skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
São Paulo's University radio had a program like this too. On Saturday afternoons, during interviews, one of the audio channels was transmitting programs (MSX-only, sadly)
Maybe they were busy creating a great product instead of obsessing about perfect architecture and optimising prematurely?

I think you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who believes that ensuring all of the servers are running the same code is a 'premature optimization'.
The cost of Ubers and unregulated market will fall as more supply comes on tap -- both via Uber and via 3rd parties.

In two years time Uber and everyone else will have a public API to communicate their permanent variable pricing, and they'll be a ton of smartphone apps that talk to all of the APIs from all of the providers and suggest which one to take based on the current supply/demand curve and other factors.
Wow he managed to get a car at 1:30am after NYE? That's amazing! I'd definitely pay those prices for that kind of convenience! Would be prefer cheaper prices but no cars available for several hours? I think not.
>> " 'this' refers to the object, I don't give a shit how it works."

Well, it is quite important knowing how `this` works in JavaScript. See: http://www.digital-web.com/articles/scope_in_javascript/
I think it was Apple 2 as well. This was the first thing I looked for.
Good job Alexis :)
Um, isn't this the definition of sunk cost? They already lost money on their bet. Trying to raise prices in the future to pay for the past is a blunder.

If they can get away with raising prices and not losing customers, it is irrelevant that they overpaid for coffee they already bought. They just earn more per cup. If they can't get away with it, then this is a foolish thing to do, as they can't make their previous payments vanish.

Didn't their executives go to business school?
Very well said. And nice suit! ;)
Commodity Trading agreements are for businesses who use items as the input for their production.

Starbucks is one of the few types of companies that SHOULD be buying commodities contracts to control unpredictability
Nice. Anyone remember a game where essentially little paratroopers fall down from the sky and you have a cannon rotating on a turret to shoot them down? When you hit the little paratroopers they blew into little green pieces all over the screen. That was a blast.

My sister sold our Apple IIe at a yard sale for like $8.00 in the mid 90's :(
Analyst: Netflix Now the 15th Most-Watched TV 'Network' in U.S.
It's an interesting question how much of the population is really capable of becoming productive coders in a professional setting. Certainly we already have a wide class of coders doing things like advanced Excel spreadsheets which require much of the critical thinking required to write general-purpose code, but even there you find that there is a distinct subset of people who really grok it and break through the next level of creative problem-solving ability.

I would argue that unless you can break through that wall where you have the tenacity, will and base knowledge to debug anything that is thrown your way, you will not be employable professionally as a coder because inevitably you will get hung up on something. I'm not sure the obvious outward computer-geek level passion is required, but I certainly think you need a real sense of satisfaction with the problem solving aspect of the job. How much of the population possesses that? I'm not sure, but I'm guessing far less than half.

My prediction instead is that hackers will continue hacking until we achieve artificial intelligence, and then computers themselves will do the heavy lifting and we can all be creative directors. At that point we will have to contend with far more difficult existential issues such as how to structure society and happiness for a species that is evolved from a difficult struggle for survival in a world where automation accounts for every physical need. Maybe philosophy will be the next mass profession.
What about salaries, benefits, and other costs? I think the article is placing too much importance on the price of beans rather than the prices of other overhead (including fuel and labor).
I'm 99% sure you're wrong about 1). The internal pointer is the VALUE that is pointing to the struct RString. `str2 = str` will make another VALUE point to the same struct RString. Consider

str = "foo"
str2 = str
str.object_id == str2.object_id #=> true

I'm fairly sure that implies that str and str2 share everything including the RString object, so it couldn't really have one of str/str2 have a field that points to the other.

I am not sure about 2) and 3) but I'd expect some copy-on-write mechanism based on a flag field in the RBasic struct, and taking substrings might be O(1) thanks to sharing too.
Android Market catching the app store
Too broke to be a 501(c)3. 
I have been trying to raise a few bucks for years now. I have looked at tons of sites including crowdrise.com and others.

