skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Video Spoofs Tim Cook’s Convergence Putdown: Froaster
Irish News Paper funding startups to disrupt its own business
Tumblr Finally Wants To Make Some Money, Launches Its First Ads
Not what you describe, but tries to solve the same problem: PowerPC has instructions that tell the system what memory you are planning to use. See for example https://developer.apple.com/hardwaredrivers/ve/caches.html

There also are CPUs that attempt to detect access patterns without help from the programmer, for example Power: http://chipdesignmag.com/display.php?articleId=3926&issu....

I think Intel CPUs have similar functionality, but these were the ones I found first (using "cache stride hints" as Google query), perhaps because Intel uses different terminology.
1) It's very easy to tell if you pay attention. Selfish people are trivial to spot. Also those who sweet talk others with compliments to use them and move on afterwards.

2) How do you know? Sociopaths break the trust of people and can easily break a working system. A classic real anecdote of mine:

We were about 100 people in a very large open space office. The vast majority of us were normal or nice. But two selfish idiots kept stealing/hoarding anything that was freely available. From coffee cups and plastic cutlery to toilet paper. This drove everyone to hoard all those resources, creating a bigger problem and masking the original culprits.

My point is a tiny fraction of the population can easily break a healthy system/society. Don't underestimate this.
Getting insights into your userbase
Digg's probably the only other example I can think of.
If you haven't, I highly recommend reading Jonah Lehrer's book Imagine: http://www.amazon.com/Imagine-Creativity-Works-Jonah-Lehrer/...

It turns out that there are two sides to creativity: a more left-brained tendency to focus on something and take it to completion and a more right-brained tendency to have inspirations and insights.

It certainly sounds like you've got the left-brained part of it down, but I don't think that shutting out new ideas like this is a good idea. What's important is being able to recognize which random ideas are worth entertaining and which ones aren't. I know that if I shut out all of my random ideas, I'd have dismissed some of the best ones.

This isn't just an abstract question either. Having really great ideas that are executed well is the difference between a product that merely does its job and a product that people love and tell all their friends about.
How to run a tech startup
Thanks for reminding me of half of my html5 "todo" list.

[edit] whether I find the free time to get around to any of it is another matter, admittedly.
Here? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3919881
GPU Technology Conference 2012 - this month in San Jose, CA
Very true, I often dread "upgrades" or "redesigns" to software or websites that I like using. Everything seems to now be adding hoops that you have to jump through.

This is why I often prefer things that I either have to pay for or that are OSS because then at least I feel like I have some of influence in the relationship.

I dread the day that google slap a login page up in front of their search engine service.
Thanks for the correction - though, quite honestly, having met Judge Alsup, I'm not sure this is any better. He hates technology.
How LinkedIn built its new iPad app
Ditch The Community Manager. Hire The Community Analyst
Reasons Why You Need to Teach a Skillshare Class
Not true!

A programmer who is aware of the latency issues around disks can figure out how to move data out of memory into files, and how to change algorithms to arrange for sequential access to data. One who is not aware has no way to figure out how to stop the month-end data processing run taking five days. (That is a real world example.)
I guess Google too hates open source since they won't release their proprietary modifications to the Linux kernel and their search engine code and will go after anyone getting them and putting it on Github.
Because people who say "Do this, I want to give you money" often turn out to:

a. Not really have money to give.
b. Not really want to give money.

And frankly, "getting money" is probably low on Katherine's list right now. She has a product roadmap that she's executing on and doesn't want to be pulled away from. The money stuff will come later if she charts the right course.

It's counterintuitive at first, but as an entrepreneur, once you get burned a few times creating a feature or changing course due to a request from "someone who wants to give you money", you start learning to tune out the folks who demand stuff with that kind of domineering urgency. I've found this very difficult on my end and have people on my team help spot when to tune people out so I can get better at it.
I've had to work with sociopaths, and being used and abused ain't fun.

But I hope you'll get over it. For sure, cynicism, won't bring you happiness.
Questions from Oracle v. Google jury hint at copyright violation
Their tens of millions of dollars in revenue?
Hey I sent you an email about a small issue I had setting up this wrapper.
> I haven't seen a convincing argument that Google needs social.

