skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In an ideal world, the person you describe would be the one hired every time.

But let's face it: Most products are not interesting to the developers working on them.

I love programming. It's my life. I can get excited about -coding- anything. The actual product, though? Not so much.

In fact, the company that recently hired me asked if I was interested in their product, and I honestly answered that I wasn't, but programming was my passion. When he frowned a little (it was obviously the wrong answer), I told him that I wasn't interested in the product I was coming from, either, and I'd been there 5 years and loved it. And it was true.

Avid programmers are the kind of people who took everything apart when they were kids. How things work, and making them work, is much more interesting than what the result of that work is.

So I disagree with their assessment, if that's why they didn't hire you. Your passion for programming should have been more than enough to cover a lack of passion for the product itself.

And I'll even take it a step further: You could be an asset to the team. You are the user that got away. You used the product, and left. You can tell them how to get you to stay as a user, and you've got the technical know-how to make it happen... And you'll be excited about implementing those features.
How to use Event Machine with Passenger
Ask HN: Facebook API docs app for ipad?
Is there an app for the API documentation in the same style as this Ruby tut app http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ruby-tutorial/id404183343?mt=8 here?
How Fog Creek learned to do sales part 2
I don't understand this logic. If it's a given that the price of a company goes up after the IPO, why would any company ever sell beforehand?
Collection of "How we survived AWS outage" stories
Sounds like you want GrooveShark: http://groveshark.com
Personnally I've got no problems on OS X using in parallel:

- stock python 2.6.1 and /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages

- brew install python (which brings in python 2.7)

- brew install python3

... and a bunch of virtualenvs
PRC = People's Republic of China. Is China a Republic?
I agree with most of your comment, but I think there are a few inaccuracies worth pointing out.

> The thing is, being a rockstar is ... [about] using drugs to dull the loss of identity caused by never being in the same city for more than 6 hours.

I am not entirely sure that's the root cause for rock stars' drug use. It's certainly part of it, but in large part it's intimately tied to the socialization context that surrounds the entire rock scene.

When a fan is going to a show, it's a special event. A large population of those fans use drugs in an effort to enhance their enjoyment. They also want to share that enjoyment with the band, and they are quite willing to share their supply with the band. In other words, the rock band basically has a free, unlimited supply of drugs and a social expectaton to take advantage of that.

> There's a reason why they all act so damn crazy after a certain point in their careers.

I'm sure you didn't mean that literally, but there are several rock stars who don't end up crazy. Led Zeppelin, Brian May (a PhD!), BB King, Buddy Guy, Ben Folds, Nickelback, Darius Rucker (Hootie), I could go on forever... The reality is that it's a small subset of rock stars that go crazy, and I would argue that the proportion is actually lower than for the average population of somewhat-heavy drug users.
Indeed. This was more of an experiment than anything else. Ideally, I should have a function that catches all exceptions before calling the user's function to make it safer.
Not to mention the probably billions of works of art, music, and literature which were inspired by various drugs, including LSD.
Indeed, the one solid-state class I took used Kittels, and I quickly ended up borrowing Ashcroft from someone. Kittels was the least "physics-y" physics textbook I ever came across.
Glad you like it and thanks for taking the time to follow up with this feedback.

I think the charging model needs overhauling because a vast number of people sign up on the trial and never subscribe. I think this is because the trial is too limiting - what I should probably do is a give a free month (or at least, some measure of free time) to everyone who signs up.

Do you think the monthly price is reasonable? Would you pay £12 / $20 per year?

I'm investigating archiving mentions as well so the opportunity for conversation threading would be there. Glad you mentioned this.

I'll duplicate the pagination controls too, good point!

Will take your stats suggestions onboard - this is definitely an area with a lot of potential.

Thanks again :).
Yes, of all things to cancel - the science database?

What about the other amenities?

