skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, it actually was "legal" as in FCC regulations; and you could get fines for broadcasting signal out of spec. (Though I've never known of it happening.)

I'm not sure what the situation is now with digital TV. My last years in the industry were before the mandatory switch, and the places I was working were simulcasting. So we were creating stuff that was NTSC safe. By then most of the software we were using took care of keeping things in spec, but some of the older equipment we were using, mostly character generators and few really cranky old switchers and effects boxes, still required that we be careful about our input levels.
I'd counsel the company to turn a profit.

But I'm not in silicon valley.
Actually at the moment you are probably in a lot better position than the bank - you have money which you are prepared to lend them at a very low rate of interest.

Similarly when you take out a mortgage - your interest is paying their salaries. It's a service industry and the bank manager is your servant.

The only different these days is that you are probably in a much better financial state than the bank!
400€/month. Paid the rent and some living costs. Non-technical internship. The other place I interviewed at and was named the pay I would have gotten 300€/month or so. (That's in Germany, by the way.)

Both was ok for me. I was still a student, so paying a bit less than I needed to survive on that wage alone was ok. It shows appreciation of my work and trust in me.
From what I hear unpaid internships are common for law students as well. It would be interesting to do more research on this, but I suspect unpaid internships happen in any field that has a surplus of workers. The tech industry doesn't have this problem so most internships are paid.
I think that goes without saying; technical interns are in high enough demand that if you're not paying minimum wage they have options elsewhere.
He got this far wearing a hoodie, why wear a tie now?
What surprises me is Square doesn't hold a rolling percentage of transactions in reserve in case of charge backs. Seems like that would avoid this situation.
I was an unpaid intern at a lobbying office last summer and will be an unpaid congressional intern this summer (both DC). However, my college has given me a stipend (sort of merit based) so I can end up net positive on the summer.

I certainly wouldn't be able to afford this if it weren't for the stipend (though I'd probably do it for less and just break even or slightly negative). The biggest thing that I think is different for my intern experience from what I hear about the horrors about unpaid interns is that I get money like a paid intern, but have the expectations of an unpaid intern. The people I work for aren't paying me, so they can't expect too much labor out of me. As far as they're concerned, their payment is in experience, so I basically got free reign to do (or watch other people do) many things that might not be productive, but I found interesting. The anecdotal evidence of my friends with paid positions had to really earn their pay and don't have anywhere near the freedom that I did. It's plausible that I just found a good internship last summer (no fetching coffee), but I would say that I personally benefited from being paid by my college and not my employer.
Half a million Americans died in the last 80 days, most due to aging. Nobody really paid much attention to that either - or the same number in the preceding 80 days, and the 80 days prior to that, and so on. One can ponder what that says about humans.
Except it isn't a random outside party. It's his credit card processor and it wasn't a random amount, it was the specific amount under dispute.
KLIK for iOS (iPad,iPhone) Released
Twitter engineers talk Scalding: Powerful & Concise MapReduce Programming
1. Yes, he was an asshole. And is.
2. Who cares how old Wall Street is? Does this magically make an asshole into less of an asshole, or instantly grant him credibility? I sing classical music written by dudes who have been dead for centuries; I don't see anyone lining up to give me more respect and money than bankers. Why not? Don't I automatically deserve it?
3. No, they do not "rule the game". Zuck is the guy with something of value here. Not the bankers. Did you notice which direction the money is flowing here? That tells you who has the power in this transaction.
Thus begins the HackerNews vote blackmarket.
Directories in Unix were/are files that just contain pointers to other files. So they are a bit like a directory in a building. However, "folder" is probably an improvement if you think in terms of it _containing_ other things. Folders are still recognizable real things. Ask any hipster. Now let's talk about folders that contain other folders and so on. There is where the physical metaphor gets strained. Still, it's fine and quite contemporary.
I dunno, I think we could all use a bit more pubic humility ;)
Microsoft are keen to position Windows 8 on ARM as "just like Windows 8 on x86," when in fact it is nothing of the sort.
Really interesting report
I begin with questions to understand more teams context and to get to know other aspects that are interesting to me.

1) How often teams released in each of the 4 years

2) What is the state of the code-base (i.e. how many parts of the code devs would prefer not to work with, how many bugs are discovered only in production, what is the CC, what is the size of the longest method/class, how many conditionals and static members are in the code, how much time it take for a new team member to do it's first check-in)

3) What about collective code ownership ?

4) How many time you discovered/learned things only after releasing a feature and how are you dealing with that now

5) How much unknowns, uncertainties, unexpected-unpredictable events and changes there are in your domain and business and how you deal with them

6) What about devops and support and operation of the system in production?

7) what about the features released, how much they are the right features for the users and for the stakeholders ? how much early the team spot the wrong feature?
> The (huge) sticking point is cross-platform development and work on Windows.

