dot) com
The Greatest Scam in Tech
A 15-minute search yields: we don't know how prions infect a cell.

"the underlying mechanism of infection remains unresolved"
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjo...

"the exact physiological function of PrPC and the mechanism of neurotoxicity are still unknown"
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ben/cp/2010/00000007/0...

...I did run across this interesting paper suggesting that prions could be a widely-used regulatory mechanism rather than an aberration, however:

http://www.nature.com/nrm/journal/v11/n12/abs/nrm3007.html
Your people page on your website isn't loading for me in Chrome on OSX, just FYI.
Or the AACS key, which is much more manageable as a permanent addition to one's body.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy

tattoo: http://www.thenewfreedom.net/wp/2007/05/02/takedown-this/
Plenty of reduce queries, you just didn't need to write the code ;) Good point, though, good material for the next round. I'm open to suggestions if you have an interesting data set or question.
Say 'No' to Spec Work
An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician are each given the same problem.

1. the engineer comes in, writes a few lines of equations, does some calculations, and writes down the answer.

2. the physicist comes in, derives some formulas, writes some equations, writes some more equations, does some calculations and finally writes down the answer.

3. the mathematician comes in, lists some axioms, proves some theorems from the axioms, writes equations across the entire whiteboard, gets another whiteboard, fills it up with equations also, writes some final calculations and finally says, "it can be solved."
Battle Lines
whoops! Will fix.
I could have used this when I was first introduced to recursion.

"Recursion doesn’t know it’s recursion. Recursion doesn’t know it’s complicated"....awesome.
Feature-length film, The Trashmaster, made entirely in Grand Theft Auto IV
They are also selling a brand. People buy Sony (I'd say Apple, but then the OS clouds the issue) laptops because they like the brand. Reputation, good configurations, good quality ... you guys know what a good brand should be.

One way to build a brand is to build a web store. You lose Amazon's distribution, payment systems, data-mining, and visibility; but you gain more brand recognition. You could also sell on Amazon, but that will take people away from your site which may mean your brand loses it's uniqueness.

Face it, if you don't have a good brand and you are selling anything that can be made in China, you can't expect any margins. Wallmart and Amazon will sell the same thing cheaper.
Actually to go through the security checkpoints armed federal agents need to have 2 sets of tickets printed from the check in desk. Which requires a call to their supervisor. They then have to fill out a form at the security check point and are asked for a secret password/code that is changed periodically. I don't think that just having credentials is going to get you past security.

I know this because I have a friend who flys armed since he is a Border Patrol Agent.
The Laws of Productivity: http://lunar.lostgarden.com/Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf
I thought drug dealing cost money?

Isn't that why they have to subsidize it with pirate videos - at least thats what the ad at the cinema said,
Oh c'mon, have you looked at the front page of reddit lately? Hacker News is hardly in danger of becoming indistinguishable.

We come here to interact with a group of people with some sort of shared ethos and sensibility, submitting and voting on content we collectively find interesting. If you don't enjoy seeing this on the front page, vote something else up.
I used the Ultra Top Secret Classified approach -- and look at me: I'm a thousandaire!
High quality imported mosaic glass tiles
Acorntiles offers high quality imported mosaic bathroom tiles,Ceramic Tiles,glass tiles,Porcelain tiles,mosaics in uk.we have produces a fine range of varieties of tiles,backsplash all around the world.Acorn UK's largest distributor of quality ceramic tile,porcelain tile,metal and glass.
I learned a different lesson, which is that you can win big by being willing to get your hands dirty. After all, Steve Pavlina's site is like a burlap bag filled with a mixture of turds and diamonds. I'd get over my disgust for fecal matter pretty fast if I found such an object.

(For example, his advice regarding waking up to an alarm was invaluable to me.)

You don't have to trust somebody to learn from them.
Short answer in this situation: No.

Expanding a bit: The employees only gain in the most abstract sense by working longer to implement a bunch of features that are vaguely defined as to when and why. They get no extra money, no sense of worth attached to their shares, no bonus for doing the work.

This isn't about some "incentives don't work" crap either. It is pretty simple people dynamics: these guys work at a startup for a salary, they are not really in it for the big payout, they are in it for the job. Having to work absurd hours when there is no obvious benefit or need is a good way to create resentment. If it was a 2 or 3 week push to "finish this stuff and knock out a release" fine, but give them some relaxing days/paid time off at the end. That is what they respond to.

