skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess I should have specified Linux distributions, but then I thought that would be obvious from the context.

Besides latest stable of Plan9 was 10 years ago and latest stable of Inferno was 5 years ago...
"I build websites".

I'm actually a developer for a full-service digital agency but when you get into developer territory it's rare that the conversation will go any further than "oh, that's cool".
So, in short, big companies still don't get there doesn't have to be a correlation between GPA, educational background and actual skill to work?

Today with the internet, blogs, Github and other such things, I just don't get it!
Haha great name, need to squat that :P Though in our case, the developers have been trained to used GIT, Bugzilla, and good software engineering practices. They have completed multiple large scale projects each. Not quite novice.

Though your comment about CV is a good idea. We will likely have a section with CV for each program you can hire monthly.
While I hate to blindly agree and lump all these successful companies into API traps, you are pretty much right. From a business standpoint, if Facebook (or any other API company) sees massive growth/activity in an application on its platform, you better believe they are going to take notice and have some course of action.

You can even throw LinkedIn into this group (http://blog.programmableweb.com/2012/06/21/linkedin-shuts-do...).

The main aggravation/issue stems from developers wanting to use these APIs to gain access to users without fully qualifying the risks. I could easily be building a fantasy sports app on Facebook thinking, "they won't EVER get into this market. They have much bigger problems to solve." 2 years later, they get into the space and shut me down because I am a competitor.

These "wannabe collaborators" are not trying to improve the experience on said platform. They are trying to gain access to a vast database of users with low barriers of entry and an easy to use(/abuse) marketing channels. It's unfortunate that no one has the foresight into understanding where a company as large as Facebook/LinkedIn/etc may pivot into, but only insiders really have first hand knowledge of this sort of thing.
As akeefer pointed out, this was a long rant which finally got to the point: separate effort and scheduling. Take a quick chop at estimating effort, but not in terms of duration/dates on a schedule. Relative size works fine. It's better to take a quick hit at estimation over and over again as you begin to see empirical results than it is to spend a lot of time up-front trying to do the perfect estimate.

Software management is not like programming. It's also not like other kinds of management. Any group of people needs some sort of management function. The trick is to put in the most lightweight structure possible. For some reason many technical people of great intelligence, when faced with planning activities, begin to construct various kinds of paper and mathematical wonderlands to live in. We naturally enjoy creating complex models.

Don't do that.
I could access a registry by guessing an ID (an ActiveRecord primary key, so just an integer), not searching for names. Agreed, this isn't very useful, but the list isn't protected/obscured if the URLs are that easy to guess.

For example, at Amazon Universal Wishlist, the ID of a valid wishlist is very hard to guess -- like 6HV8XSTGDT3E7-difficult. On top, you can select whether you want that list to be public (discoverable via name search), visible if one knows the link, or private.
Try to sign up (by clicking the "I have 50$" button on the right.
Erm, GNU is doing the "innovation" here, i.e. adding spurious new flags and options. Which got quite annoying back in the days when I had to work with other commercial Unices and still hits me from time to time on BSDs (including OS X).

Anyone still remember /usr/ucb/bin?
OS X: Moving a user's home directory to an encrypted second drive
Their board and staff consist of 27 people, including all directors. The breakdown of their expenditures structure is on the right sidebar of the donation page:

5% Fundraising

11% Administration

84% Programs and Services

At the bottom of the same sidebar are links to their past financial documents, up to 2010 ( http://www.freetheslaves.net/Document.Doc?id=251 ). In that are their compensations per-employee on page 7 and 8. Of the 12 employees listed, no one received compensation of more than $36,000, and the total compensation for all of them was less than $80,000. Most received zero compensation. The average hours each work per week are also listed, so one can take an educated guess about the corporate structure.

Their total revenue (~$2.9 mil) and expenditure (~$3.1 mil) are listed on page 12. For that year, they operated at a ~$200k loss, leaving them with ~$1.1 mil in assets at the end of the fiscal year. More itemized details are available within.

