skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went through hight school and university without using that pattern (not that I wrote many essays, and when I did I made a point of writing against the topic) and was only introduced to it in ESL class I took after immigrating to canada. I'm not a very creative person -- I rather like rigid structures and perfect formatting of my code -- but I hated this immediately. It is probably just me, but somehow the idea of making an "essay" according to the rules of making essays as defined just highlights the utter pointlessness of the process and saps all energy and dispels any delusions about making meaningful arguments I might have had...
Netsniff-ng v0.5.7 – The packet sniffing beast
I use "I think" it to distinguish widely agreed upon facts from my own conclusions.
I posted a follow-up to this piece.

http://scripting.com/stories/2012/07/20/moreOnLocAndTwitter....

Dave
The primary good thing about Sparrow for the Mac is the simplicity and lack of bloat compared to Mail.app. Lack of bloat is nice regardless of what mail server you use.
"Because replacement parts are no longer available, an "out-of-band signaling" system was installed in 1998 for the transmitters located in the U.S. This system uses a continuous tone that is below the normal audio frequency range. When the tone is present, the transmitters are keyed. When the tone is not present, the transmitters are unkeyed. It worked fine, but the Astronaut Office complained about the lack of tones which everyone had become accustomed to as an alert that a transmission was about to start. So, the Quindar tone generator, which was still installed in case it was necessary to key the transmitters at an overseas site, was re-enabled. "

Wonderful link, thanks. The quote above almost rivals Primo Levi's story about the paint recipe in The Periodic Table.
Google Raises the Maps Bar
Cool, nice work.

Now do it with the automatic porn-filters rather than face recognition ;)
Sure it might sound silly but sometimes it's not whether you can actually do the task or not. It's more of how will you approach something that you are not expected to do. Different people have different approaches.

I agree that if you're hiring a programmer strictly to program and do nothing else, that's fine. But if you're looking for someone who thinks outside of the box, is capable of coming with ideas and solutions when the solutions are yet to be known, having tests like these is probably a way to figure out how a person thinks. Whether it's a good way or not, I'm not so sure as I've never had to administer one of these tests.
Quarks PwDump v0.2b Released
And it's a shame that postulating genetic group selection is so attractive, since ISTM that this is a very plausible case of group selection of memes about male and female tasks.
Apple Store Rips Down Torchlight Ripoff
> The test is objective

Less so than you might think. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001863.h...
I recently picked up a box full of old copies The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction at a book sale. Whoever had originally purchased them had most of the 1960s and a good part of the 1950s, so they obviously had a lasting interest in science fiction.

The last volume he purchased was August 1969.

In my imagination, after the moon landing, he bought one more issue, and it just didn't work anymore. Science fiction had become science fact, and he had no need for any more fiction.

I wonder how he felt later, after we left the moon for the last time and never went back.
It feels like a lot of kickstarters are barely more than a "pre-order" mechanism. I'm not sure what happens if a project gets funded but then fails to deliver. It seems like when you give to a kickstarter, you should go into it fully prepared to never get your money back and never get the finished product.
It is humorous to me how critical reading skills have dropped here over the years. Two people somehow took away from my comment that it costs $15k to incorporate, even though I said it was cheap and the $15k is more than enough to get started.

I miss the old HN where every thread didn't get bogged down with stuff like that.
When web sites fail: Don't throw good money after bad
Tell HN: Did you know you can view source of images in Chrome?
I just found this out by accident. Check out the following in Google Chrome:

view-source:http://cdn.backyardchickens.com/3/37/378cfe56_IMG_0001.jpeg

Interesting finding as you can view metadata of many images (think EXIF data on JPEGs).
If someone says "don't use add-ons", they are stupid.

If someone says "you might want to be careful enabling 20 add-ons because the chances of them all being well-written and interacting nicely is low, in which case you might need to do some experimentation to see if one or two of them are causing undue problems", they are a realist.

