skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Web Design Trends 2011/2012
No, all of them had, and most still do. People don't seem to realize how freaking old and complicated those things are.
A "cloned you" at lifenaut.com
I thought both Foursquare and 10gen handled the situation then very well, especially considering how much traction the story got (it had all the elements - a popular service, a popular new database, etc.)

I was sort of suggesting that this anonymous post may have come from somebody at Foursquare, since what is described kinda matches what happen there. The 'politics' element could also match because of the common investor - but I see that both 10gen and 4sq have responded here saying that they do not know who wrote this - which I believe.
The whole concept seems a bit "eh" but imagine if this company grew into something?
What's wrong with Code Complete? You might pick a couple of nits, but these things have to be explained somewhere, and Steve McConnell does a good job there.
Some transparency would be appreciated.

- Who are you?

Your HN acct was created 14 hours ago, and it's name is extremely specific to this particular post -- "nomoremongo". Nothing wrong with it, just a little peculiar considering the subject mater.

- Where did you experience these problems?

I guess I could see some issue around revealing where you work, but honestly, that just sucks. It really doesn't have anything to do with questioning your honesty and integrity; it's more about just being open about things. If you're going to be open about your experiences, why not be open about all of it?

Not to be rude, but the anonymous-nature of this post comes off as a bit over-dramatic.
If you don't apply, for sure you won't have the job :)

It depends on the company and on their needs 4 months from now. But I would expect a company to wait 4 months to get the right profile.
Oh no, you have to learn two languages. The horror! If you know JS it takes about 10 minutes to learn CS, and all of that 10 minutes is learning about all the typing you don't have to do anymore. function function function function... I'm getting sick of it already.
Working on a side project for yourself is easy and as he says, it's possible to find the time.

However, having my own founded and co-founded companies for the last 20 years, I must say unless you have enough money to really work on what you want, you're always working for someone else. As a consultant, you're always working for clients and if business isn't too bad, you can at some point be picky and chose your clients. But, your still working for someone else.

Then, as a pure startup that gets funded, you are working for your investors. Usually, you try to have the best fit and keep enough ownership to make your own decisions, but you're still accountable, which is ok with me. It's sometimes good to have someone to check a bit over your decisions.

But, unless your are extremely fortunate, you are still usually working for someone else. Still, you gain more autonomy and flexibility as opposed to purely being employed.

This said, working for myself works for me and I would never go back to being employed by someone else.

Just know that you'll still be accountable to someone else. The difference is if you screw up, you cannot blame the company. You can only blame yourself. If this happens, it will be a good learning experience.
Remember Ingres? Me neither.
http://bit.ly/uhb6OY
Fair enough on the numbers, thanks for posting the updated figure. DS was 2004 and Wii was 2006. Iphone was 2007, it wasn't that big a head start.
a) Reporting a fact is Libelous?

b) I believe the word you are looking for is Cartel rather than Monopoly, but in either case; if the bill passes they have other problems.

c) It's not a fair tactic; but there's nothing to stop Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft from coordinating on having a day where they banner link to a "Stop the power grab!" site. Singling out individual politicians is problematic.

Seriously though, as a country this whole thing is a sideshow. Our society has become too top heavy and the rights and resources have become too concentrated to the point where the average person no longer believes the social contract is for their long term benefit. That's a very dangerous place to be, and we're worried about losing access to a few cat videos?
Sorry for you, that's a pain. My advice would be: let go this specific job and search for a job right now; you have until the end of November if I understood?

As you had opportunities with Google etc - why not recontacting them? Turns out the initial plan didn't work out.
Was there any other interns there at the same time as you were? That phone call almost sounds like it was intended for someone else.
This is only true if you're 100% unwilling/unable to do anything except code.

This is not true of all "developers." Being able to code does not disqualify you from being an intelligent, versatile human being capable of all sorts of things. And, failing that, it certainly does not prevent you from taking a holistic look at your business and outsourcing the things you can't handle.

The funny thing you realize is how many designers can't design, how many salespeople can't sell, etc. By being committed and flexible, it's amazing the edge you can have, even if you have to pay other people sometimes.

Contrary to popular belief, the first time you code something, the computer does not shoot beams out to alter your DNA and devolve you into a developer sapiens/developer-o-saurus. What you choose to spend your time on and prioritize is up to you, and being able to code only makes you more capable, not less.
I'm a big fan of The Quick Python Book[0] and Dive into Python [1]. The former is especially good if you're coming from a similar dynamic language.

