skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ZenPayroll is hiring software engineers to help make payroll delightful
+ We're building the future of payroll. If you love solving foundational problems that affect millions of people, we'd love to talk with you. You’ll be an early member of the team with significant responsibility and equity stake.

+ Payroll is complex and there are tough engineering challenges to be tackled. We move tens of millions of dollars every month. Payroll is business critical and must always be correct. Business owners and their employees depend on us to receive their pay. We strive for 100% test coverage, and every commit is code reviewed by another developer on the team. We all hold each other to rigorous standards and we’ve all become better developers because of it. Read about our engineering culture at:http://engineering.zenpayroll.com/

+ Our founders are second time entrepreneurs from Stanford who have had two prior exits. We’re in this for the long haul and are committed to building ZenPayroll into a truly significant company that we’re proud of.

THINGS WE’RE LOOKING FOR:

+ Experience with Rails | Backbone.js | CoffeeScript | MySQL is a plus but not a pre-requisite.

+ Interest in using a test driven and code review development process.

+ Interest in building user-facing features and core-backend functionality, as well as being an active part of the design process.

+ Desire to understand the customer perspective. All members of our team are builders and it's important everyone understands the pain point we're solving.

PERKS:

+ You'll be a core member of our team as we grow the company. As a result, you'll receive a competitive salary + significant equity stake.

+ Housing stipend if you live near the office, delicious and healthy food and snacks, company retreats, gym/sports club stipend, dream work set-up, and more -- including copious espressos brewed by one of our co-founders. People are the foundation of our company and we make sure they know they're valued. Full list of perks at www.zenpayroll.com/careers

Above all, we're looking for individuals who are yearning to do the best work of their lives. You'll be amply rewarded for the work you do.

To apply, send a note to jobs [at] zenpayroll [dot] com and include your LinkedIn, GitHub, and/or any project pages.

We’re located in SoMa, San Francisco, CA and you must be local or willing to relocate (we'll cover the cost).
Owner of a small publishing company here. We publish "how to" guides under the "In 30 Minutes" brand (Dropbox In 30 Minutes, LinkedIn In 30 Minutes, etc.) (1) but my company has also published two fiction titles.

You asked about selling books outside of the software realm. The In 30 Minutes guides are aimed at mainstream users, and I found through some early pricing experiments that attempting to charge more than $10 for these types of ebooks is very difficult. I have also found through more recent experiments that pricing ebook versions less than $5 leads to an immediate and sustained rise in sales.

I sell ebooks through Amazon, iTunes, and B&N as well as PDF versions on Gumroad. I have also made mobi/epub versions available on Gumroad, but very few people buy them -- Amazon, Apple and Android tablet manufacturers do not make it easy to transfer these types of files to their devices, which is a roadblock to most people in my target audience.

In my limited experience promoting fiction, factors such as categorization, whether or not the book is in a series, and the number of reviews on Amazon or Goodreads influence awareness and purchasing decisions. Because there is so much competition in the fiction realm, and most new titles by relatively unknown authors are priced at $4 or less, I think the reaction to an expensive fiction ebook by another unknown author would be negative.

For anyone who is interested in self-publishing, I wrote another HN post last year that a lot of people found useful. It includes tips on how to get started using a lean approach to writing, production, and marketing (2). Good luck!

1. http://in30minutes.com

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6052075
Nintendo makes money on games that people want to play. To suggest anything else is nonsense, or at least overcomplicating the situation. Innovation can help with that, but isn't guaranteed to. Consider that some of the best-selling games on the Wii and DS were the New Super Mario Bros. games -- these were games that were so popular they moved hardware, and yet their core genres and mechanics are identical to the Mario games of the NES and SNES era. In fact, it could be argued that their success was exactly because they stuck so closely to that old formula -- other Mario games, such as the 3D platformers, don't sell nearly as well.

