skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Others have pointed out the phenomenon, but I like this concrete illustration of it in action.

Slashdot once interviewed The Filthy Critic, and he talked about a friend who had spent time in the writing rooms of a few sitcoms. The writers working on shows that were really pretty poor thought their work was hilarious. They couldn't get enough of their own jokes. He contrasted it with The Simpsons's writing room: full of frustrated, self-loathing writers who didn't think what they were doing was any good at all.
In 2007 DST changed and Mexico did not follow suit, so the short PST/EST/CST timezones were not specific enough anymore. Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Time_Zone):

Effective in the US in 2007 as a result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the local time changes from PST to PDT at 02:00 LST to 03:00 LDT on the second Sunday in March and the time returns at 02:00 LDT to 01:00 LST on the first Sunday in November. Canada would also acknowledge this change. In Mexico, beginning in 2010, the portion of the country in this time zone uses the extended dates, as do some other parts. The vast majority of Mexico, however, still uses the old dates.
Two Stories of Ignaz Semmelweis
There are plenty of examples (Apple being the first one that comes to mind) of companies who charge a ton (and make a ton of money) for a product that is available elsewhere for cheaper.

Price isn't always everything in the consumers mind.
Sooner or later, email will either die or get better. The problem with email for most of its life was that there was little competition. Certainly SMTP has never had a serious rival. IMAP came to challenge POP, and won: this made email better. And Exchange has certainly set a standard that IMAP and webmail providers have had to meet.

But it's not much compared to the seething shark tank that the web has been for the last twenty years. Sooner or later I think a RESTful HTTP or SPDY API will replace IMAP, and (for client-server comms at least) SMTP.

I think ccLoop is a side-issue, because they were addressing the problem of mailing list management. Contactually's approach seems to be wrong-headed to me, making the user send and receive more emails! But really it's more of a CRM system than a step forward for email, so perhaps it's solving a problem I don't have.

At comms.io, we're writing an email client. The idea is to work with IMAP, take on the lessons of Gmail, but modernize the experience, make it lightweight and transparent. If you've seen the Gmail interface lately, what I mean by lightweight is the opposite of that. Anyone who's interested in helping out, do get in touch.
Here's the code:
https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/trunk/include/ruby/ruby.h#...

It looks like uintptr_t support is there, just disabled for now.
That's exactly what I see ifttt becoming.
Yeah, there's preprocessor cleverness. It will choose either of unsigned, unsigned long or unsigned long long. There's a "#if defind HAVE_UINTPTR_T && 0" section, I'm curious why they're effectively disabling that.
So, I am not a programmer or a designer but have spent several years as a manager needing to hire talent so my two cents is from that perspective. I see your site like a self-serve online recruiter and it reminds me of the days that I would submit a job posting on Monster.com - only more detail and it looks like, better features. I especially like the ability to 'match' my employer needs in detail with an applicant's talent (similar to Match.com). I would use this if I needed to find tech talent! As far as the idea, design, and UI are concerned, nothing stood out as being unfriendly or difficult. I might suggest though that you change the icon for 'easy to use' to something different than the universal sign for 'handicapped'. My only other note is that psychologically ... you might want to consider adjusting the color scheme - black and grey are 'dark' and not necessarily conducive to a feeling of professional sharpness. You could change that by replacing the 'tan' color bars to match the bright blue ones that you use on other parts of the site. Hope this helped a little!
This is 100% awesome :) Now I wish I had an apple 2 around to try it.
I've updated the graph according to your suggestion.

Before every variable was normalized according to its own min/max, now there is a global min/max. Thank you all for the suggestions.
This is the correct answer. Someone accepted the translation without thinking too much about it, but it's almost certain that it wasn't a Facebook employee who decided on that "translation".
Do Designers Actually Exploit The Poor While Trying To Do Good?
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This is just yet another example of why taxis should be deregulated.

The reason Uber is as expensive as it is is that it there are too few cars. On New Years eve more people want to take a cap but there is no way to increase supply, because there are too few medallions.
We need a privacy graph service, one trusted API we sign up to and give it all access. Then developers can simply access different level of our services through this one api.
AWeber Email Marketing tips for 2012
I've been using the Asimov FTP site, a PC, ProTerm, and a null modem cable / Super Serial Card to achieve this result.

This is amazing—so much simpler! My Apple //e sits right next to my laptop on my desk, so for me, this is giving it a whole new lease on life.