"pictures of Dan's wedding" "those backpacks John keeps talking about" and "where the fuck are my car keys" are all queries that require people-data in order to dereference whom you're talking about
The Irish Times Digital Challenge #ITdc 
The Irish Times is launching the Digital Challenge to build strong and mutually beneficial relationships with emerging digital businesses.
Flock caveats, implementing locking and job sequences
Remembers me how frustrated I was when I shared pictures from Picasa with people on my contact list and what it did, without warning me, was to send everyone a Google+ invitation.
It's not really a browser security issue. It's just that Linux graphics drivers suck horribly, and so they create security issues and crashes everywhere.
Cloud services for Windows 8 and Windows Phone: Windows Live, reimagined
That sounds like a lot of fun to maintain and keep version control on, especially when they're written by different people with different motivations.
Ahh, the point is missed by the ignorant. I was not, in any way, comparing this at all to the holocaust. That you would think that says volumes about what your opinion means, however.
If patents are only good if used defensively (because someone else threatens you with a patent infringement claim) then this is similar to having no patents at all. The difference is that if you abolish patents, patentable aspects of a product will become trade secrets rather than shared in a patent filing.
That's tangential to the problem at hand. MPEG LA's entire purpose for existing is to be a one stop shop for the essential H.264 codec patents. So instead of going to MS, Apple, Samsung, Hitachi, etc. individually, you just go to MPEG LA, get a license, then go on with your life.

Motorola is not on that list, and have not granted their patents. However, since they're asserting that it covers the encoding and decoding of H.264, it's questionable whether or not they can assert them against H.264 codecs. In fact, the US courts have invalidated patents that were not declared to the pool before. See dpark's post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3919324
Forget about coding. Make yourself a nice cup of coffee or tea. Sit down. Fire up a browser and watch a few interviews on Mixergy full-screen. That ought to clear-out the "funk" and get you inspired to go kick ass again.

Not affiliated with Mixergy. Just a happy user and premium member.
Raising your hand only tells the professor that you, an individual, are confused. Interruptions by a single student that doesn't understand the material, when the rest of the class does, might actually cause the professor to focus too much attention on a subject that doesn't need it.

This is far better. There will always be a couple people that are not following. If the professor is getting 90% "I understood" responses, he can simply mention that anyone with questions on that topic is free to meet them after class, while the rest of the time can be spent on topics where there is a lower rate of understanding.
Can someone explain how this is possible within the web's standard security model?
That's why I play Coursera's videos at higher rates. It makes the learning much more intensive and interesting.
What an interesting writer. I've never heard of him before. Thanks!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baldwin
Maybe they plan to divide it into smaller chunks and loan them out to people via some kind of internet website for that sort of thing?
I guess the fact that Google put them up to it as retaliation for the fact that MS did the exact same thing to them is lost on this thread.

Did you know Microsoft makes more money licensing Android to Google then it does selling windows phones? Yeah payback is a bitch. Its ok thread goers, lets continue ignoring the real issue here and side with one of the largest patent trolls: MS.
Pinterest for porn. Share your porn picture.
Do all browsers support that?
Stop using Google! You know its a company that spies on your every move, you know they are selling your information to governments, you know they are constantly IN YOUR FACE everywhere you turn on the net these days.

They are even worse than Microsoft was back in the days, when Google came along with a clean search engine and a clean slate. These days, "dont do evil" is as ridicolous as Obamas "Change!" campaign.

Google is a strong supporter of CISPA as well. Whats left to like in this company? They make a good browser and good apps, but its not worth what they are doing to their customers.
We use this full document very often during teaching in graduate-level courses and it always helped the students understanding the underlying concepts of data access. Even though for most of the people a thorough understanding of DRAM refresh latencies is not important, it is still a very, very important read for every programmer.

Why?

The answer is easy: Almost everything in modern computers is about locality spatial and temporal locality. As soon as the complexity of the programs you write is one level above "Hello World" or in Rails-speak a simple controller method. This will become important.

It's easy to translate the concepts of aligning data in DRAM because it's faster to Rails-ish behavior. Assume that you read lot's of data from your database and you process it item by item. Inside your loop you perform another fetch from the database, again and again. If you would try to join the data (speak aligning) than you would need less requests to the database.

Any system architecture that involves handling data will at one point in time come to the situation where the programmer will think about ordering instructions, database queries or even attributes inside a c-struct (see the discussion about why short ruby strings are faster than long...) If you won't keep anything in your mind from this document, but if you remember that sequential access and exploiting locality will increase the performance, then the document made it's point.

