skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple goes further than simply buying more air freight.

I work for an APPLE/DELL/otherstuff reseller.

The decision to use sea or air freight is based on a calculation based on the size of the product and its value (and therefore the amount of capital that would float for weeks instead of being here quite fast).

Apple, with its valuable and small product is always Air Freight.

An iMac 27" is twice the value and half the size of an OptiPlex 790. So Air Freight would only make it 10% more expensive.

Apple designs with that in mind.
The article summarizes the difference between British and American college entrance system as well.

When you apply for CS in Britain (and I'm talking about Oxbridge), they care only about your experience with computers and mathematics.

However, in HYPMS [1] the qualification is based on your irrelevant grades and your extracurriculars. You might be the most active guy and get a place but a poor programmer.

[1] Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford
The Military Needs More Disruptive Thinkers
i know a guy running a software shop. he's an active participant in the local meetup community, and he cares about people. it's no surpise that he has all sorts of talented people trying to work with him, and not enough funding to hire them all. (at least, i think that's why he hasn't hired me ;)

i also know a few other people running software shops, who don't participate in the local meetup community. none of the best local developers even know who these other employers are. i'm sort of sick of hearing them complain about how hard it is to find talent.

the flip side of this, is that if I as an engineer want to have a steady stream of future opportunities with the best employers, I need to make myself known to them, by, you guessed it! making myself visible in the meetup community, and internet community at large.

ez game.
"they have the ability to have feet on the ground"

This is very expensive compared to an automated online system like google has.

But more importantly the local papers don't have the traffic necessary in order to make this a success. And people aren't doing searches on their local newspaper website for "plumber topeka kansas" they are doing it on google.
btw, we (ifttt) are hiring. There are only 5 of us right now. We're looking for an iOS guy and someone who's good at scaling & evented systems.
Sorry, of course you are right. And it is too late to 'edit' the comment. Thanks for pointing it out.
PG is absolutely right re: treating publishers as servers: this is NOT just about fraud, please take a look at this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803981
It sounds more like it is a less efficient process for finding employees, and seems to require someone sharp to find the diamonds. It just simply yields the most optimal result.

Given a lack of time, or someone in HR who knows nothing about programmers, this approach may not turn out as well.
There are hundreds of alternatives...none of them seem to get any major traction.

Most of it is due to the fact that only a tiny portion of people are actually affected...and because these alternatives offer much lower quality of advertisers...and much lower earnings.
That's the risk of putting all your eggs into one basket (no pun intended here).

Back in the days when I was still creating websites and monetizing them I learned the hard way: Google killed my Adsense account and I lost a lot (back then to me) of money.

After that I started diversifying - even if Adsense was most profitable back then I also mixed in other ads.

And yeah - trying to reach a human being at google to resolve issues is pretty much impossible.

As harsh as it sounds: Write the money off. If you get it sometime in the distant future it will be a nice surprise but don't count on the money.
Fluid grid layouts in Dreamweaver CS6
Both ads advertise Free, and it's clear that it's a car game in both ads... Also you need to consider the fact that higher CTR means higher relevancy score and potentially lower costs if you're paying by the click.
They would be a negative for some quantitative finance jobs. Not because they make you a bad quant. There is a perception among practitioners (who are mostly math/physics PhDs themselves) and headhunters that web development people do not know enough math to be a quant.

To quote one well-known headhunter:
'Good point, there seems to be a correlation between "web design" and only ever having done fluffy crap of no value in this line of work. Of course, correlation is not fact but as a headhunter it is hard to avoid that prejudice'
Want to know what Hacker Schoolers work on? I made a visualization of hacker schoolers github projects: http://hs.bn.ee
I'm curious if the decline in industrial output per capita can be explained by the increase in population alone, or if it has decreased more than that.
Considering less than 1% of the price of an iPhone or iPad "stays" in China as the cost of assembly, moving all production back to the US for that 1% seems ridiculous.

In any case you guys should concentrate in the 30% (or so) of the price that goes into parts and components, almost all made by Korean and Taiwanese companies.

Besides most of those components are already made using highly-automated processes because humans lack the precision needed to manufacture at such small scales.

Not saying it would be easy, just that it isn't impossible, and 30% is a much better deal than 1%.
For a while I was clicking on adds that I disliked to cost the people making them money and gives it to the site I like enough to be on. But, I think that just promotes people making more adds like that.
Right, I'm familiar with Spolsky's piece, but I think there are times when a rewrite is legitimate. I think that a situation where you must roll a completely custom in-house compiler that generates binaries which exceed 1 GB in size in order to get adequate performance of your app is a good candidate for a new architecture, despite Spolsky's claims. Spolsky's article discusses throwing out pages of code because the programmers "don't know what half of these API calls are for" and "[wanting] to build something grand" -- these are quite different impulses than the real-world problems staring Facebook in the face by its continued usage of PHP.

