skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good point but they are profitable as long as we let them be meaning that if people would stop putting up with mistreatment employers would be forced to change to turn a profit. (Note: my optimism about this occurring is pretty low)
An email list! I interview startups which are hiring and email the interview to my list. Thinking about podcasting the interviews in the near future. http://startupfrontier.com

Also a visualization of US Foreign Aid using D3: http://www.euphonious-intuition.com/USForeignAidVis/
I love my inbox and I don't know what I would do without it. I use it as my primary interface to as many applications as possible.

E-mail forever!
Wow, having someone implement a square root algorithm on the spot, that's quite a question to ask. I agree that is a terrible question because not many top developers would be able to answer it on the spot unless they had recently happened to have implemented it. It's not like it's an obvious algorithm. I could mention the existence of Carmack's root algorithm, which I don't have memorized but I do know he got from someone else, and flop around a bit.

It's weird there are so many companies claiming to not be able to find people but you hear about their hiring process and it's no wonder.
The truth about Carrier IQ phone tracking
AMD sued over allegedly faulty chips
Very good writeup. This specifically covers setting up the firewall rules to only allow inter-group communication. This is very important to understand when working with a Riak cluster because Riak itself has very little to no internal security mechanics. You must proxy Riak through some middleware or somesuch for any real world usage.

Something to keep in mind is the multi-zone/geographic clustering. Brightbox specifically mentions they have a low latency link between their zones. I would test throughly. Riak is built on Erlang, which at its core is a message passing language. Riak by extension is very sensitive to the speed, throughput and latency by which those messages are passed amongst its members. Again, test throughly, YMMV.
What exactly has github contributed to code accessibility? (that FreeBSD's ports system didn't do 15 years ago)
As much as I love Uber, I use it because my work pays for it (expensed travel to client sites) - but I would very very rarely use it for personal use.

I have used it once for personal use - to go to a wedding at a church 1 mile from my house; $23.00

I spend ~400 a month on Uber Cab right now...

---

The service is fantastic but the prices are rather ridiculous.

I would NEVER have used them on NYE - and the prices people were paying just shows that either all those people are really rich, or really stupid.

I am pissed that I can buy a single leg from SFO to Seattle on Virgin for $59 -- but to take a cab from my house to SFO is $65.00

We can talk about supply/demand market etc all day - but there is just something wrong with the cost of transportation in SF. Period.
This service is great. I'm really excited to see it grow. Congrats on the funding. It would be great to be able to login to multiple accounts of the same service. Might already be a feature, but I wasn't able to get that set up. Sent a support email. Hopefully that can be added. Really pumped about where this will go.
I went back to my Visa application. You are right. I´ll edit my post. There are certain cases where there is no cap. The one that applies to me is "A nonprofit research organization or governmental research organization."
8 CFR 214.2 (h) (19) (iii) (C)

My mind played tricks (back when I was researcher there was that option to increase your chances). However I do remember that presenting a legal case that my skills were worth was an important factor to get the H1B.
So what does it substitute for various races? And what's the "male" leet-speak equivalent?
I thought I remembered reading somewhere that Python optimizes this so that both forms are basically equivalent, performance-wise. At least in relatively recent versions of Python.
This was interesting and caused me to go off on a neat little tangent too.

I was curious about the VALUE declaration in:

struct RString {
long len;
char *ptr;
VALUE shared;
};

From the Hacker Guide referenced, I found this definition:

typedef unsigned long VALUE;

This is then casted, when needed, to a pointer to whatever type of struct you are dealing with. How does that work?

Well, on a 32-bit machine, if I'm correct in my reading, an unsigned long is 4 bytes in size and can contain these numbers: 0 to 4294967295

That last number is 4 gigabytes, which is the size of byte-addressable memory on a 32-bit machine. So VALUE can point anywhere. Neat!
My 8th grade science teacher did this for us and it changed my life.

I chose to learn Java and then HTML. 15 years later, I'm making websites and writing Android apps at my own company.

I cannot think of a single experience in all of my education that had anywhere near the impact on my life as that assignment.
"That hit home more than ever with the launch of the Mac App Store this year, since many of our customers wanted to be able to 'upgrade' to the Mac App Store versions of our apps,"

I am genuinely baffled as to why any developer would want to encourage this kind of behaviour. Why willingly go from earning 100% to 70%?

I understand that the App Store has the ability to reach new users that might make that 30% worth it, but when you have existing users that have already bought outside of the App Store... it boggles the mind.

"I'd like to see Apple reaching out to more high schools and universities to help direct their efforts as they attempt to turn out more iOS developers

No, no, no, no. 100 times, no. High Schools and Universities should not be teaching vendor lock-in. I can't believe that anyone would even be in favour of it. Teach students to program. If they're good at it, picking up Objective C will not be difficult.
I can't suggest any others - I've never tried any.

