skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It may be minimally creative, but might be an essential ingredient for efficiently linking a person's interests with content related to those interests.

Some of these comments show a heavy bias towards creating consumable content over actually creating something new and physical. My experience with users of Pinterest is that they increase their actual output of creative physical things. I think that's good. If they don't blog about their experience creating a new Christmas card holder or batch of cookies that's fine by me (I liked eating the cookies).
"Because it's one of the rare jobs where performance can be easily and objectively measured."

That is only true if you focus entirely on sale dollars as the measuring stick.

It is much harder to measure the impact of things like customer satisfaction, office dysfunction, job churn and so forth.
In case anybody is interested, here is the link to the 1999 interview: http://www.linux-mag.com/id/349/
The cassette loading method is going to limit this to games that fit entirely in RAM and never access their disk once loaded. That's going to rule out a lot of games. Obviously anything that needs more than one floppy, but even a lot of games that do fit on one side are still going to want to access the disk they came on.

Nevertheless, awesome!
Jump ship!
https://duckduckgo.com/
esp. see: https://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html

strips referers (so sites don't see whence you came), bang syntax (search other sites directly), doesn't track, doesn't log, "vim keybindings"... it's pretty sweet. :)
In my Steve Jobs memorial (http://www.ericjgruber.com/blog/2011/10/thank-you-steve-jobs...), I opined about the Apple IIe and one of my favorite games growing up, Montezuma's Revenge. And sure enough, it's there.

Seeing this made me wish I could play it again. Excellent job.
No. H1-B is just a subsidy to the wealthiest Americans. Besides, it turned out that the biggest abusers of the guest workers was Indian outsourcing companies. go figur. Sure, lots of fly by night venture caps think "If I could just hire cheap ...". What they don't seem to realize is there is no controls over capital flows. If it's such a good idea, it can be done where labor is cheaper. Downside is suit might have to travel and get hepatitis shots.

Better ideas is limit guest worker visas to like 20,000 a month for 1 year gigs and let capital bid on the slots with no restrictions. Top bidder wins. Money goes to pay down the debt. No favoring tech companies like Microsoft with their lobbyists and billions in the bank with special preferences.
Samsung Rips Off The iPhone...3GS
Desktop reference for B2B blogging:Fill-in with your particular info
good to know - thanks
CoffeeScript, the Rise of "Build Your Own JavaScript"
YA RLY
I can think of a number of things why it's used:

1) It tests if you're able to think on your feet. Anyone can Google for help/solution/code for a problem, but most people want to know if you can think for yourself and that your first reaction to a problem isn't to go for the browser. They want to know what you're thinking and how you can solve a problem.

2) It tests how you handle stress. Do you blank out and panic? Do you start shaking uncontrollably and can't speak properly? Crunch time gets stressful, and if you're easily stressed out your desired employer may see this and think you're not a good fit.

3) It tests teamwork. A lot of times, interviewers will drop hints or advice on how to solve a problem. I've heard that some programmers will just disregard it or try to fight it and solve it their own way. It's a good time for an interviewer to see if you're someone they'd want to work with.

EDIT: If you're going to downvote me, you should leave a reply why you found my comment to be deconstructive or irrelevant.
How we make it easy for online scam artists
Apples and oranges. You can take Virgin (shared transportation) to Seattle for $59, but try booking a private plane for SFO->SEA at that rate!

Your public transportation cost to SFO is about $10.
Developer or Designer? Work with Codecademy to Make 2012 Code Year
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We're looking for developers, designers, and developer evangelists.

Developers should have previous experience with consumer web products and know (or be willing to learn) our stack of Ruby, Rails, MongoDB, JavaScript, and backbone.js. Every time we deploy, you'll be reaching hundreds of thousands of users.

Designers should be able to code their designs and should have also designed fun consumer web interaces. You'll be designing the interface for the future of learning.

Developer Evangelists should have experience with coding and development but don't need to write the cleanest code on a regular basis. You'll be working with external developers and on Codecademy's content.

Get in touch at jobs(at)codecademy(dot)com or by checking out codecademy.com/jobs. All jobs are in New York or San Francisco.
Yeah I've been am emacs user for decades but I know just enough vi to be able to navigate and edit config files, for this very reason. You always have vi.

I probably should learn a bit more.
Wow, can 3rd-party services actually delete all your data if they wanted to? It's not just read-only access?
Here it is, not sure why it was removed from the blog post:

http://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ap2tXBYlw7QmdEg3...
Previous posts[1] have indicated that Fog Creek does rather extensive profit sharing. Isn't that just a form of commission? Further, profit sharing includes non-sales employees.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000038.html
Fun fact: a VALUE is not only a pointer. Ruby takes advantage of the fact that pointers are aligned to a certain boundary (so a few of the least significant bits are always zero) and stores flags in the least significant bits.

