skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Verbling YCS11- Frontend/Backend/Flash AV engineers: come fix language learning
About us

We connect language learners with native speakers around the world for face to face verbal practice through live video. After GigaOM named us a top 5 company out of the 63 in our Y Combinator Summer 2011 batch, we went on to raise capital from helpful VCs and angels in an oversubscribed round. Our offices -- fully equipped with pet jellyfish -- are in SOMA, San Francisco.

About you

You work best in highly productive, small environments. You thrive on the fast pace and development cycle of a startup, but you're also a fun person to hang out with outside of work. You want your contribution to have global reach, and to bring together and meaningfully improve the lives of millions of people around the world.

Frontend engineer (Responsibilities)
- Implement a world-class UX experience for an international, multilingual user base
- Create simple and reusable UI components that interact real-time with our backend
- Quickly iterate on experimental features
- Optimize frontend for usability, cross-browser compatibility, and render time (Requirements)
- Significant experience with HTML/CSS/Javascript
- Bachelors's degree in CS (or related) field
- Work on an agile team with continous integration and deployment, ready to jump on any urgent task
- Passion for design, simplicity, and HCI (Plus)
- Previous projects (personal, academic, or corporate) that show a zest for design and engineering.
- Experience with MVC frameworks, Backbone, jQuery, Require.js/AMD, Socket.io
HTML5 and Flash integration

Backend engineer (Responsibilities)
-Implement scalable backend modules to serve real-time features
-Work with frontend engineers to plan and implement new ideas for a first-class conversation tool
-Build a fault tolerant platform to serve a large concurrent user base (Requirements)
- Experience with high-load/high-concurrency situations in a web environment
- A strong academic background, CS degree preferred. You're a smart, well-rounded engineer.
- Work on an agile team with continuos integration and deployment, trying out new ideas on a fast pace (Plus)
- Previous projects (personal, academic, or corporate) that show a zest for scalability
- Strong background with Node.js and Django
- Linux/AWS administration

Flash AV engineer (Responsibilites)
- Enable millions of concurrent users to be able to learn each other’s languages effectively through in-browser live video
- Talk to users in Verbling (Requirements)
- Experience with RTFMP/RTMP, Peer-to-Peer streaming
- Strong coding background (Plus)
-HTML5 and plugin experience

jobs@verbling.com
7 iPhone app interfaces that “Think Different”
TrialPay - Palo Alto, CA (F/T, will cover relo)

For the last 5 years, we've been quietly changing the world of online advertising. We work on getting users to try new products and services, install new mobile apps, play new games, and visit new stores by giving them stuff that they already want for free.

We're looking for strong back-end engineers and people who like playing with data (we have a lot).

aline@trialpay.com
Twitter is harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, study finds
> There's no shame in programming in high level languages to deliver more value more quickly. Ditto with operations, ditto with everything.

Agreed. That isn't the same as the "don't want to know how the system works" mentality. High level languages are great tools for "encoding and automating processes you understand so you Don't Repeat Yourself, or perhaps Don't Need To Do It The First Time". They are great for "making all the initial decisions for you so you can get started and come back to those later".

They are horrid tools for "allowing you to be ignorant".

Now, I don't think everyone should know everything about computer systems (heck, just asking someone to know everything about C++ is a tall order ;-), and I certainly don't think you should have memorized all the configuration logic for hardware and software. However, if you are a technology professional, you really should see a key part of your professional value as your understanding of as much of how the system functions as possible. The understanding will never be total; it will never be complete; it ought to be an area of concern.

If it isn't, you aren't an technology professional. You might be an entrepreneur. You might even be a great product designer. You aren't an engineer.

That might sound like it is about semantics. It isn't. Computer systems are basically towers of babel where each brick is another leaky abstraction. Engineers are the people who build, maintain, and replace that tower. You can't do the job well if you only know about the roof.

Entrepreneurs have such a huge challenge just searching for a viable business model, that they tend to see all other problems as irrelevant. While the problems are usually smaller, possibly even trivial by comparison, they aren't irrelevant. If you are a tech company, doing technology right is more than just a tiny bit relevant.

Think of it this way: SQL provides a tremendously high level of abstraction to data systems. This makes it terribly efficient for quickly coming up with queries you want answers for. However, if something ever goes wrong, or if you are writing application code that is going to be run over and over again, you want someone who understands a lot more about the system than just how to translate a question in to SQL. That goes double if somehow the query is vital to your business' ongoing operations.
> What’s happened over the last five years shows not that Apple disrupted the phone handset industry, but rather that Apple destroyed the handset industry — by disrupting the computer industry.

