skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>But trying to use class as an excuse for your own failure is not valid in this day and age.

If it's a factor, then it's perfectly valid. All this talk about "it's your own failure" only serves to stop anybody from attempting to change the overall class thing (not by his individual, outlier, success: systemically).

I don't see many rich black entrepreneurs coming from Mississippi or Alabama, for example. Or from "white trash" trailer parks. Or the latino California population.

Mostly upper and higher middle class white and asian families with mucho dinero.

Do you see anything different?

Let's take the top 100 successful startup founders of the last 10 years and check their backgrounds.
Is there something like ownCloud that uses Python/PostgreSQL? I don't really want to pollute my server with MySQL/PHP.
This is absolute nonsense.

You cannot infer someone's age from their years of experience (unless you are stipulating a figure which is a material fraction of a lifespan, say 20+, which never happens)

* I have 5 years of java experience. How old am I?
(55 - I have spent most of my life as a c dev but have done some java over the recent years)

* I have 16 years of java experience. How old am I?
(34 - I graduated in 97 and have been working in it since)

I don't understand the whining. Are you upset that someone wouldn't look at you for a job because you haven't got X years of experience? Have you considered that actually experience is valuable to a company, and why do you think they would be interested in training you and being the proving ground for all the mistakes you'll make as you learn?
My math program offered a (difficult) upper division History of Math course at least.

But to your point, I'd categorize undergraduate mathematics as being atemporal rather than ahistorical. On the other hand, computer science programs (at least of the so-called "Java School" variety) seem to have an antipathy for the past rather than a mere disinterest.
>I assume that no law will ever make firearms magically inaccessible to criminals.

Sure, it is not impossible to own a gun in the UK, but the laws do make it a lot more difficult. Because there's no legal supply, they're harder to get hold of, and even if a criminal does, they're taking a significant risk every time they carry it around. It just isn't worthwhile for random petty criminals to carry a gun in the same way as in the US. The result is that criminals having guns simply isn't something that people in the UK worry about, to the extent that we are even comfortable with an unarmed police force.

Of course the big difference between the US and the UK is the number of guns available. Making guns as inaccessible in the US as they are in the UK would be a phenomenal undertaking, and likely would result temporarily in the "only outlaws have guns" scenario from pro-gun rhetoric. It would be nice if there was a gradual path you guys could take, but realistically you're probably just stuck with them.
> For example, it may be indirect discrimination against a young person to impose a requirement for employees to have held a driving licence for 10 years

I understand this to be because it is legally only possible for a person to have obtained their license at the age of 18 (or 16 depending on where you're from).

I don't think this would apply to "experience in LANGUAGE" at all as, technically, a young person could have that experience from a very young age.

From the excerpt you've quoted, I don't think specifying years experience in a language would be against the law.
What I read in this piece of news (though not really any article in particular) was: "Yahoo spent 30 million to attract the attention of high school kids"...
I'd say so, Marissa Mayer was an engineer before becoming an executive.
I read the entire thing as someone being jealous and trying to explain that away by picking at the deal.
I feel this would be an appropriate subject for a Dilbert comic. Storyline is that someone accidentally left the dot out of $300000.00 to make it $30000000 and then everyone else went along with it for fear of looking stupid.
MySQL can do parallel querying through some of the less common back-ends, like Infinidb, which are more suited to warehousing than OLTP like InnoDB/XtraDB.

http://infinidb.org/component/content/article/53/158
Interesting post. I think the most important change that needs to happen is the rigid mindset of the gatekeepers (initial reviewers of applicants) that are often given very specific criteria relative to number of years and the key buzzwords to look for. I have had clients seeking 5 years of x who refused to speak to candidates with 4.5 years. These are companies that will never have good teams, because their basis for hiring is primarily based on time.

I do see this trend changing a bit even in larger companies in the software world. Part of that may be due to the amount of tech choices available, and there are more candidates moving between languages more frequently than say 10 years ago when Java and .Net were the two big camps.

Legality aside (in the US), experience in a role (leadership particularly) should have merit in hiring but number of years needs to be devalued in many cases.
While I applaud Google for trying to protect their brand, if the general population wants to use it, there is nothing in the world that Google can do about it. Eg, "Hoovering the carpet" etc.

Take it the other way, the term google has entered popular culture and it means (for me anyway) to search for it on the internet. Eg "I was googling for that cat video the other day..."

Could it be that Google has objections because it is being used in a negative manner. I mean, Google has always wants to be a search engine that can locate anything on the internet. Eg "The cat video was ungooglable..."
It's only awkward if you are carrying around a big ego. I've joined places just after acquisition and had co-workers who were worth millions as well. It's really not a big deal.
Show HN: online itinerary planner
I agree, it's shameful that there's been so little innovation from the big players to move beyond QWERTY.

