skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly, and if you read the Betabeat article (linked in the TC article above), her crimes were 99% social offenses. The whole thing reads like a bunch of high school cheerleader bullshit. Moreso, the damage appears exclusively limited to her own reputation.
As a multi-time founder with an exit to my credit and about 3/4 of a college degree from a small liberal arts college in Louisiana(Dropout) I completely agree with the sentiment here.

That said, I also think there is nothing wrong with going after candidates from top tier schools since most of those people have been properly vetted in the past and will likely handle themselves well in high pressure situations.

All in all Justin's article is spot on that credentials really shouldn't matter all that much as long as the talent is there.

However, The fact that someone has to write a blog post stating that and calling it bold really shows the lack of direction our country has as a whole right now unfortunately
Yeah, I don't get it either. I find OS X is my preferred environment for hardcore dev; I have the best of many worlds - terminal, multiple desktops, browsers, text editors, word processors, spreadsheets, email - I consider that pretty serious work.
http://peterfeld.tumblr.com/post/70200626/im-not-upset-that-...
Works on Safari, Chrome, Firefox, but not in IE
Buy, send, and accept bitcoin - all from one API
The first and the last time I have observed satellites in the sky was about 20 years ago in Kirov Oblast (Russia). They were fainter than the brightest stars but still distinctly visible with a few crawling across the sky at a given time. The area was rural then but not completely desolate with several villages within 10k radius. There should be large areas of the US where there is comparable or lower level light pollution than in Kirov Oblast. Depending on where you live such an area might be only a few hours drive away.
She stole people's money and resources, dude. Hardly a social offense.
Then who gives an F? This is just a bunch of cheerleaders butthurt that someone was going around saying they were friends with her, with the school newspaper writers (TC/Betabeat) getting in on it because, hey, they want to be friends with the cool kids too.
I'm really interested to hear that. I've only ever noticed this on American shows and, until now, I always assumed it was added for American's benefit, but hard coded so they also appeared on UK airings. But now I'm wondering we're the ones adding it.
This had to be a fun project/client. How did you design the color selector? Was it tons of different images or something more programmatic?
My personal biases (which I understand, and thus look at a bit more, but tend to consider valid):

1) People who hacked on projects on their own is WAY more important than "worked for a big successful company" or school. Even if the project fails.

2) Personality/performance traits matter a lot more than specific skills.

3) I'm generally biased toward hiring military veterans (US, Israeli, etc.); yet, there are parts of the US military which have a higher-than-ambient density of idiots, so it's gotta be selective.

4) Hiring mostly makes sense through network of existing people (founders, early employees), although "soft" connections to that network matter more than core membership.

I also probably shouldn't admit this legally (but I think it's safe) -- I would be biased toward 25+ year olds, vs. 18-25. I don't see much difference after mid/late 20s, but teens or early 20s, not so much. I would absolutely hire a qualified 18 year old, but I don't really look in the 18-25 year old range when hiring, and due to the historical accident of dotcom 1.0, people who were at least aware of their surroundings in the tech industry (even if in a junior role) in 1997+ would be a huge win.
>There's nothing inherently 'manly' about being a strong independent person.

No, but being strong interdependent person in modern civilization is different than living alone in the wilderness.

It is inherently easier for a man to survive for years alone in the wilderness, without the aid of technology, than it is for a woman. The extra size, strength, and endurance is handy.
That's why I follow the basic three-fund portfolio advocated by contemporaries of John Bogle, founder of Vanguard: VTSMX, total US stock market, VTIAX, total international stock market and VBTLX, total bond market index.

Three basic index funds each with very, very low fees compared to actively-managed funds. I'm at 60/30/10% respectively in those funds.
Looks like how AndroidAnnotations breaks down AsyncTasks into simple methods using @Background and @UiThread. I love that so much.
Oh, well fuck me:

http://peterfeld.tumblr.com/post/588040110/im-not-upset-that...
> My own experiences with Facebook have been pretty disappointing. I ended up reconnecting with old friends I'd lost touch with over the years, only to find out that with the exception of exactly one of them, they all had political, religious, and social views vastly different than my own.