Innovation is good when it supports the goal of creating games people want to play. Wii Sports, for example, could not be done without the Wii Remote. That was a good innovation that served both to lower the barrier of entry to games and to allow for new modes of play that people found fun. But things like the 3D of the 3DS, which Nintendo is now wisely backing away from, or the tablet on the Wii U, which substantially increased its price tag, don't provide those same benefits. And hardware innovation alone doesn't cut it -- it needs games like Wii Sports to support it.

And I think that for a company like Nintendo, third-party support is heavily overrated. The best way to get third-party support is to sell enough consoles that they can no longer ignore you, and the only way to do that is strong first-party games.
Coinbase and Overstock.com Announce Largest Bitcoin Merchant Integration To Date
We did consider SignalR with the Service Bus backplane (we run on Azure). We also considered node.js with Socket.IO/Redis, Firebase, and a number of other realtime systems. But when we looked into it we realized we would be duplicating a lot of code on the realtime side that was already there on the RESTful API side. With this approach we're able to do realtime with minimal modifications to our server and client side implementations that deal with our simple use case of keeping a resource up to date. Because we use AngularJS, simply updating the resource on the client side re-binds everything.
This is great, thanks!
I unminified it first to look at the code, but it looks like its not doing anything nasty.
> I don't know if I can accept the prognostication of someone who thinks that in 2003 "any self-respecting developer was carrying a MacBook, preferably the one the size of a small aircraft carrier"

I know I can't, simply because the Macbook did not exist in 2003. The Macbook was only introduced in 2006. In 2003, it was called iBook.

And, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't remember "developers" being the lion share of those buying iBooks back in 2003-05.
> In what freezing fucking hell is a dual-core, 1 GHz computer with gigabytes of RAM and tens of gigabytes of storage and 3D acceleration that can fit in my pocket memory-starved and CPU-starved?

In the same weird world that an old NeXT Cube is easier to write applications for and has more responsive apps than the modern web client HTML5 apps.
I agree. I have never paid for ebooks before I came across Leanpub. If my game/book was being copied without me being paid for it, I'll be happy that people like it so much. It only means that more folks will see it and at it will pay off in better sales eventually.

I'm not inclined to dig it out right now, but if it interests you, do check out what Neil Gaiman said about his books being copied in a similar manner.
The Collaborative Tale Behind the World’s First Mass Produced Electric Guitar
Living in the future
Certainly agree for a panel of experts. Thinking about day-to-day use for the masses (which I don't know if they are targeting or not), Watson would certainly outperform most of the doctors I've been examined by in the last few years (and I'd trust it more than the doctors).
Nokia brings folders to Windows Phone with its Lumia Black rollout
I'd like to see that happen if only to push Google to open a Google Now API. To me this sounds like Wolfram Alpha for business more than Siri or Google Now though.
OK. The team thing is fair. I was attempting to contrast the sort of content I usually see here with 4Chan-type content (and I don't really care if that is insulting, if it is true), but you're right. I would downvote the post if I was able to. Alas, I suppose I'll ignore it.
How are you guys going to get Cryptocat on the iPhone app store? Apple rejects GPL-licensed apps.
If your argument is "byte size", images matter. There's no getting away from that.

This Marco Polo, Columbus-esc view of "rediscovering the basics" is on ego, not efficiency. You're not discovering new territory by rebuilding the wheel, passing it off as "efficiency".

Bandwidth costs would be the only point I could possibly side with - but as mentioned, you add a JPG or any resource for that matter, and the benefits are gone.

If you are going to go about the busy work of rebuilding the wheel, ask yourself, is there a single user's life you are improving? If you have sacrificed the user experience at all - to save 10kb - then you've disserviced them, while patting yourself on the back needlessly. 10k barely changed my experience on a 14.4-33.6kb modem, so I am unsure of how to make the argument today.
Would love to see Facebook release this, rather than just talk about it!
How the NSA makes the nation insecure
No, this is plain ol' institutionalized racism.
Yeah, but if you have a test suite you add Python 3 and silence the existing failures. Now you can (at least partially) avoid writing new code that wouldn't work on 3, as well as gain the option of refactoring things to resolve compatibility - with lots of freedom to decide how much effort to spend on that if any.

