skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I interviewed with a firm that said the initially advertised salary was too high for my offer because I refused to describe myself as an expert in silverlight and opengl. If they find an expert in opengl, silverlight, c#, sql server, web services, c, and desktop applications, I wonder what they think that would be worth.

So yes, I do think it's a negotiating strategy. I hope nobody good will fall for it, I'd like to see this behavior punished by only being able to hire bad developers.
Perhaps Jason's approach may come out of his intuition, I'd like to explain it from a more "academic" perspective. In economics, the labor market is often suffered from information asymmetries where the employer has little means to determine the productivity of prospective employees. Therefore, if the employer is willing to pay average wage, it will obtain below average workers, as workers who has higher than average productivities won't accept the offer. Such a phenomenon is also called "the Market of lemons" in the context of used car market.

The root cause of such a market failure is because workers' productivity is difficult to measure. A certain measure has to be introduced to indicate the worker productivity indirectly (often termed Signaling in economics). For decades HR/Recruiters have been addressing this problem by using different metrics as the signals/indicators. Popular signals include education (GPA, university prestige).

Programming may be a bit more challenging as multiple factors can affect programmers' productivity, e.g., intrinsic intelligence, problem solving skills, the speed of learning. Our hard-working recruiters/interviewers have introduced some new signals --- brain teasers, coding tests, etc.

What Jason proposed in this blog post is that we don't need all those signals, they are all inaccurate and can be fooled around by a well-prepared interviewee, why not directly measure their performance by working with them for a short period, say, three weeks.

That does sound like a good idea. IMHO, that's basically what internship does for students, but not sure if that will work for full-time employees, as it will incur extra opportunity cost for them.
Actually, I kind of rock at interviews...
Tools to Introduce Programming to Kids
The "first to invent" system already in US patent law already faces the same issue, so if it can be done there it then can be done here.
How about the possibility that he is a reader of Jean Louis Gassee's blog http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/05/15/ballmer%e2%80%99s-lates...
Well, there goes Qt.
How many of the respondents have a deep understanding of patent law, and it's application to algorithms and more specifically computer software? Rather than provide substantive input, most of the responses to this query illustrate 1) the shallow nature of most people's understanding of the issues, and 2) a corresponding willingness to highlight such a lack of understanding. Taken from the perspective of a process, one can almost always describe software as a process that effects some change on a physical object, or objects. For example, exposure to novel features (the one's you might think to patent) change the neural functioning of a user which takes it out of the realm of "software" and into that of a physical process. You're feeling sleepy....very sleepy...
55 Striking Data Visualization and Infographic Poster Designs
Original thread from April 30 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2501022
Aptana Studio is based on Eclipse:
http://www.aptana.com/products/studio3

Another JavaScript IDE is WebStorm:
http://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/
I'm pretty new to HN; I don't know if there's a PM feature but I don't see one. If you have a reddit account you can PM me there, same username.
You harvest book covers and then sort them by call number. Google something to the effect of "virtual shelf browser". It's ugly and isn't very effective, but neither is scanning the spines of hundreds of books.
I'm not sure that's the case. I think if patents were cheaper to get and enforce, people would patent more trivial things and sue each other far more often. Look at copyright enforcement as practices by the RIAA and Righthaven.

What really needs to be cheaper and easier is getting invalid patents overturned.
It's doesn't cast doubt on the examples at all, your code is less generic:

(defn has-uppercase? [string]
(some #(Character/isUpperCase %) string))

This code can deal with any sequence of characters: String, Array, PersistentList, PersistentVector, Cons, LazySequence, etc. Your example only deals with String.
I like that avoidance of the vi v Emacs war; but I do agree. You do good work in the editor which you both know and have used.
I'm with you. The author doesn't appear to be very experienced in any of these languages. He just seems to be posting his own naive interpretations.

That said, I'm really excited about Clojure. I got back into programming via Ruby and now Clojure is getting me back into data structures.
" The nice thing about a pair is the way it naturally lends itself to iterative processing: There's the CAR and the CDR, the first and the rest."

While elegant, the convention of cons cells as lists is increasingly going to be a flaw, because using linear recursion to process a list often obscures parallelism vs using a binary divide/conquer description of algorithms. See recent talks by Guy Steel on lisps organized as concatenation trees.

Also, I think Lua is a good existential example that organizing a language on top of a single MAP data structure can be quite sensible.
BitCoin will be made illegal, but cryptocash is here to stay
Voxeo undercharging Twilio 50%, what's their profit margin on SMS?
Late on Friday night I browsed over to smsified.com since I'd been keeping an eye on its minimal "1 cent per SMS coming soon" webpage. That night I was surprised to see the service had quietly launched and Tropo's pricing had also already dropped since Voxeo owns both of them. As of Monday, Twilio hasn't followed their lead (which I've been waiting for since my app uses Twilio). I've read about SMS costing the carriers almost nothing, but I'm wondering what the actual profit margins are. How low can they go?
This assumes you know ahead of time exactly what values must be inspected to solve the problem. This is frequently very much not the case, especially if you're ever working on somebody else's code.