It's still pretty good thanks to the work the Xamarin guys have done.

We have a large .NET code based developed on Windows for Windows and out of curiosity once we tried to compile under Mono. We were expecting hundreds of issues and we ended up with only a few errors and if I'm not mistaken I believe it had to do with some of the file based handling code we had. Granted we never fixed those and attempted to run it, but I think they've done some amazing work.

Even now, one of the only ways (maybe the only?) to build a re-usable library for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7 is to build .Net library that compiles under Mono.
Windows 8 vs Ubuntu 12.04 vs MacOS X 10.7
Data Visualization: Your Startup's Exit Valuation
The alternative isn't "not dipping in working capital", the alternative is "freezing all received funds for a month, all the time".

Chargebacks happen; and you shouldn't expect that you will get paid for 100% of your sales. Deal with it or don't accept credit cards - the rules of the credit card game favor the cardholder a lot, that's why customers want to use their cards.
The Fiction to Reality Timeline
If you care about reliability of the delivery, you can do a number of things: do a single call, wait for response and retry if needed, or store the messages in mnesia and only notify there's something to pick up (pull scenario with ack), or do a number of other possible things.

Lost messages are a fact of life really - the same will happen with any other system - either you persist the message and ack the reception on every stage or you risk dropping the queue.
So in other words your apps mostly involved rendering text to a page and letting form submissions edit the database. Which explains why IE support is incredibly easy for you.
Of course if he was a real maverick he would tell the bankers and the stock market to stuff it.

He has more customers on his site than the Nasdaq has share buyers/sellers. If he decided to reinvent stock markets and simply sell shares directly to facebook members then you would see some panic!

After all if shares are all traded electronically why do we need a room full of scrolling displays pretending to be ticker tape and opened by a bell? Why not have buying and selling shares in any company a feature of facebook ?
Nice. I particularly like your zooming icons.
Agreed. Square's policy seems clear. Since Square pays out transactions very quickly, it's essential to be able to recover funds when there are questions. Merchants need to anticipate this. The alternative is Square holding the money for a long time, which nobody wants.

Clearing funds at any time (not just on business days), as Dwolla proposes[1], will mitigate some aspects of the OP's concern.

It appears to me that Square's service is superb and prompt, especially when compared with a traditional credit card processor that won't even accept email inquiries.

[1] http://blog.dwolla.com/ach-goes-real-time-with-fisync-free-f...
Maybe Gandhi challenged the status quo with his choice of outfit, but a billionaire turning up to a meeting in a suit is hardly sticking it to the man.

What if the billionaire forces the bankers to take 1/3 of their usual cut? Is that sticking it to the man? I say it is.
it was 100,000 per year for five years.

The article mentions that people did notice when it was dropped down, but doesn't mention anything about when deaths/year went up.
You'd be doing God's work!

Companies with better-balanced workforces deserve to be recognized.
How long have you been on HN? I assure you that a colossal amount of virtual ink has been spent complaining about Apple's closed OS, their opaque app store policies, etc. Stories about iOS apps getting rejected dominated the front page for many weeks.

I'd say the community here is far more understanding of Microsoft than, say, the Slashdot crowd.
Been thinking about switching to Mixpanel, but can't see any massive improvements over the new Google Analytics, and it looks a lot more tedious to set up.

Any opinions here?
The real world is noisy and messy. Our senses are evolved to deal with that. When we sense something not noisy or messy, it really stands out. When I first started working with digital imagery, back in the 1970s, it looked very alien and harsh. Of course a lot of it still does to a certain extent, but we've learned to accept it as a kind of visual language. I would expect that most readers of Hacker News can't remember a time when they weren't surrounded by digital images and sounds.
Fairly simplistic but interesting way to make data an interactive part of the conversation.. without excel.
He thinks to highly of himself but I find it fashionating why he thinks so highly of himself.

He is absolutely blind to how little his money actually gets him. There is two much money (which is what happens when the FED prints money) chasing too few good investments that needs them (which is what happens when the price to run a company keeps going down).

But yeah, he just cannot fathom that money are not as important and that he by proxy isn't going to be as important.
The end of Earth, the end of us, and the end of the universe
You mean like the PS3?
Exceptions indicate //exceptional conditions//, i.e. conditions other than the intended state transitions of the program. They aren't a guard against crashing, they are a mechanism for formalizing error states in the program.

Memory corruption? Appropriate response: fail. Logic error? Appropriate response: fail. Exception? Appropriate response? Decide if program can continue, respond.

I'd say the bigger issue is less of "exceptions" so much as "states". Adding any kind of error handling increases the number of state conditions that your program may be in, and that complexity is obscenely hard to manage. I don't think C or C++ or Java or Erlang or any other language will free you from the burden of proper software engineering.
" maybe it's just me, but the customer pays you, they can send as many emails as they want"

It's just you. Emails for a company at this scale enter a ticket queue, not somebody's inbox. Adding more tickets for the same issue impedes the company's ability to help other customers and doesn't get you help any faster.

