skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Past projects are typically not solo projects, so it's hard to establish who did what."

That's why I give references, they can comment/confirm what I did. If they're bad (but professional) references, they'll just confirm that I worked with them.

Also, I wasn't clear, but I meant personal projects (with commit records) as a separate consideration from employment.
New Adult Search Engine Thriving
This search engine hosted by the popular tumblr.com is gaining popularity fast. It's simple,fast,easy and it's powered by Google.
Ben NanoNote - tiny linux device perfect for notetaking
Seems to break if you have a link without an href.

It also seems to blow away any previous listeners places on elements. Any plans to have callbacks for events so that listeners can be re-bound?

Aside from that, looks totally sweet. I'm going to use this in a bunch of places.
I'm sad I thought this was going to be something similar to the noteslate.
Fire the QA department :
Error: Can't open file: './yliu0_myhw/mhwSet.frm' (errno: 24)

:) Looks nice.
It used to be linked from this page but it looks like it's 404 ATM

http://www.surveygizmo.com/company/jobs/
Is there a real controversy over whether the Harappan script is writing vs. "a kind of ornamentation"? Your comment smacks of condescension but I'm sure you can just provide citations. Your (wikipedia) article contains some arguments based on relative frequency of symbols, but is controverted by studies of modern pictographic languages with similar characteristic (e.g. Chinese.)

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5931/1165

You also mentioned the Brahmi script is "unquestionably based on the scripts of the ancient Near East". That is also news to me. Could you provide citations, please?

The real controversial implication, IMHO, of studying ancient Indian languages is that Sanskrit (used over thousands of years and refined by rigid grammar rules by e.g. Panini 500 B.C.) may actually be the language from which Latin, and hence many European Romantic languages, developed.

http://mutiny.wordpress.com/2007/02/09/sanskrit-mother-of-eu...

That's probably worth diving into, if you are genuinely curious. As the Welsh linguist Sir William Jones said,

"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists."

[edit- link added and fluff redacted. :)]
Wasn't there a mathematical study that concluded that the Indus script has the structure of a language? I found an article on it http://grimoires.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/grim-writing-the-i...
What Startups Can Learn From Instagram
The iphone virtual keyboard has a button for '.com' that is much easier than typing .ly
"the c standard only guarantees that they don't evaluate to 0"

Why do people who haven't checked the C standard make such claims? My C lecturer made exactly the same mistake.
Shake to pause your mobile game
For me, motivation is the key and projects that don't involve a customer or end user or someone directly benefiting from the tasks involved don't get completed.

Obviously, you can envision someone benefiting from long term projects. But that is not the same thing as an actual person actually benefitting. You can't imagine it. You can't fake it. You need it.

So find some way to get real people involved in what you want to accomplish.
My first thought was 'oh, another node.js chat app...', but I have to say, the design is really slick - very cool.
Dark chocolate could prevent heart problems in high-risk people
We've moved on to a fictitious setup. I was so disgusted with my bank and their password policies and authentication measures. They too restrict to 8 characters, but they happen to also offer a SecurID token. This token can be used in conjunction with the initial authentication. I would happily switch to any bank where I can know my data is secure. How do we trust them?
Oh - and they might want to add .DS_Store to .gitignore :)
Although I agree with your view in general, their case is slightly different. Their entire product is at its core URLs, while it's advantageous to obtain the .com of their name in this case I don't believe it's the end of the world nor will it be a big issue. With a site like Twitter word of mouth is important and valuable, but with a site like refer.ly where all encounters with the site will come with a URL it's no big issue.
I'm surprised they used mixed-case file names when their class names are lowercase. You have to remember both capitalizations. Mixed-case file names can also be problematic when porting to case-insensitive file systems like Windows' or Mac OS X'.
You picked the perfect example to be wrong about :)

Facebook ships every day, and in the early days they shipped continually because they were editing the code on the live servers (no revision control even). I doubt that anyone would have called the very first version of facebook "great", but they've shipped thousands of times since then, and now they have product with a billion users. And of course Facebook wasn't his first product either -- remember the Facemash story?
Has anyone got a recommendation for a book on this topic? Amazon is pulling up nothing.
If I understand correctly, selling the historical data would make your site pretty much valueless because anyone can do what your doing if they want to collect current and future data.

Assuming that is the case, my simple advice would be to sell the website and its historical data as a package and move on to a new challenge.

With several interested parties competing, you can probably determine a reasonable market price. As others become aware of and interested in the data, competitors will appear. Your historical data will become less valuable as it ages and becomes less reflective of current trends.

Relying on the secret sauce to create value works if you're doing something as disruptive as Google a decade ago. But for straight forward statistics on something that's easy to collect, first mover advantage is going to be limited.

