skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn't this a bit like saying Microsoft should be scared of losing WinXP to desktop Linux? Like IE, iTunes is free. Unlike IE:

* iTunes is cross-platform, unlike Firefox, there's no popular desktop environment that iTunes neglects.

* iTunes is mostly beloved by its users (foobar2000 users excluded).

* iTunes has lock-in from the iTunes Music Store, which is the most popular online music vendor.

* iTunes has lock-in from the iPod, which is the most popular music player.

* iTunes has lock-in from the iPhone and the iPhone app store.
I do think these kinds of facilities swap hard drives. It's much more convenient for the developer when you can count on every functional machine having the same setup. You don't want to just give every machine more hard drives than you need because that's a lot of added cost.
I do this on a less formal scale by always cooking 6-8 servings on each Saturday and Sunday nights, tupperwaring the leftovers.

Disposable Tupperware is god's gift to hackers.
Typecast - Japan's obsession with blood groups
Google Video was originally positioned as the Authorities providing TV. Its brand was convoluted. Remember in-video audio search? It was never about user sharing. It was never about me.

YouTube is sort of a special case, in that it has obvious network effects, and pretty much anyone that corners the market has a lock. eBay, Amazon, delicious, etc.

We continue to be surprised by the network effect. So perhaps the interesting question when you find yourself asking "so what?" is "does this have critical mass and a network effect in play?"

Go read Wealth of Networks. ;-)
I wonder if they'll axe some of the balance on my student loan...
As a system administrator, it has often been very useful to me to be able to turn on extra logging when I need to. When something is going wrong, there is sometimes no way to tell what information is important and what is not.

A lot of the problem with "over logging" may be Windows versus Unix. In the Unix world, your logs are in a flat file and you have a million tools to deal with those logs. In the Windows world, logs are in a database and your gui to view them has an interface which changes every other week.
Former Yahoo VP Qi Lu Likely to Be Named Microsoft’s Digital Head by Next Week
10 steps to take before you get laid off
I recall a psych study on this. They found that people who externalize failure and internalize success are happier, but those who internalize failure and externalize success are more successful. And yeah, they did find the corollary that more successful people tend to be less happy. Makes perfect sense really.
agree with that. perl is tremendous for sysadmin tasks.

we've had 90% complete python tools rewritten from scratch in perl because perl is so superior.

disclaimer: i'm a recovering ex-sysadmin
Isn't there some danger that you are over-generalizing from an industry where there are exceptionally low barriers to entry to a global trend? What if you want to make a new automobile, or even worse, a new airliner?

However, I think there is another trend that reinforces what you say here. Previously there was a strong incentive for risk-averse people to work in large corporations. I'm a risk-averse person and I once worked at a large corporation. With the change in organizational behavior so that layoffs have become a first resort action, instead of an action only appropriate in desperate circumstances, there is little risk-aversion benefit to large organizations. So other than health insurance, large corporations have become a generally inferior class of employers. This is true even if you are not entrepreneurial.
This is farking great! It needs some usability fixes but what I really want to know is...

WHY AREN'T THEY CHARGING ME to make tests!?!??!

Don't give this away for free! Maybe I could earn credits by taking tests, but please, make some money on this!

I guess they need lots of tests to make it work... but they should offer pro level features? Say, you get 5 feedbacks for free, all of them on subscription. You could also pay per test for all reasults.

This could be a low maintenance gold mine.
Wow! This is impressive, thanks.
I know. The library is available to 2.5 as "processing", but starting OS processes when all you wanted were threads is somewhat ugly. I agree it's not possible to do it properly with the GIL in place and attempts to remove it did have less than amazing results on single-thread applications.

That's annoying... Even more annoying when I think it's easier to do in Java ;-)
How big of you.
A Recount in Minnesota’s Too-Close-To-Call Senate Race Is Futile
I made more than $2100 a month as a grad student -- and we weren't paid very well.
If you've been victim of debit card fraud, how long did it take you to notice, and how quickly did BofA return cash to your account?

