skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I seriously doubt hiring managers are actually "blindly copypastaing acronyms" unless they are hiring for a role for which they have previously written similar/identical a job ad.

A much, much more likely scenario -- and this I have observed first-hand many times -- is that BigCorp used to have Bob on staff, until Bob realised he was worth more and left; subsequently, the hiring managers assess what exactly it was Bob was hired to do (Cobol) and what he actually did (something like the above) and decided to include the former and a carbon copy match of every niche, technology, domain and specialist skillset Bob had.

Why?

Because they want another Bob, of course! It's unlikely such a person exist and, more likely, the ones who do charge out the yazoo for their skills.
There was another good analysis in the CBC of Canada's next upcoming companies: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2012/07/12/f-canadia...

The key question is not whether there ARE tech companies getting started in Canada, it's whether they will stay in Canada once successful to help re-invest in the industry here.

But the most common pattern presently is that companies leave before they get (legitimately) successful. Either via acquisition or the need for capital - both not easily found in Canadian cities as it can in SV or NYC.
"There are many more folks in my position."

Us humans (other animals as well, by the way) have been self medicating ourselves for - ever really. Michael Pollen wrote about this in "The Botany of Desire". His brilliant look at our relationship with four plants that we use to treat our "fundamental desires" of "sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control": the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato.

Intoxication. We can expand it's list, of course, to include poppies, and the coca plants. Our problem is that many abuse these. The people of South America have been chewing the leaves of the Cocoa plants for thousands of years. Without addiction destroying their societies. We need these plants. And mother nature was good enough to provide them. :)

But we also need education. And in American, we'd rather "just say no". Then be honest about being a human being and our need for intoxication.

And when I write intoxication I don't mean falling down drunk. That's certainly part of it - to have a moment of rest outside our our heads. But it's also, like the post above stated - to conquer depression, stress and (I'll add) anxiety.
I think the generous free trial could allow them to raise the floor even higher than $1.49.

Part of the reason I won't buy expensive apps on iPhone is because there's no recourse if they're terrible. Google's 15 minute trial period is a start, but for some games that's not long enough to download the content they need to run.

It will also motivate developers to create apps with more than 7 days worth of value. How many people will actually keep a fart app or a game with 2 levels for more than 7 days?

I think this will be an interesting experiment and look forward to seeing what effect is has on the quality and quantity of available applications.
You always brighten my day Asa. :-)
Quick survey: Who paid for TextMate? Who also feels indignant about TextMate 2’s as-yet non-existence?

It’s intriguing to see the difference in reaction between Sparrow’s decisive EoL and the drawn-out, de facto EoL that TextMate experienced.

I'd just like to remind you all: Sublime Text 2 came along, and most of you who were using TextMate switched to that, right? You’ll survive. Just stop claiming a non-existent right to the productive output of another human, because once upon a time you bought something from them. You still have the version of Sparrow that you bought, and that’s what you paid for, whether you thought that’s what you were buying or not.

N.B.: I was tele-raised by Judge Judy, I don’t take kindly to irrational sentiment or feelings of indignation.
But if I've dissolved my American LLC and sold/transferred all its assets to my new LLC (or LLC equivalent) in $COUNTRY, what can they really do? They can't sue my old LLC, it's nonexistent. They can't sue me, I'm not liable for the activities of my American LLC. They could sue my new LLC, but they'd have to file in $COUNTRY, where the patent (or whatever) laws are more favorable to me. I suppose they could get an injunction in the U.S. to prevent my new LLC from selling to customers here, but with a webapp that I just sell subscriptions to, how could they enforce that?

I'm sure that I'm missing something here, but I don't know what.
Here's a one sentence answer that I think would help non-technology people understand software in general: It's like writing a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story in a foreign language.
Ask HN: Best way to raise Family and Friends Round
I never imagined myself asking family and friends for money. I have always had a bit of a chip on my shoulder and wanted to do everything on my own, and without a free hand out along the way. I'm 30 years old and i've gone to battle within many different settings at a handful of startups. I believe I'm mentally prepared to 'go for gusto' and try to raise 50k from family and friends.

I used to advise my friends within the startup community to avoid raising money from family at all costs. And now I sit here pondering what is the best way? How can I be respectful and ensure everyone is comfortable to say yes or no? How should everything be structured? Should I treat this like raising any round, or what should I do differently? How should I structure equity? What if my girlfriends family wants to get involved (this could add a lot of pressure and strain on our relationship)? Should I try to spread it out over as many family friends as possible. or the opposite?

Edit:

- My family and friends are middle class. I wouldn't classify them as rich or poor, but wealthy enough to travel on a few vacations per year.

- Family and friends do not come from a startup background, or tech background at that. This is all pretty new to them, but they have seen the social network..

