skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Flagyl Metronidazole
Pharmacy Online :: Online Prescription Drugstore is a Online Pharmacy shop website offering high-quality no prescription drugs from our store and over-the-counter medications at discount drugs prices. we offer a wide range of drugs for men's women's and pet health with lowest price.
Right, my point was more along the lines of a hypothetical patent on the idea of "an method for editing text on a computer in a text oriented way," and that admitting that you'd seen and borrowed from another program would be a huge mistake today, rather than just acknowledging he did what good programmers do.
And have it easily replaced by whomever will run it cheaper. What does Instapaper cost? $1/month?
The Mythical Man Month

The Soul of a New Machine (hardware; nonetheless pertinent, if dated -- was a best-seller)
>However, I think it's fair to say WoW is an anomaly in terms of revenue.

Yes, and it may be WoW has to fade away for another MMO to succeed at that level, which limits upside growth for the industry. People who see movies will see multiple movies over the course of a year, but MMO players tend to play one at a time. It's a different model - service vs. product.
A Comprehensive and Feature Rich Help Desk Tool -iuvoDesk Review
He's nearly there, but the reason for the number 23 is staring you right in the face. It's not arbitrary. A heap allocated string requires 8 bytes for the length, 8 bytes for the pointer to the string, and 8 bytes for the capacity / reference count. The sum is 24 bytes.

So you either use it as a length/pointer/capacity/refcount struct, or save the malloc and use the 24 bytes directly for 23 chars and a NULL terminator.
For all of those folks who want to get better at visualization, the canonical text is http://amzn.com/0961392142 (Tufte)
I agree with your thinking that some sales folks might balk at the notion; but I'm not sure I follow your argument you should be directly (financially) rewarded for the additional effort in the larger deal. I've known several sales folks who chase many small deals simply because they're a lot easier to manage, require less time to close, and by collecting as many of them as possible, they're able to maximize their commissions.

My thought is that, just like in every other aspect of the business, your top players will be your highest paid as part of the normal compensation process--and those top people should be the ones closing the bigger deals. Just because you don't get cut a check for that specific deal doesn't mean there wouldn't be rewards for doing so.
Neat recursive anonymous/lambda/closure functions in PHP
Although you have a point, I think you take it too far. Many of the worst decisions I have seen salespeople make were based on the drive to get someone to buy now rather than, say, next week. They even knew that rushing things was going to be bad for the customer, but the salespeople's interests didn't align with the customer's.

If you pressure someone into a sale now and they decide to leave soon afterward — perhaps even demanding a refund or issuing a chargeback — you've probably lost them for at least a year, and then the company is worse off than if you hadn't made the sale at all. But if you take a little while to make sure you get it right, the lost week or month will get canceled out by how happy they are with what you've given them.

So you're absolutely right that, all other things being equal, a sale right now is better than a sale tomorrow. But all other things are not always equal, and if you try to force every peg you find into that round hole, you're just going to end up with a lot of broken pieces.
I have used it in Seattle, for business and personal.

Honestly, the reasons I'm happy to pay a premium are the phone app and the reliability: I'm fed up of booking a cab that turns up 30+ minutes late.

If any of the three/four big taxi firms in Seattle put together an app like Uber's (basically with the 'pick me up from this spot ASAP and keep me up to date with how far away you are' feature) - they would be my go-to ride every time, and would be incredibly popular.

Have never taken a cab in SF; the crazy shortage of medallions in the city sounds almost criminal.
Being compensated below market rate for sub-founder-level equity is a sucker's game. If you like working at startups (I do), either find one that can pay market rates, or start your own.
> most geeks will no longer touch them with a 10 foot pole

A great many geeks wouldn't have done anyway though, so that might bit be a significant long-term change.
I use Uber from time to time and enjoy it immensely. I agree with several of the article's things Uber could have done better, but so much of the whole outcry is people not wanting to take responsibility for their own actions.
Facebook as a service is ripe for disruption #doomed
12 Must follow Tweeters on Wellbeing and Mental Health for 2012
my G+ link:

http://gplus.to/kadnan
The article mis-interprets Ariely's study.

Fog Creek asserts that the study shows a negative relationship between commission and performance. This relationship was found - for very large rewards. Small rewards increase performance when compared to no reward.

Here is the original paper: http://m.pss.sagepub.com/content/15/11/787.short.

In a follow-up study, he showed that effort increases with reward almost as predicted, but error rate increases exponentially: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-937X.2009..... The effect is also variable depending on whether it is a primarily intellectual or mechanical task.

I'm not making a ruling on commissions here, just saying the Ariely quote corroborates Fog Creek's null hypothesis.
Switching to rbenv (for servers)
Why didn't you ask Linden when he was in the office?
Apple removed the cassette port in the Apple //c.