"I used to like that guy, until I found out he thinks things what are different from things I think"

(racists are still terrible OK)
Can't get a #StartUpVisa? Try relocating to Morocco.
Is there really nonzero demand for Perl?
Once one code path is optimized it is what it is, there can be nothing "slightly different" as long as your code is the same, if you get different results for the same inputs you don't follow the same path. When you change the code, you have the brand new landscape -- it's you who changed it.

Moving out of the FPU registers will happen in always the same points before you change the code, and even where moving out occurs you won't observe 80 bits partial results unless you intentionally turn that feature on.

If you have any specific counterexample I happily welcome it.
MS Office going for subscription model
If he's looking for people without degrees I suspect it's more important that you have a child's salary requirements...
What? My mounted volumes show up just fine on my desktop?
If you're interested in leaving your mark on web development, focus on becoming very proficient in JavaScript. Then take a look at any one of the currently popular JS frameworks/toolkits: Backbone, Angular, Batman, Knockout, etc.
This may sound pendatic, but Accidental Empires is a must read, even after all these years. Particularly if you did not live through the initial rise of the personal computing industry or were too young for it to have any conscious impact on you.

I take it as a humbling record of just how grueling this industry is. But also just how much it spins on happenstance, timing and of course interpersonal politics.

If any lessons come out of that book, it may still be true that putting your effort being creating (or undermining) a standard is one of the core engines of this space.
Here's some fairly recent photos of Agafia and her companion Erofei.

http://www.panoramio.com/photo/7516964?tag=%D0%9B%D1%8B%D0%B...
It risk vs reward. To own the resources that generate large amounts of ISK/Resources, you'll need to risk your ships to defend it. You can grind all day long in places which has little to no risk to your ship, but it will take a long time to earn enough resources for a nice ship.
There is one major flaw in this thinking. He says LTV should be at least 4x cost of customer acquisition (CAC) and that he would pay $60 for a warm lead. So let's assume he follows this and 4 x $60 is his LTV = $240. With 22 leads from TechCrunch the total potential value of those leads is 22 x $240, not 22 x $60

TC leads were potentially worth $5,520 if fully converted (not $1,320 - which is the cost he's willing to pay for equivalent leads)

Of course, very rarely do all conversions occur but I think when doing marketing it is important to know the fully converted value of each channel (in this case PR) so that you can figure out how much to spend. In general $5,000 of potential revenue (or TCV) is my minimum bar for a PR story, for example, so this story makes the cut just barely. I think the TC traffic they got was pretty abysmal, probably would be worth it to hire PR next time since they've got a B2B product that can afford $60 per warm lead

Conversion rates can change and constantly be improved on the product/sales side (public pricing, free trial, free + premium features for upsell, etc) but I've found that often growing the TCV (total converted value) of the channel is more worthwhile than trying to optimize in the early days when fixing conversion is harder than just finding attention opportunities. If you can find channels that consistently drive you leads worth 10-20x CAC and continue opening the channel more (getting more TC stories for example) you can figure out where its limit it.

This topic has been on my mind a lot, needs a whole blog post on DistributionHacks to dig into channel methodology and running multiple experiments to find the TCV of leads for each, stack rank, and implement system for scaling that as a business machine with predictable inputs and outputs --- but I haven't had time. Maybe this weekend.
Your company's security posture is probably horrible (but it might be OK)
> You cannot put a link to your compputer or hard drive on the desktop anymore.

Open finder. Hit Cmd + , to bring up the preferences. Click the Hard Disks checkbox.
YouTube has at least a portion of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYJKd0rkKss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3NRdZ8J24Q

Dick's capabilities (he had been a carpenter when living in civilization) were amazing, though he remained in periodic contact with the rest of civilization, including receiving regular supplies.

