skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know, it might be completely irrational and unreasonable, but it kinda bothers me that you only ever submit stuff from your own web site, and that so much of it is so completely off-topic for HN.

Do you submit everything on your site? Does it not give you cause for pause that basically nothing ever gets upvoted? You may not care about the (lack of) karma, but it's a strong indication that there's a complete mismatch between the community here and your submissions.

I guess it doesn't matter, but I was just, well, curious.
can you reccomend a book to get started with r?
Great suggestion, we just added RSS!
If you made the link from the http://www.seomoz.org/refer-an-engineer page using your email address, we actually would track it back to you (cool feature of Jobvite - you can set it up to tweet/FB share/email links w/ your tracking code).

But, of course, much appreciated. :-)
Vietnam bans online gaming after 10pm
No... it's not sarcasm at all. It's a ridiculously complex function with nested-nested-nested conditionals in nested-nested loops.

It makes puppies cry.
Just download boxee for the PC and try it out, it's free.
I'm not sure this is descriptive enough.
Graphic.ly brings comics to Android
Yeah I had In-N-Out once, it was ok enough.

St. Johns is a great burger place just off 101, around Santa Clara. Good programming bookshop nearby also.
Another slightly annoying saying is "The plural of anecdote is not data".

Any anecdote is a data point, if you assume that it is factually correct.

You may or may not be able to draw any significant conclusions from that data, once you take into account sample size and bias, of course.

But unless you're going to "sample" the entire population of interest, pretty much all statistical analysis in the real world is done based on multiple anecdotes. We just try to minimise the bias and to choose a sample size large enough to give results significant enough for our purposes.
If you can't do it face to face then use the telephone.

Email is a terrible medium for communicating anything complex or things having an emotional dimension.
Early on, compensation grows quickly with experience, especially from 0 years to 5 years (a bit less than doubling). Then, the more experience you have the less effect another year of experience will have on the salary you can command. After about 15 years, it doesn't matter much at all.

Developers stand to gain a lot by switching jobs after their first few years in the industry. Companies stand to gain a lot by hiring and retaining new developers.
If you want early access you really should check out the BetaCandy.com guys, they will launch tomorrow at Launch SF and probably open up their signup list a little more.
French search company lobs new antitrust complaint at Google
even worse, some clients (e.g. Adium) will show invisible users connect and disconnect if you have a conversation open with them.
"But not really that often"

Oh, except for every time that someone made a large enough profit (wordperfect, visicalc, Corel Office, Peachtree or Quicken) or made a big enough splash (Netscape/Mozilla, google, more recently mint.com) in their ecosystem.

"pulled your app from the store"

But, they can if you sell on XBox Live Arcade, or Windows Phone Apps Marketplace (especially if you have an open source license for your app that MS doesn't like).
A better way to say it would be background knowledge.

Some idea of:

- How computer hardware is put together (from the NAND gate up)
- How computer memory is organized/optimized
(and how the abstractions involved can break down)
- How compilers/interpreters/computer languages work
- How a handful of the most commonly used algorithms work
(and the implications of their time/space complexity)
- How networks are organized and implemented
- What operating systems do, and how that relates to hardware
- Basic security, how exploits work

The thing I see, is a lot of people learn something about the above, but only in the very narrow confines of their particular web development stack. I suspect they're just reciting a set of best practices by rote without understanding principles. They're completely unable to generalize the knowledge, to the point where they say patently incorrect things in comments, even sometimes here on HN. If people can't generalize in a basic way about computer systems, how do they properly think about things like security?

It's like my sister, who is a choreographer and has an exquisite understanding of physics and geometry -- as it applies to dancers. Yet, as far as I can tell, she's completely unable to generalize this to driving and furniture, though she would benefit greatly if she could overcome this limitation. For one thing, when she's driving the family around in a rented car in Italy, she wouldn't end up straddling the center line every time we go around a blind curve. For another thing, her DIY kitchen table made from salvaged parts wouldn't have 3 inches of shear wobble, and her custom desk made from IKEA parts wouldn't have a huge sag in its center. I know she understands the physical ideas behind static mechanics and diagonal bracing applied to dance. I know she has a knack for spatial geometry, because she can have a half dozen dancers move around between each other, keep them from colliding, get everyone where they need to go for the next move, and make the whole thing look beautiful.

I'm also reminded of that Richard Feynman story about teaching physics in Brazil.
It's the same in Ohio as well
Part of the post-mortem that I'd love to read about this is whether ANYONE comes in without a referral. It's kinda dishonest for someone to "invent" a referral when the person didn't actually refer them, but $12k is a big incentive.
Varnish wasn't in production at that point. We're testing/using Varnish now for some things. It definitely is helping.

