skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"And yes I'm the same idiot that sold a used wetsuit on eBay for £9,000."

Ah, I remember this!

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160...

very similar, but an ebay listing not a portfolio website. he certainly knows how to copywrite in a way that gets him traffic.
Hi,

I posted my name now in my HN profile. It doesn't really mean anything.

I am not per-se attacking you. I am merely commenting on your arguments. I am not especially convinced of you claim that Facebook is withholding just because of the IM leaks. The comment about the movie is about the general accuracy in the depiction of the events. It's a very subjective question and I am sure you are correct about some of the turn of events not being completely accurate and my source being that some events were correctly depicted. (I suspect you guys are talking about different eras in Facebook's history, before and after the move to the silicon valley).

In general my comment is trying to reason why your efforts in setting the record straight, as you claim, have been unsuccessful, why there is still a lot of confusion around the story and why "I was there" is not a good argument especially if you have incentives to misrepresent the facts (I am not saying you are).
It's a native Facebook app that's designed to be simple. No extra fluff, just easy to use.

Example screenshot here: http://www.andrewcross.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Screen-...
Did you notice that you were responding to a MS+PhD applicant? Placing him is going to be orders of magnitude harder than placing someone working on their bachelor's.

If Google wanted to have him churn out features on Google Docs for a couple months, they could, but that'd be an enormous waste of a PhD.
This approach can go both ways, I was hired despite just having a Bachelor's from a 3rd tier US university
The quest to build the perfect lie detector
The attitude is more compelling than the work. But, in a group of candidates of similar quality, I would be more likely to hire the guy with a sense of humour.
> The only company still using WebObjects in production today is Apple.

What about Web Help Desk?

http://www.webhelpdesk.com/
Privacy and Security Policies: A HIPAA-HITECH Checklist
Another company with an attitude: http://gandi.net : "No Bullshit" (they have a trademark sign on it, but i doubt they 've actually applied for it)
ok, good point. However, based on my experience with HN, I bet the second segment of people you describe are under represented here. I generally see swagger discouraged around here so a strategy like this is not effective, even if it made the frontpage.
How are any of those examples significantly different from:

list($foo, $bar) = f();

Given that PHP uses the array() keyword for constructing arrays, it is perfectly symmetrical. My IDE highlights the list() keyword just the same as all the other keywords.
Jordan sky high shoes
It's worse than that. They only gave examples for the games Zynga is suing over. Similar examples could be found for other Zynga games.
Who cares? I've never heard of this guy.
If you've ever had to do a website for a small biz, you typically find that either a) you end up doing the copy or b) the site never gets finished (and you don't get paid, or if you do get paid, you get to put an empty site in your portfolio). Good copy-writing is thus very handy skill to have (and this guy, in his eBay listing at least, absolutely nails it... the £9k bottom line speaks for itself).
A Headset that Reads Your Brainwaves
Tan Le intoduces an amazing headset and its accompanying software that can map human brain waves for different functions and applications.
In a free society, everything is permissible unless it is forbidden. In a non-free society, everything is forbidden unless it is permitted. When the laws are so numerous and complicated that the ordinary person does not know what is forbidden, a free society feels and functions like an un-free society.

A society under law means that people cannot be prosecuted by the whim of the authority, but only according to objective, written law. Yet even a society of written law can be under arbitrary rule if the laws are so numerous and complicated, that citizens do not know when they are breaking them, and if violations are so common that prosecutions and penalties are exacted based on police and prosecutorial "discretion."

Perhaps the legislature that pass the laws and the executive branch that lobbies for them have no idea of their cumulative effect, but I doubt it. They are not rubes. They are experts in the domain in the same way that experienced programmers are expert in theirs. They have to know that they are steadily transforming society from a free one, to one that is not free, from one that is ruled by law, to one that is ruled by men. Yet they don't care. The simplest explanation is that people who are attracted to government are people who want to control other people. If they weren't, if they valued freedom, they would refuse to create laws for the same reason that 37 Signals refuse to add features to their software: because while each individual law or feature may have merit, the cumulative effect is to destroy the more important value of freedom (or, in the case of software, simplicity.)
If anyone's interested, an alternative to this is GNUstepWeb: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUstepWeb
Looks like I should explain myself:

If there was no association between having an "addictive personality" and being a successful CEO, we would expect "addictives" to be CEOs just as often as non-addictives. If being an addictive helps with being a successful CEO, we'd expect a higher concentration of addictives amongst the population of successful CEOs.

The grandparent is presenting a argument a much stronger straw-man: that the majority of successful CEOs have addictive personalities. The original post does not make that claim.
This has been requested by the community for a while now. Synatctic sugar? Definitely. But it's also more.

