skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is a great example of why LiberWriter has been doing fairly well. Most of us here understand it and think it's pretty cool. Imagine your mother or father, who have retired and decided to finally write that book they've always thought of trying to parse all of that. Gems? XML? Say what?
Apple Fires Maps Manager
Salary negotiations - they should probably teach this at school. My company has a 'comp day' where you head into a room with a couple of managers and they tell you what you're getting. But I've got no idea what the protocol is for disagreeing. Presumably it's their for negotiating otherwise they would you send you a letter and skip the meeting. A lot of people, when they don't know the protocol of a situation, will just nod and be swept along.
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Seems like a good old fashioned scapegoating. The problem with Apple Maps is entirely at the marketing and corporate decision making level.

I was an employee at Vicinity Corp (the first provider of Yahoo Maps back in the olden days) and can tell you from experience that good mapping software (and accumulation of good map data) is an extremely difficult problem.

Apple Maps is actually quite decent if you view it as a 1.0 product. Anyone expecting it to be truly competitive with Google Maps on the first go needs to reread Joel Spolsky's old essay on the 10 year rule for good software.

The failure of Apple Maps is that the execs made the decision to replace a superior product with it while simultaneously messaging that the new software was actually superior to the old one, when it clearly wasn't.

While I know nothing of the real story behind this, I suspect the guy who was let go here wasn't the guy who made the actual bad decisions.
Was Dustin Curtis or some company of his acquired, or is this just innuendo?
Go implements OOP slightly differently than other
languages. Functions are defined on an interface,
not a class or subclass.

This is not quite correct. Functions are defined on concrete types. Interfaces are named collections of functions, used to describe behavior.
This is the first I have heard of it. I am going to check it out.
I've also worked with developers in their fifties who are awful.

Me to.

And I've worked with devs in the 20s who are awful. And their 30s. And their 40s. And their 60s.

I've also worked with great devs in all those age ranges.

Proportions seem about the same to me.

Good developers are able to learn and adapt quickly, and often older developers can't do that.

I've not noticed a difference.

I have noticed that it's harder to spot the folk in their 20s who don't learn and adapt quickly since folk in their 20s have to learn something to make any progress at all. Once that pressure is off and they've become fixated on Rails / C# / whatever they seem just as unlikely to change as any other age range. They just get fixated on the "cool" thing - so it takes longer to spot.
Finally got through. Although I'm not keeping my hopes up as far as when they'll ship it.
I bet many of these hiring managers don't really know what they're doing, so they're doing what everyone else is doing. This protects them from looking stupid, which many people fear more than actual failure. Some of these businesses will succeed but in general failure to get hired by someone who doesn't know what they are doing is, for the truly qualified, a good outcome.

I doubt that truly qualified people are being turned away for age. I doubt that really capable companies are that hung up on age. I do believe that there is discrimination among _under_ qualified people. Given the importance of learning experiences and networking and luck, this is probably a serious disadvantage to older under-qualified people. It certainly isn't fair. But anyone who is under-qualified really should think more about making themselves more qualified than looking around for someone to make things fair.

(That needn't be extended to race or gender discrimination law. Those are targeting structural disadvantages thought to be outside the control of the discriminated, e.g. they lack the same opportunity to improve their own qualifications. And they are often intended to make it more clear that the economy offers opportunities to all comers, in the face of a variety of perceptions. Whether you agree with those arguments or not, I don't see how they apply to people getting older.)
I'm confused why this is on the top of the front page.
This worked for me after about 6 minutes of clicking.
reply.
I find it interesting that in all those discussions about voting systems, which are mostly focused on USA president elections, nobody mentions two-round voting, also known as run-off voting.

This is what we have in Slovenia for electing our president. In the first round, there are many candidates, and each voter can vote for one. If any candidate gets at least 50% of votes, he automatically wins.

If, on the other hand, there is no majority winner, the two best candidates compete head-to-head in the second round.

Such a system allows you to always vote for your favourite candidate in the first round, and if your candidate doesn't make it into the second round, you can vote for the fallback one.

Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system
>the idea that 25 years of experience automatically makes you a better programmer is wrong.

Seriously? You think you can do something for 25 years without getting better at it?
This news is not being officially revealed by Apple. More than likely the news spread very quickly within Apple, and then naturally leaked out. At my last company when someone was laid off every competing company knew about it within 30 minutes. Imagine how quickly it spread in a high-profile situation like this.

