skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you own the company?

I am a co-founder. From my reading, this article was primarily targeted at founders, so I responded in kind.

Edit: As a side note, there's a hidden subtlety in your phrasing that's worth pointing out. When you're an employee, your interests are still primarily personal. When you're a founder, the line between personal and business interests are scant if they exist at all. As an employee you'll often be in contact with folks that (whether consciously or otherwise) you think may be useful for you at some point. As a founder, that extends out to the business, and the question of if they'll be useful to you in that moment equivalent to if they'll be useful for the company. Now, there is life after the present company for founders as well, but psychologically, at least for me and I assume many others, that realm is far less in the foreground than it is for an employed person.
Well, it may be just a game, but apparently people often use the same usernames and passwords for "game" sites as well as banking, etc. It would be good to at least encrypt those so any intruder would have a hard time using that information...

See http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/
Sort of related/unrelated: But I had this thought about traction:

Wall Street is often blamed for encouraging short-term thinking as it is driven by results from one quarter to the next. And since incentive schemes for top employees are often connected to stock price you end up with short-term strategic thinking.

The same way I think that VCs and angel investors in startups, with their relentless focus on traction, push entrepreneurs towards a particular class of products, one that lead to dramatic growth. But that also leads to, I think, short term thinking by entrepreneurs. And so you see a lot of social photo-sharing mobile local stuff. Hockey-stick here I come.

But just as easy it was for these entrepreneurs to get dramatic growth in that space one has to think that others will come later and experience the same.

I think that actually slow-growth in a company, building barriers to entry, switching costs, relationships with players in the ecosystem might lead to more sustainable meaningful business than the ephemeral satisfaction of rapid growth.

I guess, easy come, easy go.
Meta-warning: Don't rely on your ability to keep a low profile to keep you out of trouble. Having your name on this list shouldn't bother you at all. These are some of the nicest people that have ever spied on you.
Free Business Card Designs
Why would that be bounded far below modern memory limits? Why would that be bounded at all?

Secondly, you're making the logic error A => B implies not A => not B. If state spaces as large as modern memory limits allow are too large, that doesn't imply that state spaces far below modern memory limits are small enough to handle.

Thirdly, your program trivially terminates doing nothing.
Hmm so there's no way to delete my name once its added? On the plus side, I don't think this service will be running for long.
This is a good line of investigation. I don't understand all the harrumphing here, except possibly as a means of self-congratulations at to why the harrumpher in question didn't bother inventing this tool themselves and how they understand the "halting problem" in a way not known at MIT.

As the economist famously joked in response to 'how are you'... "Compared to what?" The comparison here is to killing the program and losing all the data.

Obviously there are some big limitations on this - especially given that the state of the program isn't necessarily entirely defined in terms of the process itself, but also a series of possibly stateful network connections and os resources.

Another big limitation is that a straight-up infinite loop at the level of the binary isn't necessarily the only way that a program could get stuck - we could be going around quite a complex loop at the binary level in response to an _interpreted_ loop, and killing the whole interpreter isn't necessarily going to return the program into a usable state.

That being said, what else are you going to do in this case? A number of the alternate solutions here seem to involve time travel.

Some fun possibilities - if you can replicate the OS state, and there's no important network state held open by the program, you can make a bunch of copies of the broken program and try lots of different approaches. You might also be able to fire up the program cleanly, get to the main event loop, identify what that looks like, and just magically splice that state back on top of the broken program in the hope that whatever is happening in global data structures is self-contained enough to recover from.

