skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is this essentially "unofficially okay"

I would make it officially OK and inform my potential employer of the intent to do work outside of your agreement with them. Above board is always better. A word of advice though once you have an official OK in writing, don't talk about your other work at your job. You can read the famous story of Woz, the Apple 1 and HP for the reasoning why you should not. In short they said they where not interested, he built it and then they wanted a slice of the pie. It's better to get it in writing before any side projects and then never mention it again.
I always attributed DHH's characteristics to a worldly European bravado. He uses language, but not in a vile way. It's punctuations of emotion and emphasis. There's a quality of "opinionated, hot, european guy being loud = cool; others = know your place."

Be careful not to conflate the simple language issue with the heavier weighted, and slightly related, issues of inappropriate misogyny and child rapist jokes.
Worse still, if you increase your price, they would not come back, which make the first discount even less useful.
I know it doesn't answer your question but take the job at Google. The odds are you'll be "richer" are much more in the long run. Plus, it solves your problems right now.
I took computer engineering instead of computer science because it provides a more in depth study of the field .
The reverse was that it took longer to finish it and it was harder.
So, the answer was yes.
I think it was uncommonly honest for him to discuss it in those terms. Possibly not wise, but I hate to condemn a person for not concealing their motives.

And -- there's no exclusion between topic and persona. But you can have many topics, but you rarely get multiple public personas. For many people, and I'd bet Zach is one of them, their reputation is their biggest asset. Being careful about it seems entirely sensible to me.
Fox News Invites Audience to Speak With GOP Candidates on Google+ Hangouts
This sounds like a ghetto interpretation of a pension.
This is absolutely true: the key demographic for Rum & Monkey is 14-year-old Indonesian teenage girls.

Thank you, you are key to making our days in the call center go by quickly.

-- Aditya
Everything will be relegated to the 'dustbin of history' given a long enough time period, it's a completely meaningless statement.

CDs were quite useful for many years, before they were replaced by newer, superior technologies. Mobile apps are currently the best way to deliver the best user experience on mobile devices.

In the future this may change, but that should not be particularly surprising to anybody given how quickly technology improves.
My reaction was to the very first line of the piece.

"Swearing is a strong tool. It can be a particularly strong tool during presentations."

I get that Zach believes he is building a connection and empathy by using profanity. My argument is the same there as well. I personally believe that profanity doesn't work well as a tool for creating personal connections and empathy either.

There is a group of people that thinks:
"Oh man! he used the f-word in his public talk. He's so passionate and edgy. I feel connected to his disregard for old-fashioned professionalism."

I would suspect the group of people that think along those lines is rather small. I would also suspect that even for those people that feel a connection, the net result of the use of that profanity in their overall take-away from the talk is a tiny positive.
I think it has it's place ... not sure if the market is ready for it though. This is kind of like web 4.0.
I saw the same thing and was also confused. It looks like a section heading, so I went through trying to find the explanation of who was sleeping with whom in this company...
Nothing builds confidence in a fellow developer like

//We have to do it this way. Trust me

followed by crap code...
Except that Linux doesn't tend to suffer from the browser-infesting stealth installs common to other platforms; the case of packaged addons seems far more common and likely.
That's a good point... I do forget, manned vs. robotic are two completely different ball games.
Villa Capriana , Campania - Amalfi Coast
Clinton also had a rather dazzling and effective way of connecting with an audience, but it was much more noticeable in person. People talk about having the uncanny sense that he was speaking to them personally.
The same reason we have front-end developers who don't know how to write business logic, and back-end developers who don't know how to write a presentation layer.
Be careful, I've created a fastmail.fm (actually airpost.net which is one of their domains) account, and unless you're paying for it, they can and will wipe your account if you leave it fallow/unused for a year or more (unsure what the duration is).

This became an annoying problem when I created a seperate account backed by my airpost.net email (won't do that again unless I decide to pay for the email acct).
While I agree that "science" (as defined in the article) is a very good way to make use of data, I do not think the data without the science is useless.

For one, if you collect the data now you can always apply the "science" later--as long as you have the data and can query it, you're always ready. This alone means that collecting data now could be useful even if you have no idea of what to do with it. Storage is relatively cheap, and you--or somebody else--might come up with a clever way to analyze it in the future.

Additionally, I think the author underestimates the potential of machine learning. I am by no means an expert in the field (I'm taking an AI class--that has to count for something! ;) I hope) but even the simple techniques we've covered can get some interesting information without much domain knowledge involved. As ML evolves, I suspect there will be more and more technology that can find interesting trends and relationships in data regardless of what the data is actually modelling. The article does mention ML a bit, but I think it will be much more significant in the near future.

