skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For our programmer slots you don't need prior experience engineering organisms. Ginkgo is a good place for solid engineers to learn to hack biology. The majority of the team came from non-biology backgrounds initially.
When and where did Oracle say that this Exadata thing can run Facebook (or what handle Facebook's entire computing load may mean)? Any data about it?
I've had similar feelings about working for financial services industries - all of their main revenue sources don't actually make anyone's life any better, other than in some tangential way that is secondary to the enrichment of the company.

That said, most internet companies do deliver some modicum of usefulness to their users, as a byproduct of selling their eyeballs to advertisers (which is the actual product).
I've found eclipse not too bad using my MacBook Air -- having an SSD helps a lot.

I actually used it as my primary Latex editor while writing my PhD thesis this spring.
Applications like those provided by Google, Twitter and Facebook only achieve their popularity based on their widespread use, thus the need to keep them free and supported by advertising. Just like television, radio, the heavily-subsidized news industry and many, many more programs that rely on sponsorships in lieu of publicly-funded grants. These programs create jobs and in many cases promote education and health awareness through outreach, not to mention life-saving services and charities who without the use of advertising would not be able to sustain themselves. Advertising is a fact of life and has been socially pervasive since times immemorial. Advertising is communication and vice versa. Without it we would not be able to function as a society.

* that tv license they have in the UK is whack.
The Xbox is a piece of shite from a hardware standpoint. It comes with an insanely huge power brick that could be a medium-power game console in its own right given its size and weight; the hard disk clip doesn't work and of course there's Mr. RROD.

Why did it win? The same reason why anything from Microsoft wins: Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
From an architectural standpoint I've always found that separating concerns is "always a good thing". Getting the database right is a difficult enough task without adding in extra complexity of the logic layer.

My recent experience has actually pushed into the more extreme conclusion that even the database task itself is too complex for a single tool, so we use different kinds of databases to accomplish different aspects of the same db task.

If you add the logic layer to this picture it becomes apparent the most valuable asset on has is flexibility, keep your tools simple and focused.
No, you're still missing the point, but probably because the article wasn't clear. It's written from the perspective of a software startup who needs to get a concept out fast, and then iterate. If you're in a field where you do high volume trading, real-time data transmission or whatever then of course you should use something faster.

I still assert that for the beginning startup, or anyone looking to build out an idea, they don't need to worry about whether Ruby is fast enough.
Also why he'll never be a journalist, magazine columnist, or work on a TV show.

Advertising is just a "bug" in the system that a lot of companies are exploiting: it turns out you can make a lot of money by doing nearly nothing. Eventually the advertising revenue will dry up because people will become immune to it (or just smarter), and everyone will figure out some new way to monetize their services, perhaps by charging money to use them.

If you want advertising to go away, support these companies. The more ads people see, the less they'll click. And then the whole system blows up.
Good overview and I recommend this detailed dive into the deep end by a HNer:

http://clayallsopp.posterous.com/building-an-android-app-fro...
It should be "lose", not "loose". Please fix that.
Although I understand the title mirrors the article, is it too pedantic to note that "Fail" is grammatically incorrect in this context and it should read Censorship Failure...?
I've not seen any substantial or conclusive figures on this yet - if you know of any I'd welcome seeing them.
That's a great idea. I haven't seen a similar service.
Also, good execution. I'm impressed by how well it seems to work and that's a pretty good site you have there.

I'm curious how paypal is working out for you. I always feel it's a bit hokey or something. Do you have plans to use a "real" credit card processor?
You are correct that, while unlawful combatants are not guaranteed the same rights under the Geneva Conventions as lawful combatants, there is no requirement to actively deny those rights. However, there are some very good reasons for going out of your way to not treat unlawful combatants as well as lawful combatants. As you mentioned, not everybody is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions. However, a lot of countries/groups that aren't signatories, have made varying levels of effort to abide by them anyway in past conflicts. This is generally a good thing. There are two main incentives for non-signatories to try to abide by the Geneva Conventions: first, if they lose, they are less likely to be subjected to war-crimes trials at the end of the conflict; second, if they are captured during the conflict, they will enjoy the status of lawful combatants. If they know that captured unlawful combatants are given the same treatment as captured lawful combatants, they will have much less incentive to abide by the Geneva Conventions. Therefore, it is a good idea for Geneva Conventions signatories to not apply the full rights of lawful combatants to captured unlawful combatants.

Incidentally, the Geneva Conventions do provide some protections for unlawful combatants, just not the full set of protections guaranteed to lawful combatants. You can't just shoot them out of hand. However, you can put them on trial, sentence them to death, and execute them. The Geneva Conventions don't really spell out due process requirements for such situations, so the distinction between "shot out of hand" and "executed after trial" could potentially be trivial.

>So when a non-state organization takes action against a state, this makes it legal for the state to treat them however they want.

