skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More like he was fired because he didn't have the social intelligence to say "Sure boss, we'll sort that out for you, I'll pull together a business case for the migration and let's meet on monday pm to go through it for sign off."

"No, I won't" is the wrong answer. The above comes to the same thing, but in my experience is not going to result in dismissal.
If they were US citizens, and harassed by US CBP, the reason they were harassed is because they did not know their rights.
I wonder how feasible it is to do batch payments for Bitcoin or even credit card. Apple seems to do this successfully with its iTunes store (a typical micropayment use case) by charging credit cards in batches of $20 to $50 over a certain period.

If there's a payment aggregator doing this for a number of micropayment merchants, I can see some future in this. However, Bitcoin protocol is not compatible with polling transactions retrospectively, so that requires either a "credit" account or a small deposit to start with.
Lisp success stories: LispWorks in Action
No, they're not at all equivalent. As I wrote elsewhere in this thread, in the six years I've been doing them high-rep olympic lifts have never injured me, but a 1RM clean and jerk has. So until you can come to me with a large scale study supporting your point, you are just making baseless assertions that are contradicted by my personal (albeit anecdotal) experience.
I read the article. You need to read my comment.

It's about the fact that food often DOES go bad by the sell-by date, and that Trader Joe - where this guy got his experience - has changed their policies to aggressively push older, effectively near-expired goods on customers. That's what I hate, and it's pretty relevant.
"Typically a PhD doesn't make you a better software engineer, so why pay more (other than its expected)?"

I don't know if a PhD makes you a better writer of code, but it definitely makes you more determined, focused and unflappable person. (That's pretty much all it does, actually. Everything else is a stereotype.) These are all qualities that are worth buying in an actual engineer.
Doing Bitcoin Business in your Neighbourhood #BitcoinAfrica
I am looking for an RC that I can control through WIFI. In other words, I want to be able to control an RC remotely through the internet (with a webcam, of course). Is this what you offer?
The Visual Workstation line failed because you could get 90% of the performance for <50% of the cost by buying/building a dual-PII/PIII workstation and throwing an NVIDIA graphics card in it. The architecture SGI used for the initial pair of Visual Workstations was proprietary and didn't provide enough performance gain to justify its proprietary-ness, and the later models were just bog-standard PCs with bog-standard NVIDIA graphics cards slapped in pretty SGI cases with huge price tags. The Visual Workstation line would've failed no matter what operating system they ran.

But the Visual Workstation line's failure was merely one gut punch in a succession of gut punches that destroyed SGI. SGI had two core competencies: graphics workstations and HPC. The availability of cheap (comparatively) multi-processor x86 workstations running ports of formerly IRIX-only software killed their workstation lines, and the combination of Itanium being late, Itanium trailing way behind x86 in $/FLOPS and watts/FLOP, and x86 clusters with fast Myrinet (later 10GigE and Infiniband) interconnects becoming in vogue killed most (not all, but enough) of SGI's HPC market share.

(I type this all with a bit of sadness: part of my first job out of college was running and porting software to a 20 CPU, 20 GB RAM SGI Power Challenge 10000, and I still have a soft spot for exotic big iron.)
You're deferring a lot of ideas in this essay ("enough said", "I'll leave that for another day", etc.) without actually going in depth on anything, and that leaves a lot of your gripes sounding really shallow. Pick one topic and stick to it.
Ask HN: To BaaS or not to BaaS
We are a startup, working on ... well ... another instant messaging and sharing app!! The goal is of course to reach millions of users.

From a time to launch perspective we are wondering if it is at all a good idea to use BaaS services like parse/StacKMob/PubNub. While we are aware of most of the pros and cons of using a BaaS, our main worries with BaaS are high costs at a later stage when users multiply, vendor lock-in. Some things we would love some experienced hackers to throw light on are:

- Any idea on costs of BaaS once one moves into the enterprise usage range with millions of API calls per day

- can one launch with a BaaS backend, and then as the app is gaining traction, build out and switch to a custom solution? is this practically feasible?

- if above (switch to custom solution) is feasible then any specific advice on what one must keep in mind while architecting the app, and any recommendations on a BaaS provider that is easier to switch over from

- any other insight if you think this is a complete no no

cheers
Ani
HTTP Compression
That's the golden rule, isn't it. The tax payers will foot the bill. All that is at stake here is whether it will be Nevadans or Californians that get stuck with the check.
What part of having a gun pointed at your head, is "outcompeting"?
Legacy IE is maintained by the corporate IT Kata I used in another comment on this thread.

"Sure Boss, I'll sort that out for you, I'll get a business case for the migration together over the weekend, can we meet on Monday to go through it and sign off?"

Moving off IE6/7 costs £x k, because there are 1->1000 applications (I know my company has about 30 major ones) that are known to need changes to function on later versions properly (even with compatibility mode) and 100+ that will need some testing.

