skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Square solves a very serious pain point.

Depends. I've seen and heard multiple stories of cab drivers or business owners failing to process using Square. For them, it certainly was more of an annoyance than a painkiller. In most these cases, I ended up paying cash.

Also, here's a truth about painkillers that few talk about: painkillers are quickly commoditized. This is why you'll find vitamins to cost more than tylenol even though it's the Tylenol that helps you when you have 102 fever.
no they wouldn't have. You don't go into cancer drug trials by taking just anyone who waltzes into the oncology ward.
IIRC, a lot of code gets shared between ReactOS and wine. It's not like the two projects are mutually exclusive.
I'd like to know the price of ganjaa there. Seems to be very cheap because you are smoking too much of it.
often its just a way of breaking up the story and to reduce page load time

It's 2013. Articles are text. This is silly.
It's not a bug. This is how you display that there's no road there right now (unless you are working on construction). Likely this is a pretty good representation of the information available for pathfinding as well.
I think my answer to the "write a sort" thing would be "are you kidding? I'd use the one in the language's standard library, because I'm not an idiot. Or if I had no choice, and was using a language and environment so primitive it had no libraries at all, I'd write bubble sort because it's easy. Or if it actually mattered I'd go read up on it and learn how."
Really? You think management is standing over the programmer's shoulder going "Whoa whoa whoa... the length validation was acceptable, but removing spaces for them? Simply indulgence. Just throw an error."

In any case I can imagine it would take less or equivalent code and time to do a string replacement than handle generating and reporting the error. In my experience, it's primarily been inexperienced programmers.
Heh, me too. Now, after having read the entire technical note, I wish that was the case.
Your two posts where you are re-stating my opinion in your own words should qualify as a strawman-like attack, so willful misunderstanding is a fair charge.

This kind of illness bleeds into a person's personality. Mental illness is a complex spectrum, not a boolean value. The more a person's capacity for reasoning about the world is compromised, the less relevant it becomes what that person wants. Clearly, if losethos would get what he wants, we'd all die a horrible death. Let that sink in for a second. So to answer your point: if I was a thoroughly crazy person, what I want would be irrelevant.

Of course, all of these points and counterpoints between us are somewhat dancing around the actual issue. So I'll come out and say it: I don't like that dude. For me personally his views outweigh the programming things he does. Your opinion differs. You write off what you don't like as noise, and cherry-pick the things you like for praise. Both viewpoints have certain merits.

However, when you summarize my point of view as

> You're disappointed that a cool project is #1 on hacker news?

you crossed the line into outright misrepresentation by using a polemic sound bite designed to distort the meaning behind the original argument. Yes, I personally am disappointed this is #1 on HN. Yes, it's a cool project. However, it should also be exceedingly obvious that I'm not disappointed because a cool project is featured prominently. And you did the same thing again with

> "this guy is a nutcase and should be denied praise since he's ill."

Yes, that guy is a "nutcase". And yes, he should be denied praise. But once again you imply a causal link between those statements where you know is none: I don't want to deny praise because he's ill. I want to deny praise because he's an asshole.

You did this maneuver two times. There is little reason to doubt you're trying to ridicule my argument by faultily restating it.

But let's put your rhetorics aside. This all is based on my personal opinion about losethos. You have a different one, and at the time of writing this, it is shared by at least 139 people. Be happy about that. It means you're probably right.
I don't think you're looking at the project the right way.

Think about it like FreeDOS. FreeDOS facilitates running DOS software on modern hardware, and by its open nature, it can continue to evolve and make DOS software runnable on the next generation of hardware.

Think about 10, 15, 20 years from now, and all that software written for XP. That is where ReactOS comes in. A sustainable, maintainable platform for running XP-era software on hardware systems yet to come.

At least, that's how I see the project, as someone who is neither involved nor a close follower of it.
> what's this XHTML5

It's HTML 5 that's an XML dialect. That's right: XHTML 2 died, but you can use XHTML5 instead.
In many ways the US patent system gives non-US software companies a leg up. It seems as though foreign software companies are rarely (if ever) sued by these "non-practicing entities".

Patent trolls are the #1 reason why I have no intention of opening up shop in the US, at least until the software patent boogeyman goes away.
That's exactly what I do whenever I expect a number like this. For instance, phone numbers... Normalize them by replacing all non-numeric characters /then/ validate them. I can't imagine trying to validate the hundred different formatting variations for phone numbers.
I don't know about you, but I have much, much better luck running executables under Windows than say Linux or OS X.

