skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Couldn't agree more. For a long time I was a developer at a financial company, where there was a similar rotation for level 2 support programmer. For a week every 5-6 weeks, you could expect phone calls at 3 AM when European users had a problem.

An absolute majority of these issues were caused by bad system architecture issues (which, to be fair, in financial company is usually not up to the technical people to solve).

And also, today a much better solution is available: instead of requiring people to be on call at nighttime, why not hire people in different time zones, across the world, specifically for the purpose of Level 2 support when your main devs are asleep?
> why can't I work 20 hours as a programmer, and 20 hours as a tree-planter, or teaching rock climbing to high school kids, for maybe 55% of a programmer's salary?

I have often wondered about this myself. I think I could be equally productive as a programmer on 20 hours a week, since I spend a lot of time on the web and generally doing things that we programmers do when we need to give our minds a break. I really don't think anybody can actually do 40 hours of programming a week.

I'm going to lazily posit the law has something to do with it. I had my own business for a while, but never really made enough money at it (I'm a lousy entrepreneur). Even if I weren't making more money for about the same time investment, I might have fled from business ownership simply because I didn't like having nightmares that I did the taxes wrong—and I never had an employee. It's probably as hard and as expensive tax-wise to hire someone for 20 hours a week as 40 and probably a lot harder for more than 40.

Another possibility is that it's just what happens in our society.

These answers don't feel all that satisfying to me.
Google couldn't win a lawsuit against a company that sold pieces of cardboard that fit over a monitor to block ads. Same thing for Rapportive, which doesn't remove any ads itself, they simply offer users a tool that happens to do that as part of its functionality.

Also, Google is simply not a very litigious company. They would be much more likely to engage in a technical game of cat and mouse (e.g. make it hard to remove the ads) than sue someone.

I wouldn't be worried about creating something like Rapportive. At worst you're like a company that sells lock picks. The onus is on your customers to stay within the bounds of the law (or ToS).
Google, Oracle Head to Showdown
Sorry, I just wrote too fast and didn't want to get into details. Of course I didn't mean literally they had zero experience, I am writing from Chrome and use Google Earth pretty often myself (SketchUp etc...).

I just wonder how many apple and windows developers they have and how many projects they have to follow/develop.

Personally, I'd prefer Dropbox, since it's a company dedicated to one thing and so far they have been doing it well.

I'm happy that google has their own product so that I can have more free space and potentially it'll lower the price of such services in general.

If it gets much better than Dropbox I'll switch completely, but let's see what this better is. For example, I don't need to edit documents with google docs, since I can never manage to print anything decent with it. So for me, integration of Google Drive and Google Docs wouldn't be a good enough extra feature.
Been a software engineer for 15 years now. I've always worked 40 hour weeks, about once a year I work a 60 hour week. I've probably made more money than my peers on average, plus I've had a life outside of work. I've always been baffled why employees put up with 50+ hour work weeks.
Gezond Afvallen en Veel Afvallen
> A programmer's salary is great, but why can't I work 20 hours as a programmer, and 20 hours as a tree-planter, or teaching rock climbing to high school kids, for maybe 55% of a programmer's salary?

You can. You need to become a contractor and only accept 20 hours of work a week.

I know that the guy that teaches yoga and step at my gym is a programmer as his "day job". That's one way to stay healthy.
> So who knows, maybe the power of lisp combined with a non-lispy syntax is a balloon that can fly.

Sounds like Apple's old language Dylan, and perhaps the Julia language:
http://www.johnmyleswhite.com/notebook/2012/03/31/julia-i-lo...
They did use a voice impersonator.
I think it's actually the "users" of rapportive who are breaking the terms of service, not rapportive.
I think he's saying that, because many first time entrepreneurs would happily take a $XX million offer to sell, most will sell early rather than holding out for a chance to be the next Dropbox. So even if the potential/expected value to be a billion dollar company is there, factors that are harder to calculate might ultimately determine exit value.
It probably helps solve the data barf problem on SD cards where every application is responsible for managing its own user data. Also, depending on the ToS, they can probably peek inside your files to gather more information about you.
Great idea! If I was a native speaker I would sign up for being a guest, but for now I think I will limit myself to listen to it :)
New Mac OS X Trojan unearthed. Call it SabPub
>The trouble is when you force the host to spend hundreds of millions on infrastructure each time //

Unfortunately it's the politicians, that want to be part of something big, spending other people's money, that choose to spend hundreds of millions. If all the countries simply said to the IOC "we're not going to spend silly money, haven't you heard there's a recession on" then it could all be done with existing infrastructure.

Meanwhile the UK could have bought everyone a Raspberry pi, a pushbike, trainers and a tracksuit and still had change to offer a free year of swimming with the £160-200 per person budget (£10bn to £12bn/ 60 million people).
Honestly, this sounds like a nightmare. It brings me back to my sysadmin days when I was getting paid $10/hour.

