skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think its a joke, I think the CEO was genuinely trying to share that he had seen a lot of correlation between folks who programmed in .NET and people who weren't a good fit for his company.

I get similar negative vibe when I talk to people who don't use data structures (seriously I interviewed a guy who wrote a frickin' file system that was linear arrays, all the way down)

But it doesn't mean there aren't jobs that aren't a great fit for those folks, and this is where I think a lot of these discussions go off the rails (if you will forgive the pun).

If I am a programmer who loves .NET, and I read this, I can choose to take it in a couple of ways, I can be offended that this guy has just hugely disrespected me and all my .NET lovin' friends, or I can be glad to know that I don't need to bother myself talking to any of his recruiters that are scouring the globe. As I tried early and often to drill into my kids, you can't control what people say but you can control how you choose to feel about it.

"This article shows the worst thing about all of us as programmers: we tend to run on assuming that we are experts in areas where we have the slimmest idea of what the hell we are actually talking about." -- I think what you were trying to say here (but don't let me put words in your mouth) is that it is a mistake for programmer's to take what they know about themselves and to generalize it to everyone else indiscriminately. I would be happy to interview .NET programmers if they were willing to try other methodologies and languages. However I will relate that I have met people who have found God's Own Language (and it varies from person to person which one it is) and refuse to try any other language, or any other development methodology. If that isn't compatible with mine then we both should know that it won't work well.

The author gives a good description of the kind of people he would like to work with, that is valuable because in reading it you can get a feel for whether or not you would like to work with him. So its a win - win.
What is the point of Color?
Nuclear industry PR reminds me of NASA's attitude to space travel prior to the Challenger explosion.

The fact is that there are fewer than 500 reactors in operation worldwide, representing a significant fraction of the total number ever built. Even if you don't consider Chernobyl a civilian reactor, a substantial fraction of the reactors ever built have now suffered severe accidents. Like the shuttles, nuclear failures are essentially black swan events. The shuttle program's probabilities of failure looked great prior to Challenger and Columbia. Now they look like dangerously experimental technology.

Likewise, nuclear power is still essentially experimental. No one can credibly quantify the risk involved, or the chances that containment features will work, when there is so little data to draw conclusions from.
I only have a link to my twitter profile in my facebook profile
well that, and beyond i.e.: http://www.barbafan.de/html5video?video=tron
Calendar is stupidly useful. I was looking for the exact app a couple of years ago. I would pay for this in a heart beat.
Does not exist yet. There's no final spec for this, and Opera just started experimenting with it.
http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2011/03/23/webcam-orientation-...
thanks for the great software!
I remember attending a Startup School talk wherein Max Levchin explained that Slide wasn't a "pimp my MySpace" company, but rather a data mining company using MySpace widgets as the trojan horse. So, Nguyen isn't the first serial entrepreneur to receive loads of funding based on his reputation and attempt to exploit the trend du jour to mine data from the masses.

We all saw how well that worked out for Slide. My guess is that Color will see a similar fate. It's unlikely you'll build a great social photo sharing application if that's not your primary focus.
It's on HN because the book promotion is interesting and unusual. How many times have you seen an ad for a book that lists author's phone number?
We pay more taxes than GE
Ask HN: Am I qualified to start any startups?
Hi HN experts:

I am a programming novice and have the passion to learn how to code in the hope that one day I could be ready to start my own startup or build my own apps.

The fact that I am a programming novice sometimes makes me think I will never be able to achieve what I just said above. Especially knowing the fact that there are some many great hackers out there who will definitely beat me to the punch.

Could you, great hackers, kindly give me some advice? I truly value yours as I have absolutely no one to ask for opinions and etc.

Many thanks for your help in advance!

Best,
Ed
As of 6:05 PM Central time, at least three people have used the phrase "ad hominem" incorrectly. Unless flyt was attempting to discredit Gruber's premise (which I don't think is the case), the argument is not ad hominem.
PFDS is a very good book even if you have no particular interest in functional programming. It's not the first book you should read on algorithms (hey, they didn't title it _Introduction to Algorithms_ for nothing), but I think PFDS is a very strong candidate as any one of the first four books you read on algorithms. It's short, it's not all that hard to understand, and the data structures and algorithms there can be relevant for reasons other than purely functional programming (especially: persistence).
This seems much inferior to http://mediaelementjs.com
The bright flash of daylight color temperature when the MacBook Pro's switch graphics cards is the only downside* that I've experienced using f.lux. After you've been using it for a while it's painful to use a computer without it at night.

*for non color-critical work
The app is pretty much a ground-up rewrite and has a ways to go vs. the previous version. It's much more awesome, though.