If only they had known then what we know now...
That'd be really easy to do with a Chrome extension.
"MS" = Manuscript.

"TB" = Tuberculosis.

Reading his little abbreviations, it's like some kind of new language or something... ;)
Yeah, I had no problem with the other junk.

But a "Whoops, we accidentally deleted all your stuff" in dropbox or gmail would be a tad devastating.
Kindle case maker sues Amazon for patent infringement, unfair competition
I was thinking of a hypothetical patent on "a method for editing text on a computer in a screen oriented manner."

Which is absurd and obviously something that shouldn't be patentable, but in my view, so is 1-click shopping on a website.
Ah, I did not notice those. They are most likely the default Gamecenter multiplayer mode where all the participants are connected to the "game" at the same time. We found a lot of limitations in this because you could only have one "game" connected at a time and this was not feasible for a reminders app. The new turn based game mode worked best for us because not everyone had to be connected at once for you to start and you could have multiple "game" sessions going on at once.
well, it would have been a she, especially in post-war England.
The way wtn said it might be a bit provocative, but here's the last paragraph of the post:

"""
I don’t think you should refactor all your code to be sure you have strings of length 23 or less. That would obviously be ridiculous. The 50% speed increase sounds impressive, but actually the time differences I measured were insignificant until I allocated 100,000s or millions of strings – how many Ruby applications will need to create this many string values? And even if you do need to create many string objects, the pain and confusion caused by using only short strings would overwhelm any performance benefit you might get.
"""

So, basically, "Never create Ruby strings longer than 23 characters" is not true at all. In some specific cases, it might be true. A more accurate title might have been "Why ruby strings with more than 23 characters are handled differently." (Or something similar)

But then, it was an interesting post and I enjoyed it; so it doesn't really matter I guess.
I'll pay someone 10-30 bucks if they recreate ifttt with a pinboard model. Keep it simple stupid, fairly cheap, and charge extra if you want to do things like SMS/Voice/things that require constant notification.
> the engineers should be fighting for better sales standards if they don't want to put the work in.

That assumes they have any way to do so. Unlikely in the situation you describe, where engineers are probably considered an expense and sales "bring in the revenue", I'd expect sales to be completely siloed from engineering and that they don't give a shit.

Hence the depressing (and likely depressed) and disillusioned answer you got from engineering: they have no way to fight this internally.
I disagree with your edit; with the quick adage that it's far easier and cheaper to retain a customer than create a new one. It sounds to me like Fog Creek has a mix between sales and account management (but so do a lot of companies that I've come across). If your sales team is also working in that account management role, retaining their clients should always be high priority even if those customers wont' be up for renewal / another contract for some time.

Moreover (and I'm reading between the lines a bit here) I think part of that statement is referring to sales people ignoring the "hard" sales and focusing only on the "easy" sales. "Are you ready to buy? No? Ok, I'll call again in 6 months" becomes, "Let's talk about your concerns so that maybe you'll buy in a month instead of 6."
I admit I made an assumption when I said microphones can't capture certain sounds. I should instead have said:

There are overtones picked up by the ear that you can't capture with a microphone and accurately play back with average computer speakers, at least in my experience.

Whether the loss in quality is the microphone's fault or the speakers' fault, I don't know. Regardless, there are sounds the musician hears and feels that not even the average in-person audience can hear, so I don't think it's a stretch to say that it's impossible to accurately judge violins based on digital recordings.
Unfortunately, some of the most successful software vendors in the world have turned over-promising and risk-shifting into a way of life. For a million reasons, the market tolerates this injustice, and more often than not rewards it. It's hard not to be bitter about it.
I linked to the video where Ariely talks about the U-shaped effect (that is small rewards increase, but large ones decrease, performance). I mentioned him to demonstrate that there was some evidence for the notion, not to say that he entirely makes the case I'm arguing for. Given the thousands of ways commissions can go wrong, I'm asking whether any small increase in benefit is ever outweighed by the problems.
It's a good way to ensure a dip in sales at the end of a good quarter.
Don't you think it would be a good idea to consider the problem you're trying to solve first?

If you start by specifying the tools first you're almost guaranteed to be wrong.
No. People are using a tool that helps them share and collect ideas to improve their lives, particularly people who aren't geeks. I've seen numerous examples of women enjoying content on Pinterest (content backed by blog posts, comments, curated collections, etc.) and using the ideas they see there to create new things... a hell of a lot of new things. I love it. I love seeing my wife enjoying herself while she creates something new and unique for our family.
I agree, its utter nonsense for the most part, it seems some companies just want you to jump through a bunch of hoops and to make you feel stupid. I think having you work on a small contracted project or something related to the business domain would be a lot more useful.
I went to public school in Coeur d'Alene and I currently live in Post Falls. I can say that we need more tech in the classroom. There is not enough of a local push for moving things forward, people are mystified by computers and very few over the age of 35 here know anything more than using it for the web or checking emails, things are better than they were but it is even hard to find a mechanic that doesn't say they "hate these new computerized cars" (even though it is old tech by my standards).

