skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Systems like "jobvite or whatever" are at odds with this approach, which, for lack of a better term, I'll call the "What Color Is My Parachute"† (WCIMP) Technique.

In the WCIMP mindset, you make a shortlist of specific companies you'd like to work for. You brainstorm a pitch about how you believe you'd like to add value to their company. Then, treating every step of the hiring process up to "interview with decision maker" as an obstacle, you run the ropes course for each company.

Jobvites and Resumorps and Interfleebs are all obstacles. Is there a system you know about that truly accepts the fact that HR is an obstacle between engaged hiring managers and engaged candidates? I don't know about it. For the most part, these tools all seem geared towards reducing the cost for companies of maintaining their existing obstacle courses.

And that's fine, because most people don't take the WCIMP approach to job hunting. Instead, they have a role in mind, and their overall goal is to hunt for a satisfactory place to practice that role. Those people are never going to think about your company and put you on a shortlist and devise a sales pitch, but are only marginally less likely to be awesome as the WCIMP candidates. Your job is only partly one of attracting candidates; it's also to filter them.

Personally, I don't see WCIMP tactics as evidence of the failure of obstacle course hiring; rather, they're just particularly graceful ways of navigating the course.

† Not endorsing the book, it's just the first one of its kind that I read, 15 years ago.
Most Things Don’t Work Out
Compilers can never generate even good code
"[I] have worked on some software you've probably heard of: Puma.com, NewBalance.com, Microsoft's Visual Studio, and so on."

Do you mean that you use Visual Studio and that you worked on the Puma and NewBalance sites?
That's well and good but have you ever legalized marijuana?

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...
That's just silly. You aren't going to get anywhere in life spouting "haters gonna hate" ad nauseum.

The comment has some very compelling points to consider. None of us, and nothing we create is so beyond constructive criticism that intelligent contrary opinions can be rejected outright.

You may have had a tough day, but god help us all if we start believing our own bullshit 24/7.
I still think that hipmunk (http://www.hipmunk.com/) does a better job.
Out of curiosity, do you have any experience with which pieces of hardware cause problems? For iOS dev, I can only forsee requiring functional display and Ethernet drivers.
I've used the Google Voice form they used in their example long ago. It was legitimate and worked just fine.

But I'm not surprised to see some people would use forms on Google Spreadsheets for phishing attacks. Seems ideal.
That would indeed be more precise, but it would also be bad writing. And my writing needs all the help it can get.
I wish Amazon would do this as well. I want 1 click flights, and something that almost all these booking sites lack... awesome customer service. These are 2 things Amazon can do well.
at least in the math department, the US really needs a revamp, especially in elementary school/middle school

in 4th grade, my math education consisted of a year full of "do 100 simple addition problems in 5 minutes". Once you did it in 5 minutes, it became "do 100 simple addition problems in 4 minutes" on the SAME sheet of problems. Then 3 minutes, then 2 minutes. It became an exercise in memorization and pencil dexterity.

i'm pretty sure everyone who did their elementary education in the US had to do this at one point in their lives. but come on! not only did my penmanship degrade from having to write so fast, it was an utter waste of an entire year of my education.

disclaimer: i didn't complain while i was doing it though. they rewarded me with candy :)
How to actually get answers to your programming questions
The Urgent Need for a Brain Centered Approach to Geroprotection for Cryonicists
Everything he said involves hiring.
Ask HN: Should my MVP have unit tests?
How minimum does minimum really mean? And is no unit tests really faster/better than writing unit tests?
A big topic in type theory nowadays is equational reasoning. The classic example is, how can you prove that two functions are observationally equivalent -- that they give the same output for all inputs? Bob discusses that in his book.

