skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In truth, employees are not rated at all on whether their app gets downloads, unless maybe you're one of the in-box apps. Apps like the one linked above are covered under a moonlighting policy -- basically, feel free to create an awesome app and sell it and keep the profits, but don't use any company resources or time to make it happen[1]. Getting 100k downloads will absolutely not factor in on your review.

Also, I'm not sure Windows 8 was ever marketed as the most openly developed OS in the world. It IS the most open of any Microsoft OS to date, however, so maybe that's why you are confused.

1) There were some exceptions to this rule I believe for WP8 apps but I'm not entirely clear on the details.

(Microsoft employee)
Except, as IBM proves, being disrupted need not be fatal. The certainty that another giant will arise seems obviously to approach 1 over time, but that Apple will die rather than successfully re-invent itself less so.

The Hudson's Bay company was incorporated in 1670, and has been in continuous operation since. It's one of the dominant big-box stores in Canada, moreso since Eatons closed down, and in the U.S. owns Zellers and Home Outfitters. The tech industry seems to have a very dark view of corporate lifespans because of the apparently quick cycle of birth and death, but it's not obvious that it has to be that way, even over centuries.
I think the editor is valuable if:
1. is responsive and lets you think visually
2. doesn't break bootstrap's model, so the output is similar to what a human would do.
This means that you should have control over ids and classes and generally know the html structure of the components.
3. lets you extend bootstrap's components with CSS,JS,HTML
4. lets you create new components in a similarly modular way
5. plays nicely with server-side/front-end templates (mustache/erb)
6. talks with github so the changes you make can eventually be merged in (feature branch, pull request)
I tried three native apps and had problems with all of them. I recently switched to ihackernews, and everything's been great. The hidden killer feature is that you can use browser-provided tabs.
Very true. There are severely competitive scholarships and fellowships, however, that exceed a 100:1 applicants-to-slot ratio. I'm not sure what the averages are. But we already know the comparison is hard because applications to university cost money. Maybe the ratio of applicants-to-slot and cost of application are just parameters of the same model, not proof that there are two different models. But you raise an interesting question:

Does a higher ratio necessarily imply more competitive? It could be that more unqualified applicants apply to more jobs than unqualified students apply to university. That would suggest that organization reduces the friction for matching the right employee to the right employer; but differences in ratio due to organization doesn't prove that the right employee is more likely to be matched to the right employer.

Why does this matter? If we take efficiency to mean reducing friction, then business will never inform applicants they were rejected. If we take efficiency to mean better candidates get better jobs more frequently, business will always inform applicants they were rejected.
it's gooooone!
People posting here should name names of their negative experiences. How else can we learn who the problem actors are?
You think that's bad, you should check out physics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything

Statistics is more about data sets and interpretation than "right" vs. "wrong".
This paper on browser fingerprinting shows that it is possible to identify a particular user, with reasonably high reliability, without using cookies or other tricks: https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf
I found when hiring that I could process 30-40 applications per hour. If I liked the application, I would respond with, "Name, thanks for applying. Are you free for a 15-minute phone interview on Date?" If I didn't like the application, I would reply with, "Name, thanks for applying. We received many applications and are going to hire someone else, but we will keep your information on file." The responses were appreciated by most people and, again, didn't take much time. I agree replying should be expected of employers.
Still unsolved: ensure your commits are not broken (aka pass all tests) without stashing everything else (in which case you could just as well stash the stuff you don't want in patch mode using `git stash -p`).

(even if they are in a feature branch, broken commits will break `git bisect` unless the branch is folded when merged)
Ask HN: Should we create a network for indie projects?
Hi guys, I'm a big fan of independent digital projects, but the discovery of those projects is (usually) pretty hard. Because of that I joined with other indie fan, and started to create an independent indie network. It will be a side project for both of us, but we have already pretty clever ideas how to make the discovery easier.

What do you think? Would there be a need for such network?
Getting information into Iran is probably just as important as getting information out though. While the specific example would be about upload speed from Iran, the over-arching issue is about upload and download speed.
I find the lambda trick not explicit and obvious enough. I fear I would do something stupid like trigger a side-effect without realising.

Again taking an example from SQLAlchemy, you can explicitly make a subquery, and then reference it instead of the original Table. A binding more like SQLAlchemy can probably written for RethinkDB.
It's funny that you mention this. In most American states, you don't even need ID to vote. We take vote security much less seriously than other countries.
Ask HN: Fiction books that entertain and educate?
Know this situation? You are tired and have this awesome non fiction book you want to finish reading but because you are tired it is hard to process the information.