I know debit card loss limits at major banks have become similar to credit card loss limits (as a competitive matter), but there are still practical differences.

Debit fraud means your bank account is empty right now -- and until you discover the fraud -- meaning payments of other expenses may fail unexpectedly.

The worst that can happen with credit card fraud is that one card gets denied. You are never short of cash unless you pay the bill without reviewing/disputing it, weeks later. Your liquidity is under your control, not the thief's or the bank's.
Joost Launches Application for iPhone
Google Geo Developers Blog: Google Earth... in your browser... on your Mac
As horrible as that is, it's really funny.
Will you please stop wasting space with these silly arguments?
Ask YC: Success innate or practice?
Malcolm Gladwell's (author or Blink and Tipping Point) has a new book, Outliers. He makes a variety of interesting and somewhat provocative claims about why successful people are successful. Perhaps the most provocative claim is that it requires 10,000 hours of practice to become and expert in anything. The implications of this include that Bill Gates and Bill Joy were so successful because of the opportunities they had to practice programming from Middle School (for Gates) and at UMich (for Joy). Do people buy this? How much of success is brilliance and how much is this amount of practice?
Will a massive exaflood of traffic crash the internet?
maybe its the same story? $99 laptop is actually a $99 iPhone with a free laptop extension app.
have you tried HUGE? I am considering applying there.

http://www.hugeinc.com/careers/
That's all true, but it's not the argument the original comment made.
Giving you helpful information is not trolling.
Well... I agree that some people will always be more independent than others. I think you are overstating things when you take it all the way to communism, but in my experience, a more communitarian society simply works better.

Don't think of it like we're taking people's freedom away, think of it like someone pointing out the dangerous ice on the sidewalk, or better yet, cleaning it up before someone slips on it. It's just neighbourly. (Can you tell I'm Canadian?)

I'm not saying all of society has to be nerfed -- that would be totalitarian -- but a world where "caveat emptor" is the last word makes for a crappy and unsustainable society. It's about balance.

Want evidence? Just open any newspaper. In fact, because they refused even modest regulation, the USA is now going to have to get 1970s-style-socialist and probably nationalize a lot of the economy. Which I think is a terrible outcome.
True, migrating to PHP4 to 5 wasn't pretty, but 5 was an order of magnitude improvement over 4 and so worth the cost. Not sure if the same can be said for this new Py release. I'm still doing everything in 2.6(which was a recent move from 2.5). Too many libraries that aren't out for 3 yet.
I don't know if cool and creative is necessarily what I'd aim for.

Tell them what went wrong, tell them why it went wrong, tell them what they can do about it. Then, maybe, make a joke.

Here's mine. Nothing to write home about, but it describes the problem in terms my customers can understand, and gives them options which work for the majority of people.

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/doesnt/exist

I'd add a search box but it has never been a pressing priority since I can correct borked links on the backend, which means "blogger typoed a URL" only 404s until I get to my admin interface.
1-(5/6)^100=0.999999988

5.99999993 times greater in fact.
You can turn it off by adding &showsearch=0 to the url:

http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/player_parameters.html
Need to increase the sensitivity on your sarcasm detector just a tad.
Hiring is hard
Actually hippopotamuses are known to be quite dangerous and territorial. Don't ever go near one.

And yes, I do believe it is "hippopotamuses" (see http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutgrammar/plur...)
dude that site is sweet - I just wish the recipe ingredients were normalized!
I can't imagine things would be so bad that companies would be eager to layoff interns. You'd have to layoff like 10 interns to equal one reasonably experienced employee.
Thanks, I'll check it out.

But I do recommend watching the whole presentation if you have the time -- especially before you start calling people "propaganda artists". That implies deliberate deception and razzle-dazzle to con the unwary.