Microsoft puts a ton of work into keeping backwards compatibility. You can watch the YouTube Video[0] of someone upgrading through every Windows version (well, most?). OS X users have to figure out if they need that Intel or PPC binary, or maybe just the larger universal one and call it a day. Then there's not being able to run any of their older PPC-only apps once Apple removed Rosetta from OS X.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14
I would ask the boss to sit down with me and give me some guidance and advice on how to improve.
Unlike English majors, software job requirements change practically quarterly. Companies (mostly start-ups) always appear to look for min 2-year experience in some latest, hottest, tech/framework, which has barely even been available that long.
If someone out there happens to have that skill, s/he will ask for a decent (but not outrageous) salary/rate for a (temporarily) rare skill. Companies looking are not willing to pay that(the CEO needs to get his $2M bonus, after all). So there is your "limited supply".

Maybe, just maybe a couple of passionate employees could be quickly trained? What a radical idea....
According to wikipedia, it is associated with (doesn't imply causation) physical changes to the brain in 40-50% of cases. I'm not any kind of expert, just reading what I see there, but apart from small decreases in brain volume (not known whether this is preexistent or not), I don't see any mention of the brain "deteriorating". Indeed, it seems that around a quarter of sufferers recover completely, others may have long periods between relapse. It is also possible to suffer schizophrenia with a high intelligence quotient.
true, but it is same with google reader. it is not profitable, but who is target audience? the guys who install and recommend most of the software for casual users. So in some cases, you need to please a smaller group, to win over bigger group.

I think any company can win market, if your local it friend/guy starts recommending you specific brand. For example, I changed 10 peoples mind how to think about AV. They went over from AVG to MSE, because I recommended. Why? Because, there is less chance for them to fuck it up and install trial.
If I were hiring somebody to do tech interviews for me I'd want them to have broader skills than "what I learned in school + Ruby". But frankly, the idea of hiring somebody to do interviews for me sounds a bit like hiring somebody to sleep with my lover...it's a job that really should be done personally.
They happen to omit that they got paid for delivering peoples private information to the NSA.

Its one thing to be forced to deliver some kind of information against your will. It something else if you do it like a shop, providing goods in return for revenue.
You are right, I shouldn't have presumed.

For all I know, you are profoundly mentally ill, and in a fleeting moment of coherence you went with a zuck joke.
To put some context on this: Ars Technica is republishing this under the full cooperation of Stack Exchange in a capacity that goes beyond simply obeying the letter of the CC-BY-SA license on the content.

When it first started a couple of years ago, the agreement (as it was explained to us) was basically Ars Technica gets new content in areas they don't normally have good coverage in (in this case, workplace issues for programmers) while Stack Exchange otensibly gets more exposure. The actual content creators (question askers and answerers) are not compensated in any way beyond the normal SE gamification features that kick in when a question becomes popular on the network.

I don't know if Ars Technica now decides on their own what questions to feature, but when the partnership started, Stack Exchange itself was actually deciding which questions to feature.

N.B. SE also had a Lifehacker content-sharing agreement a couple of years back[1], but I don't know if that's still going on.

[1]: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/119398/do-lifehacker...
Over 50% of Food Stamp Recipients Live in the Suburbs
Going off of a few other comments in this thread I would hope it stood for Must Consult w/ Me or Microsoft Consults w/ Me. I've heard that Microsoft's tests are some of the hardest in the biz compared to other associated certs at the same level.
Ask HN: I called my cc company to renew my card..
I hear staticy voices for a couple seconds, now I'm hearing a loop. eg I can hear the echo of me typing this going through the microphone, out their speakers and back through mine.

I'll try calling them back.. and hope they aren't compromised.
Sorry if I miscommunicated. I think you should go through my resume.
Called back and it went through as usual. Any idea what happened?
I wish he'd post the scan of the original, rather than the JPG of the scan of the original. Then we might be able to use it for compression research.

It's not about wanting to see nudity. The original is useful because humans are hardwired to recognize nudity. It's not a coincidence that tasteful nude pictures are considered fine art. There are literally a hundred thousand tiny features that are lost by cropping the image to her face and shoulders. Those features are much easier to compare than, say, pictures of nature. Artifacts introduced into pictures of leaves and grass are far less noticeable than artifacts introduced in the subtle variation of the colors across her back.
Are you kidding me, 2 seconds of looking at that landing page is all you need to know.
Where would Computer Science be without pornography?
on android when I click this link I'm taken to my location search history on the web. I don't think this is apple's fault.
You're right, I need to include information to show how close my guess was; I'll try to edit it in the coming week to include that.
Yeah, but segways are incredibly fucking stupid. So stupid, in fact, that pretty much only TSA officers (effectively the hall monitors of America's airports) are pretty much the only people who feel comfortable being seen on one.

