skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One reason you don't read many ex-Apple employees talking about the process is that it's complicated, and simple soundbite answers are hard to come up with.

The culture of secrecy thing is greatly overplayed by the media precisely because of the visceral reaction that you display. In reality, if someone needs to know something, they can know it. If they need to reach out to someone with a specific skill set, the resource can be disclosed. The need-to-know policy is accepted and respected inside the organization because it works, but the key point is that it does work.

The amount of cross-pollination between engineering teams is actually very high. There are certainly areas where access to specific projects is constrained, but in general the culture is very open. Sharing of code and team resources rather than duplicate development is the norm, as is tight cross-functional integration between teams. At any given time you may not know precisely what your peers are working on, but this is different from not knowing who they are, or being able to talk to them.

I have a hard time seeing Apple-the-engineering-environment as either decadent or miserable. Apart from being a bit tight for office space and having rather too much carbon fibre in the parking garages, the company is incredibly focussed on doing the job and doing it well, which doesn't sound much like decadence.

Likewise, it's hard to see what's miserable about working within Apple. The company is always doing something interesting, and it's very pragmatic about it. Projects don't get killed "on a whim", they get killed because they're a bad idea, or they don't work, or they get shelved for a year, or three, or more until the rest of the technology catches up. If you are obsessed with shipping "your thing" that might be depressing, but if you want to ship something good, knowing that you aren't going to be chained to a turkey for five years just because some suit would lose face otherwise can be very refreshing.

As an engineer, working for Apple is actually pretty amazing. The company has very little of the management BS that is prevalent in other large tech companies. Most engineering decisions (how things should work) are made by engineers; many new features are the direct result of an engineer saying "what if we did this?", or "if we stack this and this and this together we could do that"; most of the engineering management team are ex-engineers and thus well-calibrated; the toolbox and scope for attacking problems in new ways are both enormous; "that would be hard" is not usually an excuse for not doing something; "that would be stupid" is usually an excuse for not doing something. Engineers, even new hires, have a very high level of personal autonomy and corresponding responsibility; your role is largely what you make of it.

On a routine basis, the stuff you work on turns up in real products that people use and love. If you actually enjoy making things, that's all kinds of awesome.

tl;dr: If you're considering working for Apple and the fear of being locked into a box is putting you off - that's not how it is.
Ringmark: A web-based test suite measuring mobile browsers capabilities.
Startup Scene in Singapore Not Quite Silicon Valley
You are really missing the point. All of this is security theater. It will not catch people who want to exploit weaknesses. The 9/11 hijackers used boxcutters, not much different than a shiv as he describes.

The problem with "outcry" in the US is that it is short lived and most people have short attention spans. Now that the media "furor" has died down, things will progress forward as the powers-that-be wish.

I just flew round trip, BWI-SJO, was directed toward a backscatter machine and opted out. I was treated rather rudely at BWI and had to stand around until a 'male assist' or whatever they called the person that had to pat me down. The whole ordeal made me feel guilty of something when I had done nothing wrong.

I oppose backscatters on multiple fronts. Health, invasion of privacy, corrupt contracts, general ineffectiveness, etc.
Ask HN: Tool for Reducing Eye Strain?
I'm a computer science student who used to have 20/20 vision and lately I've found that my distance vision is becoming blurry. I think the problem is the amount of time spent staring at a computer screen (computer vision syndrome), and am wondering if anyone has any advice or tools they use to help avoid this?
I'm glad you liked it here :)
صورة الشهيدة مروة عادل بهاد
Parking lots
Insurgent Games Makes All Games Free, Releases Everything as Open Source
I think the author means having a technical CEO is preferred, but not sufficient. If the company is building software, it's immensely helpful if the person at the helm understands software, but they need to understand a whole bunch of other things as well (good products vs. good technology, how to network, how to sell, how to manage, etc.)
I'm not arguing that the WoW and SC2 expansions not major projects.