They didn't scold him. They told him facts-- that it didn't help anything and that the system (i.e. the software) might flag him as a spam if he hammered on it too hard.

Regarding the core issue-- they have a stated policy on chargebacks. It isn't "guilty until proven innocent", it's "Square gets to hold the money in question until it's sorted out-- and when you set up your account, you connect an account and authorize us to debit $ to cover a negative balance".

This is just how chargebacks work. It's somewhat dictated by the credit card companies-- I'm not sure Square has much flexibility to have a different policy even if it made sense to do so (IMO, their policy is perfectly reasonable).
AWS is Not the prime enabler of Scalability
* Chargeback's can't be resolved faster;
* They can't (and shouldn't) give him this money - as it's quite likely that this money will never be paid, the dispute rules favor the cardholder quite much.
How a Simple Technique Helped Me Figure Out What I Want to Do with My Life
My claim is that object teardown is not what the destructor is for. Teardown encompasses many things that are not resource releasing. Destructors are for releasing resources, not necessarily guaranteeing their destruction.

For example, fclose can fail, but even if it does, the stream given is no longer held. In fact, any further use of the stream is undefined. There is certainly a place for logging in this situation, but if close was a behavior of the class, it should have a separate close function.

As far as locking goes, it is the responsibility of the locking routine (probably a semaphore) to release the callers hold on the lock, but it is not the callers responsibility to ensure that whatever resources are associated with the lock (e.g., a file) actually get deleted. That is the locking object's responsibility.

I agree that some aspects of RAII could be better, but C is not the answer to that. C doesn't even have scope-based RAII.
Carrying on two jobs is technically possible but it would still be remarkably difficult and I think unrealistic to do this. The argument that the system overly benefits the wealthy is still valid.
Exceptions shouldn't be used as gotos. Instead of letting every exception bubble to the top, handle them at the appropriate level in the stack where you can recover from the error they representing.
Google raises concerns over browser restrictions in Windows 8
Stocks generally don't trade on purely quantitative analysis, but on investor assessments of their 'story' and how that will play out over time. If you think corporations are going to invest in networking gear you look at Cisco et al. You inspect that universe for management (good or bad?) / product (great? promising new stuff? obsoleting?) / financial stories (leverage? balance sheet clarity?), and for valuation (P / E, enterprise value to EBITDA). If you think someone's valuation is low given the stories you believe, you buy.

For seasoned stocks a market consensus about the relevant stories emerge, and events within those stories drive the trading moves. People making money by being the first to adopt or drop stories.

But an IPO has no market-consensus stories of its own. So the book-building process involves explaining the company and getting market feedback on the credibility of that story.

Now this may or may not make sense. But it does give management some feeling of relationship with the market, by which they can hear what investors think and possibly influence those perceptions. Given the importance of stock price to most managements, it would be a very bold team that went forward without any perceived tool for managing the process.
"We find the largest rise in American mortality rates occurred in 1999, the year Vioxx was introduced, while the largest drop occurred in 2004, the year it was withdrawn"

Moreover:

"Vioxx was almost entirely marketed to the elderly, and these substantial changes in the national death-rate were completely concentrated within the 65-plus population."

And:

"The FDA studies had proven that use of Vioxx led to deaths from cardiovascular diseases such as heart attacks and strokes, and these were exactly the factors driving the changes in national mortality rates."
The New Bing Makes Google Look Anti-Social
Goodbye, CouchDB
"Basically, there is nothing inherently better about jeans and a t-shirt"

More comfortable, more durable, cheaper, better selection of comfortable footwear that doesn't need servicing by a person at the airport or the main floor of an office building... need I go on?
"Though we probably learned this is not the way to use them, I have seen numerous real-world examples where this was the case."

Ah, Java code at my workplace.

catch(Exception e) {}
Testing A against B. A is found to be faster.

People in the B community come out in outrage saying that the testing is flawed, that microbenchmarking is useless, that this and that. Rinse and repeat.
That's automated hinting, it's available in TrueType, Freetype and professional type design software.
How to Close a LinkedIn Account with a "Large Network of Connections"
Yeah, that's morbid all right. I'm reminded of "Quietus" in Children of Men.
Intentionally ostracizing entire developer communities is counter-productive. Where APIs are concerned, all hackers are created equal, regardless of language. That is, in my mind, the beauty of APIs - they can be accessed equally regardless of your chosen development environment or language.
Come now, I'm sure he has an awesome idea, but we have to sign an NDA to hear it.
I would argue that suit paints are actually much more confortable than jeans.

