skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're lucky, you aren't in the UK so they won't be able to arrest you instantly on the hacking charges.

If you're very lucky, the place you are in won't honor their demands for extradition on the hacking charges.
That's what happens when Facebook is the only way to login. Shame on you Zapd. Shame on you.
DHH Offended By RSpec, Says Test::Unit Is Just Great
I don't have a DX, just an iPad, Xoom and 1st gen Kindle. But from those experiences, it's not the form factor that bothers me - it's the natural continuous access of the ebook format. I can't read PDFs onscreen for much the same reasons.

When I read technical books, I scribble; I dog-ear; I add in postits everywhere; on textbooks, I even highlight and deface quite happily. And this helps me fix in my mind where reference information is: it's the green post-it in the corner. It's the page with the drawing of a dog in the top left. (I seem to have a very visual memory for recall.)

I just cannot, no matter how hard I try, reproduce that experience on an e-reader. Yes, the features are mostly there, and search is a very nice bonus - it also works quite nicely for continuous following of tutorials - but the general way I consume these books just doesn't translate.
I'm pretty sure Xanadu was finally canceled.
This is why I love this industry. This guy has created two groundbreaking/historic companies in a decade and now he is stepping up to bat for #3.

I don't know if he will succeed on the next one, or even on the one after that - but I do know that I wouldn't bet against him.

Love/Hate Twitter, have to respect @ev for his contribution to communication, the development of Rails and the evolution of the industry.

Look forward to seeing what comes next.
I think there is a move afoot to have to sign and show ID to get a pay-go phone so that they can tie the number back to an individual.
Why I Fired My Father From the Family Business
It seems the folks at twitter want to give @jack a bigger role, especially with @ev gone. However, I wonder if he doesn't want to focus on Square, which seems to be doing great things on it's own.
There might be some good information here, but it seems to be buried in an avalanche of buzzwords and management platitudes.
How To Prosper As a Product Manager (Sawhney | Kellogg)
http://obviouscorp.com/ what happened to their site?
The best way to make dating on top of Facebook
Next up: YC gets a new partner... :-P
Okay, but he was eating 1,800 calories of twinkies and lost weight, which is unsurprising. How much weight would he have lost if he ate only 1,800 calories of carrots, or maybe just a normal diet?

This was an experiment without a control. Not sure it proves anything.
Lean startups are not about learning
And it is not like this deadline is unknown to employers.

Sadly the recruiter who knows this deadline and the managers who have "Look for suitable interns" as one of very many todo list items are not one and the same.

I did an internship at Microsoft and now work at Google; the MS internship hiring process (in 2002) was awesome and very, very fast. Your comments about Google's relative standing are definitely interesting and clearly not an anomaly, the issue is fixing them =)
Best of luck to Ev. Very impressive, not only growing the businesses, but knowing when to leave at the right moment.
Your text files appear to be missing the indention that was in the original note. Any Python developer could tell you that whitespace can be extremely important. ;-)
Sometimes it's tempting to up vote a comment just because it aligns with my view point. I think it's to do with that.
Also, it seems pretty obvious that they lost whomever was their technical person. You don't get to that stage in the game without a technical person...
Apple, Microsoft Hire Linguists in App Feud
Democratizing technology isn't fundamentally about Freedom and Openness and Fairness.

It's about making technology useable by everyday people.

You can do that by making everyone an engineer, or by placing arbitrary limits that increase the likelihood of people using the thing, or any number of ways. Limiting access to technology can absolutely democratize it.
The development of Rails?
Somone asked yesterday if now the doubters see the value of Quora. Well, I'm still firmly on the fence, though why would you post a meta-article (as it were) about Hacker News anywhere other than Hacker News?

