skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article inaccurately lumps all software companies into one bucket. As rohamg points out, he makes a black and white argument about engineering vs. sales politics, while the reality is that this differs a lot by company.

In fact, many of the larger software companies seem to be driven primarily by sales (including, increasingly, Google).

At the smaller companies (incl. startups), it absolutely makes sense for engineering to be of primary importance. At this level, being able to constantly adjust to customers' desires is essential, and an engineering emphasis helps with that.

This also flies in the fact of the supposed arrogance of engineers. If anything, I think sales people are the more arrogant ones: they think customers just need to be sold on a product, while engineers understand iterating on feedback is key to growth.
Hmm, interesting. I've been thinking about a Haskell-based shell, but the flow of concatenative programming might be a better fit. Maybe I'll have to play with this idea this summer as well...
"Yurii is a software craftsmanship enthusiast with 15 years of professional experience in the industry. Noted speaker in the Erlang community, a core contributor to the Elixir programming language and an eager explorer of distributed systems."
This is what folks in the upper class like to believe so they can feel like there's more separating them from the middle class than just money. It's also a comfort to believe that even if you end up bankrupt, you're still "upper class". (And often, that people who are new money and richer than you are somehow not "upper class.")

Make a million dollars a year, and you can go to all the charity balls and opera galas you want. And your kids can go to whatever prep school you want to send them to. That tells me it's about your wallet, not where your parents went to school.
Answer to q3. Benioff (salesforce.com), Ellison (oracle), heck probably Ballmer as well, he certainly doesn't seem to get how to run product development.
"With much power comes much responsibility!" I think that's the piece Apple is missing here. They need to work a little harder before shutting down a $10 million company. It sounds like it was handled unilaterally and at a junior level from what I read - but maybe more will come out in their favor.
Ellison was a programmer.

Benioff was a programmer too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Benioff#Career

Given the position Microsoft was in 2000, when Mr.B took charge, I don't think their position could be much worse.
Take less salary and more equity.

...why?
O_o I don't know why the play page might be showing you that.

The app requires basically every single permission possible.
I'd like to think we've gotten better about it in the last 35 years. If nothing else, the national media would be less likely to keep quiet.
I was trying to provide an intuitive example anyone could understand, not a factually accurate and modern example.
But the patents are so general in scope that they tend to preempt any technological change.

What benefit is there in inventing a better mousetrap if the very idea of causing inconvenience to vermin has been patented, and the only people beating a path to your door are verm^H^H^H^H patent lawyers.
Has it happened to you at least once that something was greyed out, but you instinctively tried harder to read it because you couldn't?
About freedom of speech, I read in Antifragile that a university dean has been fired because he said a possible explanation for gender inequality in high and low grounds ( academia and prisons) could be that women have a more stable psyché.
Lightweight, real-world interactions
Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
I think you have to be careful to separate out aspects of patentibility or patent lifecycle:

There is,

1. Patent application classification.

2. Patent application testing.

3. Patent infringement.

4. Patent legal validity.

5. Patent technical validity.

You are discussing classification, dated 1997, which can easily be misrepresented (or at least represented incompletely), as it is here.

In most jurisidictions around the world, there are very high thresholds for the first, second and third.

Both the US and Canada are unusual in having much lower thresholds for the first and second, especially in the case of business process which can be easily redefined to fall under open classifications like "art" in Canada. This is how Amazon were able to obtain their 1-Click patent, which is really a software patent (that also easily fails technical obviousness tests in most parts of the world) wrapped up in a business process and classified under "art".

The US is also unusual in having a low threshold for the third, infringement, due to their court system that very effectively supports patent trolls (for any type of patent, not just software).

Regardless of the sustainability of patenting software, the problem that is becoming clear is that waiting until the very final stages of the lifecycle to defend a patent system has very high irrecoverable structural costs and an impact far wider than the restricted economic activity to which the patent relates.
> I'm brand new to the software industry and while I know nothing about software...

Then why are you giving advice on how to run software companies?
You made me curious, and it seems that the words original (English) meaning was a "rest house for travelers" (From the French "hospice," which is from the Latin word "hospes, that also brings us the English "hospitality.) It is interesting how the meaning of words, especially English ones, can morph so.

