skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So do you just conflate all criticism into the 'whining' bucket?

A lot of people on that thread were very specific in their feedback. Both pointing out their grouses and what could be done to fix them, so I disagree with your unkind characterization that they were just a 'few people who don't like change'

The least Skype could have done was post a simple

"Thank you for the posts, we are evaluating all your feedback"

Too much to ask?
I'd bet it has to do with space, if you're in the rental business, you need more of it- and it's expensive. If you're Starbucks, you do your feasibility calculations without assuming you'll get worker-cubby rental money.
Why your meetings on RSA Conference will be a waste of time
There are a couple comments here saying that software developers shouldn't bend to the will of a vocal minority that doesn't like change. I completely agree.

However, this is not the case here. I use Skype daily for business and I can say that not a single person that I know who upgraded likes the changes. That isn't a few squeaky wheels.

Granted 20 people isn's statisticly significant, but when it is hated by 20 people in a sample size of 20 you have to wonder a bit.

I'm sure a lot of people love it; but I'm not one.
Yeah, just like Digg didn't listen to their users.
"Incidentally, I have a friend whose passport says "Ingy döt Net"."

Is it an American passport? If it comes from a country which uses ö as part of its alphabet I don't see what would be surprising.
WiFi has been free at Starbucks in the USA since July 2010. Before that, a registered Starbucks card got you free WiFi.
wouldn't the scale of mining operations within a given community be proportionate to the scale of the overall economy?

If we consider mining success as a function of investment AND natural deposits, then if the natural deposit goes to 0, investment can go to infinity without increasing the success rate.

A steady slow growth of the money supply has been proposed as a way to eliminate bubbles. No one has tried it, for all we know it is not much worse or better than what we have now.

Deflation gives everyone a great reason to save. This can turn into an economic death spiral. Exceptions do apply, as for example after a destructive war there can be strong enough demand to rebuild that the economy grows even with mild deflation.
my soundbite version of the healthcare bill was it was geared towards the poor

That doesn't make sense. Many of the ACA's biggest provisions (establishing exchanges, banning pre-existing condition limitations, allowing 26 year olds to stay on their parents' healthcare) are not at all limited to poor folks. They're primarily useful to middle class and up folks.
It is interesting to note that a beautiful python program from the "interesting alternative" category [1] beats the C program, and LuaJIT is always impressive [2] on these sorts of microbenchmarks (beating SBCL, with one third the source code).

[1] http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/program.php?test=spect...

[2] http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/program.php?test=spect...
doesn't skype have like 10 million users online at any given time? 160 upset people is like dropping salt into the ocean.
I always liked the quote from Good to Great, "Start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus."
One plane getting hacked and crashing into something will be enough to create a wave of panic like never seen before. Look what a few planes hitting a few buildings did when you could see the perpetrators. Now imagine what happens when you can't.
You really, really, really don't want to give false statements on a job application. That's usually grounds for termination should it come to light.
Pysistence: a project to make functional programming in python easier
What was the reason for the large jump from 2008 to 2009?
Is there a generally well-accepted definition of infographics / information architecture?
I have an HSA for $91/mo. I am single, 31, and healthy, and have enough saving to pay all costs until I hit 5k/yr. This costs less than an iPhone.
As somebody with an intense self-interest, I have no problem quitting a job if it's just not working out for me. I'm honest with the company, and lay out exactly why it is that I'm leaving. Sometimes it's just personal fit, and sometimes there's something dysfunctional with the company. I find that people appreciate the candor and the fact that I didn't hang around and let things turn into festering negativity.

Of course, I also had one manager who just completely went off on me and threatened to tear me a new one, but that's sort of indicative of why I was leaving in the first place. :)
It sounds like people need to open more hacker work spaces.
Coffee shops are pretty much the opposite of sure-fire money losers. This article is a few years old, but:

The failure rate for new coffeehouses is a mere 10 percent, according to the market research firm Mintel, which means the vast majority of cafes stay afloat no matter where Starbucks drops its stores. Compare that to the restaurant business, where failure is the norm.

- http://www.slate.com/id/2180301/pagenum/all/#page_start

There's a reason you can find coffee shops--both franchised and independent--everywhere you go. Selling $.16 of coffee for $4 is quite profitable!
The library in Quebec city won't even let you have a bottle of water open on your table, forget coffee.
How/where did you purchase your MacBook?

I've purchased probably close to a dozen various Apple machines (MacMini's, MacBookPro 17, MacBook, MacBookPro 15, MacBook Air) in the last ~4 years and have never had anything come on them besides OS X, iLife, iWork (which I don't consider bloatware, plus they're easy to remove if you want).
I've tried working in the library on a number of occasions. The one bad thing I've discovered is that the WIFI sucks at pretty much every public library I've worked at. And I think that's a sample size of 4 or 5 libraries. I live almost right next to the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library, and every time I've gone there to work, I've left after a while because the Internet was too slow or didn't work quite right.