Having said that, it is nice that we are killing off an entire class of memory leaks in one fell swoop.
The only question that's left is how we can make the Archive button in mail.app to work like it should with gmail. I'd hate going back to mailplane.
Being Impressed Makes People More Patient, Altruistic and Less Materialistic
China-based workers make about one third of their U.S. equivalents in those job categories -- so that'd be more like a 1K bonus stateside. Quite substantial.

[1] Source for e.g. receptionists: http://www.worldsalaries.org/hotelreceptionist.shtml
I'd love to see it open-sourced as an alternative to abandonment, but I doubt that's going to happen.
Saddam was planning to sell his oil only in euros and bush and company could not stand for that.
Whenever you confuse the two, you cause me to have to reparse the sentence. "it's" becomes "it is" and then I have to determine that that doesn't make any sense and go back to substitute it. Vice versa. I also have a linguistics background. So I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
I imagine the talent will help make Google's products overall better, and that will include a fabulous email client - and all you'll need is Chrome to run them.
It's mostly a mental barrier. Clojure isn't inherently hard, at all, it's just different. Once you get the hang of it, you can start reaping the benefits fairly quickly.

Unfortunately, most people judge difficulty in terms of familiarity, so the strangeness is off-putting even if it wouldn't be that hard for them to learn.
Silly publicity stunt and unbecoming of the principles of the free market. He could have created a lot more value by investing the money in a high-powered startup; not passing handouts to janitors and secretaries.
And then they go on to put secretaries in the room in front of the open door to stop people from going through the doorway.

I once happened to walk past the open door to the office of the Director of the CIA. I briefly considered walking in to say, "Hi," but then I thought better of it.
A good startup lawyer's template documents are based on the experiences of people who have been there and done that. And unlike an entrepreneur, who has started a very small number of companies, an attorney gets to see hundreds or maybe thousands and has a wealth of knowledge as to what can go wrong and how to prevent it.

And I didn't say it costs $15k, only that they'll defer up to $15k. You'll still have most of that $15k left.
Especially a smaller (albeit well-off) company than some of the bigger ones who caved.
Looking for feedback, it's still pretty alpha...

The idea is to be able to give a presentation, whilst your audience follows along on their mobile. A neat feature is that the same presentation can (optionally) display different content to the audience and presenter.
Sounds to me like there is still a market for non-shitty client mail apps. The Sparrow guys obviously eyed Google as an acquisition strategy, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was their plan all along.

That said, if someone fills the gap Sparrow leaves, assuming they don't fully deliver in the Google Apps experience, there is still a market to be served. At least for the time being.
FF15 gives a lot more details about memory consumption, because "compartments" (the way the JS heap is segregated) are a lot more fine-grained. In particular, compartments created by add-ons can now be identified. But note that this only covers some add-on memory consumption; the remainder is not reported separately, and doing so is difficult.

about:memory is quite intimidating, I'm hoping to implement soon a vastly simpler version that will give a simple per-tab breakdown and be understandable by normal users.
Writing skills are clearly a BFOQ for an organization where your entire work product is written; there is absolutely nothing illegal about a writing test for a programming job.
"I'd definitely be interested in a source on that 60% number and how that source arrived at a number that seems, on it's face, so incorrect."

I'd be curious to see if anyone has actually done a study on this, but to me this number actually seems quite low. I would guess that it would easily be 90+%.
Awesome news! They're developing Phonegap at a ferocious pace and I applaud the team for their progress. It was only a few months ago that they were at 1.7 and today's release of 2.0 is simply awesome.

Congrats Phonegap team!
Is it possible that with this and quickoffice that Google is actively trying to degrade the iOS app market? It's one of the major hurdles that Android has never really gotten over.
I wish that were true, but it's not. People will flame mildly stated opinions as much as they will blunt statements. I think your point is more valid in less technical contexts, where being blunt can cause personal offense. But around here, the offense is a given -- it's driven by the technical content, not the tone. You can be as deferential an Apple fan as you like and the Android posse will still attack.

