skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was a couple of years late.

Yahoo! can still be turned around but it will take something more than a cost-cutting and downsizing mentality to achieve that. Under a leader with vision with buy in from the various department heads combined with the current traffic base of Yahoo as a launchpad would still be a force to be reckoned with.

Just recovering from the Bartz years will take a while, lots of talent has been discarded or they've left seeing the writing on the wall. Before Yahoo will manage to undo that damage there is a lot of work that needs doing.
Clearly Joe Stump is ready to step in if need be. His article is down right now, probably to many people trying to see if they offered him the job, but here is the google cache.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TgPIGZf...

If I was still working at Yahoo I would be stoked to have this guy as my boss.
Wow. The argument in the original post that is linked to about scalability and functional programming is almost exactly backwards. Resource usage here is a silly red herring.

Keeping code free of side effects means you _can_ scale it. Try scaling out to multiple machines when you have a fundamental bottleneck like serialized state in your code.

All data-parallel programming techniques, dating back from at least 1985 with the connection machine lisp, and whose modern friends include MapReduce, come from unshackling ourselves from too much state.

These benefits come from making software more functional, not less functional.
Here's a thought: maybe like 10 of the previous 13 offerings, the reason has less to do with the company and more to do with the environment.
Can Google Grow Up?
It would be great it I lived in a universe where the average blog post about the job market included a sketch of the supply curve ("number of qualified applicants willing to work at salary X, for 0<X<$1 million per year") as well as the demand curve ("here's the number of people the world could profitably employ as programmers at a per-programmer salary of X"). But not only is such an estimate difficult to make - many of the relevant variables are literally unknowable, and there are way more dimensions than two - but nobody would understand it anyway. People in general are bad at functions. That's why they struggle with elementary calculus.

If you can demonstrate to a company that you (but not your competitor) are reliably worth X plus five percent, they will pay you X. Unfortunately, there are few programmers on earth who can demonstrably, repeatably, and uniquely add $1.5 million per year to an organization. And we certainly don't have a recipe for scalably generating $1.5m per year per programmer. (If you do, for god's sake stop posting on HN and get moving. We'll all come work for you and be rich!)

Whereas what we do know is that we can basically stand around at a conference and enumerate lots and lots of likely ways to use a talented web developer to generate, say, $75k of value per year. We just don't have many talented web developers who are willing to work for less than that. So most of those relatively-low-value tasks go undone, or get done less efficiently, as web developers hold out for higher-value positions that pay $100k or $125k and that earn their employers much more than that.
I once clerked for a federal judge who was part of the old-style "hands off" school of judging - let the parties fashion their own cases and let the court operate around the edges to make sure they stay in bounds. That style of judging had its advantages but it was horrible for case management. My judge wound up with nearly 400 active cases on his docket on average while judges who more actively managed their cases trended toward the low 200s. Litigants in any given case, then, might have a sense of having more control over their cases but the overall pattern was one of interminable delays as dockets and calendars got clogged with more and more situations where lawyers played out their antics without too much supervision.

Judge Alsup is of a different school. He is definitely "hands on" and handles cases in ways that put the parties under significant pressure to trim their marginal claims and defenses, to scale back on wild discovery forays, and to give serious consideration to getting to an expeditious trial (or settling) rather than potentially be steamrolled by the judge (for example, as he has impliedly threatened to do to Oracle, if it otherwise did not trim its wilder claims, by sending it packing while he stays the litigation pending patent reexaminations). One can agree or not with such a style and it can sometimes border on judicial abuse but it definitely leads to leaner dockets and calendars that are far less cluttered with marginal garbage than one would find on the docket of a more latitudinarian judge. A good (but strict and tough) judge will only play this out in areas where the judge has lawful discretion to make such calls because trying to force things that are plainly against the rules is abusive, leads to injustice, and makes for hack judging. When a judge is tough in the right sense, however, it is amazing to watch how this can trim the excesses of the adversary system and lead to better justice than would otherwise be the case if the parties were simply allowed to run wild.

The arm-twisting that is evident in the appointment of the court's own expert on damages is a direct message to both parties that they should refrain from going to wildly speculative extremes and focus on credible claims of damages only. Since there is Ninth Circuit authority for such an appointment, this is not overtly out-of-bounds for the judge to do but it is definitely aggressive and does pose a risk of prejudicing jurors if not properly handled. Reasonable minds can differ on this one but, in terms of case handling, this is one more in a series of examples of a judge suffering no nonsense in his courtroom and is at that level quite admirable.
Groupon IPO Reportedly On Hold; Road Show Cancelled
This was a great diatribe against Carol. If you guys missed it from a couple of months back an angry shareholder confronts Bartz. He's dead on and with this now happening – absolutely right.

http://soundcloud.com/erickschonfeld/yahoo-sharehloder-rant
The sad thing is they have all the parts to make a great competitor to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Some sort of messaging to strap their news, financial, flickr, etc. together into something compelling. They still have amazing front page traffic.
Leaving aside the arguments about prostitution for a moment, I think it's fair to say that a number of these women (not all) are uncomfortable with being prostitutes and are only doing it to pay for college. College is expensive largely because it is essentially the policy of this country that everyone, especially women[1], ought to have college degrees. We've seen how student tuition rises along with student loan limits; we've seen how students tend to go to college somehow no matter how expensive tuition is, how much debt they're getting into, or how important the degree is.

