skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, my takeaway from the article:

Sales commissions are good because they align what the company wants and what the salesperson wants.

Sales commissions are bad because sometimes the company wants something (pushing a harder product, etc.) that isn't in the salesperson's best interest.

ThoughtWorks' solution was to eliminate commissions, thus pushing for a salesperson role that was less of an advocate for the product towards the customer and more for an advocate for the customer towards the company.

Maybe I'm oversimplifying things, but the sales staff the author describes isn't sales -- it's marketing. Which is good! But fills an entirely different niche. One of the issues the author talks about is that the sales staff were promising things that couldn't be delivered, but I only see that more exacerbated by this approach.

What's the disadvantage of scaling commission based off of company goals? (Selling a less demanded product yields more commission). This is, from my understanding, how more institutionalized salesforces operate, and seems like a more gradual solution to the problem.
Would you consider Linux or BSD to be "first party supported"?

I've had good experiences with Mono and MonoDevelop, and given that Xamarin provides commercial support for Mono, I don't think it makes sense to automatically discard that option.
Title is inaccurate and exceedingly sensational, and the article reads like it was written by a member of Sophos' sales team.
"Maybe because of the huge language barrier(any language other than Korean has very limited reception in Korea) which is IMHO, though very difficult for me, something South Koreans should be proud of"

Proud to speak only one language? Is this the same kind of pride as looking down on people marrying someone from another country? The same kind of pride as never having eaten foreign food? These are not things to be proud of.
It's almost like the diet and weight-loss industry. We spend way more time and effort on trying to solve the problems than on preventing them in the first place.

Want to balance work/life? Here's the secret formula which I'm giving away for free today only:

Work 40 hours / week

Sleep 56 hours / week

Play 72 hours / week

This formula covers everything discussed in the blog post. What's surprising about it is that it is nothing new!

We're way overthinking this. The American workforce has been getting up, going to work, coming home and enjoying time with friends and family and hobbies for decades without having an industry of workflow systems and work-life balance editorials. But to make it this simple sells no books, attracts no seminar attendees, and brings in no blog readers.
Ha, good to know. What about restaurants with decent food at any hour - that would be a winner.
Marketing with Race by Zip
Excellent deck.
Without digging into the specifics of the matter,if the Foundation is indeed a 501(c)(3), the IRS should/will almost certainly have required it to have three independent board members.

In addition, having counseled clients on this structure, the benefit of creating a nonprofit and giving it IP is that it creates a public check on anything to do with that IP. For example, while a startup's founders can sell the company, they can't unilaterally agree to sell off the IP in the nonprofit, and the public can challenge any such sales by recourse to a state attorney general's office.

It's not perfect, but it helps protect the IP in the way founders want to. In many ways, it's a one-way decision, which is why it works.

(Yes, IAAL.)
No and I really don't care about those users - it's entirely their problem. We support vanilla IE7-10, Firefox 6+, Chrome 10+.

Any anti-virus, content filters, other browsers etc are up to the user to sort out - it's in their contract.
Agile For Families
I just realised that craigslist map view is a burglar's dream tool.
Binary Harlem Shake, cuz it's a thing now, right?
You shouldn't be using innerHTML to get your shader text, it'll break as soon as you put a comparison operator into the shader. Use textContent.

You should support using typed arrays instead of raw JS objects ({ x: , y: }) for setting vectors, since that will give people the option of using something like glMatrix.
I think this is very cool. A very creative way of showing off skills. Does it help me with anything right now? I'm not sure. But it does show outside the box thinking. I would definitely hire someone with such thought process.
I've talked with the guys putting this together. It's a sort of remote-only dev bootcamp backed by sponsor companies with a vested interest in hiring fresh new Rails/Django devs.
Any Two Pages on the Web Are Connected By 19 Clicks or Less
Americans' Spending Chart 1989-2011: ‘Headaches’ Are Eating Into ‘Nice Things’
Two issues. The first is the most important to me: I simply can't trust the other party a priori. I've had so many poor experiences on craigslist, including scams, clearly stolen items for sale, misleading descriptions, no-shows. This is why I think the identity/reputation issue is so important. If ebay needs a reputation system, craigslist needs it even more (CL is inherently more dangerous because you meet in-person and exchange cash). It's not just safety, I also value my time and every issue is wasted time.

The second isn't as big to me, but I do think searching craigslist is annoying and suboptimal. CL is a solution that worked great in 1998, but 15 years later it lags behind the standard web experience. Worse yet, as the article discusses, CL isn't just refusing to improve their user experience, they are refusing to let other people do so too.
Why?

A: MS Tax to run it.
Anecdotally, a company I used to work for actually went the opposite direction, moving from purely salaried salesreps to pure commission. I believe it was a disaster (the reporting was so bad back then there was no way to tell), but salary costs went down, so they just kept it.