If she's really trying to foment unrest among the working classes she's kind of doing it wrong, with a rather unfashionable pantsuit and a series of dull charts and graphs. I get the sense she honestly believes in her data, but perhaps she is simply honestly mistaken? Anyway, something to think about.
Anyone know what yc startups like scribd pay their developers?
Opera 10 Browser (Alpha)
Trac indeed seems interesting, especially since it integrates with Bitten CI Server. Which we need too.
You could also consider using a recruiter. I realize it's painful to pay a large chunk of salary and you really want to conserve cash in a start-up.

But you also have to trade off the speed of finding someone against the recruitment cost. I'm using both recruiters and social techniques (including giving a bonus to any engineer on my team who brings in a candidate that we actually hire).
It’s the User Experience, Stupid
This post doesn't talk about what happens when you've actually got a candidate in front of you. That too is hard.

We're using extensive testing of candidates to make sure that we understand their technical knowledge as well as traditional interviews.

All our candidates have to do a programming test before they even get considered for an interview (we made up a test that we think captures the sort of programming that they would have to do here).

Then when they come in they sit a programming knowledge test before they get to the first interview.
Where did you get your info from ?

Job listings does not mean the company is hiring. This is especially not true for large companies. Their HR depts routinely have few generic job postings in rotation to keep internal candidate databases updated. This was the case after '01 burst and I'm sure it's still the case now.
i feel like use of the word 'hack' has become a little bit too liberal
So what? He gave you all his money.
If hiring is hard, finding a decent recruiter is even harder. My experience, with recuriters, has been signing a contract to cough up 15% of annual salary to a recruiter who does nothing more than list the ad on job sites and pass along resumes. I know there are some recruiters that actually do recruit, and add value, but they are very hard to find.
Big Three: Clean up your dealerships
I suppose a good middle ground might be to request a card with a very low credit limit. Most card companies will lower your limit if requested, and it's presumably easier to resist requesting a credit increase than it is to resist spending a little more on a higher-limit card.
I do agree that it's hard to get a good recruiter and you do have to work with them to make sure they understand your requirements, but it is possible.

I've worked with a few over the years who do a really good job of screening candidates and if you give them a test that they can pass on to candidates as well then you waste less of your time.
Open source thrives in downturn
Paul mentions the decreasing costs of technology, but he doesn't mention the fundamental property of technology that allows this to happen.

This economic trend is directly related to technology and software. One of the problems for big corporations is that more and more is done by machines, i.e., software. However, the singular phenomenon of software is that, the more people working on it, the harder it is to maintain and evolve.

Small groups are much better prepared for success in our present world because they can leverage software. As a single organization grows, so grows the complexity of its internal systems.
You mentioned that "units" wasn't part of your system and he pointed out that it's actually a Unix base program (i.e. part of BSD/Solaris/Darwin) that's installable separately for GNU-based systems.

What's the problem here? Did you really need to comb through his blog and call him out like that?
So some people value cash more than land, and other people value land more than cash, and they've worked out a consensual, mutually advantageous deal, without getting government or a bunch of unelected technocrats in the loop.

Oh Noz! The sky is falling!
15% seems like a low fee. Perhaps the recruiters willing to work at that rate are not the best? The mid-sized company I used to work for would pay more like 33%. That company was able to build quite an impressive staff for a larger mid-sized company. (Also, they paid staff noticeably higher than industry average which was probably the real key.)
Unfortunately, so will be the debit card (til all the charges go through, at least). Then you get the wonderful luxury of paying multiple $35 overdraft fees on top of your bills, which is exactly what you need when you're hurting. Cash only is probably the best policy for these people.
From what I've seen, innate qualities (ambition, curiosity, love of a particular domain) that cause people to work very hard at something.
The vast majority of network-effect businesses are very difficult to tackle, though, because:

1.) If it's already apparent that this is a viable business, then there's probably already an entrenched player, and the network effect serves to keep you out.