So if I want to get any coding done, and need access to the Internet, I have found the library to be a pretty bad place. If I'm just doing some quiet reading, the library can be great.
I didn't get that feeling at all. Very few problems have a "best" solution. Generally they have a whole myriad of good solutions with various pros and cons, and as a boss you sometimes take a strategic decision say "we're going with solution X" and have people get to work rather than getting bogged down in a two week argument. I mean I don't always agree with every decision my boss makes but at the end of the day I respect the fact that he knows more about the big picture and our customers than I do and that he signs my paychecks.
It is an American passport.
Direct links are always possible:

http://pastebin.com/vhetSm20
We had a few landing page articles on hacker news lately. But this one gives a much greater background to the concept of landing pages and what else goes with it.

Been holding off on designing a real landing page for my side project http://www.virtualrockstars.com and generating signups therefor has been costing me a much higher price.

Will compare the difference next month after launching with an optimized landing page experience. Might blog and share my experience...if anyone is interested.
I would definitely go to a library that serves lattes and pastry ;)
> ...a more scalable alternative to traditional relational database management systems (RDMS) written in the SQL language.

Huh, apparently RDBMS' are written in SQL...and all this time I thought SQL wasn't even Turing complete.
Because we are social animals who automatically situate ourselves in hierarchies with those around us, and non-managers with grey in their hair create instant conflicts for many young adults' social-hierarchy construction reactions. We have an animal urge to defer to people who look like our parents, and another animal urge to be deferred to by our subordinates. Ironically, by the time our own hair has some grey in it most of us have gotten pretty good at understanding and resolving these conflicts, but for a 27 year old semi-alpha, the presence of an older person (especially man) in a nominally beta role can instantly raise their blood pressure.
Are they happy with this, or have they just not noticed? I'd feel bad about using another business's resources unless they explicitly allow it.
The Latest on Yahoo Search BOSS
Kids in middle of popularity hierarchy most likely to bully
I'm usually pretty receptive of major UI changes, but I hate Skype's new UI. It's hard to find contacts, it's weird how everything is piled into this giant window, and it took me 5 minutes to find the dial pad.
It does include wifi as well as reading privileges, but not lending.
The push to talk functionality really is handy though. That was the reason i installed the beta. I did reach a point about 2 weeks ago where the benefit of push to talk was outweighed by the extremely shoddy UI, specifically with regard to window focus.

Thankfully the newest beta makes sure that when you flip back to Skype the text input is always the active UI element in your chat (as opposed to the title for whatever god awful reason).

The UI still takes up a huge amount of space, but it is at least usable now.

Not being able to tear video out into a separate window is still very frustrating however.
You can also get group coverage through the Mass Busineess Association. My HSA policy is $850 month and covers me, my wife and two kids. Pretty high deductible though.
Similarity to .Net the framework, maybe?
It's safer if you terminate them immediately and just give them 30 days severance pay, which is the same thing.

I'm not sure I'd trust some people not to have a negative reaction and try to sabotage their project.
Adium betas? Probably. Skype betas? No, don't think so.

I've heard only deep regret from friends who tried the new Skype for Mac.
Nice, bonus points for using the YYYYMMDD date form in your folder names -- free lexical sort!! (We do likewise with suffix notation, mainly because the more common use case for us is to to first sort by "event description" then by date.)
Second this. Specifically he is pointing out that without the proper definition of a startup, this is merely lip-service that hits the right amount of buzz words for the media to regurgitate.

Why is he posting this? My guess, he genuinely cares to see entrepreneurship thrive in America and can't bare to see halfhearted attempts with hidden agendas.

My reaction was the opposite when I read his post. I thought it is pretty ballsy for someone like him to to go against the grain like this as he is likely speaking out against peers and colleagues. Status quo for Blank as he has written posts critical of VCs when deserved.
I keep my resume circulating and go on interviews for a couple months after I take each new job to guard against this. It has come in handy one time in five jobs, and I made sure to let the HR director know that I left so quickly because the work I was actually doing and the co-workers I was around were completely different from what I was shown in the interview.

