skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you find hiring? A Blekko founder said they chose Perl partly because as one of the few hot startups to be using Perl, it would make them a top choice for great Perl hackers.
Great read.

I am going to make all my mobile devices hit a webpage on a few of my servers silently on bootup (if there is a web connection) so I would at least have that ip. Also embedding a hidden image into the browser about:blank (startup) page.
When I just started, I quickly setup some filters to categorize all mail into three categories: those where I would be one of the few people in To, or those from my boss, or those that are High Priority would go into first category, most others will be in second and mail group etc. will go into third.

The problem with the system is that people who send you email are not aware of it :), and very often violate those rules. Apart from some form of AI gradually adjusting rules over the time, I'm not sure what would be a good solution.
Hmm, I don't see any documentation about an URL-router or any kind of state handling, and none of the examples modify the location-bar.

That seems like quite a showstopper, or did I just miss the docs about that?
I've never heard anyone claim to have an IQ less than 125.
Without getting into the difficult-if-not-impossible-to-answer question of whether a PhD is "worth it or not", I would like to point out that the author of the linked article is at the tail end of a process that is both lengthy and difficult (both intellectually as well as emotionally). As such, their perspective on the value (or lack thereof) of their degree is probably not at its most objective, and they also have not yet had the opportunity to see for themselves how well (or how badly) their new skills transfer to life outside of graduate school. From experience, I can say that the six month window on either side of defending one's PhD is not a good time to try and reflect rationally about the experience. Call it burnout, call it recency bias, call it whatever you want, but I found that my perspectives on "what it all meant" and "whether it was all worth it" changed quite a lot as I went through the process of writing, defending, and recovering from my dissertation, and then as I entered the workplace those perspectives changed once again (and continue to evolve).

I can safely say that I feel much more positively about the value of my PhD now than I did when I was finishing it; some part of it is increased emotional distance ("time heals all wounds...", etc.), but I think that a larger part of it is that I've had more time to reflect on the experience and am able to more rationally evaluate what I got from it (and what it cost me, in terms both financial and otherwise).
We use the chrome.windows module to pop up our authentication window. During installation, this permission appears as "access your tabs and browsing activity."

http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/windows.html
I don't want to speak on behalf of AdSense, but there are often good reasons for this.

In the project that I did for another product, we required users to re-enter their payment information to revalidate the account and ensure that the user still had access to the instrument. That process was done to protect the user's instrument.

As I said, I don't want to speak on behalf of AdSense and I'm not familiar with their processes to speak with any authority.

In any case, the change and the reason should have been very well documented and messaged to you (we go through a lot of internal user testing even on these mundane processes). If not, please reach out to the consumer operations team, they should be able to resolve your concerns.
Adeo Ressi Introduces 'Convertible Equity', Convertible Debt Without Debt
Thanks redspark, any ideas on how to find the right person for that kind of arrangement?

Coming from the other side, what made it worthwhile for you, what would be the best way to go about the process to make it easiest and most efficient for the developer?
The Best Aquariums in the United States
The examples you gave only have issues in not knowing the sizes of things. They have nothing to do with thinking in 'foreign ways'. If I show someone a golf ball and ask how many fit into a wagon I expect them to at least say "a lot". If they have math skills then I expect an order-of-magnitude estimate.

If you don't know the sizes, then the test-maker has failed you. If you know the sizes and still can't answer, then yes it is a lapse in intelligence.

Can you give me an example of a problematic question that isn't caused by using unfamiliar nouns?
This sample set is way too small to be arguing about a millisecond here or there. The variation from what's cached, or if something else happens on the machine, or whatever is going to affect the benchmarks. For a 'real' benchmark, I'd like to see a few gigs of data, or something that's not going to fit in cache. The real gain from the bloom filter is going to be in a 4-10x reduction in the working set for the same amount of data. But when the working set is trivial, then the fluctuating and fixed overheads are going to dominate.

I'd also like to see how good the bloom filter's indexing is at scale, or if it winds up being some sort of table scan.
If Win8 flops I think people will keep buying Steam games on Win7. If Win8 (and its app store) succeeds then Valve needs plan B. IMO.
If nobody is interested in Windows 8, I expect the next best option is Windows 7 for the next 10 years - the new XP.
It's necessary only because of one function call: chrome.windows.create().