This is not true. If the non-state organization abides by the Geneva Conventions, and if the state they are fighting against is a signatory, then the state must treat the non-state actors as lawful combatants (depending on its scope and scale, a civil war could be an exception because the rebels could be considered traitors and tried as such). Even if the non-state actors don't play by the rules, they still get some protections, as I explain in my previous paragraph. The rules are actually quite easy to comply with, so smaller powers and non-state organizations are not "excluded" by an inability to follow the rules, only by a conscious choice to break them. For example, something as simple as color-coded armbands will satisfy the requirement to wear identifying insignia.
Oh, hai.

I tried this idea in application to the graphic design area specifically targeting logo and brand designers [0]. It was called CertTime and it failed spectacularly. It was pretty much like selling insurance to the ignorant.

The actual idea got substantial support of the Logopond community when I first described it [1]. I also solved the usability and trust issue by outsourcing time stamping and actual signing to VeriSign. The service took the client's file, made a self-extracting archive out of it and then signed the exe with Microsoft's AuthentiCode [2]. Checking the time stamp was as easy as right-clicking on the .exe and checking the Digital Signature tab. I think this idea was a stroke of genius... but in the end it did not matter.

I got ZERO traction. In retrospect I should've paid closer attention to the lack of interest I got on Typophile [3][4], where the community is more mature and less excitable than on Logopond.

That said, there is a number of companies that offer similar service - Surety, GuardTime, Recomobo, Digistamp, MyOws, etc. Some are based around a technical solution [5] while most are based around "we are lawyers, we swear it was done on Jan 1, 1913, and you must trust us" kind of approach. MyOws would be the most active in consumer segment, and they have accumulated their current user base through iPad giveaways and what not.

Finally, I want to say - good luck, guys, hope you can pull it off. There is a need for a very simple digital notary service, but it comes with the need to educate your target audience. I was not up for that, but perhaps you are.

[0] http://swapped.cc/certtime and http://certtime.com

[1] http://pondpad.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=3578

[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537361(v=vs.85).as...

[3] http://typophile.com/node/62669

[4] http://typophile.com/node/63838

[5] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3161.txt

(edit) Oh, by the way. Regarding the "what is it in you" point. My idea was to establish a sizable userbase of people routinely using the service (in part by integrating with various graphic design galleries and portfolios around the web), use that to demonstrate the consumer-level need for trusted timestamping to VeriSign and other companies and then try and sell the company to them. See, they are in a situation when a lot of money and effort is spent on deploying and running timestamping infrastructure (for example to support codesigning), but they have no way of charging for its services directly. If one can prepare and proof a paid market for them, they could not not be interested.

Trying to charge people directly for this sort of service is unrealistic at best.

(edit) Dug up the Q&A, which took me several weeks to put together - http://swapped.cc/certtime/faq.png - it has some lesser obvious points to consider and mull over.
Podcast interview with Andrey Breslav, creator of Kotlin language
This is a flawed analogy: Competing technologies -> superposition or wave-particle duality. An iPhone is not an Android phone. Facebook is not Google+. But an electron is a wave and a particle at the same time.

It may be trivial, but there are already enough people who think they understand quantum mechanics, when they do not. This doesn't help.
My experience (i.e. anecdote) is that python programmers are more likely to work as consultants/freelancers, rather than in permanent jobs.

C developers, by contrast, are more likely to stay at the same company for 5 or 10 years.

Where I am (London), the demand for python skills is immense, even by tech-job standards. It's possible that there is a falling-off of demand elsewhere, of course.
I agree there is a point when optimization is required. At the time we were building a new product that had rapidly changing requirements and few users. So you can see my frustration when days of man hours where spent on this database.
Microsoft updates Windows Phone 7 logo: Now it's a square
The flash crash was not precipitated by a "fat finger" event but rather an intentional, albeit aggressive, move by one mutual fund, and according to regulators it was exacerbated by HFT's, not "corrected" [1][2][3][4]. Do your research--like so many you probably believed the BS that was handed out to pacify everybody when it was big news, and missed the SEC/CFTC report that came out later. More recent mini-crashes have occurred in commodities markets [5], again driven by HFT.

What is my disaster scenario? Do I really need to explain why extreme volatility can vaporize investor confidence in a market? If an event like this was caused by one market action, you can even imagine malevolent investors trying to intentionally trigger a crash or a mini-crash (holding a short position on the side so that they profit). If enough people are able to do this with regularity, the market turns into /b/ and becomes worthless for traditional users. I won't pretend to have enough imagination to see all the ways this could go wrong; we can leave it up to Wall Street to make it a reality. It would seem like common sense, however, that if neither investors nor regulators have a firm grip on the steering wheel (and maybe that's the best way for the economy to run, who am I to say?), we would be better off not putting the market in cruise control at 600mph without carefully considering all the ramifications.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870402930457552...