Jeans are just nice because you don't have to worry about tearing them etc.
I have sent some emails internally at Adobe to clarify the message here and hopefully this will be addressed soon. The bulletin notes a security update to CS5.5 and earlier versions as well as this issue being resolved in CS6. I suspect that it is really a matter of poor wording within the bulletin but, as this isn't my area of expertise within the company, I am trying to confirm.
Economic Mobility in the US by State
His numbers may be high but $40-50k/yr is pretty low. My impression is that software developer positions at top companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc) pay about 2x that.
An interesting marketing ploy. See also, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=286LN2ulNLU.
Opera Mini on iOS does all of it's rendering in the cloud and passes compressed images to the phone. I'm pretty sure they use their own rendering engine, not WebKit.
Bing launches massive redesign
Introducing The New Bing: Spend Less Time Searching, More Time Doing
"... unpaid internships are huge drivers of inequality."

I believe that they can be, but as someone who actually had an unpaid intern (and who eventually got said intern a job at the company where we were working), let me make a case that they do not have to be exploitative.

I personally enjoy teaching, and have taught at two different universities. In addition to simply being a rewarding thing to do, it is a good way to get even better at whatever you are teaching.

So when I was the production manager in charge of making a bunch of marketing sites for small insurance agencies, I called up one of the local universities. They were quite happy (after some conversations with their faculty) to send me a student who was getting ready to graduate and who was interested in creating content for the web.

I didn't expect the intern to get any actual work done, just to kind of try and work through some of the projects that we were doing. The work that I was giving him was pretty much the same work that the paid staff were getting, and although we actually did end up using elements of his designs he was much slower and had a much smaller skill set than someone I would actually hire.

However, after a semester of working with us, his markup, scripting, and associated skills were a lot better. In addition to his own efforts, I spent time structuring his work assignments in ways that built from one topic to the next, and was available to critique his work in ways that he found useful.

So, this relationship was mutually beneficial: he is more skilled than he was, has at least some work experience to put down (other than food service), he received course credit (IIRC), and got a picture of what the inside of that kind of agency looks like.

For our part, we got a very small amount of marginal work, and for my personal part I improved my own scripting and CSS skills, in addition to simply enjoying working with folks who are learning.

Now, if we were just trying to fill a minimally skilled position with someone who was an employee and skim by calling them an "intern" instead of "an exploited worker", that would be different.

But I believe it is possible (though perhaps not likely) that unpaid, non-exploitative internship relationships can exist.
Show HN: Controlling soundcloud from keyboard
Paper: Paxos Made Moderately Complex
You can do this even without a computer. There are two approaches that still work (i.e., that don't focus on biased wheels, as the casinos fixed that bug since years): Wheel watching and distance counting. The first lets you watch the rhythm of the croupier when he spins the wheel and the ball. The second just lets you count the distance between the results in the wheel. The first works way better, but requires much more training.

But I guarantee you: This kind of work is mind-numbing. I did this for a while in 1999 and let it go, members of our group continued with it over years and really suffered from the boredom. The same with gaming the slot machines (they have certain regularities or bugs, depending on the model) or poker and other games. So if you're a hacker, the challenge and fun wears off pretty quick and you wish you had a cubicle job instead.

Anyway, there are books from the mathematician and physicist Pierre Basieux, unfortunately only in German.
I must disagree. If history is any indicator, MS will fuck it up big time.

TBH I do hope they succeed, it will be good for Apple to have REAL competition. I think of Windows on ARM as "iMS" or the "WinPad"
Organisations have decided that this specific set of internships aren't worth paying a wage for. Workers have decided that they are worth their time, for the experience/foot in the door they gain.

If you ban unpaid internships, companies won't offer the positions anymore (as they have decided their value is zero), which means people seeking them won't be able to obtain them.

Sounds like everyone would actually be worse-off.
Thanks jonmarkgo, good point. Not intending to ostracize anyone here, in fact quite the opposite. Working hard to be as inclusive as we possibly can. 8-]
Injecting formality into a construction site I can see: Steel-toed boots prevent smashed feet, hard hats stop brain damage, tool belts keep the floor/ground clear from obstacles.

What does a suit confer other than "you have to wear this because you do"? What are they, five years old?
Also perhaps, is to choose Tastypie if you want API Key Authentication, and Django-Rest-Framework if you want oAuth.

That's the reason I chose Tastypie over everything else, but I really like the user-facing interface to Django-Rest better than I do Tastypie. Not enough to forego our preferred authentication-schema mind you, but I wouldn't hate having Class-based APIs either, but I haven't found that to be limiting in Tastypie either.

Also, there's a Tastypie implementation for Mongo floating around out there somewhere as well.
There is choice though, Opera and Dolphin both work on iPad and iPhone. Not as tightly integrated, I'll give that, but they are there.

There doesn't seem to be the notion of changing the "Default" browser but you certainly can load them up, put them in the doc, etc.