skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Like others have said, decide on the merits of your internship.

I left recently (a few months ago) and much of Yegge's rant rings true - but like all big companies, it is not universal. My main caveat when others ask me about working for Amazon is - know exactly which team you'll be on. That will be the difference between a hell on earth scenario vs. a pretty sweet job.

From your internship, you have much more information than most people coming into the company. Use that.

And even if it does turn out to be the wrong decision, the golden handcuffs are only on for 12-24 months. Amazon on your resume is incredibly powerful and opens a lot of doors, so you won't really have suffered in the long run for it. Towards the end of my tenure I had recruiters banging down my door, so your options even if Amazon turns out to be a bad fit are, well, pretty limitless.
While the above might be true, I know that Amazon excels at customer service whereas google's is essentially non-existent. So from the customer perspective, I would choose Amazon over google any day.
Maybe there's a way we can collaborate.
Why The 99% Should Protest Against Y Combinator
Hi folks - director of the Wes Career Center here. Happy to see this article is getting some notice.

On campus recruiting is a game of yield - the companies that come back to campus year after year have multiple positions to fill and consistently get a good turn out from Wes students. Google returns every year because we get a great response from students. Other, less well-known tech firms that have tried haven't gotten a big enough response to keep coming back for on campus recruiting.

BUT - most people will not get a job through on-campus recruiting in the first place. We have lots of resources for folks interested in tech fields, and, as the article underlines, we have a great network of alumni out there that we can help you connect to. Indeed, the whole point to Digital Wesleyan is to create awareness and real networking opportunities for alumni and for students that turn into business opportunities and job opportunities. That's why the career center jumped at the change to work with Jake to get it launched.

Come on down to Butterfield A - happy to work with you!
It is one of the contention points here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876
IPhone 5 FREE (4S) - Check it out
In chrome I run Ghostery, Adblock Plus, and Disconnect.

Any other plugins recommended?
Nyan Cat formatter for RSpec
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Ruby may seem easier to pick up than java, but it gets pretty complicated when you actually try to understand its power.

Try explaining eigenclasses to some java-only developers sometime.
The advantages of being a late adopter...
Yes, but what is the state of the art of most server-side web apps, really. Even the most successful web apps don't do all that exciting stuff. Most are just pushing data around and perform well enough with whatever tools you throw at it. In many cases performance is simply not that much of an issue compared to other factors such as development speed.

Javascript is a front-end technology and therefore it is really different and not really suitable for comparison in this case.
5 Things About Competition That Statups Should Know
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We're laser focused on texting while driving right now, it's the one big use case for voice commands.

Regardless of whether your app is same/better/worse than Siri, please please please don't pursue a use case around texting while driving.

I'll skip my rant about the fact that texting while driving is dangerous even if you remove the keyboard input (you still gotta read the reply messages @ 65mph).

(EDIT: Ok, I see that your app will read texts too. Still doesn't negate the following:)

The issue you face is that as a second-class citizen app (ie not Google or the device manufacturer) on my phone, here is my workflow to text while driving using your app:

1) I decide I want to text

2) While driving, I have to feel my way around my phone to press the fiddly "power" button at the top of the handset (let's assume it is in a cradle)

3) Oh, but wait I have screen-wipe security enabled, so I now got to dance my finger across the screen - again, while doing 75mph (yes, I like to drive fast up the 280)

4) Ok so now I'm in. But damn, I'm at the home screen. I got to find your app - we'll assume I put it on the backdrop of the home screen. I press it and wait for the app to load.

This all assumes that I put your app in a primary positon on my phone, that I wasn't already in another app and so I had to press the home button, that the home screen wasn't on a different 'pane' then the one your app icon is on, and that your app starts recording voice commands as soon as I open it up.

Sorry, but that's still A LOT of steps, is dangerous, may not be legal in California due to it being more then one button and makes a lot of assumptions.

Google and the handset manufactures, who give themselves first-class citizen access, have the advantage because they can add extra buttons for one-press access. They can also use private APIs to potentially remove the screen lock (although that has other issues associated with it). Apple, when they integrate Siri into iPhone 4S, will presumably have similar advantages.

Sorry, I'm all for the little guy and the 3rd party ecosystem - but I'm also for safety. As a driver (and motorcycle rider) I really fear people using tools like yours while driving.

For that reason, I'm sorry, but I really hope your app is a failure.
Yeah... trying to update has actually completely screwed up my phone. I can't even get it to restore.

edit: finally got it to work again after going through the 'force into restore mode' process about a dozen times.
> It's an unfortunate sign for HN when the top comment on a thread is such a content-free rant.

To the contrary, the tenor of the majority of comments makes it clear that the context is well-understood already, and this is encouraging.