Yeah, weird place.
Oky, so I've actually had a really hard time finding out what type of drones they're using. What I did get is this report - with some pictures and stats: http://www.iapf.org/images/documents/niassa.pdf

Perhaps someone else can identify it, but from it's specs, it looks like it can probably fly reasonably high... if it can manage 6-8 hours at 400km range, it looks like it kind of slots in somewhat below http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScanEagle in terms of performance (and cost).

From that guess, I'm thinking that this sucker is flying well over a mile high, which makes most gun approaches (unless they brought in a whole anti-aircraft platform...) pretty unfeasible. In any case, the cost of shooting down one of these would be pretty high - you would almost certainly need a weapon with guidance somehow (ie, a missile, which is going to really cut into your profit margins), extreme luck and patience, or lug around anti-aircraft platforms... which might not actually be out of the picture.

One of the things this article doesn't really tap into is how the nature of the poachers themselves are changing. The poachers themselves are becoming more militarized (as are the wardens now), partly due to the hilarious amounts of money poaching generates - it apparently, they represent a significant revenue stream for various African Paramilitary groups. http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/rhino-horn-crisis-and-the-d...

In any case, like most illict trades, constraining the supply rarely makes the problem go away - you gotta shutdown the demand somehow.
C# on the JVM wouldn't be much better than Java because the JVM doesn't have value types, pointers, or a full set of primitive data types. At best you'd benefit from a little bit of syntactic sugar here and there, but much of that wouldn't be useful either since the JVM's standard library is missing support for it (your enumerable methods wouldn't be consumed by any non-C# code, for example, and nobody would know how to call your properties).
I don't think that's necessarily enough to overcome the huge amount of work that has gone into making the JVM JIT fast code and giving it a world-class garbage collector.

The CLR doesn't have a well-tuned JIT compiler and a fast garbage collector? Give .NET 4.5 a try -- it included some improvements to the garbage collector that were quite well-received (and the JIT was already quite good from .NET 4).
You read my mind, and I couldn't agree more; might as well call it hexagonal.cpp because hey, eventually it'll get run as C++.
Because F# http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/microsoft...
“Killing It” Isn’t Worth It
Amit Patel discusses his old BBS door game "Solar Realms Elite"
Live-blogging the beta launch of LinerNotes.com, Day 1
Heh, glad you found it entertaining.

This project was very unique and fun for me.

Interesting that you mention the "combination." When I was able to find the aforementioned image that showed the Jenks method, I knew I had to understand what it meant and what the symbols were. I found it very cool that the mathematics were simple and it was the process that made the method work so well.

Basic exponents and algebra were all that were really needed, but the magic was in the method; much like good programming.

The insight into the power of elegant processes wrapping simple mathematics is something I've repeatedly experienced in my programming career. That moment when you hit run and all the data comes out how you wanted it to. It brings upon the realization that your result would only be possible with a true understanding of the process you were implementing. A simultaneous victory and confirmation of comprehension is a good feeling.

Beauty in the bytes.
Because it's DRM. The intent is merely to enable prosecution under the DMCA, only a token effort at "security" is needed.
> You'd have to be fresh off the street to think they taste the same.

... or have your senses fooled by false expectations. Have someone try it on you. I mentioned this article at work, and one of the more experienced wine drinkers in the office immediately went "oh, yes, I had someone fool me with that".

The thing is, even when we can taste the difference between two things when our expectations aren't being manipulated, a lot of that ability goes straight out the window when someone messes with our biases. Messing with peoples expectations about taste is one of those things childrens TV has been doing for decades for fun, because it's one of those things that always delights, and it's trivially easy to do.

In this case, give these same students a closed container and ask them to distinguish the red from the white wine, and I'd be very surprised if any of them had any problem.

What is being tested here is not their taste, but how taste can be overridden by expectations.
Why did the mods just edit the 'big data' detail out of the title? Now this just looks like a link to a benchmark?
I'd love to know what you've moved on to. I'm still 'addicted' to C# these days and it pays the bills very well. For me, before C# it was PHP & Java and I have no interest in ever going back to those.
The article misses the point of specialist companies competing with subsections of CL. It's not just what's happening to CL, it's what's happening to every dominant classified site around the world.

Classified sites used to be the dominant player in all of the markets they covered, but the profitable ones (housing, dating, jobs, etc.) have been taken over by companies specializing in those sectors leaving the classified sites with mostly the dregs of the market.

Sure some people might use CL for jobs and dating, but by and large those are the people who don't want to pay. Which is why CL's annual revenue is less than what sites like Monster and Match.com make in a few months.
That's naive and inefficient.

We only care if there is a system error, if the user phones up or they fill in the online support form. This is only to satisfy the path of the phone call. Everything else is passed around with context.

