skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been a .NET developer for close to 10 years. Our last product (UsabilityHub.com) was written in .NET simply because it is what I know.

In reality it doesn't matter how good .NET is, there are two reasons why we didn't use it for our latest venture (BugHerd.com).

1) .NET is always one step behind. When people say .NET for web apps, they really mean MVC. I love it, but the reality is that it's a .NET implementation of what was long since done elsewhere. .NET will always be a step behind. Although I must say, sometimes being the second to implement something is a good thing for stability.

2) Hiring .NET developers means hiring enterprise developers. A huge generalisation here, but that means engineers that have worked in big teams under constant direction. They don't do open source, they don't read other people's code and they aren't used to working autonomously.
I got contacted out of the blue. Phone interview lined up at a very inconvenient time and everything. An hour AFTER the appointed time for the phone interview, I received an email saying they had not noticed that I hadn't graduated yet (I've had 4 years full time experience in industry and open source). I referred them to more senior colleagues who I considered to be similarly talented and had graduated, none of whom were ever contacted.
The comments are again, just like the last n articles wrong.

> ...."algorithm" which through some convoluted mechanism allows Bitcoins to be "mined". Essentially it randomly allocates Bitcoin to early adopters...

No it doesn't, transactions use a proof-of-work to verify the transaction, this is what makes it secure and why 'miners' are given bitcoins. Think of it as payment for a service.

The other points I can't really comment on, except to look on bitcoincharts.com in 30 days there has been over 4 billion USD exchanged... money talks right.
If you ask an amateur whether their program is correct, they are likely to be offended. They’ll tell you that of course it’s correct because they were careful when they wrote it. If you ask a professional the same question, they may tell you that their program probably has bugs, but then go on to tell you how they’ve tested it and what logging facilities are in place to help debug errors when they show up later.

I was at a local Hackerspace get together and there were about 4 NASA guys there. My coworker and I were presenting a hardware project of ours, and the NASA guys started talking about one's solder join error rate. I'd never even thought about having one! I just operated on the premise that if I tried hard enough, I could get it all right. Of course, it almost never happens that way. The way those NASA guys thought of it is right: you have some average error rate. Use the error rate to estimate the number of expected defects, then look for them.

I guess that's the difference between the amateur and professional. (I am not a professional hardware person.)
I wonder what had happened if the the government were the PP...
SSH Tunneling with -L
That's done to eliminate bias. Remember how a couple days ago, there was a story on HN about how interviewing really sucks, because ultimately, what determines whether you get the job or not whether you happen to have a personal rapport with your interviewer? People end up caring more about how you present yourself socially than what you know.

The hiring committee is Google's answer to that. The idea is to completely divorce the hiring decision from people who have personally known the candidate. Instead, there's a very broad written information channel between interviewers, references, recruiters, and the hiring committee. But it remains written, so that all your unconscious biases about people stay out of the decision, and at least in theory, it's all based on hard data.
*Skype. Swype is the Android keyboard.
Case in point, in order to convert a .doc file to html was a nightmare from Word (last used 2007 and 2008 on Win/Mac) - this is especially useful if posting on craigslist/certain blogs.

Piping it through Google docs removes like 90% of the deadweight markup and makes it more compliant while retaining nearly all of the formatting.
linkable: http://absurdlycool.com
can you try clicking on "messages" in facebook and seeing if that does anything?
Very true, I actually made a post on my personal blog about that a year or so ago.
Google is considered (or at least was, by other tech companies) to have a very poor sourcing and general recruiting experience. It was assumed to be because they contract out the work.

As a contrast to that, at MSFT, we had full-time recruiting staff generally split into college and experienced recruiting (there are some extra bits not important to this). The experienced recruiting staff was assigned to divisions and worked for usually a couple of years at a time sourcing candidates specially suited to their area. The college recruiters carefully handle and ensure that only one person is in charge of each candidate, they're marshalled through all the steps, know when they'll hear what piece of info back, and are absolutely brutal with us hiring managers about making timely decisions (not that we ever drag our feet <grin>).

While working at MSFT, I was contacted several times by different Google recruiters. Each time, I was left sort of half-indifferent e-mails or voicemails, which I was informed was the desired style of contact. I'd fire them off to my sourcing manager to forward around the recruiting org for a good laugh and jokes about where these people had been before (it's a small industry, and they often would point out ex-Cisco recruiting washouts, etc.).

That said, you can certainly go far on name alone for your recruiting, especially when your options are expected to pay out well. But it's unfortunate to have to try to build teams despite your recruiting efforts. I'd hate to have been a hiring manager there.
Hey mvkel, thanks for the great perspective. I totally agree that email is still easier for something like Fast Five.

