skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not even always so blatant. I currently live in a rural county in Maryland. A buddy of mine built a detached garage last year. Parts of it he contracted out, and the contractors handled the permits. Other parts he did himself, and so had to file for his permits in person. It went something like this:

Homeowner: "I'd like a permit to build a garage."

County Clerk: "Your contractor will handle the permits for you."

Homeowner: "I'm going to build it myself."

County Clerk: "Why would you do something so selfish? Don't you want to create jobs for hard-working locals by hiring a contractor?"

"Hard-working locals" being a euphemism for "My friends and relatives." The parts that were handled by contractors sailed through inspections. The parts he did himself, he had to wait months for a county inspector to come out and in some cases was repeatedly failed for bogus reasons. Nobody ever wanted a direct bribe, they just wanted him to pay their friends/family for services he didn't need.
I think that the permit fees are supposed to go toward the expenditures that the city has in paying for someone to look over your application and do the appropriate research for zoning, local impact, etc. With the salaries and benefits given to a lot of public sector employees it wouldn't surprise me if a big portion of that $500 pays for the salaries of all the rubber stampers that oversee the paperwork.
Eset Nod32 Username And Password [ 1 April 2011 ]
You search for "Comic Sans", the results display in the Comic Sans font.

Sounds less funny when you explain it :)
Wait do you mean your experience working for companies that mandate Windows, or your experience listening to anecdotes from people who've worked at said companies?
Willager's 9 pointed Art of Pitching for a successful venture.
We have remote employees that come to San Francisco for 1-4 weeks at a time. We used to find temporary places for them on Craigslist. AirBnB is much more helpful.
OTOH, his shorter time to market also imply smaller product cost. With that difference, it could make sense to invest in beefier servers.

You could end up having 2011 technology on 2014 servers competing with 1999 tech on 2011 servers.
Seriously. How many sites have gone the way of Digg, innovating their way into obscurity? If CL is still on top after all these years they're doing something right, even if that something is... nothing.
That's weird, I find it mostly generic, content-less babbling ("3 lessons startups can learn from the infamous Gizmodo redesign"?, "You’re not entitled to anything. Hustle for everything you’re worth"?).
Programmatically determining the gender bias of an event on Facebook
yea, apple should just allow installation of third party apps outside the appstore (oho such an alien concept nowadays) and police the hell out of the official appstore.
I agree with the sentiment of your letter, I feel that it might not have been the most diplomatic thing to say, but there is a pretty good chance you won't have to worry about it. Keep improving your skills so you can voice opinions with out worry that it will kill your career.
Which "sweeping judgements" did I pass on people who do not prefer Unix? All I've said in this article is that, given the choice between Windows and Unix, I prefer Unix. I went on to add points on why I like Unix, which admittedly is a little extraneous, but I never voiced any negative judgement on Windows. Many seem to infer that themselves.
True, but half the problem there is programs that try hard to handle logging / daemonizing / etc. themselves, and do it badly.
Indeed. In Brazil, we had (maybe still have) the following situation. Suppose your car had been stolen and the police had found it. They would then expect a bribe before handing you the car. If you didn't pay the bribe the car would suddenly "disappear". But you couldn't prove they had found your car and couldn't report it because corruption is so pervasive.
"The majority of skilled developers prefer Macs or Linux."

Do you have any data to back that up or is it just an uninformed opinion? In my experience the majority of skilled developers use windows but I wouldn't try to extrapolate from my experience (as a windows developer) to a univeral truth.

