skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Landscape of E-Commerce Tools and Acquisitions [diagram]
My Stripe CTF Play-by-Play
I addressed the "Bob could have saved that photo" point: "although you could theoretically save every photo and update anyone ever lets you see on Facebook, it would be difficult enough that in practice no one does." Facebook has a sane default of not saving everything that you view on your computer. Yes, maybe someone saved one or two photos, but they probably don't have them all.

OTR is pointless for a medium that's mostly about photo sharing. For the Facebook use case, what's far more important than crypto is the set of social norms the site establishes via what's easy to do (share) and what's hard, e.g., archiving everything your friends share as it comes in. Not only would that be tricky to do without getting detected as a bot, but 99.9% of users would never think to try it. This problem is inherently more tractable with a distributed system, and that could be bad.
Just listened to a Herding Code interview with a guy who was using APL to get domain experts programming.

He had a very interesting and elegant solution to the problem: You let the domain experts take charge of implementing their domain logic. But as soon as you hit a point where what they're doing needs to be shared with the rest of the company, you bring in a software engineer to sit down with them and review the code. They take charge of making sure it's robust and reliable, and work with the domain expert to refactor it into something that will be more maintainable.

That seemed like a reasonable solution to me. And the thing that was striking was that he wasn't doing it with any newfangled visual languages or anything like that. It's already being done successfully in a business environment using APL.
Yes, yes, of course. My point is that even traditional mainframes users are now moving towards regular supercomputers, because of its convenience.
This is spot on. I can't even fathom why somebody would needlessly burn bridges like this. The fact that we live in boom times and enjoy near-unprecedented demand for our skills is no excuse for this type of myopic behavior.

What really surprised me was that the OP's candidate was a referral. It's one thing to risk burning your own bridges, but it's completely inconsiderate to possibly tarnish the reputation of someone who spoke up on your behalf. Speaking for myself, unless this was a close personal friend, I would be very reluctant to ever subsequently recommend this individual again.

Without delving into anecdotes, I've witnessed a scenario quite similar to this one. A candidate who was referred (as a "rockstar") struggled with the technical interview, and subsequently walked out. It goes without saying how he, and to a lesser extent the individual who referred him, were viewed in the aftermath.

TLDR; Please don't do this. It's completely unnecessary and possibly inconsiderate.
Take The Time to Build a Great Team
It takes great execution to come up with a good idea.
Walking out isn't rude. It's a reality check for the HR and management that something isn't kosher.

I've walked out of interviews after finding the usual bait-n-switch techniques regarding position description, expectations, travel requirements, compensation, work conditions, .. just to name a few.

Do I expect HR/management to get a clue - not really, it's not my job to further their problem solving ability.
I am guessing either this type of bomb wasn't designed to create shrapnel, or they removed the casing beforehand somehow?
I am a programmer with 10+ years exp who wares a tie every day to work. Reading though that though I see a lot of red flags that have nothing to do with the dress code. Honestly, using a custom ORM solution is a sign of incompetence. Frameworks seem easy and fun to people that don't understand them, but after a few years I think about such things a series of trade-offs not an interesting problem.

A few moths ago a coworker with ~5 years exp wanted to write their own simple graphing library to get around a few problems, everyone in the office said have fun do it on your own time, but don't add it to the code base. He had fun and it was a great learning experience, but the idea of working where most people where at that point has little appeal.

PS: 15 years ago there where a lot of great reasons to write your own framework, now days not so much.
Watch live feed of Hurricane Isaac (click switch to video)
Intuitions and anecdotes are fine, but there is actual research on visual programming languages, as well as on computer science education.

Visualizations, animations, and metaphors do help beginners learning programming and understand programming concepts. Scratch is currently probably the most well known tool for beginning students to use for programming (used with kindergartners all the way up to college freshmen).
Table Storage could be much more useful if it had indexes. A managed, reliable MongoDB hosted service would be very interesting.

With that said, SQL Database (formerly known as SQL Azure), specially with the Federations feature, is an interesting option for LOB applications.
In terms of being a target - less so than the industrial cities of North-West Germany.
It's a lot further away, so more dangerous to mount a raid and you can put a smaller payload on target, but it's still an important enemy city as well as a communications hub.

On the ground it got off relatively lightly - by the time it was reached the war was pretty much won and it was essentially surrendered without a fight.
If Wave had gotten this feature, I would have used it for all of my corporate documents.
He's supposed to be a little off. It's a plot thing. He plays the part perfectly.