It'd no longer be a huge risky project where you have to cut the QA team over to Python 3, then spend a bunch of QA's time putting the new code through the ropes with no end in site while explaining to management that this is all providing zero new functionality.
TBH, this kind of technology was what I was hoping Photosynth was going to turn into.
IBM Struggles to Turn Watson Computer Into Big Business
My Favorite New Feature in SQL Server 2014
That's alright most non-poc people, even those that try not to be, are racist because society pushes you towards it constantly. Instead I'll point you here:

http://racismschool.tumblr.com/

If you need any help, feel free to message me personally via the email in my profile.
I would guess that the Lisp version was more descriptive (it had more program lines) and needed thus much less documentation than the Haskell version.
Nice work! This will be a nice addition to my compiler design documentation.

Many thanks for the effort.
What a missed opportunity reddit was. If it hadn't turned into a meme/image site it could have been much more interesting. I had an ongoing pattern of unsubscribing from the different sections one by one as I get tired of memes, images, and general low-content posting. Until there was really nothing left.
I interviewed recently and yes you would most likely have to relocate to Seattle or Virginia. I think I did fairly well on the interview but didn't get the job.

I think I might have been too high priced like you. One of Amazon's principals is "being frugal" so I'm guessing they found someone cheaper because I was looking for around the same salary.

Also being "fullstack" is not necessarily something they want. What I've seen with larger companies like Amazon, is that there is often no position for fullstack developers. Most developers end up focusing on some part of the stack.

I'm a fullstack developer too, so while that is a great trait, I don't think it necessarily helps with Amazon developer positions. Although you do have a leg up because you have Java experience. Amazon uses a lot Java from what I could gather from the interview.
> - Cheaper insurance? I don't really believe this, but it could happen, as there would be a lot less accidents.

I haven't run the numbers myself, but it'd be worth checking to see what insurance numbers look like for private yachts or horses.
France : censorship is back
I actually like DSLs, but I think the right level of abstraction to develop them is by exposing the tokenizer, parser, AST, typesystem, semantic analyzer, and execution engine of the language as libraries in the language itself. Things like 'ast' and 'parser' in Python, package 'go' in Go, Clang for C++, etc. I've tried to fill this gap for HTML5 with Gumbo - it was initially designed to support a semantically-aware templating language in Google.

The reason I think DSLs are good but macros are bad is because DSLs make you think long and hard about the costs of implementing a new language. You have to pay for it up-front by writing a compiler and hooking it into your build system, even if you have help from the host language's libraries, and then you'll end up with something that's clearly a separate language and must be documented and learned separately. That cost makes it clear that creating a DSL is not something to do lightly, and you need a problem domain where there really are much higher-level abstractions that can't be captured by an existing programming language.

The problem with macros is that you can create a new language construct with a half dozen or so lines of code, use it in a few hundred places in the codebase, and now your maintainers have a few hundred problems.
Nokia brings folders and other features to Windows Phone
can wolfram write anything that doesn't compliment wolfram?
Since the Lisp developers were using 'Relational Lisp', I would guess that there were quite capable. Relational Lisp is another step up from a typical Lisp.
You are wrong, I totally trust the government, I'm one of the few that still trust the NSA (and I'm not even a US citizen).

It's not a question of trust, it's a question of choice. With a simple and universal way to transfer money, we no longer have to care about the currency we use, if we can easily do an international transfer with our bank, if our Paypal account is still fine, etc...

The only politic is how governments will be able to tax Bitcoin transaction and I believe it's a big issue but I believe we will be able to fix that when it will become a problem.