Here's a picture, just for the hell of it: https://p.twimg.com/AiV8lqjCIAICETx.jpg
Why salespeople are on commission?
Because it's one of the rare jobs where performance can be easily and objectively measured.

Most of the arguments in the article could just as easily apply to a fixed salary (jumping ship for better pay, fighting over who gets the big deals etc). And I would argue that the theory y vs theory x argument, that good employees are by nature more intrinsically motivated than just in it for the money, probably holds true a lot more for programmers than for salespeople. By definition, sales is about getting customers to pay money, so for a salesperson it's probably a good thing to be motivated by money.

The real question about commission-based compensation is: Is what I measure, and pay people for (this quarter's revenues) really what I want to achieve (maximum long-term profitablity)?

If you pay by commission, you will probably get higher revenues right now, but also more of the problems mentioned (mostly overselling to customers that arent really a good fit for the product).

I'd say it depends on the situation the company is in. If you're an established, profitable software company like FogCreek that wants to build long-term relationships with happy customers, a fixed salary is probably better. But if you're a startup with 2 months of runway left, desperately needing some revenue right now, you're probably better off paying commissions to your salespeople.
Dev vs. beta vs. cannary Chrome builds?
https://twitter.com/#!/thatmiddleway/status/154664983681179648

What's the difference between these?
It's the apps, stupid. Development itself for Windows Phone isn't terrible. Not as painful as Blackberry, not as idiosyncratic as Android. HOWEVER, the friction involved when attempting to move a Windows Phone project past initial development into testing mode is annoyingly high, in my experience.

Take, for example, the requirement of getting your "Hello, World" app installed on real hardware and out to beta testers:

Apple: Pay your $99 bucks, get the development environment and your identity info, generate certs. You can have your app running on your own equipment in just a few hours. A couple more hours to figure out how to package it the right way for testers (or use TestFlight) and you can add up to 100 beta testers.

Android: Don't even need to sign up as a developer and pay your 25 bucks until you're ready to go. You can have your apk running on your own devices in no time at all. You can shoot your apk out to as many people as you want to test.

Blackberry: The web site's a hot mess, but it takes less than a day for them to get you your signing key, so you can generally get Hello World running on your Blackberry hardware within a day. You can shoot your app out to as many beta testers as you want.

Windows Phone: You can't test on real hardware until your developer's identity has been verified by a third party company external to Microsoft. There are documented cases where this has taken more than three months to complete. (This is if you can even pay for the developer's account because their web site rejects valid credit cards as a matter of course unless the stars are aligned. Apparently some bug where they see all credit cards as debit cards?) We're on month two and counting waiting to get 'verified.'

I totally get that they need to determine who you are in order to get your apps into the Marketplace (Apple does this as well, although I believe they do it internally--and they're relatively fast), but just to test your software on your own hardware?

Re: beta testing, you only get three registered development devices tops per developer and while they do have a facility for beta testing, it requires automated review by Microsoft to pop into the Marketplace.

I hear from Windows Phone users daily, many of whom moved to Windows Phone from Android phones because their phones were just too unreliable and they can't bring themselves to go to iPhone, and they are very vocal about being frustrated with the number and quality of apps available to them. I can't help but feel like Microsoft just doesn't understand how important quality apps are to smartphone users and how the friction they've got in their app developer workflow is a serious impediment to growing their app ecosystem.

I really wish Microsoft would get this workflow together already...they've got a fantastic chance here to make serious inroads but I don't feel like they really understand (mobile) Developers, Developers, Developers! yet.
@sankalpk - I've seen that before, and it's a great post-mortem. I can see why it's hard for a collaboration company that's not solving a strong pain point. We look at the relationships that are live and die via e-mail, and are building a solution for that.
Here are links for Schumer & Gillibrand, to contact them:

http://sopatrack.com/congressperson/S000148-sen-chuck-schume...
http://sopatrack.com/congressperson/G000555-sen-kirsten-gill...
And MMORPGs seem to be moving towards "freemium"/"free to play" models: Guild Wars has been from the start, EQ2 recently switched to freemium following what was apparently a successful "Everquest II Extended" experience, Clone Wars Adventures is a freemium, City of Heroes added a freemium mode (City of Heroes: Freedom) this year, ...), and both of Turbine's recent MMOs — D&D Online and LOTR Online — are now freemium, which makes a new WoW (in terms of revenue) unlikely, apart from WoW2 (or Starcraft Online) maybe.
You need to follow me in order for me to message you on Twitter! I will take you up on your offer to comment on my project ... http://www.uencounter.me smile
Handpick: Selective Social Sharing Without The Noise
I'm actually fine with it. As long as I'm not one of the developers working overtime with no extra pay to get these over-promised features finished.