On balance, I don't even think this is a bad thing. Keep it short.
You could switch to 1Password and yes I realize this would cost something though for the information in question revenue to support ongoing development and maintenance seems reasonable. The AgileBits folks are very solid and I don't see them being aqui-hired anytime soon, and I've used 1P for years with little to no trouble.
Note that they also have YC funding:

Q. What's your background?

Paul and Kevin were accepted into Y-Combinator this summer to launch Pixate into it's current prototype phase
So does it compile to Objective-C? It sounds more like an 'engine' that is a part of your actual app and interprets the CSS realtime. Sounds more processor intensive than just loading up flat graphics. (not an expert, please chime in)
I doubt they will reach $200k, but this is sorely needed for iOS apps. If they had launched this without kickstarter, and at a reasonable price, I bet developers would be flocking to it.
Probability distributions fitting with Python
This post shows how to fit a probability distribution using the Scipy Library.
Nimbus Stylesheets: http://blog.jeffverkoeyen.com/nimbus-chameleon
Building and Managing Remote Teams (presentation)
Wow. Pretty harsh words for an app that costs less than $10.

Is the app unusable after it was bought by Google?

If it is still usable, are the features of the app not worth what users paid for?
An open web HTML5 game with in-app payments
My favorite time to read news is my commute. I don't get your point.
http://RethinkRethinkDigg.com
Firefox 4, 5, and 6 were not good releases when it came to memory consumption. Firefox 7 had some big improvements. Firefox 8--14 all had smaller improvements. Firefox 15 has this add-on leak prevention, which is another big win. And we're still working on this :)
With the addition of unnamed classes, Java supports functional programming - it's just extremely verbose.
I think you're being a little melodramatic here. When you buy an app, you're buying it at that point. You're not buying the developer's soul.

If they continue to work on it and improve it, it's pure gravy for the users. If they don't then you've already gotten what you've paid for. It doesn't border on fraud at all.
Ask HN: What Are Your Favorite Landing Pages (2012)
I'm doing a small redesign on my site and am looking for inspiring landing pages to help me think it through.

What are some of your favorite landing pages?
I think you got it right.
He has already done that by motivating his employee :)
> To bigger companies: chill out with the "acquihires."

Easy for someone to say whom doesn't run the M&A and Strategy department for a multi-nation corporate conglomerate engaged in one of the most competitive spaces for talent acquisition and retention.
Each web worker gets its own compartment, and thus can be garbage collected individually.
Anyone know who's doing the investigation?
New Planet Found, Smaller Than Earth, Orbiting Distant Star
Thoughts on Acquisitions
Ugh, enough with the "free market". Are you familiar with the terms human capital? Social capital? Your perspective seems to suggest that any extra profit not invested in mergers and acquisitions is money wasted, but the fact of the matter is that moves like these are a sound investment and signals a commitment to building human capital.
And in practice cutting these references hasn't caused any problems, while fixing another massive problem.
The story is missing a key detail: HOW did they win in court?

There are a couple of ways a plaintiff can lose. (1) the court finds that the defendant did not do anything that is covered by any of the valid patent claims. (2) the court finds that the patent should not have issued in the first place, due to a problem such as prior art making it not non-obvious, the patentee not being the inventor, and so on.

Knowing this is important because it determines who this case affects those who are not Kaspersky. If Kaspersky won because they simply did not do anything that is covered by the patent, but the patent is valid, then everyone else still has to worry about that patent.

If Kaspersky won because the court found that the patent is invalid, then we can all scratch this patent off our lists of patents we have to worry about.