Further, the fact that the bossman thinks this unpaid indefinite death march is a decent idea suggests it is time for resume freshening.
write state machines inside objects to maintain state and process flow, and advising them to wrap callbacks into message sends to these process containers

Any chance you could give an example of this refactoring / change of perspective (or link to a blog post, etc)? I can almost imagine what you mean, but it sounds like useful enough advice that I'd really like to grok it, and a concrete example would help a lot.

I'm currently working on another approach to reduce the complexity and error-proneness of evented programming. I'm working on a combinator library to abstract and automate the more common patterns of wiring up callbacks and propagating exceptions. Have you seen any success (or pitfalls) from this kind of approach?
We need to sponsor that image as a billboard in Washington D.C. to get the mainstream news to cover it and then maybe Congress to look at it eventually.
I tend to use Node for specific tasks like running a process that may take from 0 to 20 seconds without having a thread block. Using it for discrete tasks that it's suited for and then doing the bulk of my programming on regular vanilla synchronous server processes has worked for me as a way to manage complexity.

Until a standard model of async emerges I think programming large web apps on node will feel a little like hiking with a stone in your shoe.
WhiteProxy: only allow yourself the Internet that's relevant
Too Late
fascinating. I wasn't aware of the ad rates for podcasts. Are they for american audiences or overall audiences?
Because I would see Australian ads if I watches Grey's Anatomy or CSI -- but I hear the generic ads when I listen to TWIT.

My point was more that TV/etc is a fundamentally less trackable audience. (agreeing with your point that some advertisers don't require tackable ads).
I didn't downvote, but with one exception, most posts to this thread appear to be from people going off of their imagination plus a scientific American article or two. HN tends to have a bias towards experts, and the layperson sometimes gets caught in the crossfire - particulary if the appear to posting with some authority on a topic they don't appear to have.
"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

Luck is a huge factor in success. Napoleon used to ask of candidates for lieutenant "is he lucky?", and he meant it.

Time and chance, folks. The idea for Facebook is as old as dirt in internet time.
Whoops, You're Not Actually a Capricorn | The Atlantic Wire
In answer to the headline: Of course - just not every day. :)

In answer to the actual situation behind the headline: No. It's time to find a new boss.
Moral? No. He's has a contract with a financial company. Do you think they would behave morally if it meant giving up a dollar?

Borrowing money from a friend is a moral obligation. That's not the same as signing a contract with a financial company that has buildings full of lawyers and accountants looking for ways to screw you.
>Hacker News is hardly in danger of becoming indistinguishable.

I very very much disagree. Online communities really are a slippery slope. People are naturally predisposed to upvote cotton-candy content, and if you start letting any of it in, eventually it will overwhelm whatever nutritional content used to be there. The people who care about good content will stop checking HN, and you'll left with nothing but stuff like this.
Just to clarify, the article didn't indicate that the CEO/CFO/COO needs to learn programming to get off the ground. The non-technical founder can at the least onboard a technical co-founder or build an internal tech. team.
If a non-tech. person outsources the product, how will he/she be able to figure out if the outsourcing firm is bluffing or creating bad products?
The one thing I really got out of this article is that HN has a IRC channel, that's awesome.

http://webchat.freenode.net/ join #startups

I'm totally idling there from now on.
All other things aside, people actually had a huge amount of freedom when it came to job choice in soviet russia.
Until your Apple device is outdated or thrown away and you're left with a pile of incompatible hardware, a fact which I find pretty distasteful (nothing enrages me more than people buying perfectly good stereos with adapters for hardware that will be obsolete in two years).

Give me USB and miniplug any day over unnecessary proprietary connectors.
Creating UI Assets for iOS
> Oh, that's right, they'll get the government to step in.

Only by suing you, civilly, in a civilian court of law. Unless the company is the United States Military, you can't really be thrown in jail for breaking the contract on its own. One would have to willfully spread the information learned while under the NDA, with the intent of that information causing damage, like a security hole in some bank's network a hired pen-tester finds that allows an attacker to illegally obtain money.
Knowledge, interaction, communities, infrastructure, and facilities are all important.

Knowledge is a commodity, but that's been true since Gutenberg. It's just a little more true now. Unis could have mailed out videos of lectures in the past, for a relatively small fee.