2.) If it's not already apparent that this is a viable business, then prospective users are like "Why should I bother?" and you never get the initial critical mass. After all, if the utility of the service grows with the square of the number of people, then the utility for the first person is zero and they have no reason to begin using the service.

It seems that most firms that overcame the initial network effect did so through a combination of blind luck or leveraging other assets. For example, YouTube's traffic hovered around zero until they got SlashDotted. EBay was blind luck - Pierre Omidyar figured he'd run an experiment on creating the perfect marketplace, and it turned out people sent him money. Digg used Kevin Rose's TechTV audience to seed the initial site. FictionAlley had the most popular HP fanfiction author as one of its founders, and she pulled her fanfiction off all other sites and hosted it exclusively on FictionAlley. Microsoft lucked out on the IBM deal and then leveraged that to gradually increase their monopoly over the PC industry.
I am definitely NOT a fan of communism. Just saying that the statement "people can't handle credit cards" seems to imply that people are unable to act for their own good. That in turn would imply that the majority of people needs a dictatorship or equivalent to get by.
SVN to git: it doesn't hurt
Sounds very similar to ReVirt: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/virtual/papers/dunlap02.pdf

The idea is pretty cool: run a virtual machine, and record all the values and precise timings of all the non-deterministic events that affect the state of the VM. Then you can use the log to precisely replay the operation of the virtual machine to restore its exact state to any time in the past. How you get it to work on SMP is an interesting discussion...
Interview: BBX India - Cashless trading
Boxee adds Netflix movie streaming
getting hired is harder!
I'd rather pay the extra $20-$30 for a x86 processor.
so you need 3 pages of a blog post to sound convincing? I suppose that's the reason I don't read the majority of blogs out there...
I'd like to point you to PG's recent article. Additional checks end up biting you in the back.

Also, how are consumer protections supposed to work? I think they would require a hypothetical "perfect" state employee who is 100% honest and 100% omniscient. Even if a few of such people would exist, I doubt that there would be enough of them to monitor ALL kinds of economical transactions.

Rather, I suspect the more regulation there is, the more corruption or hidden taxes will there and be a burden on society. Even today it almost feels as if one can't do anything without the protection of an army of lawyers. More regulations => this only gets worse. Lawyers will be leeching off us, with the support of the state.

Also the current crisis can not simply be blamed on crooks. Everybody was playing the game, down to the average "normal, honest" home owners. Plus, people will always act selfish, and in trades, try to get the better deal of the involved parties.
Now is a bad time to switch careers into SAP consulting. Due to credit crisis, companies are postponing/canceling SAP related projects. So demand for SAP consultants (and consulting rates) are down. Most of consulting companies in North East have lot of ERP people on bench.

As supply chain functional consultant, there is very little coding.
Youtube was hemorrhaging cash. If someone wouldn't have bought them, Youtube would have been in big trouble. especially if we had been in a recession.
> I know there are some recruiters that actually do recruit, and add value, but they are very hard to find.

Indeed so. I've been on the other side of the fence -- i.e. as an employee -- and the vast majority of the recruitment agencies I dealt with were idiots. 99% of them have no ability to sort of competent from incompetent candidates.
You don't need exponents if you never go further in debt than your bank account balance. Just pay off your credit card every month. I do, have done so for years, and it is not a rule that is very hard to remember.

So you just need the "count the digits" rule of thumb to decide if you can afford to buy something or not. If you can count to 10, you could even compare the first digit of each number (credit card debt vs bank account balance).
I wonder if I should write a book: "Count to 10. The dead easy way to manage your finances and life a happy, healthy life."
a lot of people I know use Google to find YouTube videos in the first place

This isn't specific to YouTube. I use Google to find anything on any site - very few sites can find pages better, even with advanced search features.
Great Expectations: Managing The Mood Swings Of The Startup Roller Coaster
Another consideration is how you actually convince your prospective hire to join the company: particularly in a startup, the sort of person you want to hire is very likely to have multiple offers to choose amongst. When interviewing someone like that, I think it's important to realize the person's calibre quickly, and then to try to use the interview to show them why they ought to work for you -- in that situation, routine written programming tests probably work to your disadvantage.
Virginia Tech Is Building an Artificial America in a Supercomputer
This piece is missing some major points, particularly when they point to the market-adoption of Firefox.
We upgraded to firefox I believe adoption in V.1 was significant if I recall correctly. The reason being, that Firefox was significantly better than IE 5.5(6).