This happens to me all the time before I sleep. I read to further my knowledge and it would be awesome if I could find some easy reads (most likely fiction books), with great stories that also help me learn something new.

The topics don't matter.

Do you know any fiction books that entertain & educate?
An evangelist who happens to have also gone through the effort to write an app and submit it to the store.

Again, it's on MSDN, so not really surprising.

I'm not sure about Apple, but I know Google has developer evangelists as well.
After some time using (and customizing) it, I now quite like Gnome Shell but its sudden major change from Gnome 2 left me pretty shell shocked (arf) at first.

And to be at all comfortable with it I'm using about 15 extensions.

So now I see Gnome Shell as basically the core of a framework to develop your own desktop system. Not ideal, but I like it more than xfce (and cinnamon, last time I tried it).
Take a look at the URL in the mock-ups.
The key idea is that companies get unimaginably more applicants, some with very poor fits to the advertised job requirements, than most job applicants suppose.

If the objective is to reduce friction in hiring, firms will never inform rejected applications. Nothing could be less frictional than doing nothing.

We have to rephrase efficiency to mean better candidates are more likely to get the best jobs. That's really what we mean by "efficient labor markets."
Structures Found On The Moon
Puzzle: Hour Glass - Euclid Algorithm
Looking Back at Techonomy Detroit
Puzzle: Number of 1s in 2's complement representation
The other fun one to swap is 'more' with 'mroe', at school someone create a 'mroe' command that returned lines from the file by swapping every second and third line in the output, that lead to folks adding 'alias mroe more' in their .cshrc files :-)
thanks for the link vecter.
I have a 13' I use a lot on the move and use 2 workspaces usually 1 with a full screen terminal and other with a browser. It's just easier to sort work on a small screen that way for me. At a desktop with 2+ screens I've never really had a need for them.
> Of course, it goes even further than that. These cults of personality encourage others to mimic people like Linus when it comes to things like communication style.

I've met a number of personality cultists in tech who use the example of Steve Jobs as a justification to be a jerk. I find this to be inversely correlated with their actual insight and intelligence. (I am an iOS developer and owner of several Apple devices.)
I fully support legal purchasing of media (and do not pirate any shows myself) but this is not really a good option due to the restrictive DRM and lack of support on Linux, Android, Google TV, etc.
Awesome. How about animating it so you can see the posts actually moving up and down?
Saw your spreadsheet. Analysis might have been easier by just ripping open the APKs. For example, City Games LLC "Shoot Bubble Deluxe" is obviously Frozen Bubble code with lingering unused data sprinkled about. (Also the company's domain name was registered once upon a time to an address that was a Kentucky Fried Chicken near Google HQ.)
I think the fact that you had to put that disclaimer in the post-script at the end exemplifies your point. We have to do that around here because people will immediately stop reading once you've disagreed with a "cult" teaching and begin attacking you/defending their teaching. You shouldn't have to put a "PS I promise I'm not saying anything bas about open source I'm just using it as an example so please don't miss my point" at the end of your comment. We should all be able to be reasonable and thoughtful and not have these knee-jerk reactions whenever someone even looks at something we like funny.
Philips LED light bulbs to be sold through Apple stores. | MIT Technology Review
I can imagine that the socio-economic issues around the cartels in Mexico are much like the issues with inner-city gangs in the US: They provide a feeling of "belonging" for groups of people who haven't felt that; and they provide a possibility of being lifted out of the poor masses. Of course, your life is on the line, but if one's quality of life is poor enough, that may not be much of a consideration.

I agree that, even if the drug factor completely disappeared, it is unlikely the problems would disappear. On the other hand, having huge amounts of drug money flowing through can only massively exacerbate the problem.
"people older than 55 are not only satisfied with Windows Store apps user experience, they are actually willing to pay money for premium features".

Or it could be that people older than 55 are the biggest market for card games, regardless of platform? The entire article is filled with illogical conclusions. Please don't post this bullshit on HN, articles that so grossly underestimate their audience's intelligence are just irritating.

Flagged.
I tried really hard to keep using Gnome Shell, and even managed to do so for many months. But then there was the 6 monthly version bump and all the extensions broke.

I have two problems. The first (shared with Unity) is that I have a dual monitor setup with large screens. I usually have at least two of each top level window (eg emacs, browser) and many terminals. A panel has turned out to be the most productive way of managing them, providing the panel lets you do drag and drop to change ordering. Every Gnome release cycle the old panels break, new ones appear, and they keep missing functionality. The only way to get a decent stable usable one is to use fallback mode which Gnome is killing in the next release.

