skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the company I am in, being able to express solutions on a whiteboard is fundemental. I have turned down applicants who were brilliant programmers because they could not express their solution on a whiteboard (I find this is highly correlated with a - "I can code therefore I don't have to talk to people" persona, which is fine in some companies, just not ours)

Nearly every software project begins in a room with a whiteboard, we often spend days mulling over massive whiteboard drawings with lines, boxes, psuedo code etc. But once we have finished with the whiteboard everybody goes away and the code is written by multiple developers, in parallel and the end of the week (sometimes the end of the day) it is finished and it all integrates perfectly.

Repeat the above over the lifetime of a larger system, and the hours spent expressing the ideas on the whiteboard save 10 times themselves in implementation and test.

Some developers hate this approach and see it as robbing them of their "artistic freedom", but the fact is, large scalable solutions aren't designed, developed, tested and integrated by lonewolf coders (at least not as a rule). By being up front, pooling ideas, knocking them down and arguing them out in a "public" setting I have never seen a software project fail, be late, over budget or not meet requirements (at least as far as a project can meet dynamic requirements) - we call it the House diagnostic approach - throw ideas out there, see what makes sense - only differences are the domain (not medicine) and the fact that "House" becomes the group.

As a note: I don't expect candidates to be perfect at expressing themselves, or even have any experience with white board design at all. But if they can grasp the problem domain (and they should, all the sample problems I set are really basic (design a system to collect and sample some basic census survey data i.e. design a record structure (a class, a database, a file - i really don't care), define an efficient way of accessing the data (hash table of classes, database queries, a novel file directory structure - again don't care, I want to see that they can grasp and spout ideas about), and define some algorithms to work out averages, aggregates, max, min range, sort etc. (testing basic algorithm knowledge, and they they can apply this to their solution).

The breakdown of the last group, of 400 applicants:

300 were rejected in the paper sift because they failed the paper test....(like the above, but on paper, simpler and you have as much time as you want to do it.....there is a serious lack of good talent!)

79 were failed at the first interview because they had problems explaining themselves on a problem like the one described.

18 were failed at the second interview because they were not deemed to have enough experience in computer science, mathematics or physics (or whatever domain they were supposed to be expert in)

3 passed and were offered places, and have settled right into the company.
and.... the humble bundle is dead. good while it lasted.

clicked the very first icon there, and the movie ONLY had cinematics. not a single slipt second of gameplay.

Indie games came a long way, but they are now just the same as big studios. milking any branding they can. humble bundle unfortunately being one of them :(
Astyanax - Java Cassandra client
There's one thing true in this piece of pointless infographic you linked - it's all about context. Those 'average' rates include people working in workplaces dangerous by definition. How do you compare injuries and suicide rates in a factory where you glue a few electronic pieces together, to let's say, building railroads or mining coal?
I have looked at several other photo hosting services (Smugmug, Zenfolio, 500px, etc.) and while they all do a competent job at hosting photos, it is the communities that have developed on Flickr that I would miss.

Yes, other sites have their own communities, but leaving one for another is like moving to a strange new town that you don't know anybody in.
It's a valid concern. However, unless one is willing to pretty much give up on large classes of products, boycotting Apple just shifts your money to some other companies whose products are built in similar or worse conditions--which is counterproductive since Apple is doing much more than most of those other companies to get the conditions improved in those factories.
Excellent choice, sir, the waiter will come by with your meal at some point in the next 20 years.
Chinese workers want Foxconn jobs
Excellent post. Loved the framework's ease of use for people already familiar to jQuery.
Any sysadmins care to chime in with their view on this? Jobwise are you planning to switch to development in the near future ?
"How can an app that costs $0.99 to buy cost $200,000 to build!?"
I've bought 'a' car from Craigslist. Took us about eight hours, from 'first car' to 'I'll take it'. Looked at ten cars in person. In one day.

Granted, we were motivated, needed a car that day (long story) but it doesn't have to take weeks, if you just need a car and your value of 'acceptable' is flexible.

is it still worth it to save an extra 1-2k

Yes. $2,000 dollars can buy a lot of hamburgers.

YMMV.
I hear about things like this and think we really need something like Diaspora: a unified, social interface being run on highly distributed systems. The benefits of things like Blogspot, Twitter and Facebook without the leverage points a few big companies ruling it all provide.
I smell disruption!
With webhosting at 10 bucks per month i don't see the need.
Not to mention, it's much easier to update. In an absolute emergency, you can ssh in and close a div tag and your fix is live to every customer. With an iPhone app...
I'm confused. Didn't they just change the name and update their design? As long as the features are the same, I don't care too much if they call it Assistly or Superchefbobbyflay. As far as I've seen, the features are all still there, they just updated their design and name. A quick heads up would have been nice, but this doesn't enter FCP X territory or even the continent of Netflix. I thought your example there was a bit over the top. Netflix changed their entire business model. Assistly updated their name and design. Am I wrong? Disclosure: I don't even use Assistly - I use Zendesk. But I respect what they're doing.
"One looks at the spread between Apple's COGS and Apple's list prices and wonders how it can be reasonable that Apple captures that whole spread."