But, yeah, anyway I would suggest changing the name. My first thought was of death, and it was really only a morbid fascination that caused me to click on the link.
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that hitting a loading spinner on the home screen should never happen. Sounds like you might have encountered a cold start. Occasionally the Android OS will kill our process to relieve memory pressure. This tends to happen when you are using an app that consumes a lot of memory in the foreground and then return to Home. Improving our cold start time and adding additional protections to our process to make it less likely to be killed are things we're working on. We're also continuing to tune our ranking algorithms for showing you the freshest most interesting content when you turn the screen on. The fullscreen experience of Cover Feed presents some unique and interesting technical problems to solve, but our goal is that the most relevant and fresh content is always given the highest priority. We'll continue to tune this over time and fill in missing features. We'll be making some blog posts about the engineering of Home soon that will go into more detail on some of these areas. Thanks for your patience on the wider rollout. I'm really excited to get this in the hands of more users.
Status of the first million Bitcoins
Early Problems With The NY Times Redesign
Beyond being extremely generic, his advice underplays the importance of deliberate practice at coding. Honestly, if you can hack, the jobs will come. Sure, you might need to network a little, but the skills are the basis. Nobody from my school with technical chops is unemployed or without good internships.

Meanwhile all the students who network and promote themselves but don't code are stuck in unpaid internship after unpaid internship.
pain_perdu we're early in our partnership with CoFoundersLab and I take responsibility for the broader problem you've identified. Shahab and I will work with our tech teams to ensure that only users who complete the process get stored in the system. Had you completed the process and seen the results like thousands of other users, you may have felt differently about the process.

I totally get why you'd be frustrated not having engaged with our full process and then received communication from us. You had no idea who we were. But just know that users who do complete the process and get their results are happy with us, like the BOSI process inside CoFoundersLab and understand that we store their assessment results in case they ever need to be retrieved later. An email address and userID is all we store in order to be able to retrieve results in the future.

As with anything, you've helped us identify an opportunity for improvement. But hopefully next time you run into something like this, you'll deal directly with each company and give them ample opportunity to resolve the issue to your satisfaction - and if they don't, I'll be cheering you on as you go after them publicly.
I guess the reason is that software companies are driven and competitive by innovation which mainly comes from technical/product people.
Picture Me Running
Xbox Live outage knocks gamers offline, renders Netflix and other apps useless
There has been numerous studies that show the rich give far less than the poor to charities, so this doesn't back up your claim at all.
But if the original inventor refuses to sign off, they will find someone else to 'invent' it.
To take on Google people should take on a defined niche. Don't try and solve search, try to solve some subset of search.

We've seen this work when people take on CraigsList and Ebay and other "unstoppable" tech companies. Don't attack head on.

For example, I can think of a few popular types of searches that Google doesn't do super well: code search, product search, local search, genealogical search, real-estate search.

Blekko is of course working on searching specific namespaces, but that's not what I mean. I mean taking on a single underserved domain and really making it perfect.
I appears you have not heard about the man sentenced to 10+ years in prison for hitting and injuring a bicyclist in Healdsburg, CA (about 70 miles north of San Francisco). The article also mentions two other ongoing prosecutions of drivers for hitting bicyclists in the same area.

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20121130/ARTICLES/12113...
We tried this before, as an industry. It didn't work. There's a reason investors pattern match away from sales people as founder & CEO of a startup. Sales people are often too good at selling themselves and not so good at getting product out the door. Selling ahead of the curve right up until the point you've burned your market with missed ship dates.

Having done both sales (taken product to market leading position from scratch) and development, I am convinced it's easier to add sales leadership to take a sold product to market than to add developers and fix a badly built product that happens to have a good sales leader running the show. IMHO ymmv.
Passwords: First Letters
For what it's worth, I've worked nearly full-time at a local web design shop doing "light" development (essentially building a WordPress site from a PSD) in addition to my college classes. I probably should have mentioned that in my post.
Could be HaLVM

http://corp.galois.com/halvm
I think what he was trying to get at is that a lot of smaller startups can't afford to pay a higher salary - and in turn offer more equity. These may be great companies to work for, and the point being made is to not right them off simply due to salary.

Correct me if I'm wrong, of course.
That's something like 1.6 years salary (assuming 6 years of med school)? Seems quite cheap, compared to something like an apartment...
I definitely agree with you that the current socioeconomic system is suboptimal, and rife with perverse incentives and loopholes. It can be fixed though.
However, at the risk of mentioning the obvious, it is not the educators who are not hiring women into STEM positions, but STEM companies.

Can anyone provide any support for this claim?

That colleges pump out X% women STEM grads and Y% men and that companies hire X' women and Y' percent men where X/Y is less than X'/Y' ??

And ideally that would be followed up with the studies of the men and women STEM graduates that did not find jobs in STEM that tracked where they did find jobs, and if those jobs were second choices to a STEM job?

Is there any data for koltkorivera's claim?
Well, in the places where I've seen it done right, the code reviews happen before the code is committed.

Fixing existing code after it's already in the code base is a losing battle (particularly since it usually has to be re-tested), and you'll get pulled off onto "more important work".

And it's not a kludge, it's a very good way of improving code quality (possibly up to the union of your better programmers' skills) and preventing dodgy crap from seeing the light of day.