I'm saying that compared to the new projects(D3 and Titan), the overall personnel allocation is smaller for Heart of the Swarm and Mists of Pandaria.

The development effort on those isn't on a new codebase(unlike D3 or Titan). They're adding new features and reworking game systems in the expansions(especially with the WoW expansion, where they're completely rewriting basically every class), but the overall effort required to complete those isn't nearly as much as what they need for the new MMO.
Keep in mind that the cost to design and build a telescope like, say, Keck is roughly on par with the cost to merely launch a spacecraft like Kepler. In total the Kepler mission will end up costing nearly twice what it took to build the flagship ESO VLT observatory which includes 4x 8.2m diameter world-class telescopes. Space is expensive.
US have confiscated 20,000$ from a Danish purchasing Cuban cigars from Germany
I am not a lawyer, but I would be very surprised if Canadian courts didn't interpret that text in accordance with the general principle that all words have meaning -- i.e., explicitly stating that non-viable seeds are legal implies that the intention was that viable seeds are not legal.
> 2) Carefully.

Can you provide code demonstrating how you will "carefully" create a C array of structs with a variable-sized member? It will be very educational for me, at least, and I think others, as well.
Show HN: HubStar, the missing "star" feature for GitHub repositories
After the recent HN discussion[1] about what's wrong with GitHub's "Watch" feature, I was spurred to finish a pet project I put about 8 hours into a month ago.

HubStar[2] is the missing "star" feature for GitHub repositories. The idea is you log into the site using GitHub's OAuth, download a browser extension (currently only Chrome is available), and you can now star repositories directly from their GitHub pages. The links are stored remotely on the HubStar site for later searching.

Prior to this I was using the GitMarks Chrome plugin, but my main problem with it was that it only showed me the name of the projects I bookmarked. If I later needed to find one of them, but only remembered what it did and not what it was called, I'd have to open up a ton of old links trying to find it. HubStar fixes this by showing you the description for the repository so you can search on that as well. Further search filters, such as programming language, may be available in the future.

There's also a social aspect to the site. You can see the number of other people who have starred a repository, and I have future plans to let people view all of the users who starred a given repository, and all of the repositories starred by a given user.

The source for both the site itself and the Chrome plugin is available on GitHub[3]. I hope people find it useful and I'd love to have some contributions from other people.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3640856

[2] http://hubstar.herokuapp.com/

[3] https://github.com/tsigo/hubstar
Agreed! The $25 price point is incredible, and selling 10K units in 10 mins is a runaway success! I placed my order and will happily to wait until April, until then I will continue my project(s) working on a BeagleBone ($89) and a PandaBoard ($149).
I've been wanting this sort of thing for ages. Considering how sophisticated we think we are, how the hell are we still using tools like emacs, or even VS on a daily basis?

We should be indistinguishable from magic by now. This is a (small) step in the right direction.

Can we please live in the future already?
Eric Schmidt at Mobile World Congress in Spain
Ask HN: Reasonable cost attorney to review Consulting Agreement?
I am a consultant working in software and have recently been presented with a long-term contract on a large project. I'd really like to get a lawyer to review the contract before I sign it, but I've never worked with a lawyer before.

Any recommendations for an attorney in California that will review a consulting agreement at a reasonable price?
Linked: http://hubstar.herokuapp.com/
The intent is that it's a hackable little computer that you can plug into the monitor/tv/keyboard/peripheral you already have. Then you can experiment with programming or Linux internals or minimum viable products or whatever using a less than 50€ computer without the risk of turning your expensive need-to-do-day-job computer into a brick.

It is not supposed to be a customer item sold to be used as the only computer someone uses. It does not even have a power supply or a casing around the circuit board!