We hope to remove the need for this permission in order to do basic tab management soon: http://crbug.com/137404.
Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Spacecraft Loss of Contact
Glad you like it. The thing most of the too-few-scientist articles ignore is this: "Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States" and this: "'Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.' -- Albert Einstein."
Meteor 0.4.0
you can be kind and administer broccoli to your children crying for candy.

you can be kind and shortsighted. you can be cruel and shortsighted. Not sure why you're mixing things up. For yolo?
That's not the same thing: you're not given a time-limited test that has specific answers. A challenge means solving problems in creative ways: that kind of test is fascinating and in no way demoralizing unless you haven't learnt that even failure can be useful in it itself for the fact of trying.
Bobbie Rose Tells Tim Scott to 'Hit the Road'
Ask HN: why Facebook have 'Unlike' instead of 'Dislike'?
And yet its clear you did not read the article.
The Verge interview with Apple/Samsung jury foreman
The one thing I've learned as a consultant working outside the startup world, in the boring world of everyday business is just how much of the computerized world still runs on perl. I've seen some fantastically made systems and some real stinkers.

In the HN echo chamber, it seems like everyone who's anyone has moved on to ruby, rails, python, django, etc. Look into the every-web. My god, it's full of perl.
>We can't expect children to practice and maintain skills they don't even understand the value of over breaks. //

Why not?

My eldest is 7 and I've done regular reading, spelling, writing and arithmetic with him over summer. A little science, lots of nature study, etc.. Sure the motivation hasn't really come from him, though he does like to read. One spends most of the time at parks or in the woods or whatever (for us it has to be anything free) but education doesn't end - or at least isn't somehow disallowed - when the school bell rings.

Schools are a service that you use to aid education (though some would say otherwise!) and not a place you go and have an education handed to you. I'll take one education please, make it snappy.

I wonder whether the break serves a function as far as spaced repetition goes?
Incredible! I really wish this was at my disposal when I started working on my side project a couple months ago.

I haven't even played with PythonAnywhere yet, I'm just commenting on how great the tutorial is. It excellently fills in the gaps between django and the facebook interface.
Very true. Instead you can get your email client to check emails less regularly, say once an hour, rather than every ten minutes. I found that quite useful to maintain focus and improve overall productivity.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4460296
Because Google engineers don't seem to be hired for their experience with specific technologies/areas, but for their general competence.

EDIT: Sorry, I really should have avoided making a comment at all. Google's hiring practices have been debated here a billion times and I can't really add anything that hasn't been said before.
Can you elaborate on Marissa and UX launches?
For example, as related to G+?
No, we really don't. In fact, I would love to see the amount of time students need to put into school maxed at 8 hours a day. None of this go to school and then spend 3 hours on homework during the night. No adult would put up with that crud except under hard economic conditions or ownership stake.

All they will do with the extra days is add more grunt work. We need to rebuild the system and giving them extra days is just a poor excuse. Summer is the time for something else. Many kids still farm or go to summer camps. I learnt chemistry during the summer far better than what was taught later in school.
Here's an idea. Make school a low burden, free, for basic math and writing skills, etc. Basically what we have but lower-key. Then let everyone who really cares homeschool or pay for private school. Even if you don't abolish the requirement to go to school, lax requirements for homeschooling would have a similar effect.

Homeschooling is not for everyone, but personally, being homeschooled in high school was one of the best things that ever happened to me, in terms of learning, social interaction and even career opportunities.
Sounds like the mother of all selection bias, but still this makes me hopeful!
Great read and this brings me to ask what options there are for hard drive encryption on OSX?
I wonder if this will make hiring easier or harder in the valley?
Don't forget the teachers' pensions, which radically changes the equation. After considering that a teacher gets paid for ~25 years of not working, with health insurance paid too, whereas the engineer must survive on savings after taxes, the average teacher probably comes out ahead.
My server is back up and running. Sites hosted on it are running smoothly again.
Re filtering: I guess from my perspective, all I'd really want is a binary filter with two "folders": worth-reading and crap. I'd never look at the crap folder, but you could still say you're presenting me all of the tweets.

Re social: Again, I fully understand where you're coming from. It's a hard thing to balance. Surely in the 3 months of no blog posts, though, there must have been something new you added that would have been worth blogging? It doesn't have to be earth-shattering news, maybe just show some signs of life. Maybe spend 20 minutes every Friday afternoon to mention what's new that week? Maybe tweet one or two things every morning about something semi-related to your service.
I know I was found by those particular customers asking their personal network for a project manager/developer. It is a bit of a unique skillset since it requires someone who has excellent communication and follow-up skills, as well as a very competent developer.

What made it worthwhile for me was working on something that I found interesting. Every situation is unique, so nothing just jumps out at me to make it easier or efficient.

For all intensive purposes, this developer is going to be kind of a co-founder. Make sure you keep that in the back of your head as you search. If at all possible I would suggest looking for someone local. Every degree of separation increases the chance of mis-communication.
Samsung readies their own Retina display laptop
I never wanted an academic job, even before I started my PhD, and I know more than a few other people in the same boat. My options were always to go into industry or join a pure research organization (e.g. a national lab). Ended up at a startup 15 days after defending my thesis. Many of my friends and peers at the time did postdocs but never took up academic positions, landing up in startups or industry.