In these terms, far from being contrary to the spirit of universities like MIT, this type of prostitution arrangement service is in keeping with the proclaimed importance of college education. I.e., going to college is considered so important that many female college students are now willing to prostitute themselves (something most of them would not ordinarily do) to make sure they can keep attending.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=611440
The Power of Online Communities
<blockquote>"We live in a world where the average developer writes 3,250 lines of code per year (about 20 per day). This is going into Eclipse, pressing the "give me pattern X" and filling in the blanks, then going to a few meeting and calling it a day.</blockquote>

Maybe I'm out of the loop, but is it really this bad out there in the real world?
Hmm, so how much would it cost to buy a whole studio?
I used to work at Yahoo during the whole Microsoft debacle. I have to say that this is a disappointing development, namely because it really sounds like the board is giving up on Yahoo, and they will package up Yahoo to the highest bidder. It certainly sounds like the board is getting bored (pun intended) of trying to resuscitate Yahoo and would rather move onto newer and fresher companies with richer rewards. This unfortunately means more rounds of layoffs as they try to increase margins and profitability by hacking and slashing employees. I think in hindsight being sold to Microsoft was probably the best thing for the Yahoo, the employees, and for the shareholders.
John Gruber being deliberately obtuse
That's a wager on the environment. How about a bet that Groupon goes within 3 months of Zynga?
Meanwhile, Guidewire, a company that actually makes money, contributes to the technical world (Gosu (http://gosu-lang.org), The Aardvark Build Tool (http://vark.github.com/), etc.), that made the front page of TechCrunch because it has an upcoming IPO:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/05/insurance-technology-compan...

And that was named "The Best Tech Company to Work For"

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-best-tech-companies-to-wo...

By Business Insider has been almost totally ignored by hacker news.

Hmmmmmm.
>that have filled Groupon's pockets with over a billion in cash.

Having 'cash on hand' is great but it seems that groupon owes more than they have by a considerable margin:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Groupon-is-Effectively-minyanv...

Also that article says they have 208 million in cash, not nearly the 1.6 billion that you mention.
Hmm, in that case they seem to be making a reasonable move: remove to some extent the overhead of Conde Nast. If that's the primary motivation, then I am impressed that Conde Nast can recognize it's limitations, and give reddit a chance to grow outside of their oversight. That being said, my impression was that Conde Nast was remarkably hands off.
Yes, but they usually use some form of monad to hold either an exception or a value.

The implementation of >>= (haskell calls it bind, buts it's useful to think of it like an overloaded ";" that takes a continuation as a parameter ) examines the return value and decided wether to run the normal path or the exception path...

It doesn't quite perform the same as exceptions do (it burdens both paths with if checks, whereas imperative exceptions only burden the error path)

But the code you write looks almost identical to exception handling code. It doesn't look like something using if checks.
You hit the nail on the head. Google seems to have figured this out by bringing back a product guy (Larry) to lead the company. And Google is still investing tremendous amounts of time and talent into innovation.

It is scary to see how these early winners in the online business have faltered. AOL, Yahoo, etc. Instead of fostering a culture of innovation, they've instead looked to cut innovation and attempt to use what remaining cash they have left to buy their way into businesses that they seem to always mismanage with "operations management". Take AOL and TechCrunch.
But this isn't in the context of simply 'guess the future of the website'.

The context is a hypothesis that this type of site will grow and eventually die down - and assuming that hypothesis, it's too early to say whether Reddit has changed that trend or just changed how long it takes. I'd say that in another 10 years, if it starts to die then, it would have gone long enough to say it changed the trend. But right now, too soon.

Am I making (rough) sense?
I really appreciate your input. This is extremely helpful.

I also picked up some epoxy this afternoon to do exactly what you said.

I realize the Arduino is overkill, but I'm complete newbie and it seemed like the quickest solution. Whenever my next revision is ready, can I send you an email?
I think that's an exaggeration. In the real world you spend a week trying to track down a nasty bug -- the net result is two new lines of code in a week. Or writing a bunch of new tests or creating a new test harness. Or designing new features. Or figuring out a way to rearchitect your code to add a new feature in a way such that any new similar features don't require code change at all.

