skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Well", Harry said, "If you are asked to add
two employees, return the guy who is older. But
if both of them are the same age, then return the
guy who has been with the company the longest.
But if both guys have been working for us for the
same number of years, then return the guy with the
lowest salary. But if they both earn the same as
well, then just randomly pick one over the other"

I didn't think that was very hard to understand or verify.
It seems like all of the programmers interpret the business decision backwards. Doesn't the company want to eliminate the biggest cost center (greatest salary under $100k), not the smallest cost center (least salary over 35 years old)?
Why you need a home lab to keep your job
It's a shame most of these type of desperate to hire startups in LA use Rails, while I've spent years on Python and Django. The industry might be better off if there were fewer choices in tech stacks, would make hiring and changing jobs easier.
AngelList’s Naval Ravikant Says The Future Of VC Is In Smaller Funding Rounds
What do YOU think?
I need some feed back on the site
Cool, but why not just use web sockets?
No kidding humans don't care about 10ms jitter, missle guidance systems do. RTOS doesn't matter to humans.
I was literally just looking into thermal imaging with raspberry pi, and wondering if Rob Hopeless's thermal tech could work http://www.instructables.com/id/Thermal-Imaging-Phone-Camera...
Incoming Microsoft Launching Another Pathetic Smear Campaign Against Google
How are you making $200k/year doing Scala coding? More specifically, how do, as an experienced Scala user, get in on this?
It has to be used in the stream of commerce as a trademark. Being used as a trademark means that the term is used to identify the source of the goods.

When GW registered "space marine," prior users of the mark still retained the right to use it within their own specific geographic area.
Organizing Clojure and Compojure web applications
The major difference is that the good leaders (whose coattails others want to ride on) should be able to distinguish capable subordinates from useless yes-men.

If they can't, they deserve to drown themselves. If they can, they will filter out most of the fakers, and collect a team that can get stuff done in real adversial situations - since a great commander with a sucky team will suffer, and an okay commander who is able to build a great team will get whatever achievements are possible.
Hopefully it'll be like the other Google-branded devices, and it'll allow you to install what you want on it easily.
I agree, I feel all the time I spended learning Django, Scala/Play, Go, Haskell, etc. is worthless because startups only hire Rails and iOS guys anyways.
Loving it! Pretty cool mixes
Main problem is there is that as all information used by the leap is continuous in nature there is essentially no (forseeable) way to unequivocally convey the intended start and end of a gesture.

I personally imagine an interface not unlike a wand - people might carry around a pointing stick of some kind, with a button built into the handle to confirm gestures either on or off (at least until we can start doing crazy things like gauging intent - what if the computer only responded to your motions if it knew you were looking at it?).

Probably a terrible idea.
How a Real-Time Weather App Took Kickstarter by Storm
So for example, the android runtime operates at the same level as any other process. You will run android applications at the same "performance" level as native qnx apps. The benefits of the microkernel means crashes of an android runtime or the adobe AIR runtime have zero chance of bringing down other platform services, etc. You have to remember it was once planned to also offer a "legacy" runtime environment so that j2me/bb apps would continue to run alongside android apps. That obviously was lost (good riddance!) in the development cycle. The CPU scheduler is also quite different.

The playbook represented a very "rush a beta product to market too fast" case study, so I wouldn't prejudge the smartphone builds of BB10 to the playbook experience. How does this translate into a "better" user experience is not clear to me either apart from being able to run repackaged android apps from day one. Design and flow is more important.

That said, the multimedia latency that can be important in gaming on low-powered devices is significantly improved compared to the performance of the linux kernel. Finally, if an app ecosystem builds up around "sharing" information capabilities between running apps, the QNX IPC messaging is significantly better optimized than the IPC mechanism "borrowed" from BeOS that android uses.

In theory, the advantages of the QNX microkernel to Blackberry isn't so much in that it will dramatically improve the smartphone experience per se, it is that QNX can be deployed/configured with less headache across more divergent platforms with different capabilities and hardware than the j2me platform, such as auto infotainment systems, factory floors, medical devices, etc. It would be quite possible to boot the device and "download" most of the necessary modules to run the hardware dynamically.

Finally, I think the one aspect of QNX that hasn't really been exploited or discussed yet is its use as a distributed computing platform. It is rather easy to tie QNX "nodes" together and do IPC across the network by using TDP on qnet. [0] I could imagine for example using the processing power of the "nearby" qnx systems to power the apps running on my phone to save its battery. You could see swarms of phones contributing to enterprise problems in a distributed fashion. Want to access the camera on a phone in China, the code is the same as accessing the camera on your local phone, kind of like the Plan9 filesystem/protocol. Obviously BB10 has to be successful for anything grander and someone at BB has to share my product vision for it to take root.

Sorry just rambling here, I'll stop.

