skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do like the idea of people habitually paying for FOSS, but I've wished for a while that there were more of an ecosystem of consulting companies around it. I know of companies that support specific software, but I'm thinking of a full-stack consulting shop: they go to a customer, figure out what they want, and then make whatever fixes they need to make that happen, from the kernel on up.

Maybe I'm just not seeing them, but other than Red Hat, I don't know of companies like that. I think they could make money for two reasons: first, people (especially businesses) are willing to pay for convenience, and second, they would be making money for collecting, configuring and modifying software, which means doing actual work. They could pretty easily make the case that if their customers didn't pay them, they would have to do the same work themselves.

The companies would have an advantage because, unlike a small IT department at a mid-sized company, they could afford to hire enough developers to have someone who really knew all of the software in a standard GNU/Linux system. And they could afford to hire those people because they would have lots of different contracts. They would have an advantage over proprietary software companies because they would have a huge amount of flexibility to modify the software they use.

Again, I think Red Hat does something like this, but we need a few different companies that compete with each other to really grow an ecosystem. I've been hoping that Canonical will turn into something like this (and I think they might hope that too). Having multiple vendors makes customers feel safer, because they can't be locked-in.

I think a lot of developers would want to work at a place like that, as long as they had any sort of reasonable division of labor between working on specific customer projects and maintaining software. Maybe you'd spend half of your time working directly on a project, and the other half refactoring the coreutils (or whatever). But that's really a business necessity, because if you didn't take the time to refactor, you'd never be able to help other customers in the future because the code would become a mess.
Do you need proof that drinking bleach is bad for you before you will decline a shot of the stuff?
Interviewers ask puzzles and give you tricks because they want to see your problem solving process. Obviously, anyone who hires simply off a litmus test of such questions is not doing their job, but that doesn't preclude the use of such brain teasers/problems at all.

Asking a candidate a difficult brainteaser that may be even close to impossible can be extremely revealing. There isn't a canned response, you get to see them work under pressure, you experience live problem solving and you can understand how they move through their work better. All of these factors are just as important as competency when hiring.

A great programmer doesn't "fizzle" in front of a difficult interview question. He/she may or may not get the correct answer, but as long as they have the requisite problem solving skills and communicate with their interviewer well they will come out fine. I'd say that showing how you fail can be quite beneficial when trying to get a job, especially if you happen to fail gracefully :)

It seems like 37signals is just echoing platitudes to gain karma/publicity at the expense of cheapening the discussion.
Staff Essa Evasion à Essaouira
l'équipe essa evasion au maroc est une équipe motivée qui a pour but de partager avec vous les sentiers de la région d’ Essaouira Mogador.
Huh? Only!

I live in London and have 5 people on the end of a 12Mbit down and 1Mbit up and it's fine. The company I work for has 100 people on a 40Mbit fiber.

This is all fine.

People are just greedy bandwidth whores these days.
Nike Store Robots.txt - Just Crawl It
That's different.))
Old media does a little better I think. My wife's company owns a few small newspapers up north and they do surprisingly well.
>Most rural areas throughout Europe and elsewhere are struggling with <10 Mbps, if they can get broadband at all.

That sounds like Tucson, where I used to live. Now I'm in New York and getting 50 Mbs down and 5 up for $20 – $30 less than I used to get 12 down and 2 up.
I remember a while ago I wanted to get the location of things like bus-stops. (after the whole "showusabetterway" waste-of-time site the UK gov created. )

Found the information on a site some and found that I could ONLY use it if I was under contract from a UK local council.

Most of the info sources listed on that site were bound up in huge amounts of red tape / brick walls

Frankly I am not surprised that the trains are in the same situation.
I won't present a résumé, a github link, a linked in profile, or do nonsense tests. I always send a full web-application I built for code review, do a technical demonstration and provide sample work on their codebase. Any other route is a waste of time.
Eh, people doing internet things overestimate how game-changing fast internet is. I don't care how fast the internet is, people are still going to want to meet each other for dinner, see grand-babies in person, etc. Faster internet doesn't obviate the need for travel.
Hi; here is some examples :
Ajax : http://jsfiddle.net/Extaze/45yWV/
Slider : http://jsfiddle.net/Extaze/wVLFd/
Canadian Startup Camcloud Launches Cloud Video Monitoring Service
1Password: Better and Worse for Personal Data Security
Mbed SDK is now Open Source
It's not just CYA. It's also profit, corporate reputation management and empire-building.
I'm mildly disappointed that this article has ignored both Diogenes and Lisp.

All these connections seem tenuous to me, so what's one more? Why not say Diogenes was the first Lisp-programmer philosopher? After all, he had it right, but was ignored for years.
The Most Valuable Asset
Cassandra, Hive, and Hadoop: How We Picked Our Analytics Stack
The Lighter Side Of The Cloud – Cloud Holiday 
Its February but this does not spare us from planning the summer holidays, does it? Think about nice stuff during the weekend and not only!
I don't believe patents and copyrights help even the US. They help a very select few that have the means and skills to use the system. The average person, and even the average creator loses out.

