skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even those of us who are almost professional conference goers get tired of this stuff eventually. I know I far prefer having a couple of awesome programmers over my house for a great conversation. Just did that this morning, actually, when the folks behind FluidInfo came over. No beers were consumed.

What Ryan should do is focus on hackathons and other, smaller, places where code actually gets written, shared, and discussed. There are plenty of those every week. At least there are in places like San Francisco. Every week or so there's a Node.js hackathon in our office at Rackspace. Generally folks have a choice of whether to stick around for beers after a long day, and even when the beers came out, at about 6 p.m. during dinner, it wasn't anything like a SXSW drinking fest.

Some other feedback:

1. Conferences are awful places to have real, deep, conversations. Why? There's an opportunity cost to spending any time with any specific person. Heck, you can be talking to someone very interesting, like Bram Cohen, who wrote Bittorrent and then Eric Ries walks by and you lose interest in Bram all of a sudden. It's far better to see if you can get Bram together at your house, or in a hackathon, where there's only 40 other programmers than hang out at some party with 200 other cool people you want to meet.

2. When you're in a noisy situation, like at a party (even one without alcohol, they do happen, but rarely) it's just not a great place to have a conversation. I remember being at one Techcrunch party and I couldn't even talk to the developers there. Why? I couldn't hear them and they were two feet away. So, I started drinking and smiling. Horrid for actually discussing anything important. I stopped going to those too, my time is better spent sitting down with someone in a quiet place and actually learning something.

Parties, to me, are only about one thing now: collecting business cards and making plans for meeting later on. That's what I did at SXSW. I had breakfast with the guy who runs Al Jazeera and it was magical. That's what made the parties worth it.
> Games that rely on following special unwritten rules, such as objectively bad time management (vaguely defined for how badly you're required to play), are broken.

You are the exact opposite of Calvin from the Calvin and Hobbes comics.
The style gives the impression that Raganwald is claiming "this really happened, and those people used this technique, and they lived happily ever after – so if it worked for them, it will work for you; give this technique a try

Respectfully, no it doesn’t. Try showing the story to one hundred randomly selected people and ask whether they think this really happened. I think you will find that there are a few people who have a certain type of extremely literal brain who don’t take well to parables, to satire, or anything else that isn’t a direct recitation of facts.

The fact that such people are in a minority doesn’t invalidate their (or your) feelings, but it is important to recognize that the feelings you have are not universal, just as I must recognize that not everybody likes the format.
Randi Zuckerberg producing Silicon Valley reality TV show
It would be great if you made your software available as a web app for all of us to use.
Can Windows Phone - and Nokia Lumia 900 - take on iPhone, Android?
Open-source attribution & contribution
Well of course you disagree. I'm only pointing out that your blog post and your comment above don't represent a neutral view of the likely outcomes of this litigation given the evidence we have at hand. I'm not picking sides here, because I don't know any of the facts, and I'm not suggesting you're a bad person for your bias. Any of us would be equally biased in your shoes. I'm just trying to point out a more balanced view than what you're giving us. Truth-seeking, in other words.

Also, it's worth noting that a violent reaction to a business model being threatened is not necessarily a bad thing. For example, let's suppose someone is looting your shop. Do you allow them to do so, or do you take out the baseball bat behind the counter? If the looter said, "Hey, you're only getting out that bat because your business model is being threatened," that would probably not be compelling to you or to any bystanders that happened to be about.

Again, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that what you are doing is equivalent to looting. I'm only trying to point out that other readers ought not take your side simply because you think you're threatening someone's business model.
"DO NOT RELY on ADSENSE as a sole revenue provider for your startup! Do not! "

This is really a classic business issue. There is always a tradeoff between putting all your eggs in one basket (say what zynga did with facebook initially) and having a diverse customer base. Same goes for relying on a single vendor or source.

Obviously if you can diversify it makes sense. But it all depends on the revenue hit your take by doing so. Extra money that you earn can be banked toward the future as well.
On banner ads? Lower-income middle-aged people outside large urban areas with a propensity to visit auction and gambling sites.

That's not the point, though. Being exposed to a brand's banner ads increases one's likelihood of searching for the brand, visiting the brand's website, making a purchase online, and making a purchase in a store.

