skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a terrible deal because you have to pay your top marginal income tax rate (37.5-50%) of your "good" year on that money that isn't even yours, which you otherwise wouldn't, as social security payments are tax-deductible. In the "bad" year 2 years later, you obviously can deduct it, but as your earnings are low, you're in a lower tax band or even wouldn't be paying any tax at all (which is the case for me). So in my case this loses me thousands of Euros.

In "down" years you're also forced to lend them money that you'll get back 2 years later. I fail to see how this is a good deal.

Even if the tax bands happen to coincide, it's pretty hard to find even fixed-term savings accounts that earn more interest than inflation these days. Even my pension fund is actively losing money. (of course I don't have a choice about paying into it)
This was a very interesting read. I was working for a vertical search engine in this very same period. I, and the other engineers, also attempted to get our management to recognize what google was doing right. Unfortunately, we were delayed greatly by bad technology choices forced on us by venture capitalists (e.g. "build your search engine on top of Oracle! they say they have full text search, it will save you time!"[1]) and management short-sightedness ("our future is selling audio video search results to ISPs and portals, not being our own portal." -- this despite google not being a portal.) They actually got worried when the search box on our homepage started getting more queries than some of our larger customers.

Now, FWIW, I'm building another search engine. Instead of 20 engineers we have just me. Instead of 4 years, we're going to do it in one. While I have no interest in going up against google (different plans entirely) the radical change in leverage you get with open source and PAAS or IAAS, combined with Google's having taken their eye off the ball and run off to chase Facebook down a blind alley, means that something like DuckDuckGo actually could take real share away... maybe. (%1 of google's volume would be "Real share" right?)

[1] Oracle did have full text search but did not have the performance or per-machine-efficiency we needed, so it cost us a lot, and it was a constant fight to get it to do the kind of queries our relevancy algos required. we had a constant stream of consultants in from oracle HQ, and in the end dumped it and wrote our own db from scratch in about 4 months.
Honestly, I'm part of the mostly-silent majority of polyglot programmers that choose the best language for the job and have grown increasingly weary of Rubyists wheel invention and focus on rock star programming and rock star rants.
It's the only community that I find socially insufferable, and while an unpopular opinion here, I don't relish the notion of Rubyist culture.

Culture aside, simply technologically, Ruby has nothing significant to offer as compared to the many existing languages and technology stacks, especially those pushing forward language and runtime research. The only argument for Ruby here seems to be opening the market to developers unwilling to move beyond it.
Any innovation in technology presents a company with two options - adapt, or risk failure. The MPAA mitigates this by trying to stop innovation. It's a valid business strategy, albeit one that isn't very good for PR. Luckily more and more people are becoming aware of what's going on with all of this PIPA/SOPA/CISPA/ACTA/ETC-A stuff.
Banana Apocalypse {infographics}
The idea isn't to always do what the designer suggests, but to not dismiss suggestions out of hand because of laziness.

I know HN isn't crazy over the whole "design is important" idea, but I think not being lazy for the sake of good products is something we can all get behind.
It's probably easier to rob a bank with a pencil sharpener.
Wouldn't that basically require everyone who pirates to take a questionnaire to truthfully answer?

For the record, I've been watching X-Files on Hulu on my laptop. I've made it through season two, but will probably just download AVI's of the rest of the seasons, because my Wifi barely works in the kitchen, and the video quality goes down.

Am I ethically in the clear if I stream the Hulu episodes on my desktop, while watching pirated AVI's in the kitchen?
Thanks for that. I too remember Inktomi much more as the "cache kings" with licensed search a secondary focus.
Disqus has never gotten enough credit for their design. People forget how crappy comments used to look. When Disqus came out, everyone eventually copied their design. With Disqus 2012, I think that's going to happen again. They are leading the way.
New PHP Vulnerability:?-s may expose source code for mod_cgi
I'm upset at all the polish, all the ten thousand variations on the same silly theme. They do nothing to advance our civilization. It's disheartening.