So, yes, your nails may be straight, but your chosen (regressive) technique leaves you with no way to know if they're straight and with only the option of pounding harder and harder if the nail doesn't go in the first time. Enjoy!
Do not use regular expressions for parsing HTML.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/11/parsing-html-the-ct...
As far as I know what was holding MS back before was the EU's reaction to MS maybe buying Nokia as far as EU's overseeing monopoly issues of MS..and certainly you had the Finnish government costs of winding down workers..

What we do know thus far is that possibly that much cash is still parked in EU due to MS's tax savings strategies
I would disagree that libraries aren't going anywhere. Any institution could subscribe to EBSCO, Gale, JSTOR, etc, etc without the overhead of a library or librarians.
Goal Orientation: Action vs. Outcome
To me, if true, this would be more evidence that Microsoft doesn't understand its core value proposition anymore. XBox excluded, what Microsoft does well is software that helps get business done. It's what makes them the money, and nearly every expansion into other markets has lost them money.

The strategic alliance wasn't with Nokia -- it was with RIM. RIM was the company who understood how business people thought, and imagine a .NET binding for Blackberry development. Build your backbone on Windows, a .NET view for the desktop, and one for the blackberry, using the same interfaces easily.

Now, small moves (such as Bing defaulting as a search provider and better Exchange integration) have been announced this year, but not the big money sunk into Nokia.
Please everybody, don't go reddit with the comment voting.

It is clear what the majority opinion here is, but I see well formulated comments supporting the minority opinion being voted down. If you think their arguments are wrong, don't vote them down. Instead, vote up the comments that explains why they are wrong.
You could take it a step further and turn your startup into a reality TV show. Make it something like Jersey Shore mixed with the Apprentice. If you add enough drama and sexual tension it wouldn't really have to be about anything to make it interesting.
Work sample tests are the best predictor (p of 0.54) of success on the job. http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-tal...
I'm not sure I see the point of this. Nokia is already signed on to the WP7 platform. Moreover, most of the phones that Nokia makes are not smartphones. Microsoft would be paying a lot of money for a market they're not really interested in.

On the other hand, what if Microsoft bought HTC? They've worked with Windows Mobile phones in the past, they make some of the better non-Apple smartphone hardware, and they'd be a lot cheaper than Nokia. Android would lose a big manufacturer (no more Evo phones), and Microsoft would gain one. I don't know enough about corporate acquisitions to know if this is a practical option though...
IMO a reasonable test is: If a patent can be used to sue one company it may be patentable. If it can be used to sue 100 companies working on separate products it's probably obvious.

Basically, you can't prove 1 person did not read it. But, you can be positive 100 people did not read it. Now clearly this depends on the number of people working on the problem. So, while 100 is excessive in most fields, somewhere around 3-10 is probably a good lower bound.
Hey I work for these people! =P
Here are some just for the mac: http://bostinnovation.com/2011/03/21/top-3-skype-alternative...
The structure he calls a 'tree' allows cycles and is a generalization of a list. Whether he uses the correct word isn't really interesting: it doesn't detract anything from the post.
Agreed. I was really excited to see something about the company's new ideas/direction only to be left empty handed. Let's just hope a lot of the talk about "speeding up" will actually take place. Granted, it is a team of four so they're only able to produce so much so quickly.
There are hundreds of ways you could do this, but here are my initial thoughts.

First, look at how other information products like this are marketed and sold. A lot of use the traditional "long form" sales letter. Looking over her website, it's basically what she has now just laid out slightly differently. I'm not a fan of long sales pages, but they get results.

Second, help identify the online market she's selling to. My first thoughts are moms and parents of kids that are about to go to college. I can't see a college kid buying it, but I can definitely see it being given as a gift. Look for blogs in these topics and email them to gauge interest. Perhaps give copies as prizes for their readers.

Other ways to promote the site would be to take the recipes and convert them to articles and publish them on sites like ezinearticles.com (with titles like "how to cook healthy microwave pizza"). Then in the author bio add a link to her site.

It may be worth considering converting the video / book to digital products and offering the DVD & hard copy as an upsell.
Hm, could've sworn that bug was fixed. We've found that trying a second time usually gets around the issue. Can you try doing so?
Madiston to Launch New U.K Peer-to-Peer Lending Site “LendLoanInvest”
Strangely, this sort of post sorta said "the writing's on the wall we won't be soon". Multiple mentions of "we're still here" as if expectation is that they're gone. And there were not-so-subtle inferences that they really need VC backing to grow faster.
You exist in a different reality than the one where even mediocre engineers have their pick of the litter.
>The RAF...had...a home mover's advantage in that pilots who were shot down ended up landing in the UK (able to go back into battle if British, but destined for a PoW camp if German).

