skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most French people will be able to understand most Montrealers sometimes, in the same way that someone from Britain would be able to understand a Cajun sometimes. The language is very divergent, with franglais words sprinkled here or there, shortened words, differing word usage, etc.

On top of that, for the reasons above as well as others (including their accent), people from France really dislike listening to people from Montreal speak 'French', and will avoid it whenever possible. This is similar to the way Francophones from Montreal will speak English rather than French to an Acadian, because their accent is really just that bad.
"If we are to use a medical analogy, imagine interviewing an experienced surgeon...'What is a scalpel?...show how you'd cut in that case'...such a situation is unimaginable."

I don't think this analogy tells us anything (other than that's not how the medical field works). Why is this situation unimaginable? What exactly would be wrong with this approach?

I do a couple tech interviews a week and I regularly see people with very impressive resumes that can't code fizzbuzz. The job largely consists of writing software; I see no problem with requiring candidates to demonstrate that they can, in fact, write software. I don't want to work with people that think they're too good to demonstrate their skills.
Briefly?
How Not To Find a Technical CoFounder
Would be a nice listing for AirBnB.
Thanks for your comments. I just fixed the <b> </b> issue. We'll definitely look at having the app fall back on locations other than your current location - we didn't do it originally just to keep things as simple and clean as possible. We appreciate the time you took to respond!
I'm actually more impressed that the courts, even locally, didn't try to stop him from pressing buttons and ruffling feathers. Bravo to the entire town.
in short, twitter didn't DDoS them, it was the result of all the various bots that look for new urls posted to twitter and fetch them for whatever reason.

the article says the "DDos" was "80 requests within the span of 2-3 seconds". if that amount of traffic causes as much trouble to your server as it did for that site (load average of 31, out of swap memory, server reboots), you have a really shitty architecture.

it sounds like twitter did these guys a favor by pointing out how poorly engineered their site was. why they posted about it and drew attention to their problem, i have no idea.
After reading this, I am struck with the idea that maybe Apple's reluctance to support flash, is not just motivated by the performance issues. That it could also be that the DRM support in flash would mean that companies could just abondon the app model and just use flash (i.e. Netflix or a flash based Amazon ebook reader).
Agreed. I've had two Android phones in a row with 'full flash' support, they were both more responsive with Flash uninstalled.

Regardless of what Adobe says, Flash does not work on mobile devices as of 2011.
If a person lifted weights for 7 years and never became stronger I would guess he was doing it wrong[lifting too much, lifting too little, not increasing intensity, etc]. If a person meditates for 7 years and can sees no effect...
I don't know about Twitter and HuffPo, but I'm certainly amazed by how quickly Facebook's bottom line has rocketed recently.

Let's take a look: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41521349/ns/business-us_business...

That's 250m of net income in the last quarter, more than the 200m generated in the entirety of 2009. In addition, they anticipate 2011 EBITDA of $2b (of course that's different from income, but given that FB has no debt, and depreciation is just the fractional cost of hardware, net income must be above $1.3b in 2011). I personally believe that profits will rise to the $5b annual range within 5 years, which would give it a 12 P/E valuation if it stayed at the current valuation. (But look at Google)

Anyway, I am confident that FB's financials will justify its valuation when the IPO comes along. I don't doubt that Goldman is here to make a killing.

Facebook isn't focused on turning on the money faucet right now. There are so many ways to generate cash that it'll focus on soon.
Ask HN: How many hackers (or even tech enthusiasts here) love to cook?
The Barefoot Contessa was making some awesome chicken dish while I was eating lunch in our break room and it made me really want to save a little more time for trying to cook better. I think I have mastered all thinks crockpot - it is time to step up the game! ;)

If you do like to cook, what do you cook?
> Not a great comparison. Windows is an OS, the App Store is a channel.

It is a pretty good comparison as long as App Store is the only way to install anything on iOS
The Piano Test for Program Verification
> is it safe to assume that the German police are quite a bit more sensible than their American counterparts?