Now, when I say these applications need work, often the problems are incredibly trivial, but in a corporate these things (a button has moved, a menu item doesn't work but the button does, you need to hit the ok button not hit <enter> etc. GENERATE HELPDESK CALLS!

And the calls don't go away after 2 days as the users get used to it - they are ongoing, there will be escalations, your manager's manager will be teased at the SMT event, worse your manager's managers peers in other corporates will get war stories featuring your manager in A BAD LIGHT (think about the implications of that) all of which is unfair and silly.

But this is what will happen.

Ok - you get the case done, you see your boss. The number is £30k; is it in the budget? No.

The consequence of not doing it? Your manager shows the case to her manager.

The consequence of doing it without the migration: see above.

End off.
s/titled/tilted/
Totally agree with you. The last thing BB should do is get rid of their assets. Besides, UI-wise, BBOS is already quite close to android, and very open to android apps: develop your app for android, convert it trivially to a BB app with the SDK tools and you're done.

My main gripe as a dev. regarding BB is the same as for Bada (Tizen ancestor): no SDK on linux (which also means BSD). It's a minor point though.

Nah, the real problem with BB is its image outside its user base. I bet most people associate BB with tiny devices with tiny keyboard, while people think of Apple and Android stuff as cool, fashionable. Their latest product sports touch screens and perhaps more, but it will take time for the public to pick it up.
- California has great weather

- San Francisco is really quite amenable to the homeless compared to most of the rest of the country
Clickable

http://www.concussionjs.com
Doh - got the spelling wrong!

Hmm I should go off and get to the bottom of this!
Thanks for this. I've had a similar experience with learning how to program, having taken courses and doing examples which have had no clear purposes.

I'm 22 now and finally feel like I'm headed in the right direction with the help of BlueJ and a book called "Objects First with Java". It may not be 'whimsy', but I appreciate the fact that it helps me visualize the concepts of OOP.

I recognize the feeling of insatiability, as I keep wanting to learn more and more now, all thanks to brilliant resources.
FIFO is common at many stores.

I mostly shop at a handful of local stores, one in business for around 100 years, the other around 40 now. The younger of the two is more "hippy" (for lack of a better term) and has had many expired products on the shelf I've had to point out/return (when I wasn't paying attention). The older, not so much. I don't shop at the local Safeway -- a wholly different issue.

A lot of stores go with the FIFO approach, but some staff don't necessarily pay attention. In other cases, the vendor rents space and is responsible for stocking their own shelves...this happened to me recently...juice 2 weeks past due (didn't check when purchased, returned an hour later) -- store honored the return, but mentioned it was the vendor's responsibility.
I would imagine any music would print as a random porous rectangular blob
1 day old, has no comment, but only this shitty post.
Can you image the gall of the decision maker who said to someone "well we're not going to deal with this, ship them to another state".

Wow, just wow. I am sure they sleep perfectly fine at night. I hope they lose their pension somehow.
Curdbee. I'm using the free tier and have no complaints.
>He was given a bus ticket somewhere and some food. I don't think that falls under kidnapping.

Was he free to leave the bus? No (and physical presence or absence of an officer of the State on the bus isn't necessary and isn't material here - that's is the nature of the Force of the State) Thus we have illegal imprisonment/kidnapping at least until the moment the bus left Nevada.
The writing aspect of this is all over the place and really messy, but I liked his story and felt a strong degree of empathy with it—especially the part about false starts and bad computer science education.
Maybe you really are that bad, but if you honestly aren't then how horrible
Dumpster diving for food has apparently become a whole ideology now, Freeganism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeganism

In their own words: "[Freegans] embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed."
Yeah. It was painful to read but a good story. I think it's worth editing and cleaning up.
Weather, as stated, plus SF is a pretty liberal town that at least tries to match wrods with actions. Arizona? So they could end up in one of Sheriff Joe Arpaio's concentration camps? (His term, not mine - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Arpaio#Tent_City)
I sure hope its less buggy than regular Firefox on Windows 8. I mean, my lord its bad most of the time! (depending on the update).
"typos every other sentence"

;-)
I am fed up to the back teeth with "speed" as a positive metric for coding.

> used to taking a long time to think about and solve a coding problem.

that's a good thing. A good friend of mine is a phd and lead programmer on a radio telescope project. my solution to a problem he described was quick to code and hellish to run, his involved maths I did not understand took five lines and ran super fast. he chose an algorithm that fit the problem domain better - because of more extensive training than I got.

