skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article does not support this claim. My reading is that GOOG's HR department kept/keeps the salary curve artificially flat (over-rewarding low performers) to manage pay within a narrow band and thereby prevent having to negotiate with top performers.
Shadow of Mordor Accused of Using Assassin's Creed II Code
^ This here is the best advice for non-sales folks doing sales call. This man did a lot of reading on sales.

You basically have change your mindset about it. You are not selling things to them (and no money is even exchange on the first call either), you are trying to help them.

-- No one likes to be sold to. Stop selling. Also don't think of it as cold-call.

Think of yourself as a consultant.

Think of yourself as a student.

A student in business class, writing a report and researching a company. Find out their current news about their business, and recent trends affecting their industry. Now, can your product fill to relieve some of the workflow they have according to your research.

If so, the client will open up to you. At the end of the day, that client, that manager just wants to get their work done better. If your product does that, and you found out that recent issue, your product can help with. You got a good consulting gig starting to happen.

Once you have your report, write a cold email instead.
"Pessimism" about, say, a vaccination program is realistic these days.
No, it's really not. Pretty much all large patent portfolios get licensed this way, and always have been. There are a multitude of legal, technical, practical and business reasons, but that's how it goes.

It's just that some companies don't like to pay what's due, which is fine... It's their right and they can settle it in negotiations or in court. The problem is, due to the current media atmosphere that is conducive to inflammatory rhetoric because it garners rageviews, these companies now also like to complain loudly using words like "extortion", which the tech media eagerly parrot. And then others who don't like the licensor (or patents in general) pick up that rhetoric and run with it.
Er yeah. The 'people' i.e. astroturfed left-wing activists are protesting the employees, not the CEOs.
Ah yes, fun when your CEO's email address is the same as the name of a product. I worked on +Pages, and we'd constantly be adding +page@google.com to discussions in Google Docs by mistake. ^_^
Show HN: Q&A WebApp (Spanish)
Polemicus.com is a Q&A Website (Spanish language) with a simple but full-featured interface. Contact me at http://polemicus.com/contacto
Dr. Doom Roubini: Tech to Replace White Collar Jobs
Start with downloading the hydra.hs file I linked to in the end.

Haskell is not like ruby, it's a bit harder to define functions in the interpreter. It's easier to put them in a .hs file and then :load file.hs
Curious, what hobbyist software do you play with that has a better Windows presence than on OSX?

I don't think your characterization of most Apple users is fair, either. Here's an analogy: my neighbor thinks I am an utter fool because instead of buying a 1995 Honda Accord for $50 from the junkyard and overhauling it in my garage, I bought a newish car for way more money. I value more in a vehicle than its ability to transport my body from point a to b. To him, this is idiocy.

Put more explicitly, owning what I think is the most beautiful piece of computer hardware money can buy is worth more than zero dollars to me. A lot of people seem to feel the same. And that's just the hardware, but you get the point.
Snapchat turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook. That's what the snarky comments are about.
It would matter if all of Amazon's pricing was listed in that other currency and you had to do math yourself just to figure out how much something cost. That's the way it works with bitcoin at TigerDirect and OverStock. Nothing is priced in BTC and neither company holds any BTC. They just use Coinbase as a payment provider ala PayPal, Google Wallet, Amazon Payments, Skrill, etc.
Bravo. The absurdity of some of the highest paid people in the world calling for a revolution is really comical to an immigrant like me. Not to say that the collusion was not despicable.
That's a nice bit of legwork to show that poor UI design translates directly into erroneous user interactions.

In conjunction with other recent Google stories (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7107325) it's both cautionary, largely exculpatory of users (Google caused this problem), and speaks more than slightly to Google's hubris (I've seen plenty of poor UI from them over the past several years).

An interesting aspect of this dynamic is that the object and subject of the error are asymmetric in this case. It's one thing to accidentally out yourself through "not reading instructions" or "just winging it" or "accidentally hitting the wrong control". It's another to accidentally take an action that hurts another person -- here in a significant way as it directly affects their reputation.

Hacker News is of course hardly blameless. I've more than once downvoted a comment or flagged or upvoted a story, especially on mobile, trying to access other controls on the site. At least the story flagging can be undone, though the other actions cannot be. But that's only if I care enough to do so.
Singularity University to launch $50M venture fund to tackle ‘grand challenges’
"Opensource" Android's price tag is 0.5 billion USD
If (s)he's not from the EU/Schengen area, in which case no visa is needed...
> These companies are generating massive income.