They all demand 501(c)3 status which costs $500.
Why do they shirk all the thousands of charities that can't afford that?

I am licensed to solicit money as a TN charity. You can look it up. The only difference between me and free-google-adwords, ebay-donations, globestar, and all the rest is that $500.

Come on Feds, get out of the way and let the States do their thing....

(slight rant)

Jim Pruett, Director
WikiSPEEDia.org
A TN Charity
10 Parques temáticos pelo Mundo
I think the shortage of software development skills really has to do with the lack of there being enough people who get impassioned with this kind of stuff.

I was at a party recently I was asking someone about their work. I was really interested in how they solved certain problems, etc... We were probably only talking a minute or so when she says, "Can we not talk about my job and ask me about my car or some great meal I've had?" So I apologized and we talked about other things.

But it did get me thinking that at a random party I'd be happy to talk about my job/industry/etc... While I have a lot of interests, I don't think I've ever thought, "I'm tired of talking about programming or technology". Usually when I stop talking about it, it's for the sake of those around me :-)
I created http://www.adopt-a-cloud.com/ based on a half bakery idea (http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Adoptacloud_2eorg) using the Play framework.
I was hoping TB was actually a disused hallucinogen, popular during the 40s.
The Difference Between Mediocre & Excellent Companies
It took about 3-4 months. I did not leave the country and started with my new employer within the 10 days. My new employers' lawyer lodged the I-129 (application for change) during employment with the first employer and I started with the new before the approval came back under advisement of the lawyer. If it came back rejected I suppose I would have had to leave pretty quick.
Okay, knowledge of this specific optimisation wouldn't be that useful except in some very unlikely scenarios. Nevertheless, I found this to be an interesting read about some Ruby MRI internals.

But I have to disagree with your attitude toward optimisations. Algorithmic improvements (and implementation optimisations, but generally less so) can improve performance by many orders of magnitude. Sure, sometimes it just doesn't matter, but there are plenty of cases when you should pay attention to this. For example: any web service that runs on more than a couple of servers. At some point, it will be cheaper to spend more time writing efficient software than to add hardware. Another example: mobile devices. Can you make your software 20% faster? Great, that means 20% more battery life.

I have a recent example which left a strong impression on myself. I have implemented a bot which plays Kalah[1] for a school project. I've used C and I've optimised the program as much as reasonable in a week or so. After I was done, I've looked on the web for a strong implementation to play against. I've found a bot implemented in Ruby. To my surprise, my implementation was about 4 orders of magnitude faster. A friend implemented the same thing (including algorithmic optimisations) in Java. Guess what, his was still 2 orders of magnitude slower than mine.

TLDR: Yeah, most of the time computers are fast enough. But if you have hotspots, it often pays off to optimise that code.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalah
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2772398
I'm in the same boat as you (20,web/mobile). I've done my fair share of interview and here's what I've found:

Anything that's worth doing involves a heavy amount of math. Most of my day is spend doing UI and I tend to deal with a heavy amount of math each day. So I don't know what you mean by "I'm web/mobile" but unless you are purely a designer*, your doing math.

The math that they ask at interviews usually doesn't involve anything that isn't reasonably expected to be in an algorithms book. To that extent they usually avoid some of the more specialized algorithms. eg, I've had BSTs but not Red-black trees but it's not unusual to have a question on RBTs depending on the company.

Other than knowing your algos really well that's about it.
Totally off topic, but the markup for a down voted comment actually drew my attention to it. Kind of a "nothing to see here" sign.

I do agree that the rant is quite unnecessary.
That's a really good question. The short answer is, "it depends."

In my mind, the problem is that commission is an incentive to do whatever it takes to close the deal -- especially if you're in an uncapped commission with accelerators. For example, if I'm paid 10% on my first $300k in new business, 15% on $300-499, 25% on 500+, I'm doing everything I can to hit $500k, right?