Algorithms count massively. Google is built on an algorithm that fits the problem domain better. finding and applying better algorithms to give "unfair" competitive advantage is a very good thing

so I want to see a slow code movement like a slow food movement

- Producing higher quality software delivers more business value in the medium term than lower quality

- Iterating to a solution is often slower than applying the best algorithm directly

- it takes time to understand and evolve a story

- rewrites are a good thing. most books and film scripts are rewritten a lot

- daily status meetings encourage trying to do something each day instead of taking a week to make something fantastic
Now have a look at the touchscreen UI itself, it borrows heavily from blackberry style bottom bar. The video was uploaded on Nov 11, 2007....iPhone released in June 2007. (Let's keep aside the fact that Eric Schmidt sat on Apple's board) Six months is not much of a developmental time, but not exactly less time to polish such stuff for a company the size of Google. See the progress here (May 2008): http://news.cnet.com/2300-1046_3-6240422.html
Only Touchscreen UI shown and much more polished. HTC Dream was released in Oct 2008.
Does it support DNSSEC and DANE?
Real, real answer: Not only is it happening to other people, it's happening to small N other people.

You hear about it like five times a year, and millions of people cross the border every year. The proportion of egregious false positives -- defined as, bad enough for someone to want to write about it -- is vanishingly small. The odds that it'll happen to any given person here, even any given person of the subject minority (brown), is so small it might as well be zero, from the perspective of a brain that's bad at dealing with small numbers [1].

It's hard enough to get people who read a tech site to care. Now try getting everyone to.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/6h1/people_neglect_small_probability...
> In the meantime, several Internet companies, including Google and Facebook, are building encryption systems that will be much more difficult for the N.S.A. to penetrate, forced to assure their customers that they are not a secret partner with the dark side of their own government.

Except, after all we've learned, nobody in their right mind will be able to trust those companies again.
Coursera class on computing and data analysis is going to start tomorrow.
Backdoors will always be there for everybody, eventually.
Is it even his kid? It could also be the "works" of the new boyfriend ;-)
Would be interesting to try to imagine where the bottlenecks are, because I think we can suppose there are some bottlenecks.

Maybe Apple locked itself when locking in its users?
I get where you're coming from, but I'm not willing to join you over there - I honestly think your position is flawed and that programmers are terrible at judging such issues.

I may just not be seeing the value in the judges' attempts at finding consistency, though, and I'm curious as to why they strive so hard for it versus trying to find the correct interpretation.

This is very much an epistemological question. I'm personally a utilitarian but as we are not granted with the gift of foresight I accept that we need to work within an established framework (ie maintaining consistency with precedent) because what is correct is not nearly as obvious as we would like it to be (eg in this article I think the assumption of what user agent strings are for is too pat by far). A good, accessible, and affordable book on this subject is Bad Acts and guilty Minds by Leo Katz - written by a law professor but for a lay audience. I would be a good deal more utilitarian than he is, but then I'd have approached the defense of Weev's case far differently too.
1. you can switch between apps and close them with gestures. That's been available for several versions now. It's just that's a stupid idea so nobody does it.

2. I use "contacts" all the time.

3. So what if other phones had flat design? now Apple has it. It's not a mark against Apple if they fail to make you orgasm with delight with every feature they add. Sometimes it's good enough if the phone just works without having to monkey with customisation options for days.
Yep, and living in a central coast region where the weather is great, the benefits are plenty, and most "petty" crimes are a revolving door parade, things are just peachy.

Ignoring the local business owner murdered due to the accidental release by CA state psychiatric recovery facilities @ Atascadero [0]; Murder of two police officers due to the military looking the "other way" while discharging an individual without a record of his sexual assaults [1]

Two "minor" local incidents speak well of our mental health and criminal justice systems in this state.

[0]
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/localnews/ci_20573683/suspe...

[1] http://www.contracostatimes.com/ci_22776195/former-defense-s...
Capacity planning is a good exercise, but the brutal truth of the matter is that the most common scaling problem of startups is to have no scaling problems at all.

Especially with B2B startups. I could point to a client or two which had "We're having trouble holding on to the rocket ship" at some points along their growth curve. The far more common outcome, though, is to be rate limited on customer acquisition.

If you ever are in the position where you have 120 people champing at the bit to buy your stuff but can only service 100, great, there exist easy solutions to that.

The easiest is a variant on Raise Prices. For example, back in the day when Slicehost was rate-limited on the number of boxes Dell would let them put on their personal credit cards per month, and they had a substantial waiting list, they let people bid their way to the top of the waiting list by using non-refundable pre-pay for service. If you pre-paid for 6 months, you leapt ahead on the queue in front of those only willing to pre-pay for 3. This let them convert pre-paid cash into boxes, allowing them to onboard the entire wait list within 2 months of instituting the policy.

It was genius.
So you spend the interview trying to confuse them with meaningless jargon which you're using to describe a task programmers do every day? Really?