[0] http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.3.2/neutrino/prog/qnet....
Ha, you'd think right? I think the reason the oldest, lowest salary employee was fired first was because he/she would have made the least contribution to the company. If that employee had done a great job, then he/she should technically have the highest salary.
How did reality differ from prediction?
I find it hard to believe that a Rails shop would not gladly hire an experienced Django developer, unless they were also wanting some "dev ops" duties that would benefit from direct experience with their stack.
Dad spends 7 years on incredibly detailed maze
This oversimplification isn't useful and is getting old. If mom and pop don't use the new products Google comes up with, the advertisers will spend less money and/or eventually leave. The incentives are not so nearly misaligned as you suggest.
Reminds me of my own adventures with systems hanging on PXE boot when a Symantec Ghost PreOS Image didn't boot up completely, and went on to flood the network with packets. See http://dynamicproxy.livejournal.com/46862.html
Author here. Story is loosely based on my real life. As in, I was/am the Harry. At bofa, my previous employer, I tried to be a nice quant & find math-y solutions to what turned out to be plain accountancy problems that a simple nested sql query or a stored procedure could have solved.

So I quit, and here at my current employer, once again I mess around with monoids, rings & vector spaces, though I'm not really sure how any of this adds to my employer's bottom line:)

Matter of fact, my latest pull request (http://bit.ly/14EXMaA ) allows you to do weird shit like

add("twenty three",
"two million three thousand four hundred fifty five")

to get "two million three thousand four hundred seventy eight", because add is defined like so -

def add(a:String, b:String):String = EnglishInt(EnglishInt(a).asInt+EnglishInt(b).asInt).get
The 'clever level' of a solution doesn't necessarily speak to it's maintainability which I would consider one of the strongest things to consider.
Isn't Rails just web-tier stuff? I'm sure any decent startup is pretty much technology agnostic when it comes to developing the core services (or at least they should be). I'm sure that if you can write Python, Scala, Go and Haskell that Ruby shouldn't be much of an issue and Rails is something you can probably pick up in a week or two of fiddling around with it.
I think analytics was referring more to the tools to capture analytics data, not the process of making sense of that data (which is definitely core!)
IntelliJ is the next best thing after sliced bread. You should definitely try it. It has great official support for Play.
We are Rails based, but are happy to hire people with Python + Django experience too, if they are willing to learn. We have hired people before who didn't have much Rails experience but came with an overall solid background in programming and were able to pick up Rails pretty quickly.
It's interesting to see Melbourne and Sydney at the bottom of the top 25 list. I heard the other day that 20% of the Australian workforce is in IT -- more than the US and UK. So it seems we have a lot of non-startup IT companies (or, more likely, companies that don't identify that way or appear on HN)
Rhinoceros 5 v 5.1.20927.2230 SR0 x86/x64 Mult Строительный портал
When - if ever - will the bandwidth of the Internet surpass that of FedEx?
Does anyone know if there is a workaround if you are currently using the FB.login method to authenticate users?
Federal IT Is A Mess And We Really Should Give A Damn
Interestingly, Dick's code is by far the fastest using those implementations. For a sample size of 1,000,000 employees (to highlight the efficiency difference):

Tom (sorted version): 1510ms

Dick (min-linear version): 113ms

Harry (monoid version): 995ms
Ask HN: innovation in the gold mining industry
Hi all,
as part of an industry analysis,
I was wondering if any of you knew of any innovation in the gold mining industry,
things like:

more efficient extractive methods
new techniques to hedge gold futures
community initiatives
lessening the impact of environmental damage
Don't take this the wrong way, because I really want this to be constructive criticism.

But I actually laughed when I started reading the first sentence. You sound like a law firm fishing for an asbestos-related class action suit.

Are you advertising this to everyone or the hacker community? And are you going to try to monetize it?

If I could narrow this down - I like the idea, but perhaps improve the "bedside manner" - while it is a serious subject, add some more passion at the least. You sound somber and unengaged about this topic on the website.

I really hope that helps. It looks like a good idea. Let's hope you don't run into the same obstacles the Medical Retraction team did recently.
I've been trying to find a replacement for One Number, a Chrome extension that notifies for Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Voice.

Google Voice notifications aren't a big deal since I get them in e-mail anyway, but having Google Reader notifications would be really nice.
"They've showed quite readily in the past that they really don't care that much."

I don't think the telco lobbying interests reflect the consumer's opinion.
This video seems fake (despite its high production value) for a variety of reasons.

1. Google's ads are usually made by Creative Lab and this is not at all their style. Or the style of any other Google ad. It bears more resemblance to an Apple ad than a Google one.

2. A laptop "completely designed by Google" might be something that its fans want, but I doubt Google would ever say something like this in an ad and risk antagonizing its hardware partners.