For example, if the LSB is 1, then the VALUE isn't a pointer - it's a Fixnum. This is why the maximum size of a Ruby Fixnum is one bit less than the pointer size on the machine.
Being a Happy Professional
Thumbdrive-sized streaming media players coming soon
That would probably be more useful, but it doesn't scale. An interview like that takes up a ton of resources and can leave a bad impression on a candidate.

Not only are you paying for devs to help and evaluate the candidate, you are doing this over a much longer period than a traditional interview, and you have to pay the candidate for the work they did, even if you're going to throw it out.

Nobody wants to force candidates to jump through hoops or make them feel stupid. That's a recipe for bad word-of-mouth and never hiring good devs. When I conduct interviews, I always try to make people feel like they did an OK job. I don't want them to get off the phone thinking they did really poorly. I try hard to seem impartial, but that's often quite difficult to do.

The root problem is that nobody knows what the hell they're doing in interviews. We don't know the best way to evaluate candidates, so we try various things that are ineffective or wasteful. Eventually we'll figure it out.
- On pace to register 500,000 new users this month

- Enrolled 100,000 users in the optional opt-in monitoring service (This is the new option that just became available. You can sign up for the site without enrolling in this feature.)

- Total user base of +4 million.
1st day: 100,000 registers.

The company is on pace to have over 500,000 users by the end of the month.

If they have 1,000,000 users, that's over 500,000, so the statement stands.
Honestly, I think places use commissions for the reason of underpaying some salespeople- not for the reason of rewarding top salespeople.

In my experience, commissions exist so that places can hire a ton of salespeople with relatively little risk to themselves.
Did you totally miss Facebook's existence? Teenagers these days don't even use email. Facebook's sucking in the next generation's messages. Email's too slow and asynchronous they cry. Douglas Rushkoff would bet to differ, but anyway. Facebook's unified messaging was kind of interesting, but I might as well be CCing all my email to Kim Jong-un.
I have no idea!

The permissions page at Dropbox says:

The app ifttt would like to connect with your Dropbox.

This app will have access to your entire Dropbox.
Please make sure you trust this app before proceeding.
You're currently logged in as user@example.org. If you meant to connect from another account, you can logout.

Doesn't define what "access" might entail. If the permissions allow create/upload I have to assume it includes delete as well.
Atlassian (which also makes bug tracking software) has been around longer than Fog Creek, and doesn't even have salespeople, much less commissions.

Demonstrated model of success, no need to blog about it in 2012.
Hands-on: Hacking WiFi Protected Setup with Reaver
Wow, my dad bought an Apple //c when I was around 4 y.o. and it was kept at home until I was ~8, but I couldn't remember seeing a cassette port. At least I'm at peace now.
I like that you broke out and completed preparatory steps ahead of actually upgrading Rails, but the blog post points out some process smells.

Title Upgrading Airbnb from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0

Date January 4, 2012

Why are you blogging about upgrading to Rails 3.0.x when the current stable Rails has been 3.1.x for over 4 months?

> Our app was running Rails 2.3.8 at the time, and the production instances were a mess. Each instance had its own set of gems and its own versions of those gems. Naturally, none of the instances matched.

How did this happen?

> Tobi listed every controller in our app at the time and divided them among the engineers. The engineers went through the templates used by each controller and made sure string output in templates was marked as html_safe or rendered with raw where appropriate.

Most of the XSS work was done in a single day with all of the engineers' help, but there was cleanup on pages that weren't used very often that continued for several weeks after installing the plugin.

Why look at the controller granularity for templating bugs? If any controllers share a partial or helper, you may have engineers stepping on each others' toes.

Also, shouldn't these simple bugs be quickly and fully discovered by automated tests?

> We knew the real upgrade required major code changes, so four engineers started the upgrade on a Saturday afternoon when there were minimal changes being committed. We asked other engineers to hold off on changes over the weekend to prevent any merge nightmares.

If the upgrade is done on a branch, why must the work be completed during the weekend?

And why must you block changes generally for an entire weekend because of work done to a single branch?
How to Regrow a Limb
I enjoyed the piece and it echoed several thoughts I've had about the non-profit model (and in general, the "do good" model of design/innovation which poses many interesting ethical questions).

I thought I'd comment on one common sleight-of-hand I see in talking about these projects (I say this as someone who has been active in several charity/non-profit activities). The line about a non-profit organization's "commitment [not to be evil]" being "written in law" is really a fig leaf; there's very little in the law aside from a requirement that you not disburse excess revenues, and that you follow various accounting and reporting standards. Google's non-legal "don't be evil" directly implies things like "don't abuse our users", whereas there is no legal requirement that a non-profit not offer something potentially abusive like DRM'd mp3s (or whatever pet abuse you might imagine).