Users evidencing a strong moral compass is a reason to rejoice, not despair.

If you want some context, try Wikipedia.

Monsanto is responsible for more than 50 United States Environmental Protection Agency Superfund sites, attempts to clean up Monsanto Chemical's formerly uncontrolled hazardous waste sites.[27]

The Center for Food Safety[108] listed 112 lawsuits by Monsanto against farmers for claims of seed patent violations.[27] The Center for Food Safety's analyst stated that many innocent farmers settle with Monsanto because they cannot afford a time consuming lawsuit. Monsanto is frequently described by farmers as "Gestapo" and "Mafia" both because of these lawsuits and because of the questionable means they use to collect evidence of patent infringement.[27]

It's a combination of a major environmental polluter and a patent troll.

Dumping of toxic waste in the UK

Between 1965 and 1972, Monsanto paid contractors to illegally dump thousands of tons of highly toxic waste in UK landfill sites, knowing that their chemicals were liable to contaminate wildlife and people. The Environment Agency said the chemicals were found to be polluting groundwater and the atmosphere 30 years after they were dumped.[71]

The Brofiscin quarry, near Cardiff, erupted in 2003, spilling fumes over the surrounding area, but the local community was unaware that the quarry housed toxic waste.

A UK government report shows that 67 chemicals, including Agent Orange derivatives, dioxins and PCBs exclusively made by Monsanto, are leaking from one unlined porous quarry that was not authorized to take chemical wastes. It emerged that the groundwater has been polluted since the 1970s.[72] The government was criticised for failing to publish information about the scale and exact nature of this contamination. According to the Environment Agency it could cost £100m to clean up the site in south Wales, called "one of the most contaminated" in the UK.[73]

One thing to remember is that patents are fundamentally at odds with food availability. You can either have Big Pharma-like profits, or cheap food that feeds billions.

As it is, countries with functional governments already overproduce food. Zimbabwe used to be called the "Breadbasket of Africa" before Mugabe.
Or maybe Apple doesn't know anything about the ad business and has executed poorly. No need to over think it.
I agree that the JVM memory usage is a problem, but also because we are running out of memory bandwidth on modern architectures for many use cases.

While switching to immutable state and using things like STM can help in many ways in order to program all these cores that we are getting thrown at us, we pay with the memory bandwidth costs. Doing this stuff on the JVM surely makes the problem worse.

As VMs as well as multi-core and functional style become more popular I can't help feeling we need typical memory bandwidth of new systems to grow a bit faster.
Show HN: I built Scrolldit.com, endless Reddit scrolling in a new interface
I'm really tired of language debates when 90% of effort goes into libraries, APIs, and IDE/editor integration, not the language itself. I'd take modern C++ over, say, PHP, as long as I get to use some really awesome, common, standardized web server library.

If Java becomes the new hotness again, it will be only marginally due to performance, and primarily due to the endless cycles of "new hotness" and obsessiveness in the industry.
Seed Hatchery accelerator getting soup to nuts coverage on TNW
This makes me angry! This is has some semblance of blackmail or a protection scheme like in gangs and the mafia - you know they're crooked, but you gotta pay up or they're going to come back and break your legs. I'm stretching the analogy a tad but you get the point. As the article says, "economic (and political) diplomacy...and yet, China is getting away with it because if you don't 'play ball' with them and start the blame game, you can kiss my economic market goodbye.

We need to do better at innovating newer security measures and start thinking outside the box so as tip the balance of cyber offense and defense dominance in our favor...
It depends on what the language and compiler do for you, the elegant form may actually be faster than your supposed uglier-but-faster optimization. As always, time-test before and (if you've decided it's necessary) after optimizing. I remember reading a warning somewhere in the Clojure docs about how using (get x idx) is much faster than (nth x idx), I don't remember why though.
#1: How is that at all relevant? Did Sony at some point claim they were unable to retrieve users' passwords without disproportionate effort?
We approve of this comment.

Sincerely,

DHS, CIA, NSA, FBI, ATF, and the DEA.
Hmmm. May be I haven't kept up, but I definitely remember reading about the labor practices of Nike (vietnam, I think). May be they changed, if they did, kudos to them.
I Just moved to Chicago - Are you interested in meeting up?
ABOUT ME

My name is Jade, I'm a 20 something male born and raised in Southern CA.
I'm a backend developer (primarily ruby). I just took a job in Chicago and I'm excited to meet and work with new people.

LETS TALK

Have a startup or side-project? Want to get involved in the industry? Blackhat hacker? Everybody has something to offer!