If you mean that no one within Apple should have known about the firing, that's not realistic. At the least his reports would find out right away, as would (probably) everyone else who directly interacts with him.
Worked for me as well about 30 minutes ago. Decided to try that instead of refreshing the info page on a whim.
You can pay and get more space.
A large portion of the HN readership are DIRTY HIPSTERS whose support of well defined, but gimmicky ideas often leaves me at a loss for words. Much as the fork example from the article.
it also takes the ajax roughly 3 seconds to run. So click every 3 seconds to ensure youre not cutting off a form submit that was going to take you to the ordering page.
Cheap plastic forks and knives. Though in the food not so much in the mouth.
So can we use that to send binaries to people? Because gmail will absolutely not allow you do that. They will go as far as inspecting archives to look for binaries and ban you from sending them.
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99% of the SEO's you talk to can't code? As a marketer, deeply entrenched in the SEO space, I can assure you that MOST TOP SEO's are first and foremost developers...More importantly, the coders that understand marketing are the ones that thrived and continue to thrive in the SEO world.

Growth hacking is a bedrock of the best SEO practices out there. The best SEO is inherently viral to compel and force people to link to your content. Think about Youtube, and everyone embedding videos with links back to youtube... This is literally the definition of SEO strategy...finding ways to build into your product inherent link-bait.

I would argue that Growth Hacking is a prerequisite to execute excellent SEO.
I often select a paragraph I am reading in case I get sidetracked or have to tend to a child nearby. It bugs the hell out of me when something got in the way of me selecting a paragraph!
They're not so different these days, especially in SV, I think. Apple, for one, has made itself on being a fashionable product. If one of a company's goals is to be fashionable, does it make sense to hire people who don't care about a core portion of the company's vision?
Preferential voting solves all these problems. You vote by ranking the candidates on order of preference. If your top candidate does not win the vote goes to next guy down the line until eventually it ends up for one of two candidates.
> yet to some of the people I know, I'm the "old" guy, and I haven't even hit my mid-twenties.

If that's the case, it speaks to the immaturity of some of the people you know.
It didn't die. It was forked by the community when Oracle close-sourced it. The community fork (called illumos) is being actively developed by multiple companies, which have done significant new feature work (e.g., http://dtrace.org/blogs/wdp/2011/03/our-zfs-io-throttle/).
conversely, this is one of the main reasons i use this feature.
Definitely agree with this. I ride a crappy bike I've been meaning to upgrade (it's heavy, rusted and tends to need lots of repairs), but the upside is no one's gonna work very hard to steal it. I'm loath to give up that peace of mind.

For the same reason I was reluctant to upgrade my old, slow Dell netbook to a MacBook Air but I ultimately decided the tradeoff was worth it (big productivity gain). It depends on the object, what you do with it and how big of a difference quality makes. An expensive fork or spoon obviously doesn't justify itself, but to a point, a chef's knife might.
Same for Apple Mail.

I definitely don't love it:

1. I'm one of those serial overliners which will randomly select text and paragraphs while reading, so half the time I end up with a completely useless piece of quoted text.

2. I craft mail responses by quoting all the original mail, interspersing responses and cutting the stuff I don't care for afterwards, very rarely do I only need to quote a single contiguous block of text without anything else, unless the single contiguous block of text is "all of the original mail" anyway.
While that might be true (that young people are more easily manipulated) it doesn't make much sense as a primary reason for why VC's like young people.

Ultimately, making a big successful company is really hard and VC's would want to bet on people who have the best chance of doing that - not the ones they can easily screw with.

Note: I don't buy the idea that only young people make good entrepreneurs. There's tons of evidence that older entrepreneurs can be very successful. It's probably true though that young people in general are more likely to massively revolutionize something entrenched, even if their overall success rate is the same or lower than older people.

Einstein, for example, was 26 when he published 4 papers that would change the field of physics forever: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers
I love this feature, and have been using it for a while.

Off topic, but a similar feature exists in Pinboard (https://pinboard.in). You can select some text on the page before clicking bookmark, and that gets set as the description of the page in the bookmark. It's a pretty handy feature if the page title is not enough to describe what the page is about.
I tried using this feature in Apple Mail for a few weeks before turning it off because it was super annoying (I found it annoying for the same reasons mibbitier did).
The invisible smiley was a font system problem, fixed in Firefox 19 Aurora (assuming you're on Mac).

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=715798
Doing this was a big part in saving my left hand from RSI. I can't emphasize enough how awesome it is to have ctrl bound to caps lock.
Git Database Branches
I've had a checkout script running for 10 minutes with no luck despite the site says they are in stock. Just running into errors. I'll probably let it run for another 20 minutes before giving up.

This is unfortunate though as I was trying to use the Nexus as an opportunity to migrate off iOS.

EDIT: Finally got it after 1 hour of running the script.
Historically the construct called, "family" has in some cases afforded both. However the open-source aspect is generally lost outside the bounds of said structure.
Yeah, I do. I think the only constant thing in software engineering is that you need to be able to learn and adapt. If you spend 25 years at a single organization where you aren't forced to continuously learn and adapt, you'll be at a disadvantage when you are inevitably forced to do something outside of your comfort zone.
Alt+Backspace deletes to the last non-letter.

