skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, there's only about 500 users with 2000 or more karma, but I'd still say that's roughly the baseline for "reputable": you've stuck around and made some contributions.

In so far as this site only seems to keep the interest people who are interested in this scene, that seems like one of the many types of folks a googler working on this would want to do right by. And, it would seem to me that his comment wouldn't exactly make a googler feel a sense of accomplishment. Maybe you're right, they might dismiss it. But there's a non-zero chance they felt a little worse, their lunch didn't taste quite as good after reading that. And if that's the case, my point to him was to ask what purpose did that serve? Because it didn't seem like a nuanced criticism.

This brings up another issue of reputation vs karma, which I posted separately: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2946896
VMware and Samsung to Give Mobile Devices Multiple Personalities
I'm sorry but I don't even know what you are talking about. Who cares if ANSI SQL is Turing complete?

It stores data just fine and is not vendor specific.
Bookmarklet: Porn-Fix, improves boring websites with useful porn
Has anything changed since the last time this was discussed on HN?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2887974

I'm surprised Sublime Text 2 doesn't have its own official plugin repository. Glad to see the community is filling in the gaps.
The writer doesn't get that the iPod Touch is a gateway product for kids who aren't allowed to own an iPhone. Every kid who gets one for Christmas will buy an iPhone in the future. In many ways the Touch is like their version of the Nintendo DS.
Surely Apple's "Time Machine" achieves that? The UI is bizarre and overly flashy, but it's convenient and gets the job done.
The answer is always No... it's pretty much the same old thing every day.
When I joined, downvoting was not used as much, and wasn't used to show disagreement (and this was considered good reddiquette for a long time). The community here has changed a lot though, and I sincerely do feel new and want to learn how to best contribute.
How is Ubuntu not an operating system?
I wish they'd post a guide on how to do a separate CI job per feature branch. That'd make this approach really scalable.
No,

I think a read of the article shows they claim they matched the student's photo to their Facebook profile and then the Facebook profile to other publicly available information, getting them DOB or something equivalent.

So they indeed got all their information starting from a single photo.
Thanks for your response. I take this to mean that Gmail is undergoing a complete re-write. Is that correct?
Added to safari book case.
I really like the idea of combining AdWords with domain search, though I'm not quite sure what the right implementation is.

For example, suppose that there are two domains, "[uniquequery].com" and "[commonquery].com". Do you think people would prefer the "[uniquequery].com" because their name will show up at the top when they tell people about it (and because its more unique)? Or do you think people would prefer "[commonquery].com" because it will be easier to rank for the competitive query and there might be more organic traffic?

We had a similar question, trying to decide between "brainstormdomains.com" (which seems like a much more common query, though I haven't checked) and "nolongernameless.com"/"domainrefinery.com".
Two points:

1 - TV ads are more interruptive; to ignore them, you have to leave the room or change the channel. Most people just deal with sitting through them. On a website, you can easily ignore the ad. There are plenty of exceptions in digital advertising - pre-roll for web video, page takeovers, and other stuff that is unbelievably annoying, since your expectation as a web user is to not be interrupted.

2 - It depends on the key performance indicator for the campaign. Certainly, direct response campaigns want to measure clicks (or purchases/actions - the closest you can get to the sale, the better). But there are awareness-style campaigns on the web, and those advertisers pay by impression, not clicks. The problem is that with networks, you don't know the quality of the place your ad is running, so an impression is worthless. You'll only pay directly to a publisher you know is at a certain level of quality.

At a past company, I saw our media buyers put in ads at $170 CPM (cost per thousand impressions) for a particularly relevant publisher audience. The advertiser was in financial services, and the publication was uber-niche and uber-influential.
Geez, I certainly don't want anyone to feel bad about themselves or have a bad day because of some flippant worthless comment I made. My opinion really isn't that important.
The only "fact" in this article, the amount of money spent on TV ads, was never supported (read citation). Even if that number is valid, it still doesn't prove that advertising works. The only thing this proves is that advertisers can sell - advertisements to companies.