The elementary schools here when I went to school in my opinion were moderate. I have more memories of teachers trying to correct my poor handwriting or chastising me for reading ahead of the rest of the class in my books than I do of anyone actually trying to figure out what I was interested in. By middle school my standardized test scores (Iowa tests) put me in the 95-99th percentile in the nation (I took the SAT's in the 7th grade because of it)...by my junior year in high school the vice principal said to me "...why don't you just drop out? You don't want to be here and we don't want you here" That principal was Steve Casey...winner of many awards for education in the area. That is just an example of the system up here.

I approve of the pay by performance idea for teachers and I think tech should be funded before athletics since that is what truly will push innovation and bring us out of the recession that we are in.
Excluding the weather right now, Yellow Cab is likely the worst thing about Seattle. TaxiMagic is supposed to work ok, although I've never tried it.
>how would people feel if, for instance, this HN conversation page ranked higher in Google search results than the actual RWW article?

Arguably it's of more value.
I was on the phone and he only had a minute, so what would've have been a perfect alignment of planets turned into a near miss.
It's nice to re-read such articles from time to time, but wouldn't it be even better if old discussions about the same page were linked, perhaps even automatically?
I am currently in the US, but will be looking for opportunities at Hyderabad, India. Is it possible to set up the interview in the US for a position in India ?
The git manual because of it missing from kernel.org
Contributory infringement is a real thing in the US. You can be liable for providing the means.
Sinan - Building Enterprise Erlang Applications screencast
Very true. The only exception I could think of to that is when we are working with new technologies. As an example, node js and clojure are changing rapidly enough that the year to year difference is not insignificant. As we deal with technologies that are progressing more and more rapidly with time, it would probably be a good idea to keep in mind that some people who used to know what they were talking about may no longer have any idea of what is actually going on. But this is more a particular exception to places like Hacker News.

If I had a facebook, I would never do this sort of thing there. That would really really suck.
That timezone issue (further described here: http://www.benjaminoakes.com/2010/11/23/rails-timezones/ ) sound like an odd one - anyone know what the underlying cause of the problem is?
A question arises in my mind. Could Google actually use these patents in their defense against Oracle? "We didn't have them, but now we do"?

Seems like going to court over a speeding ticket you got before the speed limit was raised.
Thanks!

I've been kicking around the idea of using evolutionary algorithms to test gameplay balance, and it's cool to see that someone else is already working on it.
Yeah. I just looked at the source because I was confused about how it knew how long the embedded string was (since the length field is in the other half of the union and ruby strings can have embedded \0 bytes), and RBasic is a struct containing a VALUE referring to a class and a VALUE "flags" that tends to have a lot of bit fiddling done to it.

Apparently out of the non-reserved bits, one is used to tell whether the string is embedded or not and five more are combined to give the string's length. Makes sense!
While I find the geopolitical ramifications interesting from a power-gaming standpoint, what is really interesting to me is the energy reserves of the planet (in terms of fossil fuels) is so fungible.

To the extent that we are successful at transitioning to electricity as the primary energy 'currency' I expect it will allow an ever widening array of technologies to contribute to the net energy 'pool'.
Thank you for that. It's crazy that GoDaddy gets ~25k new domains each day.

On an unrelated note: if you view multiple tabs, the back button in your browser will take you back through every tab you viewed. This is super annoying.
Credit Karma Launches Free Credit Monitoring, Enrolls 100,000 Users In A Day
Well, yes that is why I use Uber - I was banned from the Yellow and Royal because they would NEVER show up, and I would call multiple taxi co's because I couldnt rely on anyone to come.

I live in an area that is really hard to get a taxi (Twin Peaks) and I used to live in the Presidio where it was simply impossible.

I love the service Uber provides, I just think that the whole taxi system is over priced by about double.
IPad + Keyboard or MacBook Air?
Yeah, I tried this at home when Skyrim came out. I wanted it on both my desktop and laptop, but found that downloading Skyrim to my laptop booted me from Steam on my desktop. Was curious for a trick the parent had for being logged in at multiple places.
3 hours max. Lol. How about 8?