"Strange how much human progress and accomplishment comes from contemplation of the irrelevant." - Scott Kim
Sorry, Yahoo's Response To CEO Resume Scandal Just Won't Cut It
I love Disqus. They are one of the few startups building seemingly unsexy but solid fundamental tech.

I just hope they have a solid business and don't get bought by BigCo for talent or fear of competition.
Hey guys, I just created a(nother) web based regular expression tool for JavaScript.

When working with regular expressions I find reading and debugging single line regular expressions time consuming.

RegExd auto formats single line regular expressions into multiple lines where individual parts can be easily targeted. If an expression is invalid, RegExd will search for the longest valid sub-expression and highlight the error.

There are a few other features but I'll leave those to be discovered.

Feedback is appreciated!
A good summary of the key points from the literature. However it is possible to placebo-test CBT; we did it recently for our web-based CBTi programme sleepio.com. The paper's been accepted for publication by the journal SLEEP - read it here: http://www.journalsleep.org/AcceptedPapers/SP-025-12.pdf

Also check out the lengths we went to to develop a credible placebo here: http://www.sleepio.com/research. Basically a complete bogus system, with new tools, animation, voiceover and library...
I wonder how this could be used in traditional marketing sense? He describes it as:

First you plant the seed.
Then you wait for it to grow into a plant.
Then you …

You clearly couldn't use this approach, because it is a: disingenuous, and b: requires you to have a large number of people's emails. It's an interesting concept, especially in the context of traditional marketing.
I'm curious as to why they made this document public. If I owned almost 6% of Yahoo!, I wouldn't do anything that would publicly make Yahoo! look even worse. I would discretely contact the company and have it dealt with quietly.

Additionally, why bother lying? I doubt Mr. Thompson got the job due to his 20 year old CS degree at a tiny liberal arts college.
Facebook reportedly seeking IPO valuation of $85B to $95B
Please give me feedback via email, david@fotary.com. Thank you!
Anyone know a good source to get Arduino stuff (sensors, boards, etc.) in the USA?
I'm curious if Running Lean covers anything the other three haven't, as it's the only one I haven't read.
The comment thread here reminds me of how just about every time someone suggests that a prospective employee might have demands of an employer, he or she is "entitled," "arrogant," or "a dick."

It never fails, be the topic salary and hours, choice of technology, vacation time -- being as explicit about your requirements as employers are theirs is a very good way to get poo flung at you.

We're not serfs, people.
> is still trapped in phpBB forum sites

I really don't agree with that. Standard internet forums have a very important role in internet community, they can't just be replaced by blogs. If you approach forums as just a source of information then sure, they could be replaced by a blog because "why not put all the information I want in blog posts?" but internet forums are so much more than just a source of information. They're about sharing, community and discovery, if you only ever use forums because google search results contain links to them then your opinion is very skewed.
It would help to persuade me to register, if there was some info about what this application does :)

EDIT: Ok, it's there, I haven't been paying attention.
Apps are hosted on other servers. So if it is not using HTTPS (to get the app page hosted on another server), it cannot load the content over HTTPS that Facebook is using at the moment.

Switching Facebook to HTTP solves this problem. Because why use HTTPS with Facebook? It's not necessary.

Also, the deadline was October 1, 2011 (last year).
> UIView already provides a similar method built into the API.

Yeah, it's actually much, much simpler to do it in Objective-C in this case.

[UIView animateWithDuration:0.5f animations:^{
// Do something
}];
Initial versions of Google at Stanford ran on a mix of both Linux and Solaris.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Oh how I wish this would be considered more! I'd be willing to take quite a beating on the rate for even a 4 day work week (4 8 hour days, not dressed up 40 hour weeks).

>and still only want to pay them 75%, then hiring will be almost impossible.

Oh hiring will still be possible, you're just going to get really crap people.
> I'm just curious if suggesting it to a prospective employer would be negotiable or an instant disqualifier ("How dare he be satisfied with less money?? He must be a pinko commie!")