Illustration:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=profit+per+employee+app...

Remember this is net rev, what they take in after paying everyone. Assuming the average employee makes $120K, and given that they can't exist long enough to make $1 without the engineers showing up, these companies should be willing to pay everyone up to 2-3x that
That is stupid with credit cards, and it would be extra stupid with your digital life. Either this is one gigantic DoS vulnerability (anyone can call them up and ask them to completely immobilize you digitally for at least 24 hours), or you have some way to reliably store authentication credentials that would allow you to authenticate to such a service in an emergency, in which case you could probably just as well just store what is needed to recover things yourself.
FATAL: sense_of_humor.dll not found.
Real science is something you prove
B&N gave them a stake in the eBook business for $300M. That's not nothing. That is an instant entry into the eBook business for Microsoft. Compare that to the huge amounts of time and money and legal fighting and publisher wrangling the other players (Amazon, Apple and Google) had to invest.
Good point. Two-factor auth is required on any other browser session or device without the session cookie. It's also reset every 30 days, so you'll have to re-enter it even if you still have a session running.
Science Explains Your Boring, Repetitive Musical Taste
Since this is a 101, you might want to put your Haskell setup URL and any file dependencies/explanations of Haskell's idiosyncrasies at the top of the tutorial. A 101 is aimed at people who don't know anything about the language and assuming knowledge is a good way to ensure folks get frustrated and never come back.
Although I don't do it as regularly as I should, one compromise is to periodically backup to a USB drive and stick it in a drawer in your office. If you remember to update every few months or so, you may lose some recent things if you lose everything that you backup realtime but that's a big difference from losing everything.

I do use offsite backup in addition to regular local backups. I genuinely wonder how this will play out as video and image stuff to backup grows. At the least I'm thinking I probably need to do a better job of figuring out how to separate the important stuff from all the intermediate, rejected, etc. files.
Man I had the exact same reaction. Playing that box game made me think "wow that is the kind of thing I would have loved to spend days implementing in horribly written Turbo Pascal 15 or 16 years ago".
Fair enough, I have strong feelings against Windows and a personal bias against it too, and I use it every day!

I think what triggered my hot button there was the feeling that other tech people have looked down on me because I use Windows. I don't like Windows either, I just dislike it a bit less than the other operating systems. :-)

Sincere apologies if I overreacted, and if you're in the Bay Area feel free to take me up on that beer!
This is also an effect of the "flat" org structure. Few annoying managers! and also almost no chance of becoming one of those managers.
You're using the REPL, where every operation is basically happening in a do monad.

If you get an error like that where you intend to define something, use let.

like: let sumOfElements [] = 0
This is gold. It will take me some time to digest it and actually turn into actionable items but Thank you for taking time and writing this. Much appreciated. I wish there was a training course for this :)
This defiantly falls under Haskell not being noob friendly.

If you are in the REPL, you want to do `let sumOfElements [] = 0`

If you want multiline input, you open with `:{` and close with `:}`. Both of these need to be on their own line. For example:

Prelude>:{
Prelude| let sum [] = 0
Prelude| sum (x:xs) = x + sum xs
Prelude|:}

As tdinkar points out, it is often easier to define your functions if a file and load that file from the REPL.
Decoding cancer-addled ramblings
I would be interested to know what exactly React solves when we already have so many options - Ember, Angular, Backbone to do the same thing.

Why would one want to increase the complexity of the application by introducing "yet another new thing" on an already complex architecture.

I am just not sold on React. If someone could show a demo of why should we use React instead of, Backbone.View for example, then we can talk.
FYI, half the people with the name "throwaway" aren't throwaways. :P
Never Ask Permission
Sure! There are a couple of issues I want to close on it first, though, so it may be a little while; on the other hand, once I've done that, it'll be a lot niftier than it is right now, and a bit more reliable besides.
Are you from SV? There are plenty of affordable places to live in SV. Just because everyone is talking about how SF is sooo expensive, does not mean you can't live in Berkeley/Oakland/East Palo Alto/other areas.
aha, i tried using 'let' on the assumption that he was just being brief, but I put a 'let' in front of each of the pattern-matching function signatures, which didn't work. Thanks.

