skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would just go for objective-c. MacRuby is in version 0.1 and might be more of a headache to figure out and circumvent bugs and holes then just learning objective-c. It's not a very difficult language and easy enough if you have tried C or Java before. You'll also need to handle memory (allocation and deallocation), but you could try to rely on GC, but not for iOS. Lynda.com has a video tutorial on objective-c and also tutorials on iOS programming.
>> 4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn, would cause your car to shut down...

I had one of those, a Plymouth Voyager. Going from our house in the mountains there was an intersection with a sharp down hill right turn. Sometimes the car would stall with a loss of power steering. My wife was small and she int like it all.
As someone who tries to be a master of all, I don't see anything ridiculous about the requirements. If your passion is cars, you're likely to have some knowledge in all of those areas just because you love cars, if for no other reason.

What I found funny, and unfortunately all too true, was the pay offering. They want it all, but are only willing to pay slightly above minimum wage to get it.
How the old "GM vs Microsoft" joke developed
While it's cool how little plumbing Forth needs to be extensible via new control structures, I do make mistakes as does everyone I've ever worked with, and life is too short for yet another platform on which every program blows up randomly because it isn't 100.0% flawless. C at least tries to help a little with typed pointers, so I don't see how Forth could help but be more brittle.
Empirically, complexity(einstein's field equations) > complexity(newton's law), complexity(spherical harmonics) > complexity(electrons spinning around atom) and so on and so on. Complexity is not a criterion for truth
Cultural fit--and company culture in general--is something I rarely see mentioned. And yet, it's critical to a startup's potential for success. No matter how you define that culture, it needs to be defined. And your founders and employees need to share a similar commitment to that culture. Really glad to see it highlighted here as one of the five.
Short answer: no.

Long answer:

Possibilities:

Make it illegal: This will most likely turn bitcoin into what they are afraid it will be. If use of bitcoin is made illegal we cannot use it for personal or business use, and those who would use it for illegal reasons, trafficking in illegal goods and money laundering would still use it and would be the sum of the bitcoin economy.

Regulate it (end point taxation, quotas, or caps):
This is the best action of the government we can hope for. The government will act, and this is what economists will tell them to do. End point taxation will be hard to enforce but would be just has hard to enforce as full illegality: it would allow government control, yield revenue versus lose it and give everybody what they want. This is the compromise position.

Ignore it (How things are now, but not going to stay this way):
The government will ignore bitcoin until it causes a problem. A problem means in this case, that they are up for re-election and their constituents care about it or the credit card companies/banks get worried and send in their lobbyists. Neither of these things will happen until somebody makes an easy to use consumer facing product that allows easy use of bitcoin in everyday life that can challenge any established product (this is surely already happening).

Right now there is a lot of clamor and potential. Nobody is going to move in the legislature (the judiciary's hands are tied until somebody gets sued and the executive tends to stay out of this stuff until one of the other two sets the rules) until a real incident has happened with bitcoin. i.e. somebody is caught using it to launder money for something publicly inflammatory or some startup comes up with a great way to sell it to the consumer masses.
I'm skeptical to broad generalizations based mostly on anecdotes. I have no problem with some specific cases and I'm always ready to help my friends. After all, a friend in need is a friend indeed. By the way, I asked one of them today if she heard of any sexual scandals at the work place in Romania or Italy and she told me she hasn't hear of any. All she knows about is some rudeness (in lack of a better word).

The problem might indeed be far worse in Romania from a quantitative point of view, but not from a qualitative point of view. People don't make such a big deal like suing the boss for small things, e.g. sexual innuendo or dirty jokes. They might call him a pig like in high-school and break his neck as a friend suggested :-D, but that's it.
I have yet to find any recommendation system that stands on its own (vs. YouTube related videos for example) that I would regularly use other than HN. Any ... recommendations?
This joke doesn't get the point: computer science is one of the few areas where one person can solve a problem literally one million times as fast as another, if you measure in running time.

You don't get those kinds of productivity differentials in driving.

Moreover, access to the latest and greatest tech is a click away and costs nothing. If you were a professional driver and could click in your spare time to be in the driver's seat of a Ferrari or tank for free, of course you'd do it if you cared at all about your craft.

Finally, the hours and wages of computer scientists are obviously far better, so more demands in a CV are reasonable.

At best this is a sendup of the Craigslist naifs looking to build an FB killer at $15/hour...but I get the sense he's saying that employers shouldn't be so demanding.

Yet it is peers rather than employers who've set that standard, as there actually are a fairly substantial number of people who can do frontend and backend, full stack.

They're called hackers.
It depends on scalability, easiness to modify and adjust to changing web.
One assumption I may have that needs to be stated: OpenSSH vulnerabilities are infrequent, bordering on rare. The discovery of a remote auth bypass or remote code exec flaw in OpenSSH is a big deal; a "drop everything and block all access to port 22" deal.

