skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've often thought this was a good idea. The "interfaces" between the smaller companies would be far more strict and simple then interfaces between departments in a single large company. It's like the difference between buying a hamburger from a fast food chain which is extremely easy and asking a co-worker to sell you a burger which gets complicated very quickly.

Overhead in terms of office space etc would increase. However the simplicity of the necessary interactions between the smaller companies could turn the entire arrangement into a net gain for the parent company.
That interviewer was terrible:

> How long have you been interested in computer coding, and searching, and things like that?

If you're going to have someone do an interview about computer science, at least let the interviewer be someone with a cursory knowledge of the field.
Of course not. Of course not.
Isn't the joel test less about pass/fail and more about communicating and encouraging certain things that make a better environment for developers? I don't really care if they "pass" the joel test or not, but I do find the answers to the questions helpful. I sure as hell wouldn't want to work in a place with no source control.
Awhile back I wrote up some details on how to manage it from Rails:

http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2011/07/building-multi-tenant-rai...
Like it! But would be better imo to have prettier graphs. I am not a fan of the red and green vertical timeline heroku and others are using. It is not a normal way to look at downtime. Use a horizontal chart and let me drag and scroll myself to see each month. Provide served requests vs. failed requests per hour graphs. Basically, provide me with graph crack that shows more info and proves to me you are not trying to smooth over outages.
Yeah, fortunately Ballmer just posted the companies first quarterly loss. Now he can get his 5 from the board and LisaB can move on up. Hilarious.
What are you having trouble understanding?
Why? Because the alternative would be even worse. If a CEO desperately wants out with no notice/transition, you would not want to obligate them to stay an extra day as a contractual prisoner.

(In practice, still, most exits would still have some notice. But it'd be mediated by mutual reputational concerns, not contract terms.)
Research update: Chips with self-assembling rectangles
Still only works in IE9+...
Here's your Augmented Olympics opening ceremonies, courtesy of Deus Ex.
Your example is not functionally equivalent as address is a model instance with many address-related properties. Though I agree with your general premise. This, to me, seems like the Tell, Don't Ask solution:

class User
delegate :street_name, to: :address, prefix: true, allow_nil: true
end

<%= user.address_street_name || "No street name on file" %>
That means we get back to what we had in 2005 with the T42's 1600x1200 15" screen?
Any way to figure out what these "goals" are?
This comment is an exemplar of how not to behave on HN.

It is as insulting ("dotcom fantasy land"? "Dixon doesn't seem to know anything"?) as it is wrong: Chris's post is explicitly about "the VC model" as opposed to "investors who are less aggressive about returns". Since he's recommending that fewer startups pursue that model, you could hardly have missed his point more completely.

But it's the tone that is inappropriate, that sharp-elbowed nastiness that strives to pack something mean in every phrase. I know it feels good to write this way; I've done my share. But it really is like peeing in the swimming pool, and not underwater either.
You would definitely want them to stay until you had a replacement lined up, even if they were unhappy.
You need to aardvarkify it...
Have you thought about using open graph at all?
Employers can put all sorts of things in employement contracts to scare employees, but that doesn't mean they're enforceable.
This truth has been understood for thousands of years. It's only with the coddling that has been going on in recent generations that it feels like a revelation.
Apple the worst computer company I dealt with
Expression-Oriented evokes purity in that expressions have external facing properties which can be understood and even kept in the type system. If you use global mutation and you don't keep track of it in the type system you can't say much about those properties anymore. You can however use mutation locally and maintain your referential transparency which is a nice way to get around the limits of some not-so-functional-friendly algorithms.

I'm planning on writing about that next time around because my tracking shows barely anyone gets to the end of an article beyond a certain length.
Are you seriously suggesting that Microsoft intentionally wants to break games so they can hope to get patch review fees out of developers?

Edit: According to [1], Fez had 76,000 downloads in the first half-month (April) alone. And in [2], Fez has 114,000 gamers on its leaderboards. So, where's the value in hurting conversions and pissing of a lot of folks, just for a chance to get a $40K fee?

1: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/171271/InDepth_Xbox_Live_...

2: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/174307/Xbox_Live_Arcade_s...
If it's so great why aren't I using it right now? After my first Google search in 2000 I was hooked.

Does the article actually link to anything related to his computer coding? Oh wait here it is: http://www.cuil.com
The fact that everybody uses a particular technology does not in fact answer the question of which scales better or which cannot scale. I don't know about others here, but I would welcome actual objective information on this topic rather than sarcasm and an appeal to popularity.
I like this font, but its hinting on Linux sometimes makes it unusable. I keep jumping between Inconsolata-g, Clean, Consolas, Anka/Coder, and Andale Mono, because each one of them has something that just bugs the hell out of me.