> Anything that prevents me from doing my job (shipping code) is going to cost the company money.

I think you meant "working code" there - where "working" means "solves business problems" as wells as "not buggy" ;)
Do I still need to get licensed as an authorized money-transmitter? Unless you're getting me around that monumental obstacle, you're solving the wrong problem.
> Here in Canada, an emergency doctor would make about $250,000/year in Ontario for working what works out (in shifts) to be about 25 hours per week, after he has finished his residency.

Ya, not even sure if this is true in Canada, but it's not true in the U.S. That would be 2 days a week of typical ER shift work here (12 hour shifts). Schedules vary, but that's a very light schedule.
so, are you looking to hire? ;o)
Krishnamurti truly gives all the tools to free oneself of the very root of culture.

Indians are also known to be highly tolerant of different types of behaviours; they usually believe that this world is "maya" - a virtual reality. Depending on one's own predicament, they will create and experience their realities. All this comes from the core Indian philosophy, and those who have read Krishnamurti, know that he very well represents that philosophy.

While this view may not mean all Indians are philosophical; I would say, it may be higher % wise than other cultures. Even the most popular religious channels and their gurus hold extremely engaging philosophical discussions - very different from other cultures.
Move over developers - Biotech Future Now
A lot of world changing companies out there started without a business plan, much less a sale. It was about trying to see what could be done with X. Sales people don't get this. Tech is not only about making a quick buck, but about creating new things altogether.

There's an interesting anti-pattern I see in business time and time again...it's the company that's run as follows:

1) Start with a successful product (regardless of how it happened to become successful) and put a top-tier MBA guy in charge

2) Slowly fire or alienate all of the engineers who had anything to do with the initially successful product (too expensive!), replace them with more sales guys and/or very cheap and incompetent "maintenance engineers" so abstract engineering vs. cost numbers can show diligent stewardship of the product

2b) Stop innovating entirely

3) Squeeze the product for cash like a vampire trying to squeeze blood from a stone

4) Eventually the product momentum runs out and the sales stop coming in

Making a new product is both hard, and expensive, it's understandable that MBA types want to try and recoup that and make a multiplier on that initial investment. They're allergic to putting huge investments back in for a round 2 of innovation.

It sometimes works (see Oracle), but usually ends up with a failed company being sold off for parts.

Chrysler is a fantastic example, the First Generation 300 (2004) started out as a very popular car, selling over 110,000 copies in it's first year. A bad merger with Daimler-Benz later, Chrysler ended up in MBA-tastic Cerberus's hands in 2007. So what did they do with their almost 4 year old flagship that was selling over 120,000 copies a year? They let it sit for 2 more years. Nothing, no new models, no minor redesigns, no real updates. In 2008 sales were half, then in 2009 almost half again. It wasn't until 2011 that a new model finally came out, and it was a shockingly modest refresh after nearly 8 years and what happened? Sales almost doubled in 2012!

My point is that it's not that hard, a new front end, some cosmetic interior changes and a fancier CD player and if doubled product sales. Why didn't they do that at any time in the preceding few years? They were simply working too hard trying to squeeze blood from stone.

At the risk of being influenced by survivorship bias, Apple under Jobs is the counter argument to this. It's an example of what happens when you ruthlessly pour resources into keeping products fresh. But somehow this lesson seems to escape so many product companies (tech or other industry).

Perhaps a better non-tech example is Coca-cola. Sure it's more or less the same product, but Coke spends extraordinary amounts of money keeping their brand fresh, slight changes in bottle shape, even slighter changes to the logo and packaging, effectively putting a new front-end on their product. It's one of the most valuable brands in the world.
In general that'll just make you miserable. If it's that bad, either start actively looking (eg. interviews at lunch time), or quit and fall back on your 3-6 months of savings runway while you look.
[video] Challenging the most viewed video on YouTube - PSY "Gentleman"
Fair enough. I did the same in high school, and it's certainly a good start.

However, if people really want to be hired, they should focus on developing serious tech chops. ie. more than just slicing PSDs.
Would be very interesting to see if someone could dig up this data.
Oh I wouldn't quit my day job until - I had 8 months salary saved up (working on that now), and I was making my full salary on the side. Then I'd quit.
The Story Of Apple's Confusing, Inconsistent Rules For App Developers
"I'm proud to say that 15-17 years old girls can be hot, and I can feel attracted to them."

throwawayG9 is stating that they are proud to be a paedophile. Personally I'd feel a little wrong about dating an 18 year old girl, but a 15 year old girl is most definitely a child.
Not only that but the people building it have no idea what they're getting into. I tried to provoke them into a discussion of getting some design/spec docs for the matching engine online and everyone insisted it was "obvious" until I pushed them for 20 mins.
Show HN: Simple sketch-based image search engine written in C++ and JS (video)
This guy has all the right pieces, but sadly nobody is going to believe him until he demonstrates it on a functional plane.

