skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Starting a Django Project the Right Way
Let 1,000 Boxees bloom: fighting Big Cable's encryption initiative
Tech Hungama- Auto, Gadgets Updates, Gaming News
Voted down Jesus H Crist! From the information this isn't how much some litte town in some fly over state spent of running the dog catching service.

Its the results of a TS Clearance Vetting FFS. Do you think people are going to be open about some one if potentialy its going to be vomited over the internets whilst they are still alive.
I never thought about this before. But it seems like there are very different expectations for PC developers and smart phone developers. Companies developing software for a PC would never consider sending personal data to their servers.

Maybe its because mobile developers mostly come from web development where it is normal for the server to store such data. For a lot of web applications (web-mail, Facebook) it is part of the service.
All SSNs of deceased people are publicly available. It helps prevent fraud.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_Death_Index
Of course there are plenty of problems in dentistry. But actually thousands of scientists and oral health companies already work on it. Tech related startups are most easiest way of making revolutionary things.
Google reportedly ready to launch online storage service
OK, so it breaks and my corners go back to not being properly rounded. I can live with that.
Even high end lines sometimes have low-end kit. It's not as flashy, it's not as stylish, and everyone knows you got the low-end model. Apple still sells the previous model iPhone for very cheap.

In this case though, Tesla wants to make electric cars affordable. They're only rare and exclusive right now because they're expensive and brand new. They may continue to be rare even at $15,000. A Lotus Elise is cheap and fast and everyone wants one, but I never see them driving down the road.
I thought that the grand-parent comment referred to sentences such as this from the article:

"Git can be used as a database for your application."

If you intend to distribute your application, even though you're not copying the git source code directly, nor linking your application directly against a git library, the GPL is rather ambiguous.

"Pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program."
-- http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#Me...
Facebook: Fake Profiles Vs. Real Users
"He belonged to no organizations other than the New York Athletic Club however he had never been in the New York Athletic Club and knew nothing with regard to their membership policies."

Why was he a member of the New York Athletic Club? Did someone give him a membership as a gift?

(At the time, he did own an apartment at 146 Central Park West in New York City. [Edit: I didn't know that either. It was stated in the paragraph directly above the one mentioning the NY Athletic Club.])
I can't downvote, but I fail to see what's the problem with "coding" on a whiteboard and why people are stressing out over it. When I interview people I ask them to write code on the piece of paper. All I'm looking for is a presence of a half-decent idea and them not using things like strlen() when iterating through a C-string in their doodles. The rest we will talk over. I never expect polished code on the whiteboard, it's always a starting point for a conversation that follows.
Are entrepreneurs crazy, or just really—really passionate?
Craig Silverstein, Google Employee #1, Leaving for Khan Academy
ForceSSL Chrome extension
Newspapers' legal notice franchise under pressure from online alternatives
Girls, 13, given contraceptive implants at school (UK)
I don't know if this is the case for interviews or not, but in general, you do not have to sign the NDA to visit Google. If you choose not to sign it, you get a different looking name sticker, and Googlers have to be careful not to show you anything that could be confidential. You're also restricted to common areas; you can't see your friend's desk. If you sign the NDA, you are allowed to see everything (within reason), and Googlers can be a little less guarded around you. But if you just want to have lunch at Google or attend a LUG meeting, you can do that without signing anything. In theory.
Doesn't the Postal Service serve as the source-of-record for addresses? I think that'd be missed.
CSS Shadows VS Canvas Shadows
Doublefine just released Psychonauts for MacOS a few months ago. Strongly encourage anyone who hasn't experienced it yet to give it a try:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/psychonauts/id459476769?mt=12
You've been able to do this for Flickr for quite some time and I believe all Yahoo login pages use the same template.
Well, here's what I learned interviewing at google:

Be very good at off-the-cuff 80% solutions to topcoder problems on a whiteboard, which I am. So much so, that when they told me to use whatever sort algorithm I wanted to, I used bubblesort on purpose, to prove a point, and got away with it. Later on, I reduced another interviewer's search problem to a polynomial equation that had integer roots when a solution existed (at which point he asked me what I'd do on an architecture that didn't have a square root or a divide function and I replied "and what modern architecture would that be?"). Which is to say their interview process is a computer science puzzle game IMO. The skills displayed here have at best a loose correlation with one's engineering skills, and that non-correlation shows up like crazy in their codebases (but Steve Yegge already covered that far better than I can).

So if you are a demo coder at heart, and you've been paying attention to whatever technologies are the flavor of the month at google interviews by reading blog entries like this (apparently javascript these days), you'll do just fine.

In my case, it only took one round for me to get the offer which I (unfortunately) accepted (but the tale of my 4 godawful months at google thanks to naively letting myself get blind-allocated into the wrong team is a different story).

