skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is meaningless and misses a golden opportunity to compare and contrast the two platforms. Instead it just throws out a bunch of gibberish numbers and compares apples to oranges, states that it's comparing apples to oranges, then continues on with the comparison.

Most "internet" businesses fail. Most restaurants fail. That doesn't mean anyone who starts a pizza place is in a rush for fool's gold.

The problem is that most people do things half-assed and cluelessly. Even most entrepreneurs. It's simply meaningless to count everyone who worked full time on a Facebook app as an attempt at anything.
Anyone find any holes in the data or methodology?
How to Turn Complaints into Loyal Customers
Studies have shown customer's whose complaints are handled well are more likely to be more loyal than any other customers. Learn how to turn complaints into loyal customers here.
Tabbed browsing.

Fast page rendering

Customisable search

Button to toggle images

Password manager

Mouse gestures

Easy per-site config for cookies etc

-Yes I know FF has these now or has plugins for them. But Opera had them first.
In my experience, it's because the YUI framework is 30Mb with docs, 10Mb without. If I need 10Mb of support tools to make my app do cool stuff, I feel like I'm leaning too much on the framework, and too little on my own capabilities.
Record strategic informations about debt consolidation
I actually rely on the "jump" of the cursor to tell me where new-lines are, and that's important. (Consider something like a Python program, where the real line-ending will terminate a statement, and the next line's indentation is significant.)

If navigation behavior is to change, there must still be some way for the editor to show the wrapping points. One option is Unicode, which is now fairly well supported by editors and terminals; for instance, special symbols like "¬" could be used to show wrapping points.
I would be careful with your questions. There's a lot of bias that you can create without being aware of it.

I once had an interviewer ask me for the five rules of database normalization. Beat the heck out of me at the time -- I was just drawing a blank. I could do the work all day long, but I couldn't remember the stupid names he was looking for.

Similarly, I had a guy ask me to name the seven categories of this course he was interested in that I had taught years ago. Same deal -- just couldn't recall it, although I was very familiar with the material and had no problem teaching it.

The problem with memory questions is that they bias against people who don't currently have the answer in working memory. Simply because somebody has done something recently is no indicator of performance. The best interviews warm up on general questions about the material before diving deep. That gives a candidate time to "change gears"

I also very interested in "why" questions over "how" questions. Classrooms and cram-lessons are really good at "how" questions -- it takes some degree of actual work to understand the "whys" of something.

I've interviewed a lot of developers over the years. 99% of them really aren't anywhere near as good as they think they are. That's sad, but it's also an opportunity for developers who care about their work to get ahead. It doesn't take much ongoing effort to be truly outstanding.
Yes amazing! Why on earth can't we do that level of graphics on the desktop web yet.... Its crazy.
Under pressure and "in a strange environment" are two different things. You could put interview candidates in SCUBA gear and take them down 5 fathoms to see how they'd do under pressure, but that's also completely unrelated to predicting their actual job performance.

We don't ask trivia questions (what's the order of arguments to fputs, list all the overloads of foo in class bar) because knowing that (or anything else that's a 5 second lookup or context-sensitive help away) doesn't predict how someone will actually perform on the job.

Can any of us code as effectively on a whiteboard as we could in our favorite editor? I'd expect not, and if you were equally able on a whiteboard as in an editor, I'd wager that it's because you're not particularly good at either.
Is this what passes for "good news" these days?

Job losses continue although at a declining rate. The change is from 9.4% to 9.5%, hardly significant - see the following article which says as much:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2009/08/why_did_...

This guy also thinks it isn't even good news yet:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/jobs-paradox/
Riak: A decentralized key-value store
MacGyvered Key/Value in Symfony/Propel
> Unless you're saying "I drew some lines on this piece of paper that represent the strings on the violin; I want you to play the piece of paper like you would the instrument."

Yes, that's it.

> In which case it's a worthless interview.

I'd say the same applies to whiteboards. I have never sketched out code on a whiteboard except in an interview. Of course you can do so and become accustomed to it, just like you can finger a paper violin or piano.
Politicians, lawyers, and regulators impeding entrepreneurs and investors in the name of protecting against non-existent systematic risks to our economy.

This type of regulation originated many years ago with the broad idea that unsophisticated persons (the "little guy") needed various forms of disclosure to enable them to make informed decisions about their investments. How that rationale can even begin to apply to VCs and their LPs (who are typically large institutional investors) is an absurdity only Washington could possibly begin to fathom.

The article nails it when viewing this development as a further extension of Sarbanes-Oxley and other recent regulatory changes: much more of this and it will be time to put the IPO on the endangered species list.

This will definitely hurt startups in the long run.
+1 thesixtyone. The idea of giving users quests to reward them for exploring a site/app more is inspiring.
Tarsnap is unique among the startups that get play here in getting me to open my wallet to the tune of more than the price of a T-shirt.
> BTW, I program in both C# and Java all the time.