The second problem is "random stuff". When I tried Gnome Shell the most recent time, the System Monitor applet showed up at the bottom and only if you moved your mouse to the bottom of the screen. That is beyond spectacularly useless - it needs to be always visible. You get many many niggles like that, that add up to a whole lot of annoyance.

It seems to me that the whole experience is being optimised for a single 11 inch screen where one program at a time is run. Quite frankly Android is a better bet in that kind of scenario.
TV Ads Will No Longer Be Louder Than the TV Show
Upvoted for the "real difference" link.

I personally think that both groups are doing it wrong. I do a lot of A/B testing. In A/B testing what you care about is this:

1. Not getting a horribly wrong answer.

2. Getting an answer quickly.

A frequentist can tell me how to avoid getting an answer, but has no idea of the fact that below some threshold of data any answer is likely to be chance, and the errors that I can make are severe. And conversely if I have enough data, I'm likely to find real answers, and the mistakes I am likely to make are acceptable.

A Bayesian can tell me - in principle - that there is a threshold below which I should be cautious of making decisions and a threshold above which I can make decisions more easily. But naive priors set those thresholds too low, and I do not have sufficient data to come up with a real prior to use. I could create a conservative prior, but it would be hard to explain to anyone what I am doing.

In practice I've found that it is effective to blend the approaches. I compute frequentist statistics, but based on my past experience and knowledge of the ease of making severe errors, I insist on very high confidence levels for low amounts of data, and much lower for high amounts of data. Based on some numerical simulations, my true error rates seem acceptably low, and experiments run acceptably quickly.

(If I did not care about the speed of testing, then I could just set a rule like, "Go with the first version to get 296 conversions ahead." If the two versions have conversion rates that differ by 1%, then 95% of the time I will get the right answer. If the difference is larger, I will get the answer even more often. If the difference is smaller I will get the wrong answer more often - but the errors that come will be small and on average I'm still making good business decisions. All of the complex stats I actually do are just about getting answers quickly without compromising how often, on average, I make bad business decisions.)
I love this movie!
I'm still waiting for the perfect app to have with my husband so that we can share to-dos and import/export calendar items and get notifications on the phone/desktop. Something that an app like Pair should be a perfect home for but they don't really focus on that.
We're just seeing economies of scale in action.

It is cheaper per unit of energy to make a natural gas power plant and sell the power than it is to build a small-scale generator to power one home on natural gas. Once that model is established, there is resistance to local power generation. The same scale works at neighborhood level power generation. (Or construction, or manufacturing)

Cost is the difference now between using the cloud and running your own hardware. It is cheaper both in time and money to let a company like Google run your e-mail than to run your own server. So people do it. It is a very simple matter of convenience. I don't expect a backlash until people become mistreated to the point of breaking.

I am an enthusiast of 3D printing and I like the vision you've laid out, but I see it always being cheaper per unit to make 10,000 of something than 1 of something. So delegation will continue unless the underlying behavioral incentives, cost and convenience, change.
The punditry have learned nothing.

Help America Vote Act (HAVA) ushered in the touchscreens in a massive turf grab. Insecure, unreliable, untested touch screens were rushed to market.

The same forces are now at work pushing vote by mail and then electronic balloting.

For the vendors, is about charging for the upgrade and switchover costs. Anything to make a buck.

Election integrity is barely considered.

During the hearings to permit casting ballots VIA EMAIL in my state, a retired general now lobbying for the vendors claimed "internet security has gotten really good." Well, shit, if a general says it's cool, that's good enough for me. Bill sailed through legislature unanimously. Because its for the children, err, troops.

I talked to many of the legislators about electronic voting and casting ballots via the internet. First, they didn't understand that email was delivered via the internet in the clear. Second, if you're explaining, you're losing. Meaning once you start talking policy, their eyes glaze over, oops, sorry, your five minutes are up. Next!

The only way the legislators vote against this stuff is if they feel the heat. Meaning stuff the hearings and their inboxes with opposition.

I could go on and on, but I have pancakes waiting for me.
very well done. ux is great.
Interesting. I started thinking about a to-do app specifically for families as I was writing this post. I need to think more on that topic. There's probably something there...
Can we really trust numbers returned from a benchmark run on a VM? It seems like the other load on the system during each benchmark would effect the results.
Nice. I'm also a fan of http://hnrankings.info/ which is useful to see when a story has been flagged and suddenly drops off the front page.
My understanding is that you can have GPL software on the App Store via dual-licensing.