Take the hours, read the document, and probably forget most, but take it as an inspiration, rather than an optimization guide.
A healthy system has a way of ejecting unhealthy influences. As in, "stop this crap or we're going to have to let you go."
To avoid disk latency, you're moving data out of memory and onto disk? That's essentially a coping mechanism for having stuff taking up space in memory that doesn't need to be in memory. Knowing how and when to do that is useful, but doesn't require a lot of knowledge of the memory hierarchy beyond "the disk is incredibly freaking slower than memory."

edit: and I just realized I'm in the subthread about knowing about latencies being important, not the subthread about knowing the entire contents of the linked paper being important, so yes, I think we're agreeing.
Airbnb is frequenty cited as a counterpoint to all the bubble talk because they have a real business model and are making money. Same goes for all the other highly valued YC companies(Dropbox,OMGPOP,Heroku,etc).
Sometimes the job of an interview question is to make it clear to the interviewee that this is not, after all, somewhere they want to work.

That would be my reaction to those interview questions.

As for the follow-up question, my response would be to ask why you are optimizing your B tree for a specific architecture instead of using a cache-oblivious B tree. (Yes, I can think of several reasons why not to. But if the interviewer is asking me BS questions, I want to know whether their knowledge is similarly good.)

Of course in practice I'm generally happy to use BerkeleyDB - the B tree has never been a performance bottleneck for me except when it involved disk latency. And at that point a more fundamental reorganization of algorithms becomes necessary.
Completely sincere question that I'd love to hear your thoughts on: why in the world do you need 1000 people doing that stuff? I get how sales/marketing/customer service require high headcounts -- but product people?

Is there really something useful for 500 developers to do that the top 50 of them couldn't have done?

I've always assumed (since I don't understand it) that it's just a momentum thing. Did you ever consider keeping Airbnb under 100 employees? Would your investors have freaked at that idea? Would it have hurt your growth?
Thank you, this should be opt-in, not opt out.
I never proposed cynicism! I clearly say you should be mindful who you help. That's it.
My suspicion is that the underlying motivation in both cases is a desire for "social proof". You might have evidence that the person you're interviewing is a good fit for the job, but why hasn't anyone else hired them to do it? As much as I dislike the whole idea, it seems to just be a fact of human psychology that you have to deal with.

I suppose at the end of the day, startup founders should at least have empathy for this situation. After all, starting a startup is an exercise in not having enough "social proof".
Shouldn't they deposit that money in a bank?
More likely for people on that path, there's bigger wins from paying down technical debt that exists at a higher level than by trying to optimize your code's memory access patterns.
Interesting. I used to work for an accommodation company in a similar space to AirBnb (in fact, I was tasked with cloning you guys before I quit...) that had customer service operations centralised in two continental hubs. Sounds like your approach will work a lot better than that.
It's different this time.
It's irrelevant- the non-copyright status of an API/language specification is already well established in europe.

The war is over whether you can subsequently block these with patents on the concepts underlying the API
Don't mind the note in the article:

> Did you like this article? Please accept our trial subscription offer to be able to see more content like it and to participate in the discussion.
Pegasus mail.
http://www.pmail.com/
What are the boundary conditions here? I'm a young developer (23) who's made over half a million USD$ from web apps while in school - would many companies be interested in hiring even with programming languages I have little to no experience with?
Facebook isn't so dumb that they haven't seen YouTube as Google's trojan horse for a long time. Facebook has had a video platform since 2007 -- it just hasn't taken off.

> I miss the days when Google, Apple, and Facebook cooperated rather than squabbled.

I don't; competition is good.
And have their employees work out of Starbucks?
San Francisco, CA - http://www.indiegogo.com: Rails, DevOps and Scalability engineers - Full Time and Internship

Indiegogo is hiring all sorts of engineers (and more) to scale out our global crowdfunding platform. With the signing of the JOBS Act, things are only heating up more and it's a great time to join (for more info: http://www.indiegogo.com/contact/press). We're closing additional funding in order to keep paces with the customer and technical demands of the new frontier of crowdfunding. In doing so, we're expanding the team and our data-driven approach to empowering anyone, anywhere, to raise money for anything - spanning creative, cause and entrepreneurial projects.

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How long was the class that you taught? I didn't see it mentioned
Why Have You Forsaken Me?
The difference is that science doesn't tell you to dogmatically follow axioms per se. For example, the constancy of the speed of light is an axiom of Einstein's theory of relativity. Evidence that disproves said constancy would eventually lead to revising the theory, just as Newton's axioms were eventually replaced by Einstein's relativity. That's not dogmatic following.

On the other hand, the virgin birth of Jesus (for example) is a dogma of Christianity. From what we know about our world, a virgin birth is not possible, not with the technology that was available at the time the Bible was written. Christians still accept this tenet of Christianity at face value, despite the ample evidence against it (evidence they would never ignore in other aspects of their lives). That's dogmatic following.
This is potentially the best post ever made on TechCrunch.
Yahoo and Digg certainly seem intent on trying.

