skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, fleshing out requirements is a big part of it. Our apps are web apps but in financing, so they're not totally trivial. We do both the public facing web-apps and the tool used by loan processors for administration.

Our team has a high number of extraverts, but the introverts seem just as happy. We have no surly curmudgeons.

When I hired on, I was surprised that so many people rode bikes to work. And when I proposed climbing a local mountain to one similarly outdoorsy co-worker, I was surprised that the whole team was interested. 10 out of the 12 in the office either did the warm-up climb or actually camped out overnight and completed the larger climb (Mt St. Helens). I found this amount of shared lifestyle/outside-interests to be unique among places I've worked. I'm certain we weren't hired because of these interests, but it seems to have worked out that we share a lot of them.
I must protest.

I'm at a small startup with ~8 people, which is currently working out of a 5000+ square-foot warehouse with dozens of spare office rooms along the side. And you know what? All the engineers work together in just one large room, so they can ask each other what's going on with some part of the code and things like that.

Of course, it's only a few people, chatter is limited (and usually informative), and most of the time it's fairly quiet. I'm sure a variety of open-plan offices don't meet those needs, and could use additional partitioning and quiet spaces like the article talks about. I'm sure you run into a variety of issues trying to scale the open-space office. But contrary to your cynical assessment, the concept of open-space collaboration has some intrinsic merit and works well in a variety of cases.
I was about to post "hmm, sounds a lot like Github", but then I looked at your profile and saw, yes, it is Github.

We have a shared workspace too, modeled after Bell Labs' famous Unix Room. It's nice to work in there from time to time, but everyone except the interns also has a real office of their own where they can store hardware and records, make phone calls, or just hide away to work on a paper. I think having a personal office to which you can retreat when necessary is very important in making shared workspaces actually work.
According to Wikipedia that is wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retenti...
Iranian Court Upholds Death Sentence for Software Designer
Great words. I really loved reading it :) . What kind of stuff are you building?
This is such an ignorant comment. You're wrong, it's actually nothing like that. It's technical demonstration of edge W3C APIs, not something coded against proprietary APIs or around rendering engine bugs. It requires any browser that has implemented the W3C AudioContext API, which at this point only Chrome has implemented in a generally available release. But this doesn't quite fit into the 80 char constraint of HN link titles.
There is an unavoidable fragmentation between the tablet, and the desktop. Please show me an OS that does both better? It is unifying not fragmenting. I'd really like to hear what people think MS should have done.

From a desktop perspective windows 8 IS just like windows 7, except it has replaced the start menu and uses ribbons (can be disabled). The metro UI works reasonably with a mouse, and power-users will no doubt search with the keyboard -- exactly like they do now.

On the touch side, it will be possible to use your 'pc' with a touch interface and it will work. Which is obviously a big change from a windows 7 tablet. Instead of trying to force the desktop experience they have embraced things like full screen apps, and it is all still usable with mouse/keyboard. It is not a 'drastic change' for consumers who have been lapping up iOS and android devices.

If MS don't make a move then they will lose the touch world to android and iOS.. which will eventually become the laptop market of today (ie the mainstream). Their WP7 attempt shows that people aren't keen on a new, separate OS, even though it is often said to be good. So now is their chance to leverage their ecosystem (whether it be recompiled apps for arm or intel actually becomes common in the touch space), or lose that advantage. This, IMO, is the point of windows 8.. MS isn't going to care if you stay with windows 7. 8 is about not being shut out of the touch market. ie the survival of windows and it's advantage.
Seattle, WA. Full time

We're Amazon's platform team for media content. We own the systems for uploading, storing, and serving images/video/js/css/etc. across Amazon.com and partner sites.

Small blurb about the team: http://wap-jobs.amazon.com/jobs.html#media
Full job description: https://us-amazon.icims.com/jobs/157798/job

Feel free to email me if you've got any questions!
Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time
Visual Studio is by far the best IDE for Javascript, it actually runs the code in a VM and then use the info to offer autocomplete
Sending mailservers typically try to redeliver mails for several days if something goes wrong (and if your mailserver does not respond with a permanent error).
In the business of republishing press releases: ScienceDaily and PhysOrg
I currently work in a medium-sized room with a lot of people in it. Its noisy, and hard to work. I try to work in quieter places. So for me this all rings true.

What I wish corporations would do about it is let us play loud rock music, or things of that nature, while we work.
It will be more interesting if we can get data on when monetization began for both google and facebook and how they compare since then
What this talk essentially proposes is to scrap the teaching of an approach to program development that has produced pretty much EVERY SINGLE piece of practical software used in the history of computing, in favor of an approach that had not produced, to my knowledge, a single nontrivial piece of software by 1988, when the talk was given, and has not produced, to my knowledge, a single piece of software in the 20+ years since.

