skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IMVU Inc. Looking for Senior Software Engineer
Here's my personal pitch:

We're a top 1000 website (Quantcast rank 589) with a widely installed client application.

A tiny fraction of what you might work on:
enhancing our 3d graphics engine,
scaling up a large cluster,
server performance optimization,
aggressive automated testing,
scaling up our automated testing cluster,
flash/gecko embedding,
memory profiling, and
assembler optimization (not kidding, serious customer impact http://www.imvu.com/catalog/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpbb2&file=viewtopic.php&p=5842125#5842125)

...in short, you will never be bored.

And here's the official pitch:

Senior Software Engineer

IMVU, Inc. is seeking Software Engineers at all levels to work in our Palo Alto, CA headquarters.

We work in small, dynamic teams using test driven development and other Agile methodologies to deliver code to our customers 20+ times daily.

We all have the ability to really make a difference in the lives of our customers every day, and we build features that delight our customers while meeting our business objectives.

You will be responsible for delivering major applications for our commerce and community web site, our instant messaging client and -- since this is a startup -- whatever else needs to be done!

This position requires the following skills/experience:

Strong foundational knowledge of computer science
Expertise in Windows application development, ideally C++, Python, and/ or Flash integration
Development experience with large-scale web applications
Familiarity and affinity for test driven development and continuous integration
One or more of the following skills/experience is desired:

Implementation experience one or more of PHP, MySQL, Python, C++, Flash or other programming languages
Experience with game programming
Experience architecting or contributing to one or more open source projects
Deep knowledge of DHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and DOM
Experience architecting or large-scale web applications
Ability to cleanly implement a UI across different browsers (IE6/7, Mozilla/Firefox, Safari)
How to apply:

Please send your cover letter and resume to jobs@imvu.com

P.S. :) http://www.imvu.com/about/press_releases/press_release_20090122_1.php
Yeah, but at the same time it's weird when you're theming something and you try to use an editor and for video/audio posts you can't actually see what it looks like.

Any tips, since you're one of the big Tumblr stylists? (Also, did your Dadaist theme ever get made public or was that a demo?)
The only problem with this, is because the chat rooms are pretty open, porn can be posted, making the site not safe for work.
No blog currently, just the front page for updates
http://twitter.com/kogibbq
Also it's very easy to step on someone else's little garden of job security. Or power.
Choice Architecture - Why the Little Things We Do Really Matter [video]
Yes, it seems like Tesla Motors is building their business the right way. They certainly picked the right name for the company!
I don't want to get too specific, but we're already seeing signs of cost-cutting --- particularly hiring freezes and loss of open headcount, and in sharp capex restrictions. There's no "Yes" interpretation, since we're saying the bad stuff hasn't really started happening yet.

To believe that a tech recession peaked in September and is now past us, don't you have to believe that thousands of massive companies absorbed the Lehman Brothers and AIG shock nearly instantly?
I submitted it a week ago when it was published, but it fell right off of the new page without being voted up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465886
Innovating during a recession
The Audacity of Doing Nothing
But there's no optimization to be made, because the read head is going to pass over the whole sector anyway.
Hey if you pay up in full you get a $100 discount.
Game Theory explains: The Doping Dilemma
The key is that he knows code. Depending on the size of the organization you run you don't have to be a regular coder, but a coder you must be.

I've seen far too many CEOs and managers who are technically inept, and as such completely gloss over great technologies and business opportunities, while at the same time pursuing impossible goals with no understanding of the technical underpinnings of their business.
> Is this Joel on Software post another thinly veiled advertisement for their services? Yes.

It was also informative, at least to me. When JoS stops being informative and/or entertaining, I'll stop reading it. There's no sign of that happening, though.
It's not bundled

I think that's _why's point: the language needs to be bundled, so that programming feels to the newbie like a natural extension of exploring their system. Otherwise, not many will take the leap. It's like the difference between free and $.01.
It doesn't look like there's a mode where the the app would not get any access to private data.

Why would users trust an app that has access to their direct messages?
"Jump the shark" jumped the shark like 5 years ago.
All the harder to optimize for -- you could make the bitmasks in the on-disk format inverted, but it wouldn't help any given that you're almost always going to modify an integer at the same time. I suppose you could use unary representations :)

Another related (and potentially conflicting) optimization would be for powersaving -- in solid state logic, boolean values are represented as 'low' and 'high', and since 'high' costs more power (and nand gates plentiful), many circuits get implemented in negative logic. That could mean that an on-disk format and it's inversion would have different power consumption!
Forget Y Combinator. I'm applying to TARP.
It doesn't sound like the money is as wrapped up as the companies press release sounds.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2009/02/09/daily6...