Another assumption: the gap between the rumor of an OpenSSH remote and the time it hits "people so dumb as to burn the exploit on a scanner" is large; probably weeks, possibly months.

Another assumption: anyone running OpenSSH has turned off the dumb stuff, like password authentication. If you are using passwords to log into SSH servers, you have problems port numbers can't fix.

The only attacker SSH-on-port-51122 defends against is the one so far back in line for SSH exploits that she'll stick it on the business end of an Internet-wide scanner. That vulnerability is worth many tens of thousands of dollars. Nobody that has it in the window between announce and "public downloadable exploit" is scanning with it.

Finally, you really should only have one machine exposed to SSH, if that. If you have to manage 50 servers, set up 1 bastion server and relay through it.
Automated testing of UIs will only ever cover a relatively limited range of observable behaviour we might care about. Like a lot of unit testing, it's one of those ideas that works really neatly if you're writing a simple database front-end or calculator that deals only with easily parsed/rendered data that is input and output via well-defined, programmable interfaces.

Unfortunately, most UIs aren't built with that kind of code. Tools like Selenium aren't going to help you spot that the browser is rendering your page elements with a z-order bug, the canvas/SVG output has an aliasing problem, and your entire page design is getting a flickering scrollbar effect because of a change in the font rendering when the underline for a link appears. (And those are just examples of possible browser bugs, not even counting testing your own code to make sure the UI is rendering properly to a human looking at a screen.)
most of that is simple geometry (heh). The interesting parts creep in with the 'non-ideal' conditions.

You're not just referring to the percentage of the surface area of a sphere (which earth isn't), atmospheric distribution isn't uniform even if we go by volume (or should we be going by density?), then there's the curvature of light in the atmosphere to take into consideration, and the arbitrary descisions as to what height above sea level our observer is standing at, the variable nature of the tropopause ...

an interesting problem, but likely more interesting as a mental exercise than in actual execution.
What's an example of a serverside vulnerability that cares about version banners?
I think that was a joke. Over in London, 'Europe' is across the channel, on the mainland.
That can't be right - it doesn't have the right behavior as R->oo. As R->oo you need to get an answer of 0.5, but this gives an answer of 0.25.
"C at least tries to help a little with typed pointers, so I don't see how Forth could help but be more brittle."

You might be interested in StrongForth, a strong statically typed variant of Forth:

http://home.vrweb.de/stephan.becher/forth/
Ask HN: What startups have you bought things from?
We see a lot of startups promoted here on Hacker News ... but which ones -- if any -- have you actually purchased things from?
That is like asking if the brand of spark plugs will effect the sales figures of an automobile. There are so many other factors more important than the backend programming language that it doesn't bear measuring. To name a few: marketing, financing, leadership, team...
Ah you're right, I missed a factor of 2 in the top integral. Will edit shortly.
did you find a name yet? I own jumpduck.com
you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him put on his swimming suit

try to understand what the horse wants to do ... try to help the horse be more productive doing what he wants to do ... don't try to get your normal horse into your abnormal swim suit
Cycles of Boring vs Cycles of Boredom
I absolutely agree with you. It's turtles all the way down.
In Norway, you can actually be sentenced to jail for paying those wages. Though I've only seen fines being applied in practice.
The way the question is posed, it seems to me that the radius R of hollow spherical shell should not figure in the calculation. Assume there is no Earth, and you are hanging out in the center of a large hollow sphere. In that case, you can see 100% of that sphere, no matter how large it is. Now, let's say that earth magically appears, and now r' varies from 0 to r. The question asks to find percentage of the sky visible as a function of r'
Please, someone save Chutes and Ladders
I think every version would be a bit much, especially on smaller drives if it had logarithmic diffs i.e. every change today. Every hour for the past week. Before that every day for the past month. etc. It would probably be more disk efficient for people with smallish SSDs, but everybodies "perfect" is different.
Yeah, I would love to see that too. Do you happen to know any software developers looking for a license? :-)

I wonder if the FSF would agree to write such a license. It doesn't quite fit with their goals, I think, but they also preach "pragmatic idealism". And they provide the LGPL, so it's not without precedent.
At risk of sounding like an old git...

I built my own machine AND half-arsed Forth implementation for Z80 back in '92 from a couple of library books, a dismantled broken RM380Z and a PC with DOS 3 and TASM on it. It sort of worked but was a little unreliable (it was all on stripboard, most of the bus timing was guessed and the XTAL was way too fast). I think the entire Forth impl assembled down to about 4K.