[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-01/automatic-trade-of-...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/business/02flash.html?_r=1...

[4] http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/10/01/financial-regulati...

[5] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870432280457630...
Reminds me of the old "Poor Man's Patent": Write your idea, invention, etc. on a piece of paper, and mail it to yourself in a sealed (possibly certified) letter as proof of date of invention.

Unfortunately that, and likely this, will provide little legal protection:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/the-poor-mans-pa...

Bragging rights, however, are now yours for posterity, which might have its own value to many - just don't think this will help you out in court, particularly without third-party auditing (not that that would help much, either).
SEEKING WORK -- Remote work. (I am based in Haifa, Israel.)

Python hacker. More details are here:

http://ram.rachum.com/cv/
Coimbatore, India - InfaGPS

InfaGPS is a Fleet management - Real time fleet tracking and Web based ERP solutions provider for SMB's.

We are looking for developers with expertise in Java, .Net
Write to us at jobs@infagps.com
Check out about us at www.infagps.com
At the risk of sounding uncool, if I was stuck I would flow-chart the gosh-darned thing.

I once did this for an engineering subsystem with more than 10,000 lines of FORTRAN. It took me more than a month. We were relocating a flight simulator from Italy to Spain where it would go through testing and customer acceptance before being put back in service.

By the time I was done, I could debug the system almost as if I had written it myself. It made me look like a freaking genius.

The point is _not_ about flowcharts being wonderful. It just forces you to trace the path of execution through the code, and figure out what each bit is trying to do. The tangible documentation (i.e.: stack of flowcharts) that you end up with is great for building your confidence, and convincing your boss that progress has been made.
credit to Teddy Roosevelt for the quote
The frequent and dangerous assumption here is that a federal sales tax means the end to state sales tax.

Obviously that didn't work for income tax, and I would go even further to argue the feds should not be paid one bit of direct tax.

When the feds collect money and disperse it to the states, the states become enslaved to the federal government and loose their sovereignty. More importantly, without this sovereignty there is no competition or experimentation amongst the states.
Invert a website's content to show only HTML comments
Twitter community rallies to stop tweeted suicide attempt
It's more based on the assumption that the limitations of MySQL should apply to all databases.

I've worked 2 places with Oracle stored procedures. At both places, they were a giant nonperformant mess of spaghetti that could never be cleaned up because changing things == breaking things. And since all of the application logic had been written as transactional SQL with lots of joins over normalized tables, it was gridlock heaven inside the DB and adding more cores to the single machine barely even helped.
Besttech Computing | Sacramento Computer Repair Technician
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Ask Wolfram Alpha how to win the lottery, lol 
10 Easter Eggs Question & Answers on Wolfram|Alpha
Real name Omid?
San Francisco, CA - Sincerely

Sincerely is an early-stage, funded, and revenue-generating startup started by two former YC founders (@brezina and @plusbryan). We're a small driven team of 7 developers and designers with two popular apps launched so far: popbooth.com and postagramapp.com.

We're looking for talented ios, android, and web (node/php) engineers.

bryan@sincerely.com
Chess Lessons for Startups
I work at a company who's entire business was written in stored procedures and it has been a massive source of complexity and pain for us. Here are my issues with it:

- Most web languages have a wealth of tools for testing, introspection and instrumentation that don't exist or are hacks in PL/SQL. Unit tests, basic logging, aspects that log function execution time, posting to error tracking & app metrics services, etc.

- PL/SQL is not expressive or concise. String processing, in particular, is a nightmare. This means more code, buggier code & thus reduced developer happiness.

- At scale, developers need to be parsimonious with joins in the data layer, otherwise partitioning is impossible. This is technically possible in PL/SQL, but runs completely against the grain of SQL, so I can't imagine this actually happening in the real world. This is probably my company's biggest source of technical debt.

- SQLPlus doesn't return a non-zero error code when certain errors happen when installing PL/SQL, so release scripts have to install then assert the user_errror table is empty. This is just ugly.
I launched Twudge Report (http://twudgereport.com/). It's a novelty site, but it was a lot of fun to build.
Watch Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes Megavideo
Watch Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes Megavideo
In fact it is probably a little of each Fundamentally however the film also happens to be one of the most prominent although a little cynical blockbusters of land in the multiplex this summer.
AppFirst, Inc: Front End Web Developer WANTED
I "learned" Java in college, but didn't use it after graduating in '02. I was quite pleasantly surprised by all the (new to me) stuff like "anonymous inner classes," and ultimately I've come to respect the staunch minimalism of the language overall.
It's only your right until the next referendum to ban guns in SF, then you're in legal limbo until the state supreme court strikes it down. Rinse, wash, repeat every few years.

