skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience I haven't seen much link between gifted students being with their peers and their social awkwardness.

I knew people in the program at my school, as well as several kids who qualified for it but their parents kept them in the regular stream. There were awkward and non-awkward people in each category. The biggest determinant seemed to be what their personality and interests were already like going in.
I like to know of an example of a pension system in the U.S. that does not invest in the stock market. I'm in a defined benefit pension system and regardless of how the stock market does my benefit is guaranteed by the state. Of course, the actuaries who set up the pension devised it so that it the guaranteed benefit would very likely be able to be met by the contributions I make to it.

There is a push by some politicians to get states to declare bankruptcy so that they will be able to renege on their guarantee.
Austin, Texas
Tippr - www.poweredbytippr.com

To apply, please send a resume to mark.cunningham@tippr.com

Tippr is a fast growing venture funded internet company that provides technology to help local merchants acquire new customers.
We are hiring passionate, dedicated and brilliant engineers to join the core engineering team. As part of the core engineering team you will work closely with the product team in a fast paced, challenging environment to help shape the technology landscape and culture of the core product.

Requirements
Strong OO development background and deep experience developing enterprise software
- 3+ years of software engineering experience in Linux/Unix
- Extensive knowledge of open source technologies
- Experience writing software that communicates directly with 3rd
party software (payment gateways, automation scripts, API’s)
- Ability to work with technical and non-technical teams, in an extremely fast-paced environment
- Self-motivated and reliable
- Strong UI design sense with the ability to adapt, take critical feedback, and execute quickly on tasks

Pluses
Experience working with Python
- Knowledge of Django
- Experience or familiarity with cloud services (Amazon EC2 and S3,
Rackspace, Linode)
- Database experience a plus
- Previous start-up experience
If your product integrates with existing systems in any way, or even is still just a fairly minimal product, this doesn't really apply. You can have clients who are willing to pay for example for reports your product generates, but it's useless to them unless your product accepts data from one of their systems. You still need to prioritize requests, but to say they're not real buyers is extreme. If you don't believe they'll really become clients, that's what contracts (and maybe letters of intent) are for.
I completely respect your company's requirement for locals, but I am genuinely curious as to why companies continue to insist on local presence for most all positions. I can guess at what the perceived benefits would be, but would really like to hear from an actual hiring manager what their actual reasons are. Are the reasons more about control, or economics?
"Apply fo jobs at a few interesting companies and just see what happens?"

Yes.
This is a great article covering the same essence of visual design covered by many books. After understanding these principles you should be competent to do basic layouts. I find many designers do a worse job of internalizing these concepts than your average engineer would if they only took the time to try. Engineers are good at extrapolating from principles. Design is no different.
While one specific benchmark may not sway your decision on which programming language to use for your own projects, it should certainly be a factor when designing a large web application for hundreds of thousands of users.

Sure, but the benchmark has to fit the use case. If you're designing a large web application, find benchmarks for large web applications or write benchmark cases yourself that match the use cases you're going to see and think you need to optimise for.
The Headache Of Android Tablets
No. That was thoroughly investigated and no backdoors were found. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2029175
There are certain customers and prospects, and certain industries, where this is endemic, where you just have to stop listening to customers. Sometimes they actually do not know what they want/need. If you faithfully log feature requests, you might find there is very little commonality. If you still have a customer base, it just might mean you actually serve your target audience/industry something useful.
While I don't really think this is enough compensation for the losses incurred on the users, I think that most people were expecting nothing and will be very happy with a free 30 days and a free game (or discount, or whatever). I think most of us here on Hacker News are unhappy because we are more involved in watching what Best Business Practices are, but realistically most PSN users don't care about that at all.
How strongly does being rich tend to correlate with a reduced suicide rate?
New York, NY
Skillshare: http://www.skillshare.com/careers

Skillshare is a small yet fast-growing NYC-based web startup that is working on creating a platform to learn anything, from anyone. Our mission is to flip the traditional notion of education on its head and revolutionize learning.