If I were to argue that advertising works, I'd argue that it affects social proof; no one drives a Mercedes Benz because it is a functionally superior car. In the American market, products aren't purchased on their functionality, but on the social class they put you in. (Would argue a similar argument for non-luxury items, but it'd tl;dr.)
The debugger is a big one. I had a terrible habit of not thinking through the code but just running through the debugger until I got it working.

Not thinking about how code looks (especially to other people) since I could just resize the window to whatever.

A lot of the build complexities were hidden, which was fine as long as everything worked, but, as soon as something small broke, I spent days reading documentation and uselessly searching MSDN and the web trying to get the project to build (so, not understanding my build environment is something else I had to fix).

There are lots more (source control, collaboration, etc). I know that switching my tools and my development environment made me a better programmer.
Fortunately I have neither Facebook photos, nor an SSN.
I think Google needs to refocus on the real problem: not having internet access. [joking, but seriously...]
My Opinion on the US Blocking AT&T Merger
I'm not sure if you've been through interviews recently, but from the experience of myself and my friends who have been interviewing, this is what it seems to be. Based on my experience 1.5 years ago, I quit interviewing until I got enough time to sit down and memorize algos.

A popular question to ask as a stumper is "Given a tree, how do you determine if it is a binary search tree". Either that or "convert a sorted integer array into a BST".
I hope people start using the word faddle, fiddle-faddle, fadaise or fatuus again instead of just "fad" :)
we started with cl-prevalence and then of course (NIH-syndrome) implemented our own approach to this back in 2003, which you can find at http://bknr.net/ . We used it back then to run eboy.com, and it still is powering http://quickhoney.com http://www.createrainforest.org/ and http://ruinwesen.com/ amongst others. Those transaction logs + images are for some 6+ years old, and have gone through multiple code rewrites and compiler changes and OS changes and what not. It is good fun, has drawbacks, has advantages, definitely widens your horizon.
thanks for the vote of confidence, will write up what happened soon.
I'm reminded by the interviews with the original Xbox team at MS, who were apparently shouted at by a red faced Ballmer for weeks after they said that it wouldn't run Windows. Imagine how the Xbox's usability and popularity would have been reduced if they tried to run the Windows desktop on it.

Curious, what was the rationale for not running Windows? I can't think of anything that would necessarily be problematic about it, except resource constraints.

Microsoft hasn't realized this strategy, and I think many users will be worried by the initial lack of apps for Metro and try to use Word and Excel on a 10 inch touch device, and get angry with it when the UI is just too cumbersome.

This assumes MS doesn't think that a tablet version of Office isn't important. I suspect it may be a launch app suite.
You can fork the package_control_channel on GitHub (https://github.com/wbond/package_control_channel) or BitBucket (https://bitbucket.org/wbond/package_control_channel) and send a pull request. That or you can email me.

You don't need to create a binary package file as Package Control can work directly with GitHub and BitBucket. Simply add the regular https URL to your repository.
After looking at that hopefully he asks for easier ways to view,submit and create custom reports from public health data for both doctors and patients, I'll be here Paul.
Oh, that must be because nothing even remotely like that happened.

Lesson for the customer: Buy stuff from somebody else.
More reasons to get out.

G+ is fast becoming link plugging spammers paradise. Users have very less control over who, where and how they're seen. No wonder there are less number of counts on +1 buttons everywhere.
I would, but I'm not in the hardware space. Having said that, why look for a founder at this stage of the game. You always see YC entrants after the fact "seeking additional cofounder" etc. There was an article flouting around very recently about this very topic, e.g - Applying as a solo founder, finding a founder. The author suggests and I tend to agree, focus on product, not revenue, not finding a founder until a certain set of criteria are met. Choosing the wrong founder can kill and idea faster than you think, at least that was the ultimate argument. Calculating the risk of not getting "in" as a solo founder isn't bad either. I wish I could point you to the article, but best of luck.
(Offline Gmail team member here)