Google is a great company, really it is. I know lots of relatively happy people there, but focusing on the interview process is a mistake. The real challenge is to get yourself hired onto a good team by resisting all the pressure they exert to persuade you to jump into the blind pool, which is a recipe for russian roulette. The solution, which in retrospect I smack myself for not doing the due diligence to find out, is to insist on getting allocated to and speaking with your future team as a condition of accepting an offer. Do not compromise on this point.
It's upgrade time for me and I'm debating whether to stick with iOS or wait out for the Galaxy S3. A lot of people have recommended the S2 but I'd prefer to have the latest model before getting in to a contract for another 2 years
3D WebGL Nyan Cat
Part of the point of the whiteboard is that it's not a real development environment. Google interviews are usually designed to test how you think, not how well you can place a semicolon. The point is, it's okay if you miss a brace or forget the name of a method. It also allows you to mix diagrams and psuedo-code in with 'real' code in an easy way. (also, I can't think of a better environment to give them. You can't provide everyone with their favorite IDE with all the code hints, so in the end it's just going to be a dumb text editor anyway)

Working on a whiteboard is definitely a skill, but one that's worth developing if you plan to work with others on a complex project.

That said, they really shouldn't have been giving this guy standard CS questions. Sure, you want to make sure that he understands why writing his string concatenation loop the wrong way will result in O(n^2) behavior, but he was interviewing for a front-end position.
This may be old, not sure, but it's still great!
There are some extraordinary situations where it really does make sense: an example I read on HN a long time ago was the first cellular radio engineers that Apple hired before building the iPhone. The simple fact that they interviewed for a job might have been under an NDA. This desire to protect secrets probably gets extrapolated and trickles down to every technical candidate.
Iceweasel would seem to be a better fit for their temperature range...

Anyway, I wonder what else these scientists are running on their computers. How much of their specialized stuff is based on free software? Do Antarcticans feel a special affinity to Linux, since they've got penguins all over the place?
This is supposed to be a crossover vehicle that Elon Musk claims will be "faster then a Porsche 911 and roomier than an Audi Q7". Also he claims the most interesting view of it is with its doors open (a reference to something rumored to be called Falcon doors, some sort of folding doors).

The next model after this is the one he wants to make for like $15000-$20000

They seem to think Model X will be very well received.
Top vs. side ad positioning: how it affects your AdWords account
It would seem that nasa also has a plan for implantable pills. http://gizmodo.com/5882725/the-miraculous-nasa-breakthrough-...
It is a bit old, I remember seeing this in 2010, I believe.
It's weird to see how far Yahoo! have gone.
Our primary sector is the Northern Atlantic and the North Sea from Faroe Islands/Iceland and up to and including the Arctic. We do those calculations based on observations from several sources (like weather stations, weather balloons and satellite imagery) that we feed into our meteorological and oceanographic models. The stuff we create for our sector are in principle always made public, and you'll see those products on yr.no and on the API.

We also retrieve and use observations and products from partner institutions like NOAA (US) and the ECMWF (EU). Some of the partners (mostly national services) do not accept redistribution, so some areas might unfortunately only have basic meteorological and oceanographic data made available on our API.

It's amazing how popular yr.no has become. We got word from some South African farmers who said they were using yr.no instead of their national service, as our service was of better use for them. (The distance between Oslo and Johannesburg is 6010 miles.)
The Impossible Manifesto
Most of their employees also worked on Fat Princess for the PS3.
Spoken like someone who probably has never had to deal with vendor extensions to OpenGL... :(

Try to fix your standards body and get them to move faster!
I don't follow the car business; Is it normal or unusual to have a car launch event like this?
If the browsers available to the general public support vendor-specific sheets, the problem won't be solved at all. At some point Firefox and IE will see that there are a lot of pages out there on the web written with "text/css+webkit" and start to interpret them in order to compete. This is the same problem they are faced with today through "-webkit-".
You must have missed when I said
"Electric cars certainly do need to evolve and Tesla has done an incredible job, but there are dozens of other manufacturers out there that are just as capable."

Are you trying to argue that you're not paying for a brand? If so, by your logic then stores like Saks Fifth Avenue's "green" brands or high end auto manufacturers with hybrid vehicles have no place in America.
yep, i understand your point, and i do see the hacking angle. and i also see a bit of zealotism. I would be very curious to learn what benefits could be gained from hacking git to do something like a wiki (other than being able to say that you're using git for wiki). And i'm not cynical here, genuinely curious..
Google only hires 1 in 1000 applicants or so (at least that's what they tell you on day 1). Try not to take it personally that you failed buzzword bingo with their recruiters.