I thought we had gotten past LoC as a measure of programmer productivity?
Carol Bartz Confirms Her Firing — From Her iPad
And indeed, FP hackers do mind their pure functions' performance:

- http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/The_Fibonacci_sequence

- http://vimeo.com/20655874 ("Faster persistent data structures through hashing")
Tim, you gotta do a writeup on the deployment/testing setup.
Can someone placed to comment (ie a resident of the building) tell us what aspects were considered unsafe - and ultimately whether this is justified or whether this is a new landlord who wants everyone out to redevelop the property?
Looking for a technical cofounder to help manage web development 
The opening: We are looking for a technical founder to join the team of livday, a San Francisco - based web start-up. The two existing founders have created the website front end in Fireworks and sketched out the database structure. We are planning to contract out the coding and back end development, however we need a technical founder to manage this side of the business moving forward. We are offering a large equity stake as compensation but would consider other arrangements (e.g., salary compensation for a more short-term commitment)

The team: 1 current management consultant (UC Berkeley engineering and physics) and 1 former management consultant (UCLA business and computing). Both have coding experience, but not enough expertise to fill the technical founder role beyond the prototyping phase.

The concept: A website (and eventually a mobile app) to help users find things to do in their city that suit their preferences and occasion (e.g., 4 hours, looking to do something active and scenic). Our challenge is to become the number one destination that people use to find things to do, and we’re looking for someone who would be excited to tackle this.

If you are interested please reach out at james@livday.com.
"Trolls trolling trolls."
Culture and society put aside, all of them are the same. They are exchanges. You get something in exchange for something else. No exploitation in all of these cases. Exploitation is when you give something, getting nothing back; because you are forced to do it.

When the girl went and connected with the sugary daddy, no body obliged her to do so. No exploitation here. She could have worked hard to make money, save, take some loans and carry on her education. She definitively picked the easiest road.
Alternative title: "Up to half of all Java projects could use Scala better than Java"
Node Knockout Winners
I think the easiest way for you to significantly improve the circuit from a safety perspective is to modify the layout in such a way that the high voltage part of the circuit is on one end of it and the low voltage part on the other.

A (very safe) alternative to using the hall sensor the way it is wired up right now: consider wrapping the current carrying wire around a ferrite core and putting a number of turns around the other side of the core to pick up the current (a very basic transformer). That way there is absolutely no need to go 'near' to the low voltage part of the circuit with the high voltage portion of the wiring.

That's called a current sensing transformer.

You could also place the hall sensor if you really want to use that in the gap of a slotted toroid around which the primary wire is wound a number of turns.

Adding a fuse is a basic precaution, you should size it based on the wire thickness that you are using.

You are doing pretty good but beware of knowing 'just enough to be dangerous'.

Alternatively once you've finished prototyping the circuit you could hand off the process of packaging it in a way that complies with the various standards to an electrical engineering firm, from a liability perspective that might be a good idea anyway.

hth
Seems like their core business is pretty counter-cyclical. If the economy goes down, it'll be harder to raise funding, but more people will want coupons and more businesses will be desperate for any short-term revenue.
Countries with more gender inequality have more female IMO contestants: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/22/8801.abstract

If you change the gender of a name and leave everything else constant on an academic CV, acceptance rates go down from 70% to 45%.
http://dimer.tamu.edu/simplog/archive.php?blogid=3&pid=1...

If it were actually the case women were inherently less interested in science, sure, I wouldn't care, but discrimination exists. Much more subtly than it used to, but it's still there, and hence still a problem.
She was dealt a tough hand. Very few firms have second lives and very few innovation firms can cost cut to greatness. Motorola is a more frequent outcome than Apple.
Except even if you managed to acquire all those companies, all their key leaders would leave Yahoo in a year to do their own thing.

I mean, do you really think the New York Times staff wants to work for Yahoo! News? Or that Jack Dorsey wants to work for Yahoo! Mobile?

Yahoo can't buy their way out of this mess, IMHO.
The fact they have mistakes as bad as "brtittny" but nothing wrong with "spears" suggests to me the data was generated by a query along the lines of "<something like britney> spears" (i.e. the query specified it had to end in "spears").
My boss wants a narrated line-by-line English explanation of our code
It's bad form to use the comments to complain that your employer isn't receiving enough attention on HN.
Automated Innodb Hot Backup to S3 from ec2
I wonder if Yahoo! lacks the vision of a founder to compare with Gates, Jobs & Woz, Branson, Larry & Sergey, even Zuckerberg?