I'm still looking for a font that has clean hinting at 8pt on Linux, that doesn't have absolutely atrocious features, and that has a reasonable number of symbols on the mathematical and non-Latin Unicode planes. Fontconfig with Infinality patches helps, but not enough.
The lack of a schedule I can understand, but Stack Exchange has no testers?!
Not a lawyer or anything of that sort.

Law is sort of small hobby for me: I read every word of anything I sign and I paid a decent amount of attention in a business law class I took in college.

A great introductory book on the subject you could probably get cheaply used at a college book store is "Fundamentals of Business Law"

It goes over just about anything a small business and/or startup person would want to know (short of options, equity, and the like ) anymore you would definitely want to go with professional council on .

At will employment is a pretty standard practice is the US.

That language is in just about any offer for employment that a person would read in the states.

It basically just means "you can quit at anytime and we can get rid of you at anytime" generally except for anything that violates the employment contract or any applicable laws.

Its to help with liability and rights on both ends
startupbook.net
you guys should set a more realistic target. it probably won't deadpool since it can be run on a very small amount of money.

a target such as cumulative pageviews, or that the aggregate svbtle website will not become a major source of tech opinion (and will not break into the techmeme leaderboard[1])

[1] http://techmeme.com/lb
I think eventually you will not think this is as good of an idea as you do currently. There is a sweet spot for billing, just like anything else: somewhere between too often and too much. Just my 2p.
HIPAA requires it as far as I know, and I am sure other regulatory frameworks probably do.
The reason I suggested it is because functional has been so badly perverted. We need a term that evokes the actual spirit/philosophy of the language, not just the heritage.
Well he is only 17. Did you know about Markov chains when you were 17?
Not really. Organisation can function a long time without CEO. People at the very top are completely irrelevant to day to day operations.
You can code so start writing iPhone apps, pick something, iterate.. Find some freelance jobs while unemployed. Apply to finance companies as a quant. You can even find QA or dev jobs at around 100k to relieve pressure. QA is easier and if you can code you are a very valuable QA person. Why? Because you are breaking the code and turning it into a viable product. Any company that ships values QA.

Treat the job search as a full-time job. Since you have flexibility living at home, you can afford to wait for a good job in some sense. Otherwise find a larger company that hires MBAs into training programs. Use your school MBA network. If you don't know many people, but live close, reconnect to the program, go to all the events you may have missed. Find an internship at the very least. Some of the bigger businesses will repay your MBA loans over time. Once you get in somewhere with a high upside, solve their problems for them. Find a mentor. Maybe your MBA school will hire you? Go into public service, work for the government or teach (in those cases your income based repayment loans are wiped after 10 years). Work for a nonprofit as an MBA. They always want such folks, usually pay well, and also qualify for the 10 year program.

Join the Peace Core for a year, go abroad, see the world, the problems, come back and apply for exclusive service related Federal jobs. They also have the 10 year loan forgiveness program.

Find a smaller company that has a hard time getting top MBAs but needs them. The MBA has some value, it can be just a scam as everyone makes it out to be.

Hell, go work for Yahoo, they are all about change right now. In your application pitch ideas about how to turn the organization around.

Your wife needs to write since she is a writer. If you are a coder you need to code. If you want to solve business problems, go solve business problems. The GPA is meaningless long term. Use your strengths, acknowledge your weaknesses, work around them, and above all stay hungry.

It's hard, I have a high debt load as well. What you cannot do is sit around and worry about it. You have to move forward. If you want, declare bankruptcy, learn from it and keep moving forward.

But you can make it work.

Pick tasks that make you better: code, write, solve.

Don't expect a lump sum salvation. Work at it, chip it away... Call your credit card companies and negotiate. You have the power. They want to be repaid.

You are not alone in your struggles.
Personally, yes. Raising children is one of the most important things we do on this planet.
At-will is a description of the absence of an contract term restricting either party's right to end employment. It's not a law and it's not a restriction. What's surprising is that neither party wanted any kind of term; she didn't want a guarantee she'd be employed even a single year, and they didn't want a guarantee she wouldn't up and quit with no notice. They could've had one. Having to buy out the contract of a high-ranking person to replace them early is kind of the norm I've come to expect.
Been a really happy DejaVu Sans Mono 10 user for a while now. It was tough choosing between that and Inconsolata.
Those words and pictures are now worth $5,213,248 with 20 days to go.
Actually all this means is that only vi users are lame enough to use their editor in a web browser. ;-)

LONG LIVE EMACS!!!!!!!!!!!
Euler's identity explained in a crazy 5 minutes [video]
One million dollars a year is still very, very low for a CEO of a major public company.
There's no such thing as an "at-will employment state". No state prohibits employment contracts with length of employment or notice of termination terms. Rather than repeat it, refer to my other comments in the thread.
CARDIOVASCULAR SYSTEM
The willingness to believe in conspiracy theories, probably.
You're misinformed. At-will employment is not a law, it's a legal doctrine, a description of a legal status: the absence of an employment term restricting the right to end the employment relationship at any time. At-will employment is the default state of employment relationships in every state; they are not stating anything unique to California. In fact, California was the first state to rule a termination in an at-will relationship illegal when it was in violation of public policy.