There are reasons for mandating windows (or osx or *nix) devices. Whether they are valid reasons depends on the circumstances. Personally I prefer to develop on the system that I am developing for but that is not always feasible (ios) or desirable (anything involving xcode).
It always takes more than "a few obsessive users,"

As far as I'm aware, nobody knows what logic or thresholds are used by CL. Common wisdom is that it's "lots" but there seems to be no reason whatsoever to think that.
Poll: What is your primary development system? Mac, PC, Linux, Other
Inspired by this comment[0] and the associated thread[1]. I would love to see what the distribution of development systems is on Hacker News.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2398781
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2398618
I still remember the 5 things in this list and I wasn't even trying to... I wonder if it works with bland data?
Agreed. Can we just be clear? "Orthogonal" means "perpendicular."
I blame Paul Carr.
As one commenter on the article pointed out, the scenario described is "extortion", not bribery, so there shouldn't be any legal consequences for the person extorted in such a way anyway.
"Most states define extortion as the gaining of property or money by almost any kind of force, or threat of 1) violence, 2) property damage, 3) harm to reputation, or 4) unfavorable government action."
bribery is "the receiving or offering any undue reward by or to any person whomsoever, whose ordinary profession or business relates to the administration of public justice, in order to influence his behaviour in office and to incline him to act contrary to his duty and the known rules of honesty and integrity."
They would want to shoot for what you describe, yes. Any company would want to be all things to all people, to relentlessly accumulate users, never lose one. But nobody will achieve that idealized goal. They'll be faced with choices where they can grow their userbase more aggressively at the cost of some fraction of their faithful early adopters.

Losing early adopters never causes immediate loss of growth. If you play your cards right you will make them up manyfold. Neither does their loss cause immediate exposure to competitors. Early-adopters who left apple, or reddit, or google usually scattered to the winds, spreading out over lots of competing services.

Peter Drucker said the goal of a company is to create a customer. Rephrased, the goal of a company to organize a coherent market out of disparate customer needs. I imagine companies as engines that suck up diverse users one end, cause them to behave in a common manner, and emit users out the exhaust, hopefully at a far lower rate. Discarded users still have to be sucked up by a different coherent engine, which is hard.

Let me know if this comment makes absolutely no sense whatsoever :)
Ask YC alum: What type of team did you bring to YC?
For all the YC alum,
When you were admitted into the YC session was it just the founder(s), or did you have/bring a team to work on the product as well?<p>

I am curious to know if any additional "employees" of start-ups participated in YC events without going through the interview process.
what about a safe or lock combination for the 99.84.52?
Awesome...

About 25 years ago (gosh that's a long time), I had Atari Logo on the Atari 800 and was able to remember enough from then to get a filled circle:

make "x 0
repeat 100 [make "x :x+.01 repeat 360 [fd :x rt 1]]
> I don't want to work for an organization that primarily runs Windows by default.

That's when you say "I'm not a Windows guy" and leave it at that.
Let's be honest, you were basically singing UNIX's praises for a little bit. While I agree with them, you have to admit that saying that "Unix encapsulates, and indeed was built on, many core principles of good software design" is a sidelong criticism of Windows which you imply is not built upon core principles of good software design. I imagine this could easily be construed as an insult.

Consider if a Windows user said he didn't want to work at a Unix shop because Windows is a better-designed operating system. Would you not consider this a judgement of Unix?
In India, it is almost impossible to get something done without giving a bribe and especially if you need something in time. If not, the bribe-expecting government workers will keep you waiting till you are ready to hand over the bribe. I didn't realize it was illegal to give a bribe in India, so I guess I can't even admit to having done that - which is ridiculous!

When I needed to get a document in India (in a more rural area), the young government official, who I assumed was above all this corruption, kept telling me to come later (when there were fewer people around) and had me go to a nearby Xerox shop to get copies of a document. While I was going there, the official called the guy at the Xerox shop and told him to tell me how the process works. Suffice to say that I gave something and apparently that wasn't enough, so I had my mom visit him the next day and he made a comment that I hadn't given enough. My mom just smiled, picked up the certificate (which was in front of him) and left.