I've lost pictures in the past due to things that it's really hard to repeat with this version. The act of adding a photo from "share" into dropbox automatically makes the copy exist in dropbox's cloud (which is S3, I suppose) and my computers that sync with it. It's deleted from dropbox (but will stay for ~30 days) and placed into a work directory until I manually delete it by a process that places it in S3 first, then my local couchdb, then replicates that couchdb off site. If I'm home (or at least, my computer is), it also replicates to my laptop immediately, otherwise I'll eventually pick up the pics.

Hopefully I'll get bored with reliability and start making new features again. :) I'd be glad to help you out if you want to try what I've got, though.
Broken on chrome, osx.
At least "ginger" had a well-defined and well-understood purpose and leveraged some of Kamen's groundbreaking gyro/wheel knowhow.
If you change "will" to "may" I'd agree wholeheartedly.
Experimental or not, it has among the least accidents per KWh. 500 is a big enough number for some reasonable statistics.
If a comment is not contributing to the discussion, then down-vote it. A non-contributing comment is not the same thing as an ad hominem argument. Also, an attack on someone's character is not the same as an ad hominem argument.
At Google, Page Seeks to Cut Red Tape
Besides the fact that those two apps involve the taking of photos, they couldn't be more different. I don't think Gruber's like of one and dislike of the other can be seen as any kind of hypocrisy.

I'm also curious what how his response (or others') would have been changed had Lisagor shot an ad for them. But, as a data point, Gruber hasn't linked to at least one of Lisagor's ads. (The 3D one for jawbone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exm981pbrJg)
I feel the same way about my iPhone. One of the biggest reasons I jailbreak is so I can lower the brightness below the amount settings will allow.
Wasn't Yahoo written largely in PHP?
AFAIK, the concept and core tools behind AWS built for internal use in Amazon, making them available was a serendipitous byproduct. Their strong "you build it, you run it" manifesto would ease some of the problems that OP has pointed out, e.g. correcting other people's code.
"Imagine if all the cameras are pointing at a player that just hit a grand slam, Color.com sees that and bring you ads for the player's jersey from the gift shop."

Thats the stupidest use of technology I can think of.

Why dont we figure out a way to feed, educate and heal people.
"Compiling & fixing other people’s code?"

Google's internal code management system won't let you check in code that fails pre-checkin tests. This is generally a 'best practice' sort of approach. The challenge is however if you modify a library, and in the process of modifying it you change a side effect, and other code's unit tests fail because they depended on the side effect, you have some choices:

1) You can go fix their code so that they don't have the dependency and then check-in (this can be laborious because they have to approve your changes to their code)

2) You can re-introduce the side effect so that their code continues to work.

3) You can try to get them to change their code (very hard since they probably have bunch of other things going on that don't depend on you)

4) You can create a new library (or routine in the library) that has the semantics you want and deprecate the older version.

While this was extremely painful for folks who were working lower down in the system it was not as big an issue for folks on the upper levels. And in a perverse way it motivated good interface design.
or just:

$ host color.com; host colour.com
Intel Senior VP Renee James Talks About MeeGo & the Tablet Experience
So the r-factor more or less measures the capacity of a word/phrase/blurb to propagate itself as a meme?
Why pitching “productivity” to developers fails
Pick something simple to start with. Build it and get satisfaction from launching something and the confidence that goes with it. Then up the ante and repeat all over again. Before you know whats going on you'll be in the middle of it all.
We had to look into this: the only way to do it in a cross-browser/OS way is to use Flash. Fortunately, it's fairly simple to write a bare-bones Flash app that just creates JS hooks for all webcam functions (though the permission dialog and any video preview still needs to be in the Flash window).
Wow. Is anyone still surprised that social networks do this? Really? "Oh! so that's what they are really doing?, Aha!' I would think that's has been established as the status quo for a awhile now.

a 42$ million investment, I would be curious about any thoughts on how a company would make a profit from that investment. Other than selling information about it's users.

I think the gotcha would be "Oh the company is NOT selling customer information!" So that's how they are doing it. This article seems like they just uncovered some new revelation.
> As for one strategy making more sense, you cannot simply assert that when you have no numbers to back that up.

I can't give numbers, because they are simply impossible to quantify at this stage. (Note I said 2016, which is about the same time it'd take for Color to ramp up to its full potential.) My point is, Color is a long shot.

> nor do I think it's particularly likely that they'll succeed in becoming a multi-billion-dollar industry. But it doesn't have to be likely, when your ROI is potentially so high.

"potential" is the weasel word here. You can't possibly begin to anticipate ROI numbers for a particular investment at the stage Color is in. And you most certainly don't pump $40 million in a company if you think it's unlikely they'll succeed in becoming a multi-billion dollar industry.