An actual patch has been submitted for this before, and rejected by the PHP high muck-a-mucks, even though the community desperately wanted it, and the work was already done.

The fact that they finally gave in and included it means not only do we get a nice bit of sugar to sweeten up our programs, but also that maybe the community CAN steer the devs towards issues they care about.

Time will tell.
Try this set of macros that adds some syntactic sugar to obj c: https://github.com/petejkim/ConciseKit

For example, this:

[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:v1, k1, v2, k2, nil]

Turns into:

$dict(v1, k1, v2, k2)
It sounds like you're making a lot of assumptions about its use case, without actually using it in production. This whole thing sounds drastically over-designed.

And that initialization code is symptomatic of everything that is wrong with the statically-typed OO world. If you really need all that XML, what's wrong with this?

var cluster = new RiakCluster("riakConfig");
var client = cluster.CreateClient();
var value = client.Get("my_bucket", "my_key");

...and I suspect you could probably omit the parameter to RiakCluster, since it appears to be fixed. If lib users need more control over configuration, then they can write extra code towards that. Don't require it for the basic, default case.
"Cultures that blame alcoholism on the alcohol have higher rates of it than cultures that hold the individual responsible."

I don't think either of those options squares with the science, e.g. http://www.nijc.org/pdfs/Subject%20Matter%20Articles/Drugs%2...

And also the science about genetic differences in the way people process alcohol and experience pleasure also contradicts that dichotomy.
Fully agreed that the greatest things are built through collaboration.

What if the customer didn't want that tricked out design you made? Are they going to get made fun of for having a simple website that people can understand and use with ease? Probably not.

The designer and customer need to work TOGETHER to get something great. The designer doesn't know the ins and outs and the passion behind the business, the customer does.

Work together and get something that looks pimp but is still in line with what the customer wants.
Definitely agree with you about the usability, the giant header cut right at the bottom of my 1600x900 screen, I had to look at the source of the page before I realized I was supposed to scroll down to see more.
i like that meeting friends of other friends way of doing things and being yourself. good reminders.

also one way why i don't like g+ circles is the reinforcement of not being able to merge groups.

thats why i like online interaction. your first meeting can work on their particular interest. but you can build to that in real life interactions too.

thanks for the reply.
Maybe, but I'd be happy to do it! I can always parlay the experience into something larger.
Looking for a startup job you'll love? We're looking for a third co-founder.
Scientists prove time travel is impossible
omg people its in beta calm down
Mayby Zynga is being offensive about this stuff. Being sued right now wouldn't be a good thing for Zynga.

If anyone out there was expecting to sue Zynga they just threw an elbow. Now you know, if you are thinking about fucking with Zynga, they aren't going to be quite.
I was with you until you threw in millennial.
When Patents Attack (Audio available)
Got that - but what I'm asking is, has anyone even written an app for iOS or Android that works with either of the consoles? Not looking for something that has worked with all, just something that has worked with one, who did it, how they did it, how much it cost and what it was written for.
They are real names. Your idea of what constitutes genuine nomenclature is distorted and narrowed.
I would consider a function of surface and volume, as well as the kinds and "bandwidth" of the senses and complexity of society. You have to process all the sensory input that comes through the skin, eyes, sonar and keep your friends friendly.
uh? Many many developers have an attitude. many many do, like dhh, zed shaw and many others. They can be engaging.

There was something about the copy of this guy that was both repulsive and engaging all in the same serving ... like a train wreck you can take your eyes off.
Ditto.

I've always had the impression that, at least on HN, "weekend project" describes a level of "seriousness" rather than absolute time invested. It lets readers know what kind of scope and polish to expect when they click the link, and what sort of criticism would be helpful. Something like:

Startup > (Real Job) > Side Project > Weekend Project

If I click a weekend project post, I expect to see, e.g., a cute but not necessarily marketable idea, a clever technical hack that might not scale, or a cutting edge design that probably doesn't work in IE8. I expect feedback to focus on those things and not, say, funding advice.

ImageStash (since the article mentioned it ... yay, someone read my post!) took a good three months of weekends. But I thought of it as my Weekend Project because it was just something I started on a whim, and worked on sporadically when I was in the mood to code but burned out on both my Side Project and Real Job.
Bitcoin is Not Anonymous
TL;DR: Bitcoin is not inherently anonymous. It may be possible to conduct transactions in such a way so as to obscure your identity, but, in many cases, users and their transactions can be identified.
I lucked out; when a Google recruiter contacted me, I had just gotten a job (had been doing contract work for a year prior.)

