skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Curebit (YC W11) is hiring Ruby hackers passionate about software design
Curebit builds customer referral systems for businesses. We believe that great products need a better way to reach consumers than through ads. We believe that the old ways of centralized media are being replaced by peer-to-peer media, and that the future of product discovery lies in recommendations from like-minded individuals. We built Curebit so that companies that are loved by their customers can accelerate their word of mouth growth by asking for referrals in the right way.

PHILOSOPHY:

• we focus obsessively on product conversion (creating successful referrals for our users)

• we love experimenting, and are constantly testing ideas

• we measure everything, use data to test our hypotheses, and mine our historic data for new ideas

• we are scrappy and proud of accomplishing more with less

• we are founded by engineers and our culture is deeply technical

• we love Ruby, Rails, and elegant software design

• we use scrum, have test coverage for everything, and use automated deployment

• we SHIP more than daily

TRACTION:

• we have many happy paying customers, big & small; we've helped companies grow 80X using Curebit

• we're funded by YCombinator, 500Startups, and more than 20 proven entrepreneurs

• we're currently a team of 5; everyone has previously started at least one successful company

THE JOB:

• first engineering hire (!); work with the founders

• generous equity and market salary

• lots of complex software design/architecture challenges

• you will be building a platform used by thousands of stores, and seen by millions of shoppers

• based in San Francisco, right outside Civic Center BART (relocation assistance possible)

OUR IDEAL CANDIDATE:

• loves to code for fun

• generalist comfortable at all levels of the stack

• loves software design; writes readable, reusable, and (sometimes) declarative code

• dislikes overly clever hacks that violate convention or degrade readability/testability

• wants to be part of a startup or start one in the future (you'll be treated as a founder)

• just gets it done

REQUIREMENTS:

• eligible for employment in USA

• willing to relocate to San Francisco

TO APPLY, email us at aGFja0BjdXJlYml0LmNvbQ== with this info:

• a link to some Ruby gem/project that you think is particularly well designed

• GitHub username & code sample

• Tell us about something you've built that you're proud of

P.S. You may have read about an incident a month ago where we copied a design from 37signals. This is not something we stand for, and the people responsible are no longer with the company.
You don't need it to. Kids don't want crappy knock-offs.
Really thanks for this answer.

I didn't get very well the theorem you mention, but I'll ask a math guy friend of mine.

Many Kudos for you.
Don't underestimate the value of running all the code. In a non-compiled language that will really save your bacon if you need to change things later.
Ask HN: How do we get enough beta users?
Hi everyone

We are 3 guys who are building a website called Doubtler.
Its a site where people easily can add items, where they are in doubt about what to buy.

To give an example, you are looking at a new mobile phone, and has been reading reviews all around the web, but what phone should you choose?
The iphone 4s, the newest android model, or maybe the new windows phone 7 from nokia? - they have all won tests, but wouldn't it be great if you easily could add the three phones to a site, and then publish this site to your friends and experts, so they can guide you between the phones you already narrowed it down to? - Doubtler does exactly this. As we say it: When you're in doubt - let your friends help out.

We are working on the last parts of our beta right now, and are ready to launch it within 14 days, but how do we get enough beta testers?
- we have been posting on different forums, linkedin, facebook etc. and has gotten great feedback on the idea plus an ok amount of beta testers, but we could use more people.

Please share if you know some great places to get beta users! - or has other ideas how we can get them.

And please ask if you have any questions about doubtler.

Thank you very much for your time!

- Janus
It's kind of amusing to see how "hipster" has become a catch-all insult, particularly in nerd communities. Are you youngish and slightly unusual in a way that I don't like? Hipster!

I don't like Kevin Rose, but c'mon, at least find some more creative insults.
Lehigh Valley HACK 2012 - First ever event of its kind in the Lehigh Valley
Code Reviews and Developer Feedback
I can't be shipped to a foreign country for circumventing copy protection because I don't do it commercially and do it exclusively for interoperability and security research, which are exceptions to the anti-circumvention laws we have in the US.

On the other hand, Canadians for years flaunted a loophole in Canadian/US law to sell DirecTV circumvention hardware to US customers. Message board geeks the world over said, "those are just signals traveling through the air! Signals traveling through the air can't be anyone's property!" I guess I have a hard time arguing with that point, but I don't lose sleep over not taking those people seriously.

Reminder: we're discussing a guy who made six figures running a website specifically designed and intended to get people to pirated first-run movies. Sorry, but the distinction between "links" and "actual media frames" is not an important one in UK law or US law. Nobody is being extradited for links on their Tumblr pages.
You missed another big one: If you're based in the US, it's the law.

The CAN-SPAM Act has many faults, but it's actually surprisingly explicit about unsubscribe process. If people have to click through multiple pages or supply any information beyond email address, you are probably in violation and could be fined by the FTC.
I can completely understand the way you feel, used to feel the same way many moons ago.