So do I, so you can drop the holier than thou attitude. In case you didn't know, refactoring plugins for VS do exist, and I use them. But you're just comparing one aspect of the IDE. I use VS Team Suite, so I have built-in Unit Testing, collaboration, modelling (data and code), and multi-language projects in one solution (ie. I can write a COM object in C++ and a C# client in the same solution).

IMO, considering your objection, you are the one who hasn't done serious development in any language. (See? It's easy to drop pointless statements like that)
> This reduces the risk for the employer while also giving the employee a chance to examine the company and be paid if the work is satisfactory.

How about a one week stipend. You're view point is too company-centric, I MUCH prefer to work for people-centered companies. Either way you need something a little more symmetric if you don't want to become standard laughing stock among developers. (Or maybe you and your-co are so badass you can't do wrong and developers intrinsically trust you so it doesn't matter.)
Thanks for the info. Why is machining stronger than casting? it seems to me that to make a billet you'd need to cast that first...

As a related question: Is one method more energy efficient than the other?
These days vim and emacs are mainly used for programming, if I'm not mistaken. As a programmer, I need to have complete control and understanding of how my code is stored internally, so it wouldn't make sense to make this the default behavior, especially if it does exist as another option.
Why is your brain wrinkled?
Maybe, but only if I could filter out content by source domain (ahem techcrunch).
Repeat after me: I WILL NOT ABUSE MY CUSTOMERS, EVEN IF THEY DO SOMETHING STUPID.

You'd think some of these companies are paying you, instead of the other way around.
Wow. I always knew Dvorak was insane but this is insane++. I don't even know what he is talking about:

1) Is he talking about the upgrade path from XP to Windows 7?

2) Does he know that there is an upgrade path from Vista to Windows 7?

3) Does he know that all three versions use the registry so it clearly has no impact on upgrade paths?

4) Is he advocating that microsoft make smaller changes in order to provide an upgrade path to older versions or is he advocating they make bigger, breaking changes like getting rid of the registry?

5) Is somebody checking his pill box to see if he took his medicine? Because I am sincerely worried for his health.
How could we, since the article doesn't provide any meaningful information about either?

Of course, one can point out that they aren't doing randomized trials, but that seems a touch unreasonable to demand.
They have another model coming out 2 or 3 years after the sedan. That will be in the 30k range. If I recall correctly, Musk once said as a rule of thumb once you raise your production by 10 fold then you can halve the cost of your item.
"PG, RTM, and TLB would probably fail your test -- they don't use SQL, they use flat files."

Well, then they likely wouldn't be a good fit for the position the OP is hiring for, since it requires using SQL, not flat files.
On a trip to Thailand in 2003 with friends, in Bangkok, my baggage was lost but after 4 hours or so, it turned up and I went to collect it.
But the institutions that invest in them do.
No, that sounds about right. 70% of the people you interview will not be able to code their way out of a sack. It actually sounds like he must have done some form of initial screen just to get the success rate up to 30%.
Set aside the whether or not you get paid for the week's trial period for a minute.

How the hell does someone with a job arrange to take a week off to do this trial period for another company? Maybe it works for entry-level or the unemployed, but I don't think you'll find a lot of good senior developers who would be able to make this arrangement work. I've taken jobs entirely based on their interview process. "If I made it through that, and everyone else I'll be working with also did, I'm pumped to work with these people!" Same benefit would apply to the week long trial, but making it work logistically is difficult.
Chatterous. I have it hooked up to my IM, and I use it for group chat all the time.
The title of this submission is grossly inaccurate---the study in question shows nothing of the kind.

This is a textbook example of the media (and the submitter) jumping on correlation and confusing it with causation. Women represent a tiny minority of board members overall, and it's reasonable to assume that the old boys' network would be strongest among the wealthiest and most powerful boards. This demonstrates nothing but that the glass ceiling cracks on the lowest levels first.
Dean Kamen: Healthcare Debate "Backward Looking"
Amazing!! I love python and i love this :)

site looks down though..
Don't Send VCs Painfully Long Emails
Tarsnap! Solo Founder, great product, great payment terms. What's not to like?
Awesome, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.
Billmonk, for splitting restaurant bills with friends.
I think it would be wrong to say that Yahoo has always been a search company. It's also a mistake to say they've never competed and tried to build their own search product. But they really never have been a "search company" in the way that Google is.

They are probably the number two internet property in terms of page views. If google has 70% of the search market and Yahoo has less than 20%, Yahoo couldn't possibly be competitive in terms of page views if they really were primarily in the search business.
If you vote yes, you vote for not not returning?
Or is it yes to not returning?

Negative polls suck.

