skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does anyone know if Apple has any sort of employee empowerment policy?

At start-ups, it doesn't (or at least shouldn't) take much for the decision makers to hear from customers and respond in a way that "wow"s them, but I'd be curious to know what processes or mechanisms specifically a large company like Apple has in place to catch these kinds of opportunities.
We're more productive, sure... but we spend just as much time (if not more) working to maintain a "normal" standard of living.
I'm all about FP, and find it lovely, but I've never seen a coherent explanation of an FP solution to GUIs. What is the FP answer to MVC? What does a modern GUI application design look like, if not OOP?
I remember a story about my old college that said anyone who had too many credits and hadn't selected a major automatically got assigned to Business School - Advertising.
Ok, so I was predominantly future thinking style (as probably most of HN).

But the biggest error I see that it suggest I am inclined toward spontaneity and impulsiveness.

I can see where this comes from - I marked that I do not methodically examine choices before I make them. Which is accurate, but not so much when viewed in a vacuum.

When faced with a decision that is not time sensitive, I like to think about the idea for a few minutes, then come back to it a week later, not explicitly thinking about the problem as the week progresses. During that week of not thinking, it is typical to have a sudden breakthrough. If that doesn't happen, when I revisit the problem and commit to thinking about it, I discover that my decisions have already been made without me trying to figure everything out. In a sense it is letting my subconscious do all the heavy lifting.

I very much enjoyed reading through the results.
Apple is like the Old Testament God: on some days bestowing blessings, on other days razing the land.
Is there any reason to believe that this actually happened and isn't just an Apple employee feeding PR fluff to MacRumors? It's essentially unverifiable.
And how afraid people are to type "new XXX()" in their code. A dependency is a dependency, and I'd rather have it in the source code, myself, than in some configuration file held outside the source.

In fact, it seems downright dangerous, because it encourages changing implementation directly on a production system rather than forcing changes through a change-management process.
I did this too, last year i corrected that mistake by learning common lisp and now clojure is my second favorite language :D
Marissa Mayer on Founders
People are actually returning their iPad 2s for reasons other than production defects? (If there were defects I am sure the blogs would be abuzz about it by now.) I know this one was Wife defect but the story says Apple is looking to see if there are any production defects.

I am pondering getting one and couldn't find one anywhere. To the people returning for refund of same amount - come over on eBay ;)
Celebrities help Twitter celebrate 5th birthday
I think I understand what you're trying to say here, but the comment about presidents in war time is really throwing me off. A president is an actual person who has done "things". My opinion of the president is informed by my knowledge of those things, so, when asked my opinion of the president, I can answer. The survey question you compare it to is essentially the equivalent of asking "Do you like the idea of teachers?" If you were to ask people about the teachers in their district or their child's teachers, you would likely get a very different spread.

That's not to say that teachers don't enjoy a good deal of prestige, but I think it is safe to say that the survey you are using here may overstate your case for just how popular actual individual teachers are with their respective communities.
I get the feeling some of these companies listed are cool for certain professions but not others. I hear from friends at one of the MN based companies that it truly is awful for IT, but cool for other jobs.
"How can you possibly be burned by Apple’s iPad/iPod/iPhone update cycles? There will be new ones every year, like clockwork. I find other manufacturers to be much more confusing and unpredictable."

Yes! I suppose an alternative is to wait infinitely for an infinitely better device. :)

"Isn’t it always the case with consumer electronics – especially everything with a CPU in it – that new, better and cheaper stuff will come out while you still use the device?"

I'd hazard a guess that Apple's predictable release schedule puts this fact front-and-center, which makes it more difficult to ignore when you're considering a purchase. Who knows when the next Motorola Xoom 2 is coming out, if ever?
Yes. I saw an astronaut being interviewed along with some celebrities. Stephen Colbert has the same things on his show (interviews from space included). He even got the ISS treadmill named after him. Is there a comedy bubble?