Interaction and communities are important. I'm guessing that online 1:1 interaction is a lot weaker (though Skype could help a bit) because it's so slow. Online communities are better, as 1:N interactions can be more powerful. The question is, how important was one on one time with your lecturer? I'm guessing it wasn't a big part of your university time, unless you were doing a high level course. Too many students to lecturers.

Infrastructure and facilities (especially labs) ... except for online journal subscriptions these are getting pretty weak these days anyway. Old-timers love to gas on about the time they nearly blew up the chem lab, but I've never been allowed near the sort of things they were able to do. For some reason. People doing a big research project (on something that isn't just computational or theoretical) get a bit more play, but only on one machine.

In short, budget cuts and commercialization have killed most of what most universities have to offer anyway.
Much Hyped Facebook Mail is launched to selected users
This actually seems like a decent piece of journalism from Gizmodo.

I didn't know they had it in them.
Currently very few people have access to it ,check the screenshots
> Anthropomorphizing such things is a silly because it confuses people

The rest of my post gave a very high-level explanation of how a virus infects a human cell. To explain it in full would take many hours verbally (it took me months in my program to even get up to speed on molecular biology, having come from a CS background).

I'll give some more detail, though: when I say "specifically tuned to human physiology" I mean "tuned" to an extreme level. A human cell is a bag of water, protein, and nucleic acids enveloped by a lipid bilayer. This lipid bilayer physically prevents anything larger than...I think a subset of very small molecules from entering the cell? I am very weak in biochem, so I don't know the exact parameters around this, but I do know for certain that a virus is many orders of magnitude too large to just "get in" to a cell.

In order to gain entry to the cell, the virus has to have a protein that is extremely specifically targeted to a human protein that sits on the surface of a human cell. Like, antibody-to-antigen level specific - this is the product of many many generations of evolution. After attaching to that protein, the virus performs a very biochemically specific action to inject its payload into the cell.

> Their folding state _is_ the infection mechanism

Er, not really. It's the infection mechanism once the prion is in the cell (since the proteins to which the infection spreads are in a cell). How does the protein get in the cell in the first place?

...that's what nobody knows. It can't just float in, again because of the lipid bilayer. It needs to be actively pulled into the cell. Why would that happen?
wait, so they're going to coat everything with volcanoes?
good question - and the answer to that is the way we got our first customers.
We used to do two weeks of work free and if they still wanted to work with us, the 2 weeks get retroactively billed. These days, we have a sufficiently low walk-away penalty for the initial weeks.

We never lost a customer.. and we did work with non-technical, although smart, people.
I'm impressed you guys encode that much. I don't think you're the common case.

The case where WebM dies is that everyone continues to encode with H264 (which is what they're doing now). If you're IE or an iOS device you get raw H264. If you're Chrome or Firefox you get H264 in Flash.

You just encode H264 and that's it. Now dual encoding, and you work everywhere.

Whereas with WebM there is NO delivery mechanism to iOS devices (iOS won't play WebM and won't play Flash). You have to dual encode to get those devices. Just seems like a less likely scenario.
Beyond the RDBMS: the Brave New (Old) World of NoSQL
Bubblicious.
Your age is showing.
What happens if you are killed or decide to steal the contents of the cache?
There is a site http://openstudy.com/ where you can get into contact with other people taking the courses at OCW.

I wanted to work through the 18.06 calculus course anyway, so having that with enhanced material is great news to me.
I don't think quality and cheap are compatible. I can't envision a scenario whereby a project taking a long time will allow it to be done cheaply and well.
> People are naturally predisposed to upvote cotton-candy content, and if you start letting any of it in, eventually it will overwhelm whatever nutritional content used to be there.

Totally. That's a very valid point. It's much easier to upvote an amusing BBC2 video than to digest, upvote and participate meaningfully in a discussion around a serious technical article.

However Hacker News has remained remarkably tonally consistent in my opinion:

December 2007 frontpage: http://web.archive.org/web/20071229130614/http://news.ycombi...

December 2008 frontpage:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080701051131/http://news.ycombi...

And it looks like the group nostalgia for the glory days of reddit is a little overblown as well: http://web.archive.org/web/20071229144532/http://reddit.com/

Ok, maybe not entirely overblown. Most of that stuff looks like it was at least submitted by people who could drink legally.

