skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks. I meant nerds in the common meaning, derogatory or not. Let's try again and elaborate in more neutral terms:

I'm willing to accept it's useful, but it's clearly not a survival skill or there would be a lot of dead people with weak social skills but otherwise reasonably successful white collar lives out there.

Very very few cog-in-the-machine can't-talk-to-people tech people that otherwise lead reasonably comfortable middle class lives in our current society die because they don't know their own facial expressions, gestures, voice, or words.
The Web app formerly known as Twitter is nothing new.
The artist formerly known as Prince did the same thing in 1993.
Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson Reportedly Has Cancer
Point 2 is something I've heard Jeff Dean strongly suggest. Write microbenchmarks for all the basic operations of the "black boxes" you'll be using to build the system. That way, you can do quick back-of-the-envelope calculations to estimate the performance of the system before actually building it. You can explore the problem space much more quickly when you can simulate the important characteristics in your head instead of having to actually type them out into an editor.

Point 5 is something my former manager once told me. He'd done RoboGames or something like that as a grad student, and he found that invariably, the teams that won were the ones who had built the best debugging infrastructure into their robot, so that when it didn't behave as expected, they knew exactly what was wrong.

This is as much a property of the program as of the programmer. The best programs usually have debug information built into the structure of the program itself, along with an easy UI for viewing that debug info so you don't have to stare at log lines all day. Once a couple programmers start doing this and everyone else realizes how much time it saves, it becomes part of the culture of the organization, and everybody starts designing programs with an eye toward "Will I be able to figure out what's wrong if this doesn't work?"
What can Airbnb do? They're not a party to any agreement that a landlord has with their tenants, and I don't think they want that.

You're a landlord. You mentioned in another thread here that you have a strict "no subletting" clause in your contracts with your renters. What could Airbnb do to change your mind? Nothing, I would wager. They don't offer insurance to their client hosts, so they're definitely not going to assist with your insurance.
Exactly. This restraining order was the first I had heard from my landlord that he didn't want us airbnb'ing. A phone call and I would have stopped. I knew it was too good to be true.
Google now supports offline maps for mobile
Priceonomics (YC W12) Seeks Backend Developer
We are looking for someone who likes building distributed systems to crawl the web to help people make smarter purchase decisions.

Crawling & indexing millions of pages per day is not an easy task, but you're good at it. You enjoy optimizing systems, making them perform faster, and appreciate git commits where more code is removed than is added.

Our backend stack currently consists of Postgres, Celery, Django, and ElasticSearch. Last week, we had a company hackathon to see who could build the fastest autocompleter to peruse a database of 2MM products. The fastest returned in 31ms.

We ship code quickly. It breaks sometimes, but we're very quick to fix it. See the following examples:

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3930043

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3384686

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3384401

If you enjoy early stage companies (you'll have a huge impact) and hard scalability problems, send us a message. We'd be thrilled to hear from you. omar@priceonomics.com. Or check out our jobs page: http://priceonomics.com/jobs.

tl;dr: write fast code, acquire glory: omar@priceonomics.com.
Even In Defeat, Democrats Take Back Wisconsin Senate.
The 3D data they have generated are amazing. This will make the "satellite"-view MUCH more useful.
Concerns on electric cars after fiery crash
Re: looking for work. I am offering to help, not looking for work. I have a full-time job that I am very happy with.

Re:E-mail. I obfuscated my email to keep the e-mail spam crawlers from easily finding it and offering me assortments of male enhancements and my rightful cash stored in a African bank directly to my inbox.
I charge 20% up front. Doesn't matter if it's a $40,000 contract or a $4,000 contract. Freelancers are easy to screw over because most of us can't afford to take people to court. It would usually cost me way more money in legal fees than the contract is even worth.