Thanks for doing the benchmarking, though - that's fast!
New Microsoft patent: Walking directions that avoid crime-ridden neighborhoods
But surely all the logic applied here to commissions also applies to quotas, right? (measuring performance, assigning credit to a sale to a particular sales rep, dividing up territories equitably, etc) But the post doesn't mention eliminating quotas. Wouldn't they go hand in hand? Can you have a sales force without quotas?
> If a proper process is actually cheaper, shouldn't companies that don't have one die out? Is this happening or not? Why?

Is a proper process cheaper? Maybe it is directly, but requires hiring better programmers who cost more. Which of course has all sorts of benefits, but like the proper process itself, maybe that's only a win in the long term, so some companies don't do it. (Also many companies would like to hire good programmers, but don't know how to, and also don't know how to hire someone who knows how...)
Thanks for the citations ;)

I think people are getting way to focused on creating a broader theme around Pinterest's success from a technical implementation POV and not focusing on some of the bigger drivers. I see Pinterest being successful because of:

- Content: Foods, Crafts, Home, Babies: How many web services address these market as their primary focus? I'm only really up to speed on the craft industry and that alone is worth $30B a year. You'd have to combine the video game and music industries together to match that. Now think about how many companies are focusing on Music/Games vs. crafts and Pinterest's success isn't that crazy. They basically have a monopoly of...

- Women aged 15-55: I'm a heavy user, but from what I've seen ~98% of users are women. The site has a "feminine" aesthetic and a design first layout. Its a pleasure to browse on any screen.

- Fun: The collecting instinct is strong, the site makes it easy to collect, and I can build up a collection quickly. It is "Gamified" without any of the overplayed tropes of badges or leaderboards. It also is very "pretty" like a magazine.

It is useful (helps me collect recipes), Targeted (No boys allowed), fun (games/cool layout), and as johnnyn said "Real World Social". Users collect recipes and cook together, or talk about ideas while looking at an ipad together. It utilizes real social networks for distribution.

I may be wrong, but look at this list of "Social Curation" websites which behave very similarly to Pinterest and think about why they have not experienced the rocket ship growth:

http://pieratt.tumblr.com/post/10452105095/who-svpply-is-com...
Sad to see points of fact downmodded, no doubt by GNU fanboys. Wonder if we should also start calling Emacs' Windows port "Microsoft EMACS"?
I was going to make fun of the name but then decided to try it and same exact reaction. It's so damn awesome and easy to use. I think this is something I'd even consider paying for. Nice work Ifttt team!
Ocean Marketing Supports Obama
I'm not crazy about this site either, they seem to have selected the dates they graphed very carefully:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3407428

I agree with many other comments though, this is a poor metric for measuring how many people left GoDaddy.
Show HN: Utilizing Gamecenter in apps that are not games
We were able to successfully get an app into the App Store that utilized Gamecenter, but was not a game.

It is called Reminders with Friends. We used the turn based matchmaking in order to send and receive data (in this case reminders) between Gamecenter friends. We then use these reminders to set off time based or GPS based reminders. This was the first app that we found that was able to utitilize Gamecenter in this way.

If you have any questions, I would be happy to answer them.

Link to app: http://itunes.apple.com/app/reminders-with-friends/id486230629?mt=8

Link to website: http://slyceapps.com/reminders/
Android Market’s “Featured Apps” Seeing Explosive Download Numbers
Bad Science - Fan Death
https://ssl.scroogle.org/
Brute force tools crack Wi-Fi in hours, millions of wireless routers vulnerable
> where you can have a reasonable hope that most the programs are too small and simple to take much of a hit on the overhead

What overhead? There's no runtime overhead to ARC compared to manual reference counting.
Google buys another round of IBM patents as its Oracle trial nears
It's true that the overall unemployment rate is alarmingly high, but my understanding is that the employment rate among software developers is quite low. In my area, at least, my sense is that there aren't enough developers looking for work to meet the demand for their labor. I guess it's theoretically possible to train unemployed nontechnical people to write code, but I don't see any viable plans to make that happen.
Two thoughts:

1) The operative pieces of wood here are the nut, the bridge, and the fingerboard. These pieces are all non-integral, relatively easily, cheaply replaceable parts of the violin. I can see how a nut or bridge that's too high would make the violin harder to play with good intonation, and for sure, a fingerboard that is worn or misshapen could, but other than that, I don't think there's any other part piece of wood that matters.