We're looking for Engineers / Developers to add to our Tech team.

Our technologies include: PHP (Yii), nginx & Apache, MySQL, MongoDB, CSS (SASS), jQuery, Amazon AWS.
Experience with Analytics and/or Recommendation Algorithms a plus.

You will have the opportunity to work directly with our co-founders, both of whom have worked at successful companies in the past, including: OMGPOP, Hot Potato (acq by Facebook), Behance, and Razorfish.

You may learn more about us here: http://bit.ly/kkFVZn

Contact: careers@skillshare.com
Could a business model be wrapped around pairing blogs with relevant sponsors? Obviously some possible issues with this (sponsors can't control the message) but it's a little more unique than standard display ads.

Example - Qomments for "Ian's Made Up House Blog" sponsored by Home Depot.
I seem to be mistaken. Unpaid internships are illegal in most provinces in Candada, I suppose not BC though.

http://blogs.hrhero.com/northernexposure/2009/06/15/beware-t...

http://www.yorku.ca/ddoorey/lawblog/?p=2169
SEEKING WORK: Germany, mostly remote, UX and Rails Development

Hi there,

I’m from Germany. My name is Stefan, M.Sc., and I’m a Rails Developer with more than three years of experience in Rails and about ten years in general web development. My portfolio includes a lot of successful commercial projects and facebook games. I love building awesome user experiences and go the extra mile to make users happy.

I enjoy working in cool and agile teams, showing off code, learning from and working with others… but I can get most jobs done on my own too, if required.

My weapons of choice are:
Rails and Padrino -
CoffeeScript, jQuery -
HAML, Sass -
DataMapper -
Everything HTML5 -
OSX, Git, heroku.
If I’m not confident working with a technology or doubt that I can get something done I’ll always tell you beforehand.

I recently moved to Frankfurt and now I’m searching for freelance work and interesting web projects. So contact me whenever you need an application or feature built or anything else needs to be done :)

buhrmi at gmail

Thanks for your time,

Stefan
I have this impression that there are many more startups popping up that generally operating under the AI umbrella. Companies are doing things relating to medicine, finance, etc. There's even a couple on the May Who's Hiring post here on HN. Quite an exciting time. Seems like the AI Spring is in progress and we're coming up on Summer.
#1 startups like people who like getting down and dirty

#2 build upon your strengths

#3 improve your weaknesses

It's actually Ruby on Rails thats hot right now and what most startups are looking for right now. I'd say take some time to learn that, maybe make some simple application for practice.

Secondly, use your strengths! English? I'm assuming copywriting is something that won't com to hard to you? OWN that space! Research marketing and user interaction for websites. Then go to some startups' websites and see how you can improve their text/site layout/whatever. Show it to your friend and get some opinins. Then let the startup know your thoughts. In-person is best but email just may work. In all this, remember that your strenght(and thus, the differentiating factor) is copywriting and the fact you know English well enough to teach it.

You are gonna have to build a portfolio, or resume as you put it, before anyone will take you seriously...figure out how to get those first initial clients

Good luck!
This is a hack, not a general purpose solution, as it requires modifying the class, and and still must be done carefully to avoid accidental retain/release.

Calling retain/release from a background thread will happen simply by using blocks, gcd, or performSelector: APIs, as designed, to attempt to schedule execution on the main thread. Avoiding the issue requires exquisite care, unless you actually want to modify every single class that you may access an instance of from a background thread (such as GCD).

As to the first point, it applies in a NON-GC environment, where you hold weak references to delegates a(nd deregister them in dealloc.)
SEEKING WORK:

Web Designer / Front End Developer, remote only. Tools are Photoshop, Illustrator, HTML, CSS, jQuery and I also have a bit of a marketing brain and am comfortable with Google AdWords. I'm also experienced in creating Tumblr and WordPress themes.

