skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Employee services providers and stock options
Maybe somebody here can help me understand something: There are companies out there (such as Paychex [http://smallbusiness.paychex.com/]) that provide "employer as a service". In other words, a company contracts with them to be the employer of record for an employee, then the company hires that employee as a contractor from the provider.

The benefit to this is around things like group health care benefits. Instead of a group plan with four people, you are part of a group plan with thousands. It also removes the day-to-day accounting crap associated with employees.

The question I have: Does anybody know how those types of arrangements work with stock options in the actual small business? Has anybody had any experience with that kind of an arrangement (either as the employee or the employer)?
simple ways :
1. use different phone numbers , and measure calls.

2. show the phone number/numbers only on a specific page , and measure conversions to that page. this is a reasonable approximation for calls,

more complex:
google "call tracking" , many providers offer tools.
A Look Inside the Process of One of the World’s Most Efficient Studiers
Red Letter Day » WWDC Wayback Machine: 1999
Great description, thanks for sharing. I too am very introverted by nature, although these days people are shocked to discover it: I'm frequently acting like an extrovert, and usually enjoying it! But it's learned behavior ...

And it's a great point about how your friends' attitudes were unexpectedly contributing to your lack of energy for socialization. Over the last several years I've made it a point to spend most of my time with the friends who help me stay in the right frame of mine, instead of the ones who [unintentionally] infect me with their own negativity about new situations. And I find I'm much happier as a result!
Well, at least he's not blaming a withdrawn personality on an actual disorder, like Asperger's.

He's just saying that some people may be introverts, with a certain type of personality, and that's it. There's nothing wrong with being a type.
SpellCheck API landed in Chromium nightlies
I don't really understand all of the characterizations of the new controller as "novel", "risky", or even "innovative", for that matter. It's essentially an application of the concepts behind the (very successful) DS, and the idea of having a separate screen for one player has been done before on a home console with the Gamecube's Gameboy Advance connectivity - which mostly only seemed unsuccessful because it was non-standard (Pac Man Vs. was great, but no one had all the hardware to play it).

The concepts aren't new - the same is essentially true of the 3DS (aside from the occasional game that uses Augmented Reality, which hasn't, as far as I've seen, been heavily advertised). The bottom line is - are customers ready to shell out for a hardware upgrade, and does the ratio of price to quality/number of good games convince them to do so? So far with the 3DS the answer has been "no", but whether or not the same will be true for the WiiU is anyone's guess.
I'd say the problem is more with OO. The author touches on this a little towards the end, but ORM fulfills the demand to put relational data into objects. The issue is with all these developers insisting that they want to think only in a limited set of types, even when the page they're rendering needs half the properties of one type and a few more from another type. Something like linq2sql can actually be the answer here, if you use it to select an anonymous type containing exactly what you want, the you only need one round trip and you haven't wasted and processing.
Author of "Why Tumblr Sucks" Wants to Build Tumblr-Killer from Chinese Incubator
Quick question: why is transferring to the device done by assignment, while transferring back to the host done by a copy function?
Haha. As a white guy, I perfectly understand how black guys think. For years I tried to become more black, only to discover at a certain point that it's a dysfunctional path that leads to a superficial, seemingly fulfilling but unfocused and non-goal-directed lives.

My real point is that anyone who believes they KNOW how anyone else thinks is wrong. It's a very egotistical thought to have that you know so well what another person thinks or feels.
Sorry, I deleted another reply. My essay perhaps does a poor job of explaining what I meant when I used the word "quality." I meant quality of exposition, not quality of ideas. So I meant, it's more important to get your ideas out there quickly than to polish, polish, polish, or worse to avoid writing at all because you fear you don't write well.

The subject of whether your ideas themselves are good is another kind of quality. If they're your genuine ideas and they genuinely interest you, that's good enough for me. It may not be good enough for HN, but if you're writing "honestly," you have my support and admiration.

If someone wants to try "HNO" (Hacker News Optimization) just for the false reputation, well, I can't help them and they probably know more about how to game aggregators than I can even imagine.

But if you have genuine ideas that interest you, my discussion of "quality" is strictly about the delivery.
Hyperinflation in US is virtual certainity.

Anybody betting on this will go broke.
Forget the speed of the database. What happens when you need to transmit the returned data across a network? Would you rather transmit 32 bytes per row, or 10kB?
A couple of terminal applications that aren't vim that also use j/k are screen and w3m. Screen on its ctrl-a " selection screen and in ctrl-a esc mode, w3m on just every webpage (though it also uses emacs ctrl-v to scroll down a page).
Motorola Droid BIONIC
Several issues that I would like to highlight:

Skillshare is just one competitor - there are several startups doing similar things. Do more research about competitive landscape.