I like science, I like research, I sometimes browse IEEE's database just for kicks. That does not however change

- science databases are not an amenity

- they are exorbitantly expensive! Not to mention there's something like 4 or 5, all of which you have to subscribe to!
Interesting. What differentiates you guys from Tender App?

Also, what are you using for the inbound mail? (That you use to post replies with.)

And I'd love to talk shop about what you are using for outbound transactional mail. Product Manager for PostageApp (http://www.postageapp.com) and I love hearing about what startups are using for their needs!
The sheer mass of games that depend on steam and the number of companies involved do a lot to ensure that people will act to keep it up far more so than single-game servers.
Just a quick hack. I added timer-applet in ubuntu. I work on 30 mins intervals and then rest 5 mins. It is pretty handy.
They're called "roadies"
Just blocking coworker chatter does wonders for me:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000X6L82/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...
Meet Canada’s youngest MP in history
But the SIM card was not just discarded where it could be picked up idly. To get at it a device had to be opened. OK so opening the device to get to the SIM probably wasn't difficult, but neither would be opened a violin case and you would not "accidentally" open the device and be surprised to find a SIM in there...
How Facebook can be leveraged to reveal your age bracket
Making a video game is pretty neat and all, but I think Electron Boy wins the best wish ever prize (they hand out prizes for that, right?):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FCIskbu-OM

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2011740342_e...

Both Electron Boy and the Pop Cap kid seem to be from Seattle. The Make A Wish Seattle office is really hitting it out of the park (as much as an organisation that always hits it out of the park can do, if you know what I mean).
One of the biggest factors in persuasion is the concept of exclusivity. If people feel like they are getting in on something that not everyone else can get in on, they're more likely to do it.

Be generous with the amount of invites so you can grow.

If you like your current community of users, keeping the system invite-only will generally keep the community at that high caliber.
PS: stack is standard LAMP, right now. I intend to move the stats stuff into something like NoSQL at some point, as that's already quite heavy.
Lots of people say that in all sorts of situations, but it never seems to me that it ever helps. It seems that lawyers always make things more adversarial, they extract money whether they make things better or not, and there's rarely, if ever, any way to change your mind once you've got them in.

When I was a part of a semi-hostile management buyout the lawyers only ever made it worse. Things were rescued more than once by talking directly with the other parties despite the lawyers' advice.

But if it seems irrecoverable, usually I'd rather just walk away. YMMV.
I monitor how I spend time at my computer by running rescuetime. Their productivity report makes me want to do better, so then I waste less time.
From talking to people working on on-chip non-volatile memory, my impression is that memristors are still too immature for production. If anything, phase-change memory seems more viable at this point in time.
Same here... although the "misapplied computer expertise" stigma would be hard to shake off when launching something like cashenvoy.com
This "lab report" always brings back good memories because it indirectly launched my career in the game industry. I was finishing up my CS degree at UW Madison and working in Mike Gleicher's computer graphics lab in Spring '02. I had previously met Lucas through a fellow CS student (Alex Mohr, now at Pixar). At some point, Lucas was contacted by the AI programmer at Ensemble Studios (Mike Kidd). Mike, a UW alum, had seen the Germanium treatise and wanted Lucas to apply at ES. A month later, knowing how eager I was to join the game industry, Lucas mentioned Mike's email to me and forwarded him my info. Long story short, I got an interview at ES and was hired straight out of college into a dream job.

I look forward to seeing this link pop up again in a few years. :)
Having "swanky" residence rooms (which are paid for by the students and I'm sure they don't loose money on these) is a selling point.

In all honesty, as someone who grew up and goes to school in the Maritimes, not many people want to go to what is widely considered a retirement and tourism province for higher education when more compelling options exist like Halifax. So in order for UPEI to compete, they need to offer some other compelling reasons (for instance, they have a highly regarded veterinary program).

It is important to remember that these institutions are funded by enrolment.
I was going to mention the etymology of "Nazi" as a protective measure against comments like yours, but I figured that it was unnecessary. Apparently not. "Socialism" is an infinitely malleable and borderline meaningless term that does nothing to shed light on any topic unless qualified with some clarifying adjectives.