[0]: http://www.manning.com/ceder/

[1]: http://www.diveintopython.net/
It isn't a flaw, but it is exploitable.
Edmonton Homes
When they promised that they would hire you, you should've gotten that in writing (along with what happens if they don't hire you).

Welcome to America.
How many of them bought iOS devices for gaming purpose only?
Indian food catering
I remember (but can't seem to dig up) some research that those programs harm the productivity/morale of the top performers as well, who end up being unreasonably worried that they might end up in the bottom 10% somehow. Either they underestimate their own skills, or worry that a bad review process will undervalue them, so they end up spending a lot of time/stress worrying about reverse-engineering how the review works and optimizing for its metrics, rather than focusing on their real job.
IANAL, but an option to consider is going to the US for the 3 months a tourist visa allows you. You can use this time to look for work and there shouldn't be any problems as long as you don't actually work ... and there shouldn't be any real problems even if you do work but that's highly illegal and I did not suggest you do anything like that.

A loophole exists however. You can open a business in the UK that does consulting for the US job so technically you are employed in the UK and are staying in the US on an extended business trip. These can legally last up to something like 6 months (I think). This should give you enough time to come up with a proper solution.

The consulting thing is how developers are usually employed in my neck of Europe because it enables a lot of tax tricks and is generally easier for people. And while this scenario is battle tested for remote work, I am not sure how it actually goes over when you also relocate to the US.

Take all of this with a grain of salt, consult with an immigration lawyer before you do anything.
So why are you doing it anonymously?
Ruby presents a VM; someone who understands the capabilities and limitations of that machine will be able to write Ruby code much more effectively than someone who does not, simply because they will understand what they are writing.

It would not shock me if most Rails devs were in fact Ruby tinkerers; and there's nothing wrong with that, if that's all you need to do.
The Visa Black Card
It really bothers me when stuff like this gets posted on HN

I'm not attacking the point of view. There are two opinions on this issue that are backed by large numbers of people. One saying inequality increases with our current system and the other confirming that but saying our system "lifts all boats" making the poor richer while it makes the rich even more so.

I have no problem with debating that point.

But this article cites no actual facts. Not even from his opponents. He cites "reports from think tanks" but rather than presenting facts from those reports and refuting them he attacks the people making the points (calling them "obfuscators")

More importantly he doesn't spell out a thought process. Plenty of people write interesting opinion pieces without hard facts by spelling out their thought process and asking people to consider it when they see hard facts in the future. But that's not what this is and I'd offer his last paragraph as proof of that...

"The larger answer, however, is that extreme concentration of income is incompatible with real democracy. Can anyone seriously deny that our political system is being warped by the influence of big money, and that the warping is getting worse as the wealth of a few grows ever larger?"

By saying "can anyone seriously deny" he's not laying out his thought process he's simply trying to bully people with an opposing thought process by saying they're fools if they don't agree with him (they may very well be fools but it's unproductive and of no value to tell them that without an explanation of why they're fools)

So I go back to my original point. How does this "gratify anyone's intellectual curiosity" as the guidelines say?
Experts Exchange redesign
Often there are other factors involved, like an investor who backed out. Think about the last time you had to say no to somebody. It is hard to say no to other people and the reasons we call them are often not the real reasons.
Try not to take it personal or understand it as something unfair. Things like that happen to everybody from time to time.
Gaddafi Killed by His Own People
Gaddafi Killed by His Own People
This latest discovery of the video comes to rights and international organizations require a formal investigation procedure as the former Libyan leader was killed
Who’s in that top 0.1 percent? Are they heroic entrepreneurs creating jobs? No, for the most part, they’re corporate executives. Recent research shows that around 60 percent of the top 0.1 percent either are executives in nonfinancial companies or make their money in finance, i.e., Wall Street broadly defined. Add in lawyers and people in real estate, and we’re talking about more than 70 percent of the lucky one-thousandth.

Zuckerberg, Jobs, Bezos, Gates--virtually every startup founder is/was a corporate executive. And "people in real estate" are absolutely entrepreneurs. Without investment and good management, development doesn't happen.

I too am worried about the moral hazard posed by growing income inequality. But Krugman is being either disingenuous or outright deceptive (as usual, sadly).
How To Make It In America: S 02, Ep 5 - Mofongo (Full Episode)
I can confirm this: you can basically count the number of contract engineers in the US on your fingers and toes.
Yep. This is the most like reddit it's been yet.
Nor have I.
I've done a fair bit of development work for vitacoco, and they've not only been great to work with, they've also paid me for the work.