What changed it for me was to look at it differently:

1. If all products that were ever built were 100% good and successful, we'd be living in a different world. But, we don't. Fact is that most of us make a few good products (if we are lucky) and a lot of bad ones. It is the natural way of things, you can't control it. What you can control is how we go about doing it and how much it costs.

2. Money is raised for a lot of reasons. Money is spent for a lot of reasons. Not all worthy causes/products get funded well, same is the case for the unworthy ones. A lot of money, be it that most of it is wasted, tills the ground better and raises the odds for something good to come out of the flood of bad ones. Would you rather have no good ones at all in trying to ensure ONLY good ideas get funded and sustained?

3. You can use the same $$$s in different ways: blow it all up in one go, make different (smaller) attempts at it with clearly defined parameters for failure and success. Those two parameters are very subjective. Especially as product people we tend to keep products alive for much longer than we deserve to keep them.

4. Most important perspective for me: if you think you can do it differently, stop talking about it and have a go at it. Attempting (and even failing) to do half of most of the people we love to criticize brings about a sea change in perspective. It is always different in the trenches.
Exclusive Danny Sullivan Interview
Search Engine Land Editor Danny Sullivan presented at SLC|SEM . Here is the interview from before his presentation. Visit http://www.SLCSEM.org for information about joining SLC|SEM.
The article states it's a Samsung phone, almost certainly a Galaxy S variant by market share. All Samsung phones I know honor a pre-bootloader protocol (accessible by a leaked tool named "Odin" or its reverse-engineered open source equivalent "Heimdall"). This can read out the contents of all partitions without ever running a Linux kernel. The mountable filesystems are all readable just fine on the host.

The FBI's forensics people are idiots, basically. They have what they want already, they never needed the PIN code.
In total it might be a lot, but it can't be indepth.
for example "Error and Noise" is something you can spend a whole year studying. What are you really going to cover in one lecture? You'll just touch on a few things that might be useful at some point, but you're not building a larger encompassing understanding of "Error and Noise".

I've taking classes like this. You learn a few useful tricks, but when shit hits the fan in the real world and your tools are not enough you're left floundering. You can't prove things, you can't develop your own methods because you don't understand the principles they're based on.

This would probably be a cool class to take freshman year so that you can figure out for yourself what you'd like to study.
You're joking, right?

Free Software is not about slavish compliance with licensing terms or inventing shiny new technology for technology's sake (that movement is called Open Source). Free Software is about having the freedom to control your computing environment.

I believe this is really, really important because in a world increasingly shaped and even dominated by technology, people have to be able to look under the hood and fix the code that runs their society. Otherwise they become slaves to whoever made the rules by writing the code.

Proprietary software violates this requirement, but at least you can reverse engineer it, hack it. With cloud services, even that option is removed. The user has lost all control. This is pretty obviously bad for a democratic society, but hey, it's great for tech wizards aspiring to be the next Mark Zuckeberg, so who cares about that? :-P
Javascript Literals are confusing. It works well in Python? - Stack Overflow
"There are many inaccuracies, anecdotes and personal opinions that in my and many others' opinions don't matter..." The content of your comment renders your comment meaningless. It's like a Hofstadter Strange Loop of meaninglessness.
We try and do as much TTD as possible. Specification by test is the best way to drive out corner cases.
Is it that time of year again?
250,000 hits later – Sending Billions to the RIAA & MPAA – Stats & Update
Why hate on a guy who continually fails? That person is continually trying and learning.
To be very honest I am glad he left google. The googletesting blog went to shit as soon as he came along. It was very enlightening to read it until he showed up.

Whittaker reminded me of one of my over enthusiastic handwaving lecturers, very short on substance. Compare and contrast the articles written by Misko (Hevery) and Whittaker. I don't think his departure is a manifestation or representation of anything at Google, and I think it's telling he returned to MS.
NASA five-rocket mission to launch tonight, with live webcast 03/14 10 pm (EDT)
As in - because pi is a unit-less ratio? Plank units are still units (albeit a special case), so I don't agree with your syllogism.

However, what I meant was the human processing overhead in converting between units. I mean, pi is correct, for what it is. Tau would simply be easier for humans to use, much like SI units.
How? The way I see it it just makes things more extreme because you type orders of magnitude more in a ten minute comment than in ten minutes of coding.
Ive wasn't talking about promotion. He was just saying that "different" is not sufficient.
The US, thanks to the NET Act, has an all-encompassing definition of "profit" though. But if he was making all that money, it's not really a stretch to establish it in either jurisdiction.

All the more reason that the UK should have been the one to prosecute.
There's A GPL for that (pun intended ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License

and

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html
I think advertising has a lot to do with google's growing pains.