It depends. Gun ownership isn't nearly as common in the US, so they can safely assume that a 17 year old blackhat won't pull a gun on them.

On the other hand, I've seen a ~4.9 feet tall girl getting knocked unconsciously with a Mp5 during the eviction of a squat. In 2003, a schizophrenic in custody was beaten to death by officers in Cologne. They were sentenced from 12 to 18 months in probation. In 2005, Oury Jalloh burned to death in a holding cell in Dessau while being tied with handcuffs to a fire-proof mattress at his hands and feet. In 2008, Josef Hoss was beaten to a bloody pulp by a special unit after his arrest. He is irreparably crippled. He later recieved 30,000€ for compensation.
The ill-formed part of your question is the "in one second" part. From the point of view of the observer on the spaceship, the photon will be ~300k km away after one second. From the point of view of an 'stationary' observer, the photon will be (one second * (c - spaceship_speed)) away from the spaceship.

How can this be? Answer, as the grandparent said: time is passing differently for the person on the spaceship than it is for the person outside. It is passing in such a way that, for each of them, the speed of light is exactly c.

(edit: corrected 300km to 300k km)
To be understood better. People communicate to convey info.
That's certainly what I notice, and I am a student of CS. I find it bizarre that so many of my colleagues really feel they are in CS to learn how to program, rather than to study the higher level concepts. This is made harder by many programming-centric jobs requiring CS degrees, even though the skills those jobs really require are not dependent on such a degree.
the main pt i guess is that bots come in from different IPs and in the same time leading to resource hog of the server. Again the numbers arent that crazy but yea but one can see how it effect the site's performance
You can get all of those benefits by living in Vancouver (though rent isn't as cheap here, apartments and suites are much better maintained). On top of that, the weather is better, the people are friendlier, and you don't have to worry as much about not getting a position solely because your language skills aren't up to snuff.
I think its a little different.

Readability has made a contract with the media suppliers: you get 70% of every dollar from the customer. If Apple takes the other 30%, there is 0% left for Readability.

If they want to make any kind of revenue for themselves in Apple's system, the only option is to give the content creators a smaller percentage and charge a higher price.

It's not really a matter of if Readability deserves 30%, but if Readability deserves any money at all. Apple is basically eating their entire revenue stream.
Nice post!
We published something very similar to allow any app or web page to use pic2shop as an external barcode reader.
Here is the info and code sample:
http://www.pic2shop.com/developers/developers.html
I think the jvm as a platform is having a resurgence. Java is the assembly language of that platform so to speak.
I keep hearing this - the things only Office does for you, but often with little detail on what would it be.

What are the must-have features of Office?
Wouldn't scalable be much more suitable for hadoop?
Show HN: Restaurant Week Maps
My classmate and I made a website to make it easier to find restaurants during NY Restaurant Week.

http://www.restaurantweekmaps.com/

We pulled in Yelp ratings in addition to the info already provided by NYCGO.com.

What do you all think?
Consumers already do, if like 99% of people they get the license with a new computer. MS only soaks the people who buy retail.
All these requests were first time requests before the cache pages were created, hence it caused so much load.
The main takeaway for me is that of a deeper "that's the way it is":

* My understanding before: light has a constant speed and nothing can exceed that speed, but up until that limit everything can travel at a variety of speeds.

* My understanding after: everything travels through space-time at a constant speed. Light is "special" only in that it travels exclusively through space and not at all through time.
Replying to self: downmod that!

Typekit got in contact: they don't use the Paul Irish 'bulletproof' syntax that has the bug (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3200069/css-fonts-on-andr...). They serve separate stylesheets to separate browsers - sorry, I have my font services confused!
Germany neither has a War on Drugs nor a meth problem. There have been highly criticized raids in Germany, but there are fewer raids per capita in Germany, and in Germany police-citizen interaction is less violent (no automatic assumption that that driver that was just pulled over is armed, for example).
The New SEO is About Relationships and Relevance
Ask HN: How do you name your servers?
Just curious - do you name your boxes randomly, or do you have a set of constraints?