I would need to get paid lots of money to do this (dig into my precious free time). Probably more than 37signals is ever willing to may me.

A buddy of mine is a sysadmin and told me that at his work, only the "best" techs get this duty. The company makes it sound like an honor to get pager duty and have to deal with putting out fires at 2am.
Taste is subjective and fleeting. The once lauded tastes of the 90s are now regarded as oh so dreadfully pedestrian by enlightened contemporary minds.

You seem to have specific examples in mind. I have no idea what they are on this side of your skull. More specific language would be appreciated.

The crux of taste is rooted in celebrity worship and group think. Taste is a roll of the die and a hope that your vision resonates with those around you.

A lot of what is called "taste" is group think. Not all of it is, however. In addition to "taste" there is also Taste. A number of the hallmarks of Taste in instrumental music, like the ability to use slight modulation of rhythm to convey the visceral feeling of specific dance steps, are demonstrably cross cultural and enduring across generations. Many of the hallmarks of Taste in visual design (rule of thirds) have endured over hundreds of years. Note that these examples are rooted in the function of the human sensorium -- that's not coincidence.

This isn't to say that absolutely everything Louis Armstrong's contemporaries did still resonates today. It also isn't to say that absolutely everything the old masters painted resonates with 21st century viewers. But note how much of what Louis Armstrong and Michaelangelo did which still resonates and which contemporary artists still include in their practice. We now know from science that people are not "blank slates." This notion was just an ideological fiction. Our senses and perceptions mostly work in a particular way, and this is bound to give rise to Taste.

That said, you are mostly right, and our functioning as social animals with the ability to maintain ideologies as a group bonding mechanism also gives rise to "taste."

Taste is almost negligible.

If by this, you mean that the ratio of Taste/"taste" is frustratingly close to zero, I'd say you're right. Groupthink is agonizingly powerful, but that's only most of what there is, not all of it. (Sturgeon's Law)
What a herd of cats!
Do you think Steve Jobs worked 9 to 5 to make apple successful Yes vs No
In the late 80s, VASCAR was heavily used on I-95 between Baltimore and DC - a route I used to travel a lot. Coming from Baltimore to DC, I was pulled over and given a citation for 67 in a 55 or something similar.

VASCAR is a method that is used with a stopwatch and a simple computer that divides distance travelled by the elapsed time. To avoid too much error, markings on the pavement are usually fixed and marked at a tenth of a mile or a quarter of a mile interval. In this case, they were using the time at which the car left the shadow of a bridge, to two traffic cones on the side of the road on an uphill stretch of I-95 - http://g.co/maps/x6az8

When I got the ticket, I asked two things - how did you know how fast I was going and when did you set up? He answered that they had started writing tickets around 9:45 that morning and the ticket was issued at 2:15 in the afternoon. Instantly, I formed my alibi.

Since we knew that the lines on the street weren't painted, we knew that the sun travelling across the sky would alter the point at which the car came out of the shadow, and, we were using two traffic cones on the side of the road that didn't cast much of a shadow to judge the position of the car. I forget the math based on the time that they measured it, but, it was something on the order of 12-18mph error based on the angle of the sun, time of the year and their setup time versus when I was stopped. I had pictures, a handout showing the math used referencing geometry books with footnotes explaining the sun's positional changes, the distance that the shadow would have moved over that time period, the increasing error throughout the day.

The officer stated that his VASCAR computer had been calibrated and he was a certified operator and all of my math was just mumbo-jumbo. They took a five minute recess - unheard of in traffic court - came back, and issued a not guilty on my case. The judge then asked if anyone else there had received tickets on that date from any of the six or seven officers that had issued tickets, and about 25 people raised their hands - all having their tickets dropped.

In point of fact, he probably was within 3mph of my actual speed as all of my measurements had been done based on a 1/10th of a mile rather than the quarter mile that they had used that day, but, there were a lot of happy people that day. It is a good thing I didn't realize that the cones were set at 1/4 mile, but, there still would have been some error.
Unless it's major server failure, I really don't see a need to have immediate customer support. Most issues can be solved the next day/a few hours later.
The Brilliant Minds Behind Huffington Post Just Launched An Airbnb Killer
Just pointing out that this is pretty much the dead centre of the Hacker News interest group - if you join the dots.

This is all about the combination of

(a) the 0x10c compiler writing http://0x10c.com/
(assembler project), (had many hacker news posts) and

(b) Abdulaziz Ghuloum's An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf (which has had about two separate Hacker News posts):
While I agree with your ideas about the "syntax weight", I think that you're wrong about Java.