2) Not a rule, but sort of a default rule of thumb for a certain level of violin playing is don't play on open strings because you can't do vibrato and you can't adjust the pitch while you're playing. I remember my kid's intense, Teutonic teacher saying to him, "Well, your strings are out of tune, but that's NO EXCUSE for playing out of tune!", meaning, she expected my kid to have been able to make the adjustments on the fly with his finger placements.
How to build your own "Sixth Sense" device?
I can think of something worse: being the customer.

I had to integrate an existing system with a product sporting a 7 figure price tag. Most painful part involved dealing with disinterested engineers who brushed off our unmet requirements as "Blame the salesman."

The entire company deserves blame and the engineers should be fighting for better sales standards if they don't want to put the work in.
Not knowing much C, I was confused about why malloc() wouldn't get called for the RString structure. This is elucidating:

http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~wolber/SoftwareDev/C/CStructs.htm

Particularly this part:
"// automatic allocation, all fields placed on stack"
Someone else from Fog Creek can correct me if I'm wrong here, but I believe our sales team has a quota, but the individuals don't really. This way, they're all helping each other to reach the team quota, instead of possibly working against each other in order to hit their own quotas.
Clickpass
Scientists Uncover Equation to Predict Hit Songs
Laser skin resurfacing
Laser skin resurfacing is the noninvasive, safe and effective treatment of wrinkles that gives successful results that helping both small hypertrophic and vaguely depressed scars for younger looks.
Microsoft To Sue Company For Selling Fake Windows Recovery CDs
Comodo.com SSL Error? :) Click on the WebTrust seals on the page...
Actually a sub domain is considered a different domain with it's own page rank, I believe this is do to many hosted blogs at wordpress, blogger etc...
...and are less worried about who is going to buy right now...

So you implemented a system that makes people less worried about the most important thing to worry about?

OP makes many fine arguments about the pros and cons of commissions, but this one little nit trumps them all.

There are many reasons for businesses to suffer and eventually die: capitalization, profitability, positioning, etc. but insufficient revenue is the biggest poison of them all.

I always thought of revenue as the water level in a creek. Enough covers all the ugly rocks below. Insufficient exposes all other weaknesses.

It sounds like Fogcreek must be doing rather well for this to work and I'm happy for them. But it makes me wonder: if revenue ever starts failing to meet projections, how soon will commissions be re-instituted to stop the bleeding?

[EDIT: Some of the replies below imply that I overlooked the words "right now", but that was exactly my point: like oxygen, "who is going to buy right now" is the most important thing to worry about. Enlightened organizations may be able to ascend Maslov's Hierarchy of Needs, but as soon as sales people worry less about Level 1: Revenue Right Now, I begin to worry.]
Indeed. I am just continually amazed at the lack of caution people make when expressing these sentiments

"Never use a ruby string longer than 23 characters!!!"....or you'll just take a slightly less infinitesimal amount of time.
It's exactly this thinking that can kill science and startups. That there is unemployment, does not mean there is unemployment in every branch of the industry. In branches, where there is a lack of qualified workers, you need to take in immigrants, or you will become uncompetitive.

Also, remember that there are many people who just want to work in a different country temporarily because it is good for their career+. E.g. here in The Netherlands, we have a high influx of Chinese students and PhD candidates. But nearly all of them return once they have a degree (a degree from a Western university usually gives them good positions in China).

+ There seems to be a widely spread belief in the US that the rest of the world is envious, and would preferably want to live in the US. I have been in the US very often, but I'd never want to live in the US permanently. Social welfare, healthcare, paid leaves, pensions, etc. are so much better arranged in West Europe.
Amazing! It's apparent that there is a real gap in practical learning steps and what institutions are offering.

I'm glad to see more people taking an interest.
If they continue expanding the channels, triggers, and actions available, I'd probably come up with more business uses and would pay for it.

(Off the top of my head, some MailChimp and Eventbrite integration would be nice.)
That seems like a slightly dubious choice to me, since unsigned long isn't guaranteed to be as long as a pointer; for example, under Microsoft's 64-bit compiler it's still only 4 bytes, but pointers are obviously 8. Possibly there is some extra preprocessor cleverness to deal with it, or maybe they don't expect it to work under that compiler?
Robert Anton Wilson would be proud (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_enigma).
Amusing that when referring to a possible typist, it was automatically a "she". :-)

"On the other hand a skilled typist under my eye could do it easily enough. If you can think of anybody who would be willing to come, I will send money for the journey and full instructions. I think we could make her quite comfortable. There is always plenty to eat and I will see that she has a comfortable warm place to work in"
I thought that was an Onion title.
I'm a pretty technical guy, developer, etc. After reading your comment, I popped on over to Yahoo Pipes, having never really used it.

I didn't 100% understand what you could do with Pipes based on the first page. I still don't. Is it just for RSS and blogs?

I took one look at the Ifttt page and instantly understood what it could do for me.