(Aside: we name boxes randomly, and just named our newest box Watson :)
I see you are a Rails dev. I imagine in the backend it's something more than a Rails app. What's your stack like?
Are you asking why light travels at this speed? It's because otherwise light could not exist.

If you are asking why the limit is this specific number then no one knows. But then again we don't know the reason for any of the constants.
Apple's side: Imagine most popular newspapers and magazines sites use Google One Pass to collect subscriptions fees via website, and offer free iOS app to consume the content. Apple collects nothing. I'm not totally with Apple but they have their points.
A brief history of guile
But to say that you have hacked some non computer system, wouldn't it require you to have invented the hack?

Because as smart as your two year old is, he probably didn't invent the technics.
MultiColr Search Lab - search flickr for color
but then apple would moan it's a feature that should be available in the app and you're back to square 1

Well, Apple's explicitly disallowed this in their rules. You have to provide in-app subscription, and you can't send users to the website to sign up regardless.
It's worse. I've proven, with cold hard numbers, that our waterfall process didn't work and gotten agreement. But I get told that we _have to_ provide a waterfall schedule to some of our key customers (big multinationals) or otherwise they won't believe we'll deliver, because everybody that's not in software knows by now that waterfall is how all real software gets made. le sigh

So, what we do know is we make up a waterfall schedule to give to the customer, and then we do our own thing afterwards.
Lybia uprising - coverage by Al Jazeera
I think this is a great step for Microsoft. I believe they've learned a lot from the good PR that Android has received due in part to Androids large and outspoken developer community. I'm sure Microsoft has also noticed a lot of the negativity surrounding Motorola and their decision to lock down boot loaders (effectively removing any developers chance to mess with the phone). That and the mess that Sony has created by suing the people who hacked the PS3.

So, kudos to Microsoft.
Montreal companies have absolutely no problem hiring programmers who don't speak French (I'm the sole anglophone at my company, and they found me).

The real losers end up being the native Quebecers. There are really good programmers here working for pennies because they don't know enough English to move to or contract for companies in the Bay Area or NYC. This is true for a lot of other knowledge/creative professionals in Montreal as well.

If you look at Montreal neighborhoods and professions, you find that the ones where management and finance dominates are also the ones with mostly anglophones (of course Westmount dominates), and the ones with the highest incomes. The irony of francization is that it is creating an economic ghetto out of the native French speakers.
You'll start again when you're ready.
It's actually worse than that. Readability is passing money to publishers for FREE CONTENT. Its model is not a purchase or even a subscription - it is essentially a donation. I don't have to pay to see this content, I choose to.

I wonder how this affects the Instapaper "back door" to Readability (which is what I use)

I am also wondering where this is goingn to end. Why not ask for 30% off Evernote subscriptions too? Or every cloud accessing iPhone app?

This isn't going to end well.
I'm not familiar with the interals of WP Super Cache, but it is really odd that a cached page can't be served ~80 req/s. Perhaps Varnish will work in the case where WP Super Cache can't be tooled to write-through to cache or sooner.
My point was nothing to do with size or value! Oh dear, my pedantry has been misconstrued. My point was the conflation of hundred year old and "Tudor". I am not one to sneer at anybody for their scale of home, and indeed wish this chap luck.
Here is the Tiobe index, where again Java reigns: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....
Fraud shakes the Alibaba management as CEO and COO resign
You should check out: Cooking for Geeks - http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596805890

I got a copy the other day and it is a fun read so far.
Unfortunately, I am at the mercy of our IT in server naming, and they come up with the weirdest names, e.g. my machine is called ganada.