In a separate thread, I have posted De Millo, Lipton, and Perlis' 1979 argument against formal methods: http://fresh.homeunix.net/~luke/misc/p271-de_millo.pdf and 30+ years after that article, and 20+ years after Dijkstra's talk, I don't see how there can be an argument as to which of the two views has prevailed in practice.

I would welcome hearing Dijkstra's view argued, but I would find such an argument much more compelling if it included citations of actual, working programs (as opposed to isolated algorithms) that were developed with end-to-end formal methods. It would be even more compelling if the argument included published proofs of such programs and/or the author's personal experience developing them.
I feel pretty safe assuming a pure function in a blog post about the advantages of immutability, really.
Software Patents evil? Meh. Farming Patents? Hacker News meet TRIPs.
Feynman have a great little story about checking the facts behind the facts. Anyone got a link to that?
Awesome work! Is there a way that these filtered images could then be saved server side to be used later without the js?
I know counterexamples. My second son read Oliver Twist at no more than sixth-grade age (as I just verified by asking him what Dickens he remembers reading). We homeschool all our children, and we make sure that they learn to read thoroughly.

http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Linguistic-Approach-Leonard-Bloom...

Then they are at liberty to read whatever they want, whenever they want. Fitting today's generation of readers, they all read a lot of "high fantasy" (Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, etc.) and plenty of nonfiction on favorite subjects (e.g., mathematics, biology, history) but they are also well able and willing to read classic novels. I do get the impression, from observing what children in our community check out when they visit the local library, and from observing how infrequently some of them visit the local library, that Dickens is considered challenging reading in today's world. See also

http://www.pacinfo.com/~handley/orsig/highschool.html

for the suggestion that Oliver Twist is a senior-high-level book, which would be surprising to any of my four children.
Making references to movie piracy in your description hurts your credibility. You are playing into the content industry's argument that file sharing == piracy. Don't do that.
Why does the Terms and Conditions document (https://www.sharelatex.com/termsAndConditions.html) refer to Automattic Inc.? Is that a leftover from a quick copy and paste?
In a rant essentially about people generalizing and forcing their own world views onto others' words, the man sure likes to generalise and force his own world views onto others' words.
Lisp Is Back, and It's Bad
Excellent point, although we're still quite far from the point where that sort of technology exists and is cheap enough for police to be able to buy.

You'd also have to presume that if technology has progressed that far then things like extremely accurate long-range cameras and the ability to record sound from some distance away by measuring the vibrations on glass will also be available to them.

To some extent this is already here; the local police here have recently begun using a mobile van with a mast-mounted optical ball and have made arrests using footage captured as far as 3km away. Similar technology has been used to watch over the Occupy Wall Street protestors in NYC and elsewhere.

Point is the ability of the state to conduct surveillance on its citizens, both close-up and from a distance, is only going to increase. Fretting about individual pieces of technology misses the big picture, which is that only changes to the law and proper oversight will prevent it from happening.
I just wonder how long it is until someone sends a couple dozen of these at a President's outdoor podium.
See also: http://catb.org/jargon/html/G/glitch.html#crunchly73-06-04 and follow the next-cartoon chain from there. I particularly like http://catb.org/jargon/html/N/number-crunching.html#crunchly... .
Ironies
I write shell scripts to do just about everything. Good point about teaching these skills to non-programmers.
Where to learn Python
If you can give one online resource for learning python (as someone's first language) what would it be?
I miss Blue Frog...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog
I think the 2nd worst part of an open office besides the sound is the visual distraction of people walking back and forth in front of your desk. With sound at least you can get good headphones to mitigate it. Short of building a wall, it's hard to stop the visual distractions.
Yeah, it's a real fold, just misleadingly named:

int main() {
string s[] = { "a", "b", "c" };
// will print "abc"
cout << accumulate(s, s+3, string(""), [](string l, string r) { return l+r; });
return 0;
}

I think a closer C++ equivalent for typeclasses are specialized template functions--for example, if I define:

template<InputIterator> string accumulate<string>(InputIterator first,
InputIterator last, string init);

then my call to accumulate(s, s+3, string("")) will use that specialization.
The University of Phoenix is not interested in anything low cost.
Ask HN: I learned RoR... what next?
I created showwwdown.com and learned ruby on rails on the way.

I've really gotten hooked on RoR now, but I'm thinking, "what's next"? Should I just jump into a larger project and develop my RoR skills or is there more?

