skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I disagree with you in saying that this type of audition exercise is below me.
> We complain [...] is broken. Why is this not a better alternative?

It's not a better alternative because many of the best developers in Silicon Valley don't disagree with me. There are many reasons for this -- not everyone is a carefree recent college grad, and many people can't afford the luxury of taking the time off to do something like this. You might argue that it's a paid trial, but often "can't afford" has more to do with family obligations, time commitments, and mental bandwidth than money, even if they'd be more than willing/able to push hard in a start-up environment if it were their full-time job. Many of the best developers aren't willing to leave their current job or take time off without the commitment of a written offer. They may be more risk averse than someone younger with fewer obligations, for many of the same reasons outlined above.

But the most important reason why this is not a better alternative is that any developer who doesn't want to put up with this doesn't have to put up with it, since it's by far not the norm. Any developer who feels this way and is actually any good would have an easy time of finding an equal or better opportunity elsewhere.

> You wouldn't pitch this as "hey, I'm still not sure about you so I'm going to ask you to do X to prove your worth" - though it seems that's the interpretation you're getting from this.

It really doesn't matter how the company tries to spin this. In the current environment, the best developers in Silicon Valley can work wherever they want. By using a paid trial as policy, these companies are (willfully or not) turning away some of the best developers that they interview, for very little gain.

tl;dr: It doesn't matter whether or not you perceive this exercise as being below you. If a large enough contingent of the best developers won't put up with it, the companies who use the exercise are losing out.
It's one example of a person affected by a variety of truly challenging events.

The financial crisis which affected retirement savings. The housing crisis which affected what was typically people's largest asset. Rising health-care costs. Baby-boomers entering retirement and the impact that'll have on Social Security. Lack of pensions, and dependence on 401k's. The jobless recovery.

It's easy to blame an individual for not having planned for the predicament he finds himself in, but it's also possible to see what he's going through as a sampling of unexpected or uncontrollable macro-economic factors, weighing on a much-larger sector of the population than just this one man, in a way that will ultimately have an effect on society as a whole.
Here's the other problem with this method of asking, "Is college worth it?": as far as I know, Alex Mayyasi doesn't collect data on dropouts.

Starting and finishing at a public school in four years is almost certainly worth it for most people. Starting and dropping out, especially when you're more than one semester in, is a disaster, and the dropout numbers for many schools are staggering. I was a grad student at the University of Arizona in English Lit and routinely saw that something like half of those who enrolled as 18-year-old freshmen matriculated within six years.

The rest? Some presumably had parents to pay, but many were stuck with loans that couldn't be effectively discharged through bankruptcy and other normal means. The U of A, and other universities, pay no price for this. They have no skin in the game.

I've written more about this here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/the-problem-with-ju... and elsewhere.
And on takeoff, the Challenger crew compartment was still intact after the explosion and the crew was protected and quite likely conscious for the 2 minutes and 45 seconds while it hurtled along in a ballistic arc until it splashed down into the ocean hard enough to pulverize everything on board.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disast...
Probably through patents. Sell those to highest bidding troll, then layoff to a very small core of the remaining interesting engineers with a brain and sell those to Google or Microsoft as an aquihire.
Argentina most expensive place to buy iPad, Malaysia cheapest
This article doesn't do a very good job of stating it's thesis: The ansible version is no fewer lines than the shell script version; but requires you to understand ansible and how it works.

It doesn't seem preferable to me, from this example.

Note, I don't need to be convinced of the benefits of configuration management in terms of reproducibility and reliability. I'm just saying the OP's examples don't really make the case it suggests they make, of showing how ansible is so much easier than shell scripts. It does not appear to be.
Photo of remains has been removed.
So glad that I've _never_ had one. They sketched me out right from the beginning.
I deleted mine a few weeks back. I was getting negative value of it in the form of spam and random connections I didn't actually know in person.