I was thinking recently about the possibility of two radial dials for the thumbs. Start the dial wherever touched, spin around to the desired letter. Possibly double the range by using two layers: pull back to center for one letter, flick outward for another. Eventually, muscle memory would make the whole thing flow. Doesn't solve the one-handed use case, though.

Admittedly, it's a tough nut to crack. Ubiquitous voice recognition helps, but we may not have a real breakthrough to text input until neural interfaces. I feel like Minuum is at least a good start.
Firefox should include an ad blocker by default, then.
I did find that sentence a little strange myself. I didn't think jealousy from the writer, my first thought was "why should the employees be jealous?" Is it the employees of Summify, didn't they all receive a nice payment ($1m each)? And I can't imagine any of the Yahoo employees being jealous, well, perhaps, but I doubt it is the first time Yahoo have made a millionaire teenager. Even if they are, let them use it as motivation to build a valuable product of their own.
Loosing contacts can happen. Just this past week my father-in-laws contact info disappeared from Google contacts. This isn't the first time this has happened to me either.
I'm finding myself more and more irritated with this sort of submission to Hacker News. It makes a bold assertion and does nothing whatsoever to back it up. Then, half the comments here attempt to do the digging needed to back the point and typically we find that the point is overstated or false.

The most galling thing is the usually the tone of the original submission. It's all: "This is the way it is, kids! Run off and use this information because I'm giving you a scoop on the truth!"

The worst thing is, I don't think there is anything we can do about it. It's just the way things have devolved.
Gizoogle: A Google Parody
I'm not sure that this is the sort of board member you want? You do not want board members who are trying to sell to you?
In rural areas, certainly. There's plenty of cable that's been laid in South African cities.
Those example are really unrelated though. One is a law against unfairly ruling out potential employees, the other is about what to charge a driver who has a statistically higher chance of being in an accident. I agree that the insurance companies should take into account a driver's other assets(?) besides age, but it probably shouldn't be law.
No one is preventing the "general public" from using it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5442131
War? Like with machine guns, drones and tanks? I didn't realize Apple has those.

In all seriousness: why is every little disagreement labeled as "war" by the US media? Does it just make "good" headlines?
I actually didn't know about this before. I think one of the first article I read about the product was the story when the product was called TrimIt, and the company just received some investment from Li Ka Shing. For some reason, the articles[1][2][3] gave me the impression that the technology was developed by the founder (or did they switched the algorithms?)

[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2011/12/13/teenage-pr...
[2]: http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/15/trimit-summarizes-emails-bl...
[3]: http://gigaom.com/2011/12/13/meet-the-internets-newest-boy-g...
How did you tell that?
Google sells advertising space. They are a giant marketing company.

And no, you cannot divorce responsibilities like that. That’s just dumb. How can you even?! How is that argumentation even possible?!
No idea, but there are certain semi-discrete barriers that I've noticed:

0.8: difficulty with fundamentals. There are people out there who just can't get code to compile, or struggle with core concepts like pointers and recursion.

1.2: corporate work frontier. Large "commodity programmer" teams tend to focus more on creating a home (slight, reliable, adder status) for a large number of mediocre players than on developing talent. Most jobs won't take you far beyond 1.1-1.2; even the team leads in most corporate shops tend to be only 1.3-1.4.

1.8: escalating difficulty of getting appropriate projects. You can get to 1.5, 1.6 through side projects, book reading, and exploration in your spare hours. It's quite rare, however, that people get to 2.0 without having the (very uncommon) opportunity to do 2.0+ level work full-time. To push beyond 1.8, you need to get more autonomy in your job than most programmers ever have.
> I suspect certain choices were made in the past, often as a result of hardware limitations, which have now become too hard to change.

Save that into C:\AMEM.TXT!
A Developer Looks at BlackBerry 10
It makes a bold assertion and does nothing whatsoever to back it up.

I posted direct citation in the original post. ACAS is an official organisation assigned to preventing and resolving employment disputes in the UK. Their take on the matter:

Avoid references, however oblique, to age in both the job description and the person specification. For example, avoid asking for ‘so many years’ experience. This may rule out younger people who have the skills required but have not had the opportunity to demonstrate them over an extended period. A jobseeker could challenge any time requirement and you may have to justify it in objective terms.
A good answer.
const weasels = 5
const lawyers = 5
const mustelids = weasels - lawyers

feedWeaselsEach(chickenPortions / mustelids)
Have not had time to get it running on a VPS (the main reason I bought it), but it is worth a shot. Not veteran, but looks very cool.

http://radicale.org/
f(Erdős) = 100 (Centenary of Erdős' birth)
> The most intesting stuff I learn when I'm researching history.