All I'm seeing here is "look at this! bubble!" and nothing to link the video to the assertion.
Obama: Lead role in Libya to be handed to allies in days
It's really not that much trouble to learn how to dress. It's really not. Just subscribe to a couple types of mens' style blogs and you'll become self-sufficient quite quickly:

putthison.com
selectism.com
gq.com/style/style-guy
asuitablewardrobe.dynend.com/
My wife is buying my iPad (late Christmas gift) and she's encouraging me to junk my old XPS laptop for a new Mac Book Pro. I think I've got a keeper!
The page "List of lists of lists of lists" has been created and deleted three times: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists_of_lists
"The YC company with a solution to email overload" (YCW11)
My fiance bought a new outfit right before our first date, and he couldn't resist telling me it was new and asking if I liked it in the middle of the date. I did like it, so he had the taste, just not the inclination in general.

I don't think he got a single new article of clothing until we got engaged, when I started buying his clothes.
Anyone has a list of the patents in question? It seems like if the description is right, it has something to do with the UI. I was expecting something like the usual patent suit over the FAT filesystem used on SDCards or something like that. This is more serious.
The guys who did that are VPs, according to the article:

"It was escalated as something funny, and two of the VPs got wind of it."
Correlation doesn't prove causation....?

Did they go to prestigious schools and get graduate degrees because they were rich, or did they become rich because they went to prestigious schools and got graduate degrees?

The visualization is interesting, no doubt, but I found it to have too little detail to really be able to draw any conclusions from.
For me the killer thing about Khan's lectures is how broken down into small chunks that they are. If you don't get it -- you can watch the 10m lecture again. Not to mention you can pause/rewind, there are theoretically no distractions (like disruptive members of class), and then the point you made about lecture quality.

I really like Khan's model of doing lectures/learning at home -- and using the classroom time for exercises // with the teacher (or other students) mentoring those who are stuck on a problem set.
Yes, but it seems lately that Yahoo is where good startups go to die.

Viaweb was purchased because it was successful. According to PG, it was successful because they could implement major features in a weekend.
There might be a lesson here on how to get a lot of positive press, inform people that you are taking quality really seriously in an indirect way, and don't spend much money doing it.
Dammit Microsoft, just as I was starting to feel sympathetic towards the underdog smartphone player, you pull something like this.
"Maintainers of the PHP programming language spent the past few days scouring their source code for malicious modifications after discovering the security of one of their servers had been breached."

First paragraph of the linked article.
Usual pattern:

1) Massive government abuse

2) "Look, over there, corporations!"

It doesn't even matter that a company is involved. AT&T could go out of business tomorrow, and the government would lean on someone else to give them what they want.
Sorry for the typo, it should have said "What does the 'mutable' keyword do?"

It is interesting, sometimes when you consider two different syntactic forms of a sentence, the written form has vestiges from both.
Hi Aloisius, we have a job board it's called Vocay.com, posting come up on the sidebar on Black Web 2.0 and we also try to post them as posts so that it gets distributed through our social graph. :)

-Angela Benton
Founder, Black Web 2.0
nope, you've just got an expensive one. that's standard issue. =)
Hah, only on HackerNews are clothes on the same priority level as the iPad.

What next? Food? :)
مقتل خميس القذافي
مقتل خميس القذافي على يد طيار ليبي بطرابلس يوتيوب فيديو مقتل خميس ابن معمر القذافي في ليبيا
Agreed, there is no source link. There is 1 link to the "story" on macrumors and another to the forum discussion.
How close is the ARM proc to running something like OnLive?
I originally got a 404 error and thought it was some kind of prank.
I have a Verizon model, which I'll be returning. It was the only one I could find. I ordered an AT&T model online at 6am EST on March 11. It's still in Hong Kong.

I can return this model up til this coming Saturday and get a free refund.

iPads have had huge problems with mass organized scalping, particularly here in New York. For many, it's their job to camp out all night and buy 2 iPads, fronted by a guy carrying a wad of $50k+ cash for a bunch of people in the line.