Think about that.
Why is that a good thing for the world? Serious question. Why should we enable businesses that don't want to develop modern software? Doesn't this hold back the world in terms of productivity and software quality?
I think you're taking me a little too literally.

Incidentally, worldwide vitamin sales are expected to reach $3.3bn in 2015[1] while pain management drugs (ranging from OTC drugs to opiates) are expected to hit $60bn the same year[2]. So, painkillers revenue is ~20x vitamins.

[1] http://www.prweb.com/releases/vitamins/food_supplements/prwe...

[2] http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/1/prweb8052240.htm
My intent wasn't to misrepresent you. It was to clarify you. I have no interest in making people look bad. I'm interested in the truth. Thank you for clarifying that, and I'm sorry if I was being uncharitable.
Well, originally, my point was slightly more broad... I'd intended to insinuate that, given that this particular startup had taken this demonstratedly flawed route, and that I can't really think of that many startups that don't use this sort of bullshit rhetoric and mentality to promote themselves, the criticism largely extends to startups in general. Capitalism, yes, I'd agree is probably beyond the scope of HN.
Yeah, reading this question I started to feel anxious about my own employment. I am almost afraid to go to work on Monday.

We have quite large code base and my colleague and I are the only people developing it - and all the original devs left long time ago. I spent last three weeks chasing down a very peculiar race condition, which in theory couldn't happen. Finally I discovered a bug, mostly by accident, in one of the in-house libraries the project uses. It was unexpected to say the least, because I was told many times over that "the library code is ok, check your own". It took me another week to fix the bug, because it was really complex and even "less my own" than the code of the actual project.

In the same time my colleague fixed a multitude of bugs (mostly in our, "fresh" code) and implemented three new features.

Which means I should get fired... Hopefully, I won't - our boss is a technical person, a programmer with many years of experience, and I believe he will be just happy that the bug finally went away. But, you know - what if he retires? What if I find myself managed by someone who doesn't know the difference between wading through thousands of lines of code and years of accumulated cruft, deprecated apis and inaccurate or completely missing comments?

I think the OP should - he did this already, as he wrote in the second update to the post - just find a new, better job. The environment and management which only watched him struggle in silence and then fired him make no good place to work.
You might benefit from not reading stupid, objectivist bullshit.
In the 90s, Lena was pretty much one of the images you spent a lot of time looking at if you were in compression research. It was part of a standard set of images we were always comparing agains.

I want to say the last time I ran across mention of Lena was either here on HN or through a rant of Charles Bloom -- http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com

I do find the story fascinating each time I read it.
my neighbor's sister-in-law makes $81/hr on the laptop. She has been out of a job for 5 months but last month her payment was $19483 just working on the laptop for a few hours. Get the facts..... http://7.ly/6gn
ASLR implementation in Linux Kernel 3.7
the TIFF file is included on the page
Interesting idea.

This is part of what employers think they're buying when they use a recruiter to bring in candidates. Of course they aren't getting what they pay for, and there's also the problem of inherently misaligned interests.

You might be able to sell that same service to job-seekers too. Many candidates are so poorly practiced that they hide genuine talent. Some are even aware of those shortcomings.
Do you hire a mechanic who knows how the car works in intimate detail over a mechanic which knows how to fix cars? Depends. But usually if they know how the car works chances are they are also great at fixing them.

In tech it is the same, with the additional wrinkle that you want to hire aptitude over experience.
Sadly, Microsoft deserve a fair amount of blame for this, for not ever really supporting XHTML in IE back when it was so dominant. Oh, I mean, they "supported" it in that it would render, but they didn't support the application/xhtml+xml content-type, which mean that, in turn, nobody served their XHTML as application/xhtml+xml, and so on.

I won't say the lack of widespread adoption of XHTML was all Microsoft's fault, but they definitely played a role.
:) This made me smile.
I haven't done that many interviews, so take this FWIW, but I'd be reluctant to be interviewed by a 3rd party. I'd have no way of getting a feel for company culture, plus you probably wouldn't be able to answer MY questions about the company.

If you're focusing on the tech only, it's still another layer that adds more time and money, plus if it's specialized enough they'd probably do an internal review of code samples anyway.
Exactly. I weep to think how many CPU cycles have been wasted processing bogus, mal-formed HTML on the web. :-(
Most G8 nations 1) limit hate speech, particularly by limiting genocide advocacy; 2) don't have terrible abuses of hate speech laws; 3) don't have ridiculous abuses of terrorism laws to limit what amounts to hate speech, e.g. proselytizing about jihad; 4) have better functioning democracies than the two party system of the US where the parties are very ideologically close to each other; 5) have greater freedom of the press.