I think also that there is a difference between writing a new backend for something that is solid and in place and just throwing the whole product out the window and re-imagining it from the ground up, and I think the latter is the kind of rewrite that should be avoided and considered dangerous. When you could throw 4-5 guys on a real C# or C++ rewrite and tell them the final product has to behave identically to the PHP version, you have a much less volatile situation.

As for the PHP workflow, I agree it's nice not to have an intermediate step, but that intermediate step can usually be circumvented pretty rapidly by throwing a script or two (or just flipping a config option) into your development environment.
I have a similar experience, and this is why I left the Google Services thing. I signed up for Adsense 6 years ago. I worked with it for 3 years and I was making $150/month with it. Then I decided to change the payee name (was using my sisters'). I closed that account and signed up for another one. A month later, I made around $147 and got my account suspended.

The reason: A risk to advertisers. I tried to contact Google but I received the same email the author did. I didn't care much, after all, it's $140. Why would Google care?

But $40K? That's quite serious.
Anarchy on Your Laptop: the War for the Internet
Lessons learned from a WordPress hack
Yeah, I do. I've been to PubStandards a few times, and went to FunConf, which was basically drinking on a bus to Kilkenny, lunch, then drinking on the way back. The sore throat is annoying, but its the same as going to any party, club, or loud pub.
Good article, but I found the "hypothetical conversation" format a bit off-putting
Simple: we don't set it up like that, with the few as slaves to the many. We just distribute a basic living to everyone, shorten the length of the work necessary for "full-time" status (or ideally abolish the distinction between part-time and full-time), and let anyone who wants extra go work for it.
Slightly off-topic: in Larry Niven's Ringworld novels, an alien race (Pierson's Puppeteers) secretly influences human genetic selection to optimize for luck.
Dear Startups
I agree with every point Reginald makes but (and I am being nitpicky here) the form of the story - the seeming overtailored parable nature of it, of the kind you'd find in the Reader's Digest or a religious tract - rubs me ever so slightly the wrong way.

I could have done without all the fake (or seemingly fake anyway) dialogue between the Wooster/Oscar etc and would have preferred a straightforward "This is what I(Reginald) think" mode.

Imagine pg writing his essays in the form of "Paul wrote an ecommerce site in Lisp while Peter used C++. When Paul met Peter's wife Rosa in a coffee shop he asked her why Peter was looking so haggard and she said 'he is working through the night fixing bugs and not getting enough sleep. Would you mind talking to him? ..' "

Again, this is a very minor nitpick, just consider this feedback from one reader. I am probably considerably outnumbered by the people who like this "story" form better (and that is perfectly fine). Of course it is completely Reginald's prerogative to pick any style he wants.
http://help.skillsapp.com/kb/skills-basics/scores-passion-an... is about scoring.

Twitter tags are based on lists, but with some amount of tokenization and stemming so we count "djangonauts" and "Django" as contributing towards the same tag.
Google to use Coreboot for ChromeOS devices
The technique is very different, though - the getspool article makes a 128 million bit bitmask and flips a bit for each user.

This article refers to probabilistic techniques for counting number-of-unique objects, and uses massively less memory to do so. The bitmask technique gives 128 million in 16MB RAM and no error, where the HyperLogLog technique gives 1,000 million in 0.0015MB RAM and 2% margin of error.
How playing dumb makes you smarter
Thanks, and sorry for asking a harsh question :-)

Your recommendations are sensible. It's curious that they seem to suggest that coding ability is close to a one-dimensional measurement of the candidate. Do you think we could measure the largest principal component of coding ability with a standardized exam, like IQ? That would save everyone the hassle of interviewing, and also ensure non-discrimination as a nice bonus.
Their salaries are not bad too:

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-Degree...

As a philosophy PhD, I find the Philosophy > Starbucks meme obnoxious, but it's especially silly when philosophy is amongst the best Art/Humanities degrees one can do from that perspective (particularly if one then goes on to do something like work for an international law firm for a while - the rather conventional switch I've taken).
The concept of not hiring unlucky people reminded me of Larry Niven's Ringworld.
Why would we spend more on recreation when we have less time for it?
You're taking the linked post on an awful lot of (IMHO, unverifiable and undeserved) faith. Yes, if everything they say is true, Google are jerks at best. But a blog post does not a reputation for honesty make, sorry. Even PayPal doesn't hit verifiably honest saints more than one a year or so.

Look, I don't know anything about "hatchlings", I'm just saying I'm not going to believe a post like this prima facie. They look like a garden variety spammy facebook game to me. That's a market pretty well known for playing SEO games and gaming ad systems.