Contact: wrainbird[at]gmail.com
Cambridge, MA - Panjiva (http://panjiva.com) is changing the way companies do business across borders. Hiring in engineering (frontend UI/UX; backend data mining/ops) and business (marketing, sales, etc.). See http://panjiva.com/jobs.
http://www.ilearnedtoprogram.com/
One shining counter example: Consumer backup company Carbonite. Watch Mixergy's interview with the founder. He's not anywhere close to 25 and is a serial entreprenuer. http://mixergy.com/david-friend-carbonite-interview/
That's funny. If they're not a real buyer, does that mean I don't have to declare it as a real income?
Show HN: invoiceto.me (Make a free invoice PDF online)
http://invoiceto.me/

My weekend project was this edit-in-place style invoice maker, with one button PDF generation and localStorage for everything. Aside from the PDF generator step, everything is jQuery powered and there is effectively no backend. This is (I suppose) an Alpha version, only really tested on webkit (iPad, Safari, & Chrome).

Feedback would be great: it's my first foray into web app development and I'm finding it hard to look at the page with fresh eyes—although I have my doubts about its usability in certain areas! All comments are welcome.

Part of me is tempted to attempt a platform for edit-in-place documents of this nature, I'd be interested to know if there is a similar approach taken elsewhere.

Many thanks,
Stephen

(Note that this is a sort of follow up to my Ask HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2394319. I've taken on board the excellent advice there and have been doing lots of reading and experimenting. Want to get into the habit of shipping things ASAP though, so this is a small first step in that direction; it's also a tool that's handy for me.)
>One wouldn't refer to someone who decides to live in a remote hut in the woods, fishing and hunting but having 0 income and not managing anyone as "successful".

Would you refer to someone like that as successful?

I think some, unspoken, element of the definition of success is "more successful than others" . This is usually related to accomplishing some difficult task or solving a difficult problem others have failed to solve. There needs to be a relevant reference point for comparison.

Otherwise, we are all incredibly successful compared to our ancestors(and many less lucky people in other parts of the world) at obtaining food and water, having a long lifespan, etc.
> This bothers me. Yeah, rent and food is going to be cheap in Kenya, but an iPad will cost the same.

You do realise where iPads are built and how much those people make? :-)

Outsourcing work to cheaper places is part of this world, and sites like eLance bring the power to outsource to people like you and me instead of just letting large companies enjoy it.

Also, you don't know what job that Kenyan would have had to accept if it wasn't for eLance.
The DO clause of LOOP has an implicit progn[1], no need to do it explicitly.

Don't be clever with FLET/LABELS, 99% of the time you're doing it out of some vague "information hiding" principle. 99% of the time you end up making it a toplevel function, since local functions just make debugging harder.

A lot of (if (= x 1) ..) and (if (= x 0)) .. type forms are usually a sign you need a readable predicate. (when (foo-p <expr>) .. body)

Array this, array that. Wrap the BOARD type already. You can use classes and structs. This is not Scheme.

Excessive use of REDUCE and LAMBDA is a sign of Schemish hacking. Again, Common Lisp is neither C nor Scheme. The code uses MAP & REDUCE half the time, then AREF, LOOP and SETF the other half. FP-purism is the root cause of code schizophrenia like this. Try to write pronounceable code -- well, relatively speaking.

--

Ohboy, looking at hyperspec I don't see this spelled out, but it works that way, at least when do is the last/only clause.
And any Product Manager who lets a salesman attach a price to any change request isn't doing his/her job.
These are all good points. I must confess, when I first looked at some shootout problem code a few years ago I remember being in violent disagreement about how some of the solutions were implemented (ie thinking "If I were solving this problem in a non-toy way I wouldn't do it that way, that's a total hack for benchmark purposes"), but it looks like they've evolved a fair bit and I can't find the same complaints I had then - so kudos for that. I need to recalibrate some of my opinions on that front. :)