It would take pretty deep pockets to compete with YouTube at this point. Content isn't like search, so YouTube can tick a lot of people off and still not notice.

If Hulu (or Yahoo) had built professional channels, then they might have taken some of the high traffic stuff from YouTube. If the cable-viewers only rule is implemented on Hulu, then they might take myspace's crown away.
Ask HN: What is the job-market like for a GWT (and GAE) expert?
Hi,
I've always hated Javascript, so 5 years ago, I started investing in GWT as an escape to that . Given that my background was in "real" programming languages, GWT fits like a glove. I have found it very useful (and now GAE also), but I've been using it just for my projects at work or solo. I have no idea how much it is really used out there.

I'm therefore wondering if anyone knows what is the market like for GWT experts, especially - but not only - in Europe. Is it a skill in demand? A skill for which no one really cares?
A Tale of Ten Hobbies
I don't think MS can retroactively back away from existing language specifications. So worst-case scenario would be that Mono stagnates, but even then it would not be particularly easy target for litigation for MS.
Quantum Entanglement Can Reach Into the Past
I'm definitely liking the iPad version. It's way easier to navigate compared to the iPhone version. I'm very pleased with the app overall.
Space-X Launch Delayed Again
It's funny to think that Google Video didn't take off, and Google had to buy YouTube. Now YouTube is not available for purchase by Facebook. This is interested with the instagram purchase.
They should have used the law on 'passing off' rather than copyright.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_off
The first time I taught the class it was 2 hours. I realized that was slightly too long because everyone was engaged for the first 90 minutes but energy dropped a lot toward the end.

The 2nd class I'm teaching is officially 90 mins but I'll be staying around for at least another 30 for people to ask questions.
When they were the darling of corporate email they weren't interested in having outside developers.

Then when the iPhone came out they made a half-hearted effort to attract devs but there was no app store and to sign up you had to jump through the sort of hoops that a supplier of space shuttle avionics to Nasa would expect.

Then just when they had the sign up and an app store working they made an announcement something like - "it's all going to change with our wonderful new OS but we can't say at the moment how you will program it or if your old apps will be compatible" - at which point most devs looked at their market share and compared it with the number of customers on iPhone and Android and uninstalled the SDK.
SpaceX Forced to Delay Launch to Space Station
DEV, NYC’s New Seed Fund For Digital Media Startups, Announces First Investments
We originally wanted to work in our apartment forever. We figured we could fit 100 people in 5 apartment units in our building. Assuming we would need to scale beyond that, Joe and I talked about renting every home on the street. Imagine product in one house, marketing in another... Wasn't really feasible though.
Aspirational headline, but generally good advice.

One possible dispute would be the "get ramen profitable first" point. There's a strong case to be made for taking money pre-revenue, before your metrics get harder to defend.
888 Brannan does not look anything like the pristine building pictured in the article. Why would they need to post a clearly 'shopped picture of a building that already exists unless they were hiding something?

The actual building's windows are all painted over and that tree in the foreground does not exist. The freeway overpass pictured just across the street is a homeless encampment strewn with shopping carts, human feces, and needles. The city comes by about once a month to hose the sidewalk down with a noxious bleach solution.

btw, 888 Brannan is just around the corner from Zynga and Adobe.
Note also that even if Alsup decides that APIs are not copyrightable, and knows now that this will be his decision, he needs to consider that a higher court may disagree.

If that happens, and the case comes back to him, and he had not sent infringement to the jury in this trial, he'd have to seat a new jury and conduct a new trial just on infringement. Yuck. By letting the jury consider the factual aspects now, Alsup is ensuring that one trial will be sufficient. This saves a lot of time and effort, at the slight cost of having the present jury consider something that may turn out moot.
TL;DR:

HR at some no-name start-up gets it into their head that some kid can make all their programming dreams come true. They made a blog post to lure him.

Later, HR at some other no-name startup makes a blog post proudly announcing that the kid in question applied there first, also making some annoying backhanded compliments about how their standards were too high or some lame shit.

What next? Nothing at all.
I'm actually wondering if they will ever get into the coworking space.
It's really great how private universities are putting education online. My friends and I have been watching the free Stanford iTunes U videos and have learned so much in iOS development.
How We Use Pull Requests To Build GitHub
Dropbox: Useless for documents using utf8 ( Web Interface )
Interview with the inventor of email