In the developer world, LinkedIn is seen as marginal at best, and uncool at worst. Other industries? I don't know. I had someone tell me they get a lot of B2B value out of it in the bio med space.

At any rate, I don't miss it for a second. I had to create a quick test account for a portal I was using and the signup process was just awfully deceptive. I deleted that one as well.
> $350,000 divided by 19

Isn't really indicative of what happened, since the range of individual settlement amounts was from $2,500 to "just under $100,000". And, of course, the main thrust isn't the monetary settlements, its the Assurances of Discontinuance that are part of the settlement, which are themselves enforceable.

> On the other hand the FTC has oversight on this

Only when interstate commerce is involved, and even then it is by design not exclusive of state oversight or individual consumer remedies.

> and there are already existing rules in place.

This action was enforcement action under the existing rules.
Evictions changing face of San Francisco as landlords court affluent tech crowd
It's very easy to build binaries for Windows that run on both platforms if you're using their approved tools.

It's all the legacy apps that are the problem.
After reading your post last year, i started my own niche website making iphone app templates (easily googleable). I ended up taking it to roughly $3k/month in revenue and have just sold it to a private company.

Thank you for writing that post.
Direct Traffic is either just what it says, or traffic from 'https://' (SSL) sites. Your site is just http:// (no SSL) and thus can't get the referral information.
Story of size 1
There's an old programmers joke about this, which I'm not going to try and re-hash in entirety, but basically it's a listing of C++ code that starts off small, then as the programmer gets experience and learns how to do it 'better', the code grows, and grows, and becomes a massive engine of code. Then of course, as the years pass and the engineer gets more experience, the code shrinks and shrinks until it's slightly smaller than the original.
Yeah, I have a love/hate relationship with LinkedIn.

I don't like the site, and I don't like the company. That said, I've had on-site interviews at Google, Facebook, and the like not via my StackOverflow profile (which is pretty good, 20k+), or my blog, but directly through being hit up on LinkedIn.

I'm about to start a dream job next week, again after being contacted first on LinkedIn by my new employer.

Perhaps it's alright if you can post online about all the great work you do, or you have a name for yourself in the industry, or you make lots of OSS contributions on GitHub. Unfortunately I don't have any of those (yet!). But I do have a LinkedIn profile, and that's what got me on the one-way flight from London to SF next week.

I'm not defending LinkedIn as a company: I think they're pretty scummy. But if I didn't have my account, maybe I wouldn't have got this job.
We did a test of an EC2 data centre setup vs. our existing physical data centre setup and the largest issue - that is, if you ignore the 3x cost - is the network latency and general quality of the local network in the availability zones.

No amount of optimization could eliminate the 100-150ms penalty imposed by the EC2 network vs. our dedicated hardware. The local network was congested and "noisy" in the sense that ping times were highly variable and had high packet loss, and the number of hops to the internet at large were high, and the baseline latency to the world was also high.

As for instance lifespan, we had numerous instances just "disappear" and then needed to be recreated. We were running a hundred or so for our test so YMMV.
Clearly this isn't passive though unless you're paying employees to do literally everything and just skimming the profit, right? I mean "running a consulting firm" could be anywhere from 0 to 100+ hours a week.
Video response to #Miss America
I plateaued very quickly with TextMate. I'd say after 5 months. I'm 3+ years in with Vim and I learn new things every day.

Those numbers are obviously bothering you but they are definetely not needed. Stop focusing on that. They are only one way, largely inherited from vi's ancestry, but there are so many other ways. I don't use counts much for the same reason as you (and I find that counting breaks my train of thought) but I use search and "advanced" motions a lot and quite naturally. The ability to jump to arbitrary positions in my code and directly work (without selection) on things like inner parenthesis and other text-objects have been extremely useful in my day to day work.

Once you are used to those text-objects and motions, using any other editor is a monumental pain in the ass, however advanced and modern they are.