Though, still, I wish they hadn't gone there. I preferred some of the past doctors. I don't dislike Smith as much as I used to, though. I'm pretty neutral on him now.
GameDay Interactive – #GCTO (Video) - XConnectTO
Server configuration at a push of a git
Is there a vast decrease in time/waste product/investment when this is compared to something like a CNC mill? I've seen those things turn down 3-dimensional objects inside of other 3-dimension objects with only the slightest holes, so shapability (is that a word?) is not an argument.
I actually use paper a lot. It is especially helpful when I am away from computer and I need to design a code flow, algorithm or just write down feature or todo list. Paper and pen rocks!
Greetings to J. Romme
Sorry 'bout this, just wanted to test the submit form.
The problem is many bikes are legitimately sold for well below MSRP. When a bicycle manufacturer sponsors a college team, they typically sell just-released models to team members for less than wholesale. The members will sell the bike the following year (when the frame is still considered a current model year) for the same as they paid and buy another new one.
That's an important distinction that a lot of people are overlooking in this discussion. It's not the end result that is patented, but rather the process or method to achieve that result.
I do my best by forwarding the client through with x-fowarded-for however it's completely up to the provider.

That said there's nothing to stop the haxx disabling/hiding ads or the visitor running Adblock for that matter.
Munich was targeted by many air raids throughout the war. This was the era were an air raid was hundreds of bombers dropping thousands of bombs. In the start, there would have been an attempt at 'precision'. Initial allied air raids nominally targeted factories and other industrial chokepoints. Turns out their accuracy was so low that at some point they just switched over to bombing the city in general.

Also, towards the end of the war, the western and eastern "fronts" basically swept through all of Germany. Munich was attacked by American forces near the end of the air (they also liberated the near by concentration camp while they were at it). Fighting was not as fierce as other urban battles.
It's curious that Hacker News disagrees with the idea it's better for big businesses to buy small companies than to copy them.
Depends on the language. Writing boilerplace C++ header files, which duplicate everything in the source is certainly a low-yield way to communiate with a computer.

Graphics could help there; let me drag methods up and down the hierarchy and have it automatically refactor (change arguments and scope of references without me typing). Create new fields with a right-click and choose a type with a default name; drag a reference to a closure etc.

Even this: if I could navigate different views on the same source e.g. without comments; without debugging prints and asserts; with references and scopes delineated. This can make it faster to find where to type. But I guess thats bandwidth out again; ok.
It seems weird that HR would go out of their way to tell you you are permanently blackballed, when they have enough trouble responding to people who they are open to hiring in the future, and since it is such an obvious embarrassment and legal risk to have a policy of telling candidates they are blackballed.
Their math is off.

$1bn is 20bn nickels. With a diameter of 21.21mm and height of 1.95mm, that's an area of about 689mm, assuming 800 for a lack of packing efficiency. 800 * 20,000,000,000 = 16 trillion mm^3, or 16,000 m^3. A high end dump truck can carry ~20 yards of material, which is about 15.3 m^3. That means you'd require (16,000 m^3/15.3 m^3 per truck) = ~1,046 trucks.

1,046 trucks. Fact check your satire, bro.

(Alternatively, using the "more than 30" figure of say, 35, each truck would be carrying 457 m^3 of nickels, or about 571.5 million nickels, which would weigh 3150 short tons per truck.)

Fun morning exercise, at least.
Tech companies should learn to respect people. It's not OK to take that kind of interviewing behavior as a rite of passage.
If you wouldn't mind, please send me an email with your browser: mike@haxx.ly

Thanks heaps!
I prefer to discover goldmines while building factories. That is, I believe that taking an idea and executing on it will generate many more ideas. Take the good ideas and pivot them into your project, if it works. Use some of that gold in your factory.

Maybe the original idea was terrible - doesn't matter - you can just pivot out of it if it's going nowhere, and it found you other ideas that may go somewhere.
Ask HN: Etiquette on leaving a job shortly after you started?
Throwaway account for obvious reasons.

I'm in my second week at a new job and it's already become apparent that I'm really not a good fit for the position. I am an experienced developer and I was under the impression that I would be building new functionality, but it looks like I will just be doing minor enhancements/bugfixes for the foreseeable future.

I have several other offers that came up after I left my last job (and after I had already accepted my current position). What is the general opinion on leaving a position shortly after joining and how would you go about doing that without burning bridges?
Here's a post from another company that's been using it: http://tomcritchlow.com/private-google-plus-engagement . I understand that some people might be skeptical of G+ in the workplace. Some people were skeptical of Google Apps in the workplace, and that's fine. But G+ can be a really powerful tool for companies that want to use it.

One more anecdote: I have a friend whose company just moved from Lotus Notes to Google Apps, and they love Apps. I can easily see people in that company hopping on video calls or posting internally.
Why the U.S. Wants To End the Link Between Time and Sun
New York Times tangles with patent trolls
Here's How To Fix The Economy
Software security is like medicine
Have you ever used PHP before?
I strongly disagree. Perhaps he should have made up an excuse and be less confrontational. But it's not OK to let people abuse you. If you don't respect yourself nobody will.
absynthe comes to mind for XIX century painters

If alcohol counts, then that list includes just about every artist of the past several centuries who isn't either Muslim or Henry Rollins.