(And all of this, of course, depends on what happens in the appeals court if the plaintiff appeals).
Could somebody please enlighten me as to how one would go about utilizing 100% of the bevy of high caliber design talent that Facebook has amassed? Facebook products don't change very often, I'm rather curious as what it is they plan to do there.
Digg to be reborn on August 1
It'd be nice -- though it ain't never gonna happen -- if C-level types were not coerced (heavens!), but just expected to tip all of their below-median workers some nominal percentage (like say 15-20 percent) of their annual bonus.

For, you know, making it physically possible for them to earn that bonus in the first place.
Agreed. When helping other developers or QA people, it is frustrating that when they use Firefox they may not have Firebug installed and thus we can't research the issue right there.

When they are usng Chrome, the damn thing is built in so I know 100% of the time that we can debug it in the browser where the issue was found.

Breaking down Firebug into separate add-ons seems like a very inconvienent move. Its optimizing around the maintainer, and not the consumer - this is bad.

So if a QA guy is using Firefox, worse case sceario is he downloads Firebug and restarts the browser and reproduces the issue again. In this new model, he could download the one add-on we think we need to figure out the issue, but could end up going back multiple times to install other missing components.

At this point, it needs to be a "developer SDK" or "developer mode" which comes monolithically (For ease of use). If this ends up being a bundle of dependencies of smaller add-ons in the back so be it, but do not require the user to install more than one add-on to get the developer environment.

Chrome did it right in my mind by shipping the whole thing with the product. This also helps garuantee that it doesn't have memory leaks, API integration problems, or other bugs which crop up when delivering what I consider basic functionality as a plug-in.
(If you watched the O'Reilly live webcast, then give this a try: http://cemerick.com/2012/05/02/starting-clojure/)

Riffing on what technomancy said nearby, a lot of the issues that Clojure addresses are so taken for granted in most of the broader software development world, that it can be challenging to wrap up its benefits into a tasty, easily digestable nugget comparable to "Java gets rid of malloc and pointers" (sorta). Some have taken some whacks at doing just this, including Paul DeGrandis' talk you linked to already, as well as "Neal Ford's master plan for Clojure enterprise mindshare domination": http://blip.tv/clojure/neal-ford-neal-s-master-plan-for-cloj...

That said, the benefits of immutability and pure functions are generally obvious to any reasonably-capable programmer (my personal bias shone forth) given 10 minutes in front of a whiteboard. Can we get the, say, 10 million Java developers to sit still long enough for that? No, probably not. Maybe a tenth of them eventually, maybe. And, if a bunch of them head over to Scala because they like the look of {{{}}} instead of ((())), so be it.

A more interesting question to me lately is, what is the objective of language evangelism? Let's set aside any notion that Clojure will be "the next Java", or even achieve the same penetration as Python or Ruby. For those of us that use the language, none of those goals are particularly important. "How many developers use language X" used to be a critical question when the language you used largely delimited the reach of your eventual application/system/whatever; that is hardly the case anymore. I can write my server side in literally anything, and transpiling to JavaScript or C for client side as necessary is either within reach, or a solved problem depending on your preferred language.

So, what should be the objective? Having a large enough pool of talent to meet business objectives is the only thing I can think of that is an actual potential blocker. I know lots of people that know Clojure that would like to work in Clojure, and there are more people like that every day. Seems like the vector is trending positive; we only need to make sure it stays that way.

(This leaves out the enterprise guys to a certain degree, but that's largely due only to their [and their managers'] self-inflicted risk profile.)

Finally, I leave you with this:

http://www.indeed.com/jobanalytics/jobtrends?q=clojure%2Chas...

Note that those are absolute trendlines, not growth. You can very reasonably say that Clojure is the most in-demand functional programming language. (…for some definition of 'functional programming language' ;-)
> - Browsing a table is very slow on tables with large columns.