Try talking extensively about your desire to establish an Islamic Caliphate by eliminating the Christians. You will go to a very, very dark place. Having hate speech laws in place means there's a proper process for dealing with this stuff.

But mostly, I just think that "sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me" is a fallacy.
Articles are text with huge images. Believe it or not, a page still loads slowly for those of us in 2nd world countries behind great firewalls. Also, I think pagerank still takes page load times into account, so putting everything into one giant long page would actually hurt their google rankings.
Open source implementation of Medium's UI
Not exactly. Typically it would be to keep them so busy as to never have time to get to it. If you don't actually use the feature it's not gonna be a priority.

Also, in some places you are not allowed to check in code without a ticket or req number. When you check in on your own you commit qa and others to support it, and other devs to maintain it. Big bureaucracy sucks but exists and sometimes even has good reasons.

This is a trivial example though, but you get my drift. I agree it sucks, just trying to explain how it happens.
I'm sorry if I saw intent where there maybe was none. But I hope you see how it would look that way to someone when you paint a picture like that. Also, reading intent in forum posts is hard, especially if you don't know the person. So let me restate that those two conclusions you drew about my motivations are false, but the end result is probably pretty close anyway.
Confirm Idea - Test ideas against real people with as little work as possible
> it's a job that really should be done personally.

He's not proposing to hire the person for you, just to be an objective, presumably talented and qualified interviewer.

To use your analogy, he's the friend that vets the suitor, or offers a (solicited) opinion on your paramour. Nice line tho.
Absolutely agree with that. A few rounds of practice before appearing will not hurt and will definitely increase your chances. But I am guessing selling it to fellow developers will be difficult. So I am starting with companies. But I agree with your idea and will give your idea a try as well.
Sadly not the uncropped version. There's a high-res version of the uncropped original, but it's JPG, which is inherently unsuitable for compression testing.
Avoid SQL joins in your website code

Disagree. If you need to join data, you have do do it somewhere. You think you are going to do a better job of it than the database engine, which has probably been optimized for years if not decades to do this very thing?
Such a depressing situation. I shudder to think of such a letter arriving to my small (tiny) business. And yet I know it could happen any time. There's simply no way for me to avoid it - I can't possibly anticipate what bogus patent might be thrown at me, it may even be nothing to do with my business. It would probably be game over, shut down, years of hard work down the drain. And even then, I worry that they would sue for damages from past sales, so I may still be screwed.

How do others deal with this risk? Just ignore it and hope for the best? Is it still statistically low enough chance that that is a reasonable thing to do? Incorporate and protect assets so if you are sued you can at least back out without personal financial devastation?
just for gaming history it's worth it. Freedos allow me to play some of my old games. And there was a lot of good games on windows xp, so i hope that people could still play them.
Anecdotal: just last week a CS graduate at my work produced Python code so horrible, that our tech lead refused to comment on it. Have you heard about storing an app's - no, an app part's - settings in a __builtin__ module? And that's a tip of an iceberg in this case :)

Well, being a programmer I am able to answer both simple and a bit more complicated CS questions, although I worked hard on my own to be able to as I have no CS degree. The reverse is not true - the CS graduates cannot produce maintainable code. At least that was the case in those few cases I witnessed, so of course it's not (probably) a rule, but it certainly happens.
Technical: The "break out the notebook" is close. Use the scientific method in your debugging. By this I mean form hypotheses about the bug and test them ... rinse and repeat. The important bit here is that you keep track of the hypotheses you come up with and the way you tested them. This track serves as proof of your work that you can ask for a co-worker to examine for its effectiveness. You don't need to do all the hypotheses testing yourself if your hypothesize about some part of the system that a colleague is more familiar with. No shame in asking for help here, even if it is repeatedly denied.

Managerial: Ask how to improve. Are bugs being prioritized properly? If some level of management is not involved in prioritizing bugs, ask them to take and look and prioritize. It is not enough for you to think "hmm .. no hurry to fix this bug for the next release 'cos its a very obscure case and there are these other important ones to tackle first."

Self management: If you're overwhelmed by many bugs and are zombied about where to begin or touch next, just pick whatever looks the easiest to fix and fix it, irrespective of priority (and loop that). This at least gets some momentum going. A management that expects bugs to be fixed exactly in the prioritized order is ignorant. That's not how systems fail. What might be thought of as trivial might turn out to be very significant, and vice versa.