A good approach I've heard would be to use Google Sets: enter a few terms and see if you have enough consistent names to support your future server needs.
First AMD Fusion Powered Lenovo Notebook Impresses, ThinkPad X120e
35 Creative Poster Designs for Inspiration
A friend of mine develops games for phones professionally, and he says fragmentation and the lack of ability to query the device for what operations it supports and only sell software for the supported hardware is a big problem for him.
Named captures in regular expressions looks really nice! I'm especially excited to play with Oniguruma.
I love cooking. My favorite dish is braised pork tenderloin. Soak it in a brine with citrus and herbs overnight, sear it in a stainless steel pan on all sides, then put it in the oven (pan and all) to finish it out. Serve with green vegetables, mashed potatoes, and a glass of beaujolais nouveau.
Not to mention heating the extra space was not worthwhile.
Usually you replace an encumbent technology with a better version rather than taking ten steps back. Evolution is about progress, not regression.

The truth is, Adobe's engineering incompetence aside, Flash is a lot, lot better to make programs with than HTML5. Silverlight is a lot, lot better to make programs with than HTML5. Java, C#, Python, Ruby, C++ are all, as a whole, a lot, lot better programming languages than Javascript.

Imagine replacing DVDs with 8 tracks. That's what's happening. It's a perverse scenario, but I can't understand how you can say that it's evolution, evolution is about progress, not regression.

It's Adobe's own fault for neglecting the Mac and Linux for so long, crashing browsers, etc., added with the general menace that PDFs are too and Silverlight was just too late, but let's not pretend the technology's better. It's pretty pathetic and the snail's pace progress of html5 is embarrassing.

And where's ECMAScript 5? What the hell has happened to that, it seems to have dropped off the planet!
Oh, and don't miss Seasoned Advice! http://cooking.stackexchange.com/
Will the browser have full HTML5 support? Can I go to YouTube in it and watch videos without flash? I admittedly don't know much about the Android 3.0 browser.
I have been programming since the early 1960s (as a kid, I got access to timesharing basic on the arpanet) and am generally a diehard techie. Just my opinion but the JVM platform is probably the "big event" software-wise (comparing it to object oriented programming, relational databases, Lisp Machines, etc.) in my lifetime.

Since Java is still the main language for the JVM, I am not surprised that Java books are still popular even though the language is getting long in the tooth.
I just interviewed someone and literally asked fizzbuzz, and their answer took the better part of an hour. Any tips on cutting an interview short without insulting the interviewee?
I love cooking. In fact, my most recent app, http://7courses.com was created to solve my problem of having far to recipes to manage.
The irony is that the "never add people to a late project" principle is often viewed as a silver bullet solution to save late projects.
Lifting weights with the proper diet will give results. That is a biological fact.

Is mediating leading to a better life a scientific fact?
You should show more respect to what other people do.

You're not the only one guilty of this, everybody tend to overestimate their contribution to the world. How many times did you hear/read about a business guy / manager saying that programmers are a disposable commodity? Saying that "the entire financial industry is ready to be replaced with a lot of very short shell scripts", you are acting exactly the same way.

Did you forgot about the dot-com bubble when the tech industry was the one guilty of being over-rewarded for what was often was no value (pet.com)?
The Feed Fast Experiment
s/where/were/
I took a quick look. It's a cool demo but it's inappropriate to link to it here when there are obvious XSS issues.
Grandpa Tim Tells A Scary Story
You shouldn't be getting DDoS'd by a bunch of bots. Since you're using Apache with that hardware, you should be able to avoid crashing the entire server. Regardless, you should be able to control your server enough to avoid having it swap/crash. May want to hire a sysadmin with more experience.
Try my BSD licensed JDBC driver for MySQL/Drizzle/(insert mysql fork)
Having consulted in NYC roughly 2002-2010, I highly recommend finding a good agency. I got all my gigs that way and they were consistently longer lasting and higher paying than gigs I got through networking. Plus, I didn't have to lift a finger - no negotiations, late payments, collections, etc., and I never had any downtime as long as I gave my agent a couple weeks notice.
I understand that Apple has thrown a wrench into Readability's plans. I'm trying to understand why I should believe that Readability's plans are "fair" whereas Apple's plans are not.