Which it does, IMO.
This is flamebait (perhaps not intentionally on your part), as this question usually flares up in the 3D printer mailing lists every so often with everyone weighing in.

Mainframe Computers was first used to crack codes and calculate ballistic missile trajectories. If you were around in 1979, when personalized computers came along, would you have asked asked "what happens when people start cracking secret codes to read wires and calculating ballistic missile trajectories and selling them to foreign gov'ts?" And if so, do you think it's an important question given what you know about computer usage in 2012? Do you ask yourself that question about computers now?
Alan Kay means anyone can be persuasive, but wrong.
Facebook is great about this, but they shattered industry norms with their practice. It is one of the classiest ways they exemplify their top to bottom belief in sharing information with everyone, in product and in corporate.
In a couple of decades of occasional job interviews, I've done mostly 1:1 and a handful of 2:1.

I've only done one 4:1, which was actually lunch in between all-day 1:1 interviews, and which didn't feature any technical questions just random social conversation. It was definitely still part of the interview, though.
Out of curiosity, why do you use 406 for your view counter?
A foundry and hand-picked collection of open-source typography
Samsung to ship Windows 8 devices with its S-launcher bloatware
And don't trust doctors.
Is that adjusted for the different costs of living between the two countries?
killall might be what you're looking for, but it isn't typically necessary except for Chrome:

killall 'Google Chrome'
The author said that most comments in code are duplication, not all. And that is true in the average case. Most code comments explain what the code is doing and how it does it, and so need to be updated when either of that changes. Then they get out of date, etc.

Typically, comments can just be merged into the code directly by extracting well named methods, and using better names for variables.

Good comments tend to not be redundant, they tend to tell you "why" information and be written at the level of intent rather than at the level of implementation. And thus they don't need to be continually updated when the implementation changes.
PR Exec Leaves Brew Media Relations to Co-Found a Seed Stage Fund in NYC
I think it would be considered a bit rude for an employer to terminate an interview early without a good reason. Unless it was obvious that the interview would just be a waste of everyones time, in which case I might be grateful, I've grinded through hour long phone interviews where it's been clear in the first 5 minutes that I'm not what they are looking for.
"Going for a bike ride this weekend, does anyone want to join me?"

"Is anyone else having trouble with the printer on the third floor?"

"I think we should buy copies of Beyond Compare. I used it at my last company, and it was awesome."

"Hey Chuck, when you get a chance, cal you tell my team about that library you wrote? We have a few questions for you. I'll let them hop on the conversation and ask."

"I'm sharing a link to an article I found about that project we did last year."

And you can SEARCH these conversations (and the results can show up in your google.com search results, if you use that feature). Even the conversations that happened before your start date.
Google Docs (now called Drive documents) work just fine and I think is actually a product of rectifying the mistakes they made with Wave.
Have to agree...

Further - it's been said before - when it comes to time -vs- money - you can always find a way to make more money if you need it - but what you can't do is make more time - time goes by whether you use it or not. If I have a choice between playing with my kids and turning down some overtime, which pays very well, I'll take spending the day with my kids. That time can't be replaced later. Odds are I can always work more.
You get one life of unknown length - choose how you spend your time wisely, not by some simple formula.

Further, if I do want to do consulting work after work, it's certainly about how much I'm going to get paid, but it's also about what hte work is, how interesting it is, who it is for, and what the other network benefits might be. I won't generally work for free, some people I've charged an arm and a leg simply because I know they need it, I know I'm in a unique position to help them, and I have no vested interest in whether or not they take my offer - my personal time is valuable to me. If I had enough offers for work at high enough pay to make me really think about eating it all up, I'd quit my day job and just do that.
Find out who is hosting that site SitePeek
In NYC most stolen bikes are resold to delis and pizza shops for their delivery guys. Ever wonder why the minimum wage delivery guy is riding a $800 cannondale? They usually wrap the frame in duct tape so you don't recognize it. Get flat or a Bent rim? Just buy a new one from your local crackhead for $25 and you are on your way.
You usually won't know a web page is actually using H5BP, especially without looking at the source.

Two websites using it: http://creativecommons.org/, http://www.barackobama.com/
You don't want to start this
Will this disappear due to lack of popularity? Or be removed?
When did Apple patent pinch-to-zoom?

This video is from 1988. Are you saying Apple patented it in 2011?

First of all in 2006, before the iPhone came out, I saw Jeff Han from NYU demoing much more than just pinch-to-zoom:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ

And secondly, I thought Apple bought the pinch-to-zoom patent! I don't know much about it, but I am curious about the date.
You can get exciting things for money (travelling for example is not always trivial financially).

More to the point, both point of views have utility. I criticize "my time has a numerical value" in the post, but it is useful to have some metric in order to get your fair market value (i.e. in negotiations) or when you are in a period where all you want is to gain monetary freedom.

