skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>If you have just graduated University then it's likely that the only code samples you have will be from that

And that's why a university degree is almost meaningless. I had code samples I could have sent a prospective employer before I even started college. If you went all the way through getting a CS degree and never wrote a line of code for fun on your own time, I think that's a perfectly legitimate reason to reject your job application.
Die Zeit Uses Six Months of Mobile Data to Profile Green Politician
completely off topic, but when I started reading your comment, the 'inner voice' was C3PO...
The Truth About Government Travel Advisories, Warnings and Alerts
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4105397
So that explains why the 12 cores on my Fedora workstation were maxed-out when I came to work this morning!
Mandatory XKCD reference:
http://xkcd.com/638/
Not at Facebook. Zuck still owns a majority of the voting shares. The board has almost no teeth an couldn't have stopped the Instagram transaction if it wanted too.
So do you wish you had accepted his suggestion?
Those are interesting interpretations, thank you for that.
Original Release date: 12 Jun 2012 | Last revised: 25 Jun 2012

yeah, ancient history
He's got a point. I think the full win8 x86 tablet is quite a compelling product, but what's W8RT selling point? It's going to have no backwards compatibility, will be less polished than the iPad, and won't be cheaper than Android tablets with the same hardware.

The W8RT tablet will have Office on it, I suppose, but this is more strangeness: anyone who wants Office is going to want the x86 tablet - which doesn't come with Office!

The x86 Surface looks like a nice product, but the business strategy looks very muddled to me.
I'd rather spend my time making good languages better than making awful languages ever so slightly less awful.
I do that in some places, but its much harder to this.$el.find and replace elements than just re-running the template.
I hate tzdata updates with a passion, politicians should just get a grip and stop messing around with timezones. I'm all for ideas that create new jobs but this isn't one of them.
Dell announces acquisition of Quest Software for $2.4 Billion
Yeah i don't see what the story was here either. It sort of disgusts me to think anyone would read this and be enlightened or surprised. If you've never had to worry about being out on the streets yourself you've led a very privileged life.
That was a great article by Wired! We decided to write about them because they are a partly French-based company, and our news site covers French startups, tech and innovation.

Thanks for the link!
-Liam @ The Rude Baguette
Well, yes, obviously, but it would certainly affect how we (read: aliens) approach space travel psychologically, and thus to a certain extent its feasibility - a trip across the solar system could seem like a trip across the street.
I'm curious if I'm going to run into a catch. It seems unsustainable. Just to be clear, that's 30.8 Terrabytes of data I'll be transferring per month on your network for $0. Can someone verify this?
NICT Daedalus Cyber-attack alert system
I disagree. All the time spent finding and learning new tools can be spent getting things done. I use bash, vi, grep, and man and I can get 95% of what I need done with just those.
Cstross (Charlie Stross) doing an AMA on Reddit
I usually find this sort of reply distasteful, but it seems appropriate in this context...

I don’t know if I can’t send you the code, I’ll have to ask my employer. (Which seems really silly thing to do, considering you want to get the code to show it to some other company that you want to hire you).

The parenthetical phrase is not a complete sentence, and should have been placed before the period following "employer". "Which" should not have been capitalized. "seems really silly thing to do" is missing an article. The final period would be rendered redundant by proper placement of the parenthetical phrase.

Here is the deal, if you aren’t coding for fun ...

A colon after "deal" would be better.

driven by whatever the crazy professor think is a valid coding standard

"crazy professor" is a singular noun. Either use "thinks" or "crazy professors".

I can understand crazy coding standards, what I can’t understand is why someone would submit something that would raise so many red flags so quickly as part of a job application process.

This sentence just doesn't flow well, but that aside, the comma should be replaced with a semicolon, or it should be broken into two sentences.

And I'm sure there are more errors.

But why do I care? If someone is going to write an angry rant about how a job candidate submitted code that used suboptimal coding standards, then it would be more convincing if the author would avoid writing this angry rant using suboptimal grammatical standards.