What was surprising was not that they made the at-will relationship explicit, it's that they chose to have it that way at all. There is nothing stopping them from requiring notice before she quits, or her from requiring they hire her for at least some minimum term. You hear about having to buy-out contracts of executives all the time.
I didn't. His accomplishments sound pretty awesome! My reply above was directed more at the article and it's lack of links to the guy's work. After watching the interview I just wanted to try some searches but there was no link.
I consider Obama right-wing. He's only left-wing compared to other American politicians, and he's really not all that left-wing even then.
This is really exciting technology. From http://www.opus-codec.org/

> Opus codec is designed by the IETF Codec Working Group and incorporates technology from Skype's SILK codec and Xiph.Org's CELT codec.
Different Types of Clients for a Web or Software Development
That's nice. Unless you, say, you want to:

* Track renames of files.

* Track changes to the repository as a whole, instead of per file. I care most about stepping through revisions of a project; inspection of the history of a particular file is a secondary concern for me, but is all that CVS can do. A "project" for me is usually a set of files that are interdependent to greater and lesser degrees.

The best you get with CVS for tracking the versions of all the files in a repository is manually creating tags all the time. With Git, Subversion, Mercurial, Bazaar, etc you get this for free; it's how these tools work.

(As an aside, DOS is also a proven operating system. For varying values of "proven".)
No. What killed Digg was v4: 1) Removing the downvote option, 2) The discovery of automated accounts which would upvote sponsored articles, and 3) Reasonable alternatives, i.e. Reddit, etc.
After all, Digg is just a social bookmarking site.
I ran a survey on some FB Startup groups giving a few number ranges. People gravitate towards <1000 $ (indicating as less as possible) and when I ask them what they ended up spending, they pick (5000 - 10000 $). People spend their way to realize that they could have done a lot better by defining 'minimum' and 'viability' in the context of solving customer pain!
Your conspiracy theory about Google planting Marissa as a spy CEO is absurd.

I'm sure Marissa's departure was considered a huge loss at Google, especially to go to Yahoo. No company is ever happy to lose an executive.
> If you care about making your code smaller (which reduces the occurrence of bugs), making it more readable, etc., and performance isn't much of an issue, then it probably is a win.

Maintainability over the life of the code is more important than optimizing its present state to the most elegant solution. The code is going to grow, requirements will change, cases will be added not present in the current system.
I'd like to see analysis that suggested if traditional VCs have it right or not. Yes, yes, startup returns follow a power law distribution, I agree. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's optimal to chase the potential top companies!
"But yes, Kickstarter is selling dreams. It's helping start-ups take off simply by believing in their vision."

Funny. I applied to KS two years ago and they rejected me because "they don't fund start-ups."
No offense, but I think you may be pandering to people who don't know what they're talking about.

Guido adds first class functions and functools to the standard library and people suddenly start calling Python "functional." The same is probably going to start happening to Java once λ expressions get added.

I think functional programming has been most clearly defined as those languages whose base model of computation is the λ-calculus (or F_ω, etc.). Python is not functional because, despite having functional features, the idiomatic way of writing Python mirrors Turing machine computation.

If you restricted yourself to only the functional features of Python, well, that would be Python in name, but is that really how people write Python?
Emmy nominations 2012
Emmy nominations 2012
lets see Emmy nominations 2012 and wait for know who are to be winner
Digital corpora for use in computer forensics education research
HN is the whitest malest forum I'm a member of. Spend 30 seconds in the thread discussing a charity encouraging black girls to program[1] and it's blatantly apparent. At least 4chan is self-aware regarding the sexism and racism. Reddit tries to brush it off as jokes or isolated incidents.

HN on the other hand, a [male dominated] forum of established [white] professionals and aspiring professionals, exists in a bubble of absolute denial of these horrible attitudes.

The top voted comment about a new CEO literally questions her fitness as a mother.

I challenge anyone to find any posts questioning any other CEO's parenting choices. (Bonus points if top voted for on a story).

That shitty attitude doesn't exist for Gates, Jobs, Page, Brin, or Ellison. But a woman steps up and suddenly HN cares about her child and votes up a comment questioning how her decision affects her child and second guessing her motherly quality.

1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4261619
As gojimo said in an ealier comment

"In practice, still, most exits would still have some notice."

Companies just like to have the option.