On the other hand, reporting an official is still a bit scary knowing that him or his partners-in-crime can accidentally mess up any of the other official documents and since most of the documents are still on paper and not digitized, it could throw you down into a deeper hole. Unless a massive campaign against corruption is introduced, I dont see this problem going away anytime soon.
I'm pretty much disillusioned with all professional blogs; and by that I mean any blog where the writers are trying to build a business from it. I think Gruber pulls it off reasonably well at Daring Fireball simply because he's not greedy and he's only trying to support himself. But sites like TechCrunch have to sustain an amazing volume of content and visitors, and they can't rely on quality to keep the numbers up. Despite best efforts, they inevitably drift towards more fluff and sensationalism to drive pageviews.

It's not that the signal to noise ratio is very bad per se, but when I stack it up against my favorite blogs by individuals who I really respect, it dilutes the quality of my RSS reader considerably. Frankly, if anything is big enough news that I really need to know about it, it'll be on HN, and I can focus my attention on lesser known information that is probably a lot more valuable in the long run.
I can say that the majority of skilled developers I know use Macs or Linux, and I know a pretty good number of developers (skilled and not-as-skilled).
GMail Motion BETA
You may want to check out http://readwarp.com/startups. I worked on readwarp full-time for a year, gave up on it as a startup, demoted it to project, and still use it most days for my reading. These days I turn to it after I've gone through my can't-miss feeds on google reader.
Our brain compensates for motion blur, period, because everything we see is effectively slightly blurred due to our eyes' response to light changes being non-instantaneous.

Specifically, cone response time seems to be on the order of 15-20ms if I read http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14990682 correctly. And that's just to go from initial stimulation to peak response; presumably the response also dies off in nonzero time, so the full width of the response in time is more than 20ms. Rods respond slower than cones according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell though I can't find numbers.
I see many comments pointing out that it may be a good technical decision to develop on Windows. This is a good point; many skilled engineers target Windows and .NET with great success. In that case, having a Windows development environment makes sense.

However, it sounds like the organization in question was not deploying to Windows - from the article:

...it seemed to me that most of your development happens on Windows (though it’s almost needless to say that you deploy to Linux)

I won't judge you for using Windows over Unix (even though I prefer Unix), but I will judge the choice of using Windows for development when you are targeting Unix. I have had this experience, and it was a Management decision - not an Engineering decision, and it resulted in significantly less productive work environment. Given two opportunities that are otherwise equal, I would definitely choose the company that develops on the same platform that they deploy on (assuming we're talking about Unix or Windows - there are obvious exceptions in the embedded world).

One caveat: It is common for an organization to use both Windows and Linux for different tasks. In that case, the choice of development environment is more complicated.

Either way, I'd say that the candidate should have asked up front during the interview, "Why are you using Windows for development, and could I use Mac/Linux instead?", instead of judging them based on what seems like a lack of information. They may have a good reason. If they don't, your decision is that much easier.
Thirdi is hiring in Vancouver, BC.

Looking for excellent problem solvers, with experience building production web applications. We typically work with the Symfony or Yii PHP frameworks, with a heavy dose of JQuery, but developers are free to choose their tech on a project by project basis.

Also looking for a HTML/CSS vet, preferably with some JQuery skills who can help us deliver pixel perfect designs.

You can find contact info on thirdi.com.
still blown away from the UDP approach the other day what is this in reference to?
Does the world need another RSS app?
HP48 is RPN, which sidesteps precedence issues. So, here you explicitly need to decide if you want
2 NEG 2 ^ (i.e. (-2)^2) or
2 2 ^ NEG (i.e. -(2^2)).

The traditional order of operations is what the TI series does. In essence, it assumes you want the second form.