I can honestly recommend working with them.
I remember that being mentioned in a PEP somewhere but it never got implemented. It might be worth implementing copy in C with copy-on-write to bring some of those benchmark numbers down.
Sorry to hear about this situation as it sounds horribly stressful. My only piece of "advice" is to use the next few weeks to do the job search in lieu of traveling. NYC has lots of great startups and your background is prob relevant to many of them. It may require some 'ground & pound', i.e. cold emails, knocking on doors, etc but if you meet enough folks, one might click. And after all, you only need one job.

To this end, we're hiring for someone with a machine learning/information retrieval background so if you're interested, ping me (email is in my profile). We're going through the Visa formalities for another hire so are getting to know the process as well. Of course, that's putting the cart before the horse so reach out if interested and we can at least get the convo going. And we can expedite the conversation/interview process given your predicament.

More on the jobs here - http://www.cbinsights.com/hiring/.
I don't see knowingly exposing ones child to an infectious disease, that could be life threatening (people die from complications from shingles), any different than leaving the child in a hot car in the summer or say beating them. If you read the article this is also happening with mumps, rubella and other infectious diseases.

> Is growing up without one's parents less harmful ...

After a certain point yes. Because being crippled or dead is better than growing up with abusive parents sometimes.
Why The MongoDB Hate?
A wise opinion on "MongoGate" haters.
Note that a heap implementation for manual allocation and manual freeing isn't free of problem cases either. The heap will impose an accumulating maintenance overhead that will need to be cleared out eventually. Similarly to a GC heap you can try to amortize the overhead into some controllable, bounded chunks of computation but that doesn't mean pathological cases wouldn't exist nor happen.
Depends. Being a developer means you can also iterate lots of different ideas before finding the one that works. In that case development is 80% of the time. With today's tools (social, advertising, job outsourcing) the rest of the work can become trivial. I am now a believer that developers can be entrepreneurs and try to motivate former colleagues to do the same. Remember that recent article from M. Andreesen about software eating the world[1]? It's true.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...
I feel like one key difference between Ruby being written in C and CoffeeScript being compiled to Javascript is the debug information. As the author of the attack on CoffeeScript mentioned, being able to debug CoffeeScript code requires you to understand the JavaScript debug output and translate that back into CoffeeScript. Other than that, I agree with all of your points.
Try an experiment, grab a piece of paper and write out the top ten programmers that first come to your mind. Now next to their names write out which company they work for.

There was a time when I was tossing around the idea of starting my own business, something just wasn't clicking for me. Then I did this experiment, and I realized that most the programmers who inspired me to be a programmer worked for someone else (with pg being a major exception). I thought "It can't just be because they didn't have the courage to start there own company". And then I realized what was making me uncomfortable with starting my own business.

I enjoy the myopia I can have being paid to work reasonable hours as a developer. I have other passions in life, but I love that I can spend the vast majority of my spare time studying code, cs, math etc without worrying about business, marketing etc. Design I like (I'm not as passionate about it), but business I really just don't get excited about.

As has been discussed over and over on hn, true expertise is only going to be achieved by putting lots of time into something. For me personally, I can't help that thing be programming and CS, maybe one day that will change (it honestly wouldn't surprise me). Now if you do that same experiment with the top 10 wealthiest people you respect, you will probably come up with a bunch of entrepreneurs. The question really only comes does to which top 10 is the one you strive to be in.
>> Then to give Jobs the top honors over Gabe Newell (of Valve) and Shigeru Miyamoto (of Nintendo) is blasphemy, plain and simple.

The author is taking this all way too seriously. Who cares what a fan poll at a gaming conference says? I see this type of tunnelvision with video games/television/movie industry types all the time. Why do they think that their industry is so important? Oh my god, who gives a shit.
The problem is most lessons are already broadcast only. When you have 30 students in class, it's very hard to take a individual approach. Yes I agree the individual approach is better.

But have you considered that videos, when dealing with a class of 30 is actually more individual.

A individual student can pause, rewind etc for his own needs. Where as in a class he could not do this. You can't rewind a teacher, if anything the teacher could get angry.

If anything this allows more time for tutoring, rather than lecturing. Allowing the teacher more time for one on one work.
I don't know what to say other than to agree with you: This was awful behavior on the part of your prospective employer.

I have no facts but I can ask more questions: How do the H1B rules work? If you had been working for the company for a single week before they fired you, would your legal status be different than it is now? Or would you have had to be there a month? A year? More than a year?

Many startups are on the verge of going broke. ;) It kind of goes with the territory. And it's not as if a company that is about to go broke always sends out clear signals of that. Generally you find out in a big hurry. Like when your employer shocks you by suddenly reneging on a deal that you both spent a lot of time making.