Attachments should work, with a few caveats. Due to some annoying quirks of the HTML5 FileSystem API, there's a whitelist of supported file extensions. This includes everything useful we could think of, but it's not exhaustive.
Thanks. I just saw that. Not sure why, but I didn't see it until after I restarted the program twice.
The slow pace of CD releases can make it difficult to install, although they fortunately got a new one out the door a few weeks ago. It is not fun trying to get your network running without wireless. Others have examples below, these are just some things that make this distro a bad idea for people who don't want to learn Linux.
What you say matters to the person on the receiving end, even if you think it doesn't.
"All cores can read simultaneously."

Unless someone is writing, of course, in which case you have to worry about isolation. So a single writer would block all readers, right?

"You mean a bug in our code that causes a problem?"

No, I mean like "I already wrote some data, but now a constraint has been violated so I need to undo it".
How to log JavaScript errors
Hackers Push Sipvicious VoIP Tools In Malicious Attacks
Did WP7 ever have ground in the mobile market?
The Manual Ships
Yes, but as you said yourself it is local (targeted). Also, those ads usually have very precise call to action and very often are connected with current offer/sale/etc. They're also specific to US - very hard to find anywhere else in the world.
I agree. As an app dev who builds for the iPad and its 30M users -- why wouldn't you build for Win8 and its 100M users (if it flops) or 400M (if it sells as projected)? Sure there are 1B+ more users out there, but given that Win8 has the app store, I'll take the hundreds of millions with the app store.

Legacy windows slowly becomes the truck that Jobs spoke of. Metro becomes the car. Windows, having both, becomes the SUV.
That sounds like a mix of switching recent tabs and Goto File (ctrl+p/cmd+p).
Behind the Scenes of The Crypto Project
How many SMS messages are send monthly? 
It seems like American teens are texting all the time, it’s probably because on average they’re sending or receiving 3,339 texts a month.
Mozilla has said they don't plan on supporting the FileSystem API.
Mozilla Shows Off Firefox for Tablets
Evolution of Data Centers from 1960s to 2000s
Related: "Ten-Year-Olds Can See Through Advertisers' Tactics"

http://web.hbr.org/email/archive/dailystat.php?date=083111
Man gets $18,000 dollars from a bet that he couldn't get a retweet on Twitter.
I can't comment on unannounced engineering efforts, and I certainly didn't mean to imply anything about them.

All I can really say is that if they wanted the primary Gmail client to support offline, then it's my personal opinion that the only tenable way to do that is by having a single code path. Whether there are plans to actually do this I don't know and couldn't talk about if I did.
For SSNs issued before 1973, you need to know the location of the issuing office. For those issued after 1973, you need to know the mailing address on the application. Therefore, location of birth seems to be the most important piece of information, however you are led to it. This year, the process was randomized to reduce geographical significance and increase the amount of available numbers: http://www.ssa.gov/employer/stateweb.htm
Abolish The Presidency. It's a Useless Job.
Relevant reading: "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Cialdini.

If you only ever read one book on this stuff, this is the book to read. It is framed around the 6 core psychological principles advertisers leverage, with half the chapter on how to utilize the principle, and half the chapter on how to defend yourself against manipulation of the principle.

But more directly to your question; I think it depends. Was the product you just learned about a pharmaceutical drug that will help improve your quality of life, but that your doctor has never heard of because he left medical school 25 years ago and isn't tapped into current events in this particular field?

It's very possible (and I think, correct) to think of advertising as a net-negative to society. But it does serve the vital function of informing people about things they should know about. It solves problems of information asymmetry.