If you think my friend, who uses the term "socialism" to connect Obama with Hitler, is "not that far off the mark," as you wrote, please by all means let us all know.
Clearly, our stories are different. I posted my thoughts based on my 3 years experience in a major Fortune 500 IT corp., where 90% of managers are top-school MBA graduates.

My objection to the article was that too often, engineers are considered subordinate by definition, and seen as mere doers with no say in the matter, which is in great contrast with the idea of being an engineer I had back when I was at the university.

Reality is that in some workplaces what you call 'managerial capability' ends up being the ability to carefully choose whom you're going to spend your coffee break or lunch with, false empathy, or just plain arsekissing. Some says this is office politics, but it's a game I don't like to play.
It's all about the supply chain you use. Buy from an authorized reseller; they have a vested interest in selling you the real thing.

Tangentially, notice the counterfeit IC's from China are mostly storage (unless something has changed that I wasn't aware of) The margins on faked storage are pretty good. The margins on SMT capacitors? I can buy authentic, extremely high quality capacitors on DigiKey for $0.07.
How to find ideas
The current prediction among computer architects I've talked to is that Moore's Law will go for another 10-20 years. I don't think anyone's surprised to hear about 22nm being achieved (not to say that these continual technology shrinkings aren't hard).
You're getting voted down because most people see the domain "britneyspears.ac" and assume you're spamming, without even visiting the link.

That site actually does have some decent articles related to semiconductor physics, the whole "Britney Spears" thing is just a gag to show how simple they've made it (though the humor is likely to be appreciated only by Physics geeks :)
The language was C and my solution (adapted to the article) was something like this:

// TODO enforce! see also: soylent green
#define MAX_AGE 100

struct student {
const char *name;
int age;
};

struct students {
long n_students;
struct student *students[10e6];
};

struct students all_students[MAX_AGE];

void insert(struct student *s) {
struct students *ss = &all_students[s->age];
ss->students[ss->n_students++] = s;
}

So O(1) insertion and O(n) post-processing to stitch the arrays together again. Seems like pretty acceptable performance to me but the Google guy thought otherwise, the answer he was looking for was (probably) a counting sort.

I tried to argue that my solution was a fair bit faster and simpler to boot. That's probably why I didn't get a follow-up interview - no-one likes a smart arse. :-)
The interviewer states, citing Lennart Poettering:

"Linux is the focal point of all Free Software development"

...which is of course bullshit (pardonnez-le-mot ;-). Look at all the open source applications and servers that are developed nowadays. Look at the BSD projects! Free (as in Freedom) Software is not confined to the linuxsphere.
How you measure...

Simple answer:

I guess my original post was a long round-about way of saying:

Bad measure: "Do I feel like a had a good day?"

Better measure: "Do I feel like I got a lot done today?"

Best measure: "Do I have more valuable stuff built now than I did this morning?"

Sometimes we should just use the simplest measure and leave it at that.

how many hours-per-person-per-year of work I've saved other people

Oddly, in my experience, this is a poor metric. Example: I wrote a sophisticated workbench to make inventory planners much more efficient. And they were. All 8 of them. Then I made a 5 minute change to enable factory supervisors sort their dispatch list 8 different ways. Which helped 800 people become more efficient. That's why I don't even try to measure "value" anymore. I let the customer worry about that. I stick with daily deltas as my best measure.
I've been experimenting with the pomodoro technique: http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/
I'm saying that the notions of right and wrong come firstly from our human nature, secondly from our society and so on. Last in this list is ethics as personal preference or "something private" as Linus likes to call it.