Tesla's plan to be profitable depends on getting the model S built but they can't build the model S unless they get government money. The government won't give them the money unless they can prove viability. Sounds like this won't be resolved for a while.
It would really help to know more about where you are located, without that information it is difficult to tell you what your options are.

For the US and Canada the easiest thing is to let an insurance professional work out the details for you, get several quotes that give you the kind of coverage that you need and then sign up with one of them.

It may significantly change the picture if you incorporate first, then get a corporate health package for your startup and register yourself as an employee.

Remember about special circumstances such as business travel if you are going to spend a lot of time en-route.

Another big factor for self-employed people is insurance that covers you in case you become incapable of working, but personally I've never been able to justify the expense of that kind of insurance.

If you can, save up. I know that's weird advice to someone starting out because you'll need every penny you can get to make it go, but even so, if there is any chance of it, create a little nest egg, you never know what's around the corner.
No, it "nuked the fridge"
It's obviously a hard problem and I don't have any good solutions. I am interested in Moldbug's Neocameralism and Friedman's Dynamic Geography at the moment.

If you email me, I can send you links.
oh man. I love the idea of iteration but I think there are times in which it's time to move on to a new idea.
I believe you're talking about XAMPP: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html
If you think about programming from the Dreyfus level perspective, in the manner of the Pragmatic Programmers, the principles are attempts by people working at the wizard level to try to communicate some of the things they do intuitively to people at other levels of learning. What Jeff Atwood is overlooking, is that these are principles, so they are not targeted at the novice level practitioner, who needs step by step instructions, not principles. Rather, they are concepts for more advanced programmers to examine so they can be aware of them the next time they encounter a similar issue. The question of whether to add a method to an existing class or create a new one, for example, happens all of the time in programming. It can be helpful to see how others have approached this problem so that you can use their experience to form intuitions that reflect situations beyond the ones you have encountered.

Joel Spolsky's dismissal of these rules is rather insulting from that perspective...but actually, he has formed his own intuitions and famous little sets of rules for how things should be done. Complaining that the principles of OO design, which aren't just Robert Martin's, but come from many sources, are too pedantic seems hypocritical.

Oh well, like the other people said, it's an offhand comment on a podcast, who cares? I can only imagine how much stupid stuff would come out of my mouth if I had to blather on about programming for an hour every week.
Can I give a strong suggestion that news stories not be submitted from obviously-biased sources? The headline should be the same as what the reliably-green nytimes asked a few months ago:

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/should-taxpayer...

The Tesla business model, to me, seems hopeless. Look: There's nothing special about running vehicles by battery. They were doing it many decades ago. Every big factory and every golf course has numerous electric vehicles. In the proper context, they're just great.

The technology is well-established, but thus far none of the manufacturers thought it wise to move from factory to highway. I'm guessing there are some good reasons, among which is the fact that diesel cars are usually more efficient...
Palm Pre specs emerge
Well Twitter only has 2 modes, public and protected.

An app can access anything public through the existing API anyway without authentication.

The only difference here is that you can allow apps your trust to access your private data (or functions, like sending tweets) without giving out your password. As such it's a big step in the right direction.

Twitter apps have been one of the worst offenders for the username/password anti-pattern because of Twitter's use of HTTP-Auth for the API.
Alien Census: Can We Estimate How Much Life Is Out There?
Vic Govt limited Google's bushfire map
Hrm, it is similar to how there are always bikini clad women at tech conferences. I wonder where that chapter is in your standard marketing book.
Do you know what type of tax you have to pay on those funds?

Is it capital gains tax?
When I clicked the link earlier, it didn't log me out. Now it does.
Favorite passwords: "1234" and "password"
There are benefits to having the mode I describe:

* your app can perform more API calls without IP-based rate limiting (which can be a real problem when using the Google App Engine due to shared IPs between apps)

* you can be sure that the user is who he/she claims to be (without a DM hack), which is important for some apps
Those expenses are sexy low. Mind disclosing what you're including in them?
Joel Spolsky: Yeah. And the worst thing that happens is that you get people that just stop thinking about what they're doing.

Jeff Atwood: Rules, guidelines, and principles are gems of distilled experience that should be studied and respected. But they're never a substute for thinking critically about your work.

Kevin Pang: we should be in support of anything that will force programmers to think more about the code they write, not less

Aside from brand arguments about "Agile" versus "SOLID" versus "what-would-Jesus-do" style programming, where, exactly, is the "war" here?
What if it was shortened to just "HN" or "News.YC"?
At 200, Darwin Evolves Beyond Evolution
Friendly notice - if you're at work, this might be NSFW.
MS To Offer Free Windows 7 Upgrade To Vista Users
Tech jobs led to 'Man Jose,' but women have Silicon Valley enclaves, too
If they don't like the pay caps, they shouldn't take the bailout money. If they were as 'good' as they (and their apologists) think they are, then they would not be in the situation where they need to be bailed out.
Spot-on. The whole premise of learning to code as a "preparation" to launch a startup is just idiotic.