Big difference in my eyes.
All is fun and games until the embassy decides to upcharge $10 and provide the right document on demand. Crash goes the model.
> There may be competitors but the initial "branding" will still hold.

Are they getting a lot of repeat business? Just how often do people have to visit the consulate?
Multiple accounts per channel is something we'd like to add. Not possible at the moment. Glad you dig it!
I'm going to assume I missed something, because from what I'm reading:

1. You're avoiding IDisposable for reasons you don't explain and I fail to see

2. You replace it with an idiom which is supposed to do the same thing (except abusing iterators instead of using tools dedicated to that job) and which I don't believe works, as your connection will not (as far as I can see) be disposed of if there's an error in the foreach block. And the code you linked does not seem to use this "pattern" anywhere
Apple ][ game server
So, why would I trust you with 5 years of all my sent and received emails? Should I take your word for it that you'll just save the email addresses and the sent/received timestamp for each?
Meanwhile, in the real world, delivery is not reliable.
I'm going to split some hairs, because it matters for the topic at hand.

>Unicode of course takes up more space and fills up your buffer sooner. Looks like the jump happens after 8 chars.

It sounds like you are conflating unicode with UTF-8. There is more than one way to represent the unicode code points, and UTF-8 is one of them. Further, it seems like you assume that "unicode characters" have a constant size. This is a potentially dangerous misunderstanding of how UTF-8 works. UTF-8 code points have a variable number of bytes (from one to four bytes, IIRC.) You happen to have copied some code points that take 3 bytes each.

The UTF-8 encoding scheme is a great compromise, and the wikipedia article is easy to follow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8
Normally, private-key authentication doesn't work for most of these things because users expect to be able to log in with something they can remember, and any private key of decent strength is too long.

How about this for a login solution? For each user, you generate a private key and keep it on the server. But, you encrypt that private key with their password, and you don't keep that password or anything derived from it anywhere.

To log in, the server sends the encrypted private key and an authentication challenge to the client. The client then uses the password to decrypt the private key and respond to the challenge. Replay doesn't work, since the response is only good for that challenge. Watching the traffic on the server doesn't work, since you can only get the encrypted private key and the response. Snarfing the contents of the database doesn't even help, since you only get the encrypted private key.

For bonus points, I don't know if this is actually possible, make it so that it's impossible to tell whether a particular decryption of the private key is valid without using it to respond to an authentication challenge and sending that response to the server. This way it's impossible to brute-force the encrypted key, substantially mitigating problems with weak passwords.

Of course, I may have missed something obvious here....
I simply dislike the idea that I join a new social network based on my activities on older social networks. This strategy is like a ponzi scheme.

They sent me an invite and I refused to give them my Facebook/Twitter credentials.
Socket.IO on PubNub
I'd venture to guess fine points like this will be tweaked over time. I don't want them storing my Wordpress admin credentials either, so I haven't activated that channel yet.

(I actually emailed them about this and am awaiting a response).
Glowing bacteria biopixels: The sensor displays of the future
A Glimpse into Walmart’s Vision for Mobile
The article did say that "he" makes $500/day, which I interpreted as Adam's own net. 3 people a day, $500 each founder, maybe less for the translator (flat wage rather than a stake?), that's a decent business.

If it's $500 in total income for the team, though, that's another story.
The emphasis is on right now. We definitely care who buys, but without commissions, there's a lot less pressure to get them to buy right now. That helps us get better customers because we take the time to answer their questions and help show them how our products can solve problems for them.

In the long run, this is a much better situation for us. The customers are, on average, happier, which means they keep coming back, they recommend us, and they need less support.
When in history has creating long form content been a mainstream activity?
Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0
Location integration would be amazing. Assuming I left my living room speaker on 24/7 (which is totally fine), I'd love to be able to get Rdio spinning up some tunes as soon as I get home from wherever.
My list as user and developer:
1. iCloud API for web apps
2. API hooks for Siri
3. API to access Safari bookmarks and reading lists
4. Auto update of installed apps
5. iCloud support for iBooks and iBooks for Mac
6. Time Machine that uses iCloud storage
7. API to access Reminder lists
8. Apps for Apple TV
Defensive search-and-destroy "virus" delivered to Japanese government
Mobile Morning Coffee (01/04/12) - the iPhone 4s to hit China
> this thinking that can kill science and startups

If an industry does not employ the native people in a country, or only enriches a clique of owners, then who cares if it leaves? In any case, this line of argument is malarkey. There is no evidence of restrictive immigration driving away business. Typically you just get an industry with higher capital investments and higher wages.
Yes! They're on it, it's awesome. I'm looking forward for Path to have a public API, that will be the stuff. Have you guys notice the ~12h delay in which Path posts to Facebook or Twitter?