And even if it does vary wildly in current cultures, there is such a thing as a sense of morals that we can combine with rational thought to reach a fair solution. The fact that culture A considers ritual murder ok fails this morals + rational though test.
I think it's similar to starting a company. Successfully building and maintaining a safe nuclear power station is more about the execution rather than the idea.
A video explanation of Linkedin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcfXij6t4LA
No, this doesn't break the async philosophy. The synchronous sequence of calls is done by a question/reply made out of 2 asynchronous calls. It's just that simple to make something synchronous, as opposed to turning something synchronous asynchronous (by using a queue).

By doing this you are not limiting the queue to the size of 1. If you have N producers, you can have more than N elements in the queue, but the idea is that each producer can only enter them one by one, with the agreement of the consumer. Nothing would stop the consumer from accepting a thousand of them before waiting before replying, therefore slowing down the producer. The idea is just to limit the rate at which you accept queries by tying it to the speed of the consumer.

If this is not enough, you can look at things like the jobs tool (https://github.com/esl/jobs) to work with scheduling.

By the way, you're mistaken on the idea of message sending always succeeding. The idea is that you will never error out because of trying to send a message (send and pray), not that the message will make it to destination. If you want any guarantee that the message made it, then you need that acknowledgement async message being sent back to you.
The AtomicMap Challenge - Solutions
Collective intelligence and the “genetic” structure of groups
Austin, TX - Full Time

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We're hiring mobile developers (iPhone, Android, Blackberry) as well as server developers (Django / Python). Visit our jobs page http://www.mutualmobile.com/jobs/ for more information.
I saw these people too. Some times I used to pre-sort my garbage so they could easily pick up the stuff they wanted -cardboard and containers from the building dumpster.

An observation was that they seemed dedicated and hard working. It kind of changed my way of looking at how people deal with limited opportunities. In TW destitute people are just hard working. I was very impressed by that. They find something to do --just something. I didn't see alcohol or drug abuse. I didn't see resentment toward people who were better off.

It seemed like a more practical approach without psychological overlays. I don't think it was accepted as fate, rather it seemed like a calculus of "this is what I can do, it's hard, but I can eke out a living without depending on someone/something"

Beside that, it was kind of weird coming up on them in the middle of the night pushing their carts in the middle of traffic. That part seemed really dangerous.

When I came back to the States, this experience skewed my view of how I perceive people at the fringes in the US who seem more likely to give up on their circumstance. It just seems more self-destructive without having to be.
I wish I'd even once had students who understood the experiment well enough to fabricate data.
Presumably if the gender property is deleted the prototype.gender will come through
Communicate through drafts saved in a shared webmail account that supports https?
Absolutely. I chose the entrepreneurship route because it's something I that I feel I was born to do. Of course, I try to maintain a healthy lifestyle and a positive demeanor on the outside despite sacrificing a lot. It will take a lot of adjustments if you decide to take the plunge full-time.
That's a good analogy, but it's not one that the article mentioned at all.
Absolutely. I chose the entrepreneurship route because it's something I that I feel I was born to do. Of course, I try to maintain a healthy lifestyle and a positive demeanor on the outside despite sacrificing a lot. It will take a lot of adjustments if you decide to bootstrap a startup full-time.
I might as well plug tasktop - it's great.
Lucas. (sorry it was bugging me).
no way butter is unhealthy, I can't tell about bread though.
Non-eye-burning: https://www.readability.com/articles/9likw7md
When I have clear tasks to complete, I find the Pomodoro technique to work really well. Also, after the first couple sets, I can often continue working without distractions without actually setting the timer.
My thoughts exactly. And Linus's name was not misspelled like Jimi Hendrix's name was.
Why Consumer Internet Entrepreneurs Peak at 25
I have to agree here. Personally it is too buzz-wordy for me and I wouldn't really be interested. Can you find like one or two solution statements in regular, even overly-simple, words? Tell me one thing I could do that I can't do now or would be easier. If it's a big enough problem I will do it, but otherwise shifting my email setup is just an annoyance I'd rather avoid.
Good point; though this seems to suggest that wifi/TOR is explicitly criminal.
That is great news, thanks! :)
Thankfully this was the first link on the HN homepage. Just reading the articles and comments made me feel sufficiently guilty to stop reading any more :)
Roughly reasonable yes. But it would be more palatable as an annual cost, for some reason. That might just be me.