That sort of thing is just impossible with today's equipment. It's depressing. To much abstraction these days. Ironically Forth was probably the first language that supported writing DSLs :)

I'll dig it out and document it one day.
Credit has to go to Anders Hejlsberg, who keeps innovating upon C#. Microsoft in this case has played to their strengths because

1) it does not have to worry about language standardization and the various community processes that accompany Java.

2) Anders is exceptionally good at deciding what language features are go/no go.
But that is rare when compared to the number of people who are in the game. Similar to sports and entertainment business for that matter. The chance of hitting it big drives entire industries.
>> CLR+CIL are vastly superior to JVM, especially in memory management department

It depends greatly on the environment - client or server, pattern of allocation, etc. Very hard to tell, but in my experience JVM uses more complex algorithms and performs somewhat better on big iron.

Of course the big advantage of Java is the community - many great open source tools, books, patterns, etc.
I'm torn here. I mostly agree with you (both the Berlin presentation and the language topic). I tend to believe that I speak very high level, accent free German (heck - I'm German. But 'accent free' is key..). I had to do business in Switzerland for roughly two years.

My takeaway:

* Lots of people there (no offense intended if any CH people read this) referred to the language I know as 'written German'

* Lots of people (TV news guys are kind of the only counter examples) have a _heavy_ accent if they speak what they consider de_DE (Time for an anecdote: A good local CH friend of mine told me once that he talked with a DE guy for quite a while, on his best official German level, and was told all of a sudden if he can talk German (probably considered as 'accent-free') as well).

After fighting the 'everybody speaks German in CH/AT' a bit I'd like to point to the fact that there are lots of accents and dialects that just sound like gibberish if you're not used to them. Let's leave AT/CH out of this for a moment: If I visit the northern part of Germany/the shore, if I visit the most southern places, if I go to the southwest (Platt/Bayrisch/Hessisch) and people speak 'normally' I end up understanding 50%-70%. And I didn't even mention some dialects from the east of Germany.

Actually - if people from Berlin talk fast and use the local dialect, I'm lost..
Do governments apologize? That would imply weakness and, more concerning, fallibility. Can't have the plebes thinking something might be wrong within the government.
The bit about hiring contractors, especially for vital functions such as infrastructure and support is bad advice. A high quality contractor charges a very high hourly rate (it also usually isn't feasible to give them a sizable equity grant in its place), so you're left hiring people who would prefer a full time job but can't get one. This creates a poisonous and unpleasant atmosphere, which makes you even less likely to hire strong people full time.

I understand that "war for talent" is a popular narrative, but you note that those writing about it are almost always journalists who aren't programmers themselves. Non-technical writers don't understand quality developers want something more than a paycheck: they want to work on challenging problems, with people who they can learn from and in a company that has a shot at making an impact on the world. If you want to hire quality people than you should take hiring (all steps: from employment branding to interviewing to closing) a top priority: give employees time to interview candidates (expect each engineer to interview at least two or three candidates each week), be willing to let a position go unfilled for a _long_ time until the right person is found.

In short, be ready to reply "we'd like to do Y, but either we must strip out a feature X from Y, spend more time working on it or transfer an engineer working on Z to work on Y". If you're working on a hard technical problem, then your investors and customers shouldn't have a problem with that. If you're not (and there's nothing wrong with that), change your hiring strategy appropriately e.g., if you're building CRM software, stop trying to go after TopCoder finalists and ex-Google Search Engineers and instead look for engineers who are interested in business and product design/development. The former aren't going to be interested in joining you (other than at an exorbitant rate) until you're ready to use their talent, the latter will help you build the business to the point where you will need their help scaling it.

To use a vulgar analogy, the strategy of hiring a contractors to "move faster" is analogous to a man having nine one night stands hoping to conceive a baby in a month ("because I can't find the right long-term partner, and nine months is too long to wait anyway"): it's wrong on many levels and will poison your culture. It's long been known (Brooks' Law) that adding more "bodies" to a project to a project that's at risk of being late will only make it more late. Creating a company full of dubious quality contractors (with no loyalty, no "fire in the belly" about the product) will make your company look toxic to engineers used to working at "talent brand" companies where engineers are passionate about what they're working on and are confident in their technical abilities.

The CEO's real job is to manage the managers ("no, we don't have the resources to ship X at time T"), and sell the company (including to prospective employees). The blog post doesn't read "wow, this is a company worth leaving or turning down an offer from {Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc...} for!".
One of the things I like about HN is being exposed to ideas and projects outside of my usual circles of interest, things that don't show up in my RSS or twitter feeds. I'm pretty sure any segmentation system like that would just spit my narrow interests back at me.

I didn't find the link to be worth much, but it also took almost no time to read. It is hard for me to imagine any aggregator not having some poor content for any given reader, even if a filter was employed.
This is definitely more so the case when you run your own business. I do too and I have the same feelings, so I end up working all evenings and sometimes all weekend too.