Because COGS is what Apple pays Foxconn (and other manufacturers) to produce those items. Foxconn and the others make their profit (or loss) from the contracted amount paid, which is roughly, though not always, COGS.

It is far more likely Apple would contract factories in Vietnam and Indonesia than in Burma or North Korea to product items, as forced labour is a poor source of quality manufactured goods.
I tried that and about a million other things in Ubuntu. When I hit tab I see options, but nothing I put in my .zshrc will allow me to use the arrow keys or anything else to navigate the completion list.

I am using oh my zsh but I tried turning it off and it didn't seem to matter.

Maybe only Mac users use zsh?
If you happen to get a trade in, a quick dump might net you quite a bit. There's going to be a frenzy on this IPO.

The ZNGA and GRPN comparisons probably aren't going to be reflective of what will actually happen. Facebook is largely viewed on a tier with AMZN and GOOG.

But, really, you should ask yourself this question again after reading through the SEC S-1 filings when they're released. Make a good long term decision.
Agree 100%. The follow-on problem is that once you are owed a not-insignificant amount of money by one of these clowns, the temptation is to keep them happy and avoid conflict in the hopes you'll get paid out without having to resort to litigation.

I once worked for a few months with someone before I watched him not pay one of our contractors for no reason. When I raised the issue, he asked me if I'd be willing to take a 50% pay cut - on the work I'd already done for him.
True, it doesn't have anything to do with anything. It was just a pet peeve of mine.

We need to adhere to standards, dammit!
Any clue how an independent game developer can build the same app for multiple platforms without wasting a lot of time?

Being a sole developer I find it quite difficult to develop for multiple platforms at the same time unless there's a framework that allows me to do so. Are the people behind the games in the bundle using a sort of "multiplatform-framework" ?
And most factory workers are paid less in the US than in Europe, and outcry over that isn't very loud.

But it's a bit of a false dichotomy if someone's demanding (or rebutting) an increase of the wage to that of your own nation. If you're expecting that magically Apple would make it so that everyone at Foxconn producing ipads and iphones would get a salary of an average US worker, then you're clearly out of your mind. But then, pundits assuming that this is the only option also are quite a bit on the hyperbolic side with their argument.

The reason why Apple is getting some backlash on that – apart from basic envy – is that they're considered a premium brand. You know that you pay more just for the design – maybe even eco-friendliness. So couldn't a bit of that premium margin also be redirected towards Chinese workers? (Or maybe even a slight increase in prices to make that possible) Some kind of "fair trade" deal.

Never mind that Apple might actually be doing that, as I really don't know whether "their" workers earn more than (or are actually different from) workers assembling Dell laptops and Nokia phones.

If not, I wonder whether this could work out. If at all, it's company like Apple that could pull it off. Considering that you're already paying a pretty good price, a few dollars more going towards that end is simply a lower percentage than with bargain products.
This rant makes...no sense. A good uptime record means nothing if you change your product name? What? And even if you accept all the complaints at face value - they claim that it would all have been okay if they'd just been warned the day before? How does that work?

Either they just killed their old product and launched a completely new one with no track record and history, OR it's just a rebranding of an existing product. If it's the former, a heads up about their plans would solve absolutely, precisely, nothing. It's still a new product which cosupport.us claims they can't afford to be associated with. If it's the latter, then there's no problem.

So which is it? After waffling back and forth, cosupport.us eventually concludes with saying that they'd have been okay if they'd been warned, and that they hope that their new partner "[isn't] in the business of rebranding or renaming themselves without notice."

But why would you care if a product is renamed themselves without notice? cosupport.us doesn't say - all the complaints earlier in the rant were very specifically about why it was terrible for Assistly to launch a new product.

Look - I know nothing about Assistly or cosupport.us, but this rant reeks of entitlement. Clearly cusupport.us is upset, and I'm prepared to believe that cosupport.us may have a great case and a legitmate complaint! But I don't think this rant is doing is communicating it, nor is it doing them any favours.
Is there a reason you need MacOS X as your server OS?

Plenty of other options out there which have more testing and have substantial history with ZFS. I'd seriously look into OpenIndiana or similar - I run this with much success on an HP Microserver, which has plenty of expansion possibilities with a small form factor, ECC RAM, etc.