Depends entirely on the employer.
The Secret Meeting that Changed Rap Music and Destroyed a Generation
You may want to reconsider "It is a valid business strategy": it isn't valid if it does not work.
We had a world facing UI, and all the insight that produced, and we still weren't able to sway management that there might possibly be a profitable search business.

In the age of napster people were using our service-- and falling in love with it-- finding music on the internet.

Nope, no money there. Better to sell to ISPs in canada and hope they integrate our results with Inktomis.
In case anyone else as confused about what an IPO road show entails, here is a description I found: http://moneycentral.hoovers.com/business-information/--pagei...
Internal politics? Maybe they'd like the CEO and some directors to leave.
Note that they are in a proxy fight to get their nominations to the board of directors, opposed to the company's recommendations. So their motives are to increase the value of their stock through getting more control of Yahoo. A short term dip in the price will just get them to buy more.
Facebook sets IPO: $28-$35/share
Nice post.

Do you do anything special to make the queue which your workers are BLPOPing durable?

Is there a reason you didn't use Redis pub/sub? Seems like the perfect use case.
webhostingtalk.com Is where all the hosting companies hang out.
They may look to own more of the company - but at a lower price. A story like this could cause the stock to dip - especially if seen coming from a 5.8% minority owner. A large enough stake that it looks like they are concerned, but small enough that they don't have the direct access to Yahoo! to rectify.
I'm unsurprised, but still, goddamnit guys.

As one of the comments in the linked page points out, the problem with more modern C code is that it tends to be covered in GCC gunk. Without Microsoft implementing support, well, that won't get better.

Maybe one day Clang on Windows will be far enough along that Microsoft will let you use it as a VS backend.
If this is not proof of a bubble, I don't know what is...

...Aeron chair anyone?
Public education: but what happens when you need to go to college?

Healtcare: I want to see data supporting that, IMHO it's just patently false.

Vacation: if you say so I rest my case…

I'm the worst of possible worlds I am an European leftist who's actually employed by an American company but works remotely from Europe, so I'd say I know pretty well both systems.
42Floors Launches ‘Showroom’ For All The Stuff Offices Need
Focus means saying no? Still laser focused twelve years after the fact?

Sorry, but it has always been clear that they just didn't want to invest any kind of resources at all. Not even a few days of developer time for shipping a freaking stdint.
Their whole hypothesis is that money can buy happiness, but there is a weak correlation because people have poor consumption patterns, and if people just had better consumption patterns, money would correlate strongly with happiness. There are a couple of assumptions baked into this hypothesis that I can tear apart on the spot:

1. This assumes that consumptive happiness is additive and unbounded, i.e. if consuming A makes you X points happier, and consuming B makes you Y points happier, consuming A and B makes you (X + Y) happier, ad infinitum. There is no evidence of this, and this is such a strong assumption that to assume it in the absence of evidence is fallacious.

2. Their data surrounding giving does not control for interpersonal interactions, and personality characteristics. Since these two variables are both strongly confounding, their results are weak at best.

Beyond that, this is a review paper containing no new data. They are essentially taking isolated data points and playing connect the dots to generate their own pet hypothesis.

My "pet theory" of happiness is actually the distillate of the idea of happiness as established in a variety of neutral literature (from Aristotle to moderns like Layard and Lyubomirsky), informed to a degree by evolutionary biology. Do you really trust the impartiality of people publishing in journals for "Consumer Psychology"? That reminds me of health studies commissioned by cigarette companies.

Down-vote away, it only saddens me to the degree that it makes people less likely to be exposed to a dissenting but informative viewpoint. I don't care a whit for the popularity contest aspect of it.
Where's the evidence? Show me that I will necessarily be more productive just because I use Trello and Hipchat.
Facebook raising $5B to $6.3B in IPO
My point is that Kickstarter is not a store, and it's not a simple money-for-goods-or-services exchange. People who give money need to understand that. If they don't, they'll feel cheated if the project fails and they don't get the item that they feel they "purchased."
what? a new php vulnerability? havent heard of one of these for a few hours!!
Snapshots from the Edge of Big Visualization
A file manager for the web.
As I understand it : iOS provides essentially a C (C/C++ /Objective-C) interface. Android has a Java API.