This is easy when you're the sole developer of an application, but almost impossible for existing GPL projects where you must track down all contributors and convince them to assign copyright to you.

http://stackoverflow.com/a/8694538

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/solving-apple-app...
Financial Cliff . . . into the Abyss
An open source, secure, drop in login/authentication system for developers hosting their sites as github pages (static only, no dynamic server side code will be executed).
Obviously, the drug problem is a serious matter, but there does seem to be something off about this article. Its style, what you mentioned, and the fact that he referred to the Zetas as "Las Zetas" twice.
The New Fastest Supercomputer In The Country Is Designing Better Nuclear Power
Also use -v when committing to see the diff while writing your commit message
There is 1 good reason for electronic voting (among many reasons against).

If electronic voting is implemented then conceivably it would be much easier to convince your base to actually cast their ballots, reducing emphasis on the "ground game" and having a big operation, and thus reducing costs, and more easily allowing third parties to be viable and less well funded candidates to make a bigger impact during primaries.
Most immediately, I need to turn this file

https://github.com/2grep/CoPATH-Parser/blob/master/tests/Abb...

into this file

https://github.com/2grep/CoPATH-Parser/blob/master/tests/Des...

longer story:

I'm a doctor in the military, and we use IT systems derived from the VA's original VIsTA project. If you've ever heard of Mumps, this is it. The manuals date back to the early 80s. I am trying to build out some infrastructure so we can sensibly work with external research institutions in the San Diego area. I have figured out how to get some decent text out, which then needs to be parsed for specific things, which may vary depending on the project.

Think of this as a startup within the largest of large organizations. The downside is there's a huge bureaucracy. The upside is we're operating far enough up, that everybody understands the bureaucracy problems and some key people are willing to help facilitate some things along the way.

So my minimum viable product is a research paper published using 55 cases. Trivial, right? Maybe if you're at Stanford. Here, not so much. getting enough code written that I can automate the parsing and inject this (and some other similar files) into postgresql, and then pull data back out and do data analysis with it. I have struggled to find help. Joe has been very generous with helping me wrap my head around postgresql. I have been through a lot of python tutorials, but I have never sat down with someone who knows python and seen how they solve a problem. Go to a desert island and teach yourself python with nothing but the internet. Can it be done? Yes, but it is very hard.

So I'm hoping to build a relationship with someone who could help with practical matters, like finishing this first step of a small parser. Paul McGuire, the author of pyparsing, has been very helpful over Stack Exchange, but crafting a well-formed question on Stack Exchange is very difficult when, again, one learned to code on a desert island.

Here's my effort so far

https://github.com/2grep/CoPATH-Parser/blob/master/ProstateP...

Which I'm sure anyone here will look at and say: dude, you could have finished this by the time you wrote this comment! Except it's really hard to wrap your head around something you've never done, never seen anyone else actually do, and can only spend 10-15% of your time on.

But I need to automate some of this work if we are going to undertake larger projects in the future, which is the goal.
Interesting. Why do some stories get flagged off the front page?
Can I make a suggestion that you not put "in quotes" things the person you're conversing with did not say. That's a fairly hostile thing to do. Speak for yourself, not for the other guy.

Everything in everything I write has an implicit IMHO.

So ease up there buddy -- and don't get all derailed just because someone had an opinion you don't like or agree with. It's the beauty of life -- we all get to have our own opinions and act on them.

YMMV.
Mature commodity items, services tend to be well regulated. Because it's generally better for customers and therefore economic activities.

We barely have SLA standards for uptime, privacy, data breaches, etc.

It's cool to be a pioneer. But you're largely on your own. A trade off.
"Near the end insertion rate slowed down thanks to excesive GC activity"

Can someone explain why this happens?
> Per definition -- when a country is not a democracy, it is controlled by a junta that steals lots of resources and control the information to the citizens.

Strange definition. That would make Singapore a democracy.
Generally the term 'educator' is used to describe an individual who has completed at least a masters level degree in Education, one or more state certifications, and is employed full time as a teacher. The original motive for this lingual shift was, as far as I can tell, to distinguish between 'lay' teachers (which is to say people who simply teach what that know) and 'professional' teachers who have studied the art and practice of teaching.

However, in colloquial use, the term can be applied to anyone who is teaching students, regardless of their credentials much like folks will use the term 'engineer' to describe someone writing software even if they have yet to graduate from high school.