If I was the developer, I'd see about giving away the low end version as a loss leader. As is, charging $20 = less people will test it = less stable.
PHP People: A Love Letter
> * It lacks an easy-to-use symbolic debugger.

> * It lacks a first-rate IDE.

<plug>This is changing http://eclipse.org/koneki/ldt/</plug>;

> * Array indexes start at 1.

This sounds dangerously similar to "I can't use Python because it has significant whitespaces". Developers might like or dislike it, but if you can't get over _that_, you either lack important cognitive abilities, or you're suffering from a very serious case of Asperger's/OCD. I can't imagine that someone seriously hampered by _that_ could ever digest any large API.

However, I'll admit it's a bit irritating when you're frantically switching between C and Lua.

> the Lua style seems to be to understate the achievements to the point that folks can't tell the big new stuff from the abandoned projects.

You're right, organizing the efforts of the Lua "community" would probably be trickier than herding cats, and the Lua core team doesn't seem very interested in helping that happen. I sometimes suspect that even Lispers form a tighter community than Lua hackers...
Dear Browsers: Please implement sharing.
I presume that they both already have more money than they know what to do with, so I suspect the management fees weren't the primary motivation. Also they have office space, employees, computers, etc. None of which are free. Assuming they are collecting the 2% management fee which is allegedly standard, then most of it is probably going towards running the firm.
It's tempting. Though "coil packs" sends a shiver down my spine. My 2000 Miata blew its coil packs at 50,000 miles and after that, every 2 years, right before emissions testing time, the check engine light comes on and I spend a lot of money on emissions repairs...
320 and up: the ‘tiny screen first’ boilerplate extension
>Timeshifting isn't forbidden, but recording TV programs is.

Again, the article says nothing of the sort. He's arguing in favor of explicitly permitting certain kinds of recording, which the law currently does not. Nor, to my knowledge, and certainly not as far as the article claims, does it forbid it. It is currently unregulated, which means you're free to do it, and others are free to try and stop you.
Barnes & Noble Says It Won’t Sell Books Published by Amazon
Before the doom and gloomers start (looking below I'm a bit late, but anyways..), think about this from a practical perspective.

We can assume two things as indisputable facts:
1) Google is a multinational company.
2) To operate in a given country necessitates complying with that country's laws.

If a local country's laws say that you can't deny the holocaust (Germany) or speak ill of the king (Thailand) or talk about how corrupt the government is (Russia), or link to something that might be copyrighted (USA), or what have you, Google's options are limited to either compliance, or ceasing operations there.

What do you think would happen if Google took a public hardass stance like "We refuse to censor user content under any circumstances"? Admirable, and that would make them a darling on the internet, but only as long as it took for the local apparatchik to note that the company is violating local laws, and shuts down their operations there or worse.

Google's best bet in this case is exactly what they've done here - try to limit the spread of the local censorship from its local area. Just because Thailand's king gets easily butthurt is no reason for people outside of Thailand to suffer for the actions of a partially corrupt regime there..

If you have a better (and most importantly REALISTIC) idea, I'd love to hear it.
Really it is closer to moral relativism. The employees of Foxconn are better off than many many of their countries citizens. These employees have food shelter and (it would seem) a better than average wage for where they live. Certainly there is room for improvement as stated in the Forbes article.

Conversely most of us in the US have never volunteered at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen. Most people ignore the man at the street corner or maybe throw a couple dollars his or her way. Most people do not think about the Salvation Army (who served 59.9 million meals to the needy in 2010) unless they are trying off load some old junk or hear the bells near Christmas time.

Point being that there are people in our own cities far more needy than these Foxconn employees. Yet, I have witnessed first hand people who make an anti-Apple "morality" complaint with out ever lifting a finger for those in need. That is what I call immoral.

-Sorry for the soapbox, not directed at any poster.
Show HN: We are building an open API for the English Language
Facebook Said to Hire Morgan Stanley for IPO
Coming from a background of having to deal with the highest level of PCI-DSS scrutiny, this makes total sense. It would have been soooooo much easier to just point the auditors to the managed hosting service and say, "ask them, they're the experts." Leaving myself and the other devs to just worry about software security.
Neil Young is right — piracy is the new radio
Uhh America was way to expensive, England is much closer but still expensive. I will have to think about this, would be cool to talk with people that acctually care for clojure, my frinds are sick of me talking about it :)
Leaving aside your rather ill-informed history lesson - indicates to whom?

As a British born non-catholic who has lived and worked in both Ireland and the UK, I can assure you are over-stating its meaning, except perhaps to practicing loyalists in Northern Ireland. The accepted vernacular there as a matter of practical sensitivity to the majority is "Southern Ireland" or "The South" and "GB" for the part of the UK that excludes NI.