Google clearly has empireitis and that alone is causing them to grow into something that the google of, say, 2000 would look on and despise. But aside from that the incentives of being an ad focused company are harmful to what used to be google's core values.

The problem with any ad-focused company is that your users aren't your customers. Your customers are the ad companies, and your users are your product. There's less reason to make a product that people love passionately, deeply, and value greatly. There's only a reason to make a product that people use frequently. This is a subtle but hugely impactful distinction. It's the difference between a newspaper full of hard-hitting investigative journalism married to solid, thoughtful analysis and an run of the mill tabloid rag. When all that matters is how many eyeballs are looking at ads then it makes the most financial sense to maximize that at the cost of everything else.
My first thought: a new source for business ideas. Read through favors, see which ones popup the most, implement solution.
Paypal undercutting Square with new card swiping device
Very cool! The PDF looks awesome, thanks guys.
Its an interesting comment but lets put a few things in perspective:

1) "However, right now, Google is fighting for its life."

Any company that is dumping 2 - 3 BILLION dollars into the bank each quarter is not 'fighting for its life.' Google is doing just fine at the moment.

2) "My only disappointment is that google didn't manage to transform its internal inventions into innovations. "

This is a huge thing, and its important to know that it isn't that Google didn't make money, its that Google didn't make enough money.

When I was their 2006- 2010 I saw projects that were nominally making a profit of several million dollars a year get cancelled. That is they were covering the cost of the group working on them and they earned their bit of the advertising pie enough revenue to make money. But it was 'nominal' since at the time Google didn't charge internally anything for using the physical infrastructure which clearly did have a cost associated with it.

So when they started figuring out their costs (which they needed to do if they were going to charge for AppEngine) they got a kind of rude surprise (a nuanced description of that surprise is covered by NDA but suffice it to say they learned new stuff about themselves).

At the time I suggested that rather than penalize folks who were running their product on infrastructure that was ill suited to them, they allow those folks to change the infrastructure, and I might as well have been telling the Church that the Earth revolved around the Sun. That is where Clayton would have said, "Guys, you aren't looking at this like an entrepreneur..."
If you've only worked on projects with nailed-down requirements, you're probably not working on the sorts of projects most HN people face. The requirements change because the world changes, or our understanding of it. That's the nature of the startup. Stable codebases serving stable needs don't need as much refactoring, that's true. And in those cases units might be a waste of time. But for those of us (the majority, I'd wager, at least around here) who work on fast-moving, highly speculative projects, they are an absolute godsend.
Local Will Matter More and More
Interesting idea, that hadn't occurred to me. That is one of the reasons I've chosen to leave closed favors viewable on the site, though - so people can browse through them and learn from them if they'd like.

Thanks for checking out the site!
Abstract vs. Concrete Syntax Trees
> I like showing +Pi and -Pi both point away from 0.

What would be cool is to see two different points showing what the direction is.

c = Pi/2

+c would point upwards, -c would point downwards. 4c is a pizza.
the newest favors are the same set as the oldest favors :)
Why is integration a problem? It's working pretty well for Apple.
The course teacher's book costs $828 + $4 shipping:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/1600490069/

Is this an error?
Yeah, well the thing is I never had to use it before. But a package required it, so with a quick google-fu it said to include --force. What wasn't clear is that you had to do a --force for only that package.. while I simply added it to my already crafted command. (I.e. ctrl-p --force <enter>). Let's say I've learned that one the hard way ;)
This article could easily be paired with the Godman-Sachs article to teach a business class on the value of having right priorities in business. Often businesses lose themselves placing the pressures of business ahead of the priorities that got them to where they are in the first place. Sort of the proverbial "putting the cart before the horse" analogy. Google should focus on being itself. It sounds as if they have lost touch with what they really were in the first place. After all, they were the search engine that changed the world to such a degree that most everyone now says "google it" in reference to searching the web.
It's just a pi with one leg in the middle. It's pretty easy to read. Also engineers (who don't have very good writing) have been using tau for things like a time constant (among other uses) for a long time.

The bad handwriting problem is solved very easily, TAs should complain to the professor to make it a requirement that if you guys can't read it, it's wrong. I've had classes like this, I just use LaTeX.
Startups Trying to Improve the Political Process
Before 2008, winning an election didn’t require a social media strategy, or even a Twitter or Facebook account. Now running for any public office without a strong social media presence almost automatically sets a candidate up for failure. Startups are helping to engage voters in the political process, and providing tools to politicians. VoterTide is providing social media analysis to quickly figure out what issues supporters care about and react quickly to breaking news. Other startups like Votizen and Votifi are trying to make sure that voters aren’t just involved in the political process every four years, but every day.
I know! Never tried before because it sounded scary.
Does anyone know how fast it is compared to Relational Postgres? mongodb?
For projects I am doing on my own (albeit, these are quite simple, just fun ones) I am doing TDD approach.