Creativity for artistic purposes (or for matters of conviction) seems to have thrived since well before the concept of IP; and while the kind of content that's produced now is different (e.g. huge mass-market films), I don't believe it's intrinsically better or better enough to impose such restrictions on everyone. So the argument would have to be carried based on the more mundane practical benefits - useful devices people actually have that they would not otherwise have had, say.

But here too it seems that such laws strongly favor the creation of monopolies or oligopolies and don't favor long-term positive developments (e.g. apple, microsoft, google). I.e. it's mostly a weapon to prevent competition, not an incentive to promote the useful arts. Hence we get these long periods of stagnation between disruptive new businesses - the existing oligopolists are naturally very good at keeping out newcomers that they need to be disruptive to actually have a chance. That's not a good thing; it's a signal that there's not enough competition and development normally.

It's well known that small, vocal interests are very effective at getting what they want; so it shouldn't come as a surprise for the balance to have shifted to the overall detriment of society and in favor of rent-seekers.

I think of it as a kind of like distorting farming subsidies + tariffs. It's hard to get rid of em without hurting somebody, but that doesn't mean they're not doing harm.
Migrating from RavenDB to Cassandra
Billionaire U: Why Harvard Mints Mega-Rich Alums
Thomas Jefferson put it this way: If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea.... He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper [candle] at mine, receives light without darkening me. http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12....
In my corner of CS (overlap w/ computer-music, game development, and HCI), the trend seems to be down.

One reason is that Word is actually decent for writing papers these days. I still use LaTeX mainly because I prefer to write in vim rather than in a WYSIWYG editor, but the difference in output quality is much smaller than it was 10 years ago. For example, Word does auto-hyphenation now (though it's off by default), which is necessary to make the common 2-column justified conference-paper format look at all decent. The kerning has also improved, and the reference-management story is much better than it used to be (there's a built-in reference manager that works ok, and Zotero integration is very nice). Figure placement still sucks, but it sucks in LaTeX too (in a different way).

Another reason is that when collaborating with people outside academia, they rarely know LaTeX. So I find myself writing my own papers in LaTeX, but collaborative papers in Word. Many people from industry really like Word's "track changes" mode as well.
I just noticed that. Currently, if you use Fly.js in a project, as you give the source file to the custommer, you must use GNU/GPL license too, as explained here : http://stuck-in-windows.blogspot.fr/2009/02/fud-over-javascr...
I think I'm going to change the license.
Thank you for noticing it.
> are still concerned about big-O notation

Time complexity is important, and hiring someone who doesn't think so is dangerous. That said, it's important to ask about an algorithm you've already discussed. Asking "what's the big-O of <generic algorithm>" also tests for whether you remember the specifics of that algorithm, which isn't terribly useful.
We ended up using Haskell, which is also famously slow at compiling. But it has been significantly faster than play thus far (using snap's development mode).
Obviously hasn't read the discussion here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-...

RegEx is powerful, yes. But HTML (even though it's a standard) can be buggy, inaccurate, and difficult to expect. Some people, encouraged by older books that support the method, don't close things like `<p>` tags. Others omit the self-closing / on certain tags because they can (i.e. hr, br, img).

So can you use regular expressions to parse a known subset of expected HTML? Probably. Could use use it to parse arbitrary, unfiltered, potentially broken HTML? No. And you wouldn't expect to use RegEx to parse any other broken text document that fails to follow a defined, knowable schema either.
It's a nice approach indeed.
Should probably get rid of whatever crap site this is... but here is the direct youtube video. He basically talks about a new kind of fusion reactor they've been working on in skunkworks and how it's different from the reactor people have been trying to build forever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsRFVbcyUY
Olacabs, a bad User Experience
Thanks for creating this guys.
You're (probably) either not on Chrome (which blocks mixed content by default), or HTTPSEverywhere changes that feature (since blocking mixed content breaks a lot of websites' https version)
They have hairs on the whole surface of their abdomen (for bees), and all over their bodies (bumblebees.
).

They probably feel the electric field gradient.
Dan Martell: Growth Hacking is Not Marketing
If you are spending a significant portion of your work day staring at a code editor, surely optimising it somewhat is worth it.

I only code a little in my free time, but have a dark background makes it easier to stare at the screen, and having, say, variables a particular colour makes them stand out when scanning through code.