We see WhereBerry as most useful for less mainstream things (Inside Job, Cambodian restaurant, Lebowski play) where you want to do it, but don't know who might want to join you. WhereBerry helps you gain some momentum, at which point you can organize it via email.

Did you see any of that kind of activity? I'd love to chat briefly if you want to get in touch at feedback@.
The Lost Origin of Twitter
What about Office.live.com?
That was written in 2004, when Python was nowhere near as popular as it is now. Ruby is also really popular today too, and thus fits in the category that PG was lumping Java in.

If you want a comparatively esoteric language today, try ML or Haskell.
Where's Mark Zuckerberg?
I wonder how the Skype purchase will affect Messenger.
It's one of the most known cliches about Spain, isn't it? I find it funny since I'm from up north and we don't get that much of Canary Island-ish weather foreigners think of when they mention Spain. But yup summer in the south or the plains sucks sometimes.
follow up to previous post: OK, this is not what I thought it would be. It's a menu bar widget that allows text entry and little else. The widget isn't resizable so it only shows a few upcoming events at a time, 1-31 days, but you have to use a slider to see most of them. There's no proper calendaring, I can't go to a date for example. Seeing what is coming up next week is clumsy enough that iCal is a better choice.

Too bad. Needs tons of work. As it is, it would be OK as a freebie, but even as such I'd probably uninstall it after a while because of it taking up menu bar space and not being very useful.

This is just my user usability and usefulness feedback. It is not a flame. Downvote it anyway if you must, that's what is done. Polite criticism and honest feedback is not tolerated on these boards, I am used to it.
Being able to interact with the app without signing app is something we've wanted to do.

We chose to get it out the door first so we have a larger user base to learn from, but hopefully we'll get to it soon.

Great suggestion!
This is about using Facebook as your email account. Are you really claiming that it's a reasonable fear Facebook will somehow make your emails public?

This seems like pure knee-jerk "facebook = privacy problem" thought to me. I can't imagine Facebook making your emails public any more than I can imagine Google doing it.
Someone needs to break the carrier pricing model of charging multiple times for the same bits. I'm not sure replacing ATT or Verizon with Microsoft would be a good idea but if they are the change agent I applaud the move.
I see the .NET "culture" has transferred through even to your company name!
Free online tools to do pivot tables on spreadsheet data. Sounds like small business to me. People who already have their data in spreadsheets and don't want to hire a BI engineer to install SQL, Analysis Services, construct cubes, reports etc etc
Perfect timing! Thanks Gagan, very well written blog.
The way I see it, Netflix is like a negotiator on the side of viewers. The job they have chosen for themselves is to make the biggest pile of content they can, and charge for access to the pile. So, in a real sense, they are working for the people that want access to the pile. This is part of why Netflix customers get a personal sort of attachment to the service, it feels like they are on "our side" (or at least, the interests and incentives line up).

This is seen for me in a few things. Media type was/is irrelevant; whatever the group of people paying to see the pile want is what the will try to do. Service above and beyond the strict terms of contract. I can't be the only person to whom this has happened: the next disc on my queue was found in Netflix's system, but very far across the country. So they sent that one, but knowing it wouldn't arrive in the usual prompt time frame, they also sent the next one at no extra charge. I don't know of any contractual terms that forced them to do that.

Producers, distributors, and advertisers have long had a seat at the negotiations table in the media world. I feel like Netflix has taken the role of being the viewers' representative at that table, and they are doing very well in that role. No wonder old media companies don't care for them much.
Well the construction sector is nothing like half of the economy (16% of GDP, 12% of employment before the crash). Still, if you have 16% of your economy collapse, you will have severe problems. However, the reason why it collapsed is the same reason it collapsed everywhere else in Europe - there was no financing. Your point simply doesn't contradict mine, except for your assertion that the private sector is the only way out.

The private sector cannot currently be the solution because the money it depends on are in banks as I pointed out before. Banks aren't lending because of the problems on their balance sheets. The government, on the other hand, can print money and is the only institution that can do so, so it is your only option.

My evidence in support of what I'm arguing is Germany, whose government intervened to stimulate the economy and currently has had less of a drop in employment than the US even though its GDP fell more. Work-sharing is the most prominent, and probably most successful, program in that regard.

