skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You paste code from a company with the words "media", "brand", "share" or "ad" in its name, you get what you deserve.
The Startup Guide to Human Resources [video]
The Walmartization of the Web
Elvis Costello: Steal This Record
I've been working on a MBP for the last 5 month and like it. I recently installed Ubuntu 11.10 on a desktop PC I had at home. I setup everything for my needed dev environment, and unlike many other articles/posts I read, I loved it.

The computer specs are not the same, but unity is overall MUCH faster and smooth than my OSX MBP. The interface just works very smoothly and intuitively for me. I do most of my work in the terminal so I don't get to do every operations using the interface though. I'm even thinking about trading my MBP for a system76 ubuntu machine.

Unity is also quite new and I expect it to get better with every releases. Am I the only one in this situation?
Microsoft enables Android and iOS users to experience Windows Phone 7
How Brooklyn Got Its Groove Back
US road fatalities mapped, 9 years
Spend a couple weeks in a third world country and go shopping often. Start with a local to see how it's done and then practice by yourself. Street vendors are the absolute best negotiators (even over very small sums of money).
FWIW, the Google Hangout has got you at least one customer. I was weary of how chunky it would be, but you just showed me it on your wrist and it looks ok. I'll be putting in an order shortly.

EDIT: Hmm. I should have placed the order straight away. Looks like the site is getting hammered now.
Apple pulls iTether for iPhone
"I've been working for startups for the past 12 years. I won't be a millionaire even if my current company sells for $.5b"

I am the pot calling the kettle black here, but I'd like to point out that working in software for 12 years (or 15 or 20), whether for startups or not, would give most people a shot at being a millionaire, if that goal is chosen, tracked and executed on, and it has nothing to do with the exit lottery. The best use of money, after necessities and safety, is to make more money.
IMHO, Unity is a work in progress. It definitely requires more resources to run than other environments and it requires some getting used to. I miss the good old task-bar for quick switching instead of moving the cursor to the extreme left waiting for the tab to slide in, clicking the appropriate icon which may then load an undesired window if the sought application is running more than one instance.
I tried 'mousing over' the topmost left corner too.. it is also slow.
However, unity is clean. It just hasn't figured out how we want to do what we want or who we are.
Awesome! So a strategy mentioned to us before is highlight the skip feature, pull in reviews from sites like Yelp, Google, etc, and focus on that. This way, we'd have ratings for each business, displayable via the map in the site, and the skip feature allowing you to focus on trip planning through third party reviews. Something we'll definitely have to consider, although breaking reviews out per service would be so much more helpful in trip planning, IMO
Threats from The Burzynski Clinic
Wow, I hadn't done the affiliate thing with Amazon for a while and missed that change. That's a big deal and I bet it immediately cut the commissions people were getting by 10-20%.
Divulge the salary number at the high end of what you want, inclusive of the value of all benefits. State that you are more than willing (hoping, in fact!) to reduce the raw salary number in exchange for a supportive culture with good people, meaningful work, and productivity-enhancing benefits.

It's not a lie and it gets you exactly what you want and need.

If they want to know what you are making now, you are making exactly what you stated above.

Since there's no way for an employer to compare their culture/benefits to another company's, it is logically unsound for them to consider your past paychecks. Remind them of that.

The other simple approach is to say, "You know better than I what your organization can do with my talent. I want to work were I am most effective. The salary and work product your company offers is my best way to estimate my impact."
How to Find a Business Idea & Bootstrap it to Success
So, how many of these services does HN use? :P

hides
shrug

I've seen one AddThis call replace half a dozen individual Javascript/IFrames for all the different social networks. Seems like that would generally be an improvement.
>Why are you authing with Facebook?

Because it's easy and there are network advantages - it slurps down a profile picture automatically and fills in a bunch of otherwise useful fields.

At no point in time does anyone need to know what my DOB is. It's not a valid piece of information. You can already track me down using my credit card.

The reason why I'm prickly about my DOB is because it's used as a "relatively unique identifier". It's the first question my bank asks me because… it's meant to be semi private in the first place.

I can't change the security practices of banks, but I can lower the odds of being seriously screwed by managing my disclosure of "relatively unique identifiers".

> Do you distrust the site you're using to find someone to share some housing with?

Of course! There are almost no organizations worthy of your trust. I'm forced to trust Google, but that's about it.

In regards to AirBNB, while I'm sure their current management is a-OK this says nothing about what will happen with the data if they go bankrupt in a couple of years.

I had a client who shall go unnamed turn around and sell a dump of their database to marketers. I was pretty surprised when I saw random test accounts suddenly get spammed.