It takes years to become a half-decent programmer, so if you have this hot internet-idea right now but no idea about programming then better go find someone who can implement it for you instead of trying to learn it yourself...
Angels to entrepreneurs: You don't want our money
I don't think the advice is "learn to code", as such; rather, the author's saying "be prepared to do whatever your business needs to be successful." Obviously the CEO shouldn't be writing a lot of code in the long run, but at a startup, everyone needs to be prepared to do whatever needs to be done, not necessarily what their job description defines. Hiring "web guys, a marketing team, science advisors, customer support people", etc. makes sense in the long run, but a CEO who only views his role as managing others + "the vision thing" and isn't prepared to get his hands dirty, probably isn't a great early-stage startup CEO.
I've been developing Asp.net apps for years. It pays the bills. While I agree there are many issues with how things work, that doesnt mean it isn't the right tool or framework for many types of applications.

Unfortunately the writer makes it seem like all Asp.net developers use just the visual designer and the pre-made tools. At my job we have a whole library of in-house custom controls. Not so that the developers don't have to learn html, but for consistency and speed. I can't really remember when the last time was that I used the visual designer...

I must say though, I have been using Asp.net MVC for some personal projects and I absolutely love it!
ASP.NET WebForms or MVC? What about the third option?
reminds me of what you said on anti-yellowism, best to not care on most things people are fervent about, and what you said about historical imperfections in maps. i agree wholeheartedly and suggest this as a good example of minimalism at work.
To write one bit you have to read the whole sector, modify the bit and then write the whole sector back again, so the head (not the read head, there is no such thing) will have to see the whole sector pass by twice in order to modify one bit.
hmmm... what would be weird would be if people tended to exhibit herd behavior, and go to the restaurants that have the most people because they must be the best ones.

If that were the case, Joel would have a financial incentive to claim that people were buying his software just as much today. I mean, especially if he were super savvy at marketing his software on his blog. hmm...
My favorite--Quantum Cloud--isn't covered by this site.

QC is based in Bangladesh, which isn't in the list of possible countries (UK, USA, Canada, Australia, India and Ireland).
The Luddite fallacy has been wrong for a few centuries now. We have vastly more automation than we did a hundred years ago, yet the unemployment rate is about the same and the median standard of living is much higher.

Something could change to make it correct in the future, but I wouldn't assume that it will happen.
I have heard and thought the same thing. Who wants to deal with a market right now, knowing that any second the government might quickly change the game on you.

It is like in school, when the kid who started loosing started changing the rules, everyone else didn't want to play any more.
The Art of Generating Buzz
This article is factually incorrect since they were not actually approved for the loans yet. http://www.greencarreports.com/blog/1018501_no-damnit-tesla-...
Why is it that every time a database gets mentioned it turns into PostgreSQL vs MySQL ?

I've worked with both, they both have their learning curve, whatever you already know is going to be 'easier' to you because you don't have to unlearn any habits, I wouldn't advice anybody to use either until I know more of the intended application.
> I wonder where that chapter is in your standard marketing book.

In the marketing book I most recently read ("Buy-ology", I think it was called), the author claims that this technique doesn't work for advertising. People remember the bikini-clad woman, not whatever she was advertising.

> Hrm, it is similar to how there are always bikini clad women at tech conferences.

I think it is an excuse for the stereotypical sex-starved geeks to hire strippers without going to a strip club. I don't really get it.

(Someone used "booth babes" at their job booth at a Perl conference a few years ago. Classy. I realllly want to work for you now...)
I agree with your basic point (I upvoted you from zero to one. What's with you getting a zero score? !!), but

"principles are attempts by people working at the wizard level to try to communicate some of the things they do intuitively to people at other levels of learning"

Thinking of Robert Martin (Or Ron Jeffries or most of the agile consultant crowd) as "wizards" to learn from is hilarious. I've noticed that most of these people have no "wizard level" code or achievements to justify their role as "transmitters of wisdom".

A "wizard" should (imho) be able to do magic, not just talk about magic or write books about (how othe rpeople should do) magic.