I (the commissioned salesperson) would lie to my mom if I'm at $490 with a $12k deal on the table. I'll lie to you, and I'll tell you things about our product/service that aren't true. You'll do this one project with us, I'll get my gigantic commission check, and then you'll a) never come back b) tell everyone you talk to about us and c) not affect my commission check. I'll also put on my resume that I "exceeded monthly quotas" and smile. Remember, I'm here to get paid. That's why we're in a commission-based role. [edit: Please keep in mind that I'm giving accounts of what I've seen, not necessarily what I've done. I wouldn't lie to my mom. Others would.]

I believe you can mitigate that problem by paying out over a term, or upon certain achievements (deployed, customer gave us a positive rating, etc.). However, what additional problems does that create in your organization? Is it good or bad to have the salespeople managing (micro or otherwise) the delivery ("selling is not delivering")? Does that compensation model get too complicated?

Call me an optimist, but I wish companies would hire people that want to truly evangelize their widgets, put them on a base salary, and then measure performance. Sales isn't rocket science, it just takes someone who is comfortable talking to people...and when you're selling something you believe in, that's really easy to do.
On of the greatest things about Erlang is that stability is orthogonal to correctness.

Essentially you have a process that does something (a worker) and a second process that will be informed if the first process dies (a supervisor).

With that core construct you build a supervisor tree which restarts subsystems (using OTP).

You can have every worker process crash out (ie no correctness) and have macro stability (the supervision tree restarts worker processes correctly).

The consequence of this is that you only code the happy path . Try/catches are very rare (typically at hypernumbers we wrap end-user input with try/catch and only have one try/catch per 25kloc or so).

The VM logs all these crashes. You check 'em out and fix them.

Happy path programming is fantastic. If I use try and use your library in ways you didn't expect it will crash (and tell me that our expectations are out of whack).

Every try/catch that you write wraps up and hides low-level bugs which you never fix. In languages where crashed bubble up the call stack there is a disjoint between correctness and stability - you need to tolerate a certain degree of errors to get stability.

Turns out actually fixing them is good.
Chef in 2012
Nice suit and great job!
> Fog creek basically just gave themselves a pay raise. Rather than giving salespeople a cut of the sales, they now are paying them a flat-fee.

Fog Creek have taken on the sales risk entirely from the sales staff. It's not a one-way trade.
Maybe I have been fortunate in choosing employers, but is 1 or 2 days off really going to make people feel good about the extra 80 hours they worked? Even considering the "tips" in this article I feel burnt out and awful about working for a company like that.
Here's a better explanation for #1:

In Ruby, most classes (including String) are reference types. This is why `str2 = str` doesn't create a new string. It doesn't create a new RString either - str and str2 are both pointers to the same RString struct.
That's a fair point.

There are certainly people who apply to Amazon after having made a couple websites, thinking that Amazon is just a website so they're qualified. What they don't see is all of the intense engineering that happens to keep that website running. A very small portion of our engineers ever write HTML.

Amazon does have a reputation of being cheap (and it's well-deserved), which is probably causing a lot of great devs to avoid the company entirely. That would skew the numbers in favor of less talented devs. However, I don't believe our rejection rate is higher than the industry average. 80% rejection at phone screens is pretty standard.

Edit: Also, for your particular example, Microsoft was _way_ better benefits than Amazon and a better office environment. I can't comment on pay, since I don't know their typical payscale.
Actually, at the end of an F1 visa, provided that you got a degree, you can work under OPT for 12 months, with a possible 17 months extension if you're in STEM.

At the end of those (12+17) months you can seek H1B.
How Geoloqi deploys fast, concurrent, zero-downtime ruby web apps with Rainbows
The Politics of Online Anonymity - Warts and All
AFAIK str2 = str will just share the RVALUE-Pointer.

I think to actually see shared strings behavior, you would have to do str2 = str.clone or str2 = str[0..-1].
There are not enough roads in the city on NYE for everyone who'd want a private car. More medallions are not going to solve this class of "spiky demand" problems.