The scalpers want AT&T models first and foremost (the GSM 3G is internationally usable) and then Wifi-only. They aren't interested in Verizon, which I guess explains whY I found out.

I've considered eBaying it but I don't think Verizon models are as in high demand as the other two. Probably more hassle than it's worth.
Trade content for Retweets
It's the sort of story I'd love to see more of on HN. Quite amusing and an insightful idea about PR for tech-companies.
Is there a reason for the "Click Here to Install Silverlight" link at the top of the page? Is there a video or something on this page about the legal action, or is it just a friendly suggestion?
Support Engineer - Mixpanel.com
Software Engineer (Front-end) - Mixpanel
The way I've heard successful start up types describe this is issue is like so.

Keeping your idea a secret is only going to hurt you and the project because it doesn't have the opportunity to grow with the criticisms of potential users and people who think differently than yourself. So in general you should talk to people about your idea.

That is unless, your 'secret sauce' is something on the order of Tungsten being the secret to light bulb filaments. That you would want to keep a secret.

I tend to agree with this assessment.
> sorry but is this what "Hacker News" has become....

How can you possibly make a statement about the quality of Hacker News articles in a comment without proper punctuation, capitalization, sentence structure, or even content? I think that if any argument is made about the trending quality of Hacker News, the evidence presented should be your comment and not this article.
Shutterfly to acquire Tiny Prints Inc.
This. The US has one of the highest on-paper corporate tax rates while having one of the lowest effective corporate tax rates that most companies actually pay.

This is basically a regressive taxation system for business since small businesses don't do things like offshore accounts and tax havens, so they get stuck with the bill. Meanwhile we're incenting big business to spend more time on that BS than on producing good product. Unfortunately, nobody will be able to reform this because any amount of moving things around between line items will be branded as RAISING TAXES!!1one2, even if it's revenue neutral (just omit the balancing cuts and it's still OBAMA RAISING TAXES).
"Maffa Stuat"? Orly? :P

But seriously, I don't get what Twitter needs a commercial for. They need a business model, not more users. But I guess they need to burn all that CV money on something.

It seems that they've recently realized that only closed platforms bring (a lot of) money (Windows, Macintosh, Facebook, Google Ads), and they think they've made a mistake by opening up previously. But platforms are like proverbial cans of worms: once you open them, good luck trying to close them back.
This is a great idea, the last (mostly) unexplored frontier. But the approach seems somewhat simplistic. Have you watched a large number of episodes of What Not To Wear? If not, I would strongly suggest you do to learn why people get stuck with bad wardrobes.
This is essentially the gist. Plus, it's super simple to send a GiftRocket. It's usually very painful to get a gift-card at stores, like, me physically being at the location.

This is much more convenient.
Seems to be a standard Microsoft home site thing.
For me, execution is everything. Knowing an idea alone is nothing compared to knowing what to exactly do with the idea.
I suspect it's true. It's certainly Apple's style. But of course there is no proof.

Think about it: if Apple put out a press release saying "we're awesome because we sent this guy a free iPad 2", everyone would (rightly) think it was crass.

What (allegedly) happened here is far classier.
Death of Moore's Law will cause economic crisis
It was so necessary to have an iPad 2 RIGHT NOW that you had to go run out and buy a model you didn't even want?
Friday:

"We are aware of a possible compromise of PHP.NET server(s) and a potential PHP source backdoor. "wiki.php.net" was taken offline" | https://twitter.com/#!/VUPEN/status/48696644975337472

Saturday:

"php.net security notice" | http://www.php.net/archive/2011.php

The article backs up this timeline as well ("The site has been down since at least Friday"). Which do you trust more, the article with the linkbait title or actual facts? ;-)
Mike, your issue is exactly what we want to solve. We thought about the current assumptions of how people order today:

1) Figure out what to eat
2) Determine if it's worth the money

On Munchery, we flip it entirely around:

1) A chef figures out what you eat based on the best ingredients of the season
2) The meal always costs the same

Or in foodie terms, Munchery is French prix fixe + Japanese omakase. We think that not only brings great value to customers, but it's just plain exciting.
Yeah, I've found that the increased speed makes me more likely to [happily, successfully] use it for more "laptop things" than I did the old one. Having a Smart Cover that props it up well for typing sure doesn't hurt any, either.
Yes, doubly so if the event never happened.
Shellac: extend Chrome with unix shell commands
The article suggests they are manually reviewing recent commits to see if someone added something user credentials of an authorized committer, not that someone altered the source repository directly.
An even better point.
Your completely right, the complexity is a much larger threat than the actual amount paid out. Ideally, and this would help immensely, a grace period would include no taxes of any kind paid out for a set amount of time, and no tax complexities to deal with in the set time. We report our numbers on a special tax form and that's it. No tax consultants needed. This would ensure that a larger number of start ups make it to a point where they are large enough to A) hire more people and B)deal with tax complexities without them being a drain on a company's chance of success. If this was possible I would bet that the chances of start ups surviving passed infancy would rise dramatically.
This isn't a new thing. I would bet HTC's cost on the license was probably pretty cheap, but if you don't make a WP7 device, then expect to pay some cash. I do find it strange I haven't seen anything from Google on this sort of thing.
Duplicate.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2350414
Every dollar you bring in has a significant effect on your runway. While making a few K a month and making it early may be far from profit, it can change your runway from 12 months to 18 months and beyond. It can also determine if you get to call it "my" business or "the" business.
True or not, this story is pretty much just fluff anyway. I clicked the title, because I figured it would be something interesting since it was on HN, but I just got a tiny anecdote about a company being nice.

"You can get good PR by giving your customers free products." This is worth reading?
well, not having an external source link simply means this is the source. Whether or not you believe it or not is a separate issue.

disclaimer: I wrote the article, and I believe it likely to be true, but can't verify it for certain, unless the Apple VPs or guy who-got-iPad steps forward.
I hate to be "that guy" but from the guidelines:

"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"

If you don't think the article is noteworthy, flag it. It's really as simple as that.
Thanks for checking it out -- glad you enjoyed reading the results. I also suspect HN will be composed of mostly future thinkers, but our research points to successful companies needing all three constructs to operate efficiently.

By the way, we will be adding a link to retake the questions in the next revision.
Greplin (YC W10) open sources exception collection system
Whoa, why so hostile?
Agreed. A major benefit that seems to be recurrent in the pilot schemes is the data the Khan system provides, and how that allows teachers to interact with students in a more personal and efficient maner. The net result being less kids fall behind. However that also shows the need for the human interaction.
Having just been mugged by T-Mobile (read here for the details: http://nyti.ms/dRW9yO), I can't say I expect worse customer service from AT&T, but that certainly isn't saying much. Oligopoly means rarely having to say you're sorry; monopoly means never having to say you're sorry.
It has been a few days, but there's no evidence other than that line to indicate they actually used all that time to review the source code. Probably just sloppy writing.
Sounds like an urban legend to me, a la "Send standard 'we have no cockroaches' letter" or the "$400 red velvet cake recipe".
Not their first time - Motorola and HTC were the first ones.

They tried branding themselves as the underdog with Bing too; but somehow I have trouble picturing them as the underdog.

You can do business with them, you can buy their products, but they don't deserve sympathy. No company does actually; you should treat them just as they treat you.
What ranges of equity/salary compensation are offered these days? If one should be skeptical about an employee who wants mostly cash, how should founders react to someone preferring all equity?
Sure, maybe if you have no clothes, or they are falling off you, or they no longer serve the purpose of actually clothing you.