Why would you dilute the message that way? I don't get it.
DES Stanford-NBS-NSA meeting recording & transcript
http://obvious.com/
Wrong domain -- it's http://www.obvious.com (and still around)
One way out of the pool might be to reach out to potential teams herself, if you have any friends of friends within the 'plex who can send out tendrils internally. (Or just contact friendly people who post on HN... >.>)
Not really. AFAIK, NeXTSTEP/OS X is based on Mach 2.x which wasn't really a microkernel (the BSD code wasn't moved to userspace until 3.0).
Also, "non-profit" only refers to the tax status of the organization. The fact that the organization employs management that may be grossly overcompensated is left unmentioned. In any case, the relationship is likely to be highly - and personally - profitable for the people running it.
Ah. Seems he didn't update this post then: http://evhead.com/2006/10/birth-of-obvious-corp_25.asp as it links to obviouscorp.com
Even more awesome. Thanks for fleshing out the list Jesse :)
I keep hearing programmers at google work on very interesting problems, but I honestly wonder if all of them do. I mean, how many programmers does google employ by now? can they all really be working in creative, challenging problems?
Indeed, if you examine the scanned notes, there are subtle gaps after most of the "E"s
That's the sort of thing that works just fine in a small company that only needs a few people but, it does not scale.

PS: All of the great developers I have worked with are both old (50+) and have a life outside of code. Spend some time around people with Genius IQ's and 30+ years of experience and you rethink just how important passion really is.
Not exactly the same but in an episode of Mixergy last week Gary Vaynerchuk spilled the beans on how he let Corkd "go" because of tensions between him and his father. So he sorta fired the business from the family, I guess. Worth a listen.
Ask HN: What programming language is color.com built in?
Read it again, you will see that "Your computer" is then limited to "Files placed in" a certain location.

This is required for their service to work ...
Is this any different from the other crushed-based Facebook apps? I've seen about 10 of these posted on HN and none of them stick out as unique.
Yes, this is often a problem, as people on flickr will tag their photos rather loosely...

Try and be a bit more specific in your tags, putting several separated by commas.

http://flickholdr.com/250/185/happy,office for example, might be more appropriate.

Disclaimer: I'm the developper behind flickholdr
I want https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2385002 to work as well.
What's your opinion on asking questions like "describe binary search"? I've asked that several times only to get stares or "are you serious?". (I still think it's critical to see someone attempt to code, as well.)

My feeling is that if they are claiming to be "programmers" but seem uncomfortable with basic algorithms/data structures, there could be a problem...no?
Well...Twitter was at the forefront of pushing the boundaries of Rails in it's early days. Testing it's stability and scalability.

Sure, it might not have been @ev specifically, but Twitter sure did. Hence @ev did.
Great guide! Since the author himself seems to be reading these comments, I finally have a chance to say just how hysterically funny the bit about analyzing the Avril Lavigne song line by line was. I laughed so hard when I got to that part.

Guess I should buy the print version of the book to support the author....
Blogger supported 1400 characters. Twitter supported 140 characters. –––––er will support 14 characters. Can't wait for the release!
My Publisher -- The Internet
In the crowd of Facebook Places, Gowalla, Foursquare and many other location based services companies. You may find difficult to get traction initially. Because,people are afraid of trying one more location based app unless, it is completely different or keep them engaged all timer or their friends from other social networking are participating in it or if they get filtered and appropriate data, rather thank junk notes.

If you can add some more aspect to it like photos, offers or tags etc and most importantly market it well. Let people know something like this exist, let them try at least once.

Then you well get traction and from there you learn from feedback. It's only about passing first hurdle.
Any bets on what Ev will work on next?
XNU (the Mac OS X / Darwin kernel) is based on Mach 3.0 but still has BSD in the kernel:

Early versions of Mach had monolithic kernels, with much of BSD's code in the kernel. Mach 3.0 was the first microkernel implementation.