More generally, you can discuss various other notions of equivalence, both for functions and (in this case) types. So if we do allow a programmer to define their own notions of equivalence, is that good enough? Not quite -- it can be difficult to propagate this notion through to derivative constructs. You'd like for there to be a way to get all sorts of "free" theorems basically. So I think that is what this blog post is beginning to talk about, in somewhat technical terms.
The essential difference is that this is a stream, not discrete messages. Yes, I know that at the IP or UDP level a stream consists of discrete datagrams, but this is not how users think of streaming media.

It's like a developer arguing that a project was completed exactly to spec, when the spec isn't what the client wanted, and the dev didn't make any real effort to understand what the client wanted.

You could always trade latency for security by batching more of the stream and encrypting larger blocks.
$500 a day is alright. Especially if you're building a prototype which doesn't the polish the final thing needs. Most of your time is wasted on UI stuff anyway when you build the final.
How to Jailbreak iOS 4.2.1 - Now, Untethered
Sorry, but the act of hiring an employee at a startup is never a no-brainer. Good luck to Loren and to the people at AirBnB, though.
I read it as him having worked on Visual Studio ...
I just checked the book store and they recommend:

JAVA PROGRAMMING:FROM PROB.ANAL...
By MALIK
Edition 5TH 12
Publisher: CENGAGE L
ISBN: 9781111530532

I appreciate everyone's recommendations, I am still willing to try out everyone's suggestions.
Unfortunately, the blog post is somewhat flawed. In the CA law he references, it clearly states that the exception to you owning your code/ideas is if they "relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer."

While IANAL, the consensus on a number of websites is that, while working for a tech startup, anything that you do in your free time could technically belong to the company you work for as its related to your "employer's business."
TBH, my real problem was that IOS development (with new sdks) basically requires you to keep upgrading your macos to the latest version, which was irritating since you needed to do it often and since for someone with a hackintosh, its not trivial. Even with functional display and ethernet drivers, if your mouse/trackpad doesn't work well, or your music doesn't work it kinda sucks (IMHO).
agree. pretty tough to make a universal claim off of a couple stories.

although, i do agree that ivy league education is very VERY overrated, especially for the price tag. although, in some cases the brand may justify the $.
Hipmunk only shows the flights that have tickets to sell through their partners.

Google has a lot more in terms of schedules.
When tech companies raise billions, it's a bubble.

When hedge fund CEOs are paid $600 million in salary... it's a recession.

Congrats to AirBnb and YC on joining the top .001% :]
Good luck Loren, hell of a visual (i.e., resume)! :-)
The Story of Browser Names
That just goes back to the far more fundamental point of writing emails (or anything else) for your audience.

One should always write for their audience, not some given set of rules.
"Many" !== all. It relies on developers to roll their own syncing. On the other hand this product would mean literally anything on one device is available on the other, regardless of network availability.
On top of that, it is undeniable that one of iOSs strongest points is its lack of hardware diversity. You dont expect the sync your iPad with your droid, but should you expect to sync everything between your Galaxy Tab and your Droid X? If so, whose burden would it be? Samsung? Motorola? Google? the community? Or every developer of every app? This streamlines it a bit more. And since it only relies on the location of a couple of plugs, any oew could make it hardware compatible.

It makes the tablet marginally thicker, but the lack of necessity for a second charger already makes up for that.

I do not think the design is without its flaws, however I really do think that this is moving more towards the future than a dead end.
ZodTTD, The Android emulator dev, responds to Google taking down his apps.
It worked a few minuts later =]
Good luck with everything
Ask HN: SAAS Accounting Application... code it?
I have just designed a SAAS Accounting package, database, flow charts (for the software process) etc.

I'm hoping to achieve success by creating the "Mint.com" for accounting for start-ups.

My question: Should I start coding away? I can understand making a minimal viable product for something "chancy", but I feel like an accounting package would be a sure thing if completed, and marketed right - for almost any niche.