As far as the interview. Stupid questions asked by stupid people who can't tell a techie from their asshole. Should be a technical discussion not an interrogation. Their loss.
Please help with market validation: Mail Order Coffee
Discourse: Happy New Year & New Release
They seem to have changed it already. It's "F3m413" for female and "Male" for male now.
Tool that takes Markdown text files in your Dropbox and makes a blog
It could be (and probably should be):

sizeof(long) + sizeof(char *) + sizeof(long)

But it's possible the DEFINE for RSTRING_EMBED_LEN_MAX is that and not a fixed number. You need the DEFINE since it would be needed elsewhere to check the length of a string before storing it.
I Hate Racism
Isn't this just the small string optimization with copy on write?
Yes, but they fix them as soon as it's brought to their attention. Thanks!
The nice thing about vi is its ubiquity. I can ssh into basically every UNIX system in the world and be reasonably certain that vi will be available. The same can't be said for BBEdit, TextMate, EMacs, Gedit, etc.

I picked up vi because I was stuck doing development over SSH from my college's public computer lab when my PC died. I stayed because once I'd learned the keystrokes, it really was a pretty decent editor. I think that Eclipse/TextMate/Gedit/etc. have some nice points and are definitely better in some respects (like, say, visual presentation), but vi is Good Enough and available basically everywhere.
Ballmer. He lives, breathes, and eats Windows, but apparently that's all he thinks Microsoft should do.
I disagree strongly, even after your edit. Revenue right now does not ipso facto translate to a better or more sustainable business. Google is a great example. They could plaster their front page with advertisements which could, quite possibly, generate more revenue right now. But they know that users having a good experience right now will bring them back tomorrow. So they put off some possible ad revenue in the hopes that their users are more likely to continue using their service.

The same thing could be said of any company. It is possible to drive too hard to make a sale and alienate your customer. Right now you may benefit. But later down the road you will probably develop a bad reputation.
> On the more grand scale, when Michael Jackson released Thriller, the first album I believe to outsell the Beatles, all those around him thought his next album should be just a simple collection of covers so he could take a break, but he was determined to out do it, dissatisfied with his current success

It's unclear whether you're talking about Thriller itself or about Bad, but Thriller was definitely driven by dissatisfaction with himself (he was extremely lonely according to his bios) and with the world at large: Jackson was frustrated by Off The Wall not having gotten Album of the Year (and felt it was unfair), and he was annoyed that the music industry and its press did not care about black people in general and him in particular (e.g. in 1980 Rolling Stone refused to do a cover story on him).
It’s your data, but what about the URLs? #myData #myURLs
It sounds like this is too extreme to apply a blanket label of "responsibility for their own actions". People have certain reasonable expectations of what something will cost, especially when it's a service they use habitually. If you suddenly change that cost by a factor of 4 or more, you can't reasonably expect people to spot that and change their behavior accordingly unless you make it extremely obvious. It doesn't sound like Uber made the surcharge as visible as the size would require.

I imagine this will attract some replies which say that it's still their fault no matter how unreasonable one might consider the price change to be. If you're planning to write one, then before you do, please consider this question: do you study a taxi's rates from top to bottom before accepting the ride every time you take a taxi?
Wow that is damn awesome.

Although, no Ultima / Ultima II in the game list :(

That was the first game I played on the Apple...

(The Bards Tale would be another great one...)
I have to agree. Google+ is more of a "rich Twitter" than a "not-Facebook Facebook". People often mistake it for the latter, which I think may be a large part of the reason that so many people are ho-hum about it.
You've posted a comment on a site that aggregates links to content. Pinterest is essentially the same thing. It's pictures, not so much text... but the pictures are augmented with user comments, curated into collections that people find useful, and generally the pictures are backed by more detailed content. My experience with users of Pinterest has been that they are frequently inspired to create new things from the ideas they find on Pinterest.
I think Pat actually points that out:

The value of RSTRING_EMBED_LEN_MAX was chosen to match the size of the len/ptr/capa values. That’s where the 23 limit comes from.
Many years ago, working a support desk at an ISP, I fielded calls from angry seniors who wanted to know why their dozens of email forwards were not getting delivered to their friends, who desperately needed to know about the Microsoft/AOL cash reward giveaway. Suffering through the message logs, I would find typo'd email addresses, blacklisting message, or whatever the cause of the day was. I'd then have to explain that email and the internet was "best effort", and there was no guarantee of delivery, even if you did manage to type the email address correctly.

Interesting now, how most people wave off email delivery as flaky, or accept that spam filters will eat the 5% of incorrectly classified mail.

Are social networks more or less reliable? Have we all become numb to the best efforts of the web? I'm not sure. I think it is interesting though. I wonder if those seniors still call up these days?
A couple of years ago, I worked at a place like this. The salespeople would promise features to new clients and guess at when they would be implemented.

As a developer there, it was my job to get them implemented by that time. I think I only stayed there 6 months before quitting for a better job..
Should H-1B Visas Be Easier to Get?
Here in NYC (the second tech hub in the the US) we have not one but two Protect IP Act co-sponsors: Senator Schumer and Senator Gillibrand. I don't think enough people know about this. Give them a call or email and let them know how you feel about Protect IP and SOPA.