>Would any solution for authentically sharing data be acceptable?

Yeah. The problem currently is that it's far too permissive by default, and you can't arbitrarily untick permissions.

Just because your application wants the ability to tweet using my account doesn't mean I think you should have that right. When you want to escalate the permission, you can ask me beforehand and I will then judge whether you're worthwhile.

The current state of affairs, where by default everyone gets everything and we're pushing this on users who don't know any better is totally fucking atrocious.
Craigslist might actually do it... I doubt AOL or eBay ever would.
How Newsletters can benefit your Business Website
Equity and vacation time are really common to negotiate. Also sometimes work location, days spent working from home, and amount of travel.
Data source: DistroWatch's Page Hit Ranking

Well there's your problem. What a terrible metric. That's a good way of finding out what one type of linux user is using, but not a good way to sample the population of computer users, and the changing face of linux users.
http://www.getinpulse.com/specs/
Imagine a world in which you could load WP onto the iPhone and Android on your Windows Phone.

The freedoms that we take granted on PCs(running Windows 7 on Macs) seem to be lost now.
Without in any way whatsover implying that you did, in some countries you cannot present an advert as an article or editorial without clearly marking it as such.

That's why on TVs you get the 'infomercial' warning and the 'this is an advert' banner in papers (certainly in my country anyway).

Having an affiliate link makes the article an advert as you are selling the book. An article such as yours can be interpreted as a shop front masquerading as free advice as soon as you put affiliate links in it, regardless of whether it affected your article or not.

Bloggers are getting away with murder right now compared to print advertising.

I realise this is not your intention, but that's why it is not the same as ad-supported products in general should be held to higher standards as their adverts are usually clearly marked where yours was not.
The small details are the reason you care
Unity could have been something great if only Ubuntu had decided to release it after thorough QA testing and polishing. First impressions are everything, and Ubuntu chose to release Unity in an objectively unfinished state. They effectively made their entire userbase their beta-testers. I for one have work to get done, and I'm not interested in being the subject of a grand UI experiment--especially one that's run by what seem to be a group of UX amateurs.

Ubuntu wasted that crucial first impression and alienated a significant portion of their core userbase--tech geeks and programmers--by pushing a half-baked product. Who knows: if I had tried Unity in 2014 instead of in Natty, maybe I would have liked it and recommended it.

Unity is just a symptom of the deeper problem, though, which is that Ubuntu is never in a finished, polished state. I tell anyone who asks what OS I'm using that I use Ubuntu, but that they should stick with Windows because Ubuntu invariably breaks every 6 months and everything is half-baked.

I just can't recommend an OS where the most important part, the DE, is buggy and unfinished, and where every distro upgrade reliably introduces random and serious regressions. (Though to be fair it's often upstream's fault on those.) I know that if I install Ubuntu for my mom, she'll click 'Upgrade to Ubuntu xx.yy' without thinking, then she'll call me because her computer won't hibernate any more, or because all of a sudden her window buttons are on the left. If a hard-core geek like me won't recommend the friendliest Linux distro, who will?
The phrase "permit pointers inside the vectors" doesn't really make sense. Vectors are just ordered collections of objects. They don't have insides and outsides, except insofar as the objects contained by the vector could be (but usually aren't) considered "inside" the vector. Lisp vectors are usually implemented as arrays of pointers, so in that sense pointers are "permitted" inside vectors. But I'm guessing that's not what you meant. (I have no idea what you actually meant.)
WiFinder
Ask HN: Maybe they don't want my help.....
At what point do you just throw in the towel and say to yourself "this industry just doesn't want to be helped" just to watch later as your predictions become true?

(By the way, your not Steve Jobs. You don't have his ability to convince anyone of anything.)

As a big example of this, let's say you have this cool way to distribute stuff like music/media/periodicals several years ago. You figured out this great way of distributing media and a good way to make money off it to an industry you see will need this. To make a long story short, after spending several years on this, everyone in the industry laughed at you and your idea of helping them make more money is in trouble because nobody there wants to buy your product or services because they see no need.

At what point do you throw in the towel and stop trying to be "nice" while help them as well as you become more successful?

At what point do you become the "big evil bad guy" creating that new technology that instead of helping them create a bigger, cooler, bigger business that instead starts destroying their core and they start sending lawyers and politicians after you?
So you're saying the comment should be downvoted if a man wrote it, but not if a woman wrote it?
Why going through another accelerator program would be helpful?
Our social shopping startup is in its early stages. We launched a private beta mid-October and are now making improvements to throw a wider net in December 2011. We won 1st place in a pitch/demo competition in October with really great feedback from VCs. We're now joining Founders Institute for their Winter program which starts Dec. 14 and then plan to get in either YC or 500.