I think it's good to be skeptical of charitable organizations given the corruption that has been exposed in some non profits. As to why 2010 is the last available? The 2011 returns were due in April 2012. Perhaps they're waiting on approval from the IRS before publishing it. Someone else could chime in here with a better reason.

As for the "don't spend money on <x> until <y> is resolved" mentality...I see it all the time:

"It's such a shame that people spend money on Instagram/Facebook/Twitter when space travel/clean energy/cancer research/etc is such a greater cause..."

The communist anti-capitalism rhetoric of the mid 1900s was similar: comparing the luxuries of the rich against the suffering of the lowest common denominator. Perhaps there was a similar pitch on the capitalist side against communism--I just don't see it.

I think the beauty of this organization (and most non-profits) is that it's based on voluntary participation. They're not forcing anyone to donate. Their emotional manipulation is on par with the typical commercial for weight loss, beer, cologne, anti-depressant medication, etc...and in my opinion, their cause is more noble.
The video on the main page is just a link to the sign up...
why not 50dollarsbacon.com
That was before everyone had the internet.
I closed the tab, after reading four lines and thinking, wow someone went this far to make a joke out of it?

Came to HN to find my answer. I guess that may work given that app.net users will eventually know what's up.
I succeed a lot with a terrible attitude. Go figure.
Meta: I clicked on the link to the story, got an "intro page" which was really just a giant advertisement, and was ultimately shown their main story index (rather than the article itself). What a complete and utter failure.
Some big companies do, just not the ones you'd probably care to work at. If they make this choice they simply lose out on a certain set of individuals. Their loss, not yours.
For 2K you aren't getting world class developers. World class developers won't work for that, let alone what you are actually paying them. I assume you would have to make twice what you are paying the developers to pay overhead and make a profit. So, I'm betting these developers are making somewhere around 5 - 7 dollars per hour.

I live in the Philippines and I know how hard it is to find good talent here. I know of a number of startups and dev agencies which have tried. The Philippines isn't exactly the tech hub of Asia. I'm assuming this is located in Manila, because you wouldn't be able to find people anywhere else. Unfortunately, the wages that these guys are making is barely enough to scrape by, even in the Philippines.

Working a straight 8 hours doing dev through the night (working on U.S. time zones) is too much to ask for what you are likely paying these guys. I have done that shift many times and it's hard. By the time the sun comes up you are a zombie and it only works if you are single and living in a man cave (block out all the windows.) If you have a family and want a somewhat normal life then forget it. Your developer would quickly burned out. Better to give them more flexible working hours.

The cost of the development is just one of many factors (code quality, time to market, etc) so cheap development isn't really a selling point. I get a lot of work cleaning up after crap developers. In the end, your ROI is likely far better with strong developers.

However, the average Joe with a low budget who knows nothing about development probably doesn't think about these points. So, you are probably asking the wrong crowd.
Time, performed by Trinity College Dublin Orchestra
Things most interviewees fail to discover
perl -p -e?
The role of the Russian Orthodox Church in denouncing blasphemy and calling for it to be criminally punished has been one of several disconcerting aspects of the case. The Patriarch's anger and calls for vengeance against "the devil" seem to lack a certain forgiving aspect of Christian character, and instead to recall a more medieval idea of Christianity.
Also clicking on http://ihave50dollars.com/ > Contact Us > huh?, redirects you to this ted talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_kristine_glimpses_of_modern_da...
From TFA "We discuss the core ideas in the context of a read-only system, for simplicity. Many Dremel queries are one-pass aggregations; there-fore, we focus on explaining those and use them for experiments in the next section. We defer the discussion of joins, indexing, up-dates, etc. to future work." Really, it takes Dremel multiple SECONDS to complete trivial massively parallelized read queries? It must take hours for an UPDATE or JOIN then. Wake me up when you move past the trivial, until then, enjoy your hair.
I think it's best from the show west wing which said grades in college are best to assess how you do in college. That being said it's an assessment of grading which very class to class not on knowledge.
Rust getting World stage, from Firefox OS
A doubling is not an order of magnitude increase, no matter how big the numbers are.
HN's headline is incredibly misleading, and no doubt a feeble attempt to corral the anti-education crowd. FTA:

"That has included the requirement of the addition of solid college grade-point averages and a preference for higher-level educational institutions for incoming resumes.”