There's a reason why online advertising technology today is so focused on measuring 'view-through' conversions - as the pool of heavy clickers decreases, click-through rates are less and less correlated with the actual effectiveness of the advertising.
Here's an interesting essay on precisely the kind of thing I'm talking about - and it explains why binary thinking on this matter is a bad way to go about it.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-ph...
Show HN: Daring tells you what to buy, no more reading reviews
My resume isn't like that, and I think that's why I don't have any problem finding jobs. My resume tells the story of each role I've had, including concrete examples and metrics of success.
I think your site is a perfect example of "lucky" candidates winning over unlucky candidates. A bunch of data probably unrelated to paying employment that a certain, lucky, subset of developers happen to score well on while others, especially those who traditionally hide on the Internet, look really bad in comparison.
All coffeescript all the time! I guess you can't expect much else from a ruby group.
Aesthetic Car Parks? Yes, please.
Hah! Love it :)
Ask HN: Any open source / free stock quote APIs available?
Just curious
Chocolate & Red Meat: Why Many Nutrition Studies Are All Wrong
Awesome article. I just came here to submit a note about style: If your text includes a large, multi-paragraph quote, it is common to elide the trailing quote between paragraphs. Including that trailing quote means that the second person in a two person conversation is now speaking. It just confused me at first, because I thought Oscar was the character to say "But it’s dangerous to confuse correlation with causation. And especially dangerous to...".
business credit card...but I'd imagine, as long as the credit card # is different, the name itself shouldn't matter
Have you talked to many women about this?
Inventory size and larger returns generally than anyone else is able to offer due to more data for better targetting.
Announcing Happstack 7
I would second this, in my $DAYJOB which is focused on building search engines, python is one of the goto languages alongside R for doing a lot of exploratory stuff.

Sure ruby could, but it would have to play catchup adding things like sage, cython, numpy, scikits etc etc
http://raganwald.posterous.com/why-i-downvote-tldr-comments-...
How to internationalize software in real-time using Eclipse plug-in
Starving your way to vigor: The benefits of an empty stomach
Let's put it this way if your adding 5% to the cost of the product adding a 4 week supply components that you sell at 1/2 price every year. Moving iPhone manufacturing to the US would cost Apple significantly more than that. It's true that one of the major problems with a supply chain for computer components is how rapidly they depreciate, but labor costs are insignificant in large part because they are in China.

Honestly, I think he is thinking you assemble an iPhone like you do a car with giant welders and cranes. The reality is much closer to just a table with buckets for components and a small chain of workers that knows all the steps plus some basic quality control. Because, it's mostly just joining components.

The actual chips are created by machines which can be located just about anywhere, just ask Intel. Even boards are often done by machines, because it's so hard to tell if someone did it wrong when soldering by hand. There are robots that can do these same operations, but humans add flexibly and it's easy to see if they messed up. Plus at current Chinese wages they just plane cost less.
I agree that you shouldn't just take us at our word (and that's why we included as much documentation as we could to support our case).

But it would make it a heck of a lot easier to defend ourselves if Google had actually accused us of doing something wrong. To this day we're not even sure what we're alleged to have done to get our account banned.
As much as I would love to apply, I am going to be in Japan through most of July and August. If anyone would like to sublet (1-2 people) my fiancée and I have 1000sqft in Brooklyn, but since we'll both be gone most of the summer I'd be happy to give a good deal to a fellow hacker! Email from my page if you need more details since I'm not offering on craigslist or anywhere else.

It's technically a 3BR, but currently one bedroom is a study (library and desk) and another is our drawing + modelmaking studio (you can use my soldering station if you'd like).
(for those downvoting him further - there's no reason to get him hell banned, pretty sure he got the point!)
I found the style grating as well, but not because I thought it might have happened or even that you intended for me to think so. It was more that I found the parable style condescending. Heavy-handed and self-indulgent are a couple of hyphenated terms that might apply to some small extent.
Hello Tom,

Quick question for you.

Does Google have any statement on the thousands and thousands of small businesses that are destroyed because Google doesn't provide any realistic customer service options unless you manage to somehow get a thread to the top of Hacker News?
Their justification attributes a blog post where the author basically says "don't use tools that will break your code if you omit these syntax features". It encourages people to write code that will break when used by others, dictating the tools they can and can't use. It's the equivalent of a child closing their eyes and sticking their fingers in their ears to magically whisk away the person standing next to them.

It's pretty disappointing to see GitHub, a company that a lot of developers (including myself) look up to and will follow, espousing something like this.
You can't really trust the opinion of someone who leads with: "I use WordPress and it’s insanely secure". It's not. It has serious security bugs in it which allow full web server access on a fairly regular basis. You need to keep it up to date and subscribe to the announcement list to ensure you don't miss an update, just like you do with any content management system.
Not a clue, but Google's got enough of a braintrust to figure it out. They deal with SERP spammers fairly well; they can deal with clickfraud as well without punishing innocent people and not giving them a chance to fix it.
"Exactly! Good record labels book venues, organize travel, handle the legal stuff like insurance etc, they are well connected advertising and know people at the radio stations advertising and know the bloggers,advertising they can introduce them to other bands/producers/video editors,advertising ... in short: they make sure that the band can concentrate on their music and that the target audience knows about them advertising"

Edit: If your promoters don't consider such things advertising find someone better that understands the industry.