Ultimately, figuring out what questions to ask about data and harnessing human curiosity will give you much more than just hoarding data. I just think it's possible that sufficiently abstract and generic approaches in the near future will make it easier to get similar--or perhaps orthogonal--results using techniques from ML and AI. I firmly believe that hoarding the data without doing anything to it is still much better than not collecting it at all.
I hate to sound harsh here, but I'm not sure you're going to be of much use at a HACK-a-thon.
Indeed.

But a lot of mobile apps are not like games. They are adaptations of web sites for a particular mobile device. This is where what he is saying surely makes a lot of sense. Really, apps like twitter should be able to be done with HTML5.

But more involved applications like games make sense to be native applications.
Thanks! If I understand correctly, I should get a one-time official OK in writing before I join, and then I use my own judgment when deciding to do some consulting (to make sure there's no conflicts of interest)? Or do I get an official OK in writing before every gig?

This is what my non-compete clause roughly says:

Duty not to compete: My work at the company requires my undivided attention. I will not, without the company's written consent, engage in any other business that directly competes with the company, uses any of the company's materials, or otherwise conflicts with the company's business interests.
I would agree with this, unless your resume includes Bell Labs in the 70-80's, I would take the job at Google, later on it will bring serious consideration by startups that are further along in their path to profitability and better funded candidates.
Scrollbars: Why is Apple eradicating a linchpin of user interface design?
My $250 iTunes bill this month suggests Apple is also shipping you a cash register.
It is probably the massive cold I have, but does that mean this replay is from a "playback" file of the old etherpad interface since it is dated February 2009?
Seriously. If the MongoDB thing doesn't work out, they should consult other tech companies on how to deal with (potentially) bad press...
Interesting to compare two products that aren't actually out yet.
There are a couple tons of hydrazine in the vehicle. That's very newsworthy by itself.
CoderBuddy, Napster investor's free Web IDE, creates Facebook App in a minute
UNIX v6 predates ANSI C by over a decade I think.
Please forgive me, this is OT: can anyone here recommend a good online resource for learning SQL "the hard way"?
There's absolutely a divide between Winston Churchill and Steve Jobs. And if you're talking at a technical conference about how awesome Github is, you're definitely on one side of that divide, and it isn't Winston Churchill.

That's not a bad thing. Steve Jobs still changed history by taking the stage and talking millions of people into buying touchscreen phones, but it's best not to get an overinflated self-image about what we do.
Don't be sorry. You haven't hurt anyone's feelings (and if you have, they were too fragile to survive long on HN). It's fine to defend your arguments and later realise you're wrong. That doesn't make you a lesser person - on the contrary, you're someone who now knows one more thing. That's good. If HN can do that more often, that's good.
Sabatticals are an interesting thing. SGI, Tandem, Sun, Google for a while, all had sabbaticals after a period of time.

HR people note that people often don't come back from them. I think that is in part because you do get to refresh a bit and think about things and ask really deep questions like "what do I really want to be doing with my time?" A lot of things change in 5 years.

However, the idea of letting people take an extended break to recharge is a good one, if someone comes up with a good way to do that without losing employees it would be well received.
One of the interesting things I discovered was that their idea of 24/7 support simply meant was that I could leave a message anytime, and they'd get back to me at some unspecified point (but usually within 48 hours!) between 8 and 5, Mon. through Fri.

When I did get a calls back, their first questions never pertained to my problem. They were far more concerned with the state of their self-help system, and wanted to know if and how failures there led to my calling them directly.

This was a couple of years ago, and it may have gotten better since then. However, the steady drumbeat of posts like this indicates that it hasn't.
To give some more context, the "startup" I'm considering isn't really so much a 5-10 person bootstrapped startup as it is a company like Dropbox, Square, Airbnb, etc.

So it's a fairly successful startup with really cool people and problems, it's well-funded, it's on a path to profitability, and it does pay a competitive base salary -- it's just not profitable right now and so doesn't offer the massive bonuses that Google does.
I respect your discomfort. But if there is also a roomful of people who want to talk about sex, who maybe even enjoy the discomfort of sprinkling often-taboo subjects into their discussion, can we as a community accommodate both them, and people who are discomforted? Can we just go to separate rooms?
> After fighting you guys...

Competitive much? :)
You know you are hostage of a company that may discontinue the technology you depend on any moment they want, right?
The Change-Up Movie
Code search is going away.
Network theory reveals patterns in Supreme Court votes
The engines failed to fire. All those fuels are not being used. The probe is circling the Earth on inertia. After a while without power the orbit will deteriorate.