Not a focus on GPA, an addition of it.

A lot of people will argue that GPA/educational background is meaningless, but I'm hard-pressed (knowing, as I do, people within my major who have 2.0 GPAs and 4.0 GPAs) to believe that if you must choose between two entry-level candidates -- both of whom have great open-source contributions and interview well -- that you shouldn't take the more academically qualified one above the other.
He's probably using the batch of people Motorola is about to lay off... If my experience with the Motorola Phillipines "developers" is any indicator, I'd run very far away.
‘Don’t laugh at my jokes too much’.
Gary Kasparov arrested at the trial. Here he is in custody looking like he is being strangled

https://twitter.com/obk/status/236423940975779840/photo/1
Maybe if alternative tools were more actively developed then they wouldn't be so horrible. Not having competition causes stagnation, which is the sad part.
LOL I read that as "A mormon in a hurry" and briefly thought to myself "What does religion have to do with trademark law"..
There would also be Monotone which had its first release in 2003. So we would have at least two distributed version control systems.
This made me think of something: it's my subjective experience that there is a relative dearth of Perl articles/discussion posted on HN. Is this correct? And if so, why is that the case? Hackers don't use Perl anymore? :)

Is anyone here using Perl in a significant way for their startup?
Wikipedia says that Dremel is named after the founder of the company.
I'm amazed every time I read/hear Nassim Taleb being quoted [1]. His black swan (outlier) "theory" [2] made some people rich, and it gained him fame.

He spent a lot of time pitching that "theory" (backing the least probable outcome) at economists at the likes of the ECB, BoE, the Fed, and so forth, and in the process pissing them all off very, very much.

Outliers are just that. Outliers. If, as an economist (or any other role that predicts anything), you went with a least-probable scenario you'd probably lose your job. So, instead, your recommendation is based on the most probable scenario. If you're thorough you might note outliers as a footnote.

[1] People who perpetuate and then capitalise on "bullshit baffles brains" annoy me.

[2] Predicting a one-in-a-billion probability that happens to come true is not a theory.
Before adopting programming as my job and passion, I was a professional actor and I plan on continuing to act professionally when I move back to to a place where it is more avaialble. Working professionally in many capacities for many years, I can tell you that luck certainly helps, for some people. This author completely discounts artists who trained, worked and pushed themselves for years and years to get where they are: regularly hired for awesome roles, being paid well, and doing it professionally day after day for their livelihood.

The fact is that pretty much every successful novelist, every successful pop star, every successful artist is successful mainly because of luck. Oftentimes there’s skill involved too, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find just as much skill in the millions of unsuccessful strivers as you do in the tiny set of people who make it huge.

There are a few things I find very wrong with this paragraph:

1) The definition of success. Even under the assumption of monetary gain, this just isn't a good statement. Success, for an artist can be measured in many other ways. That aside: plenty of successful actors got to where they were because they tried harder than others. They showed up to more auditions than others. They worked hard training themselves in schools or other avenues. They were simply better at the profession with a greater understanding of how to get hired. This brings me to my next point.

2) Just as much skill in the millions of unsuccessful strivers.

This statement is just not true. You will only find handfuls of people that are capable of pulling off, even basic, performances necessary for a professional venue. They are the exceptions and they are skilled and talented. They get work because of this uniqueness. They don't appear in shows over and over again because they are lucky, they appear because they present artistic, or even monetary, value to the production.