It would seem, then, that startups might be especially risky for visa applicants. Though much depends on the details of the immigration process. I'm sure many people around here know those details very well, however.
Do you have any specific suggestions?

Postgres installs with a default superuser ("postgres" on ubuntu) and a default database (also "postgres"), so that's not the real problem.

Installing software via a package system is trivial and required for any system, so that can't be the issue.

The package distribution invariably chooses a default location for your data and initializes it, so that requires no additional effort at all.

You have to start and stop the service, but the package distribution should make that trivial, as well ("service postgresql start|stop" on ubuntu). And again, I don't see any difference here.

So the only possible area I see for problems is connecting your first time. This is somewhat of an issue for any network service, because you need to prevent anyone with your IP from connecting as superuser. The way ubuntu solves this is by allowing local connections to postgres if the system username matches the database username. So, you have to "su" to the user "postgres", and then do "psql postgres". Now you're in as superuser.

The default "postgres" superuser doesn't have a password (default passwords are bad) and only users with a password can connect over the network. But, you can add a password (which then allows that user to connect over a network), or create new users. If the new username matches a system username, that user can connect locally. If you gave the new user a password, they can connect over a network.

Do you see any fat in the above process that can be streamlined without some horrible side-effect (like allowing anyone with your IP to connect as superuser)? I'm serious here -- if you do see room for improvement, I really, really, really, want to hear what the sticking point is so that it can be fixed.
Benchmark.scala
It is funny that options are now so associated with a company exiting that we totally forget that their original purpose was as an efficient mechanism for profit sharing
When building posts on urban legends I find it is helpful to check if they are true, because when they are false (as it is in this case), it tends to ruin the rest of the point.
Music NGram Viewer
Contact me, you'll find my email on http://qbix.com/about (I'm Greg). We are in NYC.

Check out what we are building first, and let me know if that's something you would be interested in working on.
I'm probably in the minority on this one yes.
I think that would be good as long as it was very clear in the UI that that was the expect behavior. Is there a way to get top tweets from a twitter search?
I'd recommend against putting the socket in /tmp. Anyone can reuse the connection.
> First, understand that CoffeeScript is JavaScript - but without its idiosyncrasies.

...and a different syntax. That's my main objection to CS. I'm already working with 5 different syntaxes: Python, Javascript, Erlang, HTML, and CSS. Adding yet another one isn't appealing.

Perhaps if you're writing an app on top of the Node.js stack, you can use CoffeeScript everywhere. What I would've liked to see is CoffeeScript with a syntax as close to Javascript's as possible.
I always liked the saying 'you can control what others do, but you can control your reaction to it'.

It is entirely possible that the start-up you were working for is having some issues, and are therefore unable to hire you. Or maybe they are being acquired, and can't talk about it, but also can't hire any more people.

The fact is you don't know the actual situation, only what the founder told you, and it is possible that he can't tell you the real reason. Maybe he is saying what he is saying to make himself feel better about something. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter.

Have you considered going back to the other companies that wanted to interview you and see if they are still interested?

Though it may seem like things have been really screwed up, you never know what will happen. This could turn out better than your original plan.

Best of luck
"""Want to add setters/getters to a Java class? Use YASnippet or SnipMate. Want to rename the local variable foo to bar? Use a scoped regex. Once you grok the power of generic text-manipulation, you can use it everywhere and in ways that IDE users can't imagine."""

Yes, but in a medium-large codebase (and I'd argue in a small one too) generic text manipulation is useless for refactoring compared to proper syntax and context aware manipulation.
B2b data
Yes, it does. See graph here: http://aidwatchers.com/2010/08/wonderful-graph-on-global-pop...
Many hedge funds have 2 of those 3 and sometimes 3 of those 3. It's a myth that every finance job is as bad as I-banking for Goldman.
Yes, but the innocent parties have to win the suit in order to be awarded anything. If you have someone with a lot of money to sue you in order to annoy you, they usually try not to win, but just to extend the length of the process until your money runs out.
Mozilla Firefox 8 Is now Available via FTP Server
That was my first thought: because I'm indeed a developer. Not an entrepreneur.
> A video can't do this. But perhaps 2 hours of video + 1 hour of interaction might be just as good as the 2 hours of lecture + 1 hour of interaction provided by the current system. If so we can cut our teaching expenses by 2/3.

Okay, but that doesn't improve education, it just makes it cheaper. It would certainly be a useful start; one could invest that money in hiring better-qualified teachers, or even a program where college students come in to do interactive tutoring.

> This is a big problem - the US spent $864B on government-sponsored education in 2009, more than it spent on the military.

How much of this is personnel and salary costs for teachers?