This is all just a bit WTF-ish.
there is a market for selling Twitter stock at $5B+ today. You would be crazy to turn down investing in a seed round of twitter on the principal that it isn't making money.

given the choice of being the idiot buying twitter at $5M or $5B, ill take $5M please
hi, please contact me: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bglenn09
Stackoverflow doesn't seem to have many problems with it. Anyone who has done any C# programming knows .Net is * embarrassingly fast* these days. It'll save you a lot of "scaling" money.

What killed MySpace is poor management. It is one of those companies that still don't get that good engineers are as precious as good lawyers.
It seems I just became worthy of judging bad karma .. any chance I can turn it off in my settings? Mainly because I don't want to accidentally down vote someone (this optical mouse has a habit of skipping a few pixels now and then), also I really can't see myself ever using the feature .. an eye for an eye and all that jazz.
Precisely. How many terrible, awful, untouchable projects are out there that run on top of a LAMP stack? wordpress.com comes to mind with their thousands of servers dedicated to basically caching. I strongly believe that a terrible hacker will manage to foul up even the most beautiful language/framework, while a good hacker will be able to write neat and beautiful code in even the most obtuse and awkward languages.

As for their actual infrastructure: not having a version control system and a build system (e.g.: never deploying directly from the VCS) is a must for any size team and sometimes even for single developers. Thankfully, nowadays most people do use VCS's but build and deploy systems are largely at the level of glorified shell scripts at best.
I'm confused though about what the big difference between this and say a person tweeting with a twitpic link?
They don't have to add features quickly because they spend years designing and building them based on a spec that somebody else has spent years designing all so that when it launches, you can go online and book an airline ticket or make a transaction or whatever other essential daily activity and not have to think about what is taking place, let alone see an error screen or 404
I don't allow cookies from most sites so your solution won't work for me.

What I don't understand is why it doesn't seem to work for a given open page. I can understand needing to read that cookie if I will load the page again in the future, but the bar showed up seconds after I closed it.
A humorous investment pitch for half a million dollars
This argument is popular, but I don't find it compelling. The dangers of most other energy sources are front loaded (let's ignore global warming for a moment), while the risks from nuclear power are spread over many many many years.
"What gaming of the system?"

If an organization objects to legislation and presents those objections themselves, its fairly transparent what they want and why.

When an organization attempts to inject objections to legislation through an obfuscated channel (in the above case unions) to both take advantage of the political capital of unions (on which many politicians rely for campaign contributions) and to avoid the obvious conflict of interest that would come out of a company that makes its living as a patent troll objecting to patent reform. That is 'gaming' the system.

Note that gaming isn't illegal, its just politics, but as someone once said, "Maneuvering the system for the public good is leadership, maneuvering the system for the public good and your personal benefit is public - private cooperation, but maneuvering the system for your benefit and harming the public good in the process, well that's just dirty politics."
Actually this particular article seems to highlight the fact that people who don't have good intentions get caught. These aren't new allegations.

The evidence isn't yet in whether this has any impact on Fukushima's current troubles
That was exactly my first thought. I was just ready to go home when the $41MM! news made the rounds and decided to check out the app before the commute. When it asked me to take a profile picture I had trouble finding an angle that didn't include a shot or reflection of my whiteboard (among other things), so I took a picture of my nose.

If Color takes off, and is used carelessly, it could become the single greatest social engineering weapon ever made. Who needs to sneak into your competition's office when you can just get within 150 meters and fire up an app. I would expect more secure organizations to outright ban it.
the nuclear industry seems to be caught in the multiple "9"s trap : it costs enormous amounts of money (and thus provide motive for taking shortcuts) to build a device with 0.999999999... reliability. That sucks in all the money what could otherwise have been spent on multiple, yet built to less "9"s and thus cheaper, additional levels of protection, say several more metal containment/enclosing vessels instead of the current 2 - the reactor's vessel itself and the containment structure.
There are a lot of examples when the same or less amount of money spent on cheaper components allowed to organize them into more reliable or performant system.
Word hard and iterate. The biggest obstacle is yourself. Good luck!
All these new frameworks are designed to work with OSS tech. So lets say some better NoSQL platform comes out, it supports OSS technologies first. .Net comes later and sometimes it is difficult to decide which client library to pick to connect to the NoSQL service. OSS client libraries would mature early and .Net libraries would take a little time.

Connecting OSS tech and MS stack is getting easier but still leaves you with a lot of uncertainty.

This is an example: http://wiki.basho.com/Client-Libraries.html These guys have Erlang client but there is no support for .Net.
That is pretty much the situation I was in. I was not long out of High School (actually, I believe I started when I was 16 and thus still in HS) so I did not really expect a huge salary or anything at the time.

However, after I graduated and began looking at going to school part time I was looking for a little more income so that I could pay. I was also at the age at that point that it was up to me to take care of paying for my things as opposed to having my parents help me out.