I'm not hearing that with Songbird. iTunes is a very good product. The extensions for songbird are already available for iTunes, Winamp, etc.

There just seems to be SSOOO much fluff to Songbird, and the slow release dates don't help.

I'd love to be able to root for the little guy in this instance, but Songbird just doesn't seem like that little guy that deserves it. Anybody have any insight into why that is?

I didn't download the latest version after hearing about buggy performance. I used to be connected to the 'player' business and had tried Songbird before and it was an awful experience.
I just don't get it.
Anybody here actually using Songbird and loving it? What are we missing?
A Fairer, Faster Internet Protocol
This is the same company that caused all that fuss a few weeks back with their arrogance about who they would hire and for posting a cover letter to belittle a candidate. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360574)

No wonder they're finding hiring hard.
That wasn't the point. The point is that there are completely seperate worlds. If you show a car manufacturer a list of top 10 means of transportation on the ground, should he be bothered that "horses" are still #7 on the list (I am making this up)? The horses business simply has (almost) nothing to do with the car business, even though they are both means of transportation.
What about Scheme R6RS?

http://www.r6rs.org/final/html/r6rs/r6rs-Z-H-1.html

The report gives a defining description of the programming language Scheme. Scheme is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the Lisp programming language invented by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman. It was designed to have an exceptionally clear and simple semantics and few different ways to form expressions. A wide variety of programming paradigms, including functional, imperative, and message passing styles, find convenient expression in Scheme.
Next major Android handset revealed: the Agora
Look, this stupid idea has been bandied about for years, just as the Economist article says. I'd like to point out that the Discovery Institute also promotes intelligent design and teaching creationism in U.S. schools in lieu of ACTUAL SCIENCE. Perhaps they believe we need less scientists and technologists because God will save the internet. Idiots.
Intelligence predicts sperm quality
Journalism Scholarships Available for Programmers/Developers
In Australia, at most major universities. I went to University of Queensland and had plenty of opportunities.
What a crap article: first, the malware has nothing to with a Firefox exploit. It is just something that infects a PC by any other means (the article doesn't say which), just like any other malware would.

Then the article describes the unwanted HTML in a language pack, which is totally unrelated. I guess they want to suggest that the malware in question could slip into Firefox in the same way, but there is no reason whatsoever to assume that would be the case.
Of course the other explanation is that these are simply "sexbots" - The same bots that IM every single person who ever logs on to Yahoo Messenger with something like "Hey wanna see my webcam? I'm free tonight wink"
There's something about an apology in an error message which I find incredibly grating. I don't think it's just me -- the feedback we've had in user testing has backed this up.

But saying "We're terribly sorry" is worse because a) Who is "we"? and b) "terribly sorry" is even more grating than just "sorry".
This 10,000 hours of practice seems to line up with someone doing a PhD in 4 years on ~7 hours a day of work. I've met many people with PhDs that I would consider morons, so I think you could argue that you can be successful with only practice for some definitions of success.

However, I think you're unlikely to put yourself through something like 4-5 years of constant work if you don't have some other qualities. (i.e. It's gotta be a combination of innate qualities and practice)
"waded through 85+ applicants, calling about 25 of those people, and interviewing about 10 candidates."

--For ONE position. It feels like this guy is running "American Idol" contest. Really, you bring in 10 candidates, to hire one, then you are not doing enough of a good phone screening.