skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Counterpoint, the NY Times has an ethics policy that would never have allowed anything like TechCrunch (even before the newly announced investment fund plan!).

http://www.nytco.com/press/ethics.html#keeping

"44. Staff members may not engage in financial counseling (except through the articles they write). They may not manage money for others, offer investment advice, or help operate an investment company of any sort, with or without pay. They may, however, help family members with ordinary financial planning and serve as executors or administrators of estates of relatives and friends and as court-appointed conservators and guardians."

"They may not offer ideas or proposals to people who figure in their coverage or make investments in productions in their field. (Food writers and editors may not invest in restaurants.) "

Etc etc.

The New York Times company owns a lot of stuff. So does AOL. AOL running an investment fund isn't shady in the least. Having an employee who covers tech startups on one of your media properties run a fund for you that invests in tech startups... Big difference. You don't see whoever's job it is to invest in Automattic at the NY Times out there writing A1 on the technology page.

The main difference here is there is a strict firewall at the New York Times Company and not at TechCrunch. Forget disclosure, the NY Times would never let Mike have the startups beat in the first place because of his personal investment activity. Make that professional investment activity and it's just that much more unacceptable.
Carol Bartz Ousted As Yahoo CEO [Internal Memo]
Questions from an 8-year-old
Low Back Pain Caused by Computer Use.
damn, I was hoping to see britney spores.
It seems like her being fired over the phone is a bigger deal than sending email from an iPad. Would MG write, "From a Windows computer" if she sent it from a Windows PC? Or "From a BlackBerry" if from that? She has to send it from something right and the iPad is a pretty popular device. It's not like she sent it from a JooJoo or something.
Second Firm Warns of Concern After Dutch Hack
Why would Google buy Yahoo so that Yahoo could obtain Google's talent? There is no way Google would water down its engineering pool with Yahoo's engineering staff.
implying microsoft acquisition of a big competitor is a good thing.
应力筛选恒温恒湿箱
How is that above all suspicion? If you want the candidate in office, murder his opponent for that reason, and then make sure not to actually go out and cast a vote for him, does that somehow make it less of a political assassination?

(I'm not equivocating)
Learn Currency Trading With Successful Currency Trading Coach Bernie Ebner
Mock him if you like, but he puts his finger on a real problem. When I encounter a library or language that makes a big deal about being "declarative", I now consider that a black mark against it, not a feature, because what that translates to is usually "You still have to tell it how to get the thing you want, but since we thought we could abstract away all such performance issues, we've made it impossible to introspect or fix any performance issues you may encounter, and the language will require bizarre contortions to get acceptable performance."

Example the first and one of the biggest: SQL. Sure, it's a declarative language... after you learn how databases work, after you learn how indexes work, after you profile your biggest hitting queries and work out how to rewrite them into semantically equivalent queries that perform orders of magnitude faster, after you learn how to deal with sharding, after you learn when to denormalize and when not to, after you learn the necessary performance hacks that trick the indexer into doing what you need instead of what it thinks is correct, and after a few more things I could go on about, it's a declarative language where you don't have to worry about performance any more. Yup, totally declarative.

I like Haskell, but only because I can mostly (although not entirely) see through it.

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair." - Douglas Adams

Anything that claims to be declarative is lying. All declarations in some given environment entail some process that will be used to obtain your results, you will not be able to get good performance if you don't know that process, and actively obscuring those processes only makes it harder.

You can't afford to ignore the side effects of "pure" functions.
Things to do immediately after launching a website
NASA Spacecraft Images Offer Sharper Views of Apollo Landing Sites
Google voicemails already show up in my gmail. You should just be able to set up a filter to forward them to another address.

I haven't tried it though, so YMMV.
Shutupandtakemymoney!
Top Color Trends for Fall 2011
Funny that you should post that on a news site affiliated with an investment firm.
In my experience, if you look far enough down the tracks of any forced eviction, you'll find someone's cousin who's a developer who'd love to build a trendy new hotel.

Looking at the place on google maps, I'd be willing to bet a substantial amount that we'll be hearing about a hot new night spot and a swanky new hotel right on the water. (plus a lot of gushing about what a good thing this will be for the local economy.) That or a nice bunch of million dollar condos the size of my closet.
Yahoo needs a new CEO. Who do they call?
Clojuresphere: the clojure ecosystem overview
Even though the $1M figure was meant to be rhetorical:

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:GOOG&fstype=ii

Google had revenues of $31B with less than 30,000 full time employees over the last year. Programmers there are bringing in over $1M on average. There must be some there that are actually worth it.
I remembered seeing these stats before. They are a few years old, right? Google lists the publishing date for those stats as 1 April 2002. Seems like a subset too.