Let me guess... you don't have a high rate of acceptance when you extend offers.
There are very few people who actually work under Google Research, everyone else is a software engineer (including everyone who worked on my research paper with me [1]). The trick is to realize that there are many product teams for which what you'll be doing are researchy style jobs. These are usually things where you're working on the backend (Compute Platform, Search, Google X) rather than the frontend (Javascript UI stuff). While the job description is software engineer, for those reasearchy jobs, you're doing work that's very similar to what you might be trying at the university lab. Except with a lot more data, and a lot more computing power behind you.

Matt Welsh has written a number of times about his job change from Harvard Prof to Google, and he's a software engineer by title AFAIK, but he's clearly doing research work.

[1] http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41145.html
Really what you are saying is do nothing, at least be honest about it.
#defines have to be one to a line, though - in this case, where you're optimising for layout rather than bytes, i'm not sure it would be a net win. counting, there are 5 instances of "operator", so that's a saving of 36 chars versus 40 taken up by the #define (including the whitespace at the end). there are 10 "return"s, so saving 40 chars there just about draws you even.
Neandertals, not modern humans, made first specialized bone tools in Europe
Because these 8 points are albums he actually bought. It could be that the albums that Amazon sell for cheaper are albums no one buys. By using his own purchases, he gets data that avoids this issue.
It's just you, it's not 2013.
I really do not understand how LinkedIn is still in business after all the crap they have pulled over time: they have been trampling on their users for years.

Is everyone so cheap that they wouldn't pay for a professional that would not have to resort to these fishy and downright scammy (scummy) tactics?

What does it say about the value of your professional life when all you can afford to further it is to give that much power to an organisation whose sole incentive is to make money off your back by whatever means necessary?
LinkedIn went significantly out of their way to position and format that page to phish people. I used to fall for it periodically because I just assumed I'd been signed out and my linkedin credentials were pre-filled in waiting to fail to gain access to my email fortunately. That is the heart of it.

If they'd put a 40pt font message, or simply not positioned the "other" email + password sign in screen straight after the "real" email + password sign in screen, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

The most damning part is that's not even what they're being sued for - they're being sued for another way they scammed their way into people's email accounts.
Skype drops support for Windows Phone 7
It just strikes me as odd, sometimes, that teenagers and retirees looking for a place to spend their time among friends in reasonable comfort, despite their limited income, are treated as parasites on the community; inherently less deserving to be allowed out in public than someone who has money to prove their humanity.

And then we wonder why there's juvenile delinquency.

Never mind, I'm just being unreasonably idealistic again.
I didn't explicitly say anonymous inner class to them. In fact, I didn't use the words at all. I simply gently pointed out the line of code in the code sample already and asked how it might be better leveraged.
A free web based focus writer.  
This was my first web app. Made it two years ago. Releasing it for comments. Source code: https://github.com/digitalasia/brighter
Wouldn't the benefits of ultra-pasteurization go out the window once you open the package, thereby contaminating the milk?
This was my first web app. Made it two years ago. Releasing it for comments. Source code: https://github.com/digitalasia/brighter
Some time ago I wrote a raytracing program in javascript that is supposed to be very simple to understand: https://github.com/antirez/jsrt/blob/master/rt.html

Demo here: http://antirez.com/misc/rt.html
No, it's misleading and terrible practice that is only used to introduce bias. It is absolutely unacceptable to hide origin point on histograms because it obscures the relative comparison between values.
That such a thing is possible. If I try to get below my limit in the Netherlands I am simply not able to. The only services who can go below my limit are my rent and gas/water/electricity bills. And then I just pay a high interest rate. Which doesn't really matter if you deposit money the next day.
Not worth your time. At all.
tl;dr - dude opens Medium account -> wonders what topic to write on -> picks Apple cos he owns an iPod, iPhone and Macbook -> realizes & rehashes what most people have known for years -> that Apple's hardware is world class, iTunes is bloated and iOS is a walled-garden and late-comer to flat UI.
This article contains little support for the statements it makes. I also don't agree that their software is shitty. iOS may have been a bit stale, but I have two family members (my mother and grandma), who had never used a computer before and could use an iDevice without much instruction. iOS < 7 was very simple and logical (I haven't made my mind up about 7 yet) and the applications (iPhoto, iMovie et al.) work well and are very usable for a non-expert users (who don't care what iPhoto stores its metadata in).

I think the more serious problem that Apple should solve is the hiccups in their cloud services. A significant (but different) subset of my iTunes Match songs is not playable most of the times. iMessage messages arrive in a more or less random order on random devices. Facetime calls come in on some devices, but not others. Most of my iOS wielding friends/family (and myself) have switched to other services. Facebook Chat works great, Skype is acceptable for video calling.

Another threat is the lack of differentiation in their product portfolio. So far, uniformity worked well for them, but some people switch to platforms to get a larger (phone) screen, a better camera, a cheaper phone, etc.