However, most clothes purchases are on the same level of necessity as an iPad - such as: "my current stuff is old" or "out of style" or "I just want something new and shiny".
I'd say Dailybooth has evolved passed the idea of just taking a photo in the same pose every day of the year in to more of a photo-based communication tool.
Show HN: App that suggests Amazon products.
I've built an app that suggests Amazon products after you've provided your Twitter username. It fetches all your tweets and calculates the tf-idf of the last tweet.

URL: suggester.me

Something similar was built by a HN member a while ago, but I've contacted him and he told me he was no longer working on it, so I decided to build my own.

Feedback would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, the username needs to be without the "@".
PGP Whole Disk Encryption. Yeah, I hate my life too.

I do use Arch Linux at home for a server, heaps of Linux VMs for different things and almost all of our servers are Linux, a BSD or OSX.

But my main laptop runs Windows 7, and I'm typing this on a Mac Mini. The Mac Mini is just better plugged into the TV, Windows 7 is generally the best Windows implementation I've used and is good enough for everything I want/need to do.
New Twitter RSS Bookmarklet
Clickable: http://www.suggester.me
Sounds like an excellent idea. will you be expanding to the valley any time soon? This sounds perfect for me, but I'm in Sunnyvale.
They didn't even do that though. They interviewed an astronaut on the ISS and he turned the camera toward a window. They probably didn't have to pay anything.
The Current State of HTML5 Forms
If you can't fight 'em, sue 'em. When will the software patent insanity end?
Really? I couldn't tell the differences based on how the new guy has been acting(see: Wall Street bailout, lack of standing tall with Wisconsin Union, Domain Take-Down practice, etc). I wish it were different than this, why I voted for change in the first place. Ah well.
This reminds me of Ballmer's claims that Linux infringes on Microsoft patents. They ultimately resulted in nothing, I see this heading in the same direction.

It seems more like a scare tactic than anything else. If they really wanted to go after Android, Google or Samsung would probably be included. Instead, they're going after some lower profile (though still very recognizable) manufacturers. To me that says they want publicity, not necessarily legal results.
Yes, great points. I read the article linked to from the OP and didn't take the time to look elsewhere. I don't generally have time to crawl the web looking for the "facts" for every news story I read and have faith that a story being voted up on HN is based on a reliable source / article.

I'm lost to why you felt it necessary to bait me with: "Who said it took days?", you could have just replied with the better sources you have just brought to my attention.
That's an aggressive answer to give to that question in this foru.... oh, it's the domain name. Carry on.
Correct, checking for direct repository modification isn't very hard, even with Subversion. What took a little longer was to go through and make sure there wasn't a sophisticated attack hidden in a normal commit somewhere. Hard to sneak one of those in since the full diff of every commit is read by dozens of people, but it could still happen.
Who do you use for 'demand generation'?
We're looking at outsourcing demand generation vs. hiring an inside sales person. Anyone have good experiences with a firm?
I'd be fine with it. I think later on when you've got dozens (or hundreds) of employees and a limited options pool, it might become unfeasible. But right now, I'd have no problem with paying an employee only equity. Even tiny companies like us have valuations that are, well, non-zero, so it's not like some employee can conspire to get founder equity status by simply not taking cash.

Why, know someone who will take only equity? Send him/her our way if so..;)
The last I heard Redis on windows native as a wontfix: http://code.google.com/p/redis/issues/detail?id=34
Looks like this guy built a zookeeper lite on top of riak_core. That looks interesting. For those that don't know, the "riak" nosql product is actually comprised of many submodules that each handle a certain portion of the overall application. Riak_core is the module that handles the coordination of distributing work amongst many nodes in a single cluster.
> when we still end up working ourselves to death and having no free time to show for it.

Speak for yourself. Why are you working yourself to death? I am a programmer and am not working myself to death.
Now I'm getting binary gibberish that doesn't seem to be any encoding I can divine? Going straight to http://areallybadidea.com/ has it on the front page, for now.