edit: I take your last comment as "when using the REPL, it is easier not to use the REPL." :D
I believe you mean that every operation is happening in the IO monad, and you input is being interpreted as if it was in a do block.
https://github.com/search?q=learn+*.js&type=Repositories&ref...
This comment thread is like a micro version of the origins of the hard sciences.
How Google Controls Android's Open-Source Software
Is Your Startup's Founder Paying Themselves Too Much?
Man, is twisted cursed or what? By that I mean it provides a great framework for asynchronous things and does it in the what you might call the node.js style with callbacks except it has great engineering, and yet no one seems to know about it or care very much.
and yet the practice of acqui-hiring can actually get you a 7 figure return on failing. Instead of unions, we have that, strange as it is. though mostly disproportionately good for the acqui-hired managers and not so much normal employees.
I am unfamiliar with this history, but it sounds fascinating. Can you elaborate a little more, or point me to an article discussing this?
J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon says bitcoin is a ‘terrible store of value’
And in Germany I'd be hard-pressed to find you a non-management tech job that makes north of 90k USD/year.

How is that relevant? (And) Once you factor in healthcare, education (for kids) and housing, I suspect that 90K USD in Berlin goes just as far as 200K USD in Silicon Valley, probably a lot further.
They are not comparable, nor is the current rate in the US with historic data since the definitions have changed multiple times. It is very much the same with comparing infant mortality since several EU countries count it very differently than the US.
Yup. It only looks slightly less weird than eshell or regular term mode. Still makes my ZSH prompt look screwy and still causes strange breakage with apps (iotop was completely unusable, for instance, as was anything ncurses based)
... I added a link in the bottom.

Perhaps helping users get set-up should be the first thing you address.

Also, you start off by saying the examples should work well in ghci but then show examples that are not run in ghci.

I fear your experience is blinding you to the numerous little things that trip up newcomers.

You might also state upfront what you assume the reader already knows. Such as the existence, and use, of ghci.

If you are mentioning ghci at the start then maybe show the examples as run in ghci. Or, if you prefer files, then explain how to run a file from the command line.
The H1B issue is absolutely about providing cheap, endentured labour: visa holders are tied to their sponsoring employer and must appeal to be allowed to seek other employment.

Norm Matloff of UC Davis has literally been trying to expose this for decades, with little luck:

http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/h1b.html

http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/h1b10min.html

Moreover: this is entirely consistent with behavior of employer first observed in the 18th century:

[I]n every part of Europe twenty workmen serve under a master for one that is independent, and the wages of labour are everywhere understood to be, what they usually are, when the labourer is one person, and the owner of the stock which employs him another.

What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour.

It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment. In the long run, the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.

Marx, you ask? No. Engles? No.

That's Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#link2H...
What does this thing look like? The site is really barren of images.
I remembered having commented on this about half a year ago on a post which at the time didn't get a lot of up-votes. I just dredged it up:

"Clearly the tech talent shortage can't be that bad, otherwise salaries would be going through the roof. I realize they may seem high relative to many other professions, however if we really are in dire straights, one would expect them to have spiked dramatically. That just hasn't happened. Either collectively the valley is colluding to not inflate wages, or, more likely, the problem isn't as big as many companies are making it out to be and those companies want to bring in foreign workers to help put deflationary pressure on wages."

I guess it turns out that was a false dichotomy and both things were happening. It looks like there was a conspiracy, and the tech companies still complained about not being able to find workers while pressuring congress for more H1-B visas.

My point is I don't think you'll be able to really get an accurate picture of how much wages were depressed because many companies are trying their hardest to decrease workforce mobility any way possible (legal or otherwise). I've personally seen some pretty crazy shenanigans at a very large tech company with workers being steered through insane hurdles to get a green card.

And I guess why not? If you can get someone to stick around for 5 or 6 years at a reduced wage, why wouldn't you do that?
Game #5 could easily make a nice iOS game. Make it free and IAP for additional puzzles. You'd just need to generate a whole mess more puzzles. Two little bits of feedback:

1. When one of the pieces goes off the screen, you should automatically restart, or at least let the player know they've failed. The first time this happened I wasn't immediately sure what to do--even though it was obvious after a couple seconds. Even once I knew, it was annoying to have to press restart when I'd obviously lost. Auto-restart will make players less likely to quit in frustration.