PS: 'book venues' is easy, it's filling them that's hard and that take advertising. Don't forget bands also have an agent often handles a lot of this stuff a well.
This title seems very accurate. How can that list of features justify $451 million?
Sinkhole: Infinite Explorer Browser Game
Well that's a relief. Now I don't have to feel bad about not turning that idea into a proof of concept.
Stories can be useful. You could say [arbitrary example] that "I'm trustworthy", or you could tell a story of the time you were given privileged information and didn't use it for personal gain.

The story is much more convincing, because it invokes empathy from the audience. The trick is to tell a good story. That means understanding plot, characters, tempo, your audience, and so on.

Not saying it's the be-all and end-all, but when done right stories have their place.
The initial condition is assigned to you randomly, from the closed interval [1,1000].

Suppose there were [1,k] spots. You are assigned an intial value from [1,k] and you then have to reach 0 before time t=k. Here's my code to solve the general case

object particle {
def main(args:Array[String]) = {
val simulations = args(0).toInt
val rng = new util.Random

(2 to 1000).foreach(spots=>{
val reachedZero = (1 to simulations).map(_=> {
var t = 0
var z = 1+rng.nextInt(spots)
do {
z += {if (rng.nextBoolean) 1 else -1}
t +=1
} while( z != 0 && t<spots)
z==0
})
val prob = reachedZero.count(_==true)*1.0d/simulations
printf("%4d spots: %.4f\n",spots,prob )
})
}
}

>scala particle 1000000
2	0.3773
3	0.329
4	0.292
5	0.2714
6	0.2624
7	0.2428
8	0.2247
9	0.222
10	0.2157
....

So your chances drop from 37% to 21% as the interval expands to 10 spots. At 100 spots, its 8%. By 1000 spots, you have a meager 2.5% chance of crossing 0 before 1000 seconds.
We provided that email in an effort at full transparency. If you'll note it is in the original post; we're not trying to hide anything here.
> Socratic dialogue

There are more references to culture as well. See below for a discussion of the Sesame Street (or was that "It's a Wonderful Life") names.
Right now it's a candidate's market (unless you actually suck).

The best chance companies that would like to hire me now had was seven years ago when my resume was thin and unconventional but my code was solid. Now that my background conventional (except for the lack of a related degree) they are falling all over themselves, and I am quite content in a brilliant job making more than most of them are willing to pay. I'm more skilled now, sure, but I was a good junior developer then. The fringe company that took a risk and hired me despite my resume got more than their money's worth.

You are welcome to be less nice to candidates. Let us know how that goes for you.
"And what Hatchlings is alleged to have done is likewise fraud (or perhaps accessory to fraud)."

Wait where is anything alleged to have been done by Hatchlings? Did you just make that up?

"yet you've jumped in on one side. Why?"

Because the issue appears one sided? {ignoring for the moment the many other people saying this is exactly how google operates).

"Look, this isn't "PayPal vs. regretsy" here. "

Funny it bore a striking resemblance. Web companies grow up and their shitty to nonexistent customer service doesn't go over so well when they decide to shutter a business account with significant balances.

"It's one company in a business area rife with (pseudo-)fraud trying to make a living and getting into a tussle with another company which is badly exposed to risks from the same fraud. Yawn."

There's lots of fraud in financial transactions and credit card issuers (banks) are exposed to this but if your bank suddenly closed up your account and never communicated with you I'll bet you wouldn't be yawning, you'd be screaming bloody murder.
Nice thought. How did you do it in your own example?
AT&T Nexus S ICS update?
What's the best way to get the ICS update for Nexus S users on AT&T?
I probably wouldn't have copped to it quite as fast if you hadn't named one of the characters Bertie Wooster, which was a lovely bit of signaling. Good job there.
This reminds me of that job advert which specifically asked for programmers with MacBooks only. No way in a million years would I apply there! I have an iMac, but only because I'm interested in different sorts of computer. I mean seriously, not everyone can afford an Mac.

I've had this on my chest since I saw that advert. Just needed to vent :)
What's missing in the other comments is that you can't call private methods with an explicit receiver, for example my_object.private_meth or even self.private_meth. On the other hand, public and protected methods can be called on self.