XNU's Mach component is based on Mach 3.0, although it's not used as a microkernel. The BSD subsystem is part of the kernel and so are various other subsystems that are typically implemented as user-space servers in microkernel systems.

from http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/whatismacosx/arch_xnu....
What an amazing position to be in. Most people have to struggle to raise money and attract talent. How big do you think the line is to fund and/or work at Ev's next venture? G'luck, Ev!
Wow, this is what gets upvotes these days. Nice.
My Life As Liz Season 2 Episode 8
Tell HN: Tonight's a big cricket match.
Tonight's the 2nd semi-final of the cricket world cup, between India and Pakistan (from about PST 1 am to about 9-10 am). Some say it's one of the biggest matches of the decade (being Sachin Tendulkar's probable last world cup, and an Ind vs Pak match is ALWAYS huge). Just giving you a heads up; if you have employees/contractors in the subcontinent, don't expect them to get a lot of work done tonight :)

As for anyone else who'll be watching the match tonight, huzzah!

(I'll be hacking away at javascript in a blue shirt and facepaint)
ICarCheck - Government,Police & Insurance Car Data coming to all platforms in UK
Facebook drops 'intifada' page for promoting violence
Very easy in PHP.
http://php.net/manual/en/pdo.prepared-statements.php
There was a post a while ago on HN about how a very large of the people applying for a given job are in the bottom fraction of the total talent pool.

The HN post led to this perennially popular article from Joel on Software:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html
The default amount of Karma for posting or recommending a link shouldn't be added to your 'score' until someone else actually votes it up.

Downvotes should cost the downvoter karma (perhaps not 1:1).

"Me too!" Follow on comments shouldn't get lots of karma.

"No, your broad generalization fails in one particular case" follow on comments shouldn't get lots of karma. Sometimes I feel like Hacker News is full of anal retentives, or aspies just waiting to pounce on anyone and massively upvote the most minor 'correction' - even when it turns out that the 'correction' is in fact incorrect.

Consider this - theoretically a post by PG could sit at 5 karma, and the reply to that post (from some unknown and unqualified freak from the far ends of cyberspace (such as myself)) could hit hundreds or even thousands of karma.

Anyway, given the above, I suggest that in addition to not adding default karma to karma scores (which encourages certain kinds of spammy behaviour) upvotes for replies should be capped to some multiple of the upvotes for the original point. A 2:1 multiplier for the cap would be interesting, particularly in the case of replying to a post that already had negative karma...
He gave you some advice, what he didn't do was encourage you to learn. He was wrong to discourage you but he provided constructive criticism (minus the part about becoming a journalist)

Scripting Languages (Python, Ruby, etc) teach you how to use a language but not as much to understand what's going on in the background. A basic knowledge of C is very good to have, data structures, algorithms, and just procedural programming in general is a good idea to understand to be able to optimize later. Although PHP resembles C somewhat (based on what I've heard) so you probably do have some knowledge of concepts behind C, but I would recommend at least taking a few classes at a university or college, simply because they give you a well-rounded education, and you will learn other nice things such as design patterns. Java is ubiquitous in the college environment though, I would recommended taking a class that explicitly says it's C and then one for C++.
I agree that this is the most valuable way to judge a candidate, but unfortunately I don't think it would work for most students and most companies (been through it all) because: a) students have a fair bit of school work to do, and: b) most companies can't afford the kind of talent that finds the time to work on other projects outside their normal coursework.

Now, for Google that might not be the case — they certainly should be trying to find the top talent they can get their hands on. All the more reason to ask about the extra projects, GitHub account, code samples etc. But just as many people, when they're students, don't appreciate or value the extra work you talk about, they won't do it when they work for Google and are tasked with hiring others. If all you spent time studying were algorithms and C, you won't appreciate the value of open-source contributions and feverishly learning new languages as much as someone else. And you won't hire based on that.