By the way, on my HP50G in algebraic mode, typing '-2^2' does give -4.
Facebook doesn't seem to have too much trouble attracting talent. (Personally I have little interest in working there, but PHP is only a small part of why.)
Primary dev box: Fedora Linux on a Toshiba laptop. Miscellaneous dev/experiment boxes: Various flavors of Linux (CentOS, Fedora) on a mishmash of PC hardware; and EC2 instances when needed, or just for playing around with Hadoop.
Considering operator precedence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_operations
Quote:
"Unfortunately, there exist differing conventions concerning the unary operator − (usually read "minus"). In written or printed mathematics, the expression −32 is interpreted to mean −(32) = −9, but in some applications and programming languages, notably the application Microsoft Office Excel and the programming language bc, unary operators have a higher priority than binary operators, that is, the unary minus (negation) has higher precedence than exponentiation, so in those languages −32 will be interpreted as (−3)2 = 9. [1]. In any case where there is a possibility that the notation might be misinterpreted, it is advisable to use parentheses to clarify which interpretation is intended."
sdfsdf234982347(^98^^^^((nm,mn234

!
I don't see why it's unwise at all, unless employers start using past interviewers as references. It's not like he insulted the guy's mom, he gave his honest and straightforward opinion. And as a non-"new grad" who's been a developer for over 10 years, I agree with pretty much all of his points.
I'm using a modified xoria256 in console vim. I gave it a darker background and added some missing colors.
April Fool!

Checking HN for the first time in the day, I'm surprised the story from the http://searchengineland.com/for-april-fools-google-goes-comi... cluster that made it to the front-page was this one (no offense). And no other story from that cluster has been submitted as far as searchyc can tell.

Unless the joke's on me somehow..
I've got a start going in https://github.com/markstory/solarized
Primary dev system is a Windows 7 laptop because i bought it like that.Secondary system is an Ubuntu machine.
And the third is an embedded system with Debian.
Transocean Cites "Best Year in Safety" in Bonuses
Yipes, the incentive not to report is high. I don't know that this will do anything.
Same in Argentina, is how things work.
Yep http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Fernando_Valley#Adult_enter...

"... nearly 90% of all legally distributed pornographic films made in the United States are either filmed in or produced by studios based in the San Fernando Valley"
ssh is magic. checkout -X for X11 forwarding to run remote GUI apps, and -R which lets you set up a reverse SSH tunnel when you need to connect to a machine behind a firewall.
Are you saying Apple is tracking how often and how long users are using iOS apps?
Hopefully someday I will be able to do more than swipe left and right to navigate the system. How bout releasing a whole new look and feel to iOS by swiping upwards/downwards, which'll bring you to an open and customizable feel. Widgets I suppose.
It's not that clear cut.

It seems like whoever has the most leverage and can initiate the transaction should go to jail.

Company which offers pay an EPA official ten times their salary to look the other for pollution should be the prosecuted party. But a police officer who extracts a $50 bribe for ignoring a ticket should, on the other hand, wind-up being the one prosecuted.
Chyrp 2.1 released
iMac White 20". Oldie but a goodie. However, the LCD is starting to decay somewhat, with lines and smudges internally, and 3 Gigs ram is getting a bit tight.
I've been a developer for just over 10 years now, and I would say the opposite for myself. 10 years ago, I would never have written a response like this. Now, I would in a heartbeat.

I do think that he will find it embarrassing in 10 years, but for different reasons (like in 10 years, Windows is a super awesome development platform, or running on Amazon Web Services is like running on IIS, or jQuery is the new VBScript, or something like that).
Microsoft getting aggressive with IE9's low numbers.
gedit with this https://github.com/gmate/gmate

Been suggesting Ubuntu+gedit+gmate to my friends who are starting with programming. It's better than the editor that ships with Windows (most in my geographic region use windows... like 99%).
Strawberry Perl has made CPAN _very_ easy to use on Windows. I don't know about mod_perl, but with Plack there are a lot of great options besides mod_perl for web app deployment.
Secure, synchronized, social TV
Yeah, first time going to the site. Reminds me of all the cosmo magazines at the grocery checkout stands, except this one is targeted at me.
I think you're missing GP's point. The look of black-and-white film creates a different feel than color film. Clearly, there's a lot of "information" missing from a black-and-white film. But filmmakers still use it when they want that feel. Same with the way CSI colors everything blue. Sure, it loses a lot of color info and distorts the gamut etc. but it has a particular feel because of that. So, sometimes (maybe even most of the time) you want a smoother picture with more motion information. But sometimes you want something that feels choppier. Example: http://revision3.com/filmriot/warfilm There's a short film at the beginning that demonstrates the techniques they're talking about, with commentary starting about 5:00 in. Specifically, in this film, they used a high shutter speed at 24 fps to create a choppier look. If they used 60 fps, motion would be smoothed out, so even with a high shutter speed the violent feel created by missing information wouldn't be the same.
...interlace vs. progressive...