Thanks!
Any recommendations for someone who's been fired?

How can I help someone who's been fired bounce back?

What should someone who's been fired tell potential employers why they're no longer with a previous employer?

I'm trying to help a friend, but I've never gone thru this, so I feel powerless.
This article is full of good advice, but one thing Fred doesn't say which should be added: It's quite possible that the employee is already aware that things aren't working out - especially if it's a smaller startup.

I cofounded a company and hired a friend who moved across the country. I even went to the mat with another cofounder who questioned whether he was the right fit. Turns out he wasn't. It wasn't his fault. He's very talented, but he duplicated existing skillsets (mine most of all), and the hat we needed him to wear was one that he'd never worn before. And this increased the stress of his job, which only made it even harder for him to be productive.

Fortunately, the other founders agreed to be generous about offering him an exit (in line with Fred's advice), and so when he and I had the conversation it was much easier for his departure to be a mutual decision and we've retained our friendship.

I would never go into a conversation like this unprepared and rely on the assumption it will be easy or mutual. And I haven't had to do this often enough to know if this was a rare outcome. But if you look at it from both sides and are willing to be generous with the solution, then it is possible that sometimes the "mutual decision" really is a mutual one.
Dallas Foundation Repair
For Twitter-Owned Apps and Sites, a Cacophony of Confusion
Woah! Does this exist in PDF form somewhere?

In fact it does: http://www.fisica.net/mecanicaclassica/struture_and_interpre...
Watch The Amazing Spider-Man Online Free
Cinematography of Watch The Amazing Spider-Man is by John Schwartzman and edited by Alan Edward Bell and Pietro Scalia under Columbia Pictures, Marvel Entertainment, Laura Ziskin Productions, Avi Arad Productions, and Matt Tolmach Productions studio. The film is distributed by Columbia Pictures which is scheduled to be release in theaters on July 3, 2012.
I'm a farm-lad, so no stranger to good old-fashioned work :)

I was being flippant in my above comment, and more referring to the back-breaking, soul-devouring variant of 'manual labor', the kind that drives people to drink and ruins the creative spirit.

Otherwise, I do agree, sometimes it's good to do some manual work, put the body on auto-pilot and let the mind wander. Personally I seem to get most of my best thinking time when I'm either walking, scrubbing floors, loading a van, etc...
Dell to Acquire Quest Software
Are Internet Breaks the New Coffee Breaks?
Yes, wasn't trying to denigrate your work - just pointing to previous discussion people might find useful.
Probably because they thought they were dangerous as well? Guns are unarguably MORE dangerous than swords though.
Sorry if my poor phrasing made you to write this long response :) I almost completely agree with you, and what I wanted to say was "There's no inherent reason why all HN users should be jaibroken. Sure, they should know why it's probably good and how you can jailbreak you iDevice, but it doesn't mean they should all be jailbroken just for the heck of it".

And thanks for reminding (and torturing) me about SBSettings. Actually, that's the only thing I miss terribly from my JB days...
Obvious question: how could a court tell it was actually prior, other than to take his word for it? Seems useless without proper proof that he didn't write the code yesterday.
> " I don't like using terms like "fire" or "terminate." To me they have too much emotion attached to them to be appropriate when splitting with an employee. I like to say that "fred was asked to leave the company" or "fred, we need you to leave the company." That works better for me and, I think, it also works better for the person who is being asked to leave the company. "

--

Honestly, this seems a bit spineless. Don't describe it as "asking them to leave" if in actuality the employee has no choice. If you're telling them to leave and to not show up for work again, call it what it is, either a 'firing', 'redundancy' or 'letting go'. Anything else is just dishonest.

In my previous career path we eventually faced massive lay-offs/redundancy across the company. New tech had made our jobs practically obsolete and the layoffs represented an opportunity for me to move on to better things, which is fair enough.