I understand that there are many reasons why this probably won't work... that being said, the baseline here is zero (especially if the users are made very aware that this program isn't a safety net of any kind and don't become more careless thinking that there's a magic 'fixit' program out there).
Once you start calling anything an invention, the next logical step is to allow to patent it. OK it's too late for the US, but we still have some hope in Europe, so unless you are writing stuffs using concepts and algorithms never used before, and not even appearing in TAOCP, which i highly doubt, stop calling your shit an invention. Also don't do it because that is very probably insulting to Knuth, Dijkstra, et al.
Thanks for the explanation! No shame here (I didn't study CS in undergrad) but I find it intuitive that a program can't detect an input that would loop indefinitely.
These Twitter Numbers Don't Stack Up
Makes sense...now I understand why you used "we" and "us."
Primer on SOAP vs. REST
I'm still trying to figure out what NowJS does other than expose an RPC call using socket.io. All of the features on the website are actually socket.io features.
Please bear in mind the counter article everyone is citing (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html) was written 11 years ago. I'm not saying that it's wrong because it's from 11 years ago, but you really want to consider its central example.

Netscape 6.0 was a complete rewrite. The article claims that this was a mistake.

Now, if you would recall, one of the reasons Netscape 6.0 was completely rewritten was to use Raptor/NGLayout. Raptor/NGLayout was later renamed to Gecko. Gecko is the currently developed Firefox rendering engine, and Netscape 6.0 marked the start of the Mozilla foundation.

I would harshly argue that Gecko would not have taken off nearly as well without Netscape's rewrite. But this is definitely not a story about Gecko's popularity. It's about the reason why Gecko was the decision they took at the time, and the current impact of Gecko.

Besides the fact that Gecko was one of the early open-source success stories, the reason why Netscape decided to scrap everything and start from scratch was simple: Netscape 4.0 was horrid. Remember back to the days of IE vs Netscape. Netscape was significantly slower, and had no dynamic HTML among many other features. It was buggy and would crash frequently. And the development on the "continuation" of 4.0 code was simply too slow to compete, because of outdated, not modulated code, and stuff stuck in that simply "worked," and never changed to allow for future changes.

Now, people attribute Netscape 6 to Netscape's death because of this radical decision. But take a look at Netscape's usage statistics: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/16/Netscape_Navig... . Hey, guess when Netscape 4.0 came out and IE started to dominate? 1996-1997. By 2000, when Netscape 6 was released, Netscape's usage already dwindled down to nothing.

Now, you're thinking, why didn't Gecko save Netscape? It takes too long to reverse these tides. Netscape was already dead. AOL acquired Netscape in 1998, to combat IE. Then, in 2003, AOL won an antitrust suit against Microsoft, and allowed AOL to use IE royalty-free. Netscape was pretty much scrapped at that moment because the damage had been done.

But wait.

Mozilla released Phoenix in 2004, based on Gecko. You should now the story from there. (Clue: Phoenix -> Firefox)

Disclaimer: I'm not saying that Firefox > IE or Chrome or whatever. I'm saying that the codebase Netscape 4.0 was based on was doomed to fail. Gecko still lives on today, and was started as a rewrite of Netscape.

Anyway, my point is, there are times to rewrite things, and there are times to keep them the same. If you have a good, legitimate reason to rewrite, as Netscape or NowJS did, you should. If you are just the stubborn programmer that always implements his own Queue or QuickSort when libraries exist, don't.
Every corporation has a board of directors. You're right, if you have the cash to go this alone, you're golden. If you don't then you'll be looking for cofounders and investors and will like have < 50% equity (and voting rights). i.e. everything is just as it should be and you can be controlled/fired/whatever just like any other founder in this situation.
If no patents/published applications naming the candidate are found, don't ask the question.

We can’t possibly be conducting the same kinds of interviews with the same kinds of candidates. Or possibly you are talking a very narrow view of the word “invention.” Or you work in a phenomenally litigious sector.