That's a bit of a stretch. There is still a large difference between an iPhone and a desktop/laptop computer from a user point of view. I'd be very surprised if smartphone sales had any noticeable influence on computer sales (in the developed world). The traditional computer industry doesn't seem to have been much impacted by the iPhone and I can't see by what definition of disruption it was disrupted... Sensationalism is probably good for pageviews.
Funny Video Angry Gamer 2
Zorin OS 6 Core: fresh blood
Hidden Facebook 'Want' Button
You can install the MS upgrades on a blank hdd too, can't you? It's been some years but I thought they just used to ask for a disk from the "qualifying upgrade" product to be inserted during install.
200 000 Caskets For London Olympics Evacuation Rapture Wat
Spend a little time on Explorer, while you're at it. Just look at Explorer's View menu / task pane thing, and the icon size selector. It's a teeny weeny scrollable box (just barely big enough to fit up and down scroll arrows) with 6 items visible, but only containing 8 items overall! Just look at that thing!
Terse Words: Using Twitter As Your Flask Login Provider in 6 Lines
The analogy went some way to showing how the argument based on there being "no direct competition" is a fallacy.

I find it very hard to believe that MS hasn't had a good look at Apple's OS X pricing strategy before making this move. It mightn't be that they feel pressured into lowering the price so much as they've just seen what Apple has done and think it's a good idea to get as many people to upgrade as possible.
I would like to see the "Repositories vs. Users" graph in a log-log scale, so it's possible to see the distribution of the big and small languages simultaneously.
Earlier today I poked around at the ArcGIS API they are calling from the flex app - is this what you're using?

For my particular location there is one dot that is likely the one I'm waiting to have fixed, but it could be one of several surrounding my house. What are you using for your determination of if I'm fixed? Simply finding the work orders within a distance of the point dominion says my house is at?

I'd have a lot more confidence that this app would do anything useful if it gave me info like the work order numbers in my area, the number affected per each, and the estimated resolution (although they all say "no estimate").

Still, it's a cool little project to throw together - I wish I'd had more brain-working time during the weekend to do something like this - the best I did was automatically querying the JSON for local parsing. Ultimately, though, my computers / thermostat coming back online is going to be the real indicator!

For others who are curious, the Dominion outage map is calling some ArcGIS services that take a bounding box and returns all work orders (in JSON) with their statuses (number affected, etc). It's a horrible web interface, but at least the data can be manipulated queried fairly easily.
It's great to stand on the shoulders of others, but you ought to be able to look down without getting lost.
I miss my old Nokia (can't remember the model, but I have it in a box someplace). I never minded having a b/w screen, and I appreciated the efficient access to contacts and text messaging. Newer, smarter phones still feel clumsy to be by comparison.

I wish I could just get an updated version of my old phone with a higher resolution, lower power e-ink screen, bluetooth, and possibly 802.11g (to connect my tablet).
They do have a huge network of personal weather stations that the Weather Channel doesn't have. It's mentioned in the blog post that the Weather Channel was going to start incorporating that data on weather.com.
Manufacturing vs. Software Supply Chains: A comparision
Realy nice read, lots of interesting and insightful details and gives a good insight into the whole cold-war life and times.

I have worked with a modern sweeper team and can only imagine how hard it was to detect passive/active bugs of this type at the time. Today it is even more crafty with added delays, non-metalic mic's and other wonderfuly brilliant tricks to stop the bugs being detected. Of note your bug detection gear needs to be tested and approved as you could of brought it from a supplier who has handicapped it to not detect there bugs.

As for the future, well if you could remotly tap into the human beings brainwaves then you have access to a great stereo-mic. Large steel supports in buildings and reinforced concrete also act as nice ariels if abused right. There realy is no limit.

If you have a secret and the person who wants that secret has unlimited resources and talent then it wont be a secret for long.
Well, that site is a notorious pro apple source so I don't see how they could have come to a diff pov on the smartphone disruption success story that is the iphone. The narrative is at the point of the post-pc world now, let us see how the masses react to these fantastic news.
You can do that with Windows 7 upgrade disks too, albeit with a small bit of hackery.
Facebook Testing the Want Button
Nice! Thanks for downloading the app! My next front burner project involves another niche weather site but focused on outdoors more generally. The outdoor climbing community is relatively small, so although I get decent traffic to the site, I'd like to do something a bit larger.

I'm also working on a Python library that interfaces with the national weather service for daily and hourly forecasts. It's about 95% done, although that last 5% can be tough.
"the "currentUser" model will emit an event to notify your application that it has changed"

That sounds like more than just wrapping knowledge to me.

Also, why do you absolutely want to fit everything into a framework? Or a pattern? Business logic goes into your domain models. Don't mix your business logic with your framework, that's about it...
Let me just say, I love Hacker Monthly. I got two subscriptions to it because my dad, a senior vp for sales of a brick and mortar company, enjoyed reading some of the articles so much that he would take all of my magazines. An issue was just lying around one time and he read it cover to cover. He didn't understand anything about NoSQL or python, but he got the business ideas and loved all the shop talk about Amazon and internet retailers.