I saw this talk at Blackhat on vulnerabilities in ADS-B, which scared the shit out of me. The paper is a good read http://media.blackhat.com/bh-us-12/Briefings/Costin/BH_US_12...

tl;dr: once a second every commercial plane transmits its location, heading, and speed over an unencrypted unauthenticated protocol, and other planes and air traffic control take it for truth.
It was always like this. The main way to become wealthy in ancient times was through lawsuits. As soon as well meaning intentions are put into legal words, they can be subverted.
Likewise, with the added problem for me that most of my spam is in a foreign language. I own a firstname@gmail.com account where firstname is reasonably popular in a certain country.

I get so much spam, but generally it's personal and tied to a real human being trying to do something useful with the address. People have bought holidays, theatre tickets, food, books and more in the last year or so.

I try and cancel everything in a polite and sane way, but some large companies with the address in their systems don't care. I get cellphone bills for one guy like clockwork every month.

So frustrating.
Someone keeping an eye on their cars: http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/webcam.php?id=841
Troops sleep whenever they can. Combat doesn't keep a schedule.
Several exchanges running on the same backend aren't that distributed; there are many scenarios where they would all go down at the same time.
I am in Arlington wasn't able to see anything.
That's an entirely different problem set from what seems to be happening in India. What you're describing in the US is a system where perceptions and punishment of superficially similar behaviour vary based on your position with society, namely based on whether you activate the sympathies or antipathies of the mainstream establishment. I.E. that old lady is much less likely to be perceived as aggressive and anti-social in court than a young minority member. The system is not completely fair, and you can argue about the extent to which the system is unfair, but the system at least holds fairness as an ideal, and the mainstream establishment identifies with this ideal. Cops and judges may not perceive it as unfair if a similar crime when committed by an old rich lady is more likely to be viewed as a regrettable mistake (especially if she appears distraught and repentant in court) than when committed by a minority member.

In India it seems like fairness is not even part of the equation. It sounds like a seriously dog-eat-dog environment, where there are few if any checks on raw, ruthless antisocial behaviour. Society lacks even the value system which would encourage the privileged to feel guilt and regret over their treatment of those beneath them.

Basically it is the difference between a society where people are shocked and angered by unfairness and a society where people are desensitised or even perversely excited by unfairness.
But it's bitcoin! ...laws don't apply! Jump right in!
The one with the bird looks like Peregrine Falcon nesting boxes I've seen on skyscrapers around here; I suspect the bird's sleeping.
"This approach shifts the responsibility for the gender imbalance in STEM onto the educators (where, admittedly, some of the responsibility does belong), rather than placing it on the hiring mechanisms of STEM firms."

It's not just the hiring mechanism of STEM firms, it's the culture of these firms. I work at a larger company that has quite a few female software developers, and I can't imagine any of them even wanting to apply for a job in a company that consists of a bunch of macho guys who are trying to hire a "rock star" or "ninja" programmer to code 12 hours a day (a schedule that pretty much implies that they're looking for a young person with no life or commitments outside of work). These companies will never get the chance to hire them because they'll never have an interest in working there.
They're pretty clueless.
You can check if your solution is correct at this website whois confirms to be owned by the puzzle creator, Jim Sanborn:
http://kryptosclue.com/clue/clue.html
You're claiming to do better than wolfram alpha? Are there any online demos of your technology? The better search through semantics has been thrown around for years, but so far it's never been found to beat the traditional approach. POS and grammatical comprehension has all the usual brittleness. The best or the best is CoreNLP, but that's GPL so unlikely to be in your product unless you've licensed it.
I agree with you, RWC should disallow Atherton residents from driving on their streets -- possibly enforced through randomly pulling over cars (richer cars will probably yield better results) and ticketing anyone with an Atherton address.
The problem isnt the app itself, or that it's pay to place within the app, or spammy to the users of the app. The problem is that the top apps is heavily based on # downloads, and this app gets lots of downloads. Therefore, it's gaming the top apps.

The app gratis users are cheap, crappy users that provide little value to the advertiser cause they don't spend money. It's all just to chart and get good users from the apple's placement.

And since everyone is doing this, the only way to get in the top apps is to buy one of these services. The minute you stop paying, you drop from the top charts. Really apple needs to fix the app store, or offer sponsored slots there.

[I worked at a company that used app gratis]
You can actually see some metrics at http://ddg.gg/traffic
I almost don't want to mention this, but it could be a "selling shovels" business model. Since they keep their $199 whether your exchange succeeds or fails, it looks like they are offloading all risk onto their resellers.