Anybody who compares a C based GUI+application with a Java based GUI+application knows there's a difference.
I had the same reaction as you when I first tried Unity a while ago. But now I've come around to like it. It's actually really forward thinking.

Our perception of user interfaces is very much tied to habit - what we're used to. New interfaces take some time to adjust to.

I know some people who hated Hipmunk and the iPad because they couldn't figure out how to use them.

You should give Unity another try. You may still not like it, but if you're a programmer who likes to use the keyboard more than the mouse, you will at least like the HUD.
I have 10 in the US. You lucky bastard.
That was a good read. I remember I used Yahoo for searching the web. Due to relevancy factor I moved to Altavista (but it didn't improve anything until the day I found out about Google and still use Google). I didn't know that Inktomi was powering search at that time. If Yahoo was so dependent on Inktomi or Google for its Search, I wonder why didn't they work on Search by themselves. After all they were information organization tool. Why did they ignore such a huge market. VC's were going crazy for funding search engines and number of search engines companies were either getting funded or going public. Based on these signals and the traffic they had during dot com era, they could have easily built substantially good search engine; yet they ignored it. Can anyone shed light on it?
Call me a cynic, but phrases like:

"An expert is telling us that an attack this large is likely coming from a government or large corporation"

"Many wondered when these people would come after us."

Make me seriously doubt the integrity of the claim. Speaking of Murdoch, this is the exact same trick tabloid papers pull when fabricating or exaggerating their own reporting to fit their agenda.
Yahoo! bought Overture (which owned AltaVista) way back in 2003. They only replaced the search results with Yahoo!'s a year ago after announcing the site would be shut down. Seemed like they were using it as an occasional test bed in the meantime.
$30 million for Revision3, $1 billion for Instagram. Is there really that much of a gap in value between these two companies?

I know I followed Rev3 closely because I enjoyed old-school TechTV. I also know I'm not an Instagram user. Am I the minority, here? Just trying to understand what's at play here, and what it means for the future.
Why oh Why is the headline about the stock price? Apple's price is $585ish right now. Apple is not 10 times more expensive than Facebook would be-- only a bit more than 5 times as expensive. Facebook's price range is around $86B.

It seems a lot of people want to buy a car for a "monthly payment they can afford" and car dealers have long sold people terrible terms and terribly overpriced cars by structuring the "monthly payment" lower so the person thinks the car is cheaper. Its amazing people fall for this.

Yet people react the same way to stock prices and NYT is putting the stock price in the headline?

How about "Rather than the $100B expected, Facebook is set to IPO at around $86B".

And more importantly-- and relevant to anyone who might want to buy the stock-- what's that work out to as a PE[1]? Doesn't appear anywhere in the NYT article that I could see.

So, is $86B expensive? Cheap? We don't know.

[1] On a trailing twelve months basis. I'm sure its in the prospectus, and anybody with financial literacy will look it up before buying the stock, but I still bet that a lot of people will say "$35? I can afford $35!" or "I've got $3,500 in my brokerage, I'll buy 100 shares! Can you imagine what those 100 shares will be worth when Facebook catches up to google and is priced at $350 a share?!" I don't think Facebook will be worth $860B+ in the next decade.
The nominal exchange rate you see has only a passing resemblance to exchange rates charged by CC processors.
Samsung unveils Galaxy S3
Oh, yeah. I forgot about CentOS. Distributions targeted at enterprise are harder; I use a third party repo for Asterisk and FreePBX, but I think I did have to compile a few dependencies.
UnoSlider jQuery and WordPress plugin
Hey, I just found (and bought) this awesome slider plugin. I really like it so I want to share it with you. It is standalone jQuery and WordPress plugin.
Hope you like it guys.
Going further, a dark knight takeover strategy is to quietly pool the shares that multiple companies have -> into one company that then owns a majority stake or has enough votes to exert decisions in their favor.

