skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even though you are tired of it, here is another one.

The root cause of Alexanders invasion as of Herodotus was the march of the 10000.
The Persian army could not stop this ragtag band of Greek mercenaries in all those months and so they had obviously grown weak.

So if you see a big market were at least one new entrant survived, you should raise more capital than they did and conquer the peacock throne of your market.
Animal Astronauts Float in Zero G for Science
Talking, by itself, is not revolutionary. It's when you talk about revolution that things change.
I like Larry Wall's conceptual framework for this.

The chapter of Programming Perl regarding software libraries starts out with a discussion of Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris ), but more importantly, it also explicitly mentions the ideas of False Laziness, False Impatience, and False Hubris, which each in turn lead software developers from making poor choices as to whether they should build a new software library, reuse an existing library, or just get on with their damn job, and write something easy.

But this essay gets right to the same core here. How is it that we do our jobs as software developers? What is the right way to approach a particular problem? These are hard questions to answer in abstract, but thinking about the nature of invention is a pretty good proxy.
I wonder whether the most expensive mistake is not so much the NUL-terminated string design, but the persistent use of library string and memory manipulation functions that we now call "unsafe". The culture of constantly writing your own raw-memory-based string manipulation functions and working with memory so directly, without safety constraints.

I remember using strings and STL containers in C++ and wondering why would anybody go back to the clunky ways of malloc'ing, scanning for NULs, using memcpy, strcmp and other things that might "run away" on you so easily. I remember feeling unsafe using strcpy. In contrast, it felt very safe to use C++ strings: I had to out of my way to code a buffer overflow.

Better, but not best, the "safe" replacements of strncpy require you to maintain the correct string length on your own. Basically, there are just so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot.

The industry could've signficantly addressed this by adapting a standard library for manipulating strings and memory, at least with length-restricted "safe" functions (strncpy, but one that always NUL-terminates). Potential language support and compiler support could've been added. All of this should've been done way back in the day, but it wasn't.
Indeed. A site asking for my apple.com password that isn't apple.com? No thanks.

You'd think oauth would just be part of implementing logins, and apple wouldn't be encouraging people to give their passwords to other sites.
dibarnu,

I will concede that point as everything you pointed out are solid arguments against it and well reasoned.

Thank you for the detailed reply.
Thank you, may I quote this?
I am impatient with this type of argument. Falsehoods proliferated just fine before the Internet; truth seems a more fragile flower. I think we've got a net positive.
Cablevision seems to be the largest offender, consistently delivering ~69% of advertised speed. Qwest is another I noticed from skimming the data that consistently underperforms by a significant margin.

If anything, this reads like an advertisement for FiOS. Verizon's FiOS dominates every (positive) metric. I've heard that they've stopped deploying FiOS to new districts. A shame, if true.

Guess I can always hope Google's fiber project goes well and someday sees deployment in the Chicago-land area.
Regardless of whether it's true if the next iPhone has 4G, who cares?
They quote spotty coverage and battery issues as a reason.
But if I were Apple I would most certainly not support it for a very different reason: why offer a product that can eat your data bundle in two minutes?
The real bottleneck in almost every country in the world is the high price per gigabyte. That price will go down eventually, but not by a lot in the life time of that phone (3 years tops).
There's a few factors that determine price:

A physical / technological limits, such as 3G / 4G masts

B number of masts

C number of customers

Even in a perfect market B can't keep up with C until the market is a bit more saturated with smartphones. But in many countries, including the US, phone companies have nasty monopolies and other incentives to not hurry up with building capacity.

So let's stop the hype over 4G and focus on reaching $1 / gigabyte and decent bandwidth during rush hours first.
Frogs get a bad rap. If you put them in a pan and turn it up, they jump out. Perhaps we should acknowledge this is a widespread human trait, rather than casually slandering amphibians!
It's kind of hard to deny the parallels between Flipboard and tech like what Push Pop Press has developed. I know a number of people for whom Flipboard is the preferred method of interacting with Facebook. I'd assume that Facebook has some means of knowing which applications are using their API the most. Maybe there's some underlying data here that we can't see, like maybe Flipboard makes up a lot of Facebook's mobile usage, and we know how important it is for Facebook to control the user interaction.

/rampant speculation
I guess this must be a talent grab. I haven't seen a more fluid, well-oiled app than Our Choice. The real question is, if Facebook's supposed iPad app is already close to launch, what's with the timing behind this?
It's just as arguable to say that at least some of your time is going to have to be spent online.
Richard Branson on Embracing Change
Ning Is Being Shopped Around at $150M Price Tag
For anyone else interested in this topic (or doubtful about the claim) 20/20 did an cover story on this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo8kfV9kONw&feature=playe...
Open source software is not a zero-sum game, or a limited resource to be rationed out. There is no such thing as a tragedy of the commons with open source code, because the more of it you give away, the more you have.
Amazon spent a lot of time advertising that devs get "70% of the sale price or 20% of the list price, whichever is greater".