For me ; I'd like to improve education.
Toward that end I'm working on a way to make learning web-application development accessible to anybody that is motivated to learn. This is a huge and far reaching goal so I don't really have anything concrete - I just know my life's work involves improving education.

HELP ME

I've perused meetup.com for software related groups and I'll likely attend every one I can.
However I'd ideally like to start a meetup where the goal is to talk about learning. How do we as engineers learn? What path did you take from noob to expert. How do you learn new technologies? We might even setup crash-course presentations where each member teaches the group something new.

Most meetups I've been to are just marketing presentations by the organizers. We sit there and listen to some guy's startup idea. Help me find the ones (and/or create a new one) that is genuinely interested in making the group better as a whole by encouraging and motivating its parts - the people!

ARE YOU NEW TO PROGRAMMING BUT WANT TO LEARN?

I'm also very interested in meeting people interested in programming but with no background experience - noobs. I will be more than happy to share with you what I know and offer suggestions to get you started. The only requirement is that you are motivated to learn and are serious about making stuff.

THANK YOU!

My email and personal info is in my profile if you need it.
The documentary "Food Inc" describes Monsanto's behavior with respect to genetically modified seeds.

Example from my admittedly poor memory: A farmer's neighbor bought Monsanto's genetically modified seeds and some of the seeds blew into the farmers flield. Monsanto sued him and made him destroy all his seeds. When the farmer complained to the government he discover that the official responsible for representing his interests was on the board of Monsanto.

As far as "feeding the hungry". Monsantos seeds are genetically modified produce plants that don't have replantable seeds i.e. every year you have to buy your seeds from Monsanto. The 3rd world can't afford to use Monsanto's seeds and our subsidies of the corn industry make is hard for 3rd world farmers to make a living.
As a CPA with years of experience in specialized state and local tax issues. I can tell you that sales and use tax is very complex and burdensome. But, at the same time internet retailers have taken advantage of the the law's inability to keep up with new business models, so internet retailers have had an unfair advantage over brick and mortar companies.

Just giving the issue perspective from both sides.
At MS it's pretty typical for the pace of work to become very, very casual after a release (which typically happens every few years).
RIM shares were trading at nearly $70 in February, but are now worth just under $25, meaning the company has lost nearly two thirds of its value in eight months.

Same problem as Netflix; austerity > apathy.
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I don't buy it. Having siri respond to a create reminder command with a bunch of computer-read text about what you could buy nearby would be so obnoxious and disruptive that it would undermine the user experience. Who would want to use that?

Also, it's not clear to me why they would need to create a crap user experience for some ad revenue when they get such high margins on their devices. They don't seem to be having trouble making money.
Beware: The iOS 5 Update Could Crash Your iPhone
Apple releases Xcode 4.2 with iOS 5 and Lion SDKs
The OP mentioned that Facebook is a big corporation so they clearly must have secure data structures and invincibility from all attacks ever. I'm just pointing out that to support my point -- Facebook has the ability to fetch the data but really doesn't want to. Secure data structures have nothing to do with it, they don't prevent the fetching of data. And if Facebook is smart, they don't just throw things around randomly in the database without rhyme or reason.
Google Engineer: Google+ Is a Knee-Jerk Reaction
If A players surround themselves with A players and B players surround themselves with C players then those numbers sound about right.
So the author has moral objections to what Monsanto is doing, and that is an immediate impetus for...what exactly? For the 99% to redirect their ire to Y Combinator as a proxy for Cloudant? Sorry, I have trouble reading through equivocations if someone is trying to make a point.
Oh boo-hoo. You're not exactly an impartial observer here.

Besides, it's one thing for Apple to manufacture a computer that gets bought by a Monsanto employee somewhere, and another for a YC startup to decide to work with Monsanto and help them with whatever pure evil they're up to next.
Off topic—

Sam, did you enjoy the film?
Yes, Siri, very much
How many stars out of five would you give it?
Four.
Thank you, Sam. I will try to recommend similar films in the future.

Has anyone watched the 2009 film Moon? I read that whole conversation in Kevin Spacey's voice.
I agree with your and dionidium's characterizations. My intent wasn't to paint a one-sided anti-Monsanto picture (although I think I ended up doing that, and alas can't edit my original post at this point), but rather to offer an alternative to temphn's characterization of the public's issues with Monsanto.
Good luck, you are only twenty. You have your whole life ahead of you, your father has lived his, its time to live your own. Be the best you can be and do your own thing, dont let other people run your life for you. If your friends are bothering you because of the choices you made. Tell them to get fucked. Really they are not your friends. One thing I have learned in life is that friends come and go, they are nice to have and great to waste time with but at the end of the day rely on yourself.