Should I start messing around with MongoDB and Coffeescript, or what would be the next logical step?
Quoting another comment on this topic I made while inebriated to back up the idea that this is economics 101 material:

Libertarian views assume that free markets regulate themselves basically due to perfect competition. (Trying to keep this short and simple.)

Realistically, you do not always have perfect competition and you have problems with monopoly, oligopoly, etc. Firms are potent enough that their collective decisions can manipulate markets, and in this it would be labor markets. (Perfect competition assumes that firms cannot manipulate markets.)

Libertarians oppose a government presence in markets because they believe the result is inefficiently functioning markets, and we are all worse off.

In this case, the firms collude and are manipulating labor markets so that they behave inefficiently to the advantage of the manipulative firms and disadvantage of labor. (This is usually where people try to justify labor unions as a counter to the influence of firms.)
I really wish they had chosen a name for their university that was not so Web 2.0. It makes it unclear to me whether this is a startup or an educational institution.
UoP's bad rep comes not because they're a degree mill but because they have a high dropout rate (which is sort of the opposite problem -- if they were a degree mill their dropout rate would be low).

Their problem is really that they spent many years recruiting unqualified students who used financial aid to attend, telling them things like "it's no problem to take on $100,000 in debt, with a degree you'll easily be able to get a job that pays $100K." Then the student drops out after four semesters and defaults on their loans, leaving the taxpayer holding the bag.
The kind you get in ocean currents, where such things a self-constructing Tesla valves are probably out there, somewhere, already ..
This is a perfect example of the old saying that a good programmer is a lazy programmer. Lazy programmers hate doing the same monotonous things over and over and will go to great lengths to avoid it!

This is a close cousin to what my grandfather used to call "working to get out of work" in other words spending a lot of mental effort to avoid manual labor. This usually involves fashioning a tool or device to move something that could have been moved more quickly with simple, but back-breaking manual labor.

I tend to do both of these things a lot!
They're both honors, yes, but incredibly different in the implementation. A MacArthur is much more of an abstract honor ('You have done some great work, possibly in some field that can't even be named because it is so unique, so here is some money that we hope you will use to continue doing great work.'). Many MacArthur recipients would never in their lifetimes be eligible for a Nobel. (On the other hand, many Nobel laureates would never receive a MacArthur either).

A Nobel prize, by contrast, is only given in certain fields, which already constrains the way that it is perceived. With a MacArthur, you're not necessarily competing against others in your field, because you oftentimes don't have a field (what you do is so highly specialized that nobody else really comes close). Furthermore, the prize is a political tool as much as anything else nowadays. (Looking at many of the recent Nobel Peace Prize recipients, I think anybody would agree to that.) The MacArthur has much less political identification, even compared to the prizes for biology/chemistry. It's nice to be able to attach it to your name when convenient as it gets a little bit more respect, but it's hard to interpret it in a negative way (or to see a recipient of a MacArthur as somehow compromising his/her views -- remember that Stallman has rather weak opinions on money per se when it comes to freedom; one can have a FLOSS product that nevertheless generates money).

(And as for the awards, I agree - at this point in my life I would probably be satisfied with either one!)
Where I live you could sue your employer for that. Stronger yet, they'd get an unannounced visit from the work-health folks and get a massive fine.
I'm not so sure. With the latest electro-optical turrets a helicopter can be pretty far away and still get usable footage. During the Football World Cup I observed some police helicopters orbiting just about out of earshot during their operations.

I've also seen a demonstration of an experimental locally-produced surveillance camera (in this case intended for maritime observation) that was able to display the name on a small boat 20-30km out to sea. Granted, the camera was mounted on the top of a mountain to get the required height, but nonetheless the technology was phenomenal.

The difference between all the different varieties of surveillance technologies is starting to blur quite a bit.
Seattle already has them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI13yDN2gi0
we pay in our personal data they use to serve up advertisements

We pay in our personal data (period).

They are using it for advertisements now, but they can use it for anything they can legally get away with.
Ask HN: Advice for learning Python as your first language?
If you can give one online resource for learning python (as someone's first language) what would it be?
Ah, I should change it!
Probably http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21994366
Mobile Internet Access Everywhere for Smartphone Users a.k.a. Data Roaming
The "hacker way" was a small nod to the recent Facebook filing - I don't it necessary implies any kind of elegant design.

Zuckerberg explains "hacking just means building something quickly... Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo...Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once."
UoP already does quite a bit of online instruction. It's unlikely there's much going on here that they aren't doing already.
That won't work. They certainly don't include friends' contact info when you request data that way.
A Productivity Hack for Teams - Quiet Hours
I sure hope so. I'll phone up tomorrow and ask.
As an atheist, I often look off into the distance and contemplate my isolation and non-belief.
IMHO, you're taking the wrong approach. Make something you'd like to make, then find the tools you need for that.