Not just shot-down pilots: a battle-damaged British plane had a good chance of limping back to a safe landing (at an airstrip or even a country road), while a battle-damaged German plane had much lower chances of lasting long enough to land in German territory. Even when British planes were completely shot down, the wreckage could often be recovered and used for spare parts.

The "Cactus Air Force" on Guadalcanal had similar advantages.

>Finally, unlike the Lufwaffe, the RAF had the world's first integrated air defense network, with radar pickets to detect inbound bombers, control centres to direct the interceptors, and radio-directed fighters.

People usually understand the more immediate advantages of this system ("get the jump on the enemy," etc.), but often miss the deeper implication: this was, if you'll pardon the use of a buzz-word, a true force multiplier. If they had not had their IADS, the British would have been forced to fly constant patrols all along their coastline, spreading themselves thin in an attempt to catch all of the incoming German forces. At the tactical level, their formations would have been outnumbered in most cases. At the strategic level, their crews and planes would have been worn out from ceaseless flying. Instead, they were able to keep most of their planes on the ground, with well-rested alert crews standing by, then concentrate large numbers of planes exactly where they were needed at exactly the right time.
Listen & Engage: A Recipe for Innovation
Compare this to Apple whose cash reserves (~$66B) exceed the market capitalizations of RIM (~$22B), Motorola Mobility (~$9B), and Nokia (~$32B) combined. That's pretty amazing any way you think about it.

http://www.asymco.com/2011/04/26/2895/

P.S. Microsoft has ~$49B cash on hand.
European Mail Privatization
He was never going to, he exists to keep his name coming out of people's mouths.

It's likely that he inflates his worth in order to appear more successful than he is. In 2006, he claimed he was worth $6 billion. Forbes looked into it and decided it was somewhere closer to $150 to $200 million. If he actually ran for office he'd have to expose his finances, which could cost him a lot of his notoriety.
Wow, photo required? Ouch. I bet that kills a lot of signups.

Edit: And then it stretched it sideways so I look even fatter. Nice.
Most soothing colors I ever saw
Complexity does -- SaaS is very hard to reverse engineer.
To be anal: technically GMT is closer to UT1. UTC is never "known" until after the time you are referring to as it is the reading from an atomic clock with some leap-seconds. The exact adjustment is not decided (though can generally be predicted) until IERS publishes DU1 for the time.

Though if you are not needing long period times more accurate than +/- 0.9s you can consider GMT, UT1 and UTC to be equivalent, and for sub-second measures you need to reference a local timer. This is essentially how NTPd works too - it keeps a local timer with reference to hardware events like timer interrupts plus some skew values and this is what your OS ends up using to track small amounts of time, and readings from external clocks are used to tweak the skew values so that this local timer doesn't fall too far out of sync. The skew relationship between UT1 and UTC is called DUT1.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time for more than you care to know about UTC (and, if you do care that much or simply have some serious procrastinating to work on, other references are listed too for further reading).

On London time not being GMT for half of the year, this can be a hassle. We are UK based as are our current clients for the most part. One of the larger ones (a major bank, but for contractual reasons I should probably refrain from mentioning their name) have their email and calendaring system set to GMT, which means that any time they invite us to a meeting or teleconference in this half of the year we have to adjust the time (as our mail+calendar arrangement are correctly set for UK time with daylight saving accounted for, as are the systems of our other clients) or turn up an hour late. Most irritating.
A photo isn't required for signup. You can just use the generic silhouette image for your profile image.

Image resize/distortion is something we will fix in a future update.
I support software patents, but the USPTO needs to make some drastic changes in what is considered "novel". Way, way, way too much of what is patented is, pardon the pun, patently obvious.
The Bitcoin Effect (aka Reality Distortion)
Software is a mathematical equation. Math isn't patentable.

Edit: Since people aren't convinced of my postulate that all algorithms are mathematical equations, here's a proof sketch:

All programs can be rewritten to be expressed in Haskell. All Haskell functions can be expressed as equations in the typed lambda calculus. The lambda calculus and its variants are all subsets of mathematical equations. Therefore, all programs can be expressed as mathematical equations.
While I think that it is important for consumers to realize that there are privacy features, and how to use them, I really don't think that this is an area in need of governmental regulation. The major social networking sites have privacy options, and if people are worried enough about their privacy, they are fully welcome to enable them.
It might not be part of the official spec, but it's a convention that we use in my office and I've seen a number of other places as well.