As for carrying in SF, only people named Feinstein are permitted to do that.
A truly useful trusted timestamping system should prove that Alice said x at y time. By asking only for name/email on your form, I don't see any way of cryptographically verifying Alice's identity.
Chicago - Google

We're hiring at Google Chicago. It's a great office, and we've got a great group of engineers. Feel encouraged to email me if you want a resume put into the system - my email is in my HN profile. You don't have to move to Mountain View, and you get to play with all the awesome toys we've got and work on huge-scale problems.

http://www.google.com/intl/ln/jobs/uslocations/chicago/swe/s...
Yes. "Fail" as a noun is a widespread internet meme, that has shown enough longevity to potentially enter the lexicon permanently. This is language in the making.
Keeping Players at Bay [Diablo 3]
AMA HN: I launched my profitable startup one year ago today.
On August 1, 2010, my startup, http://SproutVideo.com, had it's first full day of public operations. I've learned a lot in the last year and would like to share my experience with you. Ask away!

p.s. I figured I'd give doing an AMA a shot on HN, but if it's the wrong place for it I'll move it to anyasq.com or somewhere else.
You can write bad code in any language!
Fred Wilson's MBA Mondays (All 81 Posts)
Gmail has a prototype feature to unsubscribe you from e-mails:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/unsubscribing-made-eas...
You can press INS to create a new node. Basically, most actions are accessible via the keyboard. Just hover over the toolbar buttons, the hint text contains the shortcut.

edit: As pointed out there are no INS keys on macbooks. Will change this to TAB key ASAP.
I think just about everything in this article is accurate, but that it ultimately doesn't matter, because the particular class of goods that are subject to this is rounding error on an economic sector which, if you compared it to e.g. fixed income securities, would resemble a pimple on the nose of a particular emperor depicted on one coin of the vast horde that a dragon sleeps on.

Here's an interesting experiment for you: guess what portion of the US economy is video games, movies, music, and consumer Internet services put together. Now graph that against "Of the last 20 people you talked to, how many are white men between the ages of 12 and 24?" I think that graph shows a markedly upward slope. I also think that it does not asymptotically approach the right answer.

You could do a spiritually similar experiment with, e.g., cosmetics/beauty aids, wedding services, etc and young ladies. Or healthcare, if you're looking for a gigantic underestimation.
I thought the Android docs were quite good for the most part, but I usually just Google my questions and end up on StackOverflow. I'd love to give StackOverflow a great big hug someday.
you can also checkout http://college2startup.com Lots of startups post job openings on there.
What you want VERSUS what you need
| The Saudi refusal to take the body was also interesting, but in line with the general public/private dichotomy of their behavior.

Dichotomy? What dichotomy?

While the Saudi rulers have a good relationship with the Bin Laden family, they despised Osama Bin Laden. They thought that Osama was a threat to their leadership. Osama criticized them and wanted their overthrow. And Osama thought that the Saudis were American puppets.

And Re: Pakistan. It's a hard-to-tread situation. The most powerful in the Pakistani government are dispersed into groups of "Love the Taliban/Al Qaeda"/"Love the Americans ('s money)/"We just want to be left alone. And nobody from one group wants to piss off someone in another group, so it's this cloak and dagger situation.
Paraphrasing Zawinski, it depends what your time is worth. Remember in business, the concepts of "cheap" and "expensive" simply don't exist. A thing is "worth the money" or "not".
Question to Android devs with iOS experience: are there any tools available which would be counterpart for Instruments?
Instruments do not get mentioned in these comparisons for some reason, I think these are great tools to debug and improve performance.
Making things look great in Safari is generally as simple as making things look great in Chrome and then maybe tweaking some fonts (due to Safari's different font rendering behaviors).

Making things look great in IE6 often involves many hours and sacrifices of chickens to dark gods with names that have lost all their vowels.
Addressing the NoSQL Criticism
There were quite a few NoSQL critics at OSCON this year. I imagine this was true of past years as well, but I don’t know that first hand. I think there are several reasons behind the general disdain for NoSQL databases.
"That said, Eclipse and the Android SDK is a pain to install even if you are a java wizard." Why? I just followed Google's instructions and it was breeze to install Android SDK...
$50/hour
IT Guru Turns Out To Be Security Hole
SEEKING WORK — Boston, MA or remote

Front-end web developer (HTML/CSS/JS) with a strong design background. Full-sweep design-to-code, interactive prototypes, WordPress/Drupal templating and config, Rails/Django View-level type stuff.

Portfolio is down for the moment but ping ericdfields [at] shortmail.com if interested in work samples.
that tv license they have in the UK is whack

From over here in the United States, it looks like it's not such a terrible thing. The BBC manages to produce great programming and content, and the license is much less than what the typical US consumer pays for cable.
Japanese Find Radioactivity on Their Own
Sentences That Win Nobel Prizes