Given that this sounds like its your own project, I have a vague idea that you might find interesting: Is there a way to present the results in an additional way which is framed initially as "look at the different ways to solve subproblem X" rather than "look at the graph of performance differences"? It could be an interesting approach to have an alternative additional interface that makes browsing the sample code (maybe with annotations?) front and centre, with a focus on programming techniques as a major differentiator, with scores as an adjunct. At present the visitor is encouraged to start from benchmark scores (either for everything, for a problem, or for a language) and from there move to source code later, but there might be a way to frame it as "let me flip through solutions to problems like X and tag the ones I like the look of, then let's see how they performed"

It's a pretty vague idea, and I don't have much of a handle on how it'd work from a UI perspective, but its seems like it might head off some of the kneejerk responses you get from kneejerkers like me ;), plus it could help encourage some of the uses you're describing in your post.
Certainly, with ongoing jobs, this is definitely true. For enterprise software, this customization is basically the bulk of the business.

However, the article is about a product with a single codebase, dealing with potential customers, rather than actual customers. (The auther doesn't specifically spell this out in the article, but that's how I interpreted it) That situation is completely different, as he isn't talking about building customizations into the contract, he's talking about customers who say "add this feature AND THEN I'll buy it (for the original price)."

So you're right, but you aren't talking about the same thing at all, even though it may seem like it at first.
Waltham, MA

Hitachi Data Systems: http://www.hds.com/corporate/careers/

Private Cloud / Enterprise Data Storage - Former startup (Archivas) looking for Python developers for automated testing and Java developers with DB experience. Open source stack and great environment. Competitive salaries.
This is really not a problem. All you need to do is get this client to sign a contract before you make any changes and everyone can get along just fine.
At the very least, I hope that isn't how he worded it on his resume.
The week in iPhone 5 rumors
What are some reasons for OpenBSD not being a more popular OS on web servers? I always wondered about this, as on paper OpenBSD (and FreeBSD) seem like they have the edge but most server admins end up running linux. Another case of linux being slightly easier to use and doing the job well enough?
I disagree. There are not that many gaming network comparing to Sony. They will fully take advantage of their monopoly on the market. They will make a big announcement that they spent XX millions of dollars to secure and redo their security and network and will welcome users back with 30 days free ride. After all, your data is already stolen. Change credit cards. But that "anger" won't most likely stop you from coming back and playing again!

This will be a spot on Sony's brand... and money will be lost, but their network will survive.
http://www.twilio.com/company/jobs

There. Go. Apply. Put together a resume. Tell them why you want to work for them. Tell them what you've done. Email them. Hell, point them to this thread, about how they were the one company you could think of that you want to work for.

Let them decide if you are qualified.

The smartest people I know claim to know the least. It's that double-edged sword: the more you know, the more you know you don't know.

If you want, I'll take a look at your resume and cover letter. My email address is in my HN profile.

But seriously, if you want something, go for it.

Don't be the 'no' in your life.
My Experience as a Female CS Major
Without igniting a huge argument hinging on the (incorrect) notion that I think providers like PSN aren't responsible for the safety of their users data: we don't tend to focus stories about bank theft on the ineptitude of the banks. We tend to focus them on the criminals who commit the bank thefts.
Correction noted. I'm pretty sure though that at least some of the people on the Xanadu team were Drexler-sent.
To be fair to your argument, everything I've read so far about working conditions at Foxconn would be considered close to slave labor in the U.S. ... so yes, there certainly is room for improvement there, and yes, Apple as a major customer could have some influence over the working conditions there if they wanted.

However, it's also worth considering that good mental health isn't likely to lead to suicide even in difficult working conditions; that depression, the number one cause of suicide [1], is a mental health problem whose treatment might or might not be within the realm of a company's ability to handle; and that even Disneyland in Paris has trouble with employee suicides. [2] Although, again, to be fair to you, that article leads right away by saying that the employees there have been complaining about poor working conditions.