I don't really understands what's wrong with:
"It's like saying, I don't want to put people in charge because I don't trust them, and I don't want even to talk to others in order to resolve disagreement; instead, I choose to take all decision-making agency out the hands of humans and place it in the hands of an algorithm that can provably never be swayed, because that is the only thing I can trust."
[They] sought assurance from the regulators that they would not be held liable if they bought these two firms... Then the regulators fucked them anyway.

Not doubting you, but can you provide more substantiation / detail on that assertion, please? What kind of assurances were given, and when? And more to the point: were they contractual assurances, or were they not? I highly doubt that JPM went into the deal blind, and even more so, that they would have taken on any significant risk of open-ended liabilities on the basis of a handshake.

And they certainly didn't go into the deal as a "favor" to anyone -- they did it to save their tender, pink skins, knowing full well what the future liabilities would likely be.
DMCA only applies for third party content.
VICE VERSA - diagonal UI optimized for single hand UX
Have you looked into accepting Server Sent Events instead of long polling?
Wouldn't combining the two tactics be the actually responsible thing to do? Inform the operators anonymously, and tell them that in four weeks a copy of this e-mail will be publicized.
Is there a possibility that any of the people that observed you doing this told you about it at a later time?
> Phones are also fine as long as you use them for what they are meant to be used: initiating phone calls.

I don't know that is the case... Between the crappy bluetooth voice commands in my car, and having to unlock and click through 3+ items to get to a dialpad, I don't think "smart phones" make very smart phones...
Aw -- you're just being silly when you say that.

You know perfectly well that when companies make acquisitions, that they assume both the liabilities along with all the other assets they're acquiring.
I hope that you realize that when you've divided your listeners to Product and Cart objects, you've created a "lightweight" Model representation. Next thing you probably need is to fetch those Products and Carts from the server, and you add fetch()-function to them. Soon you'll realize that you've rewritten for example Backbone's Model class. With the exception that your solution has probably more bugs.
> It's simply what happens when you are a COOL AND TOUGH GUY and don't shave.

FTFY
Looking at the Ebay page, it says "may not ship to the UK", and that the product only ships to the US. Is that intentional? It seemed from the description that there was no restriction on who/where you sold it to?

This idea is brilliant though. I hope you find a great new home for the technology with a company who use it well.
But does Google know which ones have restraining orders against you?

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7029596
Show HN: Game based on algorithmic music to test identifying music features
Near Death Like Experience In The God Realm
Just like many who have had breathtaking experiences of heaven I had near death like experiences of different levels of heaven with out the drama of trauma. With discipline you can learn how too.
I assumed that "it" refers to the Transportation Department.
How to Become a Better Conversion Copywriter in 2014 – Tips From the Trenches
I’ve spent the last five years in the trenches writing, testing and optimizing copy for a multitude of clients in a wide variety of industries.

In this article I’ll give you what I consider to be the most effective and actionable tips for writing copy that has real impact on conversions.

If you want to become a better conversion copywriter in 2014 this one is for you!
I did a compiler for a subset of the C programming language (int & bool types, arrays, functions, loops, ...) for my post-graduate compiler course last year :

https://github.com/RaphaelJ/Cours-passerelle/blob/master/Com...
(comments are in French)

It was amazing : the full compiler was around 650 lines of code while only using Parsec as a third party library and was able to compile correctly at the first successful compilation. Compiling to LLVM (as text, I didn't used any library for code generation) using monads and Text-Lazy was also pretty pleasant.

My only deception was to be unable to use GADTs : these are awesome but so hard to use with a parser.
Maybe https://flippa.com/ is better for this?
Former Darpa director Wants You to Swallow ID Microchips
". I'm not sure it ever makes sense to do comparative benchmarking, since you can't test on arbitrarily large inputs (which is what's important when looking at algorithm complexity)"

Of course it does, if you actually want the algorithm to be used in the real world.
Well, you're not a woman who has to put up with cat-calling and name-calling on the street so I wouldn't expect you to see it as disrespectful. Mr. McClure didn't see it as disrespectful at first either until a number of his followers helped him understand why it would be.