Java definitely has no syntax for closures, because it has no semantics for function types. It has interfaces and anonymous classes, which you can use to accomplish the same requirement, but the semantics of interfaces are not 100% the same as that of function types. A small example: there's only one function type for a function that takes one int and returns one int, whereas there are infinitely many interfaces you can define to represent that function type and none of them are necessarily interchangeable among themselves.

I think this distinction is important and that this is what the author is talking about when he says "there had better be a way to write a closure somehow!" In Java, there isn't.
> why can't I work 20 hours as a programmer, and 20 hours as a tree-planter, or teaching rock climbing to high school kids, for maybe 55% of a programmer's salary?

Health insurance.
If you find yourself using primarily Java (nothing wrong with that, really), then just go all the way. I think the same is true for most any language. It's also valid to start doing everything new in a new language and gradually migrate away from where you started.
I remember Sybase ads from my teens. I did not know they were assimilated to generate MSSQL, interesting!
I second this idea. The old Klik-n-Play program contributed to my inspiration when I was a kid, and the license agreement forbidding distribution of my creations helped motivate me to continue to learn to code. My next step after Klik-n-Play and QuickBasic was Allegro and DJGPP.
The OS community is doing pretty nicely now we have Nuget
Which is why they have done a 180 are now being extra cautious.

And in doing so causing just as many problems as before. They really deserve a lot more hatred and derision then they are getting.
مسلسل بين الماضي والحب الحلقة 76 
مسلسل بين الماضي والحب الحلقة 76

بين ,الماضي ,و,الحب

http://video.qlbak.com/11205.html
Using Custom Attributes in HTML5
Since it doesn't appear anywhere in the headline, this is for CasaHop (http://www.casahop.com)

Just for the record, I DO NOT agree with the headline in any way, shape, or form. House swapping and vacation rental swapping has existed since before the internet, and while adding social networking to the transaction is a nice touch and may even work to make a viable business, I can't see how this kills Airbnb, or even competes with it.

[edit] disclosure: vacation rental owner advertising on Airbnb and other vacation rental sites, has never worked out to successfully swap houses with the 5-10 parties who've inquired over time.
Hey ZitchDog, I'm sorry to hear you are having trouble with offline mode. We try hard to make things work offline. You probably already get this, but it isn't like a chat room in the sense that you need an open socket. The standard model is more like an app like Foursquare uses, where you refresh at specified times, but we do also let you cache network operations like saving data to run once the internet is available again.

So, unless there's something here that I don't understand, this specific case seems like something that should work. If you 'd like us to explain in more detail how you can get things to work, drop us a line at feedback@parse.com and I will help get the appropriate folks involved.
Are more companies going to be saying 'no' to NoSQL? | Econsultancy
MeeGo was a nice OS about 3 years too late.

I have a N9 at work. It is nice. But with no ecosystem it nothing more than a feature phone. And whilst it is reasonable to focus on feature phones they aren't the future. Even in third world countries. They buy a feature phone whilst dreaming of an iPhone.
Google has a brilliant customer service, it's just that many people do not understand the meaning of the term "customer". If you use their free services, you are not a customer; if you do pay for it, then you get proper support and everything. It seems pretty fair to me.
I guess that's what happens when you don't have enough tests...

</cheap shot>
If folks would like to see the actual stalker in action, he's posting in the comments section of this article on The Daily Dot: http://www.dailydot.com/business/kickstarter-cyberstalker-vi...
Yeah, but most people don't do that. That's the whole point. It's hard. People are lazy. The reason why we get paid to do what we do is that we climbed that particular mountain. If it was easy, we'd be unemployed. :)
(I work at 37signals, though not as a sysadmin or developer)

Just to clarify - we do have a 24/7 on-call system administrator who is the first line of defense for when things go wrong. They're the ones who get phone calls when things do go 'bump' in the night, and they're fantastic in every way.

Our "on call" developers fix customer problems; rarely do these arise suddenly in the middle of the night, but our software has bugs (like most pieces of software) that impact customers immediately, and we've found it helpful to have a couple of developers at a time who focus on fixing those during business hours rather than working on a longer term project. Most companies probably don't call this "on call", but rather something like (as a commenter on the original post pointed out) "second level support". This is what Nick was describing in his post.

Of course, fixing root causes is the best way to solve bugs, and we do a lot of this too. We've taken a significant dent (>= 30% reduction) out of our "on call" developer load over the last 6-12 months by going after these root cause issues.

Hope that clarifies the situation some.
In fact, even the big global search box called Google will return the relevant answers if you search "green usernames".
This post is completely unreadable. Hypothetical conversation, random boldings, all sorts of logical failings, speculation, and appeals to emotion. Is there anything solid behind this 'article'?
I know I shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, but... with all the photoshop, comics, and general editorializing on this article, I'm just going to have to wait til someone with a bit more candor decides to write about it.
Was this not completely obvious? The purchase of Instagram doesn't add up.
I'm glad Google doesn't apply RIAA-logic, or Rapportive users would be in trouble.
Probably try PCA (principal components analysis) to help select the most important features of data, first, before going further in modeling it.
Wow, it's amazing how everyone thinks Google Video entered against the entrenched Youtube and lost.