And it certainly isn't a minicomputer like the PDP-11 was :)
Obama Hammers the GOP’s Energy Plan
Obama nailed the GOP when it comes to energy issues, while speaking at the University of Miami last week.
In this case the shareholders outside the multi-layered conglomerate are fairly distant, so I'd guess internal bean-counting is a more proximal pressure on Blizzard. They're owned by a holding company, Activision Blizzard, which is public, but has the majority of its shares owned by yet another holding company, Vivendi SA. So Vivendi's shareholders are the main ultimate shareholders, but those individuals control Blizzard in only a very convoluted and indirect way.

I would guess that you might see different kinds of decisions from an independent Blizzard, even if it were public (though it would also have more risks in that case).
Ask HN: Anyone wants to start a CoderDojo in NYC?
Hi HN fellows,

I just learned about CoderDojo and was wondering if anyone would be interested in starting a NYC CoderDojo (more info here: http://coderdojo.com/help-us/i-want-to-start-a-coderdojo-right-now/).

If you are interested please let me know - either via comment or email (myUserName @ ggggmail).
"chief executives typically make less than US$9,000 a year"

Is that correct? It seems unlikely.
We didn't go with Rackspace/Akamai specifically because they don't have a custom origin pull - pushing your assets somewhere else is at the very least a pain, and if you have images or video that is dynamically sized based on the URL it's pretty much a nonstarter.

We looked at Cloudfront but they don't have an Australian distribution point. In the end we went with EdgeCast (via GoGrid).

Originally we were with Voxel, but they've had a couple network issues in the past month (result of DDoS attacks I think).
If you're slowly-but-surely losing subscribers, going through downsizing, laying off developers, from a business perspecitive it's "struggling".
I think it deserves mention that without copyright, a studio doesn't even need to remake a song, they could rather simply and legally re-release the original, now public-domain song.
I imagine the implied turn of phrase was actually "struggled to make the numbers". As TheCapn pointed out, an unaccounted for 20% drop in plans is bound to shake things up a little.
Giant insect rediscovered on rock spindle after 80 years
Well, you can only play a game for so long before getting tired of it. Sure, it's a huge world. But every world dies at one point, and WoW is no different.
After Five Years, Draw Something Is an Overnight Hit for OMGPOP. Now What?
It's amazing to see how developing countries simply jumped to wireless technologies without having the need to build expensive cable based phone networks like what developed countries had to go through. I read a story of a farmer in China who sells his crops to a shady middleman who lies to him about the market price of grain. Finally when he got a cellphone and was able to subscribe to a messaging service that gives him live updates on prices he was able to negotiate better and improve his standard of living. This is truly empowering.
Terrible comparison, IMO. Microsoft doesn't sell IIS standalone, it comes bundled with their server licenses.

The Windows Server, Exchange Server, SQL Server licenses are what make the money. IIS is just included in all of them.

If they tried to charge money for IIS and shipped it for any other OS, it would fail pretty quick as it's not very sys admin friendly and most of it's performance is heavily dependent on Windows threading model.
Be aware that if you and your partner have the same level of ownership (e.g. the split is 48/48/4), your new partner has the same degree of control as either of you - i.e. any two stockholders have sufficient votes to screw the other one.

Second point is that the new owner's shares should vest over time with specific milestones - such as half for the cash and half for the completed app. Some sort of clawback related to the performance of the application might be a good idea.

My gut tells me that this sounds a little too good to be true - 4% for cash makes sense. Throwing in the programming doesn't seem justified, the NDA is also problematic when the person proposing it hasn't brought anything to the table which has an economic value associated with its disclosure.

The final point is that unless you are looking to bring on a partner, this is a distraction. If you have runway and are hitting your targets, you don't need necessarily need a partner. Then again, if you require one it is better to negotiate before you are near the end of your runway.

Good luck.
Damn, I hate hearing about layoffs. I work in a close-knit team of developers and testers, where each of one us is an important contributor to our company's goal, and it impacts our productivity tremendously when someone leaves.

Maybe I'm naive, but I would happily give up any yearly bonuses and possibly even a slight pay deduction (as a single guy I don't have many expenses) in order to keep a fellow teammate from being laid off.