I appreciated and enjoyed reading the article but the definitive nature of the statements from the author regarding "pretty much every" successful artist didn't sit well with me.

For the reasons that the author illustrated earlier in the article, yes people do get lucky. But I don't think the conclusions are appropriate to apply to the skillsets of artists in this way.

Artists can, and do, achieve successes on their own accord without lady luck. Sure, luck is helpful but for every 1 successful Hollywood star, there are scores of other successful artists working because they are simply better and more talented. You may never see these people on the silver screen. They are successful; in their own minds, and the minds of artists. All of this without regard to an agreed upon definition of success.
"Are" is the verb. I didn't understand what you wrote because of that until after a few passes.

Try [GERUND] or better, [VERBing], maybe?
/me nods. I'll write something up this weekend. Thanks for the feedback!
> Has Linus ever said why he disregarded Darcs and the other OSS options (wasn't Mercurial already starting to get somewhere at that time?).

I think you might be thinking of Monotone here. Mercurial was started some days after git.

EDIT: Wikipedia has some info about what Linus thought of Monotone. The key problem with it was performance. I have no idea to what degree they have been fixed today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotone_%28software%29#Monoto...
the penalty has not been issued yet. misleading headline.
FreeBSD vs. Slackware
I believe (s)he was referring to an order of magnitude larger than the future 100k limit for new apps.
Pussy Riot found guilty
As I mention downthread, the usual measure of damages in contract is expectancy - i.e. what value would party B recieved if party A had fufilled its part of the bargain.

In this case the bargain was akin to a undated bond (the UK issued some of these), in exchange for a payment up front and infinite stream of payments. The net present value of such is straightforward to calculate; one interesting property is that their nominal value is not dependent on the time since issuance, thought their real value drops with inflation.

The law is not unreasonable, it allows for efficient breach. No court is going to order specific performance (i.e. that Joyent actually carry out its promise) but it will have to make good via monetary damages.

US courts are sophisticated enough to understand such bargains (at least since Posner was appointed to the bench in 1981).
ColdFusion session management
ColdFusion session management is enabled by default. It utilizes CFID and CFToken as session identifiers. It sends them to the browser as persistent cookies with every request. If cookies are disabled, developers must pass these values in the URL. Session variables are automatically cleared when the session timeout is reached—but not when the browser closes
This is quite funny, it made me chuckle.

Now, putting the joke aside, let's be real. Whilst the majority of you aren't willing to spend $50 (Including myself), the fact is, some people already have and they have managed to raise a lot of money.

I suppose it doesn't matter what product you have as long as you know how to market it and most importantly, solve a problem.

Whilst App.net may be ideal for developers because it considers their requirements, I highly doubt whether main stream users care the problems that App.net is trying to solve. None of my friends would pay for a social network, and neither would I. Why? Because I can use my phone and there's plenty of other free alternatives.

Either way, I wish App.net all the best but I rather keep my $50.
I'm sorry, can't refrain from correcting you. It's Gandhi not Ghandi. And I see this mistake very prevalent.
Preparing the information for a design decision
Design agent decisions are based on information expressed as preconditions.
If the design decision has to be taken before all the information needed to evaluate
the preconditions is available, the design agent will use expectations to complete
the information.

Examples of situations that require or could benefit from the use of expectations
as substitutes for precondition information are:

1. The agent is required to provide a decision within a given time
A gerund is just a form of verb, it doesn't prevent it from also being a verb.
Wikipedia: Swap “en” with “simple” in the URL
In a 2001 article, J.P. Lewis demonstrated using the Kolgomorov-Chaitin-Solomonov noncomputability theorem that there are large limits to software Estimation:

http://scribblethink.org/Work/kcsest.pdf

Algorithmic complexity is not computable, then:

1. Program size and complexity cannot be feasibly estimated a priori.
2. Development time cannot be objectively predicted.
3. Absolute productivity cannot be objectively determined.