However, it always annoyed me how the various communications from Head Office were phrased as 'we deeply regret asking you to leave', when it was so clear that they were delighted to be rid of us, and there was no 'asking' being done at any point.
Every time an article critical of PHP appears, defenders come out of the woodwork. It's a great language, they say. It's no more flawed than any other language. Critics are just biased. It has problems, but other languages have problems too. People build large apps with PHP, so it must be good.

But come on. This language is complete crap. Code spontaneously fails depending on the locale? And the bug has been open for ten years and still is not fixed? And this is only one bizarre and inexplicable bug out of hundreds, maybe thousands, of bizarre and inexplicable bugs in PHP.

This language isn't defensible. If you want to say that it's worth dealing with the flaws due to the ecosystem, fine, fair enough. But don't tell us that PHP is no worse than any other language. It's far worse.
The patch that was shared on the lkml shows some insight on what is causing the issue. https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/1/27

Apparently the issues might be due "to the leapsecond being added without calling clock_was_set() to notify the hrtimer subsystem of the change", a possible fix being to patch kernel/time/timekeeping.c to be leapsecond aware.
I'm not a fan of "ask you to leave", it sounds more like someone that is too afraid to face up to the decision they are making.

"John, due to reasons X and Y you will no longer be employed with this company."

If I had to choose, I'd rather hear something like that.
My bad. I kind of overlooked your statement where you mentioned 'how it would affect this situation'. On that note, I agree with you, law enforcement won't really help this particular situation.
You can click the Repo title again to return to the root, or the '..' if you're inside a folder.
How “The Angel” helped 15,000 people steal broadband
Hey, I'd love to hear more about it, and I'm sure the founders of DragonBox makers We Want To Know would too, since they had kids twice this age in mind when they designed the game... reach me on sversille@flirtatiouslabs.com and I'll be more than happy to pass on your feedback directly to the founders.
I agree that contributing to open source is a good way to learn many development skills, however:

Besides, open source is fun, and you probably have way more time and resources during University than you will later in life.

Not necessarily, if you are doing CS at a top university and aiming to attain the highest possible grades this requires a huge investment of time and effort to most people.

Also it is not like a 9-5 where you can 'clock off' there is always an uncertain feeling of 'if I put another hour into this , then that might just bump me up an extra grade'

Not to mention that if you just started programming at university your code is probably going to suck pretty hard for the first 2 years at least, to the point where no serious open source project is going to want your patches.

Ultimately if Universities believed that this was important to job prospects in the industry as a whole they would make open source contributions a required part of the curriculum.
The Weavr guys have posted the backstory of the jon_ronson bot on their blog. It's an interesting read.

http://philterphactory.com/2012/04/02/jon_ronson-a-weavr-of-...
Moon pulls CERN particle collider out of shape
Oh definitely. Don't worry, no offense taken - just wanted to take the opportunity to promote us a bit ;-)
Any company who wants to avoid a lawsuit will respond to your request whether or not they consider the person to be "strong". And the good ones will contact the ex-employee and inform them that you are trying to get around their reference policy
Proview Scores $60M Settlement in iPad Name Fight
Watchmaker That Raised Money Through Kickstarter - Pebble (YC W11)
I think that with 'anorexia' they are referring to pro-ana websites (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-anorexia).

Maybe websites promoting suicide also exist? I don't know.
Not sure if it's just me, but those guys come across as extremely unlikeable in that video. I don't get how they seem oblivious to why Jon is upset about it, and even at one point one gets (faux?) annoyed that real Jon is telling people following fake Jon to stop doing so.
Self-Driving Cars: End of the Human Driving Era
Reminds me of the "head fake" from Randy Pausch's Last Lecture video, http://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture/
I'm not on the business side, but looking at our global traffic 30TB per month is a tiny percentage of what we are doing in terms of traffic.