In the general caching front though, I want to note though that Disqus is particularly hard to cache -- there's a very long tail leading to relatively a high miss:hit ratio per pound of caching.
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1859417
> Should I release w/o the killer feature that I think will set it apart - to at least get some initial traction and feedback?

I'm in the same boat as you. I have a great site that I haven't released publicly yet. It was at MVP status on January 3rd, but it lacked the 'killer feature' to set it apart from the competition.

I decided not to do a public release because you only get one chance to impress a given group. If I released and failed to impress, I'd have to 're-release' again and again which squanders time.

On the other hand, if I take things slow every release can be guaranteed a better chance of success.

So I did a private release to clients/customers who already know me. The feedback there was invaluable and I'm preparing for a public release later on this week or next.
Agree with this point. I'm both MBA/bizdev and software engineer. When putting on my MBA hat and working on sales forecast, decision making models, spread sheet is all I use. It is quick, tweakable, super easy to share. Whereas building my site which focuses on market research services, I resorted to C and existing stats packages cause they are powerful, more flexible, and basically programmable. To me what MBA/bizdev people need is significantly different from what a software developer writing stats-related code need. It is a very different scenario from the dropbox story...
Great points. We've actually deployed additional caching on the frontend, and Varnish should be appearing on future slides.
Apple Looking To Sell Digital Tracks With Better Sound Quality
Five years of experience as a programmer is like becoming a "made man" in a crime family. Before, you're nothing. After, you're trusted and respected.

I was in the same job from years 2-5 and didn't see much of a raise. Then when I got a new job it was more than double the salary. And it does seem like you have to leave to go somewhere else, or else you're a prophet without honor.

It's also clear from the graph that after 5-10 years of experience, much of the increase in income growth will be expected to come from non-salary compensation. Which may be equity, bonuses or stock plans, but it's all about getting a piece of the action. Which, again, makes programming sound like it's the mob. Sorry about that.
I believe the answer is "No, and no"... I've never seen anyone mention the ability to do either.
Ok, but let's cleanly separate the concept of a tool from the concept of a technique.

The technique here is using URL fragments for history management in AJAX applications.

This tool (GWT) does not require that technique any more than JQuery does (or myriad other examples), so the comparison of the tradeoffs of using/avoiding the technique is orthogonal to the choice of tool.
This is the same sort of thing I've noticed with sites like eBay and Etsy. Particularly the latter - the administration and a certain brand of users act like all glory and power derives from the establishment, and you need them and should be thanking them for their existence. Another group of people feel that the credit goes to the people who fill empty gray templates with content and bring the site to life.

This actually works out to be somewhat similar to politics. Reading forums and blogs, you can observe people's politics in their feelings about companies like this. Conservatives and religious folks often feel you should give respect to the site authority, while liberal people feel the customers deserve more credit and need more power. It's just like unions vs. management.
Oh, too bad then.
Bytecode interpreters for tiny computers
PlayStation 3 Hacker Seeks Donations for Legal Fund
What happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator
Curious if you used the Boxee interface on a homemade setup prior to getting the official device...?

Mostly wondering if official package offers a tight enough experience to warrant the $200 vs. getting by on a spare laptop + Boxee.
This is silly and dumb. GPS doesn't measure average speed. GPS measures location. Speed is calculated. It's calculated over the entire run - average speed - and it can be calculated between any two location measurements - which can be very close to instantaneous speed. Radar guns measure location too, for that matter - distance from the gun is measured at two instances, and speed is calculated. There's absolutely no inherent reason why GPS-based speed calculations are any less reliable than a radar gun. The better GPS systems update their position 5 times per second - far more precision than is necessary for good vehicle speed readings.
for now you can easily moderate postings yourself.

I would suggest using Turk or finding another resource that can do the manual moderating, you need to be expanding the core tech and business. Getting bogged down in these kind of tasks can kill your momentum.
Twitter lifts ban on UberMedia Apps
How to write  html5 game in 30 days
S3fsr - FUSE file system for S3
A tool fighting the tabs opening time gorging information overload monster.
Yay! Sometimes sanity wins!
I would be a bit more careful in disregarding the role of the weakening USSR. It’s true that history is never monocausal and it’s certainly not the weakening of the USSR alone that led to protests (you could even argue that the first protests in Poland in 1980 had nothing to do with the USSR) and later revolution but I think it played an important role. East Germany certainly hoped for support from the USSR and was denied the same by Gorbachev. It was certainly never completely certain that the USSR would not intervene but it was a lot more certain than in 1956.
Dumbest tech marketing stunts of all time
Ode to the "Older" Entrepreneur
That flexibility is what killed me with SO. I used the site for many months after creating an account, always recognized when I returned to the site.