There are people out there that, I think, love screwing over freelancers. They get joy out of it.
My favorite Ray Bradbury memory is the time he came to my school to talk about his books and ended up yelling at my English teach for trying to find hidden meaning that wasn't there just for the sake of busywork. RIP Mr. Bradbury.
Twitter's New Bird
> though if the landlord had a hand in the operation I'd imagine it would have to be a legal business

Couldn't the landlord just up the rent? That way, presumably everyone would be happy.
Google Maps, Earth take on full 3D imagery
If you are crazy then I must be batshit insane!

I left my moderately paying (but extremely boring) job in Virginia and moved back to India few months ago and I am making apps full time. Unlike you I was'nt making anything when I started.

Life in a big city in the US and India are so different that initially I was in a "wtf did I just do" phase but I kept going. Recently I started selling my hacker news app (http://www.hackerno.de ) for $$$ and things are looking better now. Even my parents have stopped asking me to get a job!

The thing that sucked most about this whole experience is undoubtedly Xcode. Your life depends on it and it will crash all the effin time!
Google Maps launches metropolitan 3D maps in Google Earth on iOS and Android
Delight out of beta: 2 line of code to capture user interaction on iOS
If they're throwing the book at you -- throw it right back. Tell your landlord that you're going to find the hotel closest to your apartment and show up with printouts of their newest illegal competitor: your landlord.

It sucks to get the government involved with these disputes, but he opened the door.
I've wondered if the declining arc of Card's writing is connected to his apparently increasing narrowness, rigidity and dogmatism in general.
Nasdaq Approves $40M Voluntary Accommodations Fund for Facebook IPO
Yeah totally, we were thinking of setting up a geo fence around the airport and automatically sending a text with their location or notifying the person being picked up that their ride has arrived.
It looks beautiful, congratulations. Which airports do you monitor? I couldn't see that on first sight.
Very cool. Interested to see what Apple does next week as well.
Likewise Michael - took a bit of poking around to edit simple UI things.
* Can you stop a guy from making experimental taco flavored cereal at home then delivering it to people who ordered it online?*

Yes, quite easily. For the guy selling tacos, possibly prison, but more likely fines. And since we're likely dealing with interstate taco sales, these fines can be enforced via wage garnishment and may even survive a bankruptcy.

For the startup...massive civil lawsuits. That corprate entity they formed? Not going to help them if they are undercapitalized with inadequate insurance or financial reserves, since the corporate veil piercing doctrine will allow plaintiffs to go after the owners and investors personally.

I don't think that the government should be this zealous in enforcing these regulations, but there's a good chance that they will try to make a few examples out of a few unlucky startups/individuals to minimize violations.
ACM's Kode Vicious: A Nice Piece of Code
Google announces Trekker, a project to record off-road ‘Street View’ data
All US airports. It works internationally too (I recently tested it in Turkey) but we aren't advertising international airport support because our international data is incomplete. If there's enough demand we'll add global airport support in the future.
They could advocate for making a "no subletting" clause less restrictive, and show some data, or at least give a rationale for why I'd want to do that.

I'm totally willing to change my mind. In fact, I'll probably take that step on my own when I rewrite my lease. I would just like to know other people's opinions on best practices instead of taking a shot in the dark, and Airbnb seems uniquely positioned to come up with something.

What would be bad is for stories like this to create a backlash from landlords against Airbnb and reduce the usefulness of the concept.
I didn't downvotes but I can see that while he gist of your comment may be reasonable, the first sentence is harsh and not necessarily correct with our limited info.
Hopefully the mellow Garage Band loop on the website wasn't too offensive ;)
I've never lived in NYC, so I have no idea how ridiculous the leases are there, but restrictions on subleasing are common everywhere.
Metro's desktop issues, and how to fix them
I can reach both www.bing.com and www.microsoft.com, but the latter seems to be blocked by a firewall rule:

~$ ping6 www.bing.com
PING www.bing.com(2001:5002:200:2::c30a:b58) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2001:5002:200:2::c30a:b58: icmp_seq=1 ttl=58 time=321 ms
64 bytes from 2001:5002:200:2::c30a:b58: icmp_seq=2 ttl=58 time=234 ms