Somehow the state-sanctioned non-profit status seems to flip a "do-goodery" bit in a lot of people's minds even though it's primarily an accounting, reporting, and financial restriction rather than a behavioral one.
Alright, I give up on commenting on this site. Always get downmodded into oblivion when I disagree with the hivemind.
The business of follow up
I was going to argue that point, but glance at the J docs here:

http://www.jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/d202n.htm

Obverse is defined in a table and some special cases, and there's a built in "this is the obverse of that" instruction.

You could easily tie square/sort together as a pair in Python and it wouldn't be significantly different.

Under(square, sum, mylist) or whatever.
You do not need coupons for that. Simply start pricing your app for $1, and later increase the price, or start with a free app without adds, and later bring an update that adds ads (and, if you are smart, adds some features)

Both are established tactics. However, it would not surprise me if Apple attempts to compensate for such tactics.
Thanks a lot for the nice comments, guys! Sorry about the "link bait" - I really was just so surprised that the limit was 23, such a strange number, that I just had to put it in the title of the post. I didn't expect it to end up on HN.
Ten Silicon Prairie startups to watch in 2012
Could Coding Become the Next Mass Profession?
Definitely - when it comes to social communication, there's Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. And that's bleeding across into professional communications as well, with companies regularly monitoring social networks and engaging with customers on there. But e-mail still remains, for professional communication, the dominant platform.
For Consumers, Android Is More “Clopen” Than Open
additional information about differences on the Chrome Release Channels site would be awesome
I built http://www.birthdaysudoku.com - sudoku puzzles customised to include a date of birth.
Its funny that you mention that, I talked with someone who kept referring to Yahoo as the 'premier digital media company' and I finally stopped them and said, "What exactly do you mean when you say that?"

I was curious because I could not think of any interpretation where that statement made sense. When I hear the phrase I might think "Apple" or iTunes/iPod or "Amazon" for e-books, but on a multiple choice question "Which of the following companies is the premier digital media company?", Yahoo! would have been the first company I would mark off as not being it.

That being said, perhaps it helps frame the challenge for Scott, which is to help Yahoo! regain its corporate identity.
Very few salespeople can actually sell. By which I mean find prospects, build a pipeline and actually close deals on their own. Many are just order-takers who are in the right place with a warm prospect. I would put the percentage of "real" salespeople at around 20%.

Many people hired for a sales job never actually sell enough to justify their cost to the company. Hence the need for commissions as a way to weed out the many non-performers.

If all or a majority of compensation is commission, you also deter the non-performers from trying to get the job in the first place.
Link Vulturing: An Interesting New Link Building Tactic
How do you figure that? It's a license, which is a type of contract.
"""I think Jon's post was a troll post, """

Is "troll" now a synonym for "he uses bad arguments"?
What Apple charges for, and what developers/engineers will pay for, are drastically different.

How many people have downloaded Angry Birds vs how many people have paid for Tasker on the Android platform?
I loved those Amdek monitors. Never got one for myself. Now that I am a grownup who can afford such eccentric hobbies, I got myself a pair of http://tulip-house.ddo.jp/digital/SDISK2/english.html and one http://dreher.net/?s=projects/CFforAppleII&c=projects/CF...

Worth every penny.
David Beazley did something similar with his Superboard II computer.

http://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2010/08/using-python-to-encode-ca...

http://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2010/08/decoding-superboard-ii-ca...

http://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2010/09/using-telnet-to-access-my...

Pretty sweet hack, IMO
I do appreciate the reply. The only way I'd feel safe is if you never got or saw my emails. Instead of me sending 5 years of my emails to you, I'd rather you send me 2,000 lines of code to analyze my email locally and locally tell me who I need to follow up with. If your analyzation code came to me, I wouldn't even mind if it did NLP and deeply datamined the emails to tell me who I may have missed following up with.

Ideally, I'd like to see unsecure e-mail replaced by crypto communication systems based on OTR and people locally storing their emails on Raspberry Pis, but that's dangerous stuff and I probably shouldn't have even said that.

Thing is, I'm sure you're nice guys and gals right now, but when you're billionaires and have 500 million people's digital data, evil you will turn.

By the way, good presentation at SVNewTech last night.
I think it's a Bachelors degree or the equivalent years of experience, with one year of a degree being equivalent to 4 years of work experience. So you would need 12 or 16 years of work experience...
Thanks! Hope you like it, and please let me know if you have any suggestions as I'm putting a lot more time into it this year.

You wouldn't believe how many sites I've seen using that theme, unfortunately it's arguably the best SaaS theme on themeforest, one of my goals this year is to get a new site deign.
I agree that blame isn't all on the user... but most articles seem to be very one directional.

Even the person in the article mentions seeing the warning but quickly dismissing it. Think how often you see an alert pop up and dismiss it without really reading it.