For my purposes, “Describe a technical problem you encountered at XYZCorp and how you solved it” is a standard interviewing question. I suspect that if you don’t allow the question I posed in this blog post, you wouldn’t allow this one either.
An attention grabbing headline but all the same I have been using now.js and its been a great tool (although a cut down on the print statements would be nice).
Facebook violates German law, Hamburg data protection official says
Twitter Rolls Out An Improved, HTML5 Version Of Twitter.com For iPad
1. Location (I currently commute at least 2 hours a day)
2. Pay and Benefits (Married, 2 kids, house)
3. Work environment / culture (Hardest part to determine*)
4. Perks (Coffee, gym, flexibility, etc)
5. Everything else

I feel that understanding the problem space comes lower in the list of factors for me. I might be more inclined to work in a tech focused company but if factors 1-4 above are met at a company that works in agriculture... well then give me a straw hat, some overalls and I'm in.

The one thing that sucks for me is gauging the company culture. Phone or face-to-face interviews just don't cut it. And unless you know someone who works at the place it's difficult to get a good idea of what the place is really like to work at. I wish I could watch a video of people just working at the place. Show me how the meetings go, show me how you guys deploy code, show me a developer working on something, show me what happens when an issue in production comes up. ~ There's an idea, video job postings!

How do I discover great new companies? Search, search, search, interview & ask questions, talk to developers, go to meetups and talk to the people there, blog, tweet, hope something interesting somehow makes it in front of my eyeballs.

Oh and one other tip (not my site): http://dearrecruiters.com/
FiOS dominates as FCC measures actual Internet speeds
I've been using mutt with gmail. It drops into vim when it's time to compose a message. I've never heard of vmail. It sounds interesting, but I would personally recommend mutt over vmail. mutt is quite vimish.

http://wiki.mutt.org/?UserStory/GMailOverIMAP
Doesn't Twitter's TOS forbid the archiving of tweets to provide to users at a later date? I thought that's why Twapper Keeper died:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/the-end-of-twapperkeep...
What to Do When Conversion Optimization Goes Bad
I think once SSDs become standardized we'll start seeing a lot less "preceived slowness." Disk access always seems to be the most noticeable issue after a year or two of use for me.
Patent reform bill on Senate agenda after recess
Media Monkey didn't have it..
> So there is a semi-reasonable argument to be made that she caused some degree of social harm in distributing the photos.

Entertaining that argument, the harm though would be to herself. Why should she be essentially doubly punished with membership to the sex offender's list and a criminal record?
I'm at socialflavor.com but I'm being asked to log in with Facebook. Immediately suspicious as to why a non facebook site is asking for a facebook login. Did not click anything. Tab closed.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile to explain what it is you are doing, and why you are asking for facebook login. Personally I'd still abandon the site, but others might be comfortable with it.
Lion is the beginning of the transition from Mac OS X to iOS, which is exactly what Steve wants. (And why I fear my recently purchased Mac will be my last).
>Another candidate could be IBM's choice of Bill Gates over Gary Kildall to supply the operating system for its personal computer. The damage from this decision is still accumulating at breakneck speed, with StuxNet and the OOXML perversion of the ISO standardization process being exemplary bookends for how far and wide the damage spreads.

As it happens, I researched that one for years, and I now think the root cause of that one is likely Bill Gates being an aggressive businessman who treated business as war.
Sprint Becomes 1st Wireless Carrier to Make 4G Available to Wholesale Customers
Push Pop's first publication did have a novel interface, but it was fundamentally no different than what we are used to. It was a book with other forms of media embedded within it.

I can get behind Inkling being revolutionary because it seems to me (focusing on their Social Learning feature) that it is closer to Vannevar Bush's vision of the memex. It is like the memex[1] in that it is taking advantage of the interactivity and social capabilities of current tech to create an interface that better matches the way we learn. The way we learn indirectly from others via books (where information is frozen and up to you to learn from it) and the way we directly learn from each other (mainly communicating about a topic in a conversational manner).

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think
I disagree, especially if its a range of talent. No one can be excellent at 3 different things, only one field.
Password Security (For Your Own Good)
Justified or not, I think a project owes it to its users to change major version numbers when a major rewrite (much less a complete one) has occurred.