In my original draft I had the mentioned reasons titled "the factual" and I started another section titled "the existential" [reasons I find the principle problematic], where I started to delve more into why perhaps you don't want to put a price tag at all. But as the post deals more with concrete criticism and possible improvements of the application of such a price tag and assuming its existence, it felt out of place and I decided to explore it more in another post.

EDIT: also, as another wrote here you do have situations/periods in life where you may need to apply such a metric and then proper application and self-reflection is important.
Most of these have wide acceptance among the HN/Startup crowd; I might expect to see more disagreement if the list were exposed to corporate programming environments, or especially to their managers. I have a couple of quibbles, though:

- 1: I'd modify "Programmers who don’t code in their spare time for fun will never become as good as those that do", to be "Programmers who don't code in their spare time for fun will never be as good as they would if they did". I definitely believe coding for fun helps your skills, but I've seen too many "just-a-job" programmers code circles around others on the same teams who had side projects and kept up with the trendy languages. It's not a clear differentiator, just a data point.

- 2: Unit tests don't help you code in the same way that a safety net doesn't help you walk a tightrope: this is technically true, but not a helpful statement in reality.

- 10: Print statements are "valid" in that they often work, but when a debugger is available it's almost always the right way to go.
Facebook: The Real Presidential Swing State
I just learned about the existence of this book a few minutes before seeing this post (what's the name of the phenomena whereby after discovering something once, you immediately observe it again?), and the M.O. of the book resonates with me; I do lots of refactoring, as well as a fair amount of API design, and I've always put a lot of thought into the "best" way to write code. E.g. while I personally enjoy writing clever code, such code is usually a detriment in a team environment. I also get irritated when others don't put time & effort into writing clean code (or at least putting a minimal amount of thought and effort into it).

But I see that there's some pushback against this book, and so I'm not sure if it's all that it's cracked up to be. Anyone have any opinions?
Nope.

Where I work, I have an enterprise account which has a gmail, drive, groups and calendar which is signed in using a login@company.com account.

My personal stuff is different and is a different account, signed in using personal_login@gmail.com

The key point is, my company knows only about @company.com (and Google doesnt have any idea) and the other way around for @gmail.com account.
It's not half-assed so much as a first step. 10gen have previously stated that the plan is to gradually increase the granularity or write-locks over successive releases.
If you are on a pivot vortex, unit testing is evil. Otherwise, it's very helpful to maintainability.
You are entitled not to disclose all of that - you just cannot run for president with the finger on the button, command the military without congressional approval, and the ability to stack the supreme court.

It's a job application - for the most powerful position in the USA, arguably the world. I want a decade of financial history, credit check, drug test, last five places you own/lived, etc.
Teaching Kids to Love Math
I attended the meetup in Houston yesterday, where this game was demoed and source code explained. It was pretty good.
I would've said yes until I read that it was an all-day interview.
It's not the cultural norm, so if you ditch an interview, you had best go out of your way to be extremely polite about it. You might be better off just slogging it out to avoid burning bridges.
Anywhere that it's appropriate.

To expand: the paradigm of only offering +1 and not -1 is, to me, akin to the whole "everybody's a winner" problem; if I go to a product page, and all it has is a +1 button, and the 'score' is 0, then there's absolutely no context to justify the score.

Is it that the product is brand-new (and/or just added the +1 button), or conversely, is it that the product is horrible and though the +1 button has been there a year, nobody has clicked it?

Whereas if I were to visit and I could see that the score was -1000, then that would give me a very good indication that the product (or some aspect of it) sucks.

Then of course there'd likely be situations where there'd be a mix, and so it'd be good to see a representation that took all votes into account, e.g. [+1000/-500]; with that, I could see that the sample size is moderately sufficient (1500), and that most people approve -- but that it's not without detractors.

Mostly, though, I'm tired of "everybody's a winner".
What? How? You'll have one account via your corporate email address (e.g. you@employer.com) and another via your personal email address (e.g. you@gmail.com)
13 Internet Slang Terms You Need to Know
It's not even a rumor. It's a hoax.
So you do get part complexity for free with 3D Printing, but you sacrifice speed, surface quality, material properties, and tolerance - at least currently.

As far as waste, laser 3DP probably wastes a lot of energy compared with CNC milling. The laser is probably several kW for many hours - where's a similar, but less complex, part in a CNC would take minutes - like everything it really depends on the application.
One of the weaknesses of dynamic languages is that certain classes of errors aren't caught by the machine until run time. Now a think about comments, where errors are never caught by the machine.
CSS Fonts - family, size, style and variant
Perhaps he has class.
Just FYI, your raining.fm page works fine on my mobile if I trick the site into thinking I'm a desktop (HTC myTouch running android 2.3.3)