Are these guys guilty or not? No idea. Fight it out, get some evidence, and then come to the public for support.
Thanks. We're considering estimating connection speed and falling back to the static image if it's below some threshold.
Visit rubyonrails.org.
$8M in Funding and a Lawsuit to Boot? Game on.
Etsy Hacker Grants: Supporting Women in Technology
Why Kids Should Know About Their Own Brains
Not just companies, politics too. For example, many people were swooning over Obama as The One and soon found out that he's in fact a mere mortal with virtues and flaws like the rest of us. Then they turn against him because "he let them down", as if he could've ever lived up to their unreasonable , super-human expectations.
The reality, of course, is that the world is a messy place and we all do some really good things, and some really bad things, and a whole bunch of mediocre things.
Microsoft makes a seamless office suite & email+calendar solution, Apple makes some really good hardware that leverages airtight software integration, and Google makes Web that much more tolerable to use. Thinking that any of them is Perfection Incarnate - or Beelzebub himself, on the other end of the spectrum - is infantile and counterproductive.
There is. Being indifferent, in certain situations, is being evil.

And Google isn't being indifferent here, there is well documented extreme hardship created by Google's choice to operate in the way they do. They know this and choose to continue their behavior. It appears as long as Google believes it is more profitable to act in this way they will continue to do so. I would imagine (based on their actions and words) if this behavior was to negatively impact their estimates of their profits then they would change.
You also need to specify that you need to know by 30 days. Without both restrictions a simple binary search works.
How to Beat the Exhaustiveness of Stressful Work
This is absolutely true. The background colour is slightly different, but on my laptop screen that's hardly visible at all, unless I tilt the screen at an extreme angle[1].

I have to say I kind of feel cheated by that trickery, every time, and it is one of the reasons (though not the most important one) that I use Google much less recently (in favour of DDG).

[1] no I'm not particularly happy about this screen, the rest of the machine is great but if I had known it would be this bad I might have picked a different model (I got an Asus EEE 1215B)
Disclosure: former Hacker Schooler.

Great experience. If I were asked to name one criticism off the top of my head, though, it would be "gender gap." It was my first foray into tech, and I was a bit taken aback. Now I'm acclimated, but it's great to see they've got the resources to try and tackle the gap head on. The school always draws quite a few tech-experienced people who were in nontechnical (and not male-dominated) fields. This means they can bypass the whole four-years-of-classes-with-only-dudes problem that comes with expecting any shift from academia.
With severe unintended consequences for some of the protagonists, as I recall :-)
irc is hostile to the kind of user that 37 signals markets to. I don't know that it's necessarily hostile to the kind of user who works in Facebook engineering.
This get's to the real reason the RIAA hates the piracy. Once someone is internet famous they don't need promoters to start making good money. When someones is actually good they can keep making good money just from word of mouth. Because when you get down to it Advertising is the only thing recording labels bring to the equation now days.

That's not to say people won't sign on. Just that once your making good money your less interested in signing a deal that gives 90% of the profits to a record company. And that power imbalance is why record company's can be so profitable in the first place.
Indeed. My ad scoring program deducts 5 points and transparently kills off ads that contain terms like "ninja" and "rock star" because to my mind they indicate a propensity for either abuse ("a rock star should be able to code this in three days!!") or fad-following ineptitude ("rock stars are the coolest kind of programmers, I must have them! also, we write EVERYTHING in Ruby, it's like the Mac of programming").
The legal definition of commerce has little relation to the dictionary definition. A Webster's dictionary is useless in a court room.

The definition of commerce used in the Lanham Act is explicitly "all commerce which may be regulated by Congress", which is extraordinarily broad, as the commerce clause of the Constitution is the basis of probably 90% of laws Congress passes. There doesn't even have to be interstate commerce involved, merely a substantial effect on it -- which is why Congress can regulate policy that affects businesses that engage in interstate commerce, even if the thing they're regulating isn't itself interstate commerce. They also regulate businesses that do not engage in interstate commerce but whose operation has an effect on interstate commerce as a whole.

Suffice it to say, there are lots of ways you can create a piece of software that is not directly sold across state lines but has an effect on commerce, and that subjects it to the Lanham act and all other federal commerce regulations.
Nice simulation work! Initially I thought this was a one dimensional random walk problem where the answer is a function of n (as other comments have pointed out). In that case, there (n choose k) paths that take k steps in a single direction of n total steps, and each occurs with p(0.5^n). In this problem we are given n, but not k. Given a starting point, we can easily calculate the probability of crossing 0.

So my question is, how are you dealing with the initial condition?
Right now, we aren't doing any kind of indexing. If you apply for a position through our service, you give whatever information you want about yourself, and we check out your public data on those networks. If you don't want to share your twitter or stack overflow, leave those fields blank.