[edit] Here we go. This is the JSDoc we use, and presumably Protovis does too. Take a look at the Optional Parameters section: http://code.google.com/p/jsdoc-toolkit/wiki/TagParam
Another team member here. I did the UX design and HTML/CSS for the site and I don't think I've ever worked so hard and so efficiently in my life. Thanks Startup Weekend!

We've set up an invite page at http://talkible.com if you're interested.
Design Without Limits
I don't think this idea is that terrible, however, there should be some sort of preface. Traditional interviews (i.e. go to an office, talk to 1-3 people, etc.) just don't cut it. What's more is that their terribly unrepresentative of how most people actually behave on the job. If anything, a get-together in the evening should be held and everyone can meet up. Even better, if there's some sort of community event, it could be suggested to invite the potential hire and introduce them to your network (that way their more familiar with who you're actually working with). I can definitely say, though, that there is hardly a one-size fits all solution for finding new employees. Each business should determine what type of employee they'd like to work with and then develop a scenario/situation in which they can impress the company (whether that be temporary/contract work, a meetup, whatever).
> In fact the way patents should work is that the patent officer spends a week trying to solve said problem themselves.
Does that really sound at all scalable (or even reasonable) to you?

I imagine that many of the proposals that move through the patent office are highly contextual and may be simple ideas wrapped up in daunting language. It seems reasonable that it would take far more than a week to even get your arms around some of the problems themselves, let alone the solutions.

Then spend more than a week on it. I didn't use a week as "cap", but rather a starting point. If it takes a month, sure then spend a month. You'll get no arguments from me. Especially since patents regularly take 5+ years to get approved.
They are going to have to move more quickly if they want to make a dent. I respect that they're still going strong, but the fact that they haven't done anything yet speaks louder.
I highly doubt these are real sketches of the process. More likely after the fact.

The process is usually not anywhere near as linear as it is depicted in the blog article.
In general, I agree with you, but in this specific instance I think that software patents are more trouble than they're worth.
agreed. But Yelp and Facebook do a micro version of this for job applicants. They give you a test - usually along the lines of, mock up something to make our platform better. You have 24 Hrs. Go. Since they're prol two of the hottest places to work, not least because they're two of the biggest pre-IPO joints out there, they can get away with this. Even if you get rejected (and I did), they get your idea (and mine were great, I tell you! Fully mocked up). Well, I bombed the intws but they did like my mocks. You feel like a cheap prostitute afterwards.
I think that the principle of patents is okay. Invest time and money developing an idea, with a guarantee of exclusivity on executing on that idea in the marketplace for a period of time. It encourages a level of risk taking for "getting there first".

Patents are an artificial system forced upon us with the hope that they accelerate innovation. Just as you said, the hope there is that it encourages someone to take the risk of making something new with the hope of massive exclusive rewards.

The problem with that hope is that it ignores how innovation happens. There is no reclusive mad scientist working in some dank basement on the next-best-great-thing. That's childish.

Innovation happens through collaboration. You take someone else's work and you build upon it. Bit by bit, people build the next-best-thing.

The current patent system tries to take this into account by creating a lifespan of 20 years or so. But for those 20 years ... you are stifling the potential innovation that can happen by incorporating that new-best-thing into the next-best-thing.

This is even worse for software! A new paradigm arises (Internet, AJAX, Geolocation, etc.), a new set of algorithms become necessary to make things work. These paradigm shifts take years, not decades. As a consequence, innovation is limited to those who created the initial algorithms, since they're the only ones who can build on the most basic work.

Imagine Google created the algorithm/API for getting geolocation from the browser and built it into Chrome, then patented it. Nobody else would be able to do it. Obvious invention you say? Not as obvious as Amazon's one-click-to-buy button. The worst part in this example is simply that while Google may have invented it, there is an almost certain chance that Mozilla/Apple/Microsoft would have been able to make it better within weeks. We are missing out on that kind of innovation for patented software.
You should link us to your profiles, I'd like to see what you lift =D
I wanted to log in with Twitter (don't like FB..), but you wanted to have quite a nice list of permissions. Without even knowing a lot about your app, why should I agree (I didn't)?

Can you explain what you do with the social network accounts?
Fair enough, but mine was not an alternate to his Clojure code, but to his Java code (which only checks String). Perhaps he should have focused on the functional efficiency like you did, rather than just bloated lines of code.
My understanding is that, at least in the UK, patents are a contract between the inventor and the state. The state grants you a monopoly and in exchange you tell the state how it works. The state has the right to seize your invention (after offering you some compensation). My first patent was held up by the UK government for nearly 2 years whilst they worked out if they wanted it !

IMO the fundamental problem with software patents is that the bar for a "patentable invention" is far too low.

Abolishing software patents isn't feasible for me. What about the firmware embedded in many current hardware devices. Where would you draw the line ?

If you abolish patents this really would disadvantage start-ups as large corporations could easily copy any good invention before the start-up has reached critical mass.