Furthermore, you will also be competing with not-for-profits (khanacademy) and institutions (MIT Open Courseware, StanfordU on iTunes, etc) which offer free knowledge. Free is hard to beat.

Lack of a laser-focus: define a niche market of 'learners' seeking a particular kind of knowledge.

Lack of a value proposition: Read your pitch and ask yourself 'So What?'. Repeat as many times as necessary to refine your pitch until it resonates with your audience immediately.

If your idea is going to be built around attracting celebrity mentors or subject matter / industry experts then that's a very big challenge. What's your plan of attack for that?

I could go on, but I hope you get the point that what you are describing is a generic idea. You need to spend more time researching and refining it before anybody could provide you with any meaningful feedback about pursuing it as a business venture.
It hinges on observations made during the transit of Venus across the Sun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus

Eli Maor wrote a great book "Venus in Transit" that accounts this multi-century quest to accurately measure this event, which occurs very rarely and requires accurate timekeeping across large distances to compute the triangulation. It's a fascinating story.
Didn't people just like this say the first Wii had behind-the-times hardware, and that it would fail from lack of DVD support? It's like all the tech geeks who've spent years trying to line up the specs-to-price ratio of Apple vs. PC products, and are bewildered that so many people prefer the former, applying math where intuition is needed instead.

You may be impervious to design, but I assure you, users are not.
What we can learn from the Special Olympics
I'm interested in the hand wringing motivation. This is the company that had the 'GameCube' if you will recall and completely missed participating in the generation of consoles before the current one.

So while current technology is long in the tooth as it were and market saturation is cutting into sales. That doesn't mean they are dead unless they are mismanaged (see Sega, Coleco).

Somehow I don't expect really creative changes like we saw with the Wii and its controller technology coming from Sony or Microsoft, in that I think it seems to be outside their risk profile. Of course the new crop at Microsoft seems to be a bit more aggresive. (I believe that because Kinect was a much more interesting response to WiiMotion than the Move was).
Note that one of the prerequisites for Intel's Windows compiler is Visual Studio.

Is it really? That would be funny, because it's not even a prereq for the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler!
Gmail is taking forever to load in Chrome: Why is this happening?
Feels a bit like deja vu from the google native client. As it was proven that many, many things are already fast in JavaScript.
Ask HN:  Advice for building blog traffic
I've been blogging at http://rawsyntax.com/ for a couple months now. I've been submitting my articles here, reddit.com/r/programming, and dzone.com, and also tweeting them from my twitter.

The blog is also hosted on tumblr, I've been following people, others have reblogged my posts. As far as I can tell, the content on my site is relatively SEO friendly (at least the basic stuff).

My question is what else can I do to increase traffic? What other aggregators should I submit my articles to?
This is why I rarely buy anything that has just come on the market. The publishers whose business model depends on being first to market with the reviews has an incentive to water down criticisms to avoid upsetting big advertisers, and thus the first wave of reviews is heavily tilted in favor of market heavyweights. This made a certain amount of sense back in the days of print dominance, since review copy needed to be prepared weeks ahead of a product launch in order to remain current. In the age of the internet, though, advance access is worth much less than it used to be, and is certainly not worth the cost of lost credibility.

It might be interesting to see a review site built around the necessity to purchase the product being reviewed rather than getting it free from the manufacturer.
That's not entirely true, the term 'ambulance chasers' was coined for a reason, and there are plenty of instances where both sides still lose and only the lawyers gain anything substantial (class actions).
Mitch Kapor on the early days of the PC era and the future of the web
Fun fact: this is the real reason why vinyl is so loved by DJs.

See also: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Flow_(psychol...
I think most people just consider themselves as one or the other generally. I'm extremely talkative and outgoing, and always have been the type to engage with others. Growing up, majority of my report cards from elementary school use to say something like, "does a great job but talks too much" LOL. It's hard to ever consider myself introverted given how extreme my personality is.
I wholly agree with you, though I think what he may have meant by "squandered potential" was their decision to target their marketing (and many of their first party titles) at more casual gamers, seemingly abandoning their core audience.
Ok, so I upvoted you, but maaan do you have it wrong.

I am the definition of introversion (to myself, avoid crowds, do not need to chat with everyone at the party, content with silence that others think is awkward, definitely do not want to ever be the center of attention, like to be alone with my thoughts ...)

"What, you don't want to go to the Nicki Minaj concert?" "Let me explain. You see, I'm an introvert...."

I have been to concerts by myself just because my friends do not like Coldplay, or would not pay a hundred to watch Jay Z, or just wanted to be out of the house. Guess what? I always had a blast.

I have been to the movies alone. My ex girlfriend used to hate me for this one. So now I do not tell anyone I date when I need a freaking night alone at the theather. It's my dirty little secret.

I go clubbing mostly by myself because my friends like to go to places I do not like. On top of that I am shy, but boy do I talk to girls. "It takes one man to talk to girls", you do not need a wingman to talk to girls. You only need a nice smile, and attitude.