Google Video preceded Youtube. Google Video was launched before Youtube was even formed as a company. Youtube just straight up out-competed Google Video. Probably being a startup, capable of being naughty[1], staying closer to the copyright infringement line, and being willing to piss of big media companies helped them gain lots of users.

I don't think Dropbox has a parallel advantage in this area. I don't see how being naughty is going to help them in this product area. But of course, they are a talented and focused startup.

Google video was launched on January 25, 2005.[2]

YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005.[3]

[1] http://paulgraham.com/founders.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Videos
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube
As a Canadian, living in Canada, a country with NO "fair use" provisions because our laws are derived from those of the United Kingdom, I am well aware of how copyright and trademarks work. The Olympics are a rarefied, global, multinational corporation that demand governments bend to their will with respect to their trademarks if they want the games. Governments do so because it brings in revenue and also allows them to undertake mega projects that would otherwise never see the light of day.
it was Moki.TV before this product. love these guys.
I agree with walexander and brodney in regards to the quality of this article. However, would the Instagram deal have came off had Facebook been trading on the market? I don't think it would have.

Then again what do we really know? I for one don't know what is going on in the confidential meetings involving Zuck and the Facebook board.
>>"That project is too big, I'll never find it!" or "I'm not smart enough to understand it"

That rings so true here. When I started Python web development, I needed to understand some concept related to middleware and handlers (somewhat foreign coming from PHP). My first thought was to look for blog posts explaining how it works in Django, but that wasn't satisfactory. I took a chance and dove into the Django source code— going against the voice in my head telling me, "You'll never understand it!"— and found myself learning so much. It was great!

In software development, we're taught to abstract everything and only think of the smallest problem, but this sometimes forces us to think of libraries as magic. This was a problem for me as a beginner, but it's been getting better as I've progressed.
Does anyone have any background on who this "Donna Kline" is? Her brief bio paints her as a 'reporter', but her blog backlog looks like a constant and consistent attack against Facebook. I don't want to suggest that she is perhaps being paid to attack a particular corporation, but she doesn't seem to report on much else, or in any kind of balanced way.
I am looking at BizSpark and I cannot tell if it includes Server deployment? Windows Server 2008, etc? Anyone know?
Sounds like they might use a webdav connection the way the story talks about folders working. I was hoping for more from a story whose title uses the word 'detailed'.
How the military can utilize smartphone tech
This argument is pointless. At the end of the day, the current owner of Bootstrap can do whatever he wants. If the semi-colon issue is that important, people should just fork the project and add semi-colons.
Ashampoo Office Professional (2012)
It is not clear what Leader Technologies & conflicts of interest have to do with each other. It appears that Leader Technologies' patent was thrown out by a jury[1] (list of stories on TechDirt: [2]).

Until the IPO, Facebook is still a private company is it not?

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/07/28/us-facebook-patent...
[2] http://www.techdirt.com/blog/?company=leader+technologies
Combinator birds in Clojure
The upcoming Crowdfunding tsunami might also help keep valuations high.
The overall average is a poor metric to use in this context.

How many jobs do you think are out there are are expressly limited to 40 hours a week to avoid over time? Or 20 hours a week to limit having to offer health insurance?

I'd be far more interested in an average for "professional" employment paid on salary, it would be far more telling.
There's a big difference between having programmers on-call and actually having work/fires for the on-call programmers to solve. We only know about one of these for sure from this post.
The problem with current AI is that it is programmed. Thus it stretches to where the programmer programmed it. AI needs to learn, it needs to be let to produce emergent behaviors, not just those which were programmed into it.
Straight from the horse's mouth:

http://www.quora.com/Conflicts-of-Interest/With-Andreessen-H...
Congrats to Matt, Sandy, and Ashu! Matt has been very generous in helping me navigate through the ups and downs of startups. He's been giving me startup advice and direction for the past year and a half (starting back when I had nothing) and I don't think I would have made it out here to work on Sonalight if it weren't for him.

Since moving on from moki.tv, they've been hard at work on hotspots.io and I'm really glad it worked out for all three of them.
"more hours out of us"

This is the red flag. They may genuinely need more productivity, but any company that thinks it can get more productivity out of devs by letting them work more hours is being fundamentally mismanaged.

Long hours are virtually always a symptom something else is very wrong.
Welcome to The City That Should Not Be Named for The Event That Should Not Be Named.
Actually, MS bought the rights to the Sybase software, not the company. There are still quite a few similarities.