I really enjoy using Google's spelling correction, but what really would blow my mind, is if I one day can search for:

ntoymru d[rstd

and get results for "britney spears". It seldomly happens when I calibrate my index fingers over the wrong keys.
That is not an example of a developer taking leadership initiative.
Linus Hates Gnome3
I often mistype stuff because my fingers are offset on on the keyboard! I try to type "hello world" but it comes out as "y3oo9 294ie" or similar.

I always wondered how often folks do this and why Google doesn't detect it and suggest "did you mean"?
Nike 5
San Francisco, CA - Yammer

Yammer is an awesome tech startup masquerading as an enterprise software vendor. We're building an enterprise social network (an internal communication and collaboration tool. Like Facebook.) and we need your help.

We build our product with insight and wisdom gained from the consumer social networking space, but we charge enterprise prices (and our customers pay them!) We're fighting some big serious competitors (Salesforce/Chatter, Jive, and VMWare/Socialcast) and this space has never been more exciting.

Yammer is really changing the way people get work done. We have actual challenges to overcome and we're doing our best to make a kick-ass product that makes our users happy.

Tech we use: Ruby/Rails, Scala, and JavaScript. We have Obj-C and C# stuff too.

Some bullet points for you to skim:

• Amazing group of smart engineers to work with. Really.

• We hack in Ruby/Rails, Scala/JVM, Javascript/JQuery/Node.js/Adobe AIR, Obj-C for iOS, and some MSFT/Sharepoint stuff.

• Competitive compensation. Enough said.

• Delicious catered lunch and dinner daily, with a 3PM snack cart. Also a fully-stocked beer-and-beverage fridge.

• Fancy Apple hardware of your choice (you can have a PC if you really want one.)

Some links for you to read more:

• Our jobs page: https://www.yammer.com/jobs

• Our Engineering blog: http://eng.yammer.com/

• A blog post about why it's so awesome to work here: http://eng.yammer.com/blog/2011/5/31/shameless-recruiting.ht...

Feel free to get in touch: bkudria@yammer-inc.com
I think you're reading too much in to it. It's simply amusing to see something with cheery intent being tacked on to such an email.

I immediately disable such options myself, for fear of looking like a ----
All Things D says "Bartz was apparently on a plane today on the East coast, as was Bostock coming West, so there was no chance to meet in person. But Bartz went for the dig anyway."
Why Carol Bartz Was Fired as CEO of Yahoo
"But are they maintainable? Are they able to function when load increases? Are there hidden race conditions that go unnoticed for years? If a user inputs bad data will the application suddenly throw NPEs? Will moving to a different hardware platform with more cores expose a fatal deadlock?"

All of these are secondary to turning a profit. If the only developer(s) the business can afford commits these mistakes, so be it; but if the developer is adding more value than he is costing, it still makes sense. And no amount of appeal to technical superiority will change this; there are too many businesses that can benefit from someone able to write software, but not enough returns for them all to hire great devs. This is basic economics. You can't fight it outside of a non-existent world of surplus.
Ask HN: Web hosting for LAMP - MySQL now, MongoDB later?
Wondering what do you guys use for hosting PHP web apps? Scalability is the main concern here.

I am guessing everyone just start with shared hosting services, and switches to VPS and finally dedicated as things take off.

I've used hostmonster and dreamhost, and there are some very peculiar things I need to follow as far as their DB names and such things are concerned.

So, it would be great to have most freedom to tweak certain settings, such as PHP params, and ability to choose DB names for now.

It's not such a big PITA...but changing DB names between production and development is not my favorite task....it's just one more thing to remember always....

I am not such a big fan of AWS and such services, esp for LAMP.....where you can save a few bucks in the beginning, when it's most important.

Ohh....I am using MySQL, for now, but would love to have an option to use MongoDB later on as well, since it looks like it might scale much better for what I am planning.

Ideas please. :)
Sony Taps Former Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Exec for Security Chief
the gap between what he felt and what you said is only large because you are, apparently, completely tone deaf. programming and communicating in english are quite different things. you are good at programming, apparently, but not at communicating with the written word. that's ok. after all 50% of people are below average. and just because you're not good at this doesn't mean you can't still chat to friends in the hallway.
I've never really looked at Reddit as a company that wanted to grow under Conde Naste. They were able to demonstrate their value through influence. Now that they are a separated from Conde and under new expectations one level above from Advance, we can see what it is they're made of and if they're really going to be able to be profitable.
That's less interesting when you know that NeXTStep (the direct predecessor to OS X) was actually released for x86.