It's been many years since that occurred, but from what I recall, I told the owners that I wanted to talk to them when I had a moment. We set up a time an hour or two later to get together and talk (they had been in and our of meetings all day.) I basically just laid out all the facts, everything I did for the company, in what ways I felt I attributed to the increasing income of the company, and what I thought I should be making.

They listened to what I had to say and agreed that I was a huge contributer to the company and came to me a couple hours after that with their counter offer.

At that point I didn't feel like negotiating, so I informed them politely that I would be accepting a position at a new company.

They tried to offer me "stock" (it was a small private company that I knew would never get sold) and that they could not offer me any more money than what they offered a few hours before, and tried to think of ways to retain me.

I decided, however, that moving across the country to CA would be the best bet for me to further my career.

It was actually pretty tough for me as we had grown pretty close over the years, but I still felt like staying there would have held me back.

It sounds like you are making the right moves, however, and trying to line up plans B and C just in case things do not go as you wish.

As far as Google Summer of Code, my old project has done GSOC for several years now. I've been out of the loop for a few years now since I've left the project but they're probably accepted for 2011 as well. (http://www.pidgin.im). I'm not sure if you have any interest in working on the project, but it may be worth a shot.

--

I apologize for the delay in responding. The plumbing at my home just decided it wanted to play a little game called "yay flood time."

Best of luck to you.
Thanks @JonathanWCurd! Will definitely pick something small to start with!
You are right @g0atbutt! I am my own enemy! Thanks
The Visa figure I heard at the Computer History Museum years ago, it was first decades so that may have changed.

Goldman Sachs told me when I was writing a proposal for them years ago that they have over a petabyte of data stored. The web is 80-200TB depending on who you ask. A single department there responsible for the program based trading would alone have an entire copy of the web (and parts of the deep web, and all of twitter, etc.) since they construct those whack trading apps that suck everything up and analyze it for signals. If there are any quants on here they could tell you about this more.

The airline system I was referring to is SABRE. Early IBM was built on their rollouts and we are talking about the 50s. V interesting story, lots of references from this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)#History
haha brilliant, how did you hear about this/is it your site?
Screach makes any screen two-way interactive [video]
Fixoyun Oyunlar Zapkolik Video İzle ve Şehriye Sinema Seo Yarışması
Fixoyun Oyunlar Zapkolik Video İzle ve Şehriye Sinema Seo Yarışması konulu makale yarısmasında bitime dört gun kaldı. Bakalım ıyı bır sıralama alabılecek mıyız ?
This is a good point as well. Getting a raise from $90/hr to $100/hr isn't THAT huge in the grand scheme of things. But getting a raise from $8.00 - $30.00+/hr would be a tough to swallow pill for most small companies.
No, Myspace failed because it was a shithole filled with awful people that nobody took seriously, and Facebook turned out to be relatively clean and useful.

Don't blame technology for your failings. Facebook won because it had a first name and second name field.
He already reviewed it, and panned it then as well.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/03/24/color
Of course, catastrophic failure of a coal or wind power plant kills plant workers and maybe a few unlucky bystanders.

The Fukushima disaster, on the other hand, is poisoning square miles of land, air, sea, most likely the groundwater and probably hundreds of workers.

When you score risk, you multiply probability by impact. The power output and operational history of nuclear power indicates that the probability of failure is very low, but the impact is very high. (both in terms of severity and duration)
SICP will take a while if you really want to solve all the exercises and understand the meaning in each word. (It took me about a year and a half of sporadic studying, it took Eli Bendersky [1] roughly a year too).

It's a difficult journey, but it is a scenic tour of a lot of the core concepts in computer science.

[1] http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2008/04/18/sicp-conclusion/
True, but different networks have different constraints and require different solutions. Data warehousing, which is likely what most of GS's data is doing, is very different than trying to scaling a near-real time data access system.

Payment processing only deals with one type of data: money. This gives you as many shortcuts as the number of constraints it imposes.

Airline control and departure systems are probably as close to a typical modern web app as you'd get from your list.

My point is that while there certainly are engineers that have worked with high scalability issues without ever touching the web, they have also likely been solving slightly different problems.

P.S.: Other systems that require high availability but are not the web: telephony and cell communications, broadcasting and doomsday devices.
ITC Judge rules that Apple products do not infringe 5 Nokia patents
>who could have expected there'd be a 9.0 earthquake

In 2007 the probability of an earthquake with a magnitude of Mw8.1–8.3 was estimated as 99% within the following 30 years.[1] The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami was larger than the predicted event, but occurred in the same area and caused major flooding in the Sendai area.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/869_Sanriku_earthquake_and_tsunami

It wasn't that unexpected. It was just stronger than expected. I guess that's a consequence of there being a longer pause between major earthquake than expected
If anyone has any questions about what we're up to or wants additional information, let me know!