In Brisbane city on NYE, the public bus service was free after 9pm. There were a lot of road closures and people who wanted to travel to the city used public transport. I had my first bus trip of 2011 on NYE, and it was quick, because there weren't many cars on the road.
Comcast takes buggy equipment to a whole new level
Visa cap was a problem during 2006-2008. Starting from 2009 it became much slower. (for example, in 2008 whole main h1b cap was taken with in 1st day of april and even between these who "took" it there was a lottery. On the other hand, for 2009 visa cap was used only in September)
In some ways I would expect exactly that. Starbucks' coffee speculators would probably know more about coffee than generalist speculators. The best solution might be for Starbucks to bring in a speculation consultant to work with them - and they probably did something like that.

I have to confess I'm a little baffled at the story here, though. My understanding is that it's often more important for a large business to have knowledge of future raw materials prices than strictly the lowest possible prices. So it should be expected that buying coffee futures will do more to smooth out the ongoing price of coffee than to minimize it. Sure, it would be nice to minimize the cost of coffee beans and I'm sure Starbucks works hard to do so, but to if they (or anyone) could constantly be perfect coffee price predictors, they wouldn't need to produce coffee to make money.
Disnification? Don Bluth wasn't at Disney at that point, so give credit where it's due. :)

Yeah, he rewrote the premise, and now it's about saving your family from imminent nuclear/tractor-related apocalypse with a lab-rat sideshow. Ironic, since this means Frisby is about the NIMH story while Secret of NIMH is about Mrs Frisby (/Brisby, per Frisbee Corp. lawsuit concerns).
Some guy at Adobe Research made a conference about inverse relations in GUI context ( classical example being the degrees to fahrenheit relation ). I can't locate the URL right now * frustrated *
I think it was their C++ guru .. can't remember anything else // ahh self cache miss
I bet Uber will pivot rather than be involved with peak time travel the way they did on NYE. It is bad for the brand to charge ultra high rates when people are feeling festive.
Little known fact about Starbucks cup sizing: the menu goes 'tall', 'grande', 'venti', but you can still order a 'small', it's not on the menu, and costs like $1.12 or something.
Another data point: if I recall correctly, the visa office is only open until 12pm.
GOVERNING THE CLOUD, DEVELOPER-STYLE
putting my very first comment in HN here.

Does anyone have any experience or know the process with transferring from F-1(ESL school) to H-1B?

From What I've been told the process is F-1 > OPT > H-1B but currently,I'm in ESL school and can't get OPT.

Briefly background :BSc from Thailand computer science,6 years experience with .Net full stack,Agile,Scrum,CMMI level 3,lately really into mobile app development(iOS almost 1 year)

I started applying for jobs by looking on the job listing site and even post my resume on craigslist. got several job interviews at the time apparently by phone which both directly from company and recruiter.

overall,the interview went pretty well then last question I was asked what is your currently work status I told them F-1 student visa.... nailed it...Well,never get a call back.

never give up I jump in every single opportunity, read every searched result to start my startup in USA (e.g. blueseed,startup visa act).

Went on one face-to-face job interview and finally,got a job offer as software engineer and assistant software architect they told me that they are willing to sponsor me for H-1B. They made a contact with one law firm and I got a couple forwarded emails from them which being said how the process works and how much will it cost blah..blah..blah (the company tried to show me that they were starting the process getting me a working visa).

the law firm asked what school are you in right now I said I'm in ESL school then they said you will get a better chance if you are not in ESL school but either graduate school or college which majoring in any field that related to the job.(software engineer).

This led me to my question above and I would like to know your opinion that Is there any chance for me to get a working visa in this situation?

Thank you.
Markdown is pretty gnarly as a language. I wrote a markdown interpreter for Erlang https://github.com/hypernumbers/erlmarkdown

Initially I wrote it against the Daring Fireball spec but switched it over to track the output of the showdown javascript library.