Then one day I was signed out -- the cookie finally timed out, or was cleared somehow, etc., and I arrived at the login page, and was totally stymied. I always sign up for new services using their_domain@my_domain.tld, and that hadn't been possible here, apparently, because asking for a reminder with stackoverflow@my_domain.tld failed.

Ah, I must have registered with an account at any of these half-dozen sites. Well, I have accounts at all of them -- sometimes multiple accounts for different purposes -- all using different email addresses. I had no recollection at all of which I had chosen; I was totally stymied.

After a few days of trying different ways of getting in, I finally figured out the right one (still don't recall), and then could set stackoverflow@my_domain.tld as my backup email, so now I'm covered... but it was the worst sign-in experience I've ever had.
Em, func seems Fedora-only...
With Gtalk you actually can initiate. Gmail just says they are offline and will get it when they come back online. If they really are offline it essentially turns into an email.
Three key trends from Mobile World Congress 2011
In economics the reverse hockey stick growth is known as diminishing marginal returns. This simply means the market values the earliest years of experience as much more beneficial to a developers skill than the later.

While I understand the idea behind hiring young and inexperienced, it should be noted that the wage rates are there for a reason. The training costs/possible managerial time may be greater for the average college graduate. (Clearly not always true- I am just trying to postulate why the market values experience this way).
This is true in most industries. You either move on to a management position or stagnate. The problem is it doesn't really work in the development world where you can get better and better the more deeply you use and understand the technology. Plus it has the side effect of pushing highly technical people with no management skills out of jobs they're good at and into jobs they can't do well (imagine Woz trying to be a manager)

That's why many big tech companies have moved to a "level" system (to the best of my Knowledge Microsoft started this trend but I could be wrong). In that type of system you can continue to be a developer but move up in level and salary. That way great developers can stay great developers and not be penalized for it.
We're here to serve a previously under-served market: remote workers. LI will case a (very) wide net.

However, how many talented folks still use LI? You can call me biased but, seriously, I've hardly used LI since a good friend of mine there left the company about a year ago. I don't find value in it. Therefore, when looking for a hire, you'd never reach me.

I've heard similar anecdotes from several other people in my "cohort" of Ruby/Rails nerds.

EDIT: We're probably reaching a different audience. If it's an audience that interests you, we may be able to help you. If not, then perhaps not. We serve a niche.
The Power of Activism and Technology
I've been trying to figure out a reason other than greed for this move, and I think you nailed it: It's a barrier to entry for competing media distribution platforms. Apple makes most of it's non-app-store money off media sales and this would be a less obvious way than "we won't let any other media company on our device" to accomplish that. Great insight!
Yes - I still haven't got my head around intra-continental time differences across the US so I certainly generalised there!
Clever Logo Designs That Speak For Themselves
What the world says about Libya
Thanks! Moving to San Fran in 2 days (from New Zealand). Hopefully there's some useful stuff in there.
Kinect SDK for Windows coming to drive away buyer's remorse [video]
There is always BitTorrent, so it seemes it would benefit the film owners as well to make them available everywhere as soon as possible. Convenience and even morals can beat BitTorrent, but only if it is reasonable.

In fact, some video streaming services now seem to be available in Germany. But guess what: they require some dedicated software to be able to play the movies. I am not yet sure I really want that. Also, I am not sure my TV can deal with that (whereas it can probably play torrent movies out of the box).

(I think iTunes might have some movies in Germany, too, but last time I checked the selection was not great and highly overpriced).
The importance of being versioned
It's more of a 180-degree rotated hockey stick.
This blog post blew my mind. I generally thought of GitHub as being in the front-end business, but maybe they're really in the back-end business?

Is this sort of complexity common? I'm not saying I think it's bad, as I am sure it's all there for a good reason, but it just seems like so many services to bounce through before a web page is even served.
Of course QA knows how to program. But their skillset is about breaking code. It's about writing this crazy C++ function that shows how your API has a security bug in this case. As developers their like dev tools developers as their customers are generally devs.

Skillset maybe isn't the right word... mindset maybe better word. Both should be good programmers -- in fact you'll often have more test code than product code. But you likely won't be able to switch your dev team to QA and vice-versa and get the same results.
I think that architects and developers often forget the basics software development when planning rewrites. Because they've been working on the product for so long, they think the normal rules of working iteratively and getting feedback don't apply. They try to replicate the entire existing system at a point in time, turning the rewrite into a waterfall project. Then they're surprised when things they fall behind and can't adjust. You're better off in almost all cases to break it up and approach the problem as refactoring instead.

When I was an "e-business" consultant, we had a saying: "Six month projects take nine months, twelve month projects take eighteen months, and two year projects get canceled." If your rewrite is projected to take over a year, you're in huge trouble.
Got an Old Computer? Jolicloud OS Can Now Make it a Zippy Cloud Machine
I used to run boxee from a macbookpro onto my main television in the living room. This worked surprisingly well alongside either the Apple remote or Boxee Controller App.

Moving and re-hooking up my main computer to watch media was obviously tedious, so I ordered a Boxee Box at launch.

The Boxee Box simplified the hell out of my media experience, which is definitely worth the $200 price tag. A laptop would probably work just fine, but the Box has the new 1.0 software, and the remote included is pretty great.
You are correct, ofcourse. It is not the fault of the tool, but of a developer. The tool just made it easier.
Always charge for work after a reasonable period (perhaps 90 days) following contract end. Minimum charge - 1 hour.

Offer a maintenance contract if you want with a choice of an annual "up front" fee or monthly billing (I always charged monthly in advance).

Doing free work is no way to retain a customer's respect - I bet they do not give away much free "product" themselves.
> I wonder if functional programming can escape the traps Object Oriented programming fell into?

I'm not sure I would agree that OO has "fallen into a trap". I think OO, whether the Kay version or the C++/Java/whatever version, takes a certain approach: essentially, that one entity in any operation is considered "special". This approach can work nicely in some applications, such as a lot of GUI design work, but doesn't fit into all contexts as neatly.

That means sometimes building your design in an OO fashion is helpful, and sometimes it gets in the way. The interesting question is whether, for any given project, the benefits of the helpful side outweigh the hassle of working around the structure when it isn't helpful.

I think in the early days of OO, a lot of people assumed without evidence that the balance was usually on OO's side. Today, as other approaches with other abstraction tools are more widely known and once trendy ideas like Singletons have had their practical weaknesses revealed through experience, many of us wouldn't take the same bet.
I do random-generated passwords for important things like root accounts, FTP accounts, and business-related email accounts, but then use a formula similar to the one in the first post for every-day stuff like forums, web apps, gmail, etc, so I can type them in from memory when i'm using them multiple times a day.

Oh, and KeePass (on my Android phone, Macbook, and home Win 7 PC) + Dropbox = heaven. The whole idea of a multi-platform password store with it's actual database file kept in Dropbox (or similar) is something i've been dreaming of and begging for, for years.
Why would they rethink it, I wonder? For fear of Amazon spying on them?

I think Amazon is too big to try something funny - because they are big, a dent in their reputation would probably also hit them big. Who would still want to host on AWS if they would let down Netflix?
Great job! Congratulations Redis team!

I have been using Redis in different projects during more than a year now and Redis has become a part of my standard "stack".

It's a good hammer, thanks to it's list-set-hashes-etc support.
We (Dave & I) both like this. Thinking more about it. Thank you.
When did you stop beating your wife?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/loadques.html
How To Find Awesome Startup Roommates
I didn't actually expect people to go 'yay' or 'boo' at any statement in particular. The point is that there are value judgements associated with each one - trade offs. They are not neutral.

I have to disagree with you about the fault being not in our technology. I'd say the faults are in both. The technology is an embodiment of our flawed judgement, but is real nonetheless. We make choices about what technology to create, but once we have created it we have to live in the new environment we have made. Technology reifies our ideas. That environment affects us. Some environments bring out more positive traits in us, and some bring out more negative ones. We do have the capacity to design for the positive.

I agree that we can imagine a potentially positive use for almost anything. But we can equally well imagine a world with unicorns and fairies. What matters is the effects technologies actually have in the real world.

Our technology can never be separated from ourselves.
Those maps at the beginning of books: a short essay on education
How do I get a job at 0 years working remote from Houston?
For a moment I feared to see that chart the other way round (starting high, ending low).
There are quite a few really nice tools out there for this kind of data analysis (generally called Business Intelligence, or BI for short). None of them that I have found are procedural, they are all based on interactive dashboards. I'm sure that there is some scripting or XML formatting required behind the scenes to get the system set up to accept data, but after that it's all point-and-click.

The systems that I've seen/evaluated are Needlebase, Birst and Spotfire. None of them are particularly cheap, but if you're in a business where real-time access to data would help your team make better decisions, they could be very valuable.
Readability Creator Richard Ziade Interviewed on 5by5's Daily Edition
http://telesaur.com is another telecommute job board.
Lenovo intros Sandy Bridge ThinkPads, 30-hour battery option
How about "Progressivists"? My terminology may be incorrect here, but they believe that progress will bring a better state even if the long term plans are unknown, and the short term appears to be negative. So long as things keep changing, new and better things will be invented.
Amazon takes on Netflix with movie streaming service for Prime
Interview with PointAbout CEO Daniel Odio