It's also interesting to note his reliance on steel tools that he wasn't capable of replacing: saws, adzes, planes, axes, stove, pots and pans. He did pack in many of these, most without handles (he fashioned those from wood on site). While creative and highly independent, Proenneke was by no means self-sufficient.
I use Facebook, somehow I managed to get a federal job, even after multiple background checks of varying thoroughness. The big thing a lot of these checks look for is how susceptible you might be to outside pressure. Who cares if you got drunk a lot in college? What they really want to know is if you have a mistress or some other secret that could be used as blackmail.
Rails (Ruby) or Django (Python).
"99%"
So I'm honestly a bit confused here. She pretended to be friends with a bunch of Silicon Valley celebrities through Photoshop, and people threw money at her because of that, and people are mad at her because she was lying and wasting their money?

It would be an incredibly boring story of overly rich people who should know better being scammed, except insofar as it shows some unsavory aspects of how Silicon Valley is set up.
I don't understand why would anyone care or make a big deal of it.

There's no difference between someone with a fake photo near Justin Timberlake and a real one. It's not an achivement. It's not a sign of success. It's nothing. The whole idea of "startup cred" gained by having photos of you around important people disgusts me to no end.

Fruitful interactions matter. Posing in photos does not. If you infer something from someone being on a same photo with someone else, you are the problem, not Shirley.

I see this as a sign that most people in the "Scene" are empty extroverts too busy making impressions to make any real things happen. So you measure each other by a number of "important" people you talked to.
$> chmod -w ~/Desktop

Now you won't be able to save to your desktop ;)
Thanks for the link to Peak Experience.

Two years ago I spent six months driving across the country, camping and hiking in national parks. I experienced several instances of what I described as "transcendent ecstasy", which sounds like a similar phenomenon.
The English-Likeness Monster Stalks a New Generation of Programmers
Good values aside, this is deceivingly brilliant as a hiring technique.

Hire the undervalued "hungry" people who the Googles/Facebooks of the world won't even give an interview, and they'll 1) be easier/cheaper to convince and 2) work super hard to prove themselves (especially if it's their first job out of school). If the startup does well, it's a win-win.
How my Gmail, Twitter and Facebook accounts were hacked
Javascript without curly braces
Why Partners Should Check Out vFabric at PEX
BackFire: Firebase bindings for Backbone.js
But those links don't give the immersive YouTube experience. Interstitial ads are the core of the experience.
I want so badly to like MS. But stuff like this is making this goal almost impossible.
It's the default layout because my G+ account displays my shitty school prominently.
Justin.TV certainly wasn't, and I'd be very surprised if Exec is. I was the first engineering hire at Justin.TV, aged 33 at the time (a full decade older than one of the founders!). Nobody cared about that, they cared that I'm a good hacker who gets things done.
What’s New in vFabric Web Server 5.2.1
Jacob, our designer and first hire at Justin.tv, now Twitch’s Director of Product, hadn’t finished college in New Mexico

I've got a good hunch what that college is. A little hint: it was one of the top three Gates mentioned in "The Road Ahead" that MS regularly hired from, and with good reason.
If this is true, then this is two suicides in less than 2 weeks :(

Whatever the reasons are, it is very very sad to see nice people go, at young ages
But I think that the idea of using mathematically pure functions---programming without side effects or mutation---is a/the key idea behind functional programming.

Indeed, and it is either a blessing or a curse depending on what kind of software you’re trying to write and the sort of situations you’re trying to model.

For most of the programming work I’ve ever done myself, what I’d really like to use is languages that do have concepts like time and side effects, because they’re very useful, but which only use them in controlled ways and when the programmer actually wants them. I’ve often wondered whether such ideas might be elevated to first class concepts within future programming languages, complete with their own rules and specified interactions, just as today we have variables and types and functions, and a language will prevent errors like calling a function with only two values when it expects three or trying to use the value 20 where a string is expected.