Readability has made a contract with Apple, so I'm not clear how establishing a contract with media suppliers matters (have they? or have they taken it upon themselves to distribute a portion of their revenue due to eliminating the existing revenue model the publisher uses, without the publishers explicit consent?). Readability's contract with media suppliers is firstly contingent on Readability's contract with Apple, if Readability intends to leverage iOS app distribution. Readability cannot provide a contract to media suppliers that is in opposition to Readability's contract with Apple (again, if Readability intends to release an iOS app).

Fundamentally however, Readability's value is derived from processing articles. Readability decided they deserve 30% of any revenue they can acquire from offering that service to readers. Apple's value is derived from supplying an eco-system and they have decided they deserve 30% of any revenue they can acquire from offering that service.

Why does one of those service providers "fairly" get to receive 30% but the other does not?
I think he is saying he hit a plateau. At some point, lifting weights, you stop growing bigger. You're never going to be the size of the moon.
You did, it closes now almost immediately after opening.
The kinect and MS is going to play an interesting role in NUI. The surface 2 is also still on the way. It's exciting to see that MS still innovates.
The way you'd phrased it confused the matter further, though. I'd consider rewording some of it.
Something else is really amiss here. As I refresh the article to double-check the "~80 req/s:"

$ curl -I -m5 http://trialx.com/enablers/2011/02/how-twitter-ddosd-our-web...
curl: (28) connect() timed out!

Surely their caching is still enabled and most of their articles should be hot in an LRU.
So you're not mad when a Pepsi can appears in your favorite movie but you would be mad if the robot that had been playing a killer game of chess with you for the last hour told a joke that mentioned a famous comedy album?

Both of these you get value from. Both of these are providing some kind of marketing "push" for some product.

How about your best friend who loves some certain kind of music and is always putting links to songs you don't care about in your Facebook feed?

Like I said, the purpose was just to mess with your head a bit. Apologies if I made it sound like some kind of evil overlord controlling armies of robots. That's not what I meant at all.
Yes, you did. I wouldn't recommend going to the site on your own machine because of the security hole. They should fix this as soon as possible.
So that's what the kids called it in those days.
How to estimate the size, value, and competition level of a market
I like to say that "the biggest barrier to success is failure." In other words, the longer you let a goal go unrealized, the harder it becomes to start because your repeated failures build up into a mental obstacle.

Turning something into a habit takes a lot of repetition so it's better to just get started with a modest objective so you can create a pattern of success.
I've been listening to those talks.

They're only about an hour to 1.5 hours long, and there's only 6 of them. They are supposed to be spread over a 6 week period. So every week for six weeks, you need to find an hour to spend listening to the talk for that week.

You will be meditating during part of the talk. Other days, you will meditate 20-30 minutes. This is not a large time commitment, and since you're on HN, I'm guessing you'd be able to manage.

Good luck! The first two talks have been pretty nice so far.
It's not free content, it's ad supported content. Readability is a service that, among other things and perhaps primarily, removes ads.
This is not a good place to economize. All the good firms are expensive. But they will also do deferred fee deals with sufficiently promising startups. To get one, get an intro from a founder or investor they know.
Awesome! Do you know if the kiko codebase is still in use?
Horses were replaced not by faster horses, but by cars.

Trains were not replaced by faster trains, but by airplanes.

Good First class travel experience from Europe to Australia will not be replaced by Excelent First class experience, but rather by Suborbital flight (even without meal) which will bring you there in 2hours.
It has a brand-new UI that is tablet-optimized. I think the principle advantage of any Android tablet over iPad is Honeycomb; with widgets and real multitasking, it's much much more usable as a real computer than the iPad is.

I think it also has two cameras, a significantly faster CPU, other features like that. Really though, the main thing it has going for it is Honeycomb. Most people will be very impressed with it after playing with a demo model in a store. It's much more futuristic and cooler than the now-old iOS icon-grid paradigm.