To say nothing about cringing when someone makes the same design mistake someone else made in the 50's ;-)

Even worse: thanks to better hardware, they get away with it this time.
A decimal point? I always mess up some mundane detail!
It was a while before they even had password reset. I believe you had to ring up. Think this will be fixed next year.
last time i checked none of them got nightly creeper calls and death threats because of their involvement with PyCon. if you know of any, i’ll add them.
Can someone comment on whether this is a reasonable amount of money to pay for talented engineers and some patents? As a service, the deal doesn't make much sense...it doesn't seem that the world is hungry for ways to simplify web content, even if the technology actually worked. The most popular articles on most news sites are popular because of their in depth content or because they are slideshows of arousing photos. Summly would appear to not really affect either of those trends
Just an opinion, but I don't think Beijing will be too successful in attacking Apple.

Chinese people don't look at all foreign brands the same. Sure, Yum foods can be attacked and that can hurt their sales. But don't forget Yum sells a cheap product as well eg. KFC, Taco Bell.

Audi, Mercedes, Apple... these are all premium brands Chinese people love. If you have money (or aspire to look like one who does), buying a Chinese brand just makes you look ordinary in a place where every corner is selling some Chinese-alternative lookalike.

Disclaimer - I'm Chinese, but raised in America.
I doubt many South Africans would see it in racial terms. I live in SA, and see plenty of ads advertising credit relief for people who have been "blacklisted" (have poor credit scores).
JQuery Custom Content Scroller Does Away With Ugly Scrollbars
I kind of agree with the author. Have I been engineer in Yahoo, I would ask myself question "Why is he paid so much, where we could do it in house better and spend this money on bonuses for employees?". Especially given that fact, that Summly doesn't even own this technology just licences it from SRI.

The only explanation I see, is that what Yahoo actually really bought is the great licensing deal (flat fee? exclusivity?).
An oldie, but goodie.
It seems like an excellent idea. However, reading the other comments it seems that the execution is somewhat lacking.
In what way is that dishonest? Wearing better clothes instead of ugly ones makes you more attractive to the opposite sex, that's just a fact.
Google barely exists in China.

Facebook doesn't exist at all.

Android in on notice http://www.cnbc.com/id/100521504

So is Apple.

Microsoft seems safe, so far, and until they (or if they) clone Windows.

Rules, international agreements and fairness aside: It all makes sense. Why would China want their people spend a month's salary to buy a foreign product (assembly doesn't count)? Or why would the most popular sites be non-Chinese? Block the non-Chinese ones and local ones, totally controlled by China's gov, would pop up. If they could get away with it, a lot of other countries would do the same, they just don't have the 1.x billion people, trillions in Forex and audacity to try it.
Wishing people to death really isn't cool. How would you feel if random people on the web told you they wanted you or your family to die?

Disagrement - okay - but calling for people to be killed - not okay, especially not over over something as utterly inconsequential as ads on a damn website. Remember that you just committed a very serious criminal offense with your post. I'm not sure how this reflects on the compony you work for as per your profile.
Where is this information coming from? Is this back and forth a fictional tale or actually what happened?
Don't Ship Mediocre
"Some sites nowadays depend on advertising as a revenue stream," is a far cry from "The Internet was created on the foundations of advertising." Reading through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet, if I had to guess what motivated the people who worked on those early networks, I would say it had more to do with the potential to advance humanity with accessible, near-instant communication than it did the ability to serve ads to people. Ads were not on anyone's mind when they first saw text appear in real-time from thousands of miles away. Ads were just a single application for the new technology, and they came about much later.
Don't you mean BSD rather than Linux, as BSD was the reference TCP/IP implementation for DARPA?
>I'm a MacLeod Sociopath and don't think I'm a real sociopath.

One of the defining characteristic of a sociopath is that they don't think they're a sociopath.

<It's that rigid rules keep so many people out that the only people breaking through are the ones who disregard rules or find back doors.

This is the argument that is used when people cheat on their taxes. "Oh, everyone cheats on their taxes, so it's okay when I cheat on my taxes." Except not everyone cheats on their taxes.
Rat-to-Rat Brain Linkup, Motor-Transmission
From the google groups list [1]

"I would also like to point out that we have not disabled custom domains for any existing apps, we have merely prevented new apps on the free plan from mapping a custom domain. I understand that this is an inconvenience for some, but it was a necessary measure that was needed in order to implement a vital architectural change that allows us to provide a BETTER service for our existing customers."

So if you'd made use of the feature, you're ok, but if you're an existing free user who hasn't mapped a domain then you can't enable the domain feature. However they didn't tell their existing free users of this change.

Personally, as a free user (with nothing live) I was always surprised at what they did offer without charge, but it comes back to one simple motto "Don't be a free user".

1 - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/appfog-users/ryJqaUb...
I'd agree with you, were it not explicit that this is UK employment law here. And is probably a UK-only issue. ACAS (crudely speaking, the body responsible for UK employment law) have explicitly said so.