Does anyone think that serially joining accelerator programs like this is going to hurt us more than help? Our competitors have just raised $1-3M in seed round this year and every time we turn our heads, there's another competitor popping up. The social shopping market is heating up, so we wonder if we should just focus on finding a senior partner that can help us get funding?
Reminds be of the study showing doodling also benefits cognitive function (http://www.bakadesuyo.com/does-doodling-make-you-smarter).

It's not hard to imagine how physically occupying yourself in some way, whether it's doodling or chewing gum or diddling your thumbs or playing with a pen, frees up your mind to concentrate on a mental task.
Yammer moving away from Scala
An oldie but goodie:
http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/hasalary.htm
There was a better one, which I can't find now.
Ubuntu's strategy makes sense if it actually works. So far it looks like the drop in geek users has not been compensated by much increase in normal users. Also, if all volunteer developers leave, Canonical will end up footing the bill completely for Ubuntu; it's not clear they can afford that.
For some reason, node.js programmers are better than average designers, so their websites look slick - but that has nothing to do with running the website on node.js...

Okay, they know javascript, that helps...

But it makes node.js feel slick... a great marketing trick.
What newbie developers could really do with - a simpler stack
I have a small number of sites blocked in /etc/hosts but a little searching found this hosts.txt file that seems to be updated pretty regularly. Gonna give it a try.

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
You won't and it won't. The hiring manager and HR are lying to your face much more.
This is a great article comparing all the options for Rails 3.1
This is extremely hateful. Like with the Google Plus real name thing.
Logitech harmony software
Im not well versed in whats possible on the browser. Had a poke but still not sure how the WP7 transformations happen. Anyone able to provide a link or something to allow myself to learn?
It's only an excuse (in the sense meant here) if you actually would disclose other employers' pay policies outside of a salary negotiation. As long as you don't do that, I'd be inclined to call it the truth.
We need more like you.
> Copyright offers no practical intellectual protection for software.

Tell that to all the people who whine about the GPL.
Oh wow, that's awesome. Now if they can just combine that with a Pixel Qi screen, it would be just about perfect. Thanks for the heads up!
You're Ultimate Guide to Grammar Errors
Grab .gitignore files for a language from the command line.
Chewing gum has been around for thousands of years, first to be commercially sold in the mid 1800s. So it had somewhat of an established test market :)

Interesting aside, Wrigley didn't start off selling gum - originally it was packaged for free with their baking soda. The gum became more popular than the baking soda and well... they did a fairly profitable pivot.

Around half a century later Topps was a manufacturer of chewing gum, having roots in the tobacco industry (things you chew?). By this point in time gum was sold by itself, and there were many players in the industry. In an effort to increase sales they began packaging cards with the gum and well...
Right on. Here's a good link on negotiation using street-level bargaining strategies from other countries: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2008/03/16/bargaining-with-your-ri...
I'm a WP7 user, and I just played with this in my desktop browser to see what it was like.

My first reaction when I saw this announcement is that it was a brilliant and creative way to get people to try the new OS, but after playing with it, it isn't nearly as nice as using the real thing, and I wonder if the plan my backfire.
I'm not sure I understand the strategy of targeting the everyday mobile pad user. Linux is already killing with Android. For Ubuntu to succeed, they would either need a hardware vendor to choose Ubuntu over Android (unlikely) or expect users to buy hardware that already has an OS but can be rooted and loaded with Ubuntu. I don't doubt there are power users salivating at the chance to do that, but that's basically replicating the uphill battle Linux faces on the desktop. And after the war has already been won. (Edit: missing word).
I'm launching a blog platform called PressWord - want to be an advisor?
Give disabling Javascript a try. Uninstall Flash. Most of the web will work and it will be fast and much less annoying.
Have you personally tried changing to xfce, gnome-shell or KDE in Ubuntu 11.10? I have, and it's decidedly non-trivial. Switching to a different distro would probably be easier.
It may well be relevant -- if the women in question considered their negotiating posision weaker because of possible future maternity leave.
I smell opportunity for API providers to step up and provide Plan B and C service for the very commoditized types of APIs.

Model the API design after the leader... similar to how some have done with Delicious, AWS, etc.

I like your strategy.
I managed to buy the iPhone app last night, but now it looks like it got yanked from the app store - at least in the US?