People say that interviewing is a two way street, but I don't think that goes quite far enough. If you get a job you're not qualified for and can't do, you'll be let go quickly. If a company gets my labor by misrepresenting what they do, I see it as fair play to let them go and let them know I don't appreciate a bait and switch.
Empathetic Product Discovery for Hackers
It's the main historical example of a make-work program in the U.S., during the Great Depression: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

Perhaps because the WPA is a lot more recent, it seems to be the thing Americans think of when a make-work program is suggested. I don't think I've ever heard them criticized as Dickensian; instead they tend to be criticized as socialist.
I'm with you on that, too!
It's a shame that the tone of this post caused it to be downvoted, because you actually do raise a good point that is worth discussing. Maybe talented younger programmers are more likely to job hop and roam a bit, whereas talented older programmers start to value a bit more stability and tenure. Or maybe the older programmers have progressed to a point in their careers where they have golden handcuffs or some other benefit that keeps them pinned to their job?

The post declares, very bluntly, that if an older programmer is looking for a job, he/she must not be any good. Based on my own hires, I know this isn't the case. But maybe the mix is different from the young folks? Anyway, it's an interesting perspective that might be worth looking into.
Yeah, it's just not a well organized program IMO. It likely needs an expensive UI consultant and an expensive redo of many screens to really handle the 3-4 ways people work with it.

There are the Eurobusiness people who live in it, the Eurobusiness people who live work and play in it, the casual users who use it for the occasional phone call, the teens who use it as a substitute for AIM and everyone else from what I can see. Basically, they're trying to compromise on that, and not doing a great job.
I never said anything about technical only knowledge. I myself took a few art classes, and enjoyed them.

What I said is that people pick these majors, and then we see these crazy unemployment stats. Most of these unemployed people are not qualified to do anything that society is willing to pay money for.
Lean Startup Circle Boston Jan 2011 Meetup Notes – Part 2
huh? Tons of people have changed their name for their facebook account (e.g. "Rob FromManchester" instead of "Rob Smith"), so they don't pop up in employer searches. I've never seen or heard of a verification system.
Maybe you could have communicated why you made the decision you did and not had the relationship go south. Or you could have said something like, "You obviously feel strongly about this, I don't have time to discuss it right now but lets make some time before or after work in the next couple of days."

People have different motivations; often they just want to be heard but some times they need to be "right." Sometimes you can make a meaningless concession so that they are "right" and have them full speed on your side again instead of fighting you.
Steve Blank has a lot of blog posts about entrepreneurship and the different types - searching through his old posts would turn up good info. I also recommend reading his blog from the beginning. It's a great read, not too long (a longish book, total), and covers a lot of ground about entrepreneurship.
There is no difference at all, since the latter takes precedence (read the man pages):

$ gcc -c -Q -Os -O3 --help=optimizers > Os-O3-opts

$ gcc -c -Q -O3 --help=optimizers > O3-opts

$ diff Os-O3-opts O3-opts

$
DARPA recently assigned a grant to Olin Shivers, along with members of Northeastern University's and University of Utah's faculty, to "seek to develop bug-free, secure technology using brand-new programming languages that enable programmers to write large, complex software."[1]

Around campus, it's been described as an opportunity for Shivers et al. to write a Operating System built completely with functional languages, from the low-level drivers up to user space tools and new programming languages.

My personal thoughts is that it'd be awfully cool to have something like "Emacs as a real OS." Perhaps it is lack of knowledge and self-confidence or the limited nature of Emacs, but I find it way easier to change the way Emacs works than to change the way the Linux kernel, GNOME, GNU tools, etc. work.

[1] Page 12 of http://www.ccs.neu.edu/news/CCIS-Newsletter-Fall-10.pdf
As much as I would like to embrace change, Skype 5 for Mac is not change I can believe in. Besides the usual complain of everything being too big, I fail to see what a COMPLETE redo of the UI has anything valuable (read significant enough for a drastic total change) to offer me.

First of all, what does the barely 3d cover-flow view of my contacts suppose to help me with? Even if I maximize it to screen-size, I can only see 9 contacts (1 fully, 8 partially) at once, and they are all resampling of Icons of what 128x128 pixels? Form and function FAIL.

Second, what happened to conversation history? If I click show 6 months, I can't go back to show 1 day. Dead end workflows are always awkward.

Lastly, why in the world is there so much spacing? There's like 100px of completely blank paddings everywhere. The icons and fonts are already ginormous. Making the window so much bigger doesn't make me more likely to use it.

The UI design makes no sense whatsoever. It must have been done by an automatic random UI design decision maker.
Would love to hear about how you market to school districts/large school units.

I built a product (back in 2008) that was aimed at the education sector for students and teachers to use to study in groups, but alas it never got much traction with large groups like I intended. But it was heavily popular with international users from (mainly) Europe.

I had pretty much 0 luck marketing to school districts or schools, just a few classrooms.

It seems the school district market is a hard nut to crack that I've been wondering how one can angle on..
Nope, now you're the dishwasher. At least in my experience; if you do something that other people don't want to do, you're now the "that thing" guy for life.
Alexey Voznyuk contributed several Lisp programs, and a couple still show as the fastest Lisp program - maybe you can do better?