As perfect as your code might be, customers deserve a hint when major changes were done under the hood. Moving from 0.6 to 0.7 screams "just a few changes, some new features", not "we threw everything out and started over". This should have been made into "1.0beta", I would think.
Steve Jobs according to Google's first 10 results for "Steve Jobs is a"
The Problem with Facebook Notifications
We control the source code in question, so we deal with it by detecting unexpected recursion and screaming bloody murder.

We have a 'little bit' of recursion where we know that we won't go around the recursion more than once and we've hand-hacked that it. We have similar hacks to deal with indirect calls.

I'm not saying we've solved the problem for arbitrary code; I'm saying that solutions that fall very far short of solving problems for arbitrary codes are still enormously useful. Many compiler optimizations don't work for 'arbitrary code' either, for example, and know just enough to bail out when they see an irreducible flowgraph or a bizarre indirect jump, etc.
Content discovery is something with loads of room for improvement. You just need to convince me that you've improved it. A major unanswered question is whether it will help at all with discovering people who are not also users of your service. Another is what I need to do to use your service. "Log in and I'll tell you" will lead to a high bounce rate.

It would also help to inform users as to how the process affects them - and their personal data, their account, and what nuisance factors it will introduce to their routine. This does not need to be extensive, it just needs to be there given rampant abuse on Facebook's platform in these areas.
Seems that they don't believe in their own product. Entering anyone on their contact list shows "We had a problem adding @... to our database".
Agree that you need to tell us what the website is about. Your home page should be information selling me on your service — enough to convince me to login through Facebook and allow you to access my personal information.

Interesting concept. I don't really use Facebook for connecting with similar people though ... if you did something like this for G+ it would be cool though :)
Clickable: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/
Strange object found during a sonar survey of the sea floor
I disagree. The core Mac fanbase (media markers and programmers) needs total access to the file system. No way around it. And that's not a feature that will ever be engineered into iOS.
Holding onto code just because is a foolish notion.
Sometimes approaching things with a fresh perspective is what's best - it allows you to apply what you've learned so far and actually improve not just one section of code, but the whole kit & caboodle.

This is one of the reasons you should write tests as you develop - it ensures you have a consistent baseline you can apply.

As a developer you are constantly learning & evolving.
If you're not confident enough to draw a line under what you've done, step back and evaluate your position and rewrite it when needed - that's fine, but others find it an effective approach to building something bigger, better and more sustainable.
Tom Scott's Tweleted demonstrated this a couple years ago, back when Twitter search.twitter.com showed deleted tweets.

Knowing that it doesn't erase history, I still routinely delete inconsequential tweets, particularly @replies, to make my public twitter timeline page more representative of what someone who follows me will see.
googled for "be nice to people quotes", and among other things it brought

"Be nice to people on your way up because you'll meet them on your way down."
Museum of Fine Arts, Revere Beach (if weather is good), Fenway Park
On their blog they say it's a Mendel part: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1768
Structuring Javascript code for Google Closure's ADVANCED_OPTIMIZATIONS
Show HN: Pay Rent to Yourself and Deduct it Twice like Walmart (Save 33.5 Mil)
Too bad I've been forced to pay a $10/mo fee for the past year for 4G 'access' when the closest place to 'access' Sprint's nearest 4G is hours down the highway.
Ya' pissed me off on that one, Sprint.
Wow. You hit the nail on the head. Now for the reality. Reality is that human death is ok as long as there is a value to society. Traveling quickly saves time and creates a huge value to people and the government. IE people make more money and pay more taxes than if there were no cars.

This is why speed limits went up awhile back. It's a balancing act. Human life is worth a certain amount to the government but isn't priceless. So, not only will they not ban cars, but not lower speed limits too much.

Imagine the lives saved if there were discriminators on cars that made it so they would not go over 55mph. Lives saved, yes, but productivity lost..
All these points can be summed up into two points. First, make sure you are committed to the interactions you are engaging in. Second, if you are not committed to those interactions, make it clear to the other party (apologize, etc.).
That essay points out plainly that some, just not most, tweets are possibly copyrightable. Your parent's point stands.
USENIX - Free Online Access to Video of all Conferences
The people you meet on the way up, are the same people you'll meet on the way down. A cliché, but worth remembering.