And yes, that's disappointing.
There is nothing wrong with asking a person to describe binary search. However it's not a relevant interview question. I assert that the number of times a programmer must single-handedly implement binary search without access to an editor, a parser, and the internet, from scratch, is very very low. You could make some argument about how incompetence in binary search algorithms betrays general incompetence, but I'd rather test for that general incompetence directly by looking at a person's projects.
What's interesting to me is that the crawlers suck on average 5GB of data per day (according to their graphs) :)
This reply like the article had vaguely immature tone to it, but it was also the second time the author had me laughing today. I don't see it as any different than Lewis Black going off on politicians. As long as you're smart about it, and not just being crude for the sake of it, it works.
pg: I believe one of forrst.com's main value is its high quality contributions and faces a similar issue as it grows. They just recently released a few short guidelines to ensure that posts continue to be of quality. Maybe HN would benefit from a similar approach for comments/posts?

forrst guidelines:

1. Are you seeking critique and feedback from the community?

2. Does this teach the community something they may not have known before?

3. Will this foster constructive discussion?

4. Is this something development- or design-related the community will find interesting?
I get by just fine with Test::Unit too. RSpec smelled like gratuitous complexity from the get-go. Wasn't the whole point of Rails to get back to doing things simply?
No offense, but I think you're a tad paranoid. If I was a mechanic and I saw someone at a gasstation driving a car that was obviously dangerous because of some kind of bad fixup I would tell him. This is no different, and I don't expect anyone to sue me for that.

Here's the mail I sent:

Hi there,

It appears that you have some pretty severe security problems on your site. This is a heads up so you can get it fixed. I would recommend doing so ASAP.

Your site has been posted to hacker news (which is a friendly programming site for start-up people and nerds) as an example of bad security practices. The link is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2383857

It has also been posted to Reddit, which might be more of a problem since that site has a lot of 14 year old bored teens hanging around that know just enough about programming to do a lot of damage... Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/gdviz/how_not_t...

It appears that your site is easy to compromise, which might lead to anything from defacement to someone stealing all your content, usernames, passwords, etc.

I have nothing to do with these postings, I just don't like to see innocent sites get in trouble, hence this mail. Feel free to contact me if you need anything or have questions.

Hope you get it fixed before someone breaks it.

Yours,

Max
I spent about 6 months working at a Rails shop.

The best thing about the Rails community is the speed at which great new tools appear.

The worst thing about the Rails community is the speed at which great new tools are abandoned.
Jesus dude have you used the app? Facebook is one way to login. Not the only way.

Kelly Smith
Founder
Zapd
Precisely my thinking. It would have been helpful if there were higher resolution scans of these images.

I had difficulties reconciling 5's and S's, or the various ways in which the letter "B" was written (it really looked like there were two "B"'s in the document, though that would be difficult to tell even with higher-res photos as anything handwritten is subject to whatever surface it was written on).
But does this mean, for example, that you should escape inputs yourself before passing them off to the framework, which is then ostensibly going to escape them again?

I think a better approach is to verify that the framework is correct. You can do this experimentally, by writing unit tests, or by reading and running the unit tests of the framework itself.
I launched a seasonal product to ship necessities to college-bound freshmen called Dorm Duffle. You can see the flyer for it here: http://hirevito.com/oldportfolio/dormduffle/

Flyers were sent "to the parents of" over 15,000 incoming freshmen students for several universities in the southwest. We had one order.

Not one percent. Just one.

Market research might have told us that we might have been able to launch such a thing in NYC, but perhaps that in the southwest, people like shopping for their kids.

I don't see my entrepreneurship activities as tech or non-tech. They're all curiosity and problem-solving.
Ouch Are open source platforms (including WordPress) on the decline?
Want to be part of Startup Guild's core team? Let us know
While Ev certainly deserves plenty of credit for Twitter's success, I think you're giving him a little too much in this case.