We don't publish the details of the algorithm but in effects it would be fairly difficult to game. Either you have a solid history of consuming and contributing relevant content or you don't. If you are able to manufacture that fraudulently, well, chances are that you're somebody interesting to talk to.
HPHP has a built in multi-threaded webserver.
Vote 4 me! Panini presses in every cupboard!
Sort of.

If you copy and paste functions into your code, then those functions are still under the GPL, and your code is still under the BSD.

Anybody could then copy and paste your BSD code into their proprietary software, and only have to conform to the BSD licence's requirements.

The main issue with this is that it when you mix code from various sources in the same file, it can be very difficult for readers to know what licenses each section of code has. For that reason, when I need to include code which has a different license or copyright from the main work, then I put it in its own file with its own copyright/license header.
Device helps paraplegics stand, huge improvement over wheelchair
Sympathy for the devil (commercial sales of zero-day exploits)
Something like this?

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/02/naive-approach-to-hiring...
A pity, I use this frequently, all my sites use this for CSS simply because they're small and make small style fixes easy.
But who are the "customers"? There are no less than FOUR parties at play here: Google, the ad buyer, the content provider, and the consumer. And none of their interests are very well aligned. Being "nice" to questionably fraudulent activity (because let's be clear: delaying a fraud ban means that on the margins, they will miss some valid bans and thus lose money for themselves and their advertisers) hurts Google and the consumer at the expense of the interests of smaller content vendors.

I think the audience here is skewed. People here (pg included) are too wiling to see through their web site admin glasses and not think things through from the other perspectives.
yes, yes I did....and I will be uninstalling the auto-spell-correct asap ;)
Copper chains: Earth's deep-seated hold on copper revealed
If Google is so bad at this, wouldn't a better approach be to start or support an alternative ad network that does what you want? You sound extremely confident that Google is doing a horrible job in this space, so a competitor should just be able to do better and eat their lunch. As far as I know, Google hasn't been accused of any anticompetitive behavior, so they're not stopping you. That would be much less radical than lobbying Congress for some vaguely defined "action".

I suspect you will find that once you get to a scale similar to Google's, you'll find yourself making similar tradeoffs. You could probably be a little better, but I don't think it's possible to be both forgiving and resilient against fraudsters.

EDIT: On rereading, this sounded a little bit passive-aggressive, so I've rephrased it a bit. Hopefully it comes across more as an observation and less like an attack now.
I agree with you on the preference, but I'd like to add that sometimes a format preference exists only as a way of allowing the author to express their ideas succinctly.

As much as I may dislike the storyteller format of the article, philosophically speaking, I have a practical inability to read other, drier essays. And then there are essays which have no reasonable usage of paragraphs and sentences to encapsulate or describe ideas, etc. Compared to those, I would pick a storyteller format.
Mobile Game Maker Storm8 Competes With Goliaths of the Industry
You are correct, and I wanted to check what exactly they did say. Luckily, there is a full transcript: http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/special/TAL_460_Retracti... The discussion on this point starts on page 17. In there is the point I originally wanted to make, voiced by Charles Duhigg:

But labor is such an
enormously small part of any electronic device, right? Compared to the cost of buying
chips or making sure that you have a plant that can turn out thousands of these things a
day or being able to get strengthened glass cut exactly right within, you know, two days of
this thing being due, that's what's important. Labor is almost insignificant. What is really
important are supply chains and flexibility of factories.
Lovely. I know plenty of men who don't have the financial ability to do something like move to NYC for a summer, but to hell with them. Let's try to find those rare women who code and throw money at them.

Listen, I'm all for supporting women in engineering. There are many female engineers in my family. I just find it appalling that Etsy is willing to just throw money at one gender and not another. It's sexist garbage.

I see their motive, and i wholly support it. They could have taken a better line of play though; Rather than straight up gender segregating, why not organically filter the scholarship candidates based on female-oriented areas of study? Etsy is largely creative and industrious and driven women, so why not just sponsor projects that will naturally be female-led?

No offense to the hacker school guys and etsy guys, but this is straight up amateurish.
Hiring managers quoting Knuth? I fail to suspend my disbelief :)
yes, something like that. I find the style much more natural and less grating. The 'parable' format 'feels' (to me, purely subjectively etc etc) like chalk screeching on blackboard, obscuring the (very valid) substance of the argument.

Or maybe it is just a matter of better technique. There may be a way of telling a story to make the same points without the reader being jerked out of his involvement with the material,and being made aware he is reading a story. I don't know.
It hurts Google, the consumer and the advertiser. Some individual site owners are the only ones who benefit from a more lenient stance on fraud.
Google has always been awful at customer relations; maybe it has a lot to do with why they don't "get" social media.
MIT is building printable ROBOTS