3. Speaking of hardware partners -- who made this? Even when Google makes Nexus devices the manufacturer's logo is quite prominently displayed. Again, I doubt Google wishes to finance a non-partnered piece of hardware.

4. Also, yes, touchscreens are on laptops are stupid. This is a stupid idea.

My bet is that this is the final project of some kind or a demo video from some upstart ad company that wants to show what it can do.
None of the sample code is rendering for me.
These devices are only sensible if the UI of the OS knows how to scale; otherwise everything is tiny. From a brief Google search, Ubuntu does not know how to scale (http://askubuntu.com/questions/231646/is-ubuntu-12-10-optimi...) so I don't think you would want to run Ubuntu on this.
In the winter there's plenty of night time to hack in.
The fact that now I can, on other people's computer, type gist.github.com/my_username, show people all my snippets, makes my day! Thx guys, you've always been so thoughtful.
These are people who manage an organization that trades hundreds of millions of dollars per day, it's more akin to shaming them because they have a rusty screen door on the front door of their offices.

If the internal monitoring system was functioning and they knew about the breach then they're negligent in ignoring the problems, if it wasn't functioning/it wasn't implemented then they're negligent in not having the foresight to reduce their risk.
> The excited defense of Apple, despite my having not really attacked Apple in the first place makes it seem like there's some sort of victim mentality going on with Apple fans.

With all due respect, now you seem to be extrapolating too ;).
Computing on the Cheap
Not so much a touch as a point and gesture deal. Touch screens force you to have the screen close, or your extending your arm too far to be comfortable. The Leap would let you "touch" (and its in quotes because you don't touch anything) what would be the screen if it were close, and have that affect the screen as if you did touch it. So it is fine motor skills gesture based (unlike Kinect et al.) and yet you don't compromise the focus/size issue the screen.
Because a puts loop is I/O bound, not CPU bound.
Work for a university in bioinformatics, depending on the building you're in you don't need name-badges. I don't wear a name badge either.

Only if you're in some lab environment do you need badges to open security doors.
The only problem I could see is that the meteor api is still potentially subject to major changes which could make large parts of the book invalid in a short period of time.
> I recommend a refresher course in science.

I recommend that you learn to read. And how to not be a jerk.
Exactly. If you're getting paid $60 an hour, you just wasted $500. Someone who knows SQL (or in this case Scala) could do this problem in seconds. "didn't give a rat's ass about efficiency." is a bit redundant - you're running the query once and you're getting paid by the hour.

That being said, the manager asking a math major to do an information science task seems a tad incompetent.
As other people have pointed out, in the United States, GW's trademark for "Space Marines" does not include fiction in their "realms of business." So this is extremely dubious on its face.

Furthermore, under UK law, a trademark can be invalidated on "absolute grounds" which "cover defects in the trade mark itself":

The most common absolute ground for invalidation is that the trade mark is descriptive of the registered goods and/or services, or that it is generic for those goods/services, or otherwise non-distinctive and should therefore be free for everyone to use.

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/invalidtm.pdf

And, actually, according to that law, anyone can apply to have the mark declared invalid on absolute grounds.

The underlying issue at hand -- and this applies to American law as well -- isn't precisely about "prior art." It's about whether the phrase "space marine" is already too generic for the trademark to hold, especially when applied to fiction. "Marine" certainly isn't a GW trademark; this whole claim is predicated on the notion that it becomes uniquely theirs when the word "space" is put in front of it.

...so the linked post was infringing. Sorry, but it was.

That's not the question, is it? The question is whether it should be infringing.
Another blog post that won’t make any money
I also have one of these through the developer program. It is very neat, but it does not seem ready for prime time. When it is locked on to your fingers, it is fast; shockingly and amazingly fast and accurate. However, it drops fingers all the time; it almost never gets thumbs.

Even doing the calibration I could never going to all four corners of a 24inch screen. I suspect they will get it ironed out in the end, it does seem like AI/software issues rather than hardware issues.

I will say, that when it's working its really magical feeling. It feels accurate and like I am truly controlling something; but beyond that it didn't feel nearly robust enough for real world use.
Yeah, I missed the boat on using Google Apps as a mail server.

I used zoho.com instead. I set up the lowest grade free account they had and then just walked through the tutorials on their site. I use my gmail account to log in and check the mail server every 15 minutes and I've also set it up to allow me to send messages as if they came from my @your-domain.com address rather than my @gmail.com address.
Security: How do I know a piece of software only does what it announces?
Well, if you use websockets, you have to wire things together yourself. Sure, you might want to decide _exactly_ what data to send to each client, when to send it, how to propagate it between clients, how to deal with merging issues, etc at a message-by-message level, you want to get down to this level.

But there's probably a good chance that (unless you are doing something very specific) you'll just end up re-implementing the built in pub/sub mechanisms of meteor collections which usually give you exactly what you need with almost no work required.