For the phone call, our logging system has a web interface (log4net appender -> postgres -> asp.net web forms page). you just visit a web page and copy and type the error ID in and you get everything from the entire context, session and client info to the stack dump.
Curious, what are the best animations or transitions you've already come across on the web?
FogCreek has eliminated commissions, too. http://blog.fogcreek.com/why-do-we-pay-sales-commissions/

So have we.

My thoughts? Commission-based sales is almost never a good alignment between sales people and the company. Almost always sets up unintended consequences and leads to local maxima before reaching global optmima.

Also, if you're a software product company, you end up with the "doers" (software people, support, etc.) earning far, far less than sales-people, which causes them to get fed up and leave.

Yes, we're a business and we have to make money, but without great software developers we won't have anything to sell.

Put everyone on salary and then have company-wide profit sharing (that is equal amongst the divisions/people) tends to align everyone's interests.
To answer your question about the Mac being laughed at from the PC crowd, actually Windows crowd, because of the lack of games.

This was true until fairly recently. Because of the efforts of Valve with their Steam platform and others, we PC gamers can finally stop laughing and welcome them to the fold of the best gaming platform ever made; the PC. Because, after all, the Mac is a PC with a different OS.

Hopefully soon we can roll Linux into the group as well.

Although, the Mac did have some good games over the years. Halo was going to be one of them until Microsoft bought it to make it an XBox exclusive.
Anyone who has actually spent much time working on Windows vs. Linux with large files and probably more importantly large numbers of files is aware of how much more of pain this is on Windows. Theoretical issues aside Windows FS implementations don't hold a candle to Linux performance-wise.

As for Mono the last thing I want as a developer is to be investing my time in a language with second rate support.

Note that I certainly don't advocate Java for big data either, C++ is the way to go until something better comes along (and I'm not holding my breath).
May be people will pick up C# for non windows projects in the future, but the past just wasn't favorable for it.

The first version of C# was a 'meh' - Microsoft's Java(I already know Java; why bother?). C# got interesting(and a better Java IMO), but it took time. C# didn't have package management concepts till late(nuget is still in its infancy), and small to non-existent open source ecosystem. For a long time, it didn't run on anything else but Windows. Hobbyist who weren't willing to buy Windows(doesn't matter much if it comes with your system) and VS licences(express edition came late and explicitly disallows commercial use) didn't try C#.
There are two types of salespeople: A. Those who can and will sell with motivation to make good money. B. Those who want a steady paycheck and will sell OK. Your approach values option B. Is it bad? Not really. OK sales people still make sales. But they tend to have very negative impact on the rest of the business. I only hire sales people on commission, and pay them very well. They always bring twice as much business as a salaried one.
If you think of it in terms of the 1 or 2 pawn shops you might have access to, eBay's initial audience of 100 or 1000 as well as the usenet groups Omidyar would post to provides significant "single user" utility that most marketplaces can't provide at that same audience size. So while you're correct that it's not truly "single" user, eBay did provide significant value to the very very early sellers.
Well, eBay allows people to sell things to each other across the world/country which solves a different problem. Most of the people selling things on classifieds have no interest in having to go to the post office to ship your item and deal with paypal or something to get money. The items on these yardsale groups sell within minutes and someone comes to your door with cash in hand and the item is gone. People really like and trust the community aspect of selling things this way.
One could expect engineering students to stick to top Indian schools and a few in the US, but someone interested in law, history, humanities, etc., would have a very difficult choice between Oxbridge and anywhere else at all.
This probably won't be seen since this thread is off the front page now, but the reason package cards (and all GMail based cards) don't work is because I'm using Google Apps.

http://productforums.google.com/d/msg/mobile/B-jW1pAZpdM/Pdm...

No real reason given. Just, "NOPE." Le sigh.
Afaict, the only real option is to ignore .NET entirely and only use Mono, just like one would do with any other proprietary runtime.
Your Passion is Fake
At a conservative average of $40K pa per employee, that's an annual staff bill of around $35M annually. The Firefox-Google deal is worth $300M annually, and their user base is 15x larger.

Add in other costs, and it's not hard to see that either they've got a huge source of other income or they are hemorrhaging cash.
Most word processors are smart enough to not create widows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans) but I guess the same doesn't apply to CMSes yet. The cynical part of me thinks the last sentence was added specifically to stretch the article to (just barely) two pages, to generate more impressions.
One nice thing about CL: They get out of the way.

I haven't sold anything on eBay in probably two years because they are (or can be and have been) down-right horrible to sellers. Imagine having your entire Paypal account embargoed for a month because some guy complained about shipping costs. And this after having fifteen opportunities to NOT bid, each of which --and the listing-- clearly disclosed shipping costs.

On CL you get back to a truer buyer-seller relationship. If you don't have social problems (meaning you actually like engaging with people in person) CL is fantastic. I like shaking someone's hand after closing a win-win deal.