But, as I alluded at the end of my comment, I don't mean to convince you or anyone of the superiority of Vim because I don't care: I have no interest in the success or failure of Vim. I use Vim and a couple of IDEs in my work and I'm totaly fine with you using and prefering other tools.
I had this today as well. Where was your attempt coming from? Mine was in HK.

(To be fair, I think it was my own machine attempting to connect via VPN)
My student loan debt is completely oppressive. Educating myself was the stupidest thing I've ever done. Oh the horrible irony.
I'll delete my LinkedIn profile after I'm sure that I'll never want employment anywhere. This is essentially professional reputation/resume service, which eliminated my use of a half dozen job websites.
you get to "message" people directly whom you do not know or have a link to. makes life easier to get n contact with people whom are fun and interesting to get in contact with. one day I will get around to doing a "a quick coffee with fun and interesting people" podcast

I'm going to dive into LinkedIn OAuth this week, so I might get a better insight soon.
Richard Stallman. He hacked the law! The GPL is one of the most important things that ever happened in software, and created the foundation for so much we love today.
I am incredibly excited for this. This may well push Linux into the hands of everyday people.
The Haswell Airs came out in June and the Windows Haswell Ultrabooks were for sale beginning in August. The gap was only about 3-4 months.
Wow, I'm interning at a software company in the Bay Area and my normalized hourly wage is way more than $15/hour. Is it just me, or do a lot of firms these days just exploit cheap labor as a way to avoid admitting that their business models are actually quite low-value?
The reviewers at issue in this case were largely SEO companies (or their individual paid agents) acting on behalf of the businesses (real or fake) involved, or the actual companies involved (or their employees).

And false advertising (and deceptive business practices) were the actual charges.
Nice artwork and presentation. Looks a lot better than most of the one (wo)man show apps I've seen.
I did, a while ago. Nothing useful came out of Linkedin for me, but tons and tons of spam. It took me months to get unsubscribed from all the spam.
If you are in a service industry (consulting, law, etc.), sales, or other business role, LinkedIn is absolutely critical for qualifying leads, being qualified, and networking. If you are a line-engineer, sure, you probably can delete it.
Because you asked, I tracked down a support number and called it. It said that: "we are experiencing a problem with gmail. Check google.com/appstatus for updates. If your issue is NOT about gmail, please stay on the line."

So...nothing.
It's not about whether or not college is worth it, but rather what you want to get out of it and your expectations... You can't expect every degree to optain you a good paying job, certainly not without some creativity and a little extra curricular effort anyway...
I make six figures with just an AA degree that has nothing to do with technology.

When I'm interviewed it is clear I know what I'm doing and have the experience and passion to back it up. Maybe I'm lucky, or maybe I don't think or act like the rest of the "real" college grads.

At some point you have to really be honest with yourself and with others about what it is you're looking for and are willing to work for in life. The rest will fall into place for you.
Since the emails were supposedly sent at the behest of a user, I don't think it counts as unsolicited email.
I don't keep hardware spares for my 300+ infrastructure as our hardware provider has 24 hour turnaround on warranty replacements.

As for re-purposing, I have tons of uses for older hardware to do background computation or other jobs. I suspect I can extend the lifetime to 5+ years on most of it, which is quite good in my opinion. You just need to design your system with modularity in mind, which you should be doing regardless of your hosting choices.
The first circle is SteamOS, the second will likely to be the Steambox: http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/

There's also a third circle there...
The graph titled "Best and Worst Median Starting Salaries
Ranked by College Major" is mislabelled.

Looking at the source material[1], the table it's based on is titled, "[TABLE] 12: TOP 10 MAJORS WITH THE HIGHEST MEDIAN EARNINGS" and is data on "Full-time, full-year workers with a terminal Bachelor’s."

So it's not about starting salaries at all.