I doubt it would go unnoticed, though, so I expect someone will be interested in persuading you to get a Business account with us which is $200/month because at that point we give you an SLA.
Just leave the Internet alone. I'm not against filtering inappropriate content (although suicide 'etc' should not be blocked) but the next generation of parents will be more aware of the issues online and put their own filtering software in place if needed. Government mandated filtering is a really bad idea
If they go down, you go down. But in my experience they have been quite reliable; if you aren't already in 3 sites on independent networks for HA, they are better.

I'd spring for the $200/mo service if you are pushing real traffic just to get to try the railgun. $200 is less than epsilon for a large site.

Also, the cupcakes are probably a lie, or at least are vegan.
Even if they are (which is quite possible), this sort of filtering is just not that good. No matter the intention, this will limit access to valid information and almost certainly cause harm.
The big trade-off with AWS is it allows poor people to afford lavish computing resources for small amounts of time, at the expense of things like performance and reliability. If you have slow, steady growth metrics it makes much more sense to host yourself. Planning for peak capacity and buying only what you need is cheaper than dynamically scaling what you need.

The product is geared to a specific kind of customer, and frankly I have no idea why companies like Netflix use them. Hell, Netflix actually buys whole instance blocks [servers] just to work around the shared i/o of EC2. You'd think just buying a real dedicated server would be cheaper and easier.
FACTORISATION OF RSA-704 WITH CADO-NFS
> You open the webpage on iPad and inspect it on Safari's new web inspector (and you can tap on different elements to inspect them, just as you can do in FireBug).

That's true of Chrome on Android and even RIM's Playbook with Chrome Developer Tools. There's even talk about Chrome trying to get that working with it's versions on iOS.

> Safari 6 has much more developer tools now (detailed timeline of element renders & JS timers/dispatches), in a nicer package.

The nicer package there has been the biggest problem. I still haven't been able to figure out what all those icons mean. The simplest 'Elements' view (highlight elements to inspect them) now needs to be enabled after three clicks and a lot of time spent hovering over the icons to know that you have the right one.
Safari 6's developer tools seem to be designed by designers who don't use developer tools IMHO. It's very pretty but lacks any sort of usability.
If you come up with a way of predicting when leap seconds will be needed (hint: it's not a constant regular time interval), let us all know. Until then, there will need to be adjustments.
There is a another book that goes into detail about the Bengal famine called "Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II"

http://www.amazon.com/Churchills-Secret-War-British-Ravaging...
50 Photoshop tutorials with Fire Effects
50 Photoshop tutorials with Fire Effects. Photoshop is one of the most popular editing tools used widely by photographers and designers. Photoshop serves as a savior for photographers and designer. From creating blurred effect to giving a reflected vision to a photograph and from creating fantastic logos and banners, Photoshop is used. Photoshop
Google and the controversial political censorship issue
Most businesses can make the conscious decision to go with the simple 3-component option and accept that they might only get three or four nines of uptime, depending on how flaky AWS decides to be that year.

If you run a service where the worst case scenario for your site being down for an hour on a Thursday afternoon is "millions of dollars are lost" or "our high profile customers go out of business in a way that's directly traceable back to us" then yes, you need all 24 of those things.

If, on the other hand, the worst case scenario for your site being down for an hour on a Thursday afternoon is "some of our customers have to manually post to Facebook so that their friends know that they've been for a run", you can probably shave about 21 nodes off that diagram.
Organisation is a mandatory field? Lolcats united, then?
That's not cool bro, hacking and deleting, pff
The situation is not helped by the frequent OSS community suggestion: "Just patch Turkish." while mumbling "Bloody non-ASCII ingrates."
If the person was let go due to cost cutting, general layoffs, etc - then they should be straight up with a new employer that that was the case. In other cases, describing it as not being a fit would be a good description IMHO. Obviously it wouldn't benefit anyone to say they were let go due to incompetence or anything like that - since it could often be that the job itself wasn't aware of the persons skill set.