The startup deadpool is filled with companies that were awesome but nobody knew about.
Using something like the Jenkins gem (https://github.com/cowboyd/jenkins.rb), it's pretty easy to script. The hardest part is setting up the job configuration the branches will use.
There have been some updates, including support for utilizing git and hg to update packages that were cloned. This is pretty useful when hacking on a package or customizing it. There are also a bunch more packages in the default channel.
What a fantastic, feel-good piece on Steve. It's nice to know he's just like every other parent outside of Apple, and I'm glad someone remembered who he is as a person, not just a CEO.
Newspaper trolls and how to avoid them
"My main point in publishing this blog post is to suggest to you that newspaper columnists themselves can be highly effective trolls. Not only do newspapers allow trolls to visit and leave comments, they actively recruit them and pay them to write columns."
Ah yes, now I remember the Vista Ready fiasco. That was a pretty big mistake on Microsoft's part.
Not nearly old enough for the globe I have at home that's between 1906 - 1916.
Seems like it's only applicable to a very narrow subset of developers. Pretty much the only question that I could check anything off for was the first one. I don't develop for mobile, and I don't use any of the listed tech for web apps.
Samsung reveals bada 2.0-powered Wave 3, Wave M and Wave Y
Absolutely. Device portability would add real competition to the market, but in reality, AT&T would never agree to that because their whole rationale for the merger is to reduce competition (per the leaked memo).

Verizon would also take major issue with this and most likely not allow any such AT&T devices on their network... and if VZW did certify a device, they would only permit the most crippled hardware from AT&T on their network.

True competition between the two telco giants is an exciting proposition though, hopefully this is eventually accomplished. Just look at what it did to the long-distance market: http://video.wttw.com/video/1949293907/ (this is a PBS documentary on MCI breaking up AT&T premiering this weekend--good timing!)
But wireless infrastructure is not owned by the government or companies with protected monopolies. Until they do, blocking this merger is the best course.

Taking the infrastructure into government control is political suicide, no one is going to do it. I'm not interested in giving a protected monopoly without a stronger interpretation of anti-trust law similar to United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.

Specifically, a company with a natural monopoly on distribution (wireless, cable, POTS, or fiber telecom companies) should not be able to operate or have exclusivity deals with companies in production or exhibition markets. No Sprint only phones and no Comcast owned television channels, or I'll do everything in my power to at least make sure they have plenty of healthy competitors who can keep them in check, even if it means I pay a premium.
Harvard again becomes top university in USA
Mozilla addons site targeted in same attack that hit Google
I'm not sure it's how GitHub does it, but we use the jenkins gem to do pretty much the same thing: https://github.com/cowboyd/jenkins.rb
QPR news aggregator
Isn't your own blog's title "brevity is for the weak" ..? ;)

In all seriousness, the post was pretty typical stream-of-consciousness self-discovery stuff. It's wordy by definition.
<i>Therefore, I suspect the answer to your question "how" is "usually, not very well".</i>

All too true. Good advice on references.
All-Time Great Books on Sales
"He just wants money, and it's not even clear why."

I'm not sure that's quie right; my takeaway was that he wants to create something awesome, and that the fact that it would likely be highly profitable is somewhere between a pleasant side effect and a way of keeping score.
Not wireless, but broadband:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/28/why-is-european-broadband...

Meanwhile, the size of the U.S. may be a red herring. Most of the region between Boston and Washington is as densely populated as most of Europe and the UK. So is the California coast between San Francisco and San Diego. And so is the region of the Midwest centered on Chicago. Those areas are home to about a quarter of all Americans. In other words, we live in a big country, but a lot of it is relatively empty space.
I've tried a few tabby things in my time, but settled on mRemoteNG for combined ssh (PuTTY), RDP, VNC, ICA tabbed goodness. If they could shoehorn Xming in there as well it would be near-perfect.

http://www.mremoteng.org/
Hmm.. I didn't really get that message. I think you're absolutely right. You don't have to sacrifice relationships, happiness, and certainly not health to be successful.

But when you're entrepreneurial, you often can't be content with living the "normal" life. You really want to be like one of those people in the suburbs: they're blissful (partially because they don't know the possibilities/opportunities you see).