Finally, there are cultural considerations. What are considered terrible work conditions by American standards might not be so horrible when viewed by Chinese standards, just as American work ethics are seen as 20th century by other countries.

[1]: http://www.suicide.org/depression-and-suicide.html

[2]: http://thedisneyblog.com/2011/02/04/fourth-disneyland-paris-...
C is a Wasteland
NASA requests help finding gov't use of standard OSS licenses.
I disagree. I've taken the time to read all his blog posts, each one. I've found that level of value from his blog. What he does that's beyond most bloggers out there - he freely shares how he's screwed up, what's he's learned and is learning. The guy is smart! It's refreshing and I've learned a lot from reading his blog.
Uh, the parentheses belong on the other syllable.
I've read the entire advent for plack and started to port my app.

- Why send back an array ref instead of using the CGI way?
What is the advantage it brings?

If I want my app to run in a simple FastCGI environment (with the CGI protocol),
this will not be possible anymore so I will be dependent on the Plack suite
or create 2 versions: PSCI enabled and not PSGI enabled (this will not be much but still, 2 is worst than 1).

- Are all the $ENV variables available?
(SCRIPT_NAME for example?)

- All the plack Middleware sounds much like externalized Catalyst modules.
I don't really see what advantages it will bring to framework like Mojolicious for example (they will certainly never ever used any Middleware stuff from the Plack namespace as this is at the heart of their policy so they will just get access to the servers that implements this spec instead of using the normal CGI protocol)
If you put them all back together, you get Catalyst.

So if you start to build a new framework from scratch, yeah, this might be nice.
Everything has been done, you just pick what you want but else...
No. The seller will sell you their product for their list price. There is little uncertainty on that point.
I am reminded of Sony's ham-handed response when it was discovered that certain music CDs included a rootkit of sorts in an attempt to control piracy:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4989260

For the past few years, this quote has played in my head whenever I have encountered the Sony brand:

Mr. THOMAS HESSE (President, Sony BMG Global Digital Business): Most people, I think, don't even know what a Rootkit is, so why should they care about it?

Intellectually, I know that this exec really didn't understand the implications of his statement, but still it's hard for me to buy Sony products because I feel like I'm supporting the company's self-proclaimed right to abuse its customers like this.
Songkick (YC S07) Tracks Live Music for Users
The other word for "signing a contract" is "buying". Have you had a lot of luck getting customers to casually sign contracts before making a purchasing decision?

Lots of companies play games with contingent contracts (especially with first lighthouse customers). But the phenomenon this post is talking about seems pretty clear: the people who say "Can you implement X, and then we can talk more?".

Just the fact that you brought contracts into this seems to me to confirm his point.
EBay based priced discovery
Also, protip:

> I would love to go to work for a company out there that is already making a dent in their market (e.g. Twilio) but I just don't know if I am "qualified" enough to work for some of these companies.

Please do not make such decisions on behalf of any company (or large decision maker, for that matter). Reading your introductions, you're vastly more qualified -in ways most candidates can't even begin to compete- for a number of valuable scenarios.

This is something I see people shooting themselves in the foot a number of times: being presumptuous, making decisions on behalf of others, that puts all parties involved _worse off_. Please don't do that, for your own sake.
Dude, it's written to be humorous and he's sharing the experience of the time.

Aside, I enjoyed this blog post of yours, good reminder. http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=438
Interactive HTML5 Canvas Demonstration of Dijkstra's Algorithm
There's an important distinction.

It almost certainly won't matter to the right kind of hiring manager at the rig kind of company.

It will 100% matter to just about any recruiter. Many vacancies only path to an interview with a hiring manager is via a recruiter - if you want any of those jobs, you've got a big hurdle to overcome. But I'm guessing you don't want those jobs anyway (well, except perhaps that mythical 2004 Google offer...)
The P2P Evolution
Boids - a mini artificial life simulator