To go to the previous space, Ctrl+R SPACE works for me.
In my opinion, it depends on how much responsibility was in the hands of the manager. If this person failed on those responsibilities, then he deserves to be let go.
Glad that you are having success with MongoDB at scale. Have you considered sharing your experiences? Would be really helpful for others to learn from you.
> Wikipedia says, "Voting is a method for a group such as a meeting or an electorate to make a decision or express an opinion—often following discussions, debates, or election campaigns. Democracies elect holders of high office by voting." This is very different from "picking the best choice".

I don't see how they are different. The author never said that candidates have to be people. Substitute the word "alternatives" if you prefer.
I used OVH for about a year and had no problems (had no need for the server any more).

The only issue I did have (and might be worth considering) was probably to be expected: they seem to be very on top of network issues and won't hesitate to terminate your server if something is suspicious. I was running a game server (Call of Duty 1) that had a bug that allowed someone to maliciously redirect packets to someone else (not a spectacular amount, but enough that when they did it with ~10 servers it would cause problems for the victim) and because we were part of an attack the server was shut down and they wouldn't return it to me without agreement that we'd wipe the "infected" server -- even though it wasn't infected, it was a software bug that we could resolve if we had server access.

Definitely worth using for unimportant things, but definitely not worth risking it on production.
John Tromp's paper "Binary Lambda Calculus and Combinatory Logic" (http://homepages.cwi.nl/~tromp/cl/LC.pdf) is a genuine classic.

Henk Barendregdt's "Juggling With Combinators" (http://repository.ubn.ru.nl/handle/2066/17290) shows you a lot of interesting things you can do with Combinatory Logic.

Barendregdt's "Reflection and its use" (ftp://ftp.cs.kun.nl/pub/CompMath.Found/biologen.pdf) has a small, but interesting section on Combinatory Logic. The exercizes include finding a CL term that Barendregdt calls an "Ogre", same as Smullyan's Hopelessly Egocentric bird.

Jan Willem Klop's "Cycles in Combinatory Logic" (http://web.mac.com/janwillemklop/Site/Bibliography_files/10....) does a lot of neat things in a proof that is very hard to understand. It has a section at the end about CL bases other than SKI that's very interesting.
If someone was dumb enough to say exactly that, they should be sued for outright stupidity and perhaps for discrimination. I suspect that in practice, "those companies have not been the right fit for our investment philosophy" is as close as you'd get, and that's hardly actionable, even if you strongly suspect that their thesis is as offensive as "we invest in white people".
Tell that to the next person who complains that their vote doesn't count.
Most guys haven't invented anything though, let alone the internet. Fashion (or some other triviality) sometimes ends up being the tie breaker, all else being (or rather seeming to be) equal.
Silver silverware on the other hand, has to be polished by hand. This is not only time consuming but exposes you to harsh chemicals which probably negate any health benefit you get from not being exposed to (mostly harmless) bacteria.

Anything you put in the dishwasher is going to come out more or less sterile anyway.
Sampling is a different type of use subject to mandatory licensing laws peculiar to the music industry. There are analogous laws in the Europe, but they are not as permissive as the U.S. laws.
Ask HN: Office space in Mountain View or Palo Alto?
I'm looking for office space for 1 or 2 people in Palo Alto / MV at the moment. When I looked 6 months ago, it seemed like Craiglist was the only game in town - with the other "AirBnB for office space" type services not having any inventory for Palo Alto / MV.

Is there a good service matching small startups to office space?

I know there's a bunch of serviced offices and a couple of Plug'n'Play type companies, but it seems pretty hard to find a sublease around here.
I'd also like to know the answer. I can't figure out what the guy actually does.
This is a very nice summary of/intro to the classic/standard mathematical approach to voting and Arrow's Theorem.
Pretty much anything can be made to work for small projects. Even stodgy old SQL projects like Postgres which pay a lot of attention to being correct and doing their damndest to preserve your data.
There's another new weird phenomenon - personal shoppers. As each customer or shopping party enters a store, an employee greets them, and helps them find each item. The employee then rings it all up on a mobile device, and sends the customer/party on their way without waiting in a checkout line.

The personal shopper sounds like an incredible luxury, something I'd expect when buying $150 pants or a $1000 suit. But that's not why personal shoppers are becoming popular -- it's to combat this trend of showrooming.