Hope they can get the engine to fire before it's too late.
They do, at least I remember reading this. Give them time. They're still considering the applications that were on time.
install once is often easier than navigating to a URL on a phone each time. Many users like apps due to one click launch
A July 4th 2011 Radiation Anomaly in Seattle
Six weeks doesn't sound that much TBH, many countries require at least five weeks paid holiday per year.
I was really happy to see an honest reaction from the team in a public way. I do think that in the long run Page's streamlining of Google's products is a good thing for the company, but I do hate to see something I used go away.
I think the point is that to be harassed is to be engaged in a competition - for autonomy, freedom, time to make up your mind on your own etc.
My mistake - typo. Fixed the title.
MuseMake Opens Challenge For Entrepreneurs - Offers a Biz Plan Comp 2.0
We have a legacy database we support that creates a new dynamic stored procedure (with the same body) every time it performs a particular operation. How you can have enough knowledge to do this, but not to use a single procedure is beyond me.
Not to belabor this, but if during installation you choose "Graphical Desktop" (or are using a LiveCD) then dev tools like gcc, make etc. are not installed. (Choose "Software Development" instead and they would be.)

Sorry to hear that the installer hung though! I have not experienced that, and I'm on my 20th Fedora 16 install.
I don't really want to work with anyone who has "crafted" a "persona." I want to work with interesting people - and sometimes those people are characters. That's who they are - no work involved.

Some of them swear, a lot. If it's natural, I don't really see an issue - and if it's situationally appropriate. A technical talk to a group of developers may not be marred by an f-bomb. A presentation to a customer almost always will be.
Yes, you could write such a program.

Yes modern OSes do use non-Application RAM for caching, mostly files and other small buffers. While Firefox is probably doing a lot of caching for web content, something that modern OSes don't yet do. Hence I have no qualms about it using over a gig of RAM.

I guess my comment was read more angrily than I meant it to sound. What I mean is let applications use as much RAM as they need and be done with it.
Looking Outside Ruby: Node.js
Cream of asparagus
Cody B's Full Part From Convoy
I'm not an artist/designer, nor have I ever done spec work as a developer, but it seems to me a lot easier to decide to help a not-for-profit organization (Mozilla) aimed at general societal benefit for $0 than to do so for a for-profit company.
And when they recommend you to others, they're sure to mention that you're "dirt cheap." The fact that you do really solid work will be cited as an extra added bonus.
But then why do you call it "Earth" instead of "Planet"?
I doubt its illegal because I have friends who interned at the department of labor (and other govt. jobs) doing all the jobs that would be commonly parsed out to full time employees.
Luxury Villa Lisca Bianca at Panarea Aeolian islands
A single-sourced, anonymous, piece like this one wouldn't (or at least shouldn't) be making the front page of widely read publications.

Is this something HN can fix?

When I vote something up (as I did with the article mentioned), I'm thinking "this seems interesting", not "this seems authoritative and well sourced". The idea that someone might go through the effort of writing something like this as a "prank" didn't even enter my mind. Perhaps it might help for there to be some short-circuit mechanism for publicly flagging false stories which are found to be blatantly fabricated (or is it a rare enough occurrence that it doesn't matter)?
The Law of Attraction
Maybe, but as a programmer it's always nice to have someone paying attention to the other things you don't like doing, like making a good presentation, mocking up designs, etc. Esp since a lot of people don't pay any attention to that stuff it can be quite worthwhile.
"Wow. Why do I find all the really howling bad stuff so close to databases?"

I have seen a few of those, but you also have to include not only stored procedures but also table layout etc. Things like "if I don't define my foreign keys, I can use a foreign key to reference rows in EITHER table a or table b!"

And then of course when you write sprocs against that mess, you get more messes.

The thing is that databases are fundamentally math engines with some extra services tacked on. This means that designing databases is ideally a mathematically sound representation of your data not specific to your application, and the database queries bridge the gap. Most developers don't understand this though and so as the application changes, you get big messes.

Now, obviously the above is an ideal which really can't be met in most cases. However the closer one is, generally the more ideal the situation, and most apps are really far from it.
Git, the version control system so many people like and use every day, arose because the entire Linux kernel community found themselves suddenly without the version control system they'd become accustomed to, and had to do without until they created a replacement. And Git has long since become much better than Bitkeeper.

How much more awesome will HTML, JavaScript, and CSS get when Flash finally goes away?
Web apps are fine for lightweight, data-driven tasks. For tasks that require richer interactions they are still decidedly inferior. This may change as HTML standards and compliance evolve but it's not crazy to suggest that a well-written native app will always be one or two steps ahead.
Want More Money – Share Your Wares
No. That's why I quit this discussion.
For anyone who writes (and these days who doesn't?) I highly recommend the classic "Elements of Style" by William Strunk. If you only read one book about writing this should be it.

http://www.bartleby.com/141/

Btw, I think it's more efficent to first write a "braindump" and then start editing, rather than reiterating a sentence a time. You'll remove and rework a lot of what you write but it's easier to get in the flow and just "get things done" before you start rewriting it.
Restaurants in Cochabamba
Is it actually using 25% of physical RAM, or just (25% of 6GB) of Virtual Address space (well actually 4GB address space for 32 bit applications/browsers).