The only recommendation is for the person not to give up, start looking right away - if this person is a developer, there are so many opportunities right now that it shouldn't be hard to find a position regardless of your work experience - though depending on your locality it might require moving. For example, New York is booming with tech jobs at the moment.
This kind of old news. This has been a problem for many years. But this year there has been no rain yet in Bangalore. I suppose the rains should have started in beginning of June. Many farmers who planted the seeds expecting rains, have lost crops. So, there could be use of excess stocks this year.
Automating your way out of bad behavior
What you are really saying here is that you are mainly interested in people who started coding before attending university.

This is contrary to the view of most universities who are desperate to get people into the CS program who are not stereotypical 'geeks'. Perhaps the message they should be sending is 'if you haven't been coding for at least 3 years off your own back, don't apply for CS'.

I'm not even sure that this idea is completely true, I know plenty of people who attended top UK universities for CS and the overwhelming majority of them didn't write OSS code while at university, it didn't seem to hurt their development skills too much though.

In fact I'd wager that there are plenty of people doing cool things at google/MS/Apple etc who never wrote OSS code in their lives.

Personally I hacked around on a few things while at university, but pretty much every few months I would look back on the code I had written prior and realise what a pile of junk it was. I didn't shed a tear when the disk it was all stored on died.
> It was the abundant crops that allowed some Americans to think about liberty.

The funny thing is that you even quoted the part of my post that shows that what you're saying isn't supported by the facts of the timeline according to a written historical record.

The first settlers who left Europe mostly left for Liberty -- religious and otherwise. These were people concerned about Liberty before there even were colonies. There was no great farmland available. There was no Mississippi. There weren't even any slaves to leverage as resources. Yet, if you read the historical records, those early settlers wanted mostly to get away from the oppressive States of Europe. Freedom was their issue and it was tightly ingrained in the American culture from the beginning.

Fast-forward to the American Revolution (all about Liberty, read the writings of the Revolutionaries), and you'll see that these people were fanatics about restraining the central government long before it even had any interest in anything outside of the 13 colonies.

> An Amerindian displaced from the Mississippi 200 yrs ago or a homeless Black 50 yrs ago won't understand any of the "liberty" and "rule of law" there's been.

Slavery was horrible and really the poison that was allowed into the US founding that led to the destruction of the notion of States' Rights when we fought over the issue during the Civil War. That original sin has pretty much cost us our Liberty, since after the Federal government forced its supremacy it broke the ability of States to protect themselves. It shifted the American power structure from being bottom-up to top-down.

Amerindians were killing and DISPLACING each other over primitive tribal issues long before we arrived. Unfortunately for them, the European technological advantage was so great. That said, I like to think that we've learned a lot as a society as we proved after World War I and beyond where we never tried to keep by force any land where we fought battles for some cause.

You bring up an unintentionally interesting point: If American resources and geography were such a societal advantage, then why isn't the Amerindian culture the most dominant in the world now? They had numbers, access to the same resources, geographic isolation to protect them from other countries for centuries, etc. But they never progressed and became "important" as a society. Even after Europeans showed up and allowed them access to our technology, they used some of it pragmatically (horses and guns), but they never embraced the cultural underpinnings that would have allowed them to challenge us.
Designing beautiful URLs
Netflix does get massive discounts, though. I remember reading that it's like 70%.
As a small company, using CloudFlare as a cloud-based CDN/firewall/DDoS protection looks very attractive.

The thing that has stopped me from trying it is that you have to move your whole DNS to them though, and they have had downtime for DNS as well as their hosting.
I'm comfortable with serving www.example.com through them and dealing with the occasional downtime. But I'm not so comfortable with downtime for MX records - I really want mail@example.com to be super reliable.
Unclear which is worse for Google: The GN being banned, or customers actually trying to use the GN and experiencing constant crashing...
Exactly. You have to weigh cost of the worst case downtime vs cost of redundancy (and not to mention the added complexity of keeping all redundant systems in sync)