2. The "locked into place" pieces should have their design more differentiated from the moveable pieces--remove the arrows, for instance. This will help with clarity as levels get more and more complicated.
Ten-Minute Summary of the H-1B Work Visa
When the patent they used to collect money was invalidated(FAT patent), yet they continue in their ways, the "extortion" word seems to stick :)
Creating a HTTPS proxy in Node.js
> There should be consequences for the people who publish these things.

Should there be consequences for people who publish buggy code on github? Because that situation is completely equivalent to what these phd students did. ArXiv isn't a repository of peer-reviewed accepted papers, it's just a repository of papers, just like how github is repository of code.

The people to blame here aren't the students themselves. They just wrote up a mildly interesting observation and put it up on a repository. The people to blame are journalists and internet dumbasses who used this paper to serve their own selfish ends.

> I can't tell you how many times someone has thrown a junk science article in my face, thinking that the issue in question was now settled.

There's no denying the existence of a lot of peer-reviewed junk science but sometimes there are perfectly good reasons why papers with faulty conclusions are accepted. The question addressed by the paper might be interesting, the experimental methodology might be interesting, the data sources used in the research might be interesting, or the editors/program committee might just want to highlight the lack of progress in an area that deserves more attention.

Publishing something that is completely fault-free isn't a desirable or even an achievable goal. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of scientific publishing. The goal of scientific publication is to advance the field by stimulating discussion at the boundaries of human knowledge. This can often be done even with "buggy" results. Think of it as the scientific equivalent of fail often, fail early and fail fast mantra that drives many startups.

I'm not dismissing your frustration though because the problem you've described is a real one. We aren't very good at communicating scientific results to laypersons. But unlike you, I don't have a glib solution to a problem I don't fully understand. Magazines like the communications of the ACM with accessible, professionally-edited articles written by experts in the field are probably one step in the right direction, but there is a lot more that needs to be done here.
Google design sucks. They've never in the history of the company made a solid effort to nail UI and it's not part of their culture at all. Every one of their products is marred by UI inefficiencies, clutter, or inconsistency.
What I read out of your comment is that though comparing both kinds of companies is invalid, valuations on information economy companies is at present nonsensical at best.
I don't particularly care for Windows 8/touchscreens either, but:

Windows 8: Though I have very limited experience with this, it seems like it was born to run on a tablet.

Touchscreen: I think touchscreens in general are inefficient and clumsy, but... pretty much every device these days has a screen as a primary/secondary method in input. I don't see how this sets the Surface apart from any other modern mobile device. Perhaps you mean that the Surface's touchscreen, in particular, isn't very good?
Well, the first factor presumably is also required in order to get a new session cookie, so what's the point of the second factor there? And if someone breaks into your system, they'll have both your password and your session cookie, so they don't need the second factor either (well, except after 30 days after you have reinstalled your system, which I would think is plenty of time to abuse your account).

Really, IMO two-factor authentication only makes sense where a separate challenge-response round is required for each transaction, so a replay of stolen credentials is impossible - as it's usually done with online banking. And against burglars, you can protect your cookies as well as your passwords by encrypting the disk contents. Just be aware of cold boot and DMA attacks, and possibly evil maid attacks.
Chrome and Firefox sometimes display text unpleasantly
I'm just an armchair historiographer, but it seems to me that more or less all innovation is "by the rich for the rich only" -- at first. Pharmaceutical research, in its modern form, is a very young field; give it fifty years to grow up and figure out what the hell it's doing, and things may well look a lot more equitable.
I started looking at ansible but like salt stack better now. Windows support is one think I liked better about it. I wish I didn't have to deal with Windows but unfortunately I do and salt has the support for it.

http://docs.saltstack.com/ref/windows-package-manager.html
Since Haskell has a strong divide between compile and runtime, the REPL is this weird pseudo-runtime. It's best not to think of it like a REPL except for very simple use cases and instead think of it like a command prompt that you can evaluate some portion of Haskell in.

If you type `:help` you'll see all of the colon-commands that make up the command language. I'm not a Haskell expert, but my naive workflow tends to be a lot of usage of `:reload`. As a Lisper, I kinda feel like the colon commands should have been the default (sans colon) and one of the commands should have been `eval <haskel code>`.