Yes, the CL site sucks. Obviously utility trumps design by a longshot. I love nice design but I always remind myself of CL when stressing over "pixel perfect design" (a tendency I have). people don't use a service because they are in awe of the design, they use it because of what they get out of it.
True, my real wish is CLR/.Net framework on other platforms.

And when I wish for C# on JVM, I wish that JVM gets the things to support C# in its entirety as a first class language.
Because he might not be qualified to read it and providing an aggregation of said data in a consumable form is too much implementation work?

In some organizations, he is not even allowed to read operational data without pre-screening.
The Impact of Heroku's Routing Mesh and Random Routing
I didn't say that the CLR's collector is bad, I just said I doubt that MS has put enough energy into it to compete on an even footing with the technologies being used on the JVM.

Last I checked the JVM is more aggressive about inlining, can do escape analysis on reference types, and has a more scalable parallel collector. There are also alternative JVMs that go even further - Azul has a theoretically pauseless collector, which is certainly not something .NET offers (though pause times are pretty short for gen 1/2 collections, at least!)

The lack of aggressive inlining in many scenarios is arguably a big issue for .NET due to the more pervasive use of IEnumerable and properties, both of which add the overhead of additional method calls. In particular, when those additional method calls don't get inlined and you're passing structs around, each one involves a full copy of your struct, because the people designing the standard library didn't use 'ref' anywhere.
Also, if you're a software product company, you end up with the "doers" (software people, support, etc.) earning far, far less than sales-people, which causes them to get fed up and leave.

I don't understand this point. The sales person is the one making sure everyone else gets a paycheck. Why should they be treated equally? They are the stars of the show, not the developers, or management. If people get fed up, then let them. Code does not sell itself.
There is worse than that. In Italy several companies tried to establish as the "Italian Craigslist", using a lot of money too, and nobody succeeded so we have a fragmentation of small sites but no one is really used enough, updated enough, ... basically is all useless outdated stuff.
Actually, it's still true, but the wheels have been set in motion to make it less true over time. The Mac collection on Steam is still paltry compared to PC, particularly for AAA titles.
It's just a NodeJS tool so go take a look at https://github.com/gameclosure/devkit/blob/master/bin/basil and see what's up.
Forensic Recovery Of Scrambled Android Phones
A nice, little known C feature: Static array indices in parameter declarations
Ask HN: Do you love what you are doing right now?
If you had all the money in the world, would you still be doing what you are doing right now?

I am curious how many of us are actually living their dream.
I can confirm, F# is awesome to work with. (I've been using it primarily for ~2 years now.)

If you want to check it out:
http://tryfsharp.org
Some of them did. But the decision to retire is not always about the money.
That's an amazing idea.
Huge categorised list of free geographic data - perfect for mashups, webmaps etc
See also, "Warner Bros and Intel Sue Over HDCP Crack Piracy" from December:

http://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-and-intel-sue-over-hdcp-...

"Freedom USA, which also operates under the names AVADirect and AntaresPro, makes several devices which allow consumers to convert HDCP-encrypted digital signals to analog signals. This means that users could potentially record pay-per-view broadcasts, including Hollywood movies."

"Aside from the 'piracy' element brought up in the complaint the devices sold by Freedom USA also have legitimate uses, such as connecting a new set-top box to an older TV or monitor."
Although I've not extensively used it, I like the features C# has over Java, and that was especially true before Java borrowed back many of those ideas in its later versions.

However, I clicked on this article expecting to see some performance benchmarks to justify the title. Rather, I see some theory about why it MIGHT be faster and also some opinions about what features might make a developer more efficient in C# than Java. I worry that any actual benchmarks would not validate the title. Certainly the web application benchmarks I've seen elsewhere do not align with the title.

Ultimately, it seems to partially conflate performance with developer efficiency. Developer efficiency I am willing to concede: C# may be more developer friendly as a language, putting platform aside.
Well, maybe the label of terrorist is a bit extreme. But why the hell should you be able to maliciously broadcast an incorrect GPS signal with the intent of destruction of property (which may btw, put other bystanders in harms way as well) not be viewed as some sort of... at least incorrect act. It is pretty sad that they jump to the label terrorist. But it's not the least reasonable use of the label.

In any case, such an attack is unlikely to work. The crash into the ground is least likely to work since most drones will likely have an independent altitude information. The stall method may work - if the drone has no INS and the operator is asleep.
Facebook to pay NO tax for 2012 and will even get tax refund of $429m
Facebook will not pay any tax for 2012 despite making $1.1 billion in pre-tax profits from U.S. operations, according to a report released on Thursday.<p>But Mark Zuckerberg's company will also get a multimillion dollar tax refund of around $429 million according to Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ).<p>The refunds reportedly come from tax deductions on executive stock options and share awards.
Spec analysis: XBox720 vs PS4