Edit. Looks like they did. Glad I got it when I did last night:

http://www.loopinsight.com/2011/11/29/apple-pulls-itether-fr...
i think in EU you can buy imwatch.it (they're italian) but it's more expensive. Dont know how it is compared to this one
I think the change was more like 50-60%. A lot of people shop on Amazon for other things, if you had a 30 day cookie like it used to be, you were more or less guaranteed a sale in that 30 days.
Well to be fair, in alot of countries you have to be very upfront about something being an advertisement.

See most magazines. They'll have 6 page pullouts that while they look like articles, they make it clear with bold print that its an advertisement.

> my feeling is that we are spoiled by free stuff, enough to make us get picky about the purity of the content viewed (supply and demand).

This I agree completely with :)

And to be fair I wasn't judging you post.

I guess my question to you would be...

Why not be upfront that you are trying to make money off of me, the user?

What benefit is there to trying to hide it?
What's wrong with Common Lisp's keyword arguments? I'm not being snarky, just asking. I'd say CL works at least as well as Python in this respect.
Facebook & FTC Settle Over Investigation
I do as well, even when I type in the addresses provided in the example.
There have been software patents in the EU for decades. The section on "Europe" in the Wikipedia article on software patents (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent) contains links to decent explanations of what's going on there.
Actually, in terms of headaches available, switching distros is easier than whacking Unity with the appropriate configs to get the shell I want.

edit: I still don't have a screensaver. :(
look at it as hints. It's not actually tightly coupled, as m of that stuff is optional sugar that allows for better optimization.
I don't know if it's a cultural thing, but a lot of women I know from back home (third-world country, like drusenko mentioned) are excellent negotiators. They have the have patience, charm and downright persistence to squeeze every single penny from whatever purchase they are making (even salary negotiations). It's scary.
I'm not disagreeing with what you say, however:

Bloggers are getting away with murder right
now compared to print advertising

I think this is a little blown out of proportions. Print advertising may be clearly marked as such for obvious advertising, however articles planted by PR firms are not.
Protect your career with these 5 Web Development technologies
If women will do the same work for less money, why don't we see companies that rely on high volume and low margins hire a lot of females (so that 90%+ of their employees are female)?

A 30% cost savings on staff seems like it could be a huge competitive advantage.

If such a company exists, I would love to have someone point it out.
Is it considered voluntary if the app is running without your knowledge and can't be turned off?

To me, that's about as "voluntary" as having your house bugged.
What would you change about the representative form of government?

Any government consisting of representatives of the people will end up proposing and debating laws that certain segments of the population sees as "bad" at times.

It's a test of how well the government works if the people can voice their opinion and have an effect on Congress's debate. If this happens and curtails the law, then government is working.
Nice one. This is actually what I'm adding to Dillinger next - a Redis store for pastebin style links to markdown files.

dillinger.io

Dillinger is also 100% open source:

github.com/joemccann/dillinger
You are conflating the abstract data type with its implementation. A hash-map is one implementation of an associative array. A tree is another implementation of an associative array. A tree happens to depend on an ordering of the keys in order to do efficient lookup and a hash-map doesn't, but this is an implementation detail. It's not part of the definition of an associative array. And this is a good thing because not all data types have well defined orderings but you still might want to use them as keys, with symbols being the most notable example.
I was the first to criticize Unity back in the day, but I believe Unity has a bright future.

Canonical made a big big change with a lot of regressions and growing pains but as it stabilizes it will be a great desktop to use for normal people.

The worst thing they could do is go back again to gnome at this point.

The main problem Linux have it is that it is just copy what Apple or Windows do, look at Mint and you will see a copy of Windows(I really hate the windows start menu design and they copied it verbatim), look at Ubuntu and you will see a copy of MacOS but with no so many great designers and money behind(the minimize-maximaze window buttons disappearing drives me crazy).
Gabriel's and everyones comments are great...definitely an area that needs constant discussion.

I can't think of any industry where your vendor / supplier guarantees it will be there forever and never change.

Even with contracts and commitments, the world moves forward.

We are just moving forward at faster and faster rates. I think there is a lot of opportunity here for API owners to provide copycat services for redundancy.

Also lots of opportunity to really keep interfaces dead simple and easy to integrate, adapt and change.
Neither employers nor employees have incentive to give a fair value in one of the directions. I'm sure there are plenty of overpayed employees that aren't exactly falling over themselves to get a pay cut, nor companies falling over themselves to give employees a pay raise.
I used to recommend Ubuntu or Mint. These days, it's switched to Mint or Fedora. Ubuntu's ability to "just work" has been unsatisfactory for a while, while Mint's and Fedora's has only been getting better. I recently did a Fedora upgrade, and the only thing that broke was my hacked-up xmonad setup, which was to be expected. Everything else was either the same or better.