I highly recommend a subscription. It's the smartest magazine I have ever had the pleasure of reading.
This article really falls apart at the end. Why conflate the diversity of third-party Twitter apps with gender diversity?
Secrets of Coda 2
Python has logic programming (Pyke). But, in principle, yes: you can't add new syntax to non-homoiconic languages. You can use macros (even C has macros), but they are more limited in a nonhomoiconic language.

In my experience, though, metaprogramming is of limited use as anything other than syntactic sugar. And it often leads to very confusing code.

Other language features are far more fundamental and important: libraries, good integration with the shell, coherent error messages (!), readability, tooling, deployment, etc. As a language Clojure is beautiful, but as an ecosystem it has very far to go.
The Science of "Portal"
Hey, I skipped ME and Vista, that is why the VM gets a whirl first. We shall see.
Good question. The answer should be obvious, as CloudFlare presents this for the innovative and ground breaking technology it is...

[end sarcasm]

So yeah, basically almost all of them have it. Most have had it for years. CDN and various other business models (POP's, etc.) have been converging for a while now, so this has become pretty standard for CDN's to provide.
I was at their NYTM Preso, shocked they are selling for so low. We're in the local market and every article of maps company acquisitions I read, I always assumed it would be them.
Often legal will ask for this kind of wording so they have an out if they want it later. So it may be more future proofing than an expectation of price changes next year.
By the way I wonder how Diablo fares in Israel.

It has no localized version right and no native offering? Do you get served by eu.battle.net for euros? us.battle.net for $$$?
Is it popular? Do people play much in Israel?
There are number of different ways to access the NWS data and graphs - not surprisingly it is hard to discover them! They do have an XML web service for daily and hourly forecasts http://graphical.weather.gov/xml/ but you can also download binary files that contain all the same weather elements for the US.

I'm actually close to completing a python library that will be open source and provide an easy way to access the NWS national digital forecast database.
Lightning Points - interactive animation using JavaScript and Canvas
I think you are not very clear on the meaning of the word disrupt:

interrupt (an event, activity, or process) by causing a disturbance or problem: a rail strike that could disrupt both passenger and freight service.

a disruptive product is a product that breaks with what was before and changes the course of its class of products.

It relates to market share only insofar that it needs enough share of its market to make an impact on it, which is not necessarily a majority.

Now, I think it’s a bit silly trying to say that mobile phones/smartphones/pocketable computers didn’t change after the introduction of the iPhone (see also link below by alanh: http://www.tekgadg.com/storage/Android_before_after_iphone_t..., or check how many phones with and without keys are available today, or the success of the “app store” model).
That's pretty awesome. My-Cast for iOS presents something similar when you're in landscape mode.
Best WebGL demo yet: Build LEGO things on Google Maps
In what way are you contributing to the dialogue here? This is an incredibly interesting topic and you do a disservice by not adding anything worthwhile.
... I'm pretty sure typical MVC uses some form of event as well, i.e. an event is created to inform the view that the model has changed. (Even the wikipedia page differentiates passive MVC implementations where the language/platform cannot implement events.)

Somehow, I'm just seeing the Observer pattern and the MVC pattern in the OPs post.
I wish we could put this classic stuff in the Hacker Canon and reserve HN for, y'know, news.
It's a smart price but I suspect that Microsoft has burned too many bridges for most people to ever consider upgrading their computer's operating system. For the average person a (Windows) operating system upgrade has traditionally been cost prohibitive and often not a smooth process. That's going to scare a lot of people off even at $39.99 I'm also not convinced Microsoft has found a compelling way to sell Windows 8 yet. There's no one button buy/install option here. People will have to go seek out the software and justify the price tag to themselves. That's going to be an up-hill battle. I'm betting the percentage of users upgrading will be about the same as previous Windows releases.
One of the most horrible comparisons ever, in my opinion. Looks like it was written by someone who knows little about the subject. Check out the comments on the site.
How many fans will stop publishing their data to spite them for the acquisition or if the site gets more evil? I wonder.
> I'm under the impression that Java is the same.

No, Java is not the same. Scalars not objects in Java and are passed by value. C# is similar, except scalars are value-type objects and are passed by value.

> I'm assuming you're using the explicit cast inside the hypothetical function.

That's not what we were talking about. It's incredibly hard to have a reasonable conversation about this with you because you clearly only know a very small set of similar languages and have no experience with PHP at all.

> You appeared to be citing interpreted-ness as a reason for having a wonky module system.

You cited byte-code interpreted as if that's somewhat significant. PHP's module system really isn't very "wonky" -- it works as advertised. But since you don't use it, you wouldn't know.

> It'll tell me what things I've already done; I can't easily find out what I should be avoiding proactively.

You could read the manual. If you're new to PHP, you'd probably code strictly from the start.