I'm sure not everyone agrees with this line of thinking, and there must be some legal mumbo jumbo out there that prevents this from happening... Anyways, I'm sure those laid off developers are talented, and hope they'll rebound quickly to a greater opportunity.
Milawa on Jitawa: a Verified Theorem Prover
It's not even the length or difficulty, I just didn't feel motivated to get through it. Maybe the rest of the game will be better but I felt the beta had really terrible pacing, claustrophobic corridor-style level design and an odd Tim Burton-Warcraft universe fusion art style.
They don't care about you. Make the conversation about them. The sooner you are talking about them, the better.

Figure out a way to offer some value to them. http://bit.ly/oeZDzC [whitetailsoftware.com]

When you are speaking with them, ask open questions like "What are your three biggest problems in X business?"

One of the three is usually hiring quality people. Anyone got a solution?

More ideas on refining the calling approach: http://bit.ly/vPCtuI [blog.asmartbear.com]
I don't think that's true. Because I remember giving somebody a lot of pain for exactly that when I worked there. Of course, it might have been gone down for other reasons.
Game of Thrones Yeni poster yayınlandı
It was on the front page for a while, however it was the weekend, so likely didn't garner as much attention. And was like 2 hours... not 8-9+ like Azure.
suppose everyone that ever tried WoW returns to dip into that bucket

Not a reasonable way to estimate potential demand.

Maybe something closer to "Some percentage of established MMO gamers who now play WoW or Star Wars Online will try it according to how appealing it looks and how well it's marketed and priced."
Yeah, I think I might have been too harsh on the star idea.

I absolutely have bookmark-itus, but because of that I have a good bookmark system where I can set a date or interval for it to remind me that the bookmark exists. I think I took this idea from the GTD tickler concept.

I can see the use case for "tell me if this project has done something interesting (determine that magically) but I don't want to see every commit cluttering my feed" type features on github. Just don't break the feed to do it. It's clearly a secondary use case for the feed.

I'm also not sure if this use case is something actually useful rather than just stimulating to users. A site using this idea and github integration along with some Zynga math to optimize the dopamine dispensing combined with twitter, HN and the rest of social news would make sure that I felt like a hacker and never actually produced anything.
This is most likely 550 community and customer support people and 50 internationalisation developers. Blizzard is doing really well and has multiple games coming down the pipe.

WoW's fluctuating subscriber numbers reflect the natural state of a 7 year old game that is in a down period between expansions, so I'm not worried about that. Instead what I think is going on is that they've spent so much time growing their staff to accommodate WoW, the new Battle.net and new projects like Diablo 3 and the unannounced MMO project that they've come to a point where they've decided to take a good hard look at who's working for them, how they can optimise their workforce, and how they can cut down on the bloat.

It's likely a matter of reducing overhead and improving internal communications as opposed to any "bad news" that they need to get rid of people in order to keep the ship afloat.

As the CEO says, this is something that happens when you grow a lot: you need to make some changes every now and then. Instead of viewing this as a cutback, I'd view this as a fundamental step towards stabilising themselves as a developer that handles multiple projects simultaneously, whereas before they really operated in serial.

Taking 600 off the top of 4700 employees still leaves them with over 4000 people working for them, which is about as many as Nintendo employs, to give you an idea of what kind of sizes we're talking about in the games industry.
As described in the Wikipedia article, the arm doesn't get past the US border, only across states jurisdictions.
How I found out how that 105 companies were tracking me on the web.
>What could be releasing objects automatically? ARC – that’s its job. From ARC’s point of view, the UIColor created with -colorWithRed:... was used to access the CGColor, and then is no longer needed.

So why not use the following? (My ObjC is very rusty)

[[self.view layer]
setBackgroundColor: [UIColor colorWithRed: 0.2
green: 0.3
blue: 0.4
alpha: 1.0].CGColor ]
Default Arguments in C
...my plane...