You could say it was confidence on her part. Now we could have another discussion about whether or not that was foolish but that could be the reason
Spoken like someone who doesn't have $300 million. The type of personality that builds $300 million in equity generally doesn't slow down to enjoy the simpler things in life.
Some of it is acceptance. You might find that Buddhist meditation may help. You feel stressed and overwhelmed because you feel a lack of control over your situation/life and expected responsibilities. However, what you really lack is perspective because you are anxious about future unknowns. This is what drives your search through the self-help books. Caveat, if you do have a major disorder seek medical treatment. Those programs are organized around stabilizing the chemicals in your brain and at the same time providing cognitive therapies to help bring some perspective and rational decision making. Essentially you are fighting against your fight or flight responses and attempting to reengage your brain. It helps when you can stop your brain from producing too much speed or other stimulants. Likewise, for depression. We are drug responsive machines, people exercise like mad for the oxytocin high released after enough activity.

So what you search for is perspective and a feeling that everything is ok and will be ok. The thing is, you end up where you started but see things differently.

The financial issues are solved one day at a time.
How is MySQL competing with MS-SQL? I'm quite sure they're in different league. Price point wise MS-SQL isn't that much cheaper than Oracle.

Here's one word: upsell _HARD_

That was my experience trying to buy support/license for GlassFish. Some sales guy tries very hard to upsell us to use WebLogic (of course, otherwise he's not going to fill his quota or get a bonus).
Regardless of who writes the code, as you can clearly see the browser prompts you to allow integration for each service that has it. If you don't want desktop integration, don't click yes.
The dev cycle is: type code -> build -> push to prod.
Or how to make code that is easy to exploit. This teaches me to avoid ruby, if anything.
> If I was worth $300 million, I would not be working and I would be spending annoying (to my daughter) amounts of time with my daughter. Fuck work!

Which is probably why you don't have $300M.
I agree that the bet he proposed is doomed. I'm good with some alternate metric, too.
Victory for Open WiFi: Judge Rejects Copyright Troll's Bogus "Negligence" Theory
They passed their funding goal ages. What's your definition of "succeed"? Me pledging for a console isn't going to do much to get good games to be promised for it. I'd love to see it succeed, but it's hard to justify paying $100 for something that isn't even useful by itself.
Just because you know you're going to suffer a huge loss doesn't justify the loss itself.
One of those ideas that, after you hear it, you think ya, that makes total sense, why isn't this already being done? Very cool project idea to be working on still in high school.

Edit: This is 2011? Anyone know if something usable came out of this? http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science-fair-gold-...
Doesn't matter if they're in parallel.
I think one of the reasons they do this is because a last resort for local startups is to sell out in an acqihire to one of the large tech companies in the area, who are always looking to acquire local developer talent.

You don't have that asset to sell if your team are spread out across the world, or are located somewhere else.
I agree. Also, I don't know if I would consider a 12/12 the only way to "pass," if you want to think about it that way. A 10/12 is a pretty good score, but I think it is more about the transparency and knowing what the job offers and what it doesn't.
I highly recommend Backus' "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?" as a classic critique of the expression-statement dichotomy (which Backus calls "the von Neumann bottleneck" and then immediately blames himself for rather than von Neumann - Backus of course having led the creation of FORTRAN).

www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Backus78.pdf
Not to diminish his work in any way, but markov chains are (were?) part of the senior finite math curriculum in Ontario.

E.g. We used them to examine weather prediction models in gr. 12
Maybe it means that they have no designated testers, no separate QA team, and everybody is responsible for testing.
HIPAA does not require traffic monitoring.
True, this is just a feature. I found it very useful in Ruby, but I don't see how a paradigm can be built on top of that.
Shareholders don't often see it that way.
That's only the salary.

"The estimated value of executive pay packages can also be calculated in dramatically different ways. After factoring in future grants of restricted stock and stock options due Mayer under her employment agreement, Yahoo said her annual compensation will be worth about $20 million annually [sic], or about $100 million during the next five years that the company hopes to retain her as CEO."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/new-yahoo-...
------
Much appreciate the insights. We are actually less worried about scale now (We just got users and some revenue and we are a long shot away from scale problems). We did not want to go too far down the path where we carry tech debt so much that we have to re-do. Your answers tell that its okay to go the way we are going and there are still ways to keep the recommendations (Machine Learning part) separate.
---

I shall get back here to post a link to our product in about a week when we launch. Would very much appreciate comments then!
Agreed.

"So what's your next step?"

"Well, I might do this..."

15 seconds in,

"Okay sorry to cut you off short, I'm a terrible interviewer and my degree is in liberal arts, you're smart and stuff bye."
Joel didn't leave himself much breathing room on interpreting the test results.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html

"A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you've got serious problems. The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like Microsoft run at 12 full-time. "
AMD to introduce low-power ‘Jaguar’ model for tablets