I think even if Uber did a better job of notifying people, you'd still see an outcry.
Microsoft’s Newest Flight Simulator Goes Freemium
I have the impression from your site that Contactually uses email as a principal interface for the service - I expect I'll find out more as you've intrigued me enough to sign up and try it out.
I started out on the Comms project because most people I know find email a chore, and it seems like everyone is challenged to find their own solution to basically the same set of problems. My worry taking on a new service that uses mail as the user interface is that for many people, the whole problem with mail is the user interface. Did you consider doing it as (say) a Gmail plugin, rather than a service that mails the user?
I have trouble with a comparison between incentive comp schemes for programmers and sales commissions. One of the biggest problems with programmer incentive comp is the need to align it with business goals --- which is why you'd have to be an idiot to pay per-line-of-code. Programmer comp is several layers of indirection away from company income.

The same is not true of sales comp. Salespeople earn commissions on money they are bringing into the company. It's much easier to measure and while it's not easy to perfectly align incentives (which is why sales teams have spiffs and regions), it's at least possible.

Remember also that the alternative to "no sales commissions" probably isn't "lower paid account managers"; it's "account managers paid nearly as high, but on a salary basis". The best sales account managers can virtually print money; the median sales account manager can't sell bottled water in the Sahara Desert. Most companies that do direct sales need to attract talented sales teams.

But even with a perfect sales team, most products have sales cycles stretching weeks-to-many-months. Which means it can take a quarter or two to see how a sales account manager is going to work out. If you're paying them fixed comp, that's an awfully expensive experiment to run.

I have no idea how well this works with "inside" sales teams ("dialing for dollars" operations); maybe fixed comp makes more sense there.
Big as it is, it's still closed. How do I communicate with a person on Facebook when I don't have a Facebook account (I don't). Email has no such barrier: if you have email -- from any provider -- you can email anyone else.
I thought this article made a lot of really good points (especially about wasting time tracking commissions).

However, the OP seemed to miss why we pay sales people with commissions but programmers with salaries: it is easy to objectively measure the output of sales people and it is not easy to objectively measure the value of code.

If you asked the question, "Why do we pay most people in salaries?" the answer is because there is no easy way to pay-by-performance for most creative, subjective, or service oriented tasks.
What do you mean by pinboard model?
Thinking about it, yes, that seems OK. It is not clear what the real problem is. It just seems challenging because of the oddness.

There is some question of privacy: it might be objectionable there. But that does not really bear upon the core of copyright, which is about items that have been made public.

One could pose a similar question: what if someone else decides to dress exactly like you, and go about like that? What grounds are there for your objection to that? (There do not seem to be any . . .) If they went so far as to impersonate you in the sense of identity fraud, there is a problem. But that is really about lying rather than copying per se, like counterfeiting.
I'm sorry to say that this is wrong on so many levels. We engineers like to believe that the author is right and our guy gut tells us that "hey why do the sales people get commission and I don't??".

So why is the author wrong?

While there certainly ARE cases where commission is being used in the wrong way, there is nothing inherently wrong with it.

1) The author misinterprets the research and states that people perform worse when under an incentive. This is only true for INTELLECTUAL tasks. If you tell one group of people that they get $50 if they solve a math problem in five minutes then that group will perform worse than another group without an incentive.

But if you tell one group of people they'll get $20 for every brick they move from A to B in five minutes you can be sure they'll move the bricks much faster than a group with no incentive.

2) "The problems include infighting over who gets credit for accounts and sales."
Again, a problem with how you set up the system. This fighting can easily be avoided. Just make sure it is clear who is responsible for each customer.

3) The author also forgets one of the great features of a commission based system. If you are a small startup you may not be able to hire a large sales force. In that case, you can hire great sales people at a low base salary and make sure they only get paid when you get paid.

TL;DR: commissions are a tool among others. Use it well and it will help you. Use it in the wrong way and it won't. Use common sense.
Announcing Facebook’s 2012 Hacker Cup
You Do Not Need to Manually Manage iOS Multitasking
I for one, would welcome the entire Silicon Valley to move somewhere else.
Kodak prepares to file for bankruptcy
No. It suggests that new services are being created to distribute existing information and to create new forms of information. Blogger still exists and as far as I know is doing just fine. Twitter, Tumbler, and Pinterest just provide a new way of organizing, creating, and accessing information.
I was on BloombergTV talking SOPA today - how'd I do?
So you switch to a novelty translation yet have no sense of humor?

Granted it's in bad taste, but... it's fucking 1337 speak.
Something like this?

http://www.amazon.com/Sunforce-50048-60-Watt-Solar-Charging/...

Amazon's price in the US for this is $299. If you had two, one could run your laptop, and the other could charge a battery, which you could use at night.