Markdown is not a great language to implement. I wrote a hand parser because there are loads of places where you have to look ahead more than one token (not that I am a great lexer/parser expert).
true, although the point I was making is that sooner or later fields like agriculture, energy, manufacturing, transportation, logistics and others will be completely automated and just require coders to operate. That leaves some other fields, but these are huge parts of the economy. That's not gonna happen tomorrow of course, but we'll gradually get towards is and coder demand is just increase steadily over time.
You need to learn how to program
I certainly hope it does not become the next mass profession. I don't understand people that want everyone to learn to code. Its simple supply and demand, friends. As the supply of coders goes up, demand for my services go down.
I thought you could specify a username and receive mail as foo@facebook.com.
The most surprising tidbit is that some routers don't respect the 'WPS Enable' setting and seem to keep WPS active regardless.

On another note, could one use dd-wrt or one of the other linux router distros to respond to WPS and send fake info to an attacker? ( say if there are 5 attempts in 5 minutes send incorrect data to attacker )
Hmm... I certainly didn't mean to say he "is wrong." Given many claims I can't verify, I give the person the benefit of the doubt: I can't say if it's right or wrong so I'll assume the author is right. BUT, once I see one assertion that I know to be way off or highly uninformed, I revoke that "benefit of the doubt" on all the other claims. As I said it's unfortunate, but I can't assume the other assertions are any more valid than the one I know to be wrong/uninformed.

Horse flogging, stop now: If you were to tell my that northern Spain is rainy in the winter and Sweden has long dry summers, I'd take your word for it (I know little about the climates in those countries). BUT if you then told me snow is rare in winter in the US Northeast, which I know to be false, I ask myself "hmm... could his statements about the other places be equally inaccurate? He has demonstrated he does not know what he's talking about vis-a-vis local climate trends." Do you see what I mean? I'm not saying anything he wrote is true or false, it's just called into question by a demonstration of ignorance on the topic.
use the 24 bytes directly for 23 chars and a NULL terminator.

Ruby strings aren't null terminated though

EDIT: So I went and looked at the code, they are null terminated, but as far as I can tell, Ruby doesn't rely on this directly.
Right, because AIUI there are huge fixed costs in setting up and running an LCD fabrication plant. So the biggest market wins.
No, Hashtags Are Not Ruining English
Gizmodo writer Sam Biddle thinks hashtags are making us lazy and dumb, but is it really that simple?
That's great to know. You probably just saved me and my wife a few grand and a lot of hassle bouncing in and out of the country! This is a great visa, but it seems (to me, at least) like they rushed thru defining some parts of it.
That's a good point; thanks. I'm not sure if Dropbox diffs at sub-file level - perhaps it does.

The short story is that Dropbox + Truecrypt work fine, but may not (or may!) be optimal.
Yes, indeed. Also comparison with a number of countries, instead of just Finland, can give you a better idea of what works and what is just an accidental feature.

For example, in Germany pupils who fail two (or so) classes, have to repeat the entire year. That ends up costing the economy way more than giving those weak students special attention, and extra teacher time, to get them up to speed again. Also the German school system segregates people into university-bound and not university-bound at age ten. Switching between tracks later is possible, but hard.
Looking for friends that can hack
I've finished college and god, now I feel awful. I tried meeting some hackers through those 'find a cofounder' apps and I had a horrible experience, we just talked about 'how can we make money together' instead of having real bonds(I think that's what makes a good cofounder).

I know that much of you had awesome friends in college, or met into meetups and so on that are hackers and don't have the same sort of problem that I do, but I didn't.

So if you are laying here and feel the same emptiness, or is willing do adopt a hacker to your circle, feel free to contact me: t@art-is-t.me

or leave a message here, so I get in contact with you.

No, I'm not US based.
I don't use it. For Japanese, try Rikaichan (a Firefox translation plugin) which lets you look up unfamiliar kanji without leaving the website. You can also look words up on http://www.alc.co.jp/ but it might be hard to use unless you can read at least basic Japanese.