I mean, if you want to hack on your house so that it says "hey there!" whenever your friend (and not the mailman) walks in front of your house, I doubt CoffeeScript and MongoDB are going to get you far.

If you want to make a social local web app startup coolness like the other kids though, then yeah, those are fine.
I think that's basically what the person you're replying to suggested as the ideal.

For example, I work in a relatively open space with two different teams mixed in. It's also the central hub for all the offices. So if anyone feels like chatting, in their office or not, or gets a bit boisterous, the developer's focus and productivity goes into the toilet.

It really is excruciating during those times.

I've had my own office before and didn't really care for it. The best work environment I've been in was a "double-sized" office (maybe 20x12?) with four or five desks against the walls. Pairing up meant just rolling your chair over. The door was most often shut to keep the noise out. Impromptu team meetings were quick and easy. Everyone in the office kept conversation volume low to respect the rest of the team. When there's only 4 or 5 people in an office you can make that stick. When you center a small company around a main area, where I'm also expected to work, that's a losing battle and you end up looking like the cranky old man who just can't stand it if other people are being cheerfully sociable.
Somehow I feel this article hasn't gone through an editor.

Here are a few examples:

> In Europe, laws give people the right to know what data companies have about them, but that is not the case in the United States.

This sentence primes the audience for a discussion of the laws, but that anticipation is never fulfilled. The article jumps to a new topic immediately.

> Ads that pop up on your screen might seem useful, or at worst, a nuisance. But they are much more than that. The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you. Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger — and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.

Yes advertising uses the same 'bits and bytes' about your life to determine targeted ads, but you can't co-mingle the idea of advertising and the drastic case of being turned down on insurance because of a Facebook posting you made.

The premise of the article is that Facebook uses you, in that they use your personal data. It's true, but they use your data for advertisement and not for the other more troubling purposes the article talks about.

The author appears to want to set up a slippery slope argument by saying that simply because a market exists for personal data beyond advertising, then Facebook will either (a) sell their corpus to those companies that already provide the service or (b) start providing those services themselves.

It's possible, but there's no evidence suggesting that it is occurring already or is likely to occur in the future---businesses don't enter new industries merely because they can; there's always a cost to diversifying and for Facebook the cost of selling user-data to let employers make hiring decisions is the loss of their dominance in social networking. Once its known that the information you give you Facebook can be used for more than advertising, people likely will stop giving that information. Facebook can make a one-time sale, but loses on the chance to continue reaping ad-profits.

Why would they kill their cash-cow and core business just for dubious short-term gain?
Interestingly, the Tibetan word for meditation (Gompa) means, literally, a repetitive mental task.

Thus far, we have machines that think for us in countless ways, none yet that meditate for us.
I'm surprised it isn't one of the more popular projects among this community.

You shouldn't be. My values align roughly with that of the freedombox creators/developers but I can easily see this will have poorer adoption than other well-intentioned technology like PGP or gNewSense.

If you want a project of this nature to see widespread use it will have to be fun, usable, and pretty.
Hi.

First of all, I was wowed by the design of your app. very good job on that. I created an account and tried out some of the features. The features are great, and I think it can really help people.

Two things I would have liked to see as first time visitor:

1.) More info about what is cal, forcal, withcal, askcal. maybe in novice on planning stuff, but I am still not clear about what the differences are between these.

2.) This is not anything major but I'll give my 2 cents anyways. After signing up and clicking on the activation link, it again tells you to log in. Would be better if that extra step of logging in is avoided. As far as I know, on most sites, you are logged in after sign ups. These little things can potentially put off first timers.

Again, really good job. I'll tuning into plangr again. Don't take my advice as a must do, you clearly have put lot more thoughts into the product you are creating, and I am just a visitor. Just something to keep in mind. I am also trying to get some feedback on an app I am working on. I hope you get more quality feedback and make your already cool app a great success!

take it easy :)
-easymode
It's only an addiction when it's harmful.
From what I understand Blackboard lost almost every legal case they filed with those patents, so as long as they have enough money to get through a lawsuit, they should be fine.
I was hoping for a more specific answer. I currently work at an algorithmic trading firm making software that trades securities, but I didn't find a position like this at $250K/year.
This really does beg the question, does any of this spam actually work? Maybe we think it doesn't because of some hacker bias and our knowledge of the web but maybe normal people actually buy what they're selling. I find it hard to believe but it's possible. Are there any stats on this or anyone with experience?