~$ ping6 www.microsoft.com
PING www.microsoft.com(2a01:111:2004:3::13) 56 data bytes
From 2a01:111:0:2::52 icmp_seq=1 Destination unreachable: Administratively prohibited
From 2a01:111:0:2::52 icmp_seq=4 Destination unreachable: Administratively prohibited

I'm running a openvpn tunnel to a vps on a datacenter that provides me ipv6, so all my machines have a ipv6 address thanks to radvd.
It may well not be how AirBnB was intended to be used, but it definitely is. When I took a trip to London recently I rented an "apartment" (A room with a kitchen in it) from a guy on AirBnB that had at least seven rooms listed on the site.
On my own accord and not my employers, I'd like to invite developers to check out mojoLive as your career management tool. Our goals and vision are light years ahead of what LinkedIn has slowly become. Also, I dislike recruiters and spam.

http://mojolive.com
Jungle Hunt is a great game. I have it on my arcade. I never thought of it as a life lesson before. Hm.
Well that's a step in the right direction I guess... But still...
Don't forget about mobile! How this these select boxes work on ios or android?
LinkedIn releases update to their iOS app
It saddens me that every, single, time this topic comes up, HackerNews, of all places, displays an immense lack of knowledge of current password storage applications, how they work and what value they bring.

I think it's really humorous that people feel safe putting an encrypted file in something like Dropbox, but don't trust LastPass (who are doing the exact same thing, everything is local, client side encryption). Especially when you're missing out on all of the benefits of browser integration.

Please, take a whole 3 minutes and do a tiny bit of research. Your future self will thank you when people like swombat and myself get to laugh at LinkedIn, change our passwords and never think about it again.
"communistic business" - awesome
It's really not about preventing competition. The primary barrier to entry for restaurants and food vendors is, and always has been, access to the capital necessary to get it off the ground. It turns out that buying physical goods and equipment is more expensive than a free AWS account and a laptop.
This has been around for a while. Also, it's less than ideal, as it is simply a cache of the map (meaning no directions). Its good if you need a traditional map map, but not so good if you're used to the robustness of having a smartphone map.
IIRC this feature was available as a Labs experiment on the Android version
When I was in school, I often wondered how often teachers did this.
Is a weird thing with authors, that even though you never knew them other than through marks on paper, when they die it can actually feel like the death of a friend.

Bye Ray.
How data changed our engineering priorities
Coincidentally, exchanging food for money is also highly regulated in most developed countries.
Yeah, there's a continuum of

don't want > I'll take it > I'd pay for it
Today we’re launching WCITLeaks.org
The Westernization of Muslim demographics
Not offensive, but annoying when you have multiple tabs open and you don't know which one the music is coming from ;)
Employees at Japanese companies typically don't speak English (this includes engineers), so they're hesitant to hire someone who may cause communication/cultural problems.

They also generally don't have the same attitude towards hiring and are definitely not hiring for top talent. People are hired because they fit in the company culture first, and because they have potential second. Young engineers are paid cheaply and are not expected to be skilled; they are trained on the job.

Somewhat related:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3845850

It's definitely possible to get hired as a foreigner in a Japanese company, but it's not easy and the conditions are not great, compared to Facebook et al.
Apparently everybody else knows what a bookmarklet is and how to use it. Maybe a little explanation on the landing page for the laggards among us would help your adoption rates.
Binary was invented in 1617
I'll agree with others that it isn't the easiest thing in the world to customize. Here's a hacky approach I threw together under time pressure to reshade it for dark sites, for example:

http://www.exratione.com/2011/12/a-dark-style-for-chosen-sel...