I wrote a complete dating site (ericanight.com) from start to completion, and it seemed to have failed- so I want to insure I don't waste another 6 months.
Intel will stop making bricks (metaphor) and skip 28nm and go directly to 20nm for Atom. It is their only hope to get into mobile, even then it will be a weak value prop as the entire mobile market will be on an ARM ISA.

Even though the whole dev chain is slightly more flexible to an ISA change, Intel will still be slighty x86ed out of the market only they will be on the other side of the fence this time.

Intel won't run on the phones, but they might, if they play their cards right run on tablets and netbooks.

It really does suck to be the 900 Lb gorilla.
Yeah, I was the Program Manager in charge of the C# and VB IDE before I left. Basically if it's visible and you're using .NET, that was my territory in some for or fashion. : )
if you are building something small, like a two or so week project, then sure... skipping tests would allow you to get to the MVP faster.

the problem is that when you get to the 5th week you are really going to wish you had tests in place. making quick changes and then being able to run them against a test suite to ensure that everything is working correctly is valuable. this value goes up (in a non linear terms) as you add more and more code into the project.

to answer your question: at first writing no tests is faster, later on it becomes much slower. it is probably never better.
Aartivijay Gupta Fall 2011, Dubai
I generally think it's a fairly good deal for people. While I could've priced myself significantly higher, I wanted to make this more open to just people with ideas.

Also, my hope is that the work will actually be quite fun :D
Gah I hate it when people are good at design and can code!

Just not fair. /sighs

Good luck!
I'm glad it built.

I think the issue we're all having stems from the structural redesign of opencv 2.2. Everything has been split up into smaller headers, and the functionality is similarly separated into different shared libraries. It's a more logical code structure, but it means that we need to have different makefile rules for pre-2.2 and 2.2+ code.

As far as -lhighgui -lcv -lcxcore is concerned, those libraries don't exist on my machine anymore. "highgui" is "/usr/lib/libopencv_highgui.so", and so on. That would explain why my 'fix' didn't work for you.
It is a functioning demo, We don't quite want the idea to be released yet, so we thought we would raise Seed Funding, and go into the beta stage, and launch through that route.
Mark Twain's tabbed notebook is a really good idea.
The ROI on these in terms of career growth absolutely ROFLstomps effort at improving a traditional resume and playing spray-and-pray. (The ROI of networking is probably better than both but, hey, what can you do.)
Pitch meetings for TV/movie scripts often have writers making up stories on the spot. Then if they get the green light, what they're really thinking is, "Holy shit! Now I have to find a way to write that!"
Nothing is stopping NYC startups & employees from drafting an appropriate contract to make ownership of side-project work belong to the employee.
Could the Mac become a Post-PC device?
You're misreading the law. As an example, if you work for a software company that makes iPhone games, and you write an iPhone game in your spare time and with your own resources, that game could be at risk of being owned by your employer. If, however, instead of making an iPhone game you make a photo sharing website, there's very little risk that your work could be owned by your employer.

There are obviously lots of gray areas in between. If you're planning to try and make money off something you built in your spare time, you should talk to a lawyer.
Interesting. I type all that out afresh each time. I deliberately don't correct any typos, so that regular listeners know it's been added by hand. The personal touch, or too much artifice? I could never decide.

I never put an exclamation mark in, though!

THanks,

* to3m 8
I'd be curious to hear your take on web apps with Clojure vs Ruby vs ASP.NET MVC, since it sounds like you may actually have good experience with all three.
Ask HN: Debugging Scala Android apps?
Writing Android apps in Scala comes up here regularly. Something that seems never to be covered is debugging. A friend with an in-production Scala Android app said, if he could do it over, he'd use Java because of difficulty debugging. What are the debugging options (more than just logcat?) and what's been other people's experiences?
By chance do you (or anyone) know what the law is regarding side-projects in Illinois?
He is wrong in that all money in existence is borrowed from the central bank. Actually a very small portion of U.S. Dollars in circulation are earning interest for the Federal Reserve. Most of the U.S. Dollars being printed by the Federal Reserve today is loaned directly to the U.S. Government.