I'm pretty happy not being Google material - I have no degree, and I'll be the first to admit that there are many Comp. Sci. graduates who can code circles around me. I think that's awesome - I've reaped the benefits of the work of many others before, and from the looks of it will continue to reap them (I'm looking at you, PyPy team. Keep up the wonderful work! Let me be lazy, and not have to write an extension in C or C++. :D)

The most advanced work I've done thus far would be writing out a somewhat decent decision-tree system in C++ (I know, mind-bogglingly advanced! (: )

There's plenty of room in the mediocre to almost-above-average scale.
Since when is free stuff an insult?
Your not the only one, caught me too.
This article is mis-titled.

It makes an easy argument for "debacle," but omits the difficult "how to avoid" part.
What killed Intuit's Quicken?
Calle 13  Muerte En Hawaii HD
> I think I disagree with you and find it even more ludicrous that the antagonist actually wants to incarcerate people. To what end?

The point is not to incarcerate people, but rather to gain leverage by being able to credibly threaten incarceration. This is standard operating procedure for prosecutors and police when dealing with confidential informants in drug cases. It's not such a stretch to think it may also happen in other cases.
The answer is no one.

I'm a proud American. Great, Great, Great, Great Grandparent and G/G/G/G/G Grandparent both fought in the Revolutionary war and everything. But even I have to admit, as a rational person, the world foolishly built itself around the U.S. post WWII.

We shouldn't be this important. We shouldn't be the world's Reserve Currency AND the World's Military AND the World's Entertainment Center AND so on...

Not only is it hurting the world but it's hurting the U.S. We've been allowed to act fiscally irresponsibly for at least the last 15 years because we're the world's reserve currency and no one wants to see the Dollar's value plummet. So we've come to the point where we're doing things like Quantitative Easing against the wishes of most of our debt holders simply because we can.

The world needs to look at creating an IMF run reserve currency based on a collection of several different currencies along with other acts like building up their military to the point that they can deal with little items like Libya without needing AFCOM's resources (U.S. African Command).
This. It's a fancier term for a "side project built on spare time".
The author talks about being asked a question regarding web elements when he was leaving the Search team for the Developer Relations team.

A commenter talks about being asked algorithm questions despite being interviewed for a sysadmin role.

Another commenter talks about telling the interviewers that she is not a coder and then is asked a bunch of coding questions despite interviewing for a testing position and having written a book on testing and having years of domain experience.

If you are just wanting algorithm people then surely they're going to be lacking in other areas (e.g. Google Wave, designed by algorithmers).

The objections raised here seem to be along the lines of that the questions are not related to the jobs people are interviewing for. This has two impacts:

- people are not being asked questions about their domain (it seems incredibly stupid not to ask questions about testing if the interviewer is a tester)

- you will cut down on the diversity of your staff if you just want algorithmists (which means that you are more likely to produce more Google Waves).
如何减肥
Good to see Mr. Murdoch's paper pushing a healthy respect for the law.
FB bans my real name because one of it is deemed offensive.
You assume something that is pretty illogical with no evidence (Google may have a stronger academic bias than most, but Silicon Valley in general has an education bias, Apple included). Also, the concept that Apple is doing well and they don't have a academic bias, so that must be correct is correlation = causation. For example, I hear Google has a strong academic bias, and look at how they are doing.
I would say there is nothing wrong with having certain personality traits. I think framing it as "addictive" does cause a lot of people to feel out of control and unable to deal with things in a comfortable manner. If it doesn't have that impact on you, more power to you. But most people don't take that as neutrally descriptive but, instead, as something to feel guilty about and like it is inherently socially unacceptable and so on.
I wasn't saying they weren't real names (though we'd need to define what "real name" means to actually decide that). I was just saying that in order to fit into my personal model of "consistency" they only need to seem like they are real names.

Secondly, as I sort of hinted at in my first post, I acknowledge that it wouldn't really make much sense to design a policy around my personal visual preferences, which I realize are a bit culturally exclusive. Nonetheless, I can't help but be annoyed by some of the names I see on Facebook.
We're building some apps for Shopify too - what was the name of your app? Which app did Shopify purchase? As a side question - what has your experience with Shopify been as an app developer?
Not so directly: "I make programs, not shit programs, good ones, you're not the programmer, so shut up". This guy tries to come off as edgy but sounds more like someone who beats his wife.
I like what you are doing here, but you need to be upfront with the pricing before making a user sign up. Having to give up some personal information before even knowing what the product will cost me gives me a negative feeling.
Truer words were never spoken. "What's that, you expect me to produce 40 pages of technical-but-intelligible copy for procedures on your plastic surgery website? But that's why I gave you [insert CMS of choice here], so your people could log in and edit that themselves...my god man, I'm a web developer, not a medical research technician...what's that? You don't have people? Sigh."
One thousand upvotes. The criminalization of everyday life (of which licensing/regulation/registration/TSA searches are a key part) goes hand in hand with fewer actions against actual criminals like those involved in the recent spate of "flash mob" attacks.