This article left out a bunch of the discussion he had with people who called him out on his choice of words, it's worth reading.
Symlinks saved my .bash_profile and .vimrc
I once met someone who could correctly identify the Linux distributions preferred by a friend and myself based solely on our facial hair.
Auto-generating a Go API client for Heroku
Here is an idea for getting useful responses back - give the candidate enough info to evaluate whether they are interested. This means info on the company, detailed description of the role, ballpark on the comp. You are even more likely to get a response if your email suggests you went as far as googling the candidate.

I truly don't understand why recruiters think "unspecified opportunity at top startup in technology industry, send me your resume since I'm too lazy to google it, I want a phone conversation" is actually useful.
The straightforward design makes it fast to go from zero to having a working proficiency. But I'm not sure about "highly proficient": even experienced Pythoners get tripped up by things such as mutable function arguments, and it's often not clear why some simple-looking code is running slowly, and how to speed it up.
It sounds like nobody even tried to use your updated tool. How would they know if it was awful?
Author here, thanks for the feedback!

I wasn't aware of Firepad, but it (and some of the derivative projects) look like they are more in the category of "Web code editor" than "Web IDE". That said, I did mention Nitrous.io, Koding, and ShiftEdit, which all use Firepad.
Show HN: I'm building one html5 game per week, here is game #3
What does this have to do with Scientific Computing? I don't think there is anyone would say that in the realm of Scientific Computing there is a problem with slow in python.
So... opt-in?
Did you read the article I linked? The reason Nintendo makes their money from genre innovation, is that Microsoft and Sony have the resources to invest to make money from polished "genre king" titles--and so Nintendo, necessarily, must take the segment of the market they ignore. They do this by figuring out ways to make games cheaply that nevertheless have the potential for a strong reaction from the market--and this basically necessitates genre innovation. (Or remakes/ports, which Nintendo is also quite familiar with.)
I'm doing a non-profit shirt for my open source library
First Docker Meetup in India  Shippable in Bangalore
I've written about this before, but my experience as a programmer attached to researchers at a university has a lot of this sort of thing. At first I was intimidated being the "dumb guy" in a room of "smart folks". But I've come to realize there is a huge benefit to this role. I get to ask the questions like "I'm not following how X->Y->Z works, explain?". Since everyone else is making assumptions or following the intuition leaps from lots of Ph.D. work - and I don't have that - I frequently find bad assumptions just by trying to follow what people are saying. Similarly, I get to point out where too much yak shaving is going on, by saying "look we don't have to worry about that, I'm just going to use $existing_tool that already does it for us".

But the best part of working in an environment where I'm regularly over my head is that in ignorance I'm free (and safe) to say "hey from down here this looks a lot like this other problem in a different space, can we adapt that solution?" Whether or not it's doable, it helps because I either learn something or directly shape the what the "smart folks" are doing.

I also find that working at a level that's over my head for the last few years has made me fearless. At the startup I'm associated with, when one of the other programmers says "we don't know how to do that!" I can say "So I haven't known what I'm doing for years, doesn't mean we can't go ahead and just do it and fix it later". And we fix a lot, but with a solid straw-man it's much easier because we can say "this is the actual problem".

I think it's not just knowing your data - it's also learning to be comfortable in your own ignorance (not embracing it, just accepting it as a "for now" situation) and OK with uncertainty.
Probably a better article (on a related issue) is:

'Uber driver accused of assault passed "zero-tolerance" background check despite criminal history'

http://pando.com/2014/01/06/exclusive-uber-driver-accused-of...

There, the issue of liability seems much less clear-cut
> Consider if we cut down all trees within a dozen or so meters of roads, and installed guardrails everywhere.

You realize that we did that and it resulted in more deaths, right?