I've never understood why science PhD = academia. Learning to think analytically through problems, set up hypotheses and test them and communicate those findings has helped me in the things I've done since.

edit: Added some additional content
You cannot fake it with strong b.s. skills, and you cannot take credit for someone else's work.
You may have a problem in your math. A mean of 4.3us with a stdev of 10.9us should mean that your 99% should be over 26us, unless it's super smooth with a few huge outliers.

Also, are you sure you didn't mean ms and not us? Seems more likely for an HTTP service.
I agree. It is a misconception that Perl is "dying". It powers a lot of the web. It had a bad rep a few years ago due to cryptic-looking codes that were written as a throw away code and somehow spread all over the web :).

I was one of the skeptical developers at some point, but then I got hooked :).

Modern Perl changes the old rep alltogether. I encourage people to write well architected, maintainable, extensible code and follow design patterns regardless of the language of choice.
OS X offers FileVault natively for full-partition encryption. There are also myriad 3rd party options.

EDIT: See larry's coment :o)
In my case the effect of getting a PhD was extremely positive. I felt a huge difference in attitude at work to doctors (I worked for a couple of top big american software companies), basically allowing doctors to do whatever they liked as long as it's related to the product. And that's in the product group, I'm not even talking about the labs.
> The Google offer was a lot bigger (including in stock, the break even point was a valuation of 50 bln)

That is close to FB's valuation (40bn today) now....
https://plus.google.com/u/1/108703267897818623506/posts/GK2A...

One of the rows in our data center, lots of Supermicro goodness. We use the 12 bay 'jupiter' chassis for 2x SSD and 10X 2TB spinning rust per server.
>Determining if a company is currently viable is pretty easy maths in most cases.

That sounds very interesting, could you care to elaborate please ?
It is a very good question and I had to think really hard about it in the early days. My take on it is that I appreciate good developers regardless of the language of choice and those are the stars that we want to have at Crowdtilt. Good developers will usually learn any "needed" tools in a matter of hours.

In fact, I think if anything Perl would speed up the time it'll take to train a dev and get him/her to have an impact on the product from day one due to how easy is it to learn.
Facebook is letting developers reach users through notifications
Some may buy it for that reason. Are you implying it isn't likely to contain any useful information or advice on people who are actually interested in preparing for their interviews? Seems like a very pessimistic view.
It is nice to hear a story involving the police in which they're helpful and effective rather than spraying protesters/journalists/bystanders with pepper-spray.
>uninformed can be enhanced by experts

How is that different from expert testimony given to laymen?
i would like to see more in terms of specs of whats going on with the load balancing and why it wasn't able to scale. Also, why was it down for some users but just slow for others? I don't have much experience with that so I am curious.
How long have cletus, nostrademons, and mdwelsh worked at Google?
Pedantic note, it's actually full-partition encryption. The recovery partition and boot camp partitions, etc, are not encrypted.
Meteor 0.4.0: Introducing Spark
I was happy that the headline writer phrased it that way, precisely because most people are that naive. So for everyone who read that article, in the future, when they hear "our software catches criminals" they'll mentally append "...and dissidents".
A Lesson In Timing Attacks
"An API for your city" - LocalWiki API released
If someone's child has just died, is it more important that you be kind to them or that you be clever?
I'd rather lose the laptop but have full disk encryption and keep my data secure.
Hootsuite is not a pretty UI :)

So, isn't your filtering out a user the same as muting a user?

I just realized you can add multiple criteria (i.e. From X user, and Y keyword) ... that is valuable. I didn't realize you could do that. (Psssst - see, UX!) :)

I realize people want something pretty, and yes it's enticing but your question was why are people saying they love the idea, then signing up and not coming back. Do you have any user engagement metrics set up (using something like Mixtab) to see where the drop off happens? If you're seeing user growht, but low engagement it could be that the UX is not delivering on the value proposition.

Maybe get some friends/family who use twitter alot to sign up and give step by step feedback along the process and do some customer interviews.
I wouldn't have posted what I did if I agreed with your assertion that there's nothing in common. I also disagree with your assertion that what Apple's doing with patents is 'antics', but I know what you are saying.

This whole patent mess is, as I was trying to imply, complicated. A lot of it is up for interpretation. As I understand it, a lot of people are focusing on two things supposedly from the Apple-Samsung trial result: the obviousness of pinch-to-zoom and the trade dress stuff.

Regarding pinch-to-zoom being 'obvious', Steve Wildstrom[1] covered this nicely two days ago—it wasn't asserted at the trial. Nilay Patel also pointed out[2] that Apple doesn't have an exclusive patent for all pinch-to-zoom implementations, just theirs. So, the patents (ignoring, for the moment, the trade dress patents) that Apple asserted are in question. Apparently, there are alternative implementations in Android, but for whatever reason, Samsung decided to implement something else that was ultimately found to infringe.