Fun fact: Windows NT was released for PowerPC.
GitHub is doing a fantastic job of building a consistent presence from top to bottom. The changes as a whole have been extremely impressive over the past few months. I, as a designer that uses GitHub on a daily basis at work, am very enthusiastic about the latest updates, the new commit styles included. The GitHub team has been extremely quick to iterate and launch updates recently. I'm sure there's plenty more to come.
Iterators as a Model of Lazy Computation
You said you thought the either (a) the site was made as a troll, or (b) you couldn’t think of any other reason to have spent time on it, because (c) the content was something you’d get from your (implicitly technically clueless, rural) aunt. The implication was that whoever made this site was wasting their time and ours.

I don’t have any reason to be “already defensive” (I had never heard of this thing before today and I’m definitely not the target audience), and I agree with you that – given the demographic using the site – most of the content is pretty juvenile and uninteresting. But your criticism is mostly content free, and the tone reads as the sort of speculative petty sarcasm that I’d rather avoid on this site.

Anyway, I haven’t seen this idea before: what other site has a front page filled with tiled user-submitted pictures, which when clicked on open up a comment thread wherein each one can be remixed by other users? There are mediated “funny picture” sites like Can Has Cheezburger, and there are general-purpose discussion fora like 4chan and Reddit that include many “funny” pictures, but nothing especially like this current effort, that I’ve seen.

Funny pictures don’t really appeal to me (for that matter, I think the overwhelming majority of the content at facebook, youtube, twitter, reddit, and similar sites is also garbage), but I it’s always interesting to see what kinds of interfaces new community based sites come up with, what kinds of interactions they afford, and how that shapes users’ actions and contributions. There’s more to discuss here than “meh this sucks, it’s probably just a troll.”
Your argument sounds exactly like C++ - as you echo in Java++ - and it logically should come with exactly the same problems: different groups of Java-Scala developers will adopt subsets of the language, with coding standards etc., in an effort to institutionalize the simplification - but will come up with different subsets.

I think it's too optimistic to expect most standard developers (normally employed by companies whose main business is not software) to "pick up the nuances of the language" - these developers typically learn by example and copy-paste-modify from other similar functionality to fill out the application. They see their jobs as implementing features, and understanding nuances is not typically the quickest way for them to get their job done.
He screwed the company's owners out of many millions of dollars. Microsoft may well have killed and gutted the fish, but the CEO's responsibility is to the shareholders.
How to boost your traffic, e-mail list, and following without your blog.
I think flat tv is the best bet apple could try, as well as a cell phone the tv will be the next personal computer in our home. So, with the astonishing image quality every apple device has in their hi def screen could easily beat the competence.

As everybody knows the price is not a problem for apple.

That's my humble opinion.
Miguel de Icaza: Learning Unix
Shake to Undo (for Mac OS X)
There's a bunch of links

http://www.google.com/search?q=mexican+gangs+hammers+gladiat...

Top one

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/06/15/kidnap-victims-force...

MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's most feared drug cartel was already known for beheading, quartering and even cooking its enemies, in the brutal narcotics war gripping the country.

Now the Zetas gang is said to have created a new gladiator-like sport where innocent kidnap victims are forced to fight to the death, according to sources cited by The Times of London on Wednesday.

Members of the cartel are said to have dubbed the sadistic spectacle "Who wants to be the next hitman?"

Victims are armed with hammers and machetes and goaded into fighting for their survival and the chance to work as assassins. The alleged practice has been linked to mass graves where the remains of more than 400 people have been unearthed in recent months.

"We've been given several suggestions that this kind of activity happens," a source at the US Drug Enforcement Agency told The Times.

A source with links to the drug trade said he had heard detailed accounts of the new blood sport. "The violence has reached such a level, even the gangsters are getting sick of it," he added.

Mexico's northern border regions have suffered an explosion of violence as government forces battle the Zetas -- a drug gang formed in the 1990s by former soldiers -- and their former bosses, the powerful Gulf cartel, in a three-way war.

The conflict has claimed nearly 35,000 victims in the past five years, according to official figures, but the true toll may never be known. Since 2006 at least 5,300 Mexicans have disappeared. Witnesses have reported seeing large groups of people being snatched from intercity buses by gangs who appear to act with impunity.

Some kidnap victims have had one hand handcuffed to a car steering wheel, and a gun placed in the other, to be sent on murder missions. Others have been found hanged in the streets. Most of 200 bodies discovered in mass graves in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas were of victims apparently killed with sledgehammers or burnt alive.

A report in the Houston Chronicle, which drew on an account from an anonymous drug runner, said: "The elderly are killed. Young women are raped. And able-bodied men are given hammers, machetes and sticks and forced to fight to the death."
Hahaha, I have to admit that I've wasted too much time playing with the 8bit social beatbox. (Our Starwars Theme Song rocked though!)
Confirming being fired from an iPad is so 2011, and it's actually a trend I don't mind seeing. Using Twitter, iPads, Skype, whatever - the tech is there so why not use it.