But then I get other guilts, like not spending enough time with my wife, visiting my parents, or getting enough sleep. My brain doesn't have chance to switch off and my output is probably considerably lower than if I just stopped and took a proper break from all the tech and work

This is the main reason why I'm mandating a 4-day work week for my employees. But this is balanced... I don't then want them to feel the pressure to fit that elusive 5th day into the remaining four.

The biggest hindrance to this is that the rest of society generally works 5 days. And in the web world, people want you 24/7. But we're balking against it. Eventually, I'll get down to 4 days myself :) I can feel it
Berlin is awesome, beautiful, lovely -- in the summer, for tourists / temporary guests / foreigners. BUT... being an ex-local -- in the cold season (that lasts 8-9 months out of 12 per year) and for locally-registered sole traders or companies or employees, it's not THAT outstanding. Since I do the "lifestyle business" thing for now, as a German citizen I chose to de-register with the tax authorities and from other registers and stay out of the country except for 2-4 lovely summer months (just arrived back a few weeks back) where I stay here as a long-term "tourist" in holiday flats.

Need to socialize with Hacker types? In any place with at least 100k population, you'll find a few. And how many do you need really? My hometown Potsdam had enough of them to have a fun social life. I happily geeked out and co-worked with Hacker Newsers on Malaysian islands. If Berlin really does attract "more of them", how much value does that really add if 1-5 cool people is all that's needed?

It's a groovy place for sure for Indie hackers and creative types. But my "company" is registered elsewhere: the authorities here just simply get in the way too much, obstruct your core business with mindless pointless bureaucracy and take WAY too large a cut of your turnovers. I understand when locals or citizens who get together to form a company register it here and suffer through taxes, forms and labour regulations simply because they, their co-founders, employees and clients were born here or are locals too. But US/UK startup founders moving to Germany to set up their company here? I don't see it. Spend your first 3-6 months pre-incorporation product building here on a Ramen basis on a tourist visa, sure, OK. But don't set up shop here unless you have to. If you want to head offshore from the US or the UK, then either Chile or Asia could prove much more worthwhile. And I cannot reiterate enough: geeks and more specifically talented enthusiastic hackers -- they're really everywhere on the planet, not just in SF, Berlin and London. You'll find them wherever you go, as soon as you figure out how and where to look.
Hire the right person for the job ... sometimes you have hired the wrong person; it happens a lot; help that wrong person find his right job as rapidly as possible ... pay him to quit (Zappos-style) if that's what it takes.
The quality of the stories, or the comments?

The only changes recently are a better voting ring detector, and the hiding of comment scores. The former has definitely kept stuff off the frontpage that otherwise would have made it.

It's harder to say if the hiding of comment scores has made comments better. It has definitely made the site more pleasant for me to use, but I may be in a unique position because people love to pick fights with me.
Weird Science exonerates booze, blames testosterone for bad driving
What I'm referring to actually is an old quote attributed to Bill Gates :

"A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer."

...which I've seen variations of lately.
Is it really that easy? Both my home ADSL as my datacenter servers have permanent IP adresses, which I can't change. I could change the MAC of the network interfaces, but not the IP address.

Or do you mean going through a VPN of some kind?
I agree. Remember, these are the same types of people who would vote to ban dihydrogen monoxide because it sounds scary.
> I have seen some job ads like that, where they sought people with experience in x86 assembly, C# and database modelling as well as front-end development.

When I read specific and unlikely combinations of required experience like that, I always think "I wonder who's had that ad written in support of their H1B application?"
I bought some stuff from AppSumo in a package once though I didn't end up using any of it for very long.

MongoHQ I came across here when they announced their integration with Heroku, we never used Heroku but we did go on to become a fan and paying customer of MongoHQ's for the last year or so.

AppHarbor I have a free account on, I really like what they're doing but I'm not sure if I'm ready to give up control of my servers yet!

ChatterAnalytics from the other day I'm just waiting for them to do something so I can pay to use it, cause that scratches an itch that I have that I hacked around half-arsedly the day before their post here.
>> After reading about "Explicit virtual methods" I lost all my interest in C# forever.

Hmmm? Is it so hard to type "virtual " in all your method and properties (if you don't care about the performance)?

Also all virtual methods have to be considered a part of the API exposed by a class. So non-virtual by default is not THAT bad.
I have been living and working in France for almost three years now. I enjoy an effective 45 days of vacation a year, since the 35 hour work week is translated to vacation. The pay is not very good compared to the rest of the world, but it is a very good deal. My time is more valuable to me than the things I can buy. It is easy to make fun of the lazy French, but at times they seem to have a better grasp of what is important in life.
The one that was not written in BrainFuck would be significantly easier to add features to.