Re conversation threading: you are already archiving the reply_to_status_id values, you don't need to look at mentions to figure out conversations.
Only 1/3 faster? Unacceptable! I wonder just how IO bound it is since it's not using HDFS, it'd be nice to know what speedup we're doing on the CPU bound portion of the task.
How does Web of Science differ from Google Scholar?
What I find most inspirational about FogCreek is that they have managed to survive and thrive in even in the face of powerful "incumbents" i.e. free solutions that have a longer history.By that I mean that when the sales person for Fogcreek for Version control s/w makes a sales call, he could be faced with groups who are using either PVCS or CVS or SVN -- and yet he or she manages to close that sale. I would love to know how you get past that barrier to entry ? In more general terms, when if you are making a sales call to a prospect who already has a solution which may be inferior but nevertheless in production, how do you get them to switch ? When do you know to move on to next prospect and when to further pursue the lead ?
Web font services - An Overview
Does "mid-six-figure" mean $550k (midpoint of the six-figure range), $300k (ditto but using the geometric mean), or $150k (midpoint of the $100k-$200k range)?

(My impression is that $150k is a plausible entry-level quant salary, but it seems a bit strange to describe that as "mid-six-figure".)
So, if I understand you correctly, you treat this as a binary and not as a quantity.

if total_value_end_of_day > total_value_start_of_day
then
productive
else
NOT productive

Do I have that right?
Startup allows flash games, video on iPad
This reminded me of a very interesting interview with Russell Brand I saw recently, in which he discusses the error in seeking celebrity for the sake of celebrity as this ends without any real fulfillment. Instead, he advocates working in a particular field for the love of the craft (in his case comedy, although I don't see why this doesn't apply to any art that has cults of personality, e.g. programming).

Even though I am not a fan of his comedy, his eloquence and thoughtfulness on the subject surprised me.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qdNBrzAQjo&feature=playe...
Originally found on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/gvr1o/charlie_sheen_...
Hudson = moribund.

Check github. All the developers now do Jenkins.
Cool, thanks!

Sorry to get off-topic, but this really spurred me to think of something somewhat similar that would be very useful to me personally: a generic "mock" server. A static call-responder, if you will.

Rather than already having an API like this one does, it'd be one where a browser-side developer could specify on the server a list of static call/return pairs in a form similar to:

for web service call c with parameters p[0] = 'abc', p[1] = 123, and any value for p[2], return string 'some JSON string'".

That way one could easily have front-end folks working on browser-side code, making real web service calls and getting back real-looking results that are appropriate for this app. Later, as the real back-end progresses, the front-end can be repointed toward it.

This would need to be setup-free enough that most front-end folks wouldn't have any trouble creating/maintaining sets of these. Perhaps best would be for it to be a public service so that the devs wouldn't even have to run their own server.

Anybody know if anything like this exists?
Yep, beware I didn't even tested it:

#!/usr/bin/env zsh

(($#<1)) && {
print -- "usage: $0:t (play|work)"
exit 1
}>&2
blacklist=(
reddit.com
ycombinator.com
slashdot.com
)

hostfile=/etc/host

if [[ $1 = "play" ]]; then
if [[ ! -e $hostfile.orig ]]; then
cp $hostfile{,.orig}
else
print -- "You're already playin" >&2
exit 1
fi
cp $hostfile{.orig,}
for elem in $blacklist; do
print -- "127.0.0.1\t$elem" >> /etc/host
print -- "127.0.0.1\twww.$elem" >> /etc/host
done
fi

if [[ $1 = "work" ]]; then
cp $hostfile{.orig,}
\rm $hostfile.orig
fi

/etc/init.d/networking restart