To suggest that it is generally offensive (as in "giving the finger") is, well, offensive.

Edit: To wit - "UK Border Agency | If you are travelling to or from the Republic of Ireland [...]" http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/customs-travel/Enteringthe...
From what I know, WePay is much more friendly to everyday users. From what I've seen of Stripe, it seems to be more developer focused.

I've used WePay and they have really great customer service. Stripe is intriguing, but I haven't had a reason to use it yet.

Either way, I'm happy to see as many newcomers take on paypal as possible!
"Contracts are only really useful for big company and with big accounts."

This is totally untrue, and incorrect. Not only because you can take even a tiny client to small claims court (but without a written contract, forget it) but because contracts are also there to protect YOU from claims by a client against you and your business. If you believe that your business is valuable, or you have any personal assets you'd hate to lose to a lawsuit, you should be using a written contract any time you're doing work for hire as a contractor.
Silicon implants
Firefox ESR Released
WEBGL game done for the global game jam 2012
Same issue here, Nexus S GSM, Android 4.0.3

Support was pleasant but didn't have any solutions. The rep I chatted with indicated that the upload dates for any updated installers would be visible on the website, unfortunately that info isn't displayed on the Android/mobile version of the site.
Looks useful. I've got a long-poll based monitor part written that I must get into a sensible state and chukc on github at some point. I was intending for it to monitor a few bits of mine in a semi distributed manner (each f my little bits of the net monitoring each other. The long-poll would mean I could "tick" every tens seconds (or even every second, though 10 was the plan) using very little bandwidth (it wouldn't have to be polling a web server either, but in all my cases it would be with the web server doing other local checks (Is the DB up?, Can I login?, No new errors in the critical-stuff log?, ...).

I might have to give your service a look until I finish my little toy, if I ever do.
Why Linux Vendors Need To Sell More Than Linux
Being proficient in both the client and server is like tying both your shoes with two hands. But only being proficient in one is like trying to tie one shoe with one hand, and get somebody else to tie your other shoe with one of their hands.
I don't get it either. There's absolutely no mention about the product's quality, all I can see is whining about not liking changes.

I'm not a power user by any means, but today I've been able to do my support shift without any change at all. Even the old *.assistly.com urls work as always, they don't even redirect. The GUI received a facelift but it's hard to say that it's worse than before.

And what's all that about Assistly not existing anymore and Desk.com being a new product with hours of existence?

I mean, this is not even a consumer product, it is for people who do support for a living. If this girl can't wrap her minds about a product changing their name while still being the same product then I don't want them supporting me. Ever.
I really appreciate the time you put into this, I will take your comments to the team!
is there a way I could have disabled that?
Little known fact: Photoshop (and most other Adobe apps) comes with a JavaScript interpreter you can use to script it.
My own no-nonsense free desktop extender PROTOTYPE
* Github (http://www.github.com) - This and HN/Reddit for fun. I use Github to review my previously comitted code, marking comments in the code of ideas and thoughts so I can correct them when I get home (for profit), and exploring different languages, profiles and projects (for fun).

* Workflowy (http://www.workflowy.com) - Dump all the stuff I might need to remember or note about a project or task here.

* Trello (http://www.trello.com) - Scrum-board for my tasks, planner for the summer vacation, my wedding, etc.

* Diigo (http://www.diigo.com) - To save bookmarks, notes on pages, highlights of stuff I might need to reference, etc

* Toggl (http://www.toggl.com) - To keep track of how many hours I work on each project

EDIT: Typo/format
This behavior can be turned off by adding this to .zshrc:

setopt no_nomatch # if there are no matches for globs, leave them alone and execute the command

zsh also tries to autocomplete directory names using variables in global namespace that point to directories. I found that behavior maddening and can be turned off with:

setopt no_cdable_vars # don't use named directories in cd autocompletion
When will we get the Future of Lisp?
For a few years now I've had constant flirtations with lisp. Most recently Clojure and Racket, but I'm not fully finding my place yet. At the same time I've found the most amazing programming experience and yet at the same time felt a distance from actually being able to use it professionally.

It may be a stupid question but is there anyone else that just wants a lisp that works like it's syntax. (get out of the way and let you work) And that has the simplicity of scheme with the power of Common Lisp. That has a nice community model that embraces newer technology than mail lists. And has a module system as pleasant to use as Python's or Haskell's. And documentation as pleasant as Python's as well now that I think about it. Something that doesn't try to push exotic theories on computer science or make a huge dramatic change on how I program and just looks around and combines what works together into a useful bundle. But mostly, where the creator doesn't abandon development and let it flip-flop every few years.

That's my Dream Lisp. What's yours?