skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>In many ways, the change is still not a bad idea, because Gates has been pretty ill-suited to the tasks of the job. I’ll say it if no one else will — he’s a terrible schmoozer of investors, is not someone who cottons to kissing up to Wall Street and, well, he’s still awkward around the niceties required in such a job. (By the way, this is the part of Gates I like!)

How often does Microsoft need to go to outside investors for money? It's obviously not in as good a position as, say, ten years ago, but the company still makes lots of money. Over the years the big problem has been Microsoft has been unable to find good places to spend all its extra cash.
It means whatever you want it to mean. The point is to get you talking about a project you care about. About the specifics rather than generalities.

Your comment sounds like a perfectly fine answer to me. I personally would ask you which project was the most interesting to work on? Or which were you most disappointed by when it didn't ship? And why.

At least, that's what I'm looking for when I ask it.
On the way to my bachelor party, my friends snuck a foil-wrapped dildo into my luggage in the hopes of eliciting a TSA response. Thankfully, it didn't work.
So say exactly that. It sounds like a great answer to me.
what makes me skeptical is this "Generic raw pointers are not supported". The goal of C type languages are to offer performance not ease of use. So if that means loss of performance kinda defends the purpose. And if I want ease of use I rather use Pharo . But I support the effort, and I am certainly very interested to see what will come out of this :)
Unbundling Bitcoin into 8 pieces
When the announces announces "The Macintosh Office", the implication at first seems to be that the people buying the Macintosh Office are the lemmings jumping off a cliff.

Terrible messaging all around.
https://palava.tv/
Exactly facilitate pinky swears. U get it, G! -Bent
App-to-App public key encryption
It's been reported a at least once already, see[1]. However, I don't see why I am required to create an issue before I am allowed to complain. OwnCloud has tons of open issues on GitHub, I'm sure there are doing their best to solve them already.

[1]: https://github.com/owncloud/core/issues/2470
Pros: Smalltalk is a very simple object oriented language, dynamically typed and GCed, it has closures (used everywhere!). It has NO keywords at all, and a very simple syntax. Smalltalk is very readable. It also has amazing IDEs/debuggers. It's very easy to learn. And it was born in 1972, just like me!

Cons: aging technology with very little traction, no fast VM (compared to JVM), no multithreading...

I switched to Java in 1996 because the future of Smalltalk was cloudy. I'd switch back to Smalltalk if it could run with the same performance as Java.

It's a really amazing language.
Remember, the alternative I'm comparing it to is restoring the land to a forested state

You do both, the two activities feed into each other, the greenhouses increase air moisture down wind and help you get plants growing, which feeds back into getting more rainfall once you get a large enough area going.

You have to design for the desert: evaporation > rainfall. That means getting the water shaded asap.

That's what the fucking greenhouse is for.
Aco Face
How to make Flappy Bird, #1 app
I love Argentina, the people, the cities, the mountains, the food. But the government is absurd; petty corruption is endemic, the politicians are expected to behave like Roman leaders taking care of "their" people. Until popular expectations change, the government will continue to tank the economy.
The project was mostly to give back to the community (not to learn or anything, while it has taught me a lot)

Both mine as well as the other one is open source, but I don't know how to go about a merger.
MkDocs – Project documentation with Markdown
This time round things could be very different. Remember how the Cyprus savings confiscations in 2013 provoked a previously unseen rally on bitcoin [1]. When Argentina's financial system implodes a significant part of the economy could well switch to bitcoin [2]. For many in Argentina this would be a better option than 'rebooting' yet again into fiat.

[1] http://siliconangle.com/blog/2013/03/21/bitcoin-value-hits-7...

[2] http://www.latinvex.com/app/article.aspx?id=1170
Ballmer is a member of the board of directors
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/inside_ms.aspx#BOD
Thanks, this explains it! Annoying and scary....
This sounds a lot like a perpetual motion machine...
"Britain fought a war to free Argentina from Fascist dictatorship (and, err, get our islands back)"

Your parentheses make me hope your main statement is sarcastic. For the record, the dictatorship was already declining in popularity when it decided to take a bold gamble against the British Empire. Sadly, human nature shows that victory would have granted the regime additional years, if not decades, in power.
How does Microsoft know if a trademark is being used with or without its owner's permission? I mean, you can make a pretty solid guess in these cases, but it seems like waiting for a takedown request from the trademark owner is reasonable. (Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft, but in a different division, and I'm definitely not a lawyer)
She is cool&nice!
How to write good software
Ask HN: Who's Hiring? (February 2014)
Please lead with the location of the position and include the keywords INTERN, REMOTE, or H1B if the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome. Feel free to post any job that may interest HN readers from executive assistant to machine learning expert to CTO.
Not sure if the reasoning is the same, but I always thought academics should be judged by their few very best ideas. Applying for your first postdoc: What's your best idea? Assistant prof: what are your two best papers? Tenure decision: what are your 5 best papers?

Everyone likes to churn out a list of triple digit publications, but 99% of those will have no discernible impact on the world.
I've been in the industry for 35 years now (and hacking computers before that). If I picked just one accomplishment, I'd have to choose just one from all the accomplishments that I'm equally proud of. Furthermore, if I chose one from earlier in my career, one which was really neat and a lot of fun and technically sweet and saved the project's bacon, you might think I'd not done much interesting stuff since then.

If you ask this, you're not going to get much actual data. You won't see me write code, you won't see me react to something totally new.

I might ask this during a screening interview, but it's a soft question that should lead into more concrete technical assessments.

So: Meh. No silver bullet.
Lennart Poettering: "Systemd is about choice" – FