skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's likely a big part of it, but there are also genuine aesthetic effects. In the arthouse-film world, Super 8 filmmakers can normally choose between 18 fps and 24 fps, and don't have the same baggage Hollywood does in which only one of those "looks right": both 18-fps and 24-fps films are accepted by audiences as legitimate. Yet some directors choose one, some choose the other, and some directors switch depending on the film, because 18-fps and 24-fps shooting produce different stylistic effects.
I'd be interested to know if the author finds this article embarrassing in 10 years.

When I started in professional software development 10 years ago (about), I probably would have made many similar points.

I see a lot of the same attitudes in CS students today. They are just absolutely CERTAIN that the entire world can be easily categorized into their predefined concepts.

As you get older and more experienced, you'll realize that a lot of your early opinions were naive at best. I have a feeling the article's author will feel similarly in the future.
Ask HN: Open-source projects with good codebases for beginners?
Which publicly available source repos do you know that would be valuable to beginners in the project's language looking to broaden their knowledge?

Bonus points if the project isn't the obvious "killer app" for its language.
I have no problem with this.

He doesn't need to re-invest - he's the only investor (more or less). As was pointed out, there's other sites which do a better job, so if you don't like it, don't use it. Mr. Newmark and his staff are well-off with little effort. Even if they lose 90% of their revenue, we're still talking millions.

Heck, that's brilliant.
At the risk of sounding stupid, could someone explain this to me? I don't see it.
My experience has me at the point where I won't go into detail explaining why I don't take s position. I tried when I turned down a government contractor for a position maintaining a couple servers for a position where I would be responsible for a few hundred for a lot less. They just pushed the money and got offended not understanding I needed the challenge and learning experiences. I left the situation feeling a little guilty and then just figured out you need to do what's right for you and not get into explaining it to people who won't even remember you in a few months.
San Francisco, CA - Flash Engineers / Game Engineers, FTE or Intern

Lolapps is a small, but growing social gaming company with respectful peers. We are as dedicated to building a great culture as we are to building great products.

We have teamed up with John Romero and launched http://www.facebook.com/RavenwoodFair in October (11M MAU now and Top 10 Social Game on Facebook.)

We only have 17 engineers now and are looking to grow to 30 this year. People like working here because they are:

- working with smart, responsible, and fun people: folks that they actually enjoy doing stuff with outside of work

- learning new things, solving hard problems, writing optimized codes and iterating quickly (Our core technology stack consists of AS3, Python, MySQL, MongoDB.)

- making a huge impact with a small and collaborative team in a growing space

- building feel good games for millions of people to enjoy

- loving the amazing food, free yoga, playing games like it is part of their job... http://www.flickr.com/photos/lolapps/

Want to help us take social gaming to the next level and work on Ravenwood Fair / other new IPs? We will relocate you to our office in San Francisco.

Full listings at: http://lolapps.com/career/
Post your opinion online
This is my new startup, i would appreciate if anyone can provide some feedback please.

Thanks,
Ravi
The Rebuttal: Innovation in West Africa rests on investment in basic education.
Ask HN: What is -2^2?
Is -2^2 equal to 4 or -4? which has precedence, the negate or the power? TI algebraic calculators do it one way while HP's algebraic calculators do it another.
Erasing Individual’s Digital Past
JsonML (JSON Markup Language), a format for XML-based markup as JSON
Gadgets you should get rid of (or not)
I remember Stoustrup saying that this question was the reason that C++ doesn't have a double-asterisk operator. Everyone seems to give a different "obvious" answer.
The second half of this is left out:

Why Paying Bribes Should Be Legal To Pay, But Illegal To Accept

This changes the meaning considerably.
I love all the False Proper Nouns included in this release, as well as the "unnecessary quotes".

- Advanced Persistent Threat
- Spear Phishing
- Computer Incident Response Team
- "defeat"
- Phishing
- Trojan

I think they say a lot.
http://www.google.com/search?q=recursion
Shouldn't you just be able to report the corrupt official for not giving you the refund in the first place?
I wish there was a tail -f <wildchar> that follow even if new files are created that match. my systems timestamp their logs by hour, and more than once I've been confused as to why the app just "stopped" just to realize that it's five past.
Ask HN: What to read instead of Techcrunch?
I'm interested in reading other tech blogs other than Techcrunch. I've checked out Epicenter, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb and InfoWorld. Which one of those would you say is the best compared to TC? What tech/startup news blogs are worth following?
I've always been taught that (-2)^2 = 4, while -2^2 = -4. This has stayed true all through college calculus, but I can't prove it.
Uh, no... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability
Data visualizations have progressed in almost all craigslist competitors (and mashups), but visualizations won't be the death of craigslist. The battleground is content. Sure there's plenty of spam and scams, but people love craiglist listings because there is so much unique content.

One major contributor to craiglist becoming so successful as a website is essentially the ease of posting content. That lead to lots of content and not coincidentally lots of traffic, but it also means that much of the data is unstructured. Creating more intelligent ways to interact with data requires some structure, but the easiest way to structure data is to complicate the listing creation process. When someone figures out a great balance and has enough search traffic to keep listers coming back, craigslist will have a real competitor.
I believe the most common answer is -4, due to exponentiation having a higher precedence than negation. I'm not sure it's completely standard, though. In written mathematics it would be more common to write (-2)^2 if you really meant the -2 to be exponentiated. But, it might be different if you were using a style of traditional mathematics typesetting where unary negation and subtraction are more clearly distinguished. I could imagine something like 5 - -2^2 meaning to subtract (-2)^2 from 5, if it were written in a typesetting style where the unary minus was smaller and clearly more "bound" to the 2 than the subtraction was.

Miscellaneous support: a random elementary algebra textbook: http://infinity.cos.edu/algebra/Rueger%20Text/Chapter02/2.6_... and a dude from mathforum.org: http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/53240.html
I like how my workplace does it. Everyone gets a linux desktop. You then get the option of either a MAC or Windows 7 laptop, totally up to you.
See Plan 9: http://lwn.net/Articles/137439/
The situation where somebody is being forced to pay a bribe is already illegal.

Why do I actually have to pay it in order for the authorities to do something about it?

This seems erroneously predicated on the assumption that the briber is doing so because he knows the payer will be complicit in the crime. I think the more likely scenario is that the briber does this because he has no fear of the authorities or their ability to enforce such laws.
well, by making it so that paying bribes is legal, and being convicted of receiving a bribe results in having to pay it back, the briber is incentivized to entice officials and then to turn them in.

by simply making it so that you can turn them in there isn't really an incentive for the briber to go through the hassle of doing so.
Check out The Startup Project: http://www.startupproject.org/
It's not wrong for a developer to use Windows, but it is wrong for a company to impose it, or even to have it as the default option.

I agree with the only caveat being if the dev shop is working on a platform-native stack (like .NET or iOS) - in which case you obviously have to use the 'family' platform for consistency and to be able to obtain all features (like being able to compile + emulate an iOS app - which can only be done on a Mac).
The corrupt official is not going to be straightforward. Think of a convoluted system where the official can put you behind tons of red tape (you might literally spend hours filling up nonsensical forms). But a small price to pay and -poof- all the red tape vanishes.

Reporting such (clearly) corrupt officials itself might involve paying bribes (think recursive) or might involve a court date months into the future which completely defeats the purpose. The justice system is itself part of the corruption problem.
Just want to say that this looks pretty cool. Reminds me of Barry Schwartz' "The Paradox of Choice" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM)
This is what happens in a lot of third-world countries, India included. It would be impossible to get anything done business-wise in some countries that are heavy on bribes—without bribes, it would take forever to get licenses, building permits, and other government-mandated items for doing business, whereas a bribe would put you on the fast track.
I think I was mistaken in understanding what you said. Yes, factoring is in NP, but it is not known to be NP-hard. Being in NP doesn't automatically imply its usefulness in Crypto (because, as you say, P is a subset of NP). Neither does the NP-hardness of a problem automatically imply its usefulness. Crypto seems to need these weird problems that are not always NP-hard, yet, in some sense, harder than NP-hard problems. You can think of it as: crypto => P != NP, but not vice-versa.
What is Self Compete?
This seems fine when you have to bribe someone to get something you should already be getting. But what about when you bribe for other things, such as access to information you shouldn't have access to? Or to get certain laws passed?
I'm finding myself fascinated and curious about the review...

What a great spin "I was anxiously waiting my review cide, then realized it's three freaking dollars, so I bought it myself". That's marketing/PR/psychological manipulation gold! I'd love to hear aout the process that lead to Ars publishing that for them. Was it just pure dumb luck on the reviewers part? Was it a "primed" phrase from the developers? Or was it part of a carefully planned and highly skilled marketing/PR campaign?

I _really_ like it!

I might even buy the game...
It is just a technicality. If you know an upper bound on the running time you can simply run it for that many time steps and then return "no" if it doesn't halt by then (because it could never thereon answer "yes"). This only works with concrete upper bounds on running time (and not for general decidability).
I read it as shorthand for (-1) * 2^2, so -4.
jedit
Last year our upstream provider broke TCP (they upgraded a router/firewall box and it wasn't supposed to affect us, but it dropped asymetrically routed TCP traffic) but UDP packets still got out, and thanks to seeing UDP syslog traffic making it out helped us diagnose the issue. Using the "more reliable TCP method" (rsyslogd supports this) would have made the issue harder to track down.
Yes, it's all combined. You need a US corporation to signup I believe.
Permits and things are already quite bribe-like:

Owner: "Can I open a store here?"

City: "No."

Owner: "How about if I paid you, say, $500?"

City: "OK then!"
The degree of entitlement among new grads in the software development industry is incredible. I know because I've been there. Now I see it from the other side as an employer, and when I think of the way I acted after I graduated, I want to go back and kick myself. In retrospect, this was a sign of immaturity and self-aggrandizing.

I genuinely believed at the time that Emacs and Linux and Common Lisp somehow made me special, when in reality I just wanted to convince myself that I was a better developer than my peers. I wasn't. I was a good coder, but I was immature, wasted a ton of people's time, and refused to listen to people who wrote code that solved real problems while I was on my "let's switch to Linux and Lisp" crusade.

I can point out a ton of examples where Windows is significantly better than Linux and vice versa. Same goes for most programming languages, development environments, and software methodologies. Saying "I like UNIX more and prefer to develop in it" is one thing. Saying that a choice of the OS tells me something about an organization and that their particular system of choice is somehow based on worse philosophical principles than my alternative is naive and condescending beyond belief.

The rule of thumb is to understand before you decide you've understood. If we used this principle more often, the industry overall would be a much more nourishing environment to work in.
http://thenextweb.com/ is pretty good for certain fields. http://mashable.com/ also covers similar topics.
("Orthogonal" is a jargony way of saying "opposed.")
Update: Several commenters raised questions about my gloss of "orthogonal." So I emailed Basu to ask him how he was using the word here. His answer: "Orthogonal interests are interests pulling in opposite directions."

Yeah... someone needs a refresher in linear algebra and a reminder not to use words the meaning of which he doesn't know.
I think any picture Leonardo would have taken would be a significant cultural artifact, as would any telephone he built, or any computer he made.
Cool idea; I like it.

I do have a question, though: what if people use iWagerr to conduct financial bets? Where does that leave you from a legal standpoint? I've been considering building a platform that allows users to fund themselves and, for lack of a better word, gamble on games of skill. The problem that I've been having with that is how to make that legal (as casinos, of course, are not).

Where would you be if, as you suggest, I use iWagerr to bet on Butler vs. VCU but have money riding on the game?
That Math Forum post is excellent. Thanks!
For the record, the TI-83 is -4 and the HP48 is 4. TI-83 (or now TI-84) is the dominant calculator in US math classes.
I found the incorrect usage of the word "orthogonal" in the article much more distracting than I'd have expected.
i'd be interested to see him revisit this letter after he's had the chance to sit on the other side of the table in an interview.
Anyone hiring in New Zealand? My wife and I are in the process of migrating to NZ.
Here's a thought: show the rating as a 90 day rolling average with the option to view the all-time stats. Throw in additional logic to handle the cases where there are too few ratings in the last 90 days... then use the last n ratings (for some reasonable value of n), no matter how far back they go, for example.

That would seem to me to give the best of both worlds. If you release a crappy app and then later release a glorious update, you'll have to earn back your new ratings over time as old ones fall off the chart which encourages developers to release quality apps starting from day one.
pahalial, i agree with you; feedback is king. you can take it with a grain of salt, but if you learn to take things constructively, it could possibly lead to improvement.

i think this candidate's response was quite detailed, like for example the fact that he didn't see value in the being grilled on theoretical puzzles.
I like this editor a lot also. Sublime Text 2 is quite nice. Enables me to use a nice editor across all of the platforms on which I have to develop.
Gold rush? Sell shovels and picks!

I'm not kidding. Find a way to supply something to the people seeking to get rich. And profit from their efforts whether they succeed or not.
As I said, making it more competitive to become a public teacher would be a good idea. I had almost forgotten about how many elementary school teachers in the US dislike or even struggle with basic mathematics until reading your link, but that's definitely a big issue. I don't think I ever encountered the craziness of using animals or fruits to represent tens or hundreds as mentioned in Dr. Ma's book, but it's no surprise to hear it.

I know this isn't going to be a popular view, but some major problems in US schools are caused by an obsession with small class sizes. From everything I've seen, I'd say that the importance of small classes is dwarfed by that of having a good teacher. The smaller the classes are, the more teachers you need and the less selective you can be about them. I think this is one of the primary reasons the US (and just about every western country) spends so much more money per student than say Singapore and gets little to show for it.

In general, I like the system of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore for earlier schooling. On the flip side, their weakness is college. What works well for giving everyone a basic grasp on fundamental skills doesn't work so well when they need to become self-directed learners. A lot of the current discussion is on increasing the focus on creativity and student autonomy, but there's a long, long way to go. The other huge problem is that after entering a school it's almost impossible to fail out of it and students not planning on grad school often just coast.

But tokenadult, you must have already known all that! In your earlier comments, haven't you said you've spent a huge chunk of your life in Taiwan, learned to read Chinese well and already critiqued children's teaching materials there?
This change (making bribes legal for the payer, just not the payee) seems highly sensible. Right now, if an official demands a bribe for something you have a right to in the first place, you can attempt to report them, but meanwhile you have to do without, with the associated cost to you. With this change, you can still report the person demanding the bribe, but in the meantime you can choose whether it would cost you less to go ahead and pay the bribe (and hope to get it back later) than to do without whatever you'd needed in the first place.

This won't help in all cases, though: as I understand it, some countries (including the US) have laws against paying bribes in other countries, even when such a prohibition effectively prevents doing business in those countries.
I don't get the impression that many of the commenters here are spending a lot of time trying to hire good people right now. I am, and I'd be grateful to receive an email like this.

I wouldn't like it, but honest, personal feedback on an interview process is hard to find.
NetBSD. They consider code quality their #1 feature.
My anecdotal experience indicates that this is an accurate heuristic.
How to publish a scientific comment in 1-2-3 easy steps
komodoedit is very nice http://www.activestate.com/komodo-edit
Brought a tear to my eye. You can't see it under these mirrorshades.
I grew up in Mexico and I can see the logic behind this, I don't think it would work in practice:

People usually give bribes when they've done something wrong, not when they are entitled to something. If a clerk asked me for a bribe in exchange for tax refund, I'd demand to talk to his supervisor, and I'm pretty sure he'd shit bricks and pretend to be joking.

Let's say I fail a driving test, the clerk insinuates (because it's never obvious) an extra "fee" might help me get my licence:

1. What if the clerk never suggested a bribe, but instead I threatened to accuse him of bribery if he didn't give me a passing score?

2. If he did suggest a bribe, would my licence still be valid?

3. A bribed official would never give you a receipt of your bribery, how are they going to know if what you're saying is true? I can picture trolls affirming they were bribed by thousands of traffic officers in hopes of profitting from a faulty system.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It depends on the structural corruption of the regulatory system – i.e., whether permits and such are fairly priced.

For example, we could make a kind of slippery slope argument going the other way as well:

“Can I use this service you offer at $500?”

“No.”

“How about if I pay you $500?”

“Okay then!”
I"m partial to apartmentratings.com. Most rental sites earn their money from the apartments so they are not allowed to show you any negative info, meaning no user generated content. apartmentratings.com is a pariah in the industry because they actually let real people give their opinions.
Anyone check the source?

/*I liked Google better*/
*{font-family:comic sans ms!important}
/*before the fonts changed.*/
...and a beautiful day in Cupertino for the on-campus beer bash.
On the other hand, for a while it seemed that more often than not an idealistic stand against Windows was the only viable type, and I daresay we're all better off for those who took it.
Freakin' funny. Love it!
Considering how strongly the author feels about developing exclusively on *nix, I found it surprising that it took as much as an interview for him to learn that "company X" uses Windows. Almost all software job reqs. offer reasonable insight as to what key technologies they use.

Other than that, I found his response reeking of condescension and inexperience.
San Francisco - Frontend Engineer or Ruby Hacker

Storenvy, an awesome online storefront builder and social shopping marketplace is hiring Ruby hackers and a front-end engineer.

Think of us as "Tumblr for online stores". We're building all kinds of amazing tools that make selling cool stuff on the Internet way more awesome -- from sick drag & drop online store builder interfaces to mobile apps. And we're a small team so you'll have loads of responsibility, autonomy, and big impact on the final product.We have lots of fun, pay well, and are making a meaningful impact in people's lives.

For those interested, we were funded be a dream team of investors (First Round, Spark Capital, Kleiner Perkins, CRV, David Cohen (TechStars), John Maloney (Prez of Tumblr) and more. Just closed a $1.5m financing and growing!

http://www.storenvy.com/jobs

Thanks! - Jon
"but if you're claiming that the average psychological burden of teaching is remotely comparable to the average psychological burden of being a CEO -- well, you're completely wrong."

This generalizes a bit too much. There are various kinds of teaching situations (college, private school, inner-city public school) and various kinds of CEO situations. Apples and oranges.

The psychological burden of teaching can be pretty intense. Depending on your situation you may have to deal with: unsupportive parents/administration, paying for school supplies out of your own small paycheck, noticing and reporting child abuse, dealing with the issues of your pregnant ninth graders, dealing with violence toward yourself and other students (including gun violence and gang violence), etc. all while you are trying to inspire in your students an appreciation for cosines.