It's been described as listless and without vision or a clear direction for several years now. Particularly with more macro economic trends, now is a good time for CEOs and business owners to re-engage themselves and their teams with the original vision or intent of their business, to help confirm a new vision moving forward.

I've just never felt that Yahoo! had that baton handed to them by the original founders (I even had to search for their names - Jerry Yang and David Filo). Plenty of companies grow to enormous success without the founder having to drive it, of course, but there's usually some connection that links the CEO to the company's founding principles. Yang is still on the Board I believe - can anyone point me to where his thoughts on the direction might have been shared?
A Microsoft acquisition looked attractive, but I would argue that a Google acquisition would be far better for both.

Google would foster a culture totally different from Yahoo's, and at the same time thrill the existing Yahoo employees - which means they would stick around. So much opportunity for both.

Microsoft is a great company, but their online businesses are losing money like crazy, and I suspect that many Yahooers would not be super excited about joining Microsoft.
Identifying talent is not a substitute for actual vision. Buzz does an excellent job of making that point here:

http://log.scifihifi.com/post/6891792369/i-would-like-to-ann...
That has not been my experience. I just wrote a script to compute my stats for the last 10 years. I did roughly 20,000 lines of code per year (this is not counting comments and empty lines, if that is included then this goes up to 35,000 lines). Oh, and I prefer VIM to Eclipse :D.

But using LOC as a measure of work quality or suitability for learning another language is really ludicrous. I would really hope that most people in the industry and Java programmers in particular are capable of learning Scala. I like to think that suitability of the language for a task is a quality of a language not the programmer. Yes, all languages in use are Turing complete, but some are better suited for certain tasks. The question we should be asking is what kinds of projects Scala excels at, and what kinds of applications is it really good for?
Aren't funded startups, around here, the people you can charge a lot of rent money to? I mean, every time I walk through the highest-value retail spaces in the south bay (like, say, castro st in mountain view.) I run across startup offices.

I'm not sure what you could do with land around here that would net you more money than being a trendy startup hub.
I have found the easiest way to get more engagements is to directly contact the organizers of the events that you would like to speak at. Ask if they would like an abstract of the talk you would like to present and find out if they have open spots in the field that you would like to get a spot in. Strangely enough ad-words are pretty cheap for tech speaker keywords so you could try an ad campaign targeting relative search terms.

Like anything else, marketing is the key here. View yourself as the product and think about the ways you would sell that product. A speaker web site would be in order, any video's you have of your engagements should go there. Bio info should be included as well as a calendar of talks that you have and will give along with any supporting information for those talks. If you would like more suggestions, feel free to contact me, my email is in my profile.
Tilt: a WebGL-based 3D visualization of a Webpage
The problem is that Yahoo was born as a product that became obsolete quickly. It has no DNA anymore, it's just a collection of various media services. It's not a computer, or a piece of software, or a social network. It was a directory of web links. A library.

It's doubtful that a Steve Jobs could come back to Yahoo and get it back in touch with its roots. IMHO, their best bet is to sell.
Yea, but if you buy all the companies. They couldn't leave in one year because they would need to earn out there shares.
And the Google TV would be manufactured by Motorola, no less!
I'm thinking economically: qualified in my use means that a client is willing to pay for the end product.
My Startup Story: Lessons Learned from Ngame.tv
hey you have an email i can ge you at? i'd be interested in talking to you the book.
I don't know about that. Aol bought techcrunch and let them go hog wild, that ended up okay.
10 new industries Apple could go into (but probably won’t)
He's not really trolling them tbh. 4chan's community is just worried that moot will shut down 4chan in favour of Canvas. A lot of 4chan users look at Canvas as another Web 2.0 company that will quickly sell out.

And anyway, Canvas can't stay in public beta forever, can it?
I am not a resident, but have been there several times and have friends there. My understanding is that the issue has nothing to do with it actually being unsafe and more to do with zoning. Basically what was there previously was a restaurant and they converted it to office space without getting the proper permits from San Francisco. You can see something to that effect in Scoble's picture:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/111091089527727420853/posts/PefH...

Edit: great details posted by guelo suggests the story is not quite what I'd heard, the owner seems like a ridiculous person - it seems the city didn't care to certify his construction work at all at first but now wants to - http://www.sfweekly.com/2002-11-20/news/griftin-on-the-dock-...

http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-05-29/bay-area/29596184_1_po...
I'm not so sure about this. The roots of a company run deeper than a product. The original goal of Yahoo! was similar in spirit to Google: help people make sense of the massive amount of information available on the web. They've of course gone in a wild array of directions since then, and I'm not sure they had as long a view of the web as Google did, but I'd be surprised if the founders don't have a good number of strong views they've held about how things should work online since the beginning. It remains to be seen if they can tap into the creative energy and focus that led Yahoo! to its early success.