There are many problems with the Federal Reserve, but bitcoin isn't the solution. The biggest problem with bitcoin is that it puts computer users in the position currently held by bankers. You have to realize that most people in the world aren't computer users. Bitcoin further stratifies that difference.
LLVM to JS compiler- kripken/emscripten
I'm reminded of Joel (Spolsky's) excellent commentary on this matter.

http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/19422/if-im-working-...

tl;dr from the post:

"So... to answer your question. There is unlikely to be substantial difference between the contracts that you sign at various companies in the US working as a programmer or in the law that applies."
Has anyone with a successful w/e project been successfully sued over this in NY state and lost?
Where did he call them unbiased? (I would call them reliable, though they certainly have an agenda. But they've always struck me as working hard to present facts, or at least label opinion as such. Certainly I can't think of another site about drugs that I would trust over Erowid. And I would be very interested indeed to hear of deliberately misleading information posted there.)
I don't mean to be a negative Nancy here, but Twitter's direction in the past year has been anything but elegant.

Many of these features should have been done a long time ago, instead of letting an eco system grow as deeply as it did, knowing full well that any opportunity to monetize the platform would involve cannibalizing developers and creating resentment.

Having said all that, I'm looking forward to these changes as it will definitely create a more cohesive user experience.
Why would any employer agree to that?
As you pointed out, it's a gray area.

http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/19422/if-im-working-...

"Not related to your employer's line of work. Um, wait. What's the definition of related? If my employer is Microsoft, they do everything. They made a goddamn BARNEY PLUSH TOY with a computer in it once. Are plush toys related? Obviously operating systems, compilers, desktop applications, search engines, and games are related to Microsoft's line of work. Hmmm."

"This ambiguity is meant to create enough of a chilling effect on the employee working in their spare time that for all intents and purposes it achieves the effect that the employer wants: the employee doesn't bother doing any side projects that might turn into a business some day, and the employer gets a nice, refreshed employee coming to work in the morning after spending the previous evening watching TV."
The gray areas were exactly my point. There are sometimes clear-cut cases but generally things can be very vague to us non-lawyer types.

Look at this earlier HN thread for more info - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2208056 . It talks about all the potential ramifications and that one should almost always talk to a lawyer.
Do most peole have more than 1 browser installed?
Do most of the web users in the states have more than 1 browser installed with his/her computer?
Reasonably accurate info would help any web app developer...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_kernel_names

Some interesting version names in there. I find 2.6.22-rc3 particularly intruiging...
As RIM continues to fall behind Apple, investors call for ouster of co-CEOs
If it were a condition to hire a well-suited candidate. It's surprisingly difficult to find good programmers in NYC.
I don't have any respect for ZodTTD. For years he's been taking open source software and reselling it on Cydia with no attribution for the original authors. As far as I'm concerned, he's a thief.
Many employers operating outside of California have a policy very similar to the California law. There are some companies with even more generous policies, though I'm not familiar with any major tech companies with a more generous policy.
Most of these 'rules' simply won't work everywhere. Stop getting hung up on your (or their) particular format.

- Respect the recipient's time. Be brief as possible, but not vague.
Well, these folks at Google have been working on something along those lines...
I think the most important thing is missing: Selling the product!

The notion that you can't sell a product you haven't created yet is prevalent in tech circles, but it isn't true. I did a startup some years ago where we got around $10.000 worth of sales with nothing but handwaving, smooth talking and powerpoint. The product launched a few months later. Our investors loved it because it was a serious indication that we had a product that someone would buy, and that we were able to sell it.

This isn't unusual, especially in B2C markets. Tech guys just often seem to miss it, probably because there are a lot of incompetent people out there calling themselves business people. A good business guy is as hard to find as a good hacker.
The title on reddit was implied that ZodTTD was going to respond to the licensing claims. I see nothing here that serves as a response to the claims being levied against yongzh and ZodTTD.
Human psychology operates in a realm only dimly linked to logic, my friend. Consider the response in the US to the "risk" of terrorism, which in quantitative terms is tiny.
Google will eventually come for you.