Good luck.
Ask HN: I'm writing my first book ever, on HTML5, do you have any advice?
I signed the contract last week.

I'm shooting for ~500 pages, give or take, with the largest part being Canvas at ~150 pages. The book will be in full color.

I've never written anything of this scale before and certainly never authored a book.

Do you have any advice in general? Or anything you'd wish was in an HTML5 book that might not be present in others so far, etc?

Also, do you have any pet peeves about technical books, or things you wish authors did more or less of?

Thanks!
Interesting article, but submitting it with this as the title is misleading. The "death spiral" quote is from the text of the article, and is not used to describe the gender gap as a whole, but rather what happens when an individual startup fails to bring on any women in the first 15 to 20 employees (i.e. bringing one woman into an environment with 20 men is nigh impossible, and just gets harder as you hire more and more men because you can't hire any women).
No it doesn't take "a click". It's pathetic how you malign Amazons good name, when they were the ones who are the victims in this case.
LOL. Before clicking on the link I said out loud, "This will be yet another article blaming the 'collapse' of an 'ancient civilization' on 'climate change'."

Clicked the link, wasn't disappointed.
Very important document. At year end, how many employees really believe they're in the bottom 50% of a population? And is it really worth fighting this when measurement of ability is so hard?

Most "Up or Out" firms need to cull people so they are firm, and try to create the appearance of rigor.

Most software firms find this much more difficult. Very few start-ups have formal evaluation processes, which sounds terrible to the MBA crowd, but could just be admitting that it's impossible to really fairly judge people. (Deming would say judge the system anyway)
Are there any disadvantages of TeX being Turing complete?
You can do it with images as well.

If the site lets you upload an image to a readable directory you may be able to trick the webserver into executing your image.

This and the SQLite issue are not limited to PHP BTW, PHP is just most common.

To prevent this make sure never to let the user control the on disk filename of an image they upload!

I would actually never let the webserver directly serve uploaded files to the user. Store the files in a directory not served by a webserver, and use a small bit of code to read the file and send it to the user.

I always run my code such that the webserver has read only access to any directory it will serve. This helps limit exploits since the attacker has no ability to write anything and then have it execute. (Not a panacea of course, if you have a large enough bug, the attacker could write to /tmp then exec the code.)
First look at Nintendo's Wii U Miiverse social network
One of the things that has been making me nervous is that my supervisor sent all the interns a list of technologies that would be useful to "have some familiarity with" going in. How much on-the-job training is there typically in a programming job and how much are you expected to learn on your own time or before coming in? I, being overly neurotic, mapped out a time plan for becoming strong in all the areas over the course of three weeks, but getting an apartment/buying furniture got in the way and I only got half of them done.
Well, there is some controversy, not considerable. But I think that mostly stems from the fact that no one has been able to decipher it yet.

But computer analysis and all was done recently to strongly suggest this is indeed a script rather than some kind of ornamentation.

Please refer to the following TED talk by one of the scientists who worked on it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/rajesh_rao_computing_a_rosetta_ston...
This makes me wonder, what is the difference in technologies? I never used IRC to be honest, was it downloadable software or was it web based? (I'm not that young I swear, I'll be 35 next week - I just didn't do chat)
what if the mouse-over triggered a POST?
- They are partnering with businesses and many of those businesses aren't familiar with .ly to the extent that tech people are.

http://refer.ly/business

The local pizza shop probably isn't aware of bit.ly. Which now uses bitly.com (bit.ly redirects.). Ditto for recur.ly -> recurly.com.

- Their current branding shows "referly" not "refer.ly"

- Email addresses at the company are @refer.ly and could easily get addressed to @referly.com - best case scenario it bounces (and the bounce is noticed). Worse case scenario the email is read by someone else.

- You are underestimating the amount of word of mouth in a domain being passed along. You don't want to have to spell it out that's refer dot .ly anymore than you want to call it "referlee.com" and have to spell that out.

- A mainstream media article on the company will throw off potential customers that aren't familiar with .ly domains

- Ditto for mention on any TV etc.

Swimmers shave their body hair to gain any additional advantage in speed they can. Definitely worth avoiding problems in this area. The name of a company is always an important issue to consider.
You don't have to be an artist to steal — or artists are everywhere
Live demo up here if anyone else was curious: http://www.pssdbt.com:3000

If you want to run it yourself on a public-facing server, you'll need to change the connection to Socket.IO on line 2 of /public/js/script.js to point to your server instead of localhost. I also had to edit /views/themes/default/room_list.jade and put the 'each room,key in rooms' bit inside of an 'if rooms' statement because that was throwing an error.