I'm not saying this is the intent here, but one of the first steps down the path.
This opinion is from someone who's been in charge of hiring a few times and will likely do so again: If you can actually do the job described, I don't give a damn about your credentials. I would not fire an employee who I found out fabricated credentials, if they had been working well for a while.
As I understand, the Gates Foundation has saved ~5.8 million lives through vaccines and healthcare, and seems to be on track to save many more: http://frugaldad.com/microsoft/

I'm genuinely curious-how is that "business as usual" for big philanthropy? Who else is successfully nearly eliminating major fatal diseases?
If you are interested in how we do the realertime notifications stay tuned for a blog post (and talk at EuroPython). Hint it isn't node.js.
'Worked' from whose perspective?

Delaying is invariably cheaper and more effective for any given quarter's financial results. And after several decades of our market becoming increasingly quarterly-number obsessed, it seems only fair to judge the soundness of decision-making based on the market standards.
No, what he's saying is that mods need to only be able to mute users, not kick them. Kicking someone out of the room they want to be in only hurts your service -- not the room -- because they won't have any interest in visiting the other rooms and they're not going to bother going back into a room they've been kicked out of. There is truly no reason anyone should be kicked. It leaves a sour taste in the user's mouth, especially if -- like those of us posting here -- it was for no other reason than the mod's ability to do so.

Anyone in the room to troll or flood (by the way, your 'flood' methodology sucks - I type fast, I shouldn't be reprimanded for it) will be put off of the room and move on to the next, at which point, a certain amount of mutes in a certain amount of time should set a flag that puts a global mute on that person for a set amount of time.
The Ultimate collection of Open Source Resources for Java
Its a long accepted colloquialism. It also doesn't help that a lot of torrent sites openly embrace pirate crap as cutesy. I guess no one likes saying copyright infringement.
Because Digg was enormous and now it's worthless?
For me, it'd be fine if MSC (Microsoft's C/C++ compiler) supported a good chunk the following features:

* 'restrict' keyword
* C99 inline semantics
* snprintf
* flexible array members
* designated initializers
* UTF-8 string literals without using escape sequences
* compound literals

Now I understand wanting to "focus" on C++, but some of the above are very easy. For example, you can write snprintf as a three line wrapper around _snprintf, and change the parser to accept restrict (it already accepts __restrict). One would hope that since MSC already accepts wide characters, adding UTF-8 support would be fairly trivial. (Right now, you can only put UTF-8 in string literals either by tricking the compiler into thinking that you're using an encoding OTHER than UTF-8, or by using escape sequences). I would also hope that C99 inline semantics are easy to implement.

If we had those easy things, the bigger items (designated initializers, flexible array members, and compound literals) would seem less.
Intellectualism is not about showing off how much you agree with authorities. Intellectualism is about thinking and understanding, eventually until you become one.

When discussing coding style, you can quote experts. Or you can understand their arguments, understand the impact and tradeoffs of coding decisions, and realize why they are true. And in the case of Topcoder, about as far as possible from building large systems, you can realize that the optimum style changes and understand why.

I think there's a broad trend to treat code as magic, something where anything can happen. Most people learn coding styles by being given suggestions, and then noticing from experience that they like it better. If you reject this mindset and believe that code is orderly, then this advice changes from Wisdom of the Elders (TM) into an engineering calculation. I specialize in automated restructuring of software architecture, so this mindset is something I try hard to fight against.
Where’s The Money? Episode #11 – Foursquare
> it seems like the only hope of seeing a decent retirement for the average person without a lot of capital to start with

not on a risk-adjusted basis
I am always impressed (although often repulsed) by spammers. Getting someone to look you up on Google is a a clever way not only to get people to see your ads, but to solidify your position in the search rankings. Clever!
"Might have"? Sounds like his college was only offering one CS class at the time... much less a degree.