- i'm dumping 15k in, the last of my savings.. i'm all in
Yes, movie rating/behavior personal data portability should be common. Just need a data structure and a protocol...
"It’d be a shitty, reduced, pale imitation of what Sparrow actually was, because the developers would have had to take so much time off to attend the funerals of their families who had died from starvation."

I mean, throwing hypothetical come backs was bad enough but mixing uncalled for low blows to GPL really tops it off for me. This clueless person believes GPL is "shitty" by definition... what a lovely special snow flake intelect we got here, moving on. Make sure to miss the contribute button on his about page, he probably put it on there for sarcastic stance.
For me, the resistance between $1 and $1.49 is about equal. That is, pretty much zero resistance. Anything below about $2 i think i would still click 'purchase' on a whim without really investigating it. Only at about $3 is would i pause and consider if i really needed it.

(fwiw i'm far from rich, and I own an Android + iPhone and have purchased less than 30 apps lifetime... so I guess whimsy doesn't strike me often, even at 99c! Just adding another data-point.)
I'm trying to switch from G+ to FB and finding Facebook way too obtrusive. And that's annoying and even offending. Why am I getting tons of absolutely irrelevant "friend" suggestions, which mainly consist of unknown sexy girls? That's really cheap manipulation. And those offerings like "mark checkbox to send FB invitation to _all_ contacts in your mail service". Meh...
Is Mitt Romney Buying Twitter Followers?
Word, bro. Word. :(
And in certain situations it's better not to know, because knowingly infringing patents can result in significantly higher monetary penalties than unknowingly infringing them.
Opiates are one thing that really work for depression.

Pretty sure that depends on the underlying neurochemical reason for the depression.

Norepinephrine and Dopamine-related drugs (typically associated with speed) are what helped my depression.

One of the tricky things about treatment for mental illness is that things that may appear the same on the surface can vary greatly from person to person as to the root cause (and hence proper treatment).
Do you think there is a way for (potential) customers to identify any information about the intentions of the developer or company?

Well, in many cases "free" is strongly suggestive of the "not trying to build a company, just building a portfolio in order to attract job offers" scenario. Beyond that, it's hard to say.

The recent Internet Defense League makes me wonder if something similar couldn't be launched [...]

I'm not sure what "something similar" would be here. Your favourite website is being shut down because its developers got acquihired by Google, so you should write a letter to your member of congress?
I've raised money from friends before. I'd be honest with them about the risks involved (while still conveying your vision and the opportunity) and let them know that you'll be putting everything you have into the effort, no matter the result. Good luck, admire your dedication.
I don't worry about that. Just write, don't think about how you'll use the notes.

Looking back, the first few years of notes aren't very useful to read. Almost all the benefit came from the act of writing. It took years for the muscle to develop, for me to start writing in a way that is conducive to reading and organization.

But don't try to do too much at the start. Just write, and keep writing. Keep it as simple as possible so the momentum is sustainable.
Good question. I haven't done any research because I am curious about the technology and not to interrupt the market.

But one thing I already noticed is that you don't need to register with my app since everything is done client-side (no plans about server persistence yet).

And, well, the caching of bookmarked sites. That also happens completely without a backend server.
Darn...too late to edit.

Note that if the number of floors is 105 instead of 100, then you can still do it in 14 drops, and the solution is unique: 14, 27, 39, 50, 60, 69, 77, 84, 90, 95, 99, 102, 104, 105.

The two solutions given above for 100 floors can be derived from the 105 solution. To get the solution given in the article, use the 105 floor solution and if it calls for dropping from a floor above 100 pretend that you did that drop and the egg broke, and don't actually count that drop in your drop count since you didn't actually do the drop.

The get the solution I gave, take the 105 floor solution, and shift it down 4 floors, so it ends on 100 instead of 105.

Many more solutions are possible by mixing the ideas of pretending that floors about 100 break, and by shifting all or part of the 105 solution down.
What law entitles users to bug fixes for major issues?
New Home Based Business Trends In America -
Pride!? As far as I'm concerned, my ADHD can go f&&k itself!

:)

Whenever I hear someone say how cool it is that they have ADHD and how happy they are about it I get very skeptical.

I don't want to armchair-diagnose people, but the inability to control you attention has serious downsides.
That would be Chrome's problem, not SVG's. SVG is, essentially, XML; a language. If Chrome crashed, it's cause it didn't handle something well.

As one who used to do SVG all the time, I never had any such issues.
All of which begs a question: if our rare giants are doomed to fall and our startups are fated to exit outside of Canada, what sort of tech sector do we really have? More important, do we even need a tech sector?

Bad premise -- neither of these are foregone conclusions.

Plenty of "giants" from the past two decades have fallen on both sides of the border. There's no reason to believe a Canadian "giant" is "doomed to fall".