Last time I did this I used a fixed-width column when displaying text fields. Everything built-in was able to handle things smoothly when clipping to just the first __ characters. (Of course you can't see it all then, but I've found it useful enough... and can paste a cell elsewhere to see all of it.)
This is great, but this statement from the author is a pretty terrible assumption:

"It's nice to see an executive giving away a huge chunk of money to the employees that had as much to do with Lenovo's successful year as any executive within the company"
I would say Python's killer app is its massive library -- the size and quality has few rivals. No doubt Python's readability and approachability contributed to this.
The problem is that most people who rail against poor grammar haven't the slightest clue what grammar actually entails, and are instead peeving on stylistic issues that vary both due to the region the applicant hails from and how old the applicant is. In a lot of cases, they may as well be basing a hiring decision on whether the applicant says 'bubbler' instead of 'water fountain' or 'pop' instead of 'soda'.
I'd like all newspaper editors to read Mr. Roberts' article.

I've been working on blogging for a while. Mostly thinking about it, some writing, no publishing to the internet. I would draw a line from undertones in this article to my hesitancy to hit the "post" button.

At the risk of sounding ignorant, arrogant, or both, I'm going to make sweeping generalities. The problem as I see it is that most low hanging blog topic fruit falls under the category of "Obvious Content." If you're writing about hiring, as HN articles are wont, I promise you someone has written the same point argued the same way before. I could head up the same topic from the "Less Usual Side," but I have no personal interest in playing devil's advocate and choosing to argue for something I don't believe to be true. There's a place for that, and I'm not arguing that original thought can come out of debate or rebuttal. Unless you're publishing some kind of original research, what I have to say has probably been said already more eloquently than I could say it myself. I'm afraid I would simply be adding to the noise.

My interesting HN social experiment of the day: I would like to challenge every one to only post truly original thought. I suppose posting a unique argument to an existing topic is OK, but I'd shoot for completely untouched topics to expand the reaches of our collective thinking.
Presumably they're not rebuilding the same product!

So I doubt that applies at all.

And a Digg-type site is not that hard to build. It's light-years away from the complexity of a web browser, for instance.
Does everyone in the YC program have funding? Obviously, they have access to funding, but does everyone without exception take on funding?
Personally, I've found my grammar degrades after a day of coding. I can write well formed sentences in general, but by the end of the day my mind is working in a much different day and my emails drift towards an embarrassing place.

I don't think there's anything wrong with having your own particular standards for hiring. If it works for you in solving your particular problem: great! One of the things I began to appreciate when I first starting interviewing in the Valley is how much companies did or didn't care about nuance in their interviews. If the interview was too easy, it generally signaled to me that they don't sweat the details and maybe don't hire people that are going to stretch me professionally.
It looks like they have modeled the subprocesses of the cell and run a simulation of an assembly of those, instead of actually running (for example) a physics simulation of the entire organism at the atomic level. FYI
is this not backwards in any ways?
Okay, as a non-entrepreneur, just a lowly programmer type, my great stumbling block is negotiating pay. I kind of suck at negotiation and don't really know what my skills are worth.

I don't want to be a millionaire, Donald Trump type character. I want to be able to do interesting things and have enough money coming in so I can live somewhere nice and build a life with a partner if I'm lucky enough to end up finding one. It certainly doesn't feel like I'm worth the sort of money people seem willing to pay me.

It's only made worse in situations where it's a less formal work environment: when it's a startup or a startup-like atmosphere, working for people you know socially rather than just professionally, where it feels like you are pushing for higher pay against them or whatever.

Some people seem to be full of confidence and/or bullshit to the point where they can walk in and put an eye-wateringly large consulting fee or salary on the table and not blink.

And the stupid thing is I realise I suck at this, and sort of excuse it on the basis that I'm here to churn you out Java or Ruby or whatever.

I did read that one of the things that holds women back in the workplace specifically is lack of negotiation skills over salaries and raises. Any geek-friendly tips on fixing a slightly fear or reluctance to negotiate frankly over this stuff? When I speak to others, they seem to grok how to do it just as easily as I grok reading a stack trace, say.