That's the worst part. The sales guys get a bonus and the developers get an 80 hour work-week.
Congrats! (I participated in the round)
> Within the first day of its existence (the option became available just yesterday), the company has managed to enroll an impressive 100,000 users for the opt-in credit monitoring service. The move brings Credit Karma’s total user base to over 4 million.

> Says CEO Kenneth Lin, Credit Karma is now on pace to register over 500,000 users this month thanks to the launch of the new monitoring service.

huh?
I see. I may have been misunderstood due to how non-specific the question was. I guess I'm asking if there are newer technologies that the community is becoming more in favor of.

For web, which is what this project requires, I've typically used PHP and MySQL as my trusty go-to. I know Facebook has used it successfully to a certain extent, but I'm wondering if a Ruby MongoDB approach would be better for the long term.

In short, I'm wondering if I'm using a chisel when there's a jackhammer out there.
There are multiple sources of processing delay in a TV image processor. The two main sources are the scaling and de-interlacing blocks. Scaling is pretty benign. A cheap scaler will introduce somewhere in the order of four lines of delay. A more advanced scaler might do 16 or 32 lines. These are lines of video. If we are talking about 1080, then 16 lines is 16/1080th of a frame. In other words, not insignificant for TV applications.

The de-interlacing block is where most of the delay comes from. Interlaced video (standard definition, 1080i, etc.) only transmits half the lines per field. This means that the processor has to synthesize the missing pixels in order to have full frames to display. A really cheap de-interlacer can be done with just a few lines of delay. You wouldn't want this as it would introduce bad imaging artifacts. Pretty much all consumer TVs use a method called "motion adaptive de-interlacing" (MADI). There are many implementations of MADI. In general terms you use data from frames before and after the one you want to process in order to detect pixels that have moved. Those that did not move can simply be replicated or averaged into the missing slots. Anything that moved requires different treatment. The key here is that you need to store a couple of frames worth of video before you can start with MADI. That's your two frames of delay (or more).

There might be other delays introduced by other subsystems such as the receiver.
Why did the film adaptation of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH into The Secret of NIMH rewrite the end plot with that stupid mystical jewel-locket-thing?

They pretty much rewrote the entire premise of the book. It was originally about lab rats who acquired human-level intelligence from experiments, and then had to rapidly build a civilization from scratch. Disnification turned it into some typical magical talking animal thing.
Matador: MVC for Node
DejaNews - I was excited by Google buying this. All those news posts, with a good search engine in front. What could go wrong?

And then clueful users didn't want their words used for ads, so they started x-no-archiving their posts. And then eternal September really took off with vast numbers of people using Google Groups.

Usenet was dying a slow horrible death and there are lots of reasons for that (Dutch dumpers; stealth binaries; rushed "standards" like Yenc; etc) but Google didn't help (and probably made things a lot worse) when they borked DejaNews.
Using the speaker of iPad/iPhone to emulate the Apple ][ cassette tape is brilliant.
Long time HN contributor, first time I've felt the need to go anonymous.

I've been in sales my entire professional career, but always commissioned based. I've worked in SMB with small teams and enterprise with massive teams. I feel like these are related points (to paying commission), but you may have a different opinion.

First, commission is like crack. Once you get a taste, it's hard to kick. Earning potential is outrageous. I was the highest paid employee for two years. I made more than the founders, anyone on our leadership/executive team, and anyone that built what I sold. That last point kept me up at night, so I eventually found a way to redistribute the wealth. I stayed in sales because I couldn't imagine "how anyone could live on that little" (< $100k). It's hard to quit.

Second, crack either transforms people or attracts a certain personality type. I've never been surrounded by so many disloyal, self centered, unethical, and maniacal people. Ever. I've also caught myself crossing boundaries I would have never previously considered -- until I thought about how it would push me over the accelerator and significantly increase my commission. I have met some people with strong character and ethics in sales, who are great salespeople, but they're a tiny minority.

Third, those ethical breaches typically result in misrepresentation of the company/product/service you're selling. Commissions are typically paid on a contract, not on the lifetime value of the customer. I firmly believe the commission-based sales people are potentially the most damaging thing to your company. Set an inaccurate expectation to close the deal? As a sales person, you're on to the next one. Results in high churn and damaged credibility, neither of which affects the salesperson's commission check.