As for our startups being "fated to exit outside of Canada", there are plenty of examples of companies who are growing fast and seem to be in it for the long run (Shopify, FreshBooks, HootSuite, Wattpad). Some of these companies may ultimately exit to a foreign buyer, but each startup launched and exited is another shot in the arm for our burgeoning startup community, and I suspect that an increasing number of Canadian companies will be sticking around as this community grows.
Last notch tweeted Xbox sales were over 3 million, at $20 each that's $60m worth of sales. No idea about Android or iOS.

Restitution could come from revenues of any US product sales or assets, not just the specific one being contested.
I think TV series is a bit too much. I mean, even I liked Firefly but "emotionally investing"? Come on.

On a different note, I do have a smartphone. But I hesitate as hell to buy apps on my Android (no paid app here) for the very fear that if I suddenly jump to another platform I'll lose everything. Of course, I'm quite new to this "new" smartphone generation.

My previous smartphone was a S60 Symbian over 6 years ago.
> E(# of drops) = E(# of drops for 1st) + E(# of drops for 2nd)

In the general case, I don't think this is true. I think you're relying on the idea that all intervals are equally large. But I'm not definite here.

> E(# of drops for 2nd) = 1/2 the difference between two drops of the 1st egg

Sure, but this depends in a nasty way on your schedule for dropping the first egg.

> E(# of drops of 1st) = 1/2 the number of intervals

This is definitely wrong. Say my schedule for dropping the first egg is [1, 2, 3, 100]. On your analysis, the expected number of drops the first egg will take to break is 1.5. If we assume that the egg's breaking threshold is uniformly distributed over floors 1-100, the actual expectation for drops-to-break-the-egg is 3.94.

> 100 = the number of intervals × the difference

True for the average difference, but this is pretty explicit about assuming that the size of an interval is constant.
81% burnt lady needs a lot of money to stay in hospital, Please donate
Code Rush - Netscape Mozilla Documentary 1998 - 2000
Bail Out the Boat
For me it's a mental health issue. If you are suffering no clear detriments you should be able to determine what improves your quality of life.

Despite having lost family to both alcohol and opiates I'm not opposed to self-medication. Personally, watch out for long term health effects and of when you are particularly vulnerable to increase usage. Socially, I wish self-medicators dealt with doctors and therapists by default instead of dealers and police.
I've never used Raphael.js but, looking at the front page, it says it uses the SVG recommendation. But so do browsers and browsers implement it internally. The advantage may be two-fold. 1) It works in all browsers where, as it is with most technology, Internet Explorer didn't support SVG and 2) every object is a DOM object. (But isn't every SVG object a XML object? Been away too long.)

Does Raphael draw in a canvas? SVG draws in the browser viewport. Which does a better job of drawing vectors?

iow, I don't know.
Did you use a credit card (likely)? Charge-back.
Possible solution to PG's frighteningly ambitious idea for email overload
"Sparrow’s acquisition is a success story. Indie devs make a great product, build a customer-base, and are rewarded with a buy-out from a big company and they get new jobs with that company. It might not be what your particular goal or end-game is, but it is a success."

So when you boil it down "mak[ing] a great product, build a customer-base, ... are rewarded" with a job at google.

Therefore building the product was, essentially, like a job interview.
another critical error is damage to the egg (or any object) from each 'successful' drop.

An object that survies from being dropped from height x may not survive being dropped a second time from height x.
There is a third option: try to push the world in a direction where hard-edged borders and international surveillance are less important.
Know your web browsers
It doesn't prevent them of course, but the higher price floor and the lower cut incentive for >$25k seem to both be designed to encourage devs to focus on high-quality apps rather than flood the store with a lot of crappy ones. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there will be tons of crappy apps anyway, but hopefully a slightly better signal-to-noise ratio overall.
Google beat us, the users, and Sparrow let them. Google is better at aggregating wealth than either we or Sparrow was.

That's the problem. Now, a solution.

What I think would have been interesting was an auction. Us against Google. Google bids first. $25MM. Then, in a Kickstarter fashion, we could bid against that, within a certain timeframe. I think this kind of "end user buy-out protection clause" should be a standard for startups like Sparrow, looking to both assure the userbase that they will not be pulled out from under them, and their own team that they'll get a comfortable payout no matter what.

Granted, a weakness of this plan is that if the consumers win the auction, what is to prevent someone else from making another offer immediately? The auction becomes something like an extortion scheme at that point. To deal with this the consumer side of the auction is time-limited - if the consumers win the auction, then product improvements are assured for, oh, 3 years.