My current concern with HN is actually not fluff content, but the preponderance of inane business and personal development blog posts. If I have to see one more "how to find a technical co-founder" post... ;)
I'd guess he or she was taking notes. I don't know how it works with Facebook, but sometimes the interviewer has to write up the results for the hiring committee, and just saying "hire" or "don't hire" isn't enough - you have to justify your answer.
it depends on how liquid the shares are. If 80% are controlled by insiders,and institutions loyal to insider, they can run up the stock, despite the incongruity with fundamentals.

case study: Open Table

http://www.google.ca/finance?q=open+table

It has a P/E of 157!!!!! And it's still going strong. Likely because it's getting pumped by thin trading.

It's the classic pump n dump. Run up the stock, and try to unload it to dumb money like mutual funds, and pension funds aka (your money).

Groupon's P/E can run just as high. It depends on how high they have to push it to entice dumb money, which is likely why they are pushing out a pre-IPO PR blitz to frame the story beforehand.

This was all done in Web 1.0. Same bag of tricks. Let's see if the average American has learned anything.
Fantastic. Only four years in which anyone throwing a stick to a dog could be creditably threatened with a patent suit.

My gut says that the threat would be hollow, but my gut says a lot of things. Like that "1-Click" is too obvious to patent - all you need is a requirement "reduce the number of steps a user needs to place a purchase order", and that's the logical conclusion. Can you tell me if 1-click patents are valid?

If anything can be patented (if not actually defended), and patent threats (even hollow ones) are an obstacle to new businesses, how is the patents system encouraging innovation?

I know pg advises to ignore other companies patents completely (though you should file a few of your own), and worry about the flack when you have something to lose, but that doesn't mean the system isn't crap.
It depends on what extreme you take it to. For the classic sports example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45mMioJ5szc

Fail Fast can also be seen as: Perform, get feedback, perform slightly better, get more feedback, iterate until perfect.
Goldman Sachs raises Infosys to buy
Sounds like the author just has a chip on their shoulder because of some bad experiences.

Certainly not all UX/Designers behave like this. It's a bit much to say they all suck. I've dealt with a lot of dick-head programmers as well, but I don't issue blanket statements about them all sucking; it's just not true. I try not to let my experiences jade me too much, lest I miss some interesting or important things.
Learn Python the Hard Way: P2PU School of Webcraft
Open question about the iOS 4.3 four-finger pinch
There is a very good reason why designers tend not to explain the specific details of design "suckage" but simply exclaim "it sucks." "It sucks" means that the design has to be thrown out, and one should generally start from scratch. What you're looking for, on the other hand, is an explanation that goes something like this "ok, this part of your design is pretty good, but this one is the really sucky part, and it is sucky because you did so and so, and you only need to change this to so and so and you're good." What you're looking for, in other words, is way to incrementally improve upon an existing design, which is the way engineering and software development is often done. Designers don't think like this. Designers frown upon incremental improvement, since it would imply (1) That design rules are being codified -- which is first of all hard since language used to describe the emotional associations this or that design evokes simply may not exist, and second of all may not be desirable since codification often means banalisation; (2) That design is not holistic -- which means it has some similarity to the dreaded case of a design by a committee ("ok, you do this part, I will do this part, and she will work on that part"), the end result of which is, as we all know, a camel, not a horse.

The best design is always holistic, which means that (1) one and only one person either completely designs everything or closely supervises the entire process, and (2) it is impossible to redesign any single part of the product without redesigning most if not all of the other remaining parts.

Therefore, in design, it is either "it sucks balls; start over" or "this is groovy; rock on."
Anybody care to comment on how good the SVG implementation in IE9 is? I've found, somewhat counterintuitively, that you can get better rendering performance from SVG than Canvas if your application is a good fit for certain techniques, and I'm hoping that we can use them in IE9 too.
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Hackers, try it out see whether you can break it..
http://www.locust123.com
http://www.mobadsexchange.com
You seem to be arguing that dropping H.264 <video> from Chrome will spur adoption of WebM. As many have pointed out, including the parent, a more likely scenario is it will spur adoption of Flash+H.264. Path of least resistance and all that.

Playing hardball is fine, but you've got to be sure you are actually playing and not merely whacking random spectators in the nuts.
The Verizon iPhone Is Too Late - Dan Lyons
Deleted Status Updates Appearing In Facebook Memorable Stories