How can you order those same shoes or books from Amazon when the personal shopper is busy ringing it all up for you?
Visual Studio 2012 Update 1
Oh my that NYT feature drove me nuts. Not only does it mess with us habitual selectors but it is basically hidden from the users who need it most, those not savy enough to select-right-click-search-on-google a word they don't understand.
also helps to have firebug open. It throws 3 posts. once they are done, hit the button again.
If by "care about" you mean "annoyed by it and treat it as a sign that I am corresponding with a techno-illiterate who is, in addition, at least somewhat slovenly in regard to his correspondence," then, yes.
Social choice theory is One Of Those Things which everyone (myself included) needs to spend more time learning about.
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Thunderbird does the same thing and I agree with you. I've learned to just hit reply, then edit.
Google links play store to public Google+ content
(Leanpub cofounder here.)

We changed this very recently: readers can new choose a checkbox to share their email with the author, and this checkbox is on the purchase form as well as on the reader dashboard.

(And, being Canadian, I feel the need to apologize. So, we are sorry it took us so long to get this feature right!)
I think this bias stems from the perception that people who are older are more established in life and their ability to support themselves and possibly their family is not dependent on the success or failure of the company.

I think the model that most people, including investors, see when they picture early stage start-ups is a small team that is so connected to the success of the company that they are willing to work themselves to unhealthy lengths if need be to succeed. That image is often associated with young recent grads or drop outs because they have student debts, are less likely to be able to find another job, and don't have any substantial savings to fall back on if the company goes under.

On some level this does make sense, if you are relying on this company succeeding to be able to earn a living then you probably want to be looking at the guy next to you and see a guy in the same boat. However it fails to take into account the experience or expertise that may be brought into the company by someone who is older and has proven the ability to succeed in this industry, which may lead to the success that will earn everyone in the company a living.
Crash Course in web2py
They post them from time to time, but you're right, they primarily list VPS hosting.

http://www.lowendbox.com/tag/dedicated-server/
That's neat. I used to cut down emails by means of ctrl-K in my browser, which, being mapped to emacs keys, means "delete this line". However, in their brand new email compose thing, Google has seen fit to override this, making that key combination point to "make a hyperlink" or some such BS, causing me much, much frustration. Yes, I know, you can still utilize the old way of doing things... but for how long until they decide that it's simply got to go and it's time for you to upgrade.

I guess RMS has a point.
I agree that Java is not a good language to start off with as you do not get good understand of what is really going on at the machine level. But to say to stop teaching it outright is ridiculous. Where it be the growing android market or web enterprise jave development it is still in wide use. Java also is a prime language for learning/using OOP design principles.
You are correct about the Android maps, and MapsGL isn't just something they're working on, it works now in the desktop browsers that support it.
IP created by an employee is "work for hire" because it is assumed that all of the employee's work is specific to the employer. A contractor may perform the same task for many different clients, so a contractor's work is not the IP of the client unless the contract explicitly states that that is a work for hire or is assigned to the client.
Ask HN: Why can't Google operate an online store?
The full and proper question is how can a big corporation full of competent developers, having their own solutions for scalability, fail again and again at processing online orders at surges?

This is not meant as a jab at Google specifically and I'm sure I and many would have trouble architecting themselves a web store scalable on that scale, but surely Google has people competent at the issue on the scale of Apple, Amazon, etc., all regularly handling such surges (and if not, they have the money to hire). What in a company culture can cause it again and again?

edit: this of course comes after the (again) saturated Nexus 4 launch - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4838416
An hour and fifteen minutes, I've been tying to purchase one item. This is time I'll never get back in my life. This is the first time I have tried to be an early adopter. I only found out about the Nexus4 several weeks back when I was ready to purchase the Galaxy Nexus, only to find out those were no longer available.

Google is their own worst enemy here with such a crappy check out process, I would not need to have several computers and browsers hitting their servers to get one Item. Why not let us pre order and send the darn thing when it comes in? Why open the ordering for a small window of time while we all eat bandwidth and time?

This is ridiculous. Now I've been at it for two and a half hours. If I did not see the device disappear from my cart a few dozen times, I may have just let it sit in my cart for a few hours before hitting "submit" a couple dozen times per minute over the past couple hours!

Who comes up with this sales model?
I agree with your points, however, you don't need anywhere near $5k LTV to be able to spend $100 to acquire a customer. Also, I'm unsure what "10" viral means, but with k>1 virality your business will grow exponentially by definition.
Here's an example:

https://leanpub.com/s/0DZeiyt-T53wahAxB34u4E.pdf

https://leanpub.com/s/0DZeiyt-T53wahAxB34u4E.epub

https://leanpub.com/s/0DZeiyt-T53wahAxB34u4E.mobi

It's my book so I can do this :)
I can't be sure, but I suspect that what you are calling top-posting is the opposite. Top-posting refers to the sloppy practice of just pasting your reply ("posting") on "top" of the entire quoted email, rather than quoting selectively and replying point-by-point, as you're supposed to do.
Making this required reading for startups before they talk to me again about mobile and other non-revenue ideas.