See this blog post for more info:
http://www.skorks.com/2010/04/ruby-access-control-are-privat...
I've long wondered why we're not investing more in skilled labor/vocational training as a country - any idea what the bottleneck is there? A lack of qualified instructors? Specifically, I think it'd be great if the govt. made training a valid alternative to "looking for a job" as a requirement for continued welfare/unemployment (might already be the case, but I've not heard of that being so).
I think the problem I have is that it is not the case that "developers" are taking their work on line. It is the case that "some developers" are taking their work online.

If all you care about is that subset of developers, I'm sure your approach is fine.
I'm not quite sure I follow.. are you suggesting that not wearing a tie would mean "removal from the process", even today? I've never worn a tie to a programming interview and generally it seems most experienced developers don't, at least in on the west coast of the US
Not included in his update.

2010 GAAP 4th quarter Net income = $2.54 billion

2011 GAAP 4th quarter Net income = $2.71 billion

or $170M growth in net income.

But let's just forget about that and congratulate Larry Page for a wonderful job in helping grow Google+ membership to 100M and Android activation to 850K per day because really, that's VERY important.
We have a variety of Redis machines, some of them are in a consistent hash ring (the ones we're using for caching); some are using modulo-based hashing (the ones where losing data on adding more machines isn't an option), and some are just single-node installs.
Because Apple and the whole USA IT industry can not build good enough software for industrial automation. I mean, today's software building technology is too primitive.
Pre-Built Developer VMs (for Oracle VM VirtualBox)
Hi Tom, I am the founder of Hatchlings. Thanks for looking into this. We completely understand the need to fight fraud. We've spent heavily on advertising as well and rely on Google and others to make sure our spend is not going to waste.

Our beef here is not even necessarily with the false positive. The main problems here are that

a) We have never been accused of wrongdoing by Google. This makes it very hard to defend ourselves.

b) That it takes making a lot of noise in a very public manner to get any sort of response.

and c) That we had a working relationship with Google and a track record of working with our account manager to improve our ad placements, etc.

If there was a legitimate concern with our "traffic quality" why didn't someone at Google give me a call to talk about it and see what we could do to fix whatever issues there apparently were?
I'm not sure I agree with putting people who can't put together a resume without spelling/grammar mistakes into the same unlucky group that simply had their resumes tossed by chance. Having spelling and grammar mistakes on a resume is sloppy... not unlucky. At a minimum it indicates they may not pay attention to details when it really matters. But maybe that is just me. Or maybe it just doesn't matter on a resume anymore. I'll admit I've never had to whittle down a stack of 100 resumes... more like 10 so I would never just blindly throw half away. But as I skim them all, the ones with the spelling and grammar mistakes get set into the "second string" pile. I'll give them a second look if the deeper dive into the other pile still doesn't find The One. I've had it work both ways. Some times second string does have The One. And other times second string is never looked at again.
Have you written a blog post about your experience? Or something at length in another forum?
Being sued is proof that you made it. Congrats!
I guarantee you someone is already working on an LLVM backend. I've thought about it myself but I don't have the time.
I definitely noticed. I used to get 70 spam emails a day and after the takedown that number went down to 4 to 7. So I'm very thankful for that.

Further proving that the war on spam is not in vain. I had always assumed it was futile because there's so many spammers, but over time I learned there's actually only a small number of spammers who are responsible for the majority of spam.
Because clearly all women make decisions on whether to enter a field based on some absurdly gross overgeneralization of that field.

There is at least some research suggesting this is the case.

Archived article: http://web.archive.org/web/20100106021904/http://scicom.ucsc...

HN Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=969646
AdSense also requires a SSN so they can file a 1099 with the IRS.
Jim Plamondon has written a excellent comment on the article that I don't reproduce here only because I'm not sure how he would feel about that.

Be sure not to miss it if you do read the OP.
I haven't played bughouse since college. Spent way too much time during freshman and sophomore years playing chess and bughouse.

Those guys wasted too much time pushing pawns. When you play with/against good players, you learn not to move that f pawn. The way we played, the objective was to attack the king as soon as possible, so if you move that f pawn, I start getting pawns from the other board that I can drop for check that forces the king out to the middle of the board. That eliminates castling, and I can use the pieces on the board and higher-point pieces from the other board to bring about mate quickly.

The thing to worry about most, is getting addicted to bughouse. One more game quickly becomes several more games. You might even start to draw a crowd. Then the day's productivity is shot.
A scholarship or grant is not the same as salary. Do you think college scholarships based on gender or race are sexist or racist?
"In the first quarter of 2012, an average of 94 billion spam emails were sent per day... There is no sign of a return to pre-Rustock spam levels."

Just 94 billion per day. That's what I call optimism.
What is your minimal viable marketing strategy you find it useful?

I would love to hear it.