I say we should have bases on the moon the same as we have bases on antarctica.
Fee wouldn't be for the content, but for the participation.
SendGrid: Hosted Email service for password reminders, welcome messages, etc
This just sounds like PR to me.

If the production costs (labor, parts etc) happened over a lengthy period and then they recognized profit for 109 shipped cars in July... of course they have a profitable month in July. I'd want to examine the end to end costs of the cars.

Also there fixed costs and I really doubt they have even come close to covering the fixed costs associated with automobile production.

I'm really glad they are profitable for July, it means they might be only a few years away from mass producing these babies.
Yes, Firefox memory usage grows without limit over time; but to be fair, so does Opera's. Opera's growth is just less. (These comments tempered with "YMMV".)
The article itself contradicts that explanation: "women were more effective at tasks such as executive supervision and monitoring", "Female directors also had a better record of attending board meetings", "Our research shows that women directors are doing their jobs very well".

In fact, they also say that female directors were a benefit to "poorly-managed" companies. So, one thing you might claim is that this fits in with the general theory that the performance of men has a higher standard deviation than the performance of women.
“Our research shows that women directors are doing their jobs very well. But a tough board, with more monitoring, may not always be a good thing.”

Hm. Let's think about this. Perhaps if AIG had more women on the board, they would have been more closely "monitoring" all the exposure the company had in its insurance of mortgage-backed securities. So maybe AIG would not have made so much money in that line of business prior to the collapse of those assets, but perhaps they also would not have needed a huge government bail-out either. Just speculating here...

The study claims that women on boards tend to monitor more closely and perhaps that's because they are more risk-averse. I can't see that as always being a bad thing. Could be taken too far, but surely it's been lacking in recent times.
Oh. MS's SharePoint premier support is definitely staffed with contractors; the two times I called, I talked to non-employees. I wouldn't draw any conclusions about the development staff from that though.
Here is another explanation: Underperforming companies are more desperate and so choose candidates with good track records even if they are not male. Males who can have the pick of the crop are more likely to work for successful companies. So the causation could go the other way: female directors are more likely to be chosen by underperforming companies than overperforming ones.
There's been a few threads about sending Outbound email- I always bookmark them because it's a particular pain point for us. Sending out Thousands of daily messages without ending up on SPAM lists or having ISP problems can be difficult.

There are a couple of other solutions people have suggested, but SendGrid looks easy to script, and the pricing is much lower than what I've seen in the past.

I don't know if the quality is any good, but they seem a decent contender.
I can't wait for Silicon Valley to be the next Detroit! Hmmm on second thought... ;)

Tesla, not government bailouts, represents the future of America's auto industry. In the computer industry we can observe relatively short regenerative cycles whereby companies are founded, grow, and then slowly die off as the reins are passed to the next company. I think this is very healthy for the industry. It assures that we can adapt and use new methods that make more sense given changes in technology and society.

I realize that the barrier of entry into the automotive industry is much higher than the computer industry, but I still can't help thinking that the same players have existed in automotive for so long that it's just become stagnant. They're all bogged down in bureaucracy and committed to modes of operation that just don't make sense any more. The industry is in need of some healthy churn.

It looks like Tesla might succeed at contributing to this renaissance. I hope others are courageous enough to follow suit.
Misleading title. I assumed this article was about if Seattle or the Bay was better.

Please make it more clear, since this is a great article that everyone should read.
Something doesn't add up.

109 roadsters at $109,000 = $11,881,000. So car sales, which are Tesla's main business, only account for a little over half of their reported $20 mil revenue. Something else contributed about $8 million dollars, and I suspect was either partially or wholly responsible for them being profitable.

With the relatively small Tesla brand I doubt it's merchandising or licensing (where companies like Ferrari or Porsche can pull in big bucks). My guess is that it may be either realizing future income (Roadster & S model deposits) or a income from the 10% stake Daimler acquired in mid May.

I really hope that Tesla succeeds, my biggest concern is whether they'll be able to successfully scale into the mass market and remain profitable while doing so.
Painful and true. When we started up we thought we were going to sell some fantastic developer tools . . . then realized that there was no money in that. Then we developed a niche product that actually pays the bills.

If money is coming in at the end of the month you're on the right track, if not then you won't be around for long.
Also, they're partnering with Daimler to produce electric Smart cars (in limited quantity, admittedly).
The question is, "How do we determine if the candidate's definition of work matches the employer's definition of work?"

Well, the candidate would be giving away a week of his time, which can be a bit problematic. How would you arrange this if the candiate was already employed?

He'd take a week of unpaid vacation from his current workplace, and give it away on a chance he might want to switch jobs and be accepted? Besides, 1/4 of your monthly salary is definitely a noticeable loss.

What if this was a common practise? "Oh well, this didn't work out. I'll take another week of unpaid vacation to try out for that other company then"..