Consequently, many people are under the impression that when the download the free app of the day, they are doing the devs a favor and earning them 20% of their list price, and I have absolutely seen people in public forums run around advertising when an app from a dev they like is a free-app-of-the-day, telling people to help support said developer by downloading the app even if they don't really want it because said developer will receive some financial support from the download.

The fact that all of the above is bullshit and that Amazon has been secretly negotiating that down to 0% of the list price with the admonition that the developers cannot tell anyone they aren't getting the 20% everyone thinks they're getting tends to indicate that Amazon is aware of this confusion and exploiting it for their own gain.
Vilnius mayor tackles illegal parking with a tank
This is definitely a great question, although llimllib is spot-on about a needed neutralizing of the question.

I think it's most useful when you can:
a)present both options in a positive light ("I am a github/mashable-whisperer and can string libraries and API's together at ridiculous speed!" for instance) and b) it's clear that there is no wrong answer.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be a wrong answer for your organization, but I am saying that the question will become less useful if there is, because your candidate will be tempted to fudge.
That blog post is less about interviewing than the title suggests. It's an interesting dichotomy.
I give you a hint. His domain is German, but he is in the USA. To be able to do so, he needs an Admin in Germany responsible to receive any complaints and legal actions.
http://denic.de/domainbedingungen.html
Read §3. Don't have the time to translate, I used google:
"If the domain holder is not domiciled in Germany, he appoints a Germany-based administrative contact shall also be the person authorized by § 184 of the Zivilpro-zessordnung, § 132 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, § 56, paragraph 3 of the Administrative Procedure Code and § 15 of the administrative procedure Act and the relevant provisions of the Administrative procedure law of the countries."

I doubt he has one, and our laws are very strict about scamming. The keyword here is "Abmahung", which can become very expensive ..
Daily brain vitamin:A group blog on math, physics and philosophy
Same story, different sources:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2835820 <- some discussion

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2836385
Obviously to strap down Megatron...sheesh
I think the submission is more about the cute cloud eating a cookie.
Your use case and mine, for example, are different. I generally am not a fan of playlists, personally. Occasionally, but not often, I'll want to listen to the same set of tracks again but more often I want a new mix every time. Worse than that, I don't know an hour from now what I'll want to listen to so I find that I generally can only fill out a playlist a couple songs at a time.

Since I need to manipulate my now playing often, having the ability to do so through vim would be basically godlike.

Now, if only it worked for a media player I actually used :/
btw, how come my post doesn't show up in the Ask section?

Thanks.
White House: Goolsbee on the National Wireless Initiative
That's true. Modem was at 56kps max mostly on regular phone line. Voice requires much less than 56kps. Voice on old line sounds crisp and clear.

Are they planning for mulit-VoIP sessions or video VoIP?
Coming soon: An Android device you can wear as a watch?
So, the actual criminals will just continue to use Tor or an overseas VPN and continue to be untrackable, and the common citizen is the one that pays the price here.

Don't think for one second that this is about child porn. "For the children" rings so hollow here, it's ridiculous.
What people did not see was that he cleaned the trash afterwards.
Not to mention that SproutCore itself is a bunch of micro-frameworks all packaged together. sigh

What jtaby's saying, in a nutshell, is: other developers should just stop working on their own (micro-)framework(s), and instead...work on Strobe's (micro-)framework(s).

Coming from a Strobe employee (who has skin in the game), this is somewhat disingenuous...
i'm wondering what would be the outcome when/if the Internet was used for teleportation of DVD disks - would it constitute "public performance" or completely legal Netflix DVD-by-mail type service with USPS replaced by teleportation?
One of the reasons that discussions about interview questions/techniques generate such heated discussions is because they cut right to the core of our self-image and mercilessly strip naked our views about software development.
tl;dr
We’re the first people to really build an end-to-end solution for web development. If you don't use our system you're not thinking straight.
Bellagio Decadent Epicurean Dinner Featuring Husic Vineyards September 17
When I was at Google I wished they had a few 'uncoders', people who made it their goal in life to leave the source tree with fewer lines of source than they found it.

True story: I went to a talk given by one of the 'engineering elders' (these were low Emp# engineers who were considered quite successful and were to be emulated by the workers :-) This person stated when they came to work at Google they were given the XYZ system to work on (sadly I'm prevented from disclosing the actual system). They remarked how they spent a couple of days looking over the system which was complicated and creaky, they couldn't figure it out so they wrote a new system. Yup, and they committed that. This person is a coding God are they not? (sarcasm) I asked what happened to the old system (I knew but was interested on their perspective) and they said it was still around because a few things still used it, but (quite proudly) nearly everything else had moved to their new system.