I do not like hiking, true, but I do take shorts trips in remote places where it would be advisable to have someone with you. I prefer to do this alone. Danger or not.

I do not like smalltalk, because it is just that smalltalk, but I understand society deals with me as I am so I make an effort to deal with society as it is, hence I do the smalltalk in order to find something that may appeal. You almost always find it within a minute.

EDIT: Introvert does not mean antisocial.
Core Impact includes a module for doing phishing with client-side exploits. Probably more expensive than this, though. Metasploit will let you do similar things, but I don't know if it's packaged up nicely like Core Impact and the current post.
I wrote that better tool support is important for widespread adoption. I think widespread adoption takes care of most of the other problems such as staffing concerns and flaky libraries.
I love how there's not one mention of Flash in the article :)
Here's an anecdote.

My first job out of collage was with a Big 6 accounting firm as a IT consultant. As part of training, we took the Myers-Briggs test (which places you on the Introvert/Extravert spectrum) and spent an entire day discussing the results. The message of the day was any of the different personality types can thrive and people should be aware of other's personality styles and taylor their interactions given what they know about themselves and what they know about the people they are interacting with. This was/is an important lesson and has been helpful in my career.

They ended the day with a set of two slides that broke down the population of the firm as a whole and the population of the partners in the firm. 80% of the firm were extraverts and >95% of the partners where extraverts. So the other lesson I learned that day, was that if you want to be in a sales-y leadership position, you better learn to behave like an extravert.
Humans have a "reserve" of willpower which can be depleted. This is science; I can't find the study right now but here's an article about it? http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/opinion/02aamodt.html

Now, consider actions which you take. Assign actions to depleting or filling up your store of willpower.

Do you find that various forms of social activity deplete or refill your store of willpower? If all the social activities you can think of deplete it, then you can safely assign yourself the introvert category.

Anyway, I'm not actually sure that this exercise is valuable. it seems like you might rather keep your identity small (see PG essay on the topic), as it can only constrain you.
Look up big five personality test online. (Check my other comment in this thread for a link) you'll find that E/I is a spectrum of opposites. Most likely you sit somewhere in the middle - or score high in both E & I.
We are in the beginning phase of what might end up being a humongous bubble. Angel investment valuations[prices] are up, IPOs are starting to take off. But it isn't totally crazy yet, and it may never get there.

As Brad DeLong says these days: it isn't a Great Recession anymore, it's a Little Depression. (And could get worse before it gets much better).
Those source cap was a PNG, however imgur scales and compresses large images to 1MB JPEGs.

From http://imgur.com/faq

Is there a maximum file size I can upload?

The maximum non-animated file size you can upload is 10MB. However, if the image is over 1MB then it will automatically be compressed or resized to 1MB, for better viewing on the net. The maximum animated file size (both GIF and PNG) is 2MB.

edit: formatting
Racket is ...
https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?#site...

Daily UV's are growing pretty well. Interesting to see the age skews higher then I would have assumed.
Be Unique But Don’t Be A GUID
I agree. At work, I fill our Java codebase with 'final' keywords because it helps me make more assumptions about code I didn't write.
1. Why not just use your debit card (which comes with every checking account) unless you have only a savings account)? I'm not sure which hosting takes just your routing number and account number (never really thought about it before or looked for it).

2. If you're looking to do develop something from scratch, I recommend using something else other than a cloud computing. EC2 is not cheap for development purposes. I would switch to EC2 when you need it but the costs can scale pretty high (I've been using EC2 and AWS in general for about 3 years now).
ADP Experiences Security Breach
just provide free RFIDified pans for them to handle
Evergreen: A perenially fresh basic CSS reset with grid, hosted centrally
Google's been starting to eat a lot of smaller start-ups' lunches recently. Google Music encroaches on Pandora's turf, and Search by Image can only be bad news for Tin Eye. I'd be curious to see how they respond.

Edit: Actually found Tin Eye's response on HN after the fact [1]. They claim that their business model (licensing to businesses) is sufficiently different from Google's consumer focus. This might be true at the moment, but it's only a matter of time until this ends up in Google Apps or the search appliance.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2658111
Music Player Extension for Gnome 3
Labels are sometimes handy for quickly getting an approximate idea of what kind of person you're interacting with. For example, I'm a human rather than (say) a turtle or a supernova, so the "human" label is very useful for telling you how to interact with me.

Labels among humans have subtler distinctions behind them, but when people fall in useful clusters, labels can be useful if you bear in mind that they're necessarily fuzzy concepts. My gender is male, I have a fairly nerdy personality, I enjoy hiking and various such outdoor activities -- surely these are potentially useful things to know about me, even if they are not perfect descriptions of me, and do not define my identity.