Imo, if you're genuinely interested in what someone's doing / wants to do .. you won't need a networking crib-sheet. If you're not genuinely interested - what are you doing?

Also, good manners are free.
Just because something isn't open, and is less than perfect, doesn't necessarily mean the solution is to replace it with something open.
Yet further proof... what happens on the internet, stays on the internet. If you don't want your grandchildren reading it someday, don't post it.
FYI that seems to be happening for every username now. Probably not a feature.
How often do you build a prototype building? Or a building as a side project?

Your analogy fails, sir.

It's easier and more common to write dirty code that functions as it should than build a building with poor foundation but that looks and functions as it should.
Throwing away Netscape 4 and rewriting it from scratch wasn't a bad decision because nothing good ever came of it; it was a bad decision because it killed the company. The shattered remnant of Netscape that hobbled across the finish line to release "Netscape 6" wasn't even Netscape anymore, it was a rapidly fading division of AOL, IIRC, that just stamped its name on a Mozilla product it had little to do with producing at that point, to widespread derision.

As bad as Netscape 4/5 may have been, while I can't guarantee trying to refactor instead of rewrite would have gone better, I can guarantee it couldn't have had any worse a result than the Total Death that was the actual result.

And the phoenix-return of Mozilla is the exception, not the rule.
When is someone going to develop a quality desktop 3D printer? I know I would be willing to pay many times the price of a Makerbot for a proper printer.
I agree that Lion transitions towards iOS, but this doesn't have much to do with the author's point, which is that crappy interface decisions in Lion reveal a certain lack of Steve-ization. The examples given by the author aren't examples of Lion becoming more iOS-like than Snow Leopard; they are examples of crappy interfaces and crappy implementation.

I say this as a devoted Mac user who, overall, really likes Lion. That doesn't mean I like every detail, though.
If Zediva really has a DVD and player for each film they are showing at any given time then it is exactly like a DVD rental service via mail. If there's 10 people watching a film right now and they only have 10 discs, me being the 11th person would not be able to stream that movie until someone else finishes (returns) one of those 10. Netflix is a streaming service where they have a 'single' copy of a film that they can stream to an 'unlimited' number of people at any given time.
Like I said elsewhere, until you can make ObjC apps on your iPhone, this is a polemic, trolling link-baity statement.

Steve's footprint is ALL OVER Lion, starting with the total abandonment of the HIG in a lot of the core apps, which from what I understand from people at Apple was all a result of Garageband for iPad. Apple often likes to completely disrupt things in order to progress them, even if it means there is a Darwinian process whereby some stuff doesn't last (see the iterations of the iPod Shuffle).

Merging iOS with OSX is something you see in Lion? Where? Scrollbars? Launchpad (which is purely an additive not substitutional feature)? Anywhere else?

Stop with the "iOS is infecting OSX" trolling please. For 9/10 people who use a personal computer, iOS feature in OSX is a welcome addition (i.e., my dad loves Launchpad and the promise of iCloud because he doesn't understand files).
So if we're charitable and say the new codebase is, oh, three times as compact, that means they threw out about 10% of their code.
Colleges Fight Google Ads That Reroute Prospective Students
Remind HN: Seattle Meetup at 6:30pm
Using color to escape and delimit code
Computers were pretty clunky, too, at the beginning. We are seeing the very earliest moments of the Star Trek replicator. When the market smells a demand, we'll get the pretty you are looking for.
I'm sure Steve is still making the big strategic decisions, but his absence is the best explanation I've heard yet for the miscarriage of the iCal and Address Book UIs. I never use Launchpad so I haven't given it much thought but I agree with the author that spilling every executable on the machine into Launchpad displays a similar lack of discipline.