Twitter actually started out as a Rails project because Florian Weber (who worked at Odeo with Jack on the initial implementation) was a member of the Rails Core team. Jack was originally going to develop it in Python, C, and Ocaml. I don't believe that Ev ever had anything to do with the decision to use Rails.

https://twitter.com/#!/jack/status/47090747706580992
Helpful tip: if you're just starting out it's probably not a great idea to post a rude comment on Hacker News in reply to someone who clearly cares enough to post a comment about your product.
I tend to intentionally take smaller projects, because I find the variety more interesting than working on the same thing for months on end, so it's rare that I get single projects over about $8k (most of them are in the $4-6 range), but that's because I'm not going after bigger ones.
Oy, I dunno. I actually use an IRC gateway for XMPP group chats because irssi does so well for the medium. My team at work uses an IRC channel for adhoc group conversations, and that's the only IRC channel most of us are in. I also have a separate irssi open to freenode, but that's unusual for my team, and the freenode irssi is tucked in a corner where I see it only during interrupts anyway.
In my spare time I'm working on making the next million for my company. Oh, when I'm not working for my company? I'm with my family or friends.

I feel like the energy I could spend doing a side project is probably better spent getting these last two features in, or fixing those lingering bugs, or getting that automation solid, etc....

It seems really odd to actually penalize someone who leaves it all on the floor. It's like a basketball player saying, "If you really want to see my skills, come to the park. The NBA is just my paycheck." -- is that the guy you want on your team? The guy who will tell his next employer, "Company XYZ paid the bills, but my real cool work is this GitHub project I did on the side".
Wasn't there some virtual pushing and shoving over whether this was just a gross rip-off of a python book? Or am I confusing it with another? (Nitpicks welcome for once, so long as you can provide a link to the thing I was thinking of :D )
Meet Edward Zuckerberg, the High-Tech Dentist (and Mark's Father)
Flagged for Twitter drama.
I'm ambivalent about RSpec, but the concept of a structured requirements language (which is front-end of Cucumber) is a good one.

Cucumber grew out of testing; it'd be interesting to see the problem approached from the other end.

Suppose you were designing a language, ab initio, for sharing requirements with end-users. What would it look like?

I've seen Steve McConnell mention "Planguage" by Tom Gilb, but online resources are scarce.
When I trying to convert from hand-writing to upper-case text, I couldn't help but think about the loss of fidelity.

It's an important point. It may have meant something, or it may have meant that he was writing on a piece of paper against a surface that wasn't large enough, so he had to shift the paper around (I wonder why the second page has a bunch of circles around text, while the first page does not).
Ever looked at how Opinion Space works? (http://www.state.gov/opinionspace/) They build a very simple profile that roughly reflects a given user's belief system.

This can give much more insight into a user's upvote - if they're upvoting the comment of a user on the opposite side of the "belief space", this is probably a more significant signal than upvoting the comment of somebody who's in the same neighborhood of the "belief space".

I think it would be interesting to see how it could work in less-political HN instead of the intentionally-political Opinion Space.
I read the article, and cared about your problem. I read this, and now couldn't possibly care less.
I think it's still going? http://www.xanadu.com/

Also released in 2007, Xanadu space: http://xanarama.net/
^This . Don't know if that would qualify as a "business" topic though, since your podcast site seems to be focusing on business topics.

Maybe a question on the business side of his racing efforts?
I think there could be a solution.

When a article is first submitted, the focus and the criteria for voting is based on the quality of the article (well actually, just the article name). If the article is viewed and looked upon favorably, it garners a vote.

Over time, two things increase as the submission gets more popular: points and comments. Number of points perpetuate the quality of the article. Number of comments demonstrate the quality of the discussion. Well, actually it doesn't. When comments are off-topic, stupid, or mean, they still add to the comment count and portray the increasing quantity/quality of discussion. So should these comments be included in the comment count?

Another issue with the degradation of comments is the display order of comments and their related threads. When a new comment is submitted, it is favored by being displayed in its own area and not tabbed in. Replies and subsequent threads are included under the original comment. This is pretty much standard practice. However, the issue is that new comments and ideas are unnecessarily displayed below the fold in favor of lower quality replies to more popular comments. This is favoring lower quality discussions to newer ideas that may never be displayed to the first-time viewer of the article discussion. So should children of parent comments be displayed automatically by default given this issue?