NOTE: I'm not arguing this is sustainable forever. What I'm arguing only applies to the current situation, which is anything but normal.
Yes. This article is correct. The days of cellular "voice + data" plans are on their way out. Eventually, everything will be entirely about data. For voice, you'll call i.p. addresses instead of phone numbers. And by being strictly data, users will have the added benefit of being able to do videoconferencing, swap files, and share screens.
On a material level, no, protest cannot create any new goods. But on a sociopolitical level, protest can force change that can lead to different allocations of resources (or human rights, a la the Civil Rights era in the US).
Can't quite grok it on this post, but where they describe "end-to-end", how exactly are keys generated and distributed? Are key fingerprints verified out of channel? How are they not susceptible to MITM attacks? Which, admittedly may be difficult, but still possible. How is this any better than sending CC data from browser to server via SSL, which at least has a CA system (as shitty as the whole CA thing is)???
Tiny Variation in One Gene May Have Led to Crucial Changes in Human Brain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition_by_the_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imam_Rapito_affair

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_El-Masri
This is very true. Microsoft has not done a good job reaching out to younger developers, which probably hurts them far more than they realize. While I like working with .NET now, I was 100% PHP & Perl dev through high school and college. When I graduated I was hired at a company that built CMS products and needed me to know PHP, ASP.NET and ColdFusion. I realized pretty quickly that my PHP and Perl skills translated pretty well. The hardest thing for me was getting used to writing real apps in an object oriented language.
It sounds like you were going through the software engineer interview process, when what you wanted to do is product management. This is a recruiter-fail: when someone expresses an interest in product decisions, it makes sense to send them through the PM interview process. But it's not really representative of what it's like to interview for all the different job families that one might apply to.
Nobody can "rapidly and correctly modify large programs."

Really, it depends on the definitions of: rapidly, correct, large, and the particular modification.

I've seen enterprise BS happen, such that the business asks for a new column in a database, which is just attached to a dumb text field that does nothing but save data, which is trivial, and gets done. Then the business points out that the business implications are that the value of something else needs to be this or that in response to this data, and that the original modification is now retroactively determined to be "wrong."

Also, there are some tricks that you can use in OO systems, along the same lines of Refactorings. I've done things, like verify that a certain method can only be called in a certain precisely delimited set of conditions, then carefully verify my code in those conditions. This doesn't always work, but it often does.
Google's main problems are not in hiring more people

There's also some incentive for them to get good people before the competition does. It's not like they can't afford the salaries.
Thanks for the feedback everyone

UPDATE: Prices and typos fixed!
Would you mind if I contact you with some questions? They don't relate to anything confidential, but they aren't the sort of things I can ask a recruiter.
I think democracy is a good thing because it is generally good at keeping the government in line. Even though 90% of what Republicans and Democrats do are the same, it is that they're eternally afraid of the public reaction that they do keep themselves in line.

This is even more true in Westminster style Democracies where Members of Parliament can defect on decisions, or defect entirely to another party or go independent. Potentially at any time. Why? Because your local MP is supposed to act on your behalf, and you elect the one that stands for what you do. I know our present conservative government, and Prime Minister, would love to do nothing more than open the election debate and with their majority get some legislation passed. However, they're so afraid of fracturing their government that the PM has out and out said he will not reopen it.

Sadly this isn't always so, as here in Canada the NDP has a dozen or so MP's who were essentially placed as seat fillers (in Quebec), but because of a bizarre turn around those padded seats became their entire election campaign.
Completely agreed. The iPod Touch market is huge, and HP has the deep pockets to buy in volume and keep up in price.
In my book, being unfair, bullying, and bad diplomacy are all in the stupid category.
> it doesn't have a very good shell

Get a better one then:
http://jpsoft.com/tccle_cmd_replacement.html

and terminal:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/

>it doesn't come with the GNU user land

just unpack this in PATH
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/UnxUpdates.zip
it has grep and awk and sed and all that

> I can't solve problems with SSH

from client side (putty) or server side (http://sshwindows.sourceforge.net/)?
Oh man, good thing you can install python yourself on RHEL. But I wouldn't expect someone using Ubuntu to know how to download and compile the source code themselves.
I have Vuvuu.com if you are interested
The mistake is to think having any degree and nothing else will give you a high paid job. In Spain there is too much "titulitis"
Time to attack 127.0.0.1 again?
mutify.com
Exploding watermelons put spotlight on Chinese farming practices
Ask HN: Technical skills needed for any Google interview/job?
I'm considering working at Google. My degree is in business management. I'll be applying for a non-engineering job. However, I'm sure I'll need some technical skills for an interview.

So here's my question: What technical skills will I absolutely need for any interview or job at Google?
It's already not very difficult to use a data-only connection for your main phone. I've been on a no-minutes data-only 3G plan for a year and a half with my Nexus One using Google Voice and bouncing between SipDroid, Skype, and the new built-in SIP client in Android 2.3.

It's just a matter of time before either 0) the majority of calls end up being VoIP or 1) carriers start explicitly banning VoIP in their ToS. Right now it takes a little extra doing to set up a SIP account, but that won't last.
Monadic Data in Fexl (fledgling concept -- please rate)
And has been for months. See the announcement here, which originally went up in November.

https://www.facebook.com/blog.php?post=452288242130
At least two of Netflix's three CDNs place servers or connections within the ISPs. Akamai has servers deployed within almost every ISP, and Limelight has peering connections to their datacenters. I'm not sure about Level3 (and they've been pretty tight-lipped given the Comcast brouhaha).