In fact, Software Estimation methods have an error margin of 100-400% (see Kemerer, C. 1987: An Empirical Validation of Software Cost Estimation Models").

Software Effort Estimation is harmfull because trusting in anything with a 400% margin of error is risky.
Or they're not aware of any alternatives, as the official Twitter app came pre-installed on their phones.
Ouch! No heed to be harsh. I certainly appreciate Linus's work. Kudos to him! I understood his point on the stupidity thing. It even took some laughs out of me. And that's the reason I posted that, so other people could too.

I don't mean to start a flamewar on scm, really. But I think git is overly complicated, and I believe I'm not alone on that.

Anyway, don't take things too seriously and have a good one!

PS: You gave a great idea. I should email Linus and offer to pay him some beers. That sure will be a great talk. Thanks mate!
With all the handwaving and yelling around this issue I find this really refreshing.
I am bemused by the coverage of this. I imagine if the BNP staged a protest in St Paul's cathedral during Easter it would be less about free speech and more about trespass and violating a sacrosanct place and causing great offence to a religious community.
You need to remove the trailing '>' from your link (or don't put it between angle brackets).

Going by that page perhaps I should start a dutch coffee house in NY!

I wonder if there are many Starbucks in Scandinavia? I know of only one here in the Netherlands.
Should be more like "triple" or some other multiple, given the risk the early adopters took. Joyent used that capital and expanded it many, many times.
The link in the original post labeled "high frequency quoting" led to a page [1] that makes a more concrete claim. Basically they say that the NBBO (national best bid and offer) are being manipulated to be small when there is no trading and larger when there is trading.

I think that's at least a little disingenuous though...
If there is no trading then it makes sense that bids will be increased and offers decreased in order to 'entice' trades. No trading means the bid/offer are too low/high - basic econ 101.

As soon as there is trading two things happen:
1) bids and offers are hit, meaning they are removed, leaving lower/higher bids/offers as the next best.
2) The HFT algorithms know that when there is a lot of trading they should lower bids and raise offers, because excess demand indicates the bid/offer are lower/higher than they need to be. Essentially, they are realizing that they are leaving money on the table.

This all might look like price manipulation to an outsider, but to anyone that knows what is going on it's just the way markets work. The difference is that it happens a lot slower in markets humans are used to.

In my mind what would indicate a problem is if bids and offers widen AHEAD of trading. This would mean the HFTs are finding out that somebody wants to trade and adjusting their quotes BEFOREHAND. That's front-running and illegal. But I don't see evidence of that here.

[1] http://www.nanex.net/aqck/2685.HTML
I like Nanex's work - the company has done a lot of excellent analysis of the progress of HFT over the past few years.

I'm wondering why there tends to be so much value judgment and moralizing in this area coming from various sources (such as Themis).

For example: HF traders are taking value from "real" traders ("real" defined by whom?), the systems are "too fast" (compared to what?) or quoting "too much" (compared to what?), and so forth.

Exchanges already seem to be penalizing participants with very high quote-to-trade ratios, suggesting that the existing regulatory and commercial system is responding to the needs of its stakeholders.

Maybe this kind of reaction is inevitable. I'm sure that there was moralizing in ancient Greece when some entrepreneur bought a load of olive oil at a low price in Athens and ran it on a fast chariot to Thessaloniki, unfairly undercutting the honest merchants of Thessaloniki and pocketing a tidy profit through their "high-speed trading" … same thing with those who used an undersea New York - London cable to gain advance knowledge of events.
"I have little doubt that motivated self-study with the appropriate books would have produced an equally valuable education in the subject"

Much easier said than done. The course plan, deadlines, and grade that are parts of a university course force motivation that often does not exist in self-study. In my case, I've only engaged in "motivated self-study", when I have been very motivated to solve a narrow problem and my studying was similarly narrow.
This article went off the rails pretty quickly. The core argument is "Your app might be totally shit and I might not find out until I buy it," which can also be true of coffee.