Are you a pilot? If so, I'd like to hear more about the subject of the TSA from your perspective.

If not, consider that those of us who might prefer to travel with a slightly higher risk for significantly greater convenience have just as much right to call a plane "ours."
Only to a point, if someone is good enough a smart company will reshuffle someone truly exceptional into another part of the company. Though one would have to be REALLY stand out in such a large company to get that treatment.
Seconded. I made some designs for a graphical IDE like this years ago, but only on paper. I'm very happy to see someone else has done the hard work for me! I hope they'll support other languages too.
Sharing session data between socket.io and Express
Design before computers ruled the universe
Getting 1/50 people to speak with you further from cold calling is not very successful. You can do much, much better. See links in my other comment.
I can tell you what programmer would NOT dare use it:

a programmer that doesn't bother understand programming and when each feature can be used, and instead relies on conventional wisdom and old wives tales (sometimes called "voodoo programming") to tell him what is acceptable and what is not.

Notice how the guys repeating the "goto is evil" mantra, like they guy in this thread:

http://kerneltrap.org/node/553/2131

are young as it's highly improbable that they ever had to deal with actual goto spaghetti code. So they just repeat what they heard somewhere.

This guy, e.g writes:

However, I have always been taught, and have always believed that "goto"s are inherently evil. They are the creators of spaghetti code (you start reading through the code to understand it (months or years after its written), and suddenly you jump to somewhere totally unrelated, and then jump somewhere else backwards, and it all gets ugly
quickly). This makes later debugging of code total hell.

Which, as I read it is clear that he has never actually witnessed in real life the kind of code he worries about ("I have always been told", "I have always believed" etc != "I know from experience").

I consider this more embarrassing than using goto.
The idea of a single device that does both mobile and desktop work well is a nice idea, but in practice the few attempts at this have failed, mainly at the hardware level. See the Motorola Atrix, previous Windows Tablet Laptops, etc.

If Microsoft was serious about building this as the future computing experience, they should have built the hardware and controlled both the hardware and software. But then they'd be no different from Apple and they'd alienate their hardware partners.
As far as CDNs go, I think CloudFlare has been fantastic. Trivial to use, as well.
Disclaimer: ex-Windows Azure person, no insider knowledge on this particular outage

That's typically because the 'service management service' typically kicks in when it needs to do things - allocate capacity, restart things when stuff goes down, etc. By default, it isn't touching the running apps inside VMs. There is no Windows Azure equivalent to Heroku's routing mesh to be taken down; the requests go to the VMs directly via the various networking layers.
Except there is a subset of people who played WoW and have since sworn off MMOs entirely (I am one such and I have a coworker who has also done so).

I somehow doubt this is THAT rare an occurrence.
I would like to know how they determined the price point. IMO, with such a name, they should be targeting higher end customers. People willing to shell out $50+ or $100+ for a specific task..... Or $15000 a la Transporteur
Thanks for the information--I wish I could direct the karma towards a non-throwaway account. Being privacy-minded, I suppose? :)
Node-typedjs: Add haskell-like type signatures to your JavaScript
I have more of a problem with the fact that it could happen.

Besides, you really don't think there would be a market for taking less well known songs, rebranding them to make them palatable to the masses, and selling that? I can't imagine that if it were completely legal, they wouldn't try.
You might like to read "The fabric of reality" by David Deutsch (quantum physicist). If you can withstand his arguments for an objective reality then you are a true solipsist.
You have to switch to Metro mode to open regular apps? That's... well, I'm speechless.
Don't know why you got downvoted - AFAIK Siri isn't tied to Azure (although it could be using it for storage), but iCloud runs across both Azure and Amazon.
Is the API down?

http://api.seatgeek.com/2/venues?state=ny

...brings up nothing
rent-a-coder, elance, a ton...
Looks like hes gaming the system somehow. No video gets over 500k views with less than 6 comments and 2 likes, 8 dislikes.