But deep down, you know you have to follow your dreams. You often wish you could go back, but you know you can't. In a sense, you wish you had the mindset and experiences of "normal" people, so you didn't had this itch to achieve more.
Show HN: Simple staging on Heroku
"It's insulting because I'm passionate about the web and I know that web applications can handle offline just as well as native applications, and their slowness to add support to their most important products contradicts that belief. And it's insulting because they've released something so that they can say they have Offline Gmail when this barely counts as that."

Insulting? I don't get it. What are you entitled to? That is such an arrogant statement. Can I ask what have you done to the web community since you are very passionate about it?

Showing passion is not about putting other people who actually build things down.

You have to realize that Google may be a big entity but it is still a group of individuals.

You have read the comment from the Offline team and they have a good reason why they can't do it right now.
A Microsoft employee's thoughts on software patents
Sony is a complex beast, and one business unit's missteps are not necessarily representative of another.

Then they should be broken up, with the respective divisions required to maintain their own corporate identities, balance sheets, and whatever goodwill may be left.

Bottom line, the CDs said "Sony", and no amount of spin is going to deflect blame from where it belongs: Sony.
Samsung copies Macbook Pro. another lawsuit?
they bought palm for $1.8billion and packaged up a few hundred million in a few product launches. If they want to sell palm at a profit or break even, it might be really important to add 1-5 million users even if there is a $100 loss per device.
Email made social again.
@jfruh @mak120 and @lobster45. It's supposed to help you find the date of manufacture of a globe, not necessarily the date those changes in the names of countries happened, or to be a complete list of all the country name changes that happened.
I do most of my development in Eclipse or VS, because frankly my time is worth more than screwing around with Vim for more than basic text editing. Funnily enough, I only break out the debugger when something's really nasty--maybe once a week, for half an hour or so. I certainly don't practice debugger-driven development, and I don't know anyone who does. Personal problem, not a tooling problem.

"Not thinking about how the code looks"--personal and cultural problem, not that of the tools; whether I'm in Vim or Coda or VS2010, I run a guideline at 100 characters (because 80 character lines is dumb in the age of the smallest dev monitor being 1280 pixels wide) and wrap to it. Never heard a complaint from anyone I work with.

Build complexity--here, you have something of a point, but MSBuild or Maven or whatever isn't appreciably different than tooling with makefiles (except that MSBuild probably has better documentation and there's some semblance of a standard way to do things).

Source control? I use Hg and Git, seamlessly, from within VS2010 or Eclipse. Not a problem at all. Collaboration? I've used VSTS for it before, but I just hang a Chrome window in my second monitor and keep Redmine (at home--Bugzilla, at work) and an IRC channel open. None of this is appreciably easier in the Land of the Holy Terminal--it's just different.

I've used both heavily IDE-driven stuff and the stone knives and bearskins that vi-land suggests, and my practices do not fundamental change from one to the other--because I understand what I am doing and how and why to do it. Changing your environment doesn't help you become a better programmer unless you understand why you did what you did and have developed the discipline to not do it regardless of tooling. Your problem existed between keyboard and chair, and it doesn't sound like you've fixed it--just hid it away.
Interestingly we just started work on a Tumblr analytics product. Will have to advertise to the fashion industry soon... :)
Agreed. it's sometimes hard to remember that these people who communicate with us using the products we buy/use are actually just people like us.

and that's kind of a big deal.
Microsoft Makes Complete 180 On Xbox 3D
Why would any programmer who isn't actually programming for Windows use Windows? Unless you're writing .net applications in VS, Windows isn't a developer-friendly operating environment.
I'm not shocked at all that they disabled comments.
For the record, Serbia and Montenegro didn't become just Montenegro; it split into two countries, Serbia AND Montenegro.
How the iPad is changing baseball
IPhone 5 with new design possibly pictured in Apple's latest Photo Stream beta