(The project name changed nearly 4 years ago http://groups.google.com/group/haskell-cafe/msg/61e427146c8d...)
I grew up in Maine and went to UMaine. The library there is open to the public. I'm in New York now and due to city budget cuts most public library branches don't open until 11AM which doesn't work for my schedule. Columbia is within walking distance of my apartment and $42/month is a screaming bargain since I'm so much more productive there than at a cafe.
Ask HN: Checking uploaded file types
My start-up is an esoteric corner of the universe where users often upload and share with each other myriad different file formats. So far I have been validating (and restricting) the files that they upload. But there is a backlash brewing since they want to share file types that I am not currently allowing.

My question is what do I do? It is practically impossible to check for all the file types and new ones keep popping up. Should I

1. Allow them to upload whatever and have a pop-up everytime somebody tries to download something warning them that they are responsible?

2. Restrict what they can upload?

3. Really try to validate each and every file format that they want. Do the rest of you do this for esoteric formats?

Thanks!
Which was probably all due to baggage fees. In fact that graph shows $2.5 billion in baggage fees charged in the US alone (your articles shows $2.5 billion worldwide, and I bet most of it is in the Asia-Pacific region).

Airlines had been steadily losing money from 9/11 up to 2009, except for a few low-cost carriers.
Isotope in the wild
The Recession Is Gone, and the CEO Could Be Next
Google: On A Clean Energy Mission
I love how-to blog entries = its a tutorial, a cheat sheet, a process guide. Especially when, like this one, they give fairly detailed instructions on services, techniques, and sequencing.
I think Southwest has proven this not to be the case. Their fares are consistently lower than the majors in spite of having no bag fees and their bottom line sure doesn't seem to be hurting any.

You could argue that the level of service isn't commensurate with what you'd get on a Delta or AA so its not the same product - but I'd say personally that my experiences with Southwest are far more pleasant than my dealings with any of the others.

edit: s/fare/far (pun notwithstanding)
All Time Greatest Printing Products
cheap ticket printing, ticket printing cheap, cheap posters printing, custom business cards, They all are productive and gainful marketing products. That is why company offers you cheap printing services.
Arguing Is Pointless
So then I guess facebook believes my fb app QA team consists of about a half dozen men who look strikingly like myself but with much more colorful names.
Out of curiosity have you used Skype version 5 on a Mac? What do you think of it?
Depends on the person and the circumstances of leaving. In most cases of firing or redundancy (vs. because they quit) it's safer to just pay them for the notice period but not let them to come into work anymore (severance). If they weren't that useful to begin with, you're not exactly missing out. If you're letting them go in some amicable way, it may be different, but I'd imagine you'd want to be very careful they won't do any damage.
No; its capitalism, you owe them money for work.

Should you provide a career path? Sure, you outlined all that in the article. You need to keep highly-skilled longtime employees somehow.
Floating point is not the problem, it's memory issues mostly due to C defaulting to allowing aliasing. C99 has the `restrict` keyword so you can generally get identical object code from both languages. SSE intrinsics are only available from C, you will either use them or assembly any time you care a lot about performance of tight kernels (very few nontrivial kernels are vectorized adequately by any of today's compilers).
I have to agree ... this kind of thing that comes to characterize a PC in the mind of the average user and when they try an Apple, its an instant win when all these confusing items aren't immediately cluttering their notification area and desktop.
I like the distractions of a good coffee shop. I like being someplace with music playing and people wandering through. It provides engagement for the parts of my brain I don't use when working.

My favorite coffee shops are loud enough that I'm not distracted by other people's conversations. Either the music is loud enough to drown them out, or enough people are talking at once that it all blends into a meaningless susurration. A place which is too quiet--like most libraries, actually--amplifies distractions.
"but I was completely pissed off that my tax dollars go to support that."

People who can't afford a few hundred dollars for their own computer and the monthly bill for internet access? If you're looking at porn in the library, it's because you can't do it anywhere else, not because you're abusing tax dollars.

Would I like the poor, the disadvantaged, the isolated to be using the library resources my taxes pay for to advance their lives? Hell yeah. Am I going to begrudge them - let alone get pissed off about - them using it to do the things I can do on my phone, on my way to the well-paying job? Hell no.
Young Entrepreneurs…a Challenge with a Prize worth over $300
I like it. Automatically having a group chat when you make a call with multiple people, and saving group chats in your history are the two things that have kept me using the Skype 5 and not downgrading. And now that the focus problem when app switching bug is fixed I really don't have any major problems with it.
[1] 12.54s < 11.14s ?
There is much more financial assistance available for college though.
Surviving the Wild West Development Process