Or buy you. The trick is to be so good at what you do that it's easier for Google to fork out cash than engineering resources.
Would you be willing to share any numbers from this experiment sometime in the future? I'm curious as to how the response rate will be now that it's on the front page of HN and how the projects ended up working out (was it too much work? did clients ask you to make final product? etc).
"First and foremost, our takedowns have nothing to do with any sort of open source licensing violation. Both Yong and I handle developer relations behind the scenes. We give cuts to original authors at times, and I have posted sources to my source repository. Though there is a lot of rhetoric surrounding this, it is not an issue."
I had thought about doing a similar experiment, but being a bit more specific of only using rails, mongoDB, and backbone.js. I ended up getting too busy with my regular client work, but Id love to hear about your experience with this in a month or two.
Then thank you so much for your work on Visual Studio's Designer. That tool is hands-down the best UI layout tool for desktop apps. The Designer is a joy to work with, and is head-and-shoulders above what wxWidgets or Qt has to offer.
Sorry ZodTTD, that's not how Open Source licenses work. Cutting a back room deal with some of the original authors for a cut of your profits doesn't absolve you from blatant violation of a software license. If that even happened, considering that all we have to go on is your already tarnished word that you're passing the profits along.

You have a rotten history of taking others' open source work and trying to turn it around for a quick buck. Google had every right to suspend your accounts.
i studied fine arts majoring in painting. i love the arts in general, but somehow i also got discontented by doing things that does nothing but hang there. and that's why i ended up as a programmer now, to do stuff that works. i still continue doing art-related stuff though.
If everyone did this, it wouldn't work. It would just raise the noise level.

That's the beauty if it. Everyone can't do this, because it takes work. It's customized for the specific company, and that's the only reason they work. It's like a cover letter on crack. If he made one that didn't find AirBnb's visual style, that didn't include specific information about what makes him special for AirBnb, it wouldn't succeed.

Proof of work. No way to automate that.
How Air Asia founder Tony Fernandes' dream came true
It's not a "High Importance" flag, that's just what the label says. Evidence suggests it's really a label that says "I came from a secretary or HR". Why we need a special flag for these things in our email clients I don't know, but here we are.
Mega slowness in rubygems custom_require
I think the OP's point is not that startups need this, but that people working 9-5 in a cubical farm in CA have a chance at starting a side business and eventually growing it into a startup, whereas in NY they have less protection for that sort of work.
Sounds like indinero.

You need to figure out how you define "success" - is it by number of users/money made etc. Then you'll have a clearer idea of what you'd like to target.

Throw up a launchrock and see if ppl are interested - I know that if it's free, you'd probably get a lot of users- and you'd probably be able to make money by selling industry reports back to your users...
I have a brilliant idea: I have found "the cure" for CF (cystic fibrosis) and it's a video game! (Now I just need to learn a programming language and write it.)

In this case, I don't think it can really be effectively copied/stolen. I have spent the last 10+ years getting myself well when doctor's claim it cannot be done. My oldest son has the same diagnosis and he is healthier than I am, so it is clearly replicable. The real reason I think the idea is important: I have spent at least five years trying to talk to people and put what I know into words on a website. And, for the most part, people just don't get it. I have concluded that I need a more information-dense delivery mode. I think writing a simulation (aka "game") will do the trick, or at least be far more effective than what I am doing currently.

Like with so many things, "the idea" may be just one piece of the tapestry of things which breathes life into a viable business or project. I was excited to hit upon this idea but remain frustrated at failing to execute (in part because getting myself healthier is still a big part of my life and I also have a full-time job). So I like this idea -- and it's so far not gotten me anywhere.

Peace.