Getting fired over the phone, however, is a disgraceful move by the Yahoo board. She's the Chief Executive Officer. It's not a move that you make over the phone and without a plan about the response.
What kinds of permits do you consider bribes?
Yes. In one particular business domain: much of the time is spent nailing down requirements, then adjusting very complex conditionals (so much of the business-spec requirements will be almost legalese nests of conditional clauses - in the insurance domain I have in mind, written by actuaries), tweaking UI, and fairly exhaustive testing.
Saying she's been fired "over the phone" seems a bit bush league. The CEO of a company serves at the pleasure of the board. We're not supposed to feel bad for her; this is the NFL. If things don't work, she's supposed to clear the way for someone who can, not spit in the board's face.

Not enough boards fire CEOs, is the problem we really have.
I think the greatest example of what Yahoo! could have been is Yahoo! Japan. They own the auction space and as part of the juggernaut SoftBank group pretty much own a big part of the space (even more if you count the spun off Soft Bank Investments).

It's sad that lack of vision and truly ingrained technical innovation prevented the company from truly realizing the advantages of being a first mover in the space but they sure had a nice run for what started as a collection of links.
Nursing Jobs Dubai 9.7.2011
I remember how many times Darwin/MacPorts didn't work when installing that package... Of course it looks sorted now but it was a tricky process for many years, ensuring the right order of package installation to get certain features to work without crashing. What a pain and in this case it looks like that is over for everyone.
MIT - not a school known for its English or Journalism programs.
Maybe it's just me, but I think if software is well-made, it should be as fun to use as a game is fun to play. With the amount of richness and animation available to developers, there's no reason using even the simplest app can't be surprising and delightful.
The bottom line of software patent reform (don't hold your breath)
I'm not sure the fact that kids can "learn" language X proves much, because generally we're teaching kids language X so they can take some kid-friendly subset of the language and do kid projects in it. This is great on its own, but showing that kids can learn Scala or Haskell doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be able to program in it.

Here's a group using Haskell: http://cdsmith.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/haskell-for-kids-wee... Are they choking and dying because Haskell is just too magically difficult for children to learn? Goodness, no. On the other hand, does this prove that Haskell is never confusing when you're three layers deep in monad transformers trying to use a parsing library and you get a twenty-line error message about a failure to unify types with type signatures bigger than Twitter will let you post full of "a" and "t1" and "t2" and "t3"s?

I mean, let's be honest, that just doesn't happen when you're using Python or Perl. (It can in Java, but still a lot of times it's just verbose, vs. Haskell's actual complexity.)
IBM Patents Your Digital Life
Linus doesn't like GitHub's pull requests
That mentions revenues only, and you can't use that to translate directly to cash, they're not the same thing, you can't use those terms interchangeably.

If a company has 100K in revenues and 50K in expenses per month after one month they'll have 50K in cash, to give a very limited example.

So you have to take the revenues and reduce them by the burn rate to get an idea of how big groupons war chest really is.

According to groupons own filings they've got 208 million in the bank so they've spent a good 1.4 billion of that money they took in.

Of course 200+ million is still not exactly pocket change.

I don't quite follow the Warren Buffet link, his only comment on groupon as far as I know is that he said he'd read their IPO filing papers but that was about it.
Speaking from experience there, Yahoo! will do better without that kind of "leadership" up top. Let's break Yahoo! up into its valuable components, sell it and shed the rest.

I'll be buying Yahoo! stock in the morning.
As you know, other countries do not have juries, and while I've seen some abuse by judges, overall, in my (limited) experience I haven't seen them be worse than juries.
I just checked and can't really make sense of why Option extends Product, so it's probably not for me.

http://www.scala-lang.org/api/current/scala/Option.html
Yahoo has some of the most visited websites in the world, for Sports, Finance, etc...

Not sure who would gain the most from those properties.
I would never dream of selling a company to Yahoo.

I don't build to flip, so seeing what they did with Flickr, Delicious and dozens of other projects (internal ones, too: SimpleGeo is proof that FireEagle should have gotten a major push out of the gate) makes me feel a little bit like Joss Whedon contemplating doing another show with FOX.

Does anyone have any compelling counter-arguments, or believe things will ever get better? Is Yahoo in AOL/NAMBLA territory at this point?
The pier (owned by the city) was always leased at below-market to a landlord with a connection to the maritime industry. All use had to have some connection to the maritime industry; I think there was a yacht club, lots of storage of boats, etc., in addition to the new tech offices (which were somehow maritime as well). After I went back to Afghanistan, there was some change where the former master leaseholder lost the lease and it got reassigned to someone else.

(I worked for Social Media back when we did the initial conversion, then started renting it out to other companies)