The fact is that there are still rather obvious error modes. What if the developers sit on their hands? What recourse would the consumer bidders have? The simple answer to this, of course, is "very little." The burden will be on the team to show that they would like to continue to work on the project if the consumer side makes it make financial sense.
I don't understand this either.
Why would someone that didn't work for the company and wasn't being paid be writing code for the company?
It all sounds really strange to me.
I can think of no good reason to use color names instead of hex values.
This is awesome. You could also add in the HN time frame to make it easier to see where in the past you are (the bit below each HN post that says "30 minutes ago, or 2 days ago"). Is there a way to just see Ask HN posts? One of the most annoying things about that section is that it's not in chronological order.
An interesting article, but perhaps rather heavy on assertion, and light on actual data. Would it not, perhaps, be significantly improved by quotes from publishers and developers who are engaged in both "freemium" and paid models? Hearing first-hand of what trends they're experiencing would lend more weight to the assertion that freemium is on its way out.

Personally, I do lean very much toward outright payment for a product or service - I pay for my LJ account, though free accounts are offered; the few TV shows I enjoy, I buy from iTunes, at least when they're made available; the music I listen to, similarly, I buy, rather than listen to on a subscription service that subsequently offers microscopic payment levels to the artists.
Colorado suspect was brilliant science student
This will, however, lower the number of 1 off apps that people need. Sometimes, I need an app to do something that I do once a year. I have no intention of paying $5 for this app and chances are, I'll download it and return it clean within that 7 day period. So if your app is very situational, the MS app store might do more harm than good.
Can you see if the egg is broken without going down? I guess you're assuming so.
Let the idiots compromise their certs to get cheap apps for free. It'll cost them in the long run when their details get stolen.
Drug addiction isn't neuro-diversity, nor something that is an effect of a special brain disorder.

Give me 100 random people, a year, the right environment, and some strong opiates, and I'll give you back 95 addicts.

While some might be more susceptible to drug addiction than others, getting addicted and forming dependence is nothing more than a process.

In general (outside the extremes of the dataset) your life's circumstances and details are more important to developing (and maintaining, and quitting) your drug habit than your brain chemistry is.
How did you handle that? And what was the outcome?
You're fucked.
Do you know of even one US-based site with one-click ordering?
"is another shot in the arm for our burgeoning startup community" still doesn't mean "tech sector" or 1.XB of R&D spending _Per Year_. These shots are but a drop in the bucket, and that is the point.

Long term entrenched growth what this article is pushing for.
Wikipedia has an article on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law

Best cite from that article to a more scholarly source appears to be to this book (http://www.amazon.com/Textbook-Intellectual-Property-Oxford-...), in which we can read:

"""
In most European countries the origins of copyright law lie in the efforts of government to regulate and control the output of printers [...] printing made it possible to have as many exact copies of a work as there were persons who wanted and could afford to buy them. This meant much more rapid and widespread circulation of ideas and information. While the state and church thought this was to be encouraged in many aspects [...], it also meant that undesirable content -- dissent and criticism of government and established religion, for example -- could circulate too quickly for their comfort. So, all over Europe, government established controls over printing, by requiring printers to have official licenses to be in business and produce books. These licenses typically gave the printer the exclusive right to print particular works for a fixed period of years, enabling him to prevent others from doing so during that period.
"""

This incarnation of copyright is pretty directly prohibited by the 1A's guarantee of freedom "of the press", but there seems to be agreement that that's what copyright was about when it was established.
Actually, it's the other way around. Logging [which is pretty much what printf debugging is] is much more sustainable for long-running nondeterministic programs. It's far easier to look at a log and say "After 3 hours, this program started giving bad responses for these specific inputs".

Debuggers are great when you know where to attach and what to look at, but finding that information out is far easier to do from a log.
Yeah, I can see that happening. Looking through my purchase history on my Mac and iPad - there are a handful of apps that I've purchased for one specific use, or are only useful for a limited time (ie, a fantasy football draft application). In all cases, I feel like I got my $1 worth, but if the feeling is "eh, I'm not going to use this anymore", there isn't any incentive to go through the process of paying for it.

Depending on how this is implemented and whether or not it is optional, it could be problematic for some useful apps.
"which unlike freemium is neither new nor a fad"
Because freemium is new and a fad?

There's nothing in the article that indicates that freemium is somehow bad for your business. Just opinions of a few people. Which don't even contradict freemium. SurveyMonkey 'downplays' its free offering, not stops it. Marco Arment says you should charge for your product, since when is freemium not charging for your product?

Freemium is not something businesses do because they're ashamed of making money, it's something businesses do to gain access to a tough market.

Do you think people on the streets are handing out newspapers, soft drinks and mini-snacks for free because of charity? It is marketing. Can anyone show me sparrow would have gotten the same amount of attention with close to no marketing budget if it had only the pay-up-front version?

How many sales would they have lost to pirating if the ad-supported version was just a trial?

Freemium works, figure out what it is that is worth money to your users, and make sure people can get it for their money. Pepsi-Cola would love a way to give their new taste to so many people for free, with almost no distribution costs.