It's like a professional cook having all his kitchen utensils laid out in a particular manner that's efficient for his work routine. I'm sure there's plenty other analogies from different professions you could apply.
Indeed, I was more dovetailing off of the comparisons between the Surface RT and Surface Pro, where the latter has the HD 4000, and the GP's discussion about "Intel's" verus "Apple's" GPUs. As you mentioned in their nascent "mobile" chips they're using PowerVR (as I mentioned, apparently even the HD 4000 is licensed and derived from PowerVR), and they have all of the same capacity as Apple to choose whichever GPU they want.
Because the attractive force is so small. The net force of the electric field plus gravity is likely very similar to just gravity.

You may have rubbed a balloon on your hair, generating a static charge. You feel no attractive force toward the balloon, but your hair is pulled toward it, and your nerves can detect the changed angles of the hair.
All fun and games until they fly in your window at night and kill you in your sleep.
AWS, sadly, is a bit slow for what I'm doing, or so I'm told - lots of rapid database writes and needs extremely low latency. (I believe their I/O has some issues?)
Where do you pollute with your political musings?
All good, but the success of this method also depends on how well the interviewer interprets/evaluates the interview. Unfortunately, the danger here is that inexperienced/immature interviewers can easily discard good candidates this way. This is similar to the skill required to grade a written test for partially correct answers vs. right/wrong ones. Hence the criticism on wide-spread usage.
I do actually think there's some merit to the idea of just "plunging in" - going ahead and attempting to read it! Sure, it will be a wtf experience in the beginning, but if you persist for a few hours, you'll start to build up a conceptual vocabulary used/established by W. of sorts (that's what happened to me anyway). But for many matters philosophy/intro-to-philosophy-X-related, I often find SEP to be an invaluable resource: http://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=wittgenst... - the articles there are quality stuff. Good luck with your rabbit hole :)

edit oh, and I had the pleasure of reading (only bits) from Ray Monk's bio of W. (http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Ludwig_Wittgenstein.ht...), which is frequently referred to in SEP's article on W. (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/) - it might make for a very nice introductory exposition, if you're up for actually reading a (not-too-thin) book about him.
You don't think the just smell sugar? Soda cans aren't beautiful but bees seem to love them.
Oh, no argument on the fact that reading is extremely useful. I read too. In expressing the balance between reading and collaborating, I felt that your article emphasized too much on reading - but I fully recognize that you do collaborate.

>>"I can read a book faster than I can speak or hear words."

I disagree that this is an argument in favor of reading. Reading is easier but I think its not always as high in quality as collaborating.

>> "Reading one (or two) such books will make discussions with the experts much more productive."

Totally agree. I try my best to read as much with the end goal being picking the brains of my colleagues.
I'm curious to know where you use the notation in daily programming. In code comments? Discussions with other developers? Other documentation?

I use the spirt of Big-O almost daily, but do the actual calculations rarely, and basically never use the notation. With some experience, you quickly get an intuitive feel for execution time, which is good enough in most cases.
How Coders Can Save The American Factory
Because the force would be vanishingly small compared to the mass of the bumblebee. That's why the article speculates that bumblebees sense the field acting on their hair, which is actually plausible.
I disagree. Setting a hard number gives a threshold for people to fight for, and allows for a variable number of issues to make it to the top each month. It gives people a number to push for.
Here's another one: wanting to enjoy comradely social bonds with other programmers.

This is one of the two motivations that Stallman listed when I asked him what motivated his work on free software. "Community" is the word he used for it.

Parenthetically, the second motivation Stallman listed is "freedom", and when he spoke that word I got the sense that he was referring to a pleasant feeling or at least an absence of an aversive feeling (namely, the feeling of being restricted) more than he was referring to an abstract moral principle.

Interestingly, he specifically disavowed an altruistic motivation. More precisely, when I asked whether he contributed because it was an efficient way to benefit many people, he said, no, that was not a significant motivation for him personally.
3. The compiler's error messages lack useful detail (e.g. "syntax error" and a line number!)

4. Stack traces are as likely to be wrong as right

5. Too much boilerplate exception handling (e.g Not_found)

6. Clunky type polymorphism (e.g. Set)
Why start a company about Coffee?
My current position did something similar with an existing FiddleJS they had. When it was time for the initial screening, we spoke on the phone while I forked the Fiddle and "whiteboarded" in real-time. I thought it was great and I urge you to pursue your project further.
There is a difference between working on a team where everyone works on the same bits and you have to work around their projects and their timelines, and being part of a team where each 'member' works in a semi-siloed, semi-independant capacity.

I much prefer the latter to the former since I don't have to work about anyone else makes changes to stuff without my knowledge but I'm still on the team, still met with the others to discuss what we are working on and how it impacts X or Y.
Flagged for being shallow linkbait garbage.
Why hiring unicorns will kill your startup faster than 'B players'
>That said, the "profitability" of the big banks is somewhat irrelevant. JP Morgan, Goldman, etc, evolved out of partnerships, where all the profits went to the partners. To this day, the banks pay out most of their revenues as compensation. "Profits" are what's left after all that.