It is really natural to me, because part of developing idea is a research. It often includes doing some test of how particular library works, what format of data expected, etc. I always was finding myself doing small isolated programs/scripts to test specific question I have about it. And now it was so natural to start using TDD approach.

As other commenters noted, due migration of much logic to JS (client) side, testing it together with server app might be a challenge. For my particular case I "solved" it by using V8 library. I am developing with Perl language and there is great libraries available on cpan. V8 and pure Perl ones. I am using V8 for performance reasons (doing encryption), but before I used pure Perl JS library and it worked perfectly too.

So if your language of choose have libraries to hook into one of JS libraries, I would highly recommend to try to include JS tests into application tests kit.
Seed investment as a recruiting strategy.
IMO, minimalism is as much a defensive strategy as it is an aesthetic for Arch users.
That's because there are only 4 posted favors so far :). The tabs should be reordering them though.
Crunchyroll has VC backing from what I understand and is very much starting to dominate the space -- to the point where they have a team in Japan that just does licensing. Anime News Network tried to do this but had a bad problem when some dopes pirated a video.

The key is to get some very old school japanese companies to change their way -- but the other issue is have a model to make money in a niche market that isn't too big. The later problem might have a long term solution, but the first problem is really the big issue. The only solution might be if the Japanese do their own version of Hulu, or partner with a player like that.

I've been an anime fanboy since 1980 (I ran the Star Blazers Fan Club) and now I'm CEO of Anime.com so this problem has always been of interest to me...
Made me think of Muphry's law there

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphrys_law
SXSW 2012: The exciting, the informative, and the awesome
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&outpu...

cache, although loading slowly
Auto-upload is a feature provided by the G+ app. There is absolutely no reason why Facebook can't include that functionality in their app. (It would be nice if this was as nicely integrated as contacts in the dialer, but it's not yet. It's due to developer time constraints or the fact that nobody has thought about it yet, not due to lock-in. Remember, Google is the company that lets carriers ship Android phones with Bing as the default search engine!)
Fundamentally its a question of Novelty versus Utility. Is it just this months new, new thing, or is it something that fundamentally solves a problem, makes your live easier/better, or sates a desire. Most of the 1st wave of apps are (understandably) novelties...its the utility equation that will be the next wave
It depends on how the add-on author sets things up:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Sync/Addon_Sync#Are_Add-on...
I agree, it be useful - if nothing else, it confirms that all of your code still runs after you change something.
Those are only exceptions in the US. The USTR has been pushing other countries to make their laws even stronger than ours. Then they do the two-step and push to strengthen our laws to match.

Please note that I'm not arguing that this is some kind of abuse of process. If anything, I'm worried because it's perfectly normal and that will make reform that much more difficult.
The prevalence of psychopaths on Wall Street
Why has the title been changed from the correct its to 'their'? Possessive for entities that aren't people really looks ugly.
What exactly do people do with this data, specifically for sites like hackernews? I don't think I've ever particularly cared about my own comments. Without context they are pretty much useless anyway.
I think you might want to work on 'faking it until you make it' by pre-seeding a ton of favors to ask of people.
Lisp Hackers: Edi Weitz
That's the problem! The reality is that most anime doesn't make money. The anime that does make money are the shows that do well on television and can support merchandise. So for example Bakugan Battle Brawlers is a terrible show, but it sells toys and makes money. And sadly a show like Lucky Star which is quite good can't even get on TV and won't move merchandise so it dies... : (
Do not include testing into bill. It is quite confusing for somebody outside of software development and I find their comments about jr. developers quite reasonable. Just put number of hours or amount to cover development and writing tests.
So this is kind of humorous that this guy is taking this personally and actually seems to think Stallman wants his kids to die, but Stallman really would do better with more compassion and empathy so people don't just tune him out.

This is like when a person claims they don't believe in evolution for religious reasons and many people just dismiss or insult them. Nobody takes the time to address their fears and try to explain things to them in a non-threatening way.

(See the highlighted text in the comments: http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/q0ee4/i_aint_even_m... )
As far as I know, they are always running. Even for the large shipping vessels. There was an article in Popular Science recently about how they are trying to come up with some sort of way for these ships to plug into the mainland for power while they are at port.
They can even generate an application-specific password for the FBI, to be revoked after the time limit specified in the warrant is reached. (No idea if this is done or not, but in theory, there is no need to know the password in order to disclose one to the FBI. All they want to do is unlock the phone, but are too dumb to connect a USB cable and run adb.)
Nudism is Healthy for Brains and Body
Why not make another one, "say no to tau", and see which gets the most buyers? :)

I'd buy a "say no to tau" patch.