"Avoid references, however oblique, to age in both the job description and the person specification. For example, avoid asking for ‘so many years’ experience. This may rule out younger people who have the skills required but have not had the opportunity to demonstrate them over an extended period. A jobseeker could challenge any time requirement and you may have to justify it in objective terms."

(stolen from Peroni at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5442441)
So we're burning down all newspapers and TV and radio stations too, right?
BTW, does anyone have documentation detailed enough to capture the fonts used in the 2250 (a vector display, but I assume the font was built-in rather than loaded from storage) and the 2260 (raster, generated at the terminal controller via a grid of magnetic cores)? I did something with the 3270 family [1], but I'd like to do more.

1- https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font
Amazon disqualifying associates promoting mostly free eBooks
Reddit is a nice alternative to Usenet but not really a replacement since it is centralized as opposed to Usenet's distributed nature.

As for e-mail, if you have a decent provider spam is a solved problem. It hasn't bothered me for years.
And here I was thinking I had made it grand enough a hyperbole that it was easy to notice.

Oh and your remark on my company is funny. I leave it to everybody with more than a 1 second attention span to figure out why. Feel free to talk to HR.
Let's reason like Elon Musk
Let's make a list of assumptions that are shared in an industry and reason from first principles if they are right. In that way we can determine which industries should be out-innovated.

Examples:
* Car industry -> combustion engines are the best -> First principles: electric engines are more efficient. => Tesla Motors
* Space industry -> outsourcing makes sense (since we like to wear suits) -> First principles: it is more expensive and not efficient. => SpaceX
I forgot my username, because they don't allow email address login, so I had to recover my username, for this they required some kind of ID, but it wasn't present in my emails, it took me a while to figure out there were different recovery pages for different types of accounts, so putting in my email just returned "invalid email address".

Took me about 45 minutes just to recover my information, it's a terrible user experience:

First off, requiring an uppercase letter, which I've never used, so I actually now need to remember another, both lowercasepassword and Uppercasepassword, then changing my username to something built out of my name and age, with capitals in them, like FirstLast92, instead of just my email.

I hope I never have to use this website again.
What can we do for translated versions? I'm not a dev but my father uses google calendar a lot because it's easy and intuitive but he knows nothing about english...
So we stop giving away information like that too?

I'm still really not sure why my requesting information from a web server should leak any information about me beyond an IP address.
It sets a minimum level; if you require 10 years of UNIX experience, you're saying you don't want anyone in their twenties (unless faffing about in Linux as a pre-teen counts as work experience). In your Java example I would be screwed, even if I knew Java inside and out, because I'm only 21. I know it's hard to imagine, with the '30 is fossilized' viewpoint many people have around here, but a lot of companies want to pay young people less money, and so give them less 'senior' positions.

There is value in hiring the right person for a position, regardless of age. At my current employer we have some very experienced, knowledgeable staff in their late 40's and 50's. We also have knowledgeable staff who are in their 20's. In my observation they tend to have different strengths, but both bring a lot of value, and it would be foolish to say that the 50-year old deserves more money for having been around longer ( and yes, having a longer track record with the technologies in question ).
Unfortunately mass media chose to report only on donglegate. One of them even started with something like “PyCon was as boring as a tech conference goes [until donglegate].”
Sudhanshu
We may be able to work something out. I sent you an email about our needs - please contact us as soon as possible.
The argument that this matters holds water. If you can steal the identities of all the applicants then, in particular, you can steal the identities of the successful ones.
>but instead, given a shortage of engineers, they are simply whining about it.

I don't like this phrase "shortage of engineers". What there is a shortage of is engineers who will work for the shit salaries these companies want to pay. Labor is a market like anything else. If there is more demand than supply....
Single page:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/fashion/tricky-conversatio...
He's not got a good reputation for communication: http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-deve...
Normally I do not listen to music, because then it is harder to concentrate on the actual task.
I'm thinking an API where you supply random seed nr, image size and optionally color and are returned an image. Useful for avatar creation :)
See my response to grey-area.

And regarding optimization. Language-defined integer type size is one thing and CPU register sizes used in calculations is different thing. It's not like having 32-bit int forces you (or compiler) to use 32-bit registers.

For every int we (i.e. programmers) should be aware of possible min and max values that can be stored in it. Thus we can easily use fixed-size ints everywhere, paying attention to signedness too of course. The problem is that there is high temptation of using int most of the time, because it's easier to write (it's shorter). For the same reason many C programs use int instead of unsigned short or uint16_t for instance. Well-defined int size is part of self-documenting code, as it shows mindfully applied constraints.
Perhaps it is a signal to the marketplace, either to other startups or to investors that Yahoo! is rejuvenating itself (or at least is trying to), moreso since it is an acquisition outside of Silicon Valley.