Way too much CSS, but I guess that's par for the course considering how much is going on inside the thing.
Wow. Not only is every single reply to StavrosK completely wrong about how BrowserID works, they're actually doubly wrong. Not only is it NOT centralized, it also can be used with:

- 2 factor auth

- asymmetric encryption (aka, a challenge/response ala PGP)

- whatever security mechanism you want, frankly. It's up to the browserid provider.
I'd concur with the folks who say that 'shocked' is over-reaching. More like surprised the owner went straight for a restraining order rather than having a chat with him at their next meeting. If I were this guy's landlord I'd probably talk first, sue later. But that's just me. It is an interesting (and good) counter story to the one of an owner having their house trashed.

That the market is expanding is not surprising. There are a lot of empty bedrooms around. We've yet to see someone doing this with their foreclosed property but I'm sure that will happen too. Like Ebay, AirBnB seems to have a 'let the user do what they will and let whomever thinks they are harmed go after them.' A good example of this was the way software companies responded to people selling old copies of software on eBay or enterprise gear that normally requires a service contract. It may start a sort of 'race to the bottom' for some folks, we'll have to wait and see.
But, given that many of the larger ISPs (at least those available to residential customers in my area -- Comcast and Verizon) are owned by companies that also provide cable (and telephone) services, what's to stop them from simply bundling cable service with your internet service and charging a bunch extra? I realize that not everyone has this problem, but in many areas there's almost an "information monopoly" with regards to web service.
After taxes, legal costs, and the slight risk of getting evicted, $20,000 is not that much money.
It's nice looking and mostly functional but I always miss the native elements.

The thing is, when I see an OS-native-looking element I know immediately what it is.

For the skinned stuff, while it looks nice to the eye, it takes longer. When we're browsing thousand of pages a day it's kind of something you notice.
Am I the only one who feels like commentary that categorizes "good" and "bad" programmers is unhelpful? One can make a good case for somebody having more appreciable traits than another, but I would be loathe to call either "good" or "bad", even in comparison to each other. This kind of labeling is just namecalling, more harmful than helpful, a stroking of egos.

The reality is that different people have varying strengths and weaknesses for specific tasks; people have different rates of personal development in different areas. It is not a matter of "good programmer" vs "bad programmer"; it is a matter of "That person can do that task in a better way than I can" or "That person can do that task more efficiently than I can" by some perceived measure of "better" and "efficient". The comparisons between people are relative, not absolute, and divided across many kinds of traits.

However, this article does bring up a number of traits that many of us can probably agree with as "goals to achieve in personal development". For that, it has great conversation value. Personally, I like the notion that memory might be correlated to some quality of design and output.

If I were to pick a trait of importance for a programmer, it would be "Consistently improves bottom line growth." Things that factor into that might be "Writes maintainable code" and "Knows his tools well", but it is debatable that these subtraits have a clear correlation with "bottom line growth". Has anyone actually measured these things?
Good posted, upvoted. One clarification:

> That's 25 users per hash

Password choices are probably Zipf-distributed, so averages don't make a ton of sense.
With Apple about to switch away from Google Maps for maps on iOS, why doesn't Google release an iOS map app that allows offline caching as well? This would be again put their product ahead of Apple's, and maybe they would remain dominant in iOS.
Infallible Formula to Create a Money-Making Startup
Lyle McDonald is the best source out there. His website at http://bodyrecomposition.com has a near-endless wealth of articles. Alan Aragon's work (http://alanaragon.com/) is on a similar level, and in many ways he's a kinder, gentler version of Lyle. However, his best stuff is only available as part of his subscriber-only Alan Aragon's Research Review. James Krieger is another one whose website at http://weightology.net I already referenced elsewhere in this thread.

As a rule, the people whose work I lean on are those with both a deep knowledge of the underlying theory as well as clinical experience working with a range of athletes and non-athletes. Of course, you should never trust anyone unconditionally and always evaluate their reasoning on its own intrinsic merits. Someone like Charles Poliquin seemingly fits my description, but he makes most of his money from selling supplements and is always pushing his products--he recommends that you consume massive doses of his insanely overpriced fish oil, rub licorice cream on your abdomen for spot-reduction fat loss, etc--so everything he says must be taken with a truckload of salt.