Please, no. Interlacing doesn't have the same nostalgic effect as a 24fps frame rate, and only serves to lower video bandwidth for devices that can't handle a progressive image at the desired frame rate. It's a tradeoff between vertical and temporal resolution that works well for limited technology because it preserves the sharpness of still images. Basically everything except broadcast TV can handle 1080p60, though, so let's let the hack die.
Hi I'm Paul Hontz and I run The Startup Foundry. I built TSF as a place where entrepreneurs could learn and grow from each other. Often times I will cover a hot startup that is still flying under the radar, conduct interviews with founders via Skype, or share advice.

We have some fantastic content lined up this week and I hope you'll check us out. We are obviously not a techcrunch clone, but I think that's a good thing :) Say "hi" in the comments if you decide you want to hang your hat at TSF for a while. All the best, Paul.

Edit: link http://thestartupfoundry.com
i cast 2 votes as i have two machines, one linux, one mac.
People are always incredibly nice when they want something (like a job) from you. If you really want to see how diplomatic someone is, you have to pay attention to how diplomatic they are when they don't have to be. That's why (for instance) a lot of employers pay special attention to how polite you are to clerical staff and others who aren't involved in the hiring process.
try dbrelay.com if looking for coding in C
Ugh, I hate what these instant-private-beta scripts have done to the web app landscape.

I know this one is a joke and I appreciate that, but it's frustrating that my legitimate app may be losing potential users because they're burned out by all these other pages vying for their attention.
Just remember PEMDAS: Parentheses first, Exponents next, Multiply/Divide, Add/Subtract. This is the order for dealing with simple math manipulations; don't trust a calculator that tells you otherwise.
Not to mention dynamic range/gamut, gamma, etc.
How To Obtain A Payday Advance For Emergencies
A good solution for many of these emergency problems can be handled with a quick payday loan.
wish i knew ruby cuz this would be an awesome job.
Ask HN: What is a good, simple project for teaching yourself Python?
I am technically savvy but do not know any modern languages. What type of project is a good place to start?

Also: Are there ways to avoid purchasing a domain and getting a server and such going? What is an easy way to run the code locally?
Good points. I agree that it's reasonable to construe what I was saying as a swipe at Windows.

What I really meant, and I guess I didn't do a sufficient job at getting this across, was that I know Unix is rock-solid; I don't know the same about Windows. Truth be told, I know very little about Windows since I haven't used it for 4 years. I was going for a positive point about Unix, not a negative one about Windows.

But you have a pretty good point about my praise of Unix being a vacuous swipe at Windows.
Not to mention that some "new grads" have also been programming for 10 years (probably not all in a professional environment, but nevertheless), whether they started programming at 13 or just finally got around to getting a degree.

If feedback and criticism are asked for, there's little point to apply sugar, especially when you probably won't have much contact in the future. Sugarcoating is required in environments where saying something that could be taken as insulting can get you killed or a much lower status.
The majority of skilled developers prefer to develop rather than talk about which environment is the best.

And the skilled developers aren't the young cats, they are the old dogs. Don't confuse what's popular with what's good.
The article does not rip on Windows. It implies that OS / language choice says something about an organization's developer culture. I share this belief, and it would be an important job criteria for me as well.

Consider three choices: (1) Big company X on Windows + .Net, (2) Big Company Y on Linux + C++, or (3) co-founding a new startup using whatever I prefer. I wouldn't fault anyone for having pre-conceived notions about the cultures prominent at these companies, would you?