On the trade dress…as I understand it, we don't allow copyright on object shapes, nor can you trademark it, so to allow for distinctive object appearance the concept of trade dress patents was created. Agree or disagree with them, these exist. There are some fairly interesting tablet and phone designs out there, and Samsung, for at least a couple of versions of tablets and phones, fairly slavishly copied Apple's appearance. They deserved to be slapped for this. There's a term for this: knockoff. Most people who recognize a knockoff deride it—yet Samsung was praised.

I am…slightly more in favour of trade dress patents than I am in favour of software patents in general (my general opinion on those is that they're bad or that at a very minimum they require both a deeper prior art search and/or a stricter test for non-obviousness).

Getting back to the whole "it's complicated" bit…Apple isn't an innocent here, and I think they are taking a risk with this sort of litigation that simply kicking competitors' asses in the marketplace (like taking the majority of the profit out of the smartphone market…) would do just as well. I think Apple's risk is brand tarnishment (they really don't want to be seen as the 400 kilo gorilla) and increased governmental oversight (look at what happened to Microsoft).

[1] http://techpinions.com/pinch-to-zoom-and-rounded-rectangles-...
[2] http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/30/3279628/apple-pinch-to-zoo...
We don't have a component for that, but given that one of our main audiences is on-device applications where the URL isn't visible to the user (think PhoneGap or webOS), this wasn't super important.

We do have some apps that do their own routing. Look at the code for gallery (https://github.com/enyojs/gallery) and api-tool (https://github.com/enyojs/api-tool). We're also adding routing to the sampler app, and that may result in some core framework support for this method.

As for other state handling -- we've been working on documenting best practices on using Enyo with Backbone, with Enyo handing views, and Backbone handling state management and syncing.
That would be... awesome.
Damn Cool Algorithms: Secure permutations with block ciphers
"The EC2 ephemeral disks normally clock in at 6-7ms latency, that's >13x slower than dedicated disks."

Um. Are you comparing hard drives to SSDs? Rotational latency for a 15k drive is a couple of milliseconds. Seek time for server drives varies from 3-10ms.

EC2 disks are slow, but there's no way they're 13 fold slower than your average server drives. And 6-7ms is just about on par with commodity hardware.
Too true! My mistake, edited my comment to reflect this.
>"A stat like $3.5 million for 30 seconds of airtime may see a serious hit in the future"

Ok, and until then the advertisers are still writing checks. You're not making a point that convinces people to stop using an advertising revenue model right now.
…except that when you introduce a patent that's standards-essential to a standards body for use in that standard, you are making a legally binding pledge not to weaponize that patent and to make it available to everyone under the same Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory rules.

Apple hasn't done that, except with some of the patents it has that are part of H.264.
"but every single person no matter their racial or religious background has the ability to become that kind of person to..."

Seriously? I don't know, but even if i had a 120% work ethic, i consider that i would never reach the level of genius of someone like Tesla, he is simply a genetic freak. Also, almost all the traits of humans seem to be unevenly undistributed in the population, not everyone has the capability to be a top athlete or top dancer, or top X. Why intelligence could be the exception?, when even common sense and observation tells us that some people are more intelligent than others.
One comment is quite insightful:

Since prior art is invalid because it can’t run on the apple processor and vice versa then these patents can’t apply because they cannot be ran on the Samsung device and vice versa

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120830/02063020214/samsun...
When consumers realise they are paying too much (i.e. people in Asia will be paying less for the "same" phones), then things will get more interesting.

Apple's patent suits will enable it to charge inflated prices. And that's what they will do.

The comparisons commenters make to pharmaceuticals are amusing.

Apple is not like a drug company that charges high prices for it developed drugs. Those companies are reimbursed for their R&D through government programs and health insurance. Apple is reimbursed directly from people's paychecks or company budgets if the devices are purchased for employees.

These devices are cheap electronics. Few people can develop a generic version of a drug in their garage. But with 3D printing, the possibility of making protoypes that rival what Apple is selling is a real possibility.

Patents on biological materials came well before patents on software. The seriousness of the problems with the patent system (that would prompt people like Posner to speak out) is due to the behaviour of IT companies, not pharmaceutical companies.
Speaking as someone who realised a long time agao a Phd was out of reach, I would characterise all "hard" science training (mostly the phd track) as the opposite of herd immunity for the human species - we need a tiny few of the species to be well trained enough, intelligent enough, renumerated enough that the innovations to sustain 7bn people at material levels I think of as bare minimum (ironically the level of subsistence of a phd student)

frankly if it's not looking worth it to you, the rest of the herd should remeber to vote for candidates willing to put the cash into science at all levels. Maybe I will ask Mitt Romney when I see him on Reddit.