So if you were reading carefully, this person created a new system to 'replace' an existing system which they didn't understand and got nearly everyone to move to the new system. That made them uber because they got something big to put on their internal resume, and a whole crapload of folks had to write new code to adapt from the old system to this new system, which imperfectly recreated the old system (remember they didn't understand the original), such that those parts of the system that relied on the more obscure bits had yet to be converted (because nobody undersood either the dependent code or the old system apparently).

Was this person smart? Blindingly brilliant according to some of their peers. Did they get things done? Hell yes, they wrote the replacement for the XYZ system from scratch! One person? Can you imagine? Would I hire them? Not unless they were the last qualified person in my pool and I was out of time.

That anecdote encapsulates the dangerous side of smart people who get things done. Sometimes they are too smart and do too much. So when the question of 'invention' comes up I like to wrap it around discovery. Sort of 'Tell me about a time where you built something that you had no idea how to build it when you started.' Things I look for are how did you go about discovering the path? What resources did you engage? What options did you consider? When did you 'call the vote'[1] ? My experience has been that things built by two or three people, working as peers, are often much 'better' (meet the needs better, cover more cases, have a more consistent model) than things built by one person.

[1] 'call the vote' - in parlimentary terms when continuing debate will not help you make a better decision, it is time to stop debate and to vote on the decsion. Good leaders look for this point, and move forward once all the voices have been heard.
If, by the people's consensus, it's legal for said 18-year old to have sex with said 14-year old, exactly why would it be illegal for said 18-year old to look at said 14-year old naked, in a photograph or otherwise[1]?

As to your second point, wiretapping laws already exist.

[1] I could actually see an argument along the lines of "the internet never forgets", "having nude photos of yourself online sucks", "14-year olds do stupid things and should be protected from themselves". However, it's not at all clear that destroying the 18-year old's life is the best way to "fix" this. (It's also quite possible to have different rules for supposedly private messages and public distribution.)
I am unimpressed by a UX that displays a message that IE8 support is coming soon as being something so awesome.
Great rallying cry.. Now what's the call to action?
It's likely someone can poke holes in my premise, but as a general rubric any law that mandates turning over personal information to law enforcement for the mere asking is highly suspect.
I just added page prefetching to my site and I'm very impressed with how well it works. Now it will be interesting to see if the # of pageviews / per visitor increases over the next few weeks.

http://imgfave.com
(scroll down to the bottom and click "next page" to see it in action)
That's not what I mean. A corporation and its customers can both profit- one does not have to do poorly for the other to do well.

I only mean that a corporation can arguably do better (for itself) if it doesn't worry about things like regulations or competitors. A classic, classic example is dumping sewage into the ocean. Companies continue to do it even when it's legislated against.
Five Low-Hanging UX Tips
+1, there's definitely an interesting pattern of Facebook acquiring top Apple-related design talent.

TechCrunch has a series of posts on "Project Spartan", a high-priority project within Facebook where they're rumored to be making a new massive mobile distribution platform based on HTML5 (http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/15/facebook-project-spartan/). Maybe related?

//end rampant speculation
2^16 bytes is a mere 64KB. Sure you can get away with small strings if you have to, but in a world where that isn't something that you have to put up with it would be quite frustrating.

For example, say you need to preform some sort of text editing style task, and insert a few chars into the middle of a file. If one of the internal representations of the file happens to be one contiguous char* , then all you have to do is one quick memmove to make some room. With a length-prefixed representation the best case scenario is you do the memmove as before, then also update the length (no biggy really, since you probably keep that around somewhere anyway). However, if you have a 2^16 restriction and have a file larger than that you're suddenly can't use a contiguous piece of memory. This would complicate numerous things including searching, splitting, and (potentially) insertion. Not having a contiguous piece of memory also complicates the process of laying any number of data structures on top of the file data. Even further, it causes issues when you want to just memmap in a file, unless you want all your files to be perpended with the number of chars in them, which causes even more issues...
Thank you Reginald. You always make me think, more reliably than any other writer about software. You pose interesting questions and have interesting viewpoints and discussion related to those questions. I hope you feel proud about this ability, because you should.

I also appreciate that you have chosen to publish your writing more in a blog format just like on http://weblog.raganwald.com instead of the GitHub experiment, I never really got into reading your stuff there.

As for the question posed, I believe I'm biased towards invention. I would prefer to work in a research department in a company or in a small company that have a business idea (partly) based on research. I hope I'm wise enough to avoid NIH, that is not really inventing anyway, so it's not as much fun as real inventing. (Working in a university seems to come with too much bureaucracy for my taste, but I do like the teaching part.)
Let me see...
Consider the situation were you see your opponent burn their boat. Given that you read the art of war, you remember never to corner your opponent, but always to provide him a way of escape. So, you send your messenger to their camp and say you will not harm anyone who surrenders. Additionally, you make a public scene of the men who surrender eating happy, you get the point.