Couldn't the argument be easily changed to "Big bank executive compensation is subsidized by taxpayers"?
Infographic: Font Lets You Make Data Maps Of The U.S., Just By Typing
In Australia the government went on this rampage of attempting to "protect" people through censorship. Perhaps a better solution would have simply been to ask Microsoft and Apple to distribute computers with a pre-loaded host file. Nice and easy to opt out, all while providing some decent protection from obvious silly sites.
Coincidence - we like flowers, and admire bees. So we appreciate that bees are attracted to beauty.

Replace bees with flies, and flowers with manure (or plants that seek to attract flies http://waynesword.palomar.edu/ww0602.htm).

Where's the objective beauty?
Or SQL. After teaching a couple of classes in logic, it's quite easy to get the gist of. In fact, as I was wrapping up grad school (in philosophy, as it happens), I suggested that if people weren't going to go on and teach philosophy, they should become DBAs (rather than law school, for instance).
Water discovered in Apollo lunar rocks may challenge theory of moon’s origin
People can be nervous on job interview and therefore "shut down" and fail simple tests. This does not reveal a persons real problem solving skills.

I don't consider myself especially nervous in job interviews and when taking tests and exams. But I still had a much harder time solving simple programming tasks than I would "back at my desk" with no-one watching. YMMW.

It would suck to want a job so bad you completely freeze up on simple interviewing tests :(
"Asking a candidate a difficult brainteaser that may be even close to impossible can be extremely revealing."

I prefer problems that are ridiculously simple on the outside; however, allow for lots of optimization. Choose the next best move in chess or go for example (or design a simple sudoku solver). A completely simplistic solver just chooses a valid move. It becomes more interesting as one looks at how are you modeling state, how are you deciding what is best, etc. This way most people will get something that works, you can see their thought processes (where are they optimizing first, why are they doing that), and maybe learn something new.
I agree, but this is something I've found resistance to in the past. For example, last year I was building an automated shipping system for a client and I wanted to spend a few days in the shipping department - this was flat out refused as the management didn't see it how it would be useful, since the process was fully documented. Turns out, much had to be rewritten because the shipping staff were (predictably) doing 'undocumented' things to speed up their workflow, the new shipping system messed this up and made them slower.
Or you could rent it at a local Redbox Or stream from vudu.com or a bunch of other places.
One of the most frustrating pains I have in life is that when I visit the doctor / dentist, even with insurance, it's difficult for me to understand exactly how much I'll end up paying and whether or not it's reasonable. It's difficult to comparison shop doctors, since pricing information is not published, and complicated to calculate what is/isn't covered.

I'm interested in finding (or building) a platform that can tell me 1) how much a particular procedure would cost me with my insurance plan and 2) whether the price the doctor is going to charge me is reasonable. I think the former could come from publicly available coverage policies of all major payers/plans and the latter could come from user/community input (similar to Glassdoor).

Does anyone know if something like this exists?
Yes but it's a bit more damning if you SIGN YOUR NAME to something you know is false. It's easier for a judge or jury to find leniency in breaking a law you didn't know about than knowingly stating a falsehood to be true. It's much easier to twist the situation from "I signed it cause they said it was okay." (Where's your proof? This will turn into a he said she said situation) to a "He intentionally mislead the government in order to [something bad, cheat on taxes, get through customs unlawfully, etc.]"
The problem isn't the video itself. It's the rest of the site. You could have posted a direct link to the video:

https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/ahJzfmdvb2dsZS1zb2x2ZWZv...

or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsRFVbcyUY
Problem with QR codes
Study: Companies paid more to CEOs than in US tax (2012)
Next generation discussion boards: Iroquote.com
The problem is not that something illegal happened. The problem is that what happened wasn't illegal.

Prosecution is boring and pointless. We should focus on limiting the damage that the next crisis can do. There's the real problem: Nothing happens in this regard. The beneficiaries of the current system have become powerful enough to deflect any external influence on their schemes.

That is the question of our time: How can we break this regime before we find ourselves (or rather: our children) living in a dystopia. As of today the odds are not looking good.
The WU tunnels are great. Have you been in any of the caves under st louis? The one under Lemp Brewery is kind of amazing - http://trickykegstands.com/cherokeeCaveTour.html
As we are moving more and more towards cloud/web based services and streaming content, the quality of our internet connections is getting more and more important while the performance of our local hardware is losing importance as time moves on.
Sometime it will probably end with big mainframes in datacenters and thin clients in forms of phones/tablets/pcs, much like it was before the PC revolution :)
I like the idea of this, just deciding how to balance it with my own hosts file that has local entries vs keeping this one updated (presuming it will be)

Interesting that something that looks to have taken a fair bit of work and is moderately useful hasn't had a comment on it.
Marketing & Financial SAAS Metrics for startups