[1]http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/whatsitwor...
How elderly people use the modern gadgets - video
Yep. I just checked my mail and saw the same thing. Though my oldest invitations seem to be from the user themselves. Seems they changed it in 2010 to @linkedin.com.
I use Ansible to manage my laptop: https://github.com/uggedal/playbooks/
> A movie where the FBI saves the country should received the same help as a movie where the FBI breaks it apart.

I disagree. That means that the FBI would have to help every filmmaker everywhere. Which is just another way of saying that the FBI should help no one, only with more rhetoric and weasel words.

I'm tired enough of living in a world where I have to keep telling sailors "this is why we can't have nice things". The solution to bad people doing bad things can't always be to hack the legs off of everyone at the kneecaps and put everyone in a "safe" wheelchair.

A better solution is that if you see a government agency misrepresenting themselves in media... point it out. Freedom of speech and freedom of press are there for a reason.
Last words transcripts from cockpit recordings
Payscale subtracts the median wage of a high school graduate...

This is a common mistake, and one which completely invalidates the process. The median high school graduate is someone who wasn't able to get into college, and many of the factors associated with that -- starting with low high school grades -- are also associated with lower earnings. You might as well say that purring results in pets gaining legs, because pets which purr have on average more legs than pets which don't purr.

To get any accurate measure of the value of going to college, you need to compare students who are similar in all ways except college attendance. Of course, this is a difficult thing to do, since it involves looking at high school grades, SAT scores, parental income, parental education, and gender at a minimum -- all of these factors are known to correlate with both individual educational achievement and individual earnings.
Hi anish_t,

About six months ago I tested Kinvey (a BaaS) for an application that makes heavy use of data. Basically you upload your data (say, from CSV) and then you access it via API calls.

It looks like you can download your data at any time, say if you need to switch providers. I don't have any experience of other providers, but with Kinvey it doesn't look like there is a risk of vendor lock-in. It's data on the wire via AJAX requests. If things turn to be expensive when you grow up, you move the data to your own backend.

That said, I must add that I never ended up using them. The reason - I just needed something with serious geospatial capabilities. I mean PostgreSQL + PostGIS kind of thing.

There is also the DIY route, which is not necessarily the best, since it will prolong the time until you release a MVP. But, if you have the manpower to work on it, maybe Drupal is a good alternative for you. It can be set up as a backend, it is secure, and it's free. I think you can even set it up as a SPARQL endpoint.

Good luck with your startup! I don't wish you to reach millions of users, but instead to make millions of dollars :)
I just turn all notifications off (as I do with all of my social networks) and use it to connect with past and present coworkers that are either uncomfortable or unwilling to connect on facebook.
no it is not and shouldn't. Selling ones last words is body-strapping and a violation of the persons civil liberties.
And the market isn't anywhere, it is a defined area with laws as fences and you don't live in wilderness but in society where we people decided that rules improve life.

Besides, this display of dead people similar to one in Palermo/Italy is macabre and mentally healthy people probably have emotions looking at dead people exhibitions, especially since one doesn't learn anything of it.

In contrast to http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/
Derek I've used your Debt Snowball app and it's been immensely helpful in getting my financial house in order. I've signed up for your newsletter and will be checking out the sample chapter of your book so you may help even more!
I think that is just Bay Area and/or tech bias. My own internship years ago started at $15 and quickly scaled up. I was going to community college at that time. *typoed
Honestly, I think that what Valve's going for here is they're trying to generate hype around a "new platform" that's actually an existing platform that's underutilized. Valve sees that there's a lot of what's effectively free RND work going into Linux as a platform for gaming, but that no one's taking advantage of that.