Also remember a job is just that. A job, its a way to make money to spend on things you want. It is not there to run your life.

pick yourself up, pack a bag and go check out the world, head over to Asia and teach English, go work in a factory and pack boxes (its hard work but, it is very honest) make time for yourself and try to remember who you are.

Go to a bar and pick up a pretty girl. when you have finished your break pick yourself up and start being creative, make one thing. After you have done all of this you should then look for proper work.

you are your own person, the world is a big place, enjoy it.
I don't think Bezos has a technical background... I thought he was a hedge fund guy before moving out to Seattle.

So what can you say about this post posted here 3 years ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465882. The blog post was down, archive.org didn't help also :). But as far as I remember the blogger was praising about bezos leadership skill. Also comments on HN supported that. I am reading HN for about 3 years. In first two years I never saw this kind of amazon bashing.In fact there was many post praising about amazon's internal culture. How on earth things change so dramatically in last one year. Is there some kind of PR war happening here? Honest question.

Edit: found archive.org snapshot http://web.archive.org/web/20090211060734/http://blog.layer8... .
Steve Jobs Was Robbed At Gunpoint In A Pizza Parlor
No ... you should have read the second half of the post ... the first half was the back story (re: Monsanto & Cloudant)
With simplistic design there isn't much that can be done wrong. This is a good thing. But OTOH in such case it's also hard to provide universal tips as tastes regarding minimalism and such are different across the globe. Therefore you cannot please anyone, but aiming for majority is achievable.

IMO in design one of the most important things is keeping, what I call, the C^3 rule. Design must be Clear, Consistent and Coherent. Creativity is not obligatory, may improve user experience, but may also worsen it. Be careful.

Clear meant as easy to follow and understand but also as tidy.

Consistent meant as lacking any contradictions but also as thought-out well enough to avoid any changes for longer period of time.

Coherent meant as expressing your product as unity, where all its parts conform to the same rules and contribute to overall look'n'feel (hopefully in a equal or similar manner) but also as suiting the content.

So let's check it.

C1. Approachable? Yes. Neat? Yes.

C2. Lacks contradictions? No, see qxb comment [1]. Future-proof? It depends [2].

C3. Cohesion? Yes with minor flaws [3]. Does look supports the text. Not everywhere [4].

[1] Beside "posts" looking like a link, its placement is also untoward. Why? Below "posts" there are dates. Are dates the most important parts of posts? No. So you have to fix viewers focus to the correct column, placing "posts" above titles.

[2] The question you have to answer is what you see in future in this blog. Will be there any non-date related pages like, let's say, "projects" or "photos". New sections in header will make it a bit heavier possibly even dominating over your above name.

[3] Your name is written lower-case, but post titles, showing at the same place (actually not exactly, which is another minor flaw) aren't lower-case.
There is also not enough room to breath below the post title. Another thing is "me"+"faq" thing. "Me" links to about page and "faq" is actually about you too. "cv" is again about you. And these links are too close of each other.
To deal with it you have several possible ways, e.g. 1) combining "me" with "faq" (incorporating /faq page into /about), so you'll have "me" "cv" or "myself" "résumé", 2) renaming these links to "who" "am" "I".

[4] Code snippets often does not fit in your text column, making it completely unbalanced and awkward. Wrap them manually (e.g. make 60-chars line a rule).
I like your first set of examples. I keep thinking it would be great if it were integrated with OpenTable. Then you could ask for recommendations for a restaurant with availability for a reservation at a specific time or time range and then reserve it. That would be a killer experience.

I'm not sure though about Siri asking for more information though. Having your phone start asking you questions would be disruptive -- the audio equivalent of a pop-up on a webpage asking you to fill out a survey. The only thing that would make Siri asking you for information unprompted than the pop-up is that it could happen anywhere.
> Norman Bourlag's life work was to develop and distribute high-yield crops.

Borlaug's work was via selective breeding. He helped countries produce unpatented food at massive scale in order to feed a billion people.

These crops also were productive because they were planted in areas that had not yet been subject to intensive farming methods. The major obstacle with modern farming is NOT the crops, but the soil quality, and depletion of topsoil is a major problem which is only exacerbated by more productive crops.

There's no free lunch -- in order to have a more productive crop, i.e. more output, it has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the agricultural inputs.

Monsanto's attempts to control and patent food, were an IP regime put in place to actually enforce that, would simply instigate a food crisis.

You can't have Big Pharma profits without severe controls on availability.

"Feeding the poor" is a complete smokescreen that is fundamentally incompatible with their business model.
Steve Yegge on Steve Yegge's Amazon Google post
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Monsanto makes Microsoft look pretty good.
I'd definitely wait. Apple is swamped now.
Stop asking me for my phone number