When I think of "wizards" I think of people like Linus Torvalds or John Carmack or Peter Norvig or our own PG. In my opinion, one can learn more form one page of wizard code than all this abstract talk of "principles of coding" from people who haven't written any top notch code in years, if ever.
So, instead of toolbars cluttering up the browser, we'll now have "social bars" cluttering up the top of websites?
Just theme it as a static html page with 7 sample posts (or 9, if you want to do each quote size differently) and all the proper pagination and everything. Then once it's all ready to go, save a copy of it as a .txt file and add the blocks in. That part honestly takes about 5 minutes.
SKU-wee
It's been fun seeing all the new features popping up on the Labs page. Meanwhile, Hotmail _finally_ adds POP3 capability.
this is just a weekend experiment. if people care about organizing around a certain subset of content (in this case sexy content), then doctors would love to have their own
emergencymed.doctorblah.com, etc.
store a random session id and store all the room data and all that shite on the server somewhere, not in a cookie. Also, use a random string of characters instead of a number for the room ids. That should take care of most of the problems that tptacek mentioned
Nothing is exactly the right thing to do.
That's something I wondered, looking at your theme: does Tumblr auto-handle quote sizes? I've never seen it in any CSS file that I've looked at in any of the themes I've sampled: how do you differentiate?
I'm not so sure that a CEO/Founder needs to know code, but I do think that a Founder of a startup company in the software realm should understand where programmers are coming from.

This post seems to be written from the perspective that if you are developing a product that utilizes code, and you have no money to spend, then clearly, you must write the code. However, some of the comments about this article aren't talking about this aspect, but rather that people who aren't coders, don't understand coders.

This, I don't think, is necessarily true. I believe that by keeping up with what coding/technology can provide, while also understand a programmer's philosophy, a noncoder can facilitate an environment that supports constructive collaboration between both the coder and the noncoder.

In short: I don't think you necessarily need to have deep coding skills to start a tech company utilizing programmers. I do think you need to have a great idea, an open mind, and a willingness to step inside the shoes and take the perspective of the coder.
I think this is actually pretty solid advice. If you have to take on external capital do it only when your own resources are absolutely exhausted. If you have a fancy car, a house without a mortgage and you're going out there to get a couple of grand of seed capital in order to launch your startup you are doing something badly wrong.

Assuming, of course that you really believe in your new venture it is much smarter to:

- liquidate any assets that you have that you can easily get some money for

- borrow from your bank, they take interest, not equity

- use your savings if you have any

If the above is not an option and you are starting your startup with $0 in your pockets and out of necessity rather than because you really have a working idea then I would suggest to get a job, work for a bit, save a bit and try to launch your startup on the side.

Once it's a going concern, you have your idea ready to launch of you've already launched and you can present some initial growth figures then you're ready to take on external investors.
Hey the nice thing about Microsoft is that you don't need to use VB for Asp.net. Sure Asp.net sucks but C# is really cool and the MVC is building up to be something solid.
Wow this is a really detailed and thorough presentation.

I think web hooks really are the next step in the progression of the web. Feeds and most APIs are very "one-way," once web resources are actually able to initiate exchanges/transactions, we are undoubtedly going to start seeing some really exciting stuff.
Interesting move on Microsoft's part. Just want to clarify that the title is somewhat misleading: this is not available to all Vista users, just users who get new PCs from participating OEMs from here on in.

Let's hope Apple can one-up this and actually offer Snow Leopard as a free upgrade to all Leopard users. But probably not.
How to lose traction on a personal software project
Open source should do both, this is not an either/or issue.

Open source should innovate where it can, but at the same time it should offer people that are locked in to certain vendors free and open alternatives to those solutions.

Breaking vendor lock in is an excellent reason to develop an open source package, even if that means that you are not 'innovating'.
In Brazil, Automobile Production Up 92% in January
"I've noticed that most of these people have no "wizard level" code or achievements."

I agree in general, but I was talking about Robert Martin in particular. Check out his code: http://github.com/unclebob/fitnesse/tree/master It's really clean. While the guys you mention have been very effective and productive programmers (maybe by having better ideas and writing more useful applications), their code accomplished really new things, as opposed to finding better ways to do old things.

Norvig wrote some good books, but I never really got the sense of how he approaches a problem from them, although I did like the AI stuff quite a bit. Martin's "agile software development" is really good. I don't know why I benefit more from a little analysis on top of the code reading, but I think it helps me put a mental framework around stuff more quickly. Anyway, you've got to love a guy who writes a book called "UML for Java Programmers" that simply trashes UML...
The most qualified candidates send in a blank resume and update it one word at a time fifty times each day ;)
Sorry, google's giving me no love either and I tried digging through my delicious bookmarks too.
I am a huge fan of Jim Collins and "Good to Great". The "stop doing list" is a great discipline to instill in any organization.
I'm in the Bay Area, but I was looking for a more general answer for everyone else here. That having been said, you really ought to be in the Bay Area if you seek to do a startup.