Then again do you actually notice a slow down when you try to edit those photos? Have you run benchmarks to see if it's really a problem with RAM usage or if it's some Flash or other plugin that's gobbling up your CPU, hence the slow down.

Does that really matter so much, since if you actually need to use that Physical ram for your editing task the OS should page out physical memory from the browser and other unused applications and make it available for your needs.
That's not a problem with spec work. That's a problem with the company. If they are happy for your work, and not trying to short change you anyway, then they'll not complain.
And a charismatic person who used the word "fuck", would he convey less than the same person avoiding using the word?
Of course. But if a for-profit company came to me, I would consider doing the same for them. I may take it. I may not. But my point is that it's not evil. It's a case-by-case thing and that if a designer wants to work for free, why are others getting up in arms about it. It DOESN'T affect them.
Show HN: Greasemonkey script for special HN handling in Google Reader
Put this together because the original "open GR item in new tab" was broken and highly inefficient. I also added special handling for HN, where it would open the comments section so you don't lose the discussion page.

https://github.com/inev/GR-open-tab
ya they probably also disable the facebook platform in their account settings.
Web apps were a natural bridge into the "cloud" world but now that we've all gotten good at decoupling our UIs from our backend and building all our web apps like a service native apps can just as easily be natural clients of the cloud.
I think at this point I am bragging that I have never written one. Ok, I have used views of views, but.......

I have, however, had the misfortune of troubleshooting those 10 page queries. Finding a stupid typo in one of those is like looking for a needle in a haystack.....
Hit the nail on the head. Exactly a point I am trying to make :)
>But right now thats like saying a kid won't have a good job because of his grade 5 scores.

Conversely, would you say that a kid in grade 5 who has bad scores is going to have a great job when he grows up, just you wait and see? We can only judge the mobile web as a platform (if one can even say that it is one platform and not many) by what it offers on mobile handsets today, not by what we hope it will one day become. Also, we can't judge it by hoping that one day, all the mobile browsers will conform to the WC3's standards, because we know how good a job today's desktop browsers do at quickly becoming standards-compliant.
I think his main point was that people are already hoarding but - like most knowledge - don't know what they're missing/clueless about without some good statistical analysts.

My employer has a whole department of these analysts and after working with them closely it is obvious to me that they are the most important / valuable to ourselves and customers asset in the whole company. Engineers can pick up on some of these things but these guys aren't just picking stuff out of their ass or anything. I'd have to agree with the author that any company storing or collecting any significant amount of data should give this stuff some serious thought.
MongoDB is a very ambitious, very new, and very large piece of software. Betting your company on something that meets that description entails significant risk.

If MongoDB makes it possible for you to do something unique, that no other proven solution would allow, it might be worth the risk.

If you used MongoDB because you heard it's the latest hip technology, and your company suffers, you made a stupid mistake that you'll hopefully learn from.
Loyalty to a country is commonly called patriotism. Are you denying that patriotism exists?
The question is: besides games, how many apps really use richer interactions than what's already possible using web technologies?
A few years ago a satellite was falling to earth[1], and although it supposedly had much less dangerous materials onboard than this thing, every nation was hurrying to blow it out of the sky. And eventually they did. Why can't they do that with this one when it falls ?

[1] http://articles.cnn.com/2008-02-19/tech/satellite.shootdown_...

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2010-07/19/content_101211...
I don't expect to be much use at the hackathon. I'm going to get more involved with the startup community and contribute whatever I can -- ideas, presentation, etc.
I'm not really a fan of these game theory-style targets, they just bring out the worst in people. Being an employee at a business for a long time should be the result of an excellent environment, not from being bribed with a long term financial milestone.
Can you add an option for scrolling through songs with the [left] & [right] arrow keys + make [Esc] to close the YouTube window, kind of like what Facebook does with the photo theater viewer
I build a Cloudmine app yesterday at a Hackathon. Setup was very fast and early one we didn't have a need for server-side processing. But then requirements evolved (as they always do) and we found the Javascript hooks very useful.

Speaking as someone who has never used node.js before, it was nice to not have to worry about setup and just start coding.
> Comedy option: Cluster of mac minis running an Objective-C server

A cluster of mac minis with ssd and maxed out on memory - running hunchentoot on Clozure Common Lisp (+ Objective-C FFI) is in fact, a very good description of my system.

I think it is a fairly attractive solution.

Never underestimate the power of the dark side of the source.
Likewise, I thought code-search was invaluable. I used it often while coding.

The plus side is that the team could reflect honestly (and in public). At some companies, commenting publicly would be a career limiting move.