For now, I’m hoping that functional programming, in the pure sense, will raise awareness of the potential benefits of controlling side effects rather than allowing them more-or-less arbitrarily as most imperative languages today do. With a bit of luck, the generation of industrial languages in a few years will then borrow ideas that stand the test of time from today’s research into type/effect systems, software transactional memory, and so on, and perhaps we can have something of the best of both worlds.
Just to be clear, when I said:

> They see it as an underage Facebook.

I meant the underage kids, not Facebook itself. I wouldn't say Instagram solicits kids, just that there are lot of them on there.
Regarding FTC action, it's worth noting that MS's page on the Surface Pro (http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-US/surface-with-windows-...) includes this small print: System software uses significant storage space; your storage capacity will be less. I freely admit ignorance of the law but to a layman it seems like they've covered themselves pretty well here. I would be curious to know what impact this would have on potential FTC action.

Further, I wonder how easily the "recovery partition" can be disabled and how much space a user could recover. How much is OS and how much is "recovery partition"?
The unfortunate (to this article) truth is that the odds of x person being talented is higher if they went to a great school.

I think it's often safe to assume that if you went to a top school you have either (or both) determination or raw intelligence. If you didn't do this you'll spend forever screening dumb people.
Graphdat • Profiling NodeJS for fun and profit
Twitter like #tags for project organization
I know what you mean...

I generally ask people "What was the last code you wrote for yourself that wasn't for work or school?". I learned that one from a friend and it is a great question that tends get to people who I want to work with.
I share some of your concerns, but I just wanted to point out that this is not something about Mixpanel or tracking services. It's just the way web applications works. At the very least, the server that the app is running on will always know all your actions because otherwise it couldn't respond to them!
At least in my area, people start out programming on a Mac, get tired of the endless workarounds they need to do the most basic Unix development, then just set up a Linux VM. Then, when it's time for a new laptop, they just buy a Thinkpad.
Not "unique," but certainly not meaningless either.

In particular, my experience with top schools is that, more than "average" schools, they're often hard—the people that get in are very competitive and competent, and the material and pace reflect this.

It's useful information to know that somebody was up to dealing with all that, because not everybody is...
Luckily there are only 20 GB worth of apps in the Windows Store.
"But there's a line that neither class of languages can cross over, and that's mutable state."

I'd add another qualifier for clarity; default or reliable mutable/immutable state. And this really comes up in libraries and such; either the language affords the use of immutability and you can count on libraries being themselves immutable, or the language affords the use of mutation and you can count on the libraries being based on mutation. Immutable languages can "borrow" mutability and mutable languages can "borrow" immutability (const, etc.), but the default matters, and there has to be some sort of default.

(Though while I cast this as a binary, there are some small in-between choices that may be relevant; see Rust, for instance, whose "unique" pointers may be a successful split. If the most useful aspect of immutability is not strictly speaking the inability to mutate values, but instead to guarantee that values can not be mutated by other threads or functions you didn't expect, then what happens if you directly express only that constraint instead of the stronger and more annoying constraint of full immutability? I'm watching that language with interest.)
That is a noble yet unfortunate decision.

The reason some firms hire only top school kids is (apart from ego) they know that whatever test/puzzle/interview they give their decision in hiring candidates will still be fairly inaccurate.

However, good credentials (I'd normally include internships but it wasn't mentioned in the original article.) simply means that there's a higher chance of the kid having a better understanding of programming than another candidate coming from a less competitive pool. What the author does in order to suppress this statistical strategy is giving anecdotal evidence. Problem with that is for every example the author might come up, this community can produce 100 nontrivial counterexamples.