Rather than caching on the router side, I believe most of the magic happens in the load-balancing side. The effect (to the end-user) is the same, though.
I think if "09" was changed to "2009" it would be much clearer. Especially as the full year is already used for 2011 in the same headline.
They have an order kiosk here at the local Jack In the Box (California). I've enjoyed using it simply because most people seem to want a human to take their orders; I'm comfortable using the computer, so I can step right up to the unoccupied kiosk and place the order.

It's convenient.
I know that the UK trains (actually the tracks) are not as good as in France or Germany, but when I did stay in France, I often traveled from Paris to Tours.

On a train (TGV), this takes about 1.5 hrs. By car it can take upwards of 3 hours on a good day. Variance in arrival time for the car was high, on the train, it was rather constant.

Of course, if you don't have good point-to-point transport (ie, taxis, walkable) at either destination then all bets are off.
There are definitely 2 distinct cultures of developers using the MS Web Stack. Webforms (what most people typically think of when they thing of .NET) is an attempt to get desktop developers on the web. While it's possible to get good markup out of Webforms, most of the default features are a table-based, inline styled abomination. Until MVC came out, I actually worked on an open source project that focused on fixing the markup generated by ASP.NET.

That being said, the new generation of ASP.NET MVC devs is top notch. People like Scott Hanselman and Phill Haack have helped make some vast improvements in the stack.
You sound like a value investor interested in dividends; good on you. However a large fraction of wall street is interested in "shareholder value", a nebulous phrase that boils down to "the share price is always going up".

As a rule, paying dividends doesn't increase the share price. Reinvested profits, huge mergers, along with bold press releases, increase the price.
Totally agree on the commitment to the whole .Net ecosystem, but that is a feature, not a problem, because for the most part the various places play very nice together - so nice in fact that we have time to actually COMPLAIN about this integration :)

Another minor point is that yes, MS has higher licence costs for sure, but the other expense for a business is the development time themselves. A .Net developer can quickly switch between WinForms/Web/Mobile/Silverlight(for what it's worth) with very little learning curve and all within the same IDE. I believe it gives a business many more options without needing to bring in and train specialists.
If that's the case, best example so far (next to Kinect, maybe).
He's transcended lists like this.
"Google Docs is creepy [sic] up on it"

Is that a typo or a subtle commentary on Google's privacy policy?
I'm a Googler. I found the hiring process exhausting, but I felt it was thorough and fair. My recruiter did a fantastic job of walking me through the process and letting me know what was going on. I'm sure Google has made lots of mistakes hiring people, but there's always a bias towards complaint. Most people don't have the energy to type up a "everything went fine" reply.
Or a job at all. Not so hard to teach people at university some quite simple numbers and statistics right? 'Ok, so you are going to specialize in Basque history; you do know that there are 4 jobs in need of that subject in whole of Spain right? And you'll earn nothing, your whole life?'.
Open Source Textbooks
What would you think if I told you I had issues with Linux, drivers crashing, kernel panics, programs not integrating nicely, and for these reasons I choose not to use Ruby?
Microsoft Research is one of the closest things to the old Bell Labs that still exists today.
Beats me, must be a Dell thing, only thing I can come up with.
Oh my god not the "Kinect was acquired Herpa-Derp" argument again. On the kinect sensor, there's pose estimation being performed @ 200 fps which is the product of work done @ MSR. Here is the paper that describes how the kinect does pose estimation faster than any comparable tech on the market : http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1453...
99 Percent Of Android Devices Are Vulnerable To Password Theft
I know someone who could plausibly answer that interview question. She has a degree in English literature, undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in law (U. Queensland and Oxford, respectively), plus taking classics on the side while learning Scots / Civil law at Edinburgh. She's scientifically literate and active in various skeptical societies. She wrote an award-winning novel and has another on the way about an alternate history Rome where Archimedes was captured and not killed by the Romans.

People like this are out there. Perhaps such "Hail Mary Non-Sequiturs" are actually worth including.
It doesn't have to do with political correctness, but rather stock price. If it comes out that Bill Gates thought this was a bad move, Microsoft shares will fall. He'd be hitting himself on the head with a hammer.
Yes, the shit sandwich, as one trainer I had called it. If you have someone who uses the sandwich, each time he says something nice you start bracing yourself for the shit that follows. Personally, I believe you should be up-front about criticism, but be aware of how it will affect the other party. There's lots and lots written about this, so I won't trudge through it again, but keeping non-confrontational language focussing on the thing that is wrong rather than "you did it wrong" is usually better.

Like the previous commenter said, it is difficult, but the shit sandwich is not always the way to go, especially not if giving feedback to me.