People like Robb Wolf and Mathieu Lalonde from the paleo community also fit my desiderata. You can learn a lot from them, so long as you keep in mind that most of their clinical inferences are so far by necessity based mostly on anecdotal data rather than controlled studies. There are also some general issues to keep in mind with the ancestral dietary approach as generally preached and practiced. There's an underlying assumption that the ancestral diet was far more uniform across cultures than the evidence shows. They also tend to downplay the evidence that grain consumption has been around for much longer than 10,000 years, indeed closer to 100,000 years, giving plenty of time for many physiological adaptations to have taken place. Stuff like that. As with everyone with strong commitments to a specific point of view, their analysis is often subject to confirmation bias. A classic case would be Robb's analysis of the traditional Okinawan diet where he completely downplayed the very high levels of carbs consumption via rice by giving virtually all the credit for the health benefits to the fatty fish consumption.
Sorry Cheapskates, But HBO Doesn’t Want Your Money
Thanks for sharing it, had not seen it. It looks like Quora's topic selector.
Attached to the order was a complete printout of my Airbnb listing and all my reviews, included as evidence I had violated clauses in my lease. (Some leases, I have since learned, have evolved specific language prohibiting tenants from listing their pads on vacation-rental sites such as Airbnb.)

I don't buy your innocence here. I've been leasing houses for ~10 years now during and after college. The leases have always required a mix of landlord approval for subletting, banned running a business from the house, and prohibited occupation by non-lessees.

Here are two clauses from an older lease[1] I happen to have in my desk:

* Tenant shall not assign this Agreement, or sub-let or grant any license to use the Premises or any part thereof without prior written consent of Landlord.

* The premises shall be used and occupied by Tenant and Tenant's immediate family... exclusively, as a private single family dwelling.

Your faux innocence is pretty annoying actually. You were abusing the property for commercial purposes and you're surprised he didn't give you a friendly phone call?

1 Looks like the lease was originally snatched from www.academichomes.com/downloads/ExampleLeaseAgreement2.doc
V-Pole technology
The V-Pole (‘V’ for Vancouver) is a slim, modular utility pole connected to underground optical wiring. In a simple Lego-like manner, it can be installed in urban settings and provides neighborhoods with wi-fi and mobile wireless, LED street lighting, electric vehicle charging, parking transactions and can act as an electronic neighborhood bulletin board.
Well done, lads, you've brought invasion of privacy to a whole new level.
I felt the same way when I started at Facebook. The thing I've learned, though, is that your language choice is very far down the list of important factors. Most important: the problem you are solving and the quality of the engineers you work with.

Underlying your question is the idea that the specific language you work with is an investment that's critical to future success. Whether this is true depends a lot on what kind of career path you want.

I've found that lower quality jobs are the most specific about languages - "Must have 5 years of Java 1.5 or above experience" should be a huge red flag, because that place is hiring based on years-of-ass-in-chair rather than skills.

Some companies seem to be looking for specific language skills - "We're looking for great python hackers" it might say. But this is often just marketing and doesn't mean they won't take a someone who can show excellence in other ways.

There are exceptions of course - if you are doing low-level systems work, it would be expected that you know the ins and outs of C, and I'm sure there's other examples in other specialties.

One last thing: it's always useful to get experience with a range of languages, and that will pay off down the road when you have to learn language N+1. At Facebook I've written (in descending order of volume): PHP, Javascript, Python, C++ and Haskell.
Man, I used to use fish. It was great. It was like all the things people eventually make zsh do but in one convenient binary.

I think my favorite feature was that history was instantly shared among all your open fish instances.
Avoid smugness indeed.
Tc-play: a free (as in freedom) implementation of TrueCrypt