I think SteamOS is just going to be a highly tuned distro, since Valve really doesn't have the man power (or the internal motivation) to build an entirely new platform. However, they are trying to make it seem like a new and different platform so that the distributors and studios will take notice and say "Maybe we should develop for this." In doing so they'll be developing for Linux at large, they just might not know it.
I hope not. Going Ubuntu will mean (long term) Mir instead of Wayland, which will suck for other distributions and projects.
How to use rbenv to manage multiple versions of ruby
Jesus. I know that was the answer I expected, but it still amazes me.
Show HN: Rainbox - Instant Community
Wait, why should I delete mine too? Because their business model is, in the author's opinion, unsustainable? Because of the fact that the author gets spam from them (I have gmail filters set up such that I am not aware of any mail LinkedIn sends me)?

This smells like just another hipster anti-culture movement. "LinkedIn is popular, down with LinkedIn!"
They've been doing that since the dawn of the internship. Students are just starting to not accept that kind of crappy treatment
the 3rd circle will be HL3
I would think that the people at Valve would be able to find a solution if anyone could... or are you claiming that this is a hard nut to crack and SteamOS's streaming solution won't end up being that great for high-resolution TVs?
Will somebody please think of the children??
Why is the circle off to one side of the box. Maybe I'm reading too much into it... but perhaps it could be a game controller and not a set-top box?
The ability to shut off emails has been pretty easy, in my experience. Other than that, I find quite a bit of value from linkedin.
I think it has a nearly-full port of Win32, it's apparently not hard to disable the signing requirement and run cross-compiled Win32 ARM binaries and turn the Surface RT into a useful computer.

Not much commercial software but the regular open-source windows stack works.
This is today's front page story in the SF Examiner. More commentary here:

"As of earlier this year, evictions of all kinds across the city hit a 12-year high.

Last year, Randy Shaw of Beyond Chron pointed to a real estate outfit called Urban Green Investments who were targeting buildings in Chinatown, North Beach, and the Mission and forcing similar evictions."

http://sfist.com/2013/09/23/chinatown_is_the_next_frontier_f...

...and here:

"On April 15, the Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee again considers legislation to overturn San Francisco’s thirty year old condo conversion law. On April 8, 97 year old Mary Phillips became the latest victim of this proposal, receiving an Ellis Act eviction notice for her apartment at 55 Dolores where she has lived since 1976. The building is owned by Urban Green Investments, which has used evictions and tenant buyouts under pressure to vacate rental units and replace them with TIC’s (it is also harassing longtime tenants of a nearby building at 49-53 Guerrero). If Mayor Lee and the Supervisors needed further evidence before acting to deter tenant displacement for future condo conversions, the targeting of Mary Phillips is it."

http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Ellis_Eviction_Notice_Se...
50 years ago (well, 60-70), a computer was a person - it was a job description. In world war 2 and the decade after, there would be rooms full of young women (they were usually women, because men were off at war) with Marchant calculators computing artillery trajectories and breaking Nazi codes. The first computers were invented to automate this job description. They were not some big pie-in-the-sky research project, they were a very pragmatic (and clumsy) attempt to mechanize away a very labor-intensive process so those workers could be freed up to do other work.

Many of the more successful startups recently follow the same pattern: they work to eliminate one job description. Zillow = real estate agents, Square = cashiers, LendUp = bankers, Yelp = food critics, AirBnB = hoteliers. Heck, the initial apps that made the personal computer successful also had that pattern: Visicalc = accountants, Adobe = print shops. Jobs and Gates got rich because they controlled the infrastructure that these businesses built upon, but the folks who built those apps also got fairly rich as well. Heck, Bill Gates's first programming job was writing a payroll program, and his first business venture was software for traffic counters.
>> A quick scan of my Google account reveals that I have granted access to 49 different websites. AND I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT MOST OF THEM ARE, OR WHAT PERMISSIONS I GAVE THEM.

It really pays to observe what permissions are being asked for. When a flashlight app asks for your GPS, and network communication, you know something's amiss.
Investment banks pay alot for both CS and Math grads... A programmer will make a lot more at a Wall Street firm than at Google or Facebook...
PhotoHunt: End-to-end Google+ Platform sample application
Minecraft - Zombie Apocalypse :D