One other issue is most founders who do not come from top schools have a tendency to think that kids in these schools are simply giving so much money to have a cheesy-easy undergraduate life and are terribly spoiled (and that might be partly true). Yet the fact is those are the top schools because students have to produce work that is quantitatively and qualitatively superior to their counterparts in other schools. This is not because of everybody are geniuses in these schools but because the average student starts at a higher level so the academics can push the students further without overestimating their capacity from day 1.
Where do you plan to promote this product? Do you have any plans for marketing this?
Retailers may add surcharge in credit card transactions
To Infinity… And Beyond
Interviewing is hard and time-consuming. So hard that any filter that's even (say) 5% effective is worthwhile. People who went to less famous universities are only undervalued when you don't think about the total cost of hiring.
I'm confused as to how anyone could think those weren't Photoshopped to begin with, they're pretty awful.
Anyone running Windows instances on EC2 will tell you that a 30 GB EBS partition only gives you around 10 GB of usable space. Windows takes up a lot of space (15 GB for 32-bit and 20 GB for 64-bit) even before apps get involved.

I remember when the original iPhone debuted, I was completely SHOCKED that Apple was able to reduce the footprint of OS X so dramatically. A 8 GB phone still gave you 6.5 GB of free space. Then with the release of Snow Leopard, Apple more than halved the size of the space required to install OS X.
http://dontpad.com can help you guys! :)

Minimal and disposable browser notepad with friendly URLs being used to save/password protect files.
Just wear a "Yo dawg, I heard you like Python!" t-shirt.
FYI local storage is not reliable, so you may want to think about a fallback, or at least putting a disclaimer explaining that what you write will probably but nitndefinitely still be there when you come back.
Reminds me of the common shock when an european travels to North America and finds out that restaurant listed prices do not include taxes nor (massive in comparison) tips.

It's all storage and it's a valid measure, especially if you consider that perhaps some stuff can be uninstalled to make more room. In practice, whoever cares about the exact amount of free space will find out, and whoever doesn't will just use the numbers to label same-kind devices as 'bigger' and 'smaller'. Comparing numbers from different types of devices is as meaningful as comparing version numbers from competing software products.
Still no beard combs though.
Thanks for that! Filed for later, when I'll start polishing my shoes and donning my suit :)
Sorry about the confusion. When I say I will pay $60 for a warm lead, that's assuming a number of them will not convert. Our LTV is in the 1000s, but another part of the cost of acquisition is the time on the phone to close the deal.

It's more like this:
- We'll pay $300 bucks for 5 warm leads to hand off to sales.
- Sales will work the leads to close, spending another $200 of time. One of them will close.
- We'll get a customer with a LTV of greater than $2000, for $500. LTV >= 4x total CAC.

In valuing the leads from TechCrunch, it's a mistake to assume they'll all close (in which case their value is beyond $5520), we have to value what they actually are: potential. We have to discount the risk. That value, is about $60, so all 22 are worth $1320.

I like the optimism though. :)

And you're right it's not a great payoff overall. ~$3000 isn't a great ROI for the effort that went into the launch. There were other channels as well beyond HN and TC, but I wanted to keep the story focused on these two.

We've been testing more channels since and there's lot of data there as well and so, so much more to learn. Looking forward to your post!
It's baffling to me why they wouldn't just make the "recovery" partition a download or put it on a USB drive to begin with.
from the article:

>Speaking as a graduate of one, top schools teach you credentialing and ladder climbing.
The article doesn't mention the age of the mother when the family went into isolation in 1936, but judging from the age of the father and the age of the oldest child, she would have been somewhere between her mid/late 20s and late 30s. That could be one reason why she only had two kids in isolation. Also, the family experienced famine, which affects fertility negatively.
And the family lived in one room. The lack of privacy may not have been conducive to reproduction.
My early 2008 macbook pro runs Mountain Lion (10.8) just fine. If I added an SSD it would be much faster but I don't feel like removing 40 screws. :)
'Recruit' implies asking people to adopt her religion, as opposed to asking existing believers for assistance.