To me, that's like asking "why use rails, why not just use HTTP?". We build on layers of abstraction.
I've been using the beta and RC versions - haven't run into any problems running on Xubuntu 12.04.
I want to get into programming
I have no background in programming but after a fruitless search for a software program i decided to write it myself.

==what i need to do==

write a program which will run sort of like most games do today
-I want to make a 2D graphic interface, and there will be hefty amounts of physics, object editing, pre-scripted simulation and the possibility of editing objects and rules as the program is running
Eventually i would like to make a 3d version but that seems like it would be very hard.
Could I get some direction with this? What program language would be best to use? is it an impossible goal to do this with no experience? I appreciate any help
I think a more correct measure would take the population of the entire bay area into account, since many people who work in startups don't live in San Francisco or Palo Alto directly.
Someone checked in bad code at Google
Can't upload anything to Google CodeReview because Google App Engine data store seems to be down. Someone checked in bad code ... or a monkey tripped on a cable.
While I've never studied the calcualtors, I'd reason that they work by comparing median and mean prices from, perhaps, the consumer price index.

The trouble is that I don't buy Median $PRODUCT or live in median $HOUSING. And it doesn't cover the fact that at higher incomes I don't spend nearly all of what I make. And many of the things I do buy are consumer products that are the same everywhere: A MacBook or a Mercedes costs the same whether you make $60k as a programmer in Kansas or $120k in California.

And for housing, if I spend 50% above the median in Florida, that in no way suggests I'll spend 50% above the median in California. Maybe I'll rent a median flat in California that, due to a more expensive housing market, has many of the amenities I had to pay more for in Florida. Or I choose to accept a smaller house in California.

And for savings, while I now save a lower percentage of my California income than I was able to save of my Florida income, the absolute dollar amount is much higher now. And for retirement savings, I don't expect to retire in the highly-taxed California anyway.

The one area these calculators can get right is to set the appropriate expectation of tax differences.
Perl 6 is a perfect example of both Fred Brooks' Second System Effect and Joel Spolsky's Things You Should Never Do.
True, Google was not the best example since it is still young and entrepreneurial despite being large.

I'm thinking of companies that are hampered by (e.g.) heavy regulation, internal politics and competition, in mature and/or commodity industries.
This is great. But, one request if you're in meddling with gists, could you make them work with orgs!

Please and thanks.
A big part of the problem is social, not technical. A bug report is essentially a set of instructions for a person who knows how to operate the software, but not necessarily anything else about the user's situation to follow. Most people are not used to writing instructions without conversational feedback and have a hard time figuring out what information in relevant and what to leave out.

For a high-volume end-user project like Chrome or Firefox, a wizard/flowchart type UI probably ought to be the default, with a more streamlined UI available to people who have been approved by admins or met some criteria programmed in to the system. An example of the process a user might go through is:

What's the problem? -> A web page doesn't look right in Chrome -> Have you tried it in another browser? -> No -> What other browsers do you have? -> None -> Ok. Here's a list of browsers that run on your OS and where to get them -> Firefox -> Ok, does it look right in Firefox? -> Yes -> Do you know how to take a screenshot?

And so on until the user has likely provided enough information for a good bug report. There could be short-circuits in the process - for example, when asking if the user has tried another browser, a small link a bit outside the main UI could say "I've tried another browser and I have screenshots from both".
This is the fundamental tradeoff between security and usability.

It would be more secure to basically give every application you install it's own home folder and keep it restricted to that.

OTOH an image editing program should be able to see images used by other image editors, a file transfer program should be able to use my SSH keys to log me into various servers etc.

The only way around this would be to have some complicated fine grained permissions system that requires apps to know about other apps that might want to access it's data.
Depends on the sales channel.

If the idea is to build tools for airline industry back-ends, then you better have top business talent who has a foot in the door of airline industry.

A place like GitHub or Heroku, for example, would benefit very little from top-tier business talent.
Microsoft does. Our badges serve as keys to get into the buildings. We can also store money on them for use at the cafeterias.

They aren't really there to tell people your name. Most people wear them on their waist so you can't read them. But they do identify you as someone who belongs, so security can chase you out if you don't have one.
Massive search fraud botnet seized by Microsoft and Symantec
I would pay money for a plugin that just detected sites like this and filtered them through readability.
Typo: demostrate
Games Workshop have been betraying their customers for ages...
I think the original post is largely right in its advice but I think your perspective on the longer term results is also very interesting.

The fact that it took from 2007 to 2011 for the mass exodus indicates that the OP actually did OK and I wouldn't overly blame him for the events a couple of years after he left although maybe his succession planning wasn't bullet proof.

Throwing yourself in fully may not always be possible but if there is an opportunity it could be worth a try. You can always shrink back to minimum effort code maintenance through your lock in period if it doesn't work.