> So what? Both are values; why is there any distinction?

Most languages make the distinction. Why shouldn't there be? That's really ugly code.

> Hell, you can call methods on numbers in Ruby and Python.

That's fine. It doesn't mean every language should do the same. Most languages, especially those PHP is based on, do not do that. Maybe one day PHP will have that but because it's weakly typed, it's difficult to know even what methods should exist. In PHP, it's perfectly reasonable to say strlen(1). Does that mean every number should have string methods? I'm guessing you never considered that?

> The problem with mysql_escape_string was that it didn't take the current database handle into account.

Yes, because the encoding properties of the current database connection are needed for encoding properly. If have two database connections, then what? It picks the first connection as the default and you encode incorrectly? Or if you had a second connection, do you just break all the existing code? What if the second connection doesn't happen every time? Then you're code is broken only every second Wednesday?

You've got a very singular perspective on things. That's fine. But by critiquing another language without knowing it you're making a lot of assumptions and blowing things way out of proportion.
As far as I understand the American system, this is a false analogy: your Congressman 'lobbies' for interests within their core voting block. i.e. why your mid-west Congressman lobbies hard for corn subsidies, if a large percentage of her voting base are corn farmers. Given the "first past the post" nature of American politics, this can exclude up to 49% of your voting base before said Congressman has even been sworn in.

To make this clearer: the way the system is set up, your Congressman isn't lobbying for any individual, they're lobbying for a percentage of the voting block that is sufficient to return them to Congress next vote. This is why campaigning on single issues is so common, and so successful for power-blocs such as the Christian Right.

(This isn't to go into gerrymandering, which further skews the 'democratic' input of your system. If you didn't already know that only ~8-12 seats in Congress are actually contested in terms of party fealty, you really, really, really should do).
The iPhone itself did not bring anything new except a slick interface coupled with multi-touch. We already had powerful smartphones, for example ones running Microsoft's Windows Mobile.

But the iPhone brought smartphones to the public's attention, and the iPhone later brought the App Store.
How is this different from somebody discovering for the first time Wikipedia and becoming all defensive, that there is an article on him, that they are using a picture of him and that he didn't approve that one personally. As far as I can see, they put in the bot-about a clear line that it was a Wiki based bot.

Especially since the comments were so nonsensical one could even argue that the bot was intended to persiflage the nonsensical Tweets by pseudo-celebrities. To bring the argument to its final destination: People responding to the fake bot, are similar to those, who were watching Chaplin's The Great Dictator and wondering why Hitler movies were showing in cinemas across the USA.
> If you're correct in that many of the things I listed aren't really a big deal, the reader will agree with you anyway, right?

Because you're supposedly educating non-PHP coders about PHP. Most PHP coders do, in fact, agree with me.
I don't see the mention of the realm on which the character ought to be created.
Is it Europe? US? Asia maybe?
That's, like, the most important bit.
Facebook clarifies email address confusion (...) contact sync will be fixed
I'll upgrade when they give us more than 2 inches to edit the PATH environment variable.
Fuck Diablo. My interview will be in Alpha Centauri.
I totally agree that the iPhone disrupted the cell phone industry. Where I disagree is that it disrupted the PC industry as well. It might have influenced the industry to some degree but it definitely didn't "disrupt" it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...

Around 10% upgrading per year isn't bad considering how big a jump it is from XP to 7. 7 to 8 is less of a jump and this announcement makes it much cheaper.
Also like every other site out there. It's the most generic way to showcase pricing and plans.
There's definitely some awesome companies in NZ open to bringing quality developers from overseas. Check out http://www.xero.com/about/careers/
Note: I'm not associated with them in any way
The gist of the post is not that you don’t need a designer, it’s rather that you should become one. Which is fine if you have some basic enthusiasms and talent in the area. As a designer it sort of pisses me off that people are going to skip hiring me, as a teacher I feel great about people learning about design :)
User privacy concerns aside (yes, I realize that is a big aside), I feel like there are only a handful of use cases where knowing this user data is actually helpful in analytics scenarios, and anything beyond just feels creepy to know.

1) More intelligent marketing spend. If you know you have a higher LTV for females for your app between the ages of 18-34 and you do a portion of your advertising on Facebook, it would be good to target just those users.

2) Insights into broad customer engagement. Let's say your 18-34 female users return to your application more often than male users in the same demographic, it'd be helpful to know what friction points cause these users to drop off.

3) Insights into spending users. Being able to segment all your user actions by those who are free and those who spend money would help you optimize your paying funnel.

4) Bug reporting. Knowing where your users are located can help illuminate whether you have server and localization problems.

I can't think of any reasons why you'd use this information to voluntarily contact users other than support-related issues. If Netflix sent me an email that said "We think you'd like these movies because other males liked these movies" I'd probably de-activate immediately.