Perhaps someone should take a look at your resume to find out why?
iPhone storage is encrypted by default.
I bought the Nexus One for AT&T about 2 years ago, am totally contract free, and even grandfathered in on an unlimited data plan at AT&T. I do some develop on Android, as well as iPhone, and have been trying to figure out what the best Android developer phone would be to upgrade to in the next 6 months or so. Preferably, I'd have something like the Nexus One that I can just buy outright and plug into my unlimited data plan at AT&T even if it costs a few more $$$. I'm pretty much underwhelmed by all the Android offerings at this point. What are developers looking forward to in terms of contract-free developer Android phones in the next 6 months?
It's not illegal to be a member of a communist organisation, or a Nazi, but it is illegal to lie on those forms. Asking those questions is a way of upping the stakes; you either admit you're a commie and they don't let you in, or you lie and you're up on a felony charge for making false statements.
In question 17, he lists two code 9 relatives, which means sister. I thought his only sister was Mona Simpson?
Separable Subsurface Scattering
Google Chrome Browser For Android
Came here to mention that. Having a simple way of managing where the various copies of my files are stored is great.
I also noticed that they address him by "Stephen" and "Steven"
The market value of anything has two sides - supply and demand.

If there is no price level at which a transaction will take place because the supply side values the utility of the commodity higher than any amount of money the demand side offers, then you cannot price it in terms of money.

What's the value of the Mona Lisa? You can't just go off and find some other painting(s), look at those prices, and come up with a number. The only way you can discover its market price is by testing the market: i.e. putting it up for sale and inviting bids.

A person's time is not substitutable; one hour in the morning is not equivalent to one hour in the middle of the night; and 24 hours of it every day is not equivalent to 24 times the price of 1 hour of it. It's not fungible. This limits your ability to put a monetary price on it.
I used Mathematica for this. For every math class I had a designated Mathematica notebook that ended up being a summary of the course by the end.
The problem is that using prefix-less names means that it needs to be standardized before any experimentation can be done.

Standards that get ratified before any experimental implementations exist tend to be horrible.
how to Lock any folder using ms DOS
Mmm, yep, that test worked! :P
A Scottish brand of waterproof coat that became a generic name for raincoat is spelled Mackintosh[1]. It could be that the FBI person was being redundant to cover all the spelling bases.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackintosh
If Only the Internet Would Be Treated Like the Offline World
Obvious solution: hire Damien Hirst to personally respray your boringly cheap, commodity Tesla. Pure snob value!
If you truly have a privacy concern just throw a TrueCrypt file store inside of your cloud storage. I do this already in dropbox and it works well.
Buffet: "A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops -- and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be."

Buffet implicitly rejects global warming here, specifically the latest projections on drought: http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2012/01/another-terrifying-dro... and others.
RIM's recent marketing blitz deemed a bust as BlackBerry 7 sales weaken
There is also a local proxy server (cannot remember the name but it has been around since the late 90s) that can do the same for any browser. Last time I looked at it, it was not intelligent and would preload every .html link on the page, plus any .css or .js they referred to.
An unlocked GSM Nexus S or Galaxy Nexus is really the only way to go.
Excepting declaring funky things like arrays of pointers to functions in C, what competent developer doesn't know the syntax to his or her own best 2 or 3 languages?

There is a difference between forgetting to put a semicolon at the end of a line (totally harmless on a whiteboard interview), and not knowing that semicolons end statements in C.

Of course, not knowing say, part of the standard library, say the semantics of rand(), without a man page or Google search is much more excusable.
> or a second 'secret' key known by every copy of the unlocking software!

Are you sure that each drive doesn't have its own key, tied to the serial number?
Dropbox is a terrific product. Simple for absolutely anyone to use, it does one thing and does it perfectly well. But I think Dropbox as a company is indeed vulnerable. They have only the one product, as perfect as it is, and no hold on their customers. If a Dropbox clone were to appear tomorrow, transferring your files is a matter of minutes if not seconds. Thus they're posed for fierce price competition, with fast-dropping profit margins. So the name of the game will be added-value services - services that would potentially "lock-in" customers and make it harder to switch. Unfortunately, Google seems better posed for such services, but I, for one, will stick with Dropbox for now, simply because I don't want to give Google access to so much of my data (it's quite enough that they keep all my e-mail).
DC office is funny. It's so small it doesn't have it's own recruiters. The recruiters in Denver handle recruiting in DC. So if you want to interview, talk to them.

Also, if you do interview, keep in mind you'll have to travel to MV for a full day interview and also a full day interview in DC. Which is actually nice if you have the time; the DC team is so small that they want to be selective with future team members.