Last, sales people are typically the least knowledgeable in the organization about the company/product/service they're trying to sell. I've always been in, uhm, technology as a service(?), but neither of the companies I've worked at have any desire to hire people who understand the technology. They hire salespeople that have "consistently exceeded quota" and "increased customer spend by x" or some other sales achievement. That's great, dude, but you sold fucking vacuum cleaners. What do you know about the product those guys in the dark rooms are slaving away over? Why are you the best person to go out and represent all of us in the market? Speaking of, I've yet to interview a salesperson that's come in with "here's a list of my previous clients who will vouch for my integrity."

For those talking about large sales team, I can personally assure you all of the negative aspects mentioned in the post become even more apparent with scale. Poaching leads, generating fake orders, tarnishing the company to exceed quota ("total lack of ethics")-- it's all there, and it's easier to hide in a bigger pond.

I know you need to move units and generate revenue, but I agree, why do we pay sales commission?
8 Ways To Avoid Burning Out Your Employees
Door hanger printing
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"""Think for a second: we don’t insist that other kinds of workers be paid on commissions. Only an amazing idiot pays a programmer by lines of code."""

This is an idiotic argument, if I ever saw one.

Lines of code don't measure the programmers contribution to your companies bottom line.

Sales do.

That said, paying sales commissions to sales people is not that different than giving shares and stocks options to programmers as an incentive.

A mediocre post, at most.
Thanks - the fallback to long long explains it for me.
How Dell.com Still Confuses and Coupons Us To Death
Completely agree with you that email will either die or get better. The timeline is the question. We haven't seen any strong competitors to the current incarnation of "e-mail" come and really threaten the core architecture. E-mail is too open, too standardized, too widely implemented to be quickly overtaken by any other solution.

With Contactually, we started with that theory - e-mail is still, and will be for the foreseeable future, the primary mode of communication. We're not focusing on making the user send and receive more emails - but we push the realization that e-mail is already where you're doing most of your communication. Why shouldn't you have a tool that leverages that?
Is there a place that has a side by side comparison to look at perhaps?
Is there a link to the minesweeper spreadsheet that I don't see?
In my experience interviewing candidates for Amazon(1), there is definitely a talent shortage. We get a surprising amount of applicants that can't write a basic program. Personally, I reject 4/5 of all applicants at the phone screen because they couldn't write a very simple program.

I use a collaborative code editor so I can see what the person is typing, and I don't give trick problems. I pose the question, and ask them to think about it before coding. Once they've landed on an acceptable solution, I ask them to write it up. 80% of the time it's broken or they can't finish it (these solutions should be 20 lines or fewer). On at least one occasion the answer was copied directly from stack overflow :\.

Trick questions are all the rage, but I'm not convinced that they actually highlight a competent developer. The problem (in tech, not specifically at Amazon) is we're all trying to emulate Google, and since they ask brain teasers then we have to ask them too, because it must be the one true way.

In summary, I think there is both a shortage of good devs, and contrived puzzle questions are not actually an good for evaluating a candidate.

(1) These views expressed are my own, and not necessarily the views of Amazon or its employees. Disclaimer added at my own discretion, not due to any corporate policy.
I tried to do this with my TI 99/4A and an MP3 player years ago, with no success. I suspect the conversion to MP3 wrecked the signal in ways that my ear could not detect.
Did people from your circles +1 any of those 2 posts? If so, the rank is 'reasonable'.
@blueplastic - we do regular security audits and will soon engage with a firm to provide that guarantee as well. In the interim, what would you like to see to alleviate that?
Very useful. Thanks.

There are so many books on data visualization it's hard to judge just from the reviews which are the canonical textbooks. So far I was just recommended this book: http://book.flowingdata.com/
What's the best way to find out if an idea is worthwhile? Spend a month working on it or a weekend?
How to Work Happily with Developers
"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."

What's the difference? In either scenario, you are rewarded proportionately to how much effort you put into landing one large deal or multiple small deals.

"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."

I suspect commissions simply originated from sales reps demanding recognition for their efforts. Bonus structures and salary positioning through systems like FogCreek assume you have fair and competent managers who recognize and reward effort. Sales teams may not always present this luxury, so reps may simply demand these commissions to cover their bases.
What task tracking tool to use?
Bad (or, my unfortunately unfavorable review of Bob Martin’s keynote)
Rogues gallery: 9 infamous social engineers