A lot of people think of work as "sitting in a cube."

Working for some place means exchanging your time for money. Whether that time is spent coding with a burning passion, moving a company in a desired direction, or looking at lolcats is another matter.
> then I don't think that you actually have a working knowledge of SQL in any sense.

Of course I have working knowledge of SQL, that's how I used MySQL back when we had to write things by hand. I just don't have a working knowledge of JOINs. I could look up the syntax if I needed to use it. [Looks it up] Looks easy enough.

There are numerous SQL commands most users of SQL would probably need to look up.

Arbitrarily deciding that having not-used X means you don't have a working knowledge is a fallacy. Someone else could arbitrarily decide the litmus test is stored procedures. MySQL didn't have those, so instead of using them we had to code at the application layer, and just happened to use application logic in places of JOINs as well.

I don't even remember if MySQL had joins, or non-buggy joins, a dozen years ago. Other people would say, "it doesn't have transactions, so it's not a real database", et cetera, et cetera. You work around limitations and get used to doing things a certain way.
BIG-IP v10 Live Install
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-0804-netflix...

Sounds like a factory to me. You guys who vote me down are just so very delusional about the information economy's greatness. LOL.
It is because they're forced to wear pants.

edit: It is because they're forced to wear pants by a chauvinistic structure.
Random idea: what if the money went to help fund an open source project of some description?

Would that sway some of the no votes into yes?
MongoDB seems to be heading that way, slowly but surely.
It's already pretty bad -- one firm I talked to was planning an IPO last October, which they pulled after the markets sank. Prior to pulling, they had to spend $2.5mm preparing for the IPO in legal and regulatory fees (not including bank's underwriting fees).

Think about what that means: for a firm worth $100mm, they would have to spend 2.5% of their net worth just paying lawyers and accountants to comply with regulations. Never mind the ongoing costs of SOX implementation after the IPO.
I highly doubt that their math was that simple. The article even mentions that the revenues reflect GAAP accounting standards. Also, 109 * $109k != $20m, so obviously their revenue numbers for July are not directly based on how many roadsters were actually shipped during that month.

The article is quoting two separate stats about Tesla's July:
1) They were profitable
2) They shipped 109 roadsters

The first is not directly and solely due to the second.
big fan of thesixtyone - has one of the best streaming music players on the web...quality product.

Plus, huge kudos to them for not relying on RIAA as is true with most other online music services.
How did they mess up? I'm considering them.
Perhaps better "executive supervision and monitoring" is not desirable.
Yet while those traits often helped badly governed companies, the Ferreira and Adams study suggests that increased monitoring can have a negative effect on well-governed businesses.

That seems to be the key sentence. Although I am not certain, it seems likely that it is board interference with already effective management, not the presence of woman, that forms the causal link here.
"I used MySQL for years, long ago, and never wrote a join."

Wow.

Note to self: start asking candidates to write SQL in interviews.

It had just never occurred to me that people who spend their entire lives talking to databases wouldn't know how to talk to them directly.

And really, you can get pretty much any piece of information out of a database using just four keywords. It's the least memorization of any language in history. SELECT, FROM, WHERE, and for extra credit, LIKE. That's it. That'll get you any non-aggregate dataset you could want, joined or otherwise.

Learn IN and GROUP BY and you've got everything else you'll ever need for reporting. It's just the simplest language ever.
If musk can do with his cars what he did with spacex he will be able to produce items for his vehicles himself and overcome the fixed cost dilemma. I recall him making some of the parts for his vehicles in the spacex plant. Most of (90 some percent) of his rockets are made in house, which is why he can undercut orbital, lockheed, and the russians by a factor of 3. Last I heard theyare building a tesla manufacturing plant in san jose. Let's wish them luck.
Agreed. I don't respect a company that won't give a person two weeks to get the feet wet... i.e. set up dev station, learn the network topology, and bone up on the development stack.

By not letting someone acclimate to your tech environment, your potentially shoving them off on the wrong foot (not to mention stressing them the fuck out,,,which WILL kill their productivity). A mistake that could cost you months of 50% productivity because you didn't (as a company) empower your developers to do their best work.

When I see managers pulling some "whip them harder" management styles, I can't help but be left with the want to remind them about the french revolution. Pointy-haired bosses will soon figure these things when "their" work force becomes a bit too empowered.
Man I remember back when Yahoo Search was powered by Google.
They missed our favorite: the ORM in the Kohana framework.
For a given month, they probably recognize a portion of the value of cars shipped. So, in July they probably recognized less than $11,881,000 for those particular 109 roadsters.

However, they also recognize a portion of cars sold in July, deposits taken during the month, and probably a portion of the price of cars ordered in previous months that will be shipped in future months, but were built during July.

The amount of revenue recognized for a month is never as simple as (cars_shipped * car_price).