Labels aren't bad; just too often misused.
"eliminate unnecesary state"

What is it you said that I didn't?
Cutting us off from the rest of the world doesn't work, b/c it would be easy to deploy a botnet inside the US.
Oh, this is awesome. Read Part 3.

It's not entirely clear if the test he relates (as "the test I did several years ago") in Part 3 is the same test he is referencing in Part 1. Part 1 does mention $50M worth of testing, after all.

But the test in Part 3 is to replace all instances of '|' with instances of 'e', in a chunk of English text. Keyboard users take 99 seconds, mouse users take 50 seconds.

He also implies that his experiment does not involve a cursor scheme that allows word-wise or sentence-wise movement (something present in friggin' Notepad, much less a real editor).

I'm not even gonna _start_ singing vim's praises at this point, because aside from preaching to the choir, it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
I used to assume the same thing (I love the buttons on my N1!) until I used a Gingerbread tablet for awhile.

The software "buttons" on a Gingerbread tablet are pretty much identical to the capacitive buttons on most Android phones, but they have the advantage of rotating with the tablet. Turn it any direction: sideways, upside down, etc. and all the buttons are still in the same relative location. It's nice actually.
Google Chromebooks Now Available For Purchase
* I suppose it's a nice ego-stroke for all the self described introverts*

No it isn't. My friend of 8 years, and also my roomate for 4 years told me Sunday I was being rude because he had his friends over and I retreated to my quarters. People just do not understand introversion, so it is good to just send them a link like this.
What _are_ the other ways of creating a globally-unique id?
My conclusion, drawn from the title alone: The term antipattern has apparently jumped the shark.

Spend five minutes decoding a particularly hairy regular expression? Regexps are an antipattern. Someone writes an inefficient SQL query? SQL is an antipattern. Stub your toe on a curb? Curbs are an antipattern.
Yes, Core Data supports storing raw binary data. IIRC is also uses caching (for SQLite stores), and lazily-loads related objects as needed. You can customize this behavior to optimize its memory usage for your code.
I moved out when I went to college and opted out of getting cable. It was kind of excruciating for the first couple of months, but then I made stuff to do, and ultimately became more productive as a result.

Unfortunately, in the decade-plus since, I've drifted more and more toward consuming content on the internet and away from creating it, and between Netflix, Hulu, PoeTV/YouTube, forums, and a variety news aggregators, the Internet has replaced cable television in a different way for me now.

So while I may not have cable TV, I've definitely regressed a good bit into the childhood habit of zoning out in front of a screen (or two). I still do create, but for better or for worse, it's a lot easier to fire open a browser and just kind of tune out for a few hours.
How's life at Google?
What worries me the most is that one expert that the Daily Mail interviewed said "It would have been hard to prepare for this type of vulnerability." The same expert "wondered how the hackers could have known to breach security by focusing on the vulnerability in the browser."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2003393/How-Citigrou...
You don't want to be an employee of PayChex in reality or as a matter of record.
I physically hold it - but I only keep 20% of my cash in gold and silver.
NASA, Darpa looking for your input for futuristic space exploration dialogue
Review my weekend project: Domain CLI
I definitely could use the longer battery life. My HP DV6 that is one year old (as of today, I think -- bye bye warranty) can barely run two hours on one charge.
The Value of Replication
Google just blacklisted the whole .cz.cc TLD
Nike+ Data Viz Highlights Urban Running Routes
Great that it's a success. But since it's a pool of cheap memes I'm not about to unblock it on my computer's hosts file.
You can check any site by going to their safe browsing API page:

http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnost...
More like a one-minute interaction which communicates a lot more stuff in subtext than a five-second interaction could hope to... including the fact that I'm not scary and that he should feel free to ask me for help if he needs it.
Perhaps this is a naive (or dumb) question, but what will all those new engineers do? Reddit is doing what it has always done why does just scaling up require so many more engineers?
Yes, but more accentuated in a bubble.
What is so great about Textmate? I hear that, as far as text editors go, it's about the best. Personally, I prefer Vim.
Or, like I had happen recently, 10GB?

Of course, that comes down to the scaling problem. The application I'm currently working on can't use ORMs (though we have rolled a few of our own read-only ones), because of 1) the size of the data we're going through, and 2) the lack of support for splitting reads and read/writes to different connections.
Including nic.cz.cc.
Not to be "that guy" .. but the headline is a little misleading; the library has similarities in syntax with STL but it is not a replacement.
Walmart has started taxing and waterboarding federal officials and invaded D.C. with soldiers and drones? Somehow I doubt it.
When real estate was over valued, blogging was all the hype
Apple Dropping the 'Mac' From 'Mac OS X'?
The problem is to the PHB's in HR, there doesn't appear to be a difference between you and the guy who just makes it work, security-be-damned except that you likely take longer and cost more.