Also worth noting, nothing is filtered (you can send <script> tags for example and they'll run for everyone).
Ah I didnt see your comment, but I added the TED talk which talks about this in the thread, up above. I hope this doesn't constitute spamming, but here is the link.

http://www.ted.com/talks/rajesh_rao_computing_a_rosetta_ston...
I'm pretty sure that the book and TV series "The Story of India" has a section on the Harappan civilization:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_India
Steeped in video game culture and barraged by positive male tech industry role models, boys tend to dominate conversations around computing early on, leaving girls feeling shut out, said Yeung .

this contradicts the evidence that social network use is mostly from girls
> and any AI that could mimic human consciousness is far in the future

Is it just me, or people who says these things gives you the impression they have no clue what neither consciousness or AI is? These people seem to want computers to mimic humans just for mimicking human's sake. They think they want to see a computer "smarter than a human". But what they really want is just a really complex fart app. We already have plenty of robots who do plenty intellectual of tasks, even learning, much better than humans. But hey, they don't really fart as realistically yet. So the singularity is still far away!
Nintendo Reveals "Wii U" Gamepad
Whomever thought this was a good idea needs to be kicked in the groin.
i stopped reading articles with "brogrammer" in them. it's overused to the point of absurdity right now.
Well fundamentally website optimization is not a multi-armed bandit problem. You are not simply choosing between machines. Instead each website change is another node on a tree and you want to find the highest performing path in constantly changing world, with additional constraints that you can't keep incompatible machines for very long.

A guess at good strategy in those situations would be something that enables you to choose a good path from a small number of options and keep doing so - on the basis that the cumulative advantage will be far more important than any particular choice in itself. Sounds like A/B testing would win if you could actually map the complexity of the problem correctly.
Sabbatical - what it's like not to work
>That's the same thing that would happen if nobody downloaded it for free but only a few people purchased it.

Agreed. In that case, I think it would make sense to conclude "there is little to no interest in my app," instead of "people want my app but would rather not pay for it."
How do you know if your kid is ready to program?
Agreed. Shame to see so many reputable companies not give a rat's ass about security when they seriously prompt for security questions like "Where was your honeymoon?" or "What was your first car?" -- I've even seen "Where did you graduate High School?"
Why not Haskell?
Well, EBC, or electronic codeblock, is a block cipher that operates

block cipher _mode_

Because I chose AES in 256-bit mode

with 256-bit _key_

AES is operating on 256-bit blocks at a time

It operates on 128-bit blocks.

etc, etc.

Wikipedia page on modes of operation is a better and more correct introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_modes_of_operatio...
Well, just to clarify further, whenever I talk like this, people think I mean to completely do away with money and/or move towards a traditional socialist or techno-communist model.

I don't want to do that. I think that almost all anti-capitalists are missing a very important lesson that we can take as a major success of capitalism: diversity and distribution is very important for robustness and ease of system evolution. Technocrats, techno-communists, social democrats, almost all seem to be aiming for centralization which has been proven to be extremely inadequate.

So I think the way forward is to create a system that while encouraging a great diversity of distributed, localized solutions to problems, at the same time the local solutions are developed and evaluated holistically over a comprehensive common global scientific information schema and database.
It's also how Kernell "hacked" Sarah Palin's email account: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin_email_hack
How California Could Force the Rest of the US to Label GMO Foods
40k might be pushing it, but 10-15k should be no problem on current hardware.

More importantly IRC servers have a battle hardened scaling solution baked right in, based on the spanning tree protocol.

Anyone looking to write a scalable chat software would be well advised to study the evolution of IRC. Anyone looking to hack a scalable chat solution would be well advised to use a mature IRCd for the backend.
Do you have a degree? What field is the degree in?
These articles typically throw the ratio of female to male employees out there as a statistic. How do we know that gender discrimination is the biggest factor in the gender gap? It's not hard to imagine that men and women on average would have different career preferences even without discrimination.
Rise of Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) API Stacks
I seriously considered buying one of these six months ago, but the lack of Wi-Fi ended up being a deal-breaker for me, unfortunately. It is possible to add Wi-Fi using a microSD chip[1], but then I wouldn't be able to expand beyond the 2GB of on board storage.

It still looks like a fantastic product though. I'm really looking forward to seeing a future Nanonote with Wi-Fi built-in.

[1] http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Ben_NanoNote_Wi-Fi
The 'trick' to edit the macros in a scratch buffer alone is worth the reading, but there's plenty more here. Very good write up.
While I agree with the point of the article I could help but think this writer didn't do too much research. Hewlett-Packard's CEO is Meg Whitman. I get the article was referring to the original entrepreneurs but another could could have been chosen.
It's also throwing a 404 error for modernizr. It's looking for it in /rooms/js/libs/modernizr..., but it's actually in /js/libs/modernizr....