The DC projects were cool too, one was google code I believe, and the other was a tool to allow the collection of data sets such as water well tests in developing Africa, etc.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "document oriented db with version control"? Couch stores revision identifiers with every document ID, though old versions are subject to deletion whenever DB compaction occurs...
Not too long ago I would have agreed with you, but I've recently changed my mind. Coding on a whiteboard is not completely useless:

1. It's a good indicator of how much you know for simple problems.

A few weeks ago I started helping a friend with a particular language and framework. He claimed to know it, having read several books on it. So I said great, go to the board and write a function that adds two numbers together. And he couldn't do it. Who knows, maybe he could have done it on a computer? Maybe he would have Google'd it quickly, or relied on code autocompletion, or the muscle memory from his fingers typing it, etc. But that's not what I wanted to know. Anyone who's written thousands of functions in a particular language could write a simple one like this on a wall, using paint, while hanging upside down. His inability to do so told me: he is not well-versed in this language. PERIOD.

2. You can practice.

"So what", you protest. "Google isn't going to ask simple problems. They'll ask hard ones." And maybe they will. And maybe having to solve it in a foreign way really will fuck you up. But my question to you is: If you know you're interviewing at Google soon, why the hell would you allow whiteboard coding to remain foreign to you? If you suck with whiteboards and you care at all about getting the job, then buy one and practice solving problems on it. Why would Google want someone who doesn't care enough to prepare for their interview? It's not that hard of a skill to pick up. And I daresay it will make you a better, easier-to-communicate-with programmer.
What team and why was it so awful? I agree that the pool system sucks.
Don't confuse Keller's opinion piece with an editorial viewpoint. The two are polar opposites.
Today I would recommend that anyone who plans to learn JS learns Lua first. It's similar enough, but simpler and you don't have to be concerned with all the browser-specific functions right away.
Agreed. I'm concerned that this backlash will also slow the adoption of CSS3 features back to the glacial pace we saw with CSS2.x
Do your profession a favor and DO NOT sign an NDA in this situation. It's just terrible. Same goes for people that sign non-competes, and thought-police agreements upon being hired.

Don't do it. It's optional, you have the right to refuse. By signing you are putting a huge amount of liability on your shoulders for no reason. You're giving that company the right to sue you for practically any reason they can conjure up.
All or something (2009)
Apple’s patent plea: Stop Samsung and Motorola from holding us hostage
So far my favorite: "He added that the Appointee lives within his means financially, however, his means are considerable and the Appointee is worth at least 100 million dollars."

It's easy to live within your means if you're worth 100 million dollars I guess. Unless you are Elton John or Nicolas Cage.
In the Market Research industry (here) this is still pretty much the de-facto standard for sending digital data between agencies!

This continues to remain unchanged by time because the leading Market Research tool [1] still prefers to use data with 80 columns, 12 multiple values per col (0-9, & and -) with optional multi cards (card numbers can be in any columns and any length).

[1] Software is called Quantum. Originally developed in the 1970s !
RPT Technology: Protect the iPad or your precious tablets
G-Form Extreme Edge for your iPad/iPad2 or other tablets, will protect your tablet from impact by utilizing RPT Technology,
I got my galaxy nexus last week, and I am over the moon about it. Came off a droid x, and it is just hands down awesome. The battery isn't all it could be, might have to go after market for that, but the screen is great, ics is finally competitive with iOS, and the fast camera is really nice for shots on the go. (which is all you should ever use a cell phone for anyways. If you want a real camera, BUY ONE.) it's not perfect by any means, but I couldn't find another android device that was comparable.
Screen size is a matter of personal preference. Few people like yourself fancy small screen sizes like that of the iPhone.. but for me, 4" screens have proven ideal and ergonomically the best of the many. Having different screen sizes is good because it offers the consumer the choice of choosing what he/she might feel best..

Having said that, I do agree with you on the GNexus screen size. 4.65" seems a little over the top..
Essentially, objects have the ability to be rolled back, forward etc. Support for messages attached to commits and transactional commits would be nice!

An extensible user collection would also be nice, so app users are database users and vice versa.
Some work on Linux too, but so far I haven't found a good SED solution for Mac OSX, which is what I care about on laptops now. The lack of a traditional BIOS complicates things.
Shopcaster: another "buy local" play from Toronto?
Same conclusion from a slightly different angle: You trade risk for expected payout. Imagine each of these scenarios is like flipping coins with different values attached. At the end of the year, you flip one coin:

- Bonds: Heads, you gain 1%. Tails, you gain 1%. If it lands on it's side, you lose everything (government default)

- Stocks: Heads, you gain 15%. Tails, you lose 10%. A lot more risk here, but the expected value of flipping the coin is higher.

Some people would rather flip the bonds coin, some would rather flip the stocks coin, and it depends on the individuals' risk tolerance.

Gold doesn't fit the model, because buying gold is speculation rather than an investment.