What has happened is your opponent has now created a room for your escape, now what?

It is similar with entrepreneurial ventures. But instead of your enemies creating an escape, your family and friends will provide one. Your parents will offer to pay grad school for you; your friends will hook you up with a new highly paying job. Your resolve will be broken.
So far information is only coming from interviews with congress-critters on the committee that passed the bill(19-10). It takes awhile for Thomas (and from there GovTrack) to get updated with the revised text.
Very true.

Its quite unfortunate that Dave Winer's career has devolved into one where all he does anymore is blog like this.
I love how he's so certain he's right and everyone else is wrong.

Sorry, but other people aren't here to do what you want. They are free to innovate or fail to innovate in any way they desire. The one-true-framework has not been invented yet and probably never will be. Constant improvement and competition are what drive everything right now, and asking us to stop it is insanity.
Splunk, Seattle, San Francisco, Cupertino (H-1B)

Splunk is hiring. You can see available positions here: http://www.splunk.com/view/careers/SP-CAAAAGG

We're generally hiring for everything, including core server engineers, dev platform engineers, dev marketing, product management, QA, performance, UI, etc. It's a big space with a lot of opportunity, and we're doing our best to capture it.

I work on the Dev Platform team in Seattle, and it's a blast. We're a small team (3 devs, including my manager, VP of Dev Platform), in a great space (across the street from Whole Foods in SLU), and everybody at Splunk is great. Feel free to reach out to me (my email is in my profile) with any questions.

We do H-1B, pre-IPO stock, benefits, etc.
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only
crime is getting caught.
— Hunter S. Thompson
Marvellous anecdote and some incredibly sage advice about interpreteting someone’s evidence of how smart they are and how much they get done. Thank you.
Nah. I think Majd was just saying that we've been thinking about a lot of the problems for a while.
I don't know if being that paranoid is healthy, unless the government or the mob is trying to get you. In which case, there are easier ways to do so besides tracking your browsing habits.

Having said that, maybe you can try browsing on a VM that you can reset via snapshots.
I don't think they were aware of this. Not from the post. But in the end YES that is the agreement, hence why rotten to the core.

Amazon always reserves the right to do whatever they want period. Its not your product, you are now an amazon employee with the right to quit.
You're quoting from the bill as drafted at the end of May. The uproar is over a last-minute re-write that changed the retention requirement to include names, banking information, etc and a vote that rejected an amendment to overturn that change.

So, yes, there's not much to freak out about in the May 25th draft. Which is why there wasn't a story until the middle of June when the DoJ started shopping around a proposal to expand the logs:
http://news.cnet.com/Your-ISP-as-Net-watchdog/2100-1028_3-57...

And people didn't get really fired up about this particular bill, until it was amended to include some of DOJ's wishlist, and made it out of committee with those changes intact:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20084939-281/house-panel-a...

I can't find the amended text on Thomas, but what you've quoted is not what has everyone worked up.
Fortran-Cobol-C-C++-Perl-Python-PHP-Java-RubyOnRails, present popularity
Fortran->Cobol->Basic->C->Pascal->C++->Perl->Python->Ruby->PHP->Java->JavaScript->Ruby On Rails And their present popularity..
The context is very important (and not appearing in the email, right). The HTC Dream (G1) came out in late 2008. It was running Dalvik then.

I think what is more likely is this: Tim Lindholm was asked to figure out how to run standard Java programs on Chromebooks and Android tablets without Dalvik or recompilation. They wanted to gain some backwards compatibility but concluded it was impossible without a licensed JVM. Android and Chrome still lack the feature.
It's a developer preview. I've seen people around here talking about dumping IE entirely if a sufficiently small number of their users used IE8. How is this different?
Sandra Bullock Surprises Ryan Reynolds at Premiere | NEWS 365
Inbox 10,000: Some Thoughts After A Month Away From Email
There are so many interesting jumping off points in this post.

* Must web apps go the same route (of consolidation) as desktop apps have (largely resulting in a Windows monopoly)?

* What's to be said about the fact that we're now seeing a dramatic increase in platform diversity in the form of mobile platforms, web apps, and even an increase in the diversity of desktop computing platforms?

* Web apps (HTML/CSS/JS) are one interface to the Internet; what about apps with the Internet as transport and APIs as the endpoint?

* Have we forgotten how young all this internet technology is? The GUI was born (commercially) in 1984 with the release of the Macintosh, making it almost 30 years old. The timeline for web apps is a lot fuzzier. In 1995 NSFNET disappeared and the Internet was 100% available to commercial organizations, but didn't take off right away. Still, if you take 1995 as the "beginning" of the web application, that makes it half as old as the GUI.