This'd all be easier to confirm, obviously, if they'd have set up a demo site. Anyone else care to take a gander?
Hate to bring hateraid to the party but I hope that education includes tolerance of others like women, foreigners, those with other religions beliefs, etc.

Start with augmentiing the culture to include women in positions of power.
These articles rub me the wrong way.

Unless their parents are engineers, girls also aren't likely to encounter coders in their own lives the same way they would, for example, a doctor or a teacher. "We don't really have that same kind of interaction with software engineers as we go about our daily lives," Goldfein said.

Neither of my parents were engineers (uneducated truck/bus drivers actually) and I never interacted with engineers growing up. So... simply "being male" was my influence to be an engineer? I call bullshit.
I have a BSc and MSc in Computer Science.
Anyone who knows anything know that most people also chose stupid passwords. They know that the stupid password will be used across multiple sites. Those sites might well store the password in plain text or with broken hashing. But those people also know that rule-lists like this one are stupid. Users get frustrated and confused and have to rapidly create a compliant password, which leads to weak passwords that get written down in silly places.

We know all this. We've known all this for many many years.

ID theft (grabbing the first number from a search engine) costs "£2.7 billion per year".

Why are we stuck with dumb archaic authentication systems? Why isn't this space being disrupted?
That's because they were using a relative reference, fixed it.
No need for the past tense, IRC is very alive!

Popular GUI-clients would be Colloquy on Mac, mIRC on windows and XChat on linux. Just download one and see for yourself; Freenode is a popular network for hackers of all kinds, QuakeNet is the network for gamers (and also happens to be the biggest with ~60k users online at any given time).
Lean? take a look at the history of Lego
to be fair... using a social network site is not exactly conversations around computing.
I use pwdhash for all my primary web passwords, but I have a secondary password that I use as my response to all security questions. I think this is a decent solution, but some services (I believe Apple is one example) requires multiple security questions and requires the responses to all be distinct.
In the federal courts, I think it is more a matter of philosophy than of economic necessity. Unlike state courts, federal courts use the single-judge calendar system, meaning that any given case is assigned to one judge for all purposes from beginning to end. This means that a judge who is proactive in managing cases will reap direct rewards in keeping his docket under control. In addition, federal judges sit for life and cannot be removed except for grounds justifying impeachment. They thus has enormous power and some run their courts almost like little fiefdoms (or at least it seems that way!). When they want to twist arms, the parties have little choice but to comply, even as they might buck and kick in the process. In any case, when high-powered lawyers and their litigant clients come into federal court and try to muscle the court and the other parties, the judge has a basic choice: do I let this go on unchecked or do I set a tone by which I control things. Eventually, the judges realized that they had to be aggressive in setting the right tone and this in time became the norm with many of them. It definitely ties in with the idea of not letting the courts be completely overwhelmed but it is not budget-driven as such but rather is motivated by necessities of reining in cases (and lawyers and parties) that would otherwise run wild to the detriment of the judge and his docket. Today, federal judges will vary on how much they use such power to curtail abuse and to promote aggressive management but the trend is very much, as you say, toward proactive management.
ues the up arrow to the left to vote - posting a comment does not vote
That's just the way the press works. e.g. 'Pivot' has been a perfectly normal business term for a long time, then 1 tech company used it, suddenly dozens of companies were 'pivoting' and eventually people start avoiding articles using the term. It'll fade away soon (hopefully).
Can financial engineering cure cancer?
Society that doesn't ban automation will soon collapse under overwhelming technological unemployment.

Note: I am not advocating the banning of automation.
rplnt, you should try using a magnet link extension (or greasemonkey script) for your browser.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dmknbldjfdgmfecaai...
I'm a programmer, and SICP is by far the most interesting programming book I have ever read. I have become a better programmer over time, but I don't know if reading the book made me a better programmer, since time is a confounding variable.
Seems like the bilking of devs for free work could be mitigated by making sure copyright of the test web app code remained with the developer being hired.

Like you said, a small project is a little bit of a red herring. No small test project done in a short amount of time (like a few days) is really going to be complex enough to test if a developer is actually proficient enough to work on a large project.
Lawn Boy 10604 20-Inch 149cc 6-1/2 GT OHV Kohler Gas Powered Lawn Mower
Intel announces new Intel science and technology center for Big Data
Ask HN: How to reward beta testers?
We are currently preparing our beta testing plan for our application (http://carmivore.com) and we will soon start inviting testers. We will charge a monthly subscription fee for the final product, but are unsure how to reward our testers properly.

Any recommendations and tips welcome!
4MNOW - the best backend server system for your app!!! Has tons of features and integrates the most popular ad networks like chartboost, tapjoy, etc. Easy SDK to install!