We've seen this before. In the Soviet Gulag depicted in "The Way Back", one of the leads questions why the guards have given so much authority to the Russian mafia within the prison. The answer is that such criminals are just a misunderstood product of bourgeois society, hence friends of the people. But political prisoners, like those who tried to start businesses, had no such excuse; they were the enemies of the people.

Same thing in today's USA. The mob of teens who broke Emily Guendelsberger's leg could not be arrested because the policemen were afraid of charges of racism.

http://mobile.avclub.com/philadelphia/articles/flash-mob-fal...

All I remember people asking was if they knew anything
about the giant group on Broad Street, and then saying
no, and the police saying all they could do was something
along the lines of chances are good they’ll attack
somebody else, and we’ll get them then, we can’t do
anything right now. I remember one of them specifically
saying "We can’t just go start arresting or picking up
black juvenile males." Then he said, "We can’t do
anything right now because you can’t identify anybody." I
also remember people saying we understood that they
should break up the group at least or do something since
it was such a large group. And they said basically that
if they scattered it would be worse so they weren’t
going to do that.

But those self-same policemen know they will get much less resistance, and more money for the state, if they ticket and fine middle-class citizens.

We're trained in school to recognize every little similarity to the Nazis, but are completely ignorant about patterns that are reminiscent of the Soviets.
There are many theories out there, and this only targets one of them. For example, the multiple universes theory states that we live in multiple realities of spacetime, all of which are isolated. So time travel could be as easy as finding a way to transport oneself between spacetime realities.

Also, time travel here seems to be defined as "traveling back in time." The twin paradox still holds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox
Because we all know that engineering doesn't exist outside of building web apps.
Agreed. Back in the bad old days of table-based layouts it wasn't always possible but in the modern age of CSS2+3, HTML5, and sweet libraries like jQuery it's the rare case where the site can't be bloody close to the design comp (unless you're in IE 6/7, in which case it'll still look good but won't have all the roundy corners and font shadows and such).
I honestly don't understand your point. I appreciate the link, but my initial skim of it gives me the impression that it says stuff that agrees with my point about "social"/experiential influences on addiction, which is not what I thought it would do. Did I miss something?

I am aware that there are physiological differences in how people process things like alcohol. (For example, men tend to tolerate it better than women.) I am hesitant to agree with framing that as "genetic" differences. I have a genetic disorder. I have changed my diet and lifestyle to reverse a lot of my symptoms and done a lot of reading and what not. I am reluctant to agree with the standard views on 'genetic' cause of stuff. It tends to not fit with my first hand experience with the subject. I am also hesitant to argue it as my views are backed primarily by my experiences so there is little I can cite to back them up and this gets me in enormous hot water in online discussions.

Also, my comment about environmental influences does not mean that things like physiology play zero role. That's a false dichotomy.
When clicking the link to the app I am greeted with a Facebook page requesting to disable secure browsing:

"We can't display this content while you're viewing Facebook over a secure connection (https)"

Unfortunately this makes it a no-go for me.
I lol'd, he wrote it drunk after all.
This is how all developers feel on the inside about their work.
And I think it works great for showing that he isn't a boring neckbeard behind the computer.

Down with corporations! and stuff...
I was a little disappointed, as well. It looks like it was perhaps titled by an editor or, conversely, edited down to its introduction so that the title no longer matched.

That said, I do hope, now that the program is gone and the cheer-leading apparatus can (hopefully) no longer feed on it, that the program can come to be analyzed with reference to its poor safety, limited capability, high cost, and needless complexity, rather than with reference to nostalgia and whatever other reality-distortion field that was present that allowed it to receive so little critical attention in the popular mind.
I'd say HN is primarily read by people who already understand that it takes a while to learn these things, so it basically IS a weekend project.

If a non-technical person came along and saw it they may need clarification that no, you probably couldn't do it as well. But for most purposes it's understood that the person has been programming for longer than the weekend itself.

Also, as nickbw said it also gives an idea of the seriousness of the project rather than anything literal. A "weekend project" or so would (to me) mean something that may not last forever, but it was fun and different to try out.
I would be shocked to find that apple had the same kind of comp-sci bias that google had. They must have a huge number of developers who have been with that company since the 80's and 90's, a time when much of the industry was being created by people with very diverse backgrounds.
The industry's not quite to the point where you can get rid of text-as-images. @font-face is supported in maybe 50% of browser versions, requires several different font formats, and even if you get it to work uniformly, you still have to deal with licensing issues.

http://caniuse.com/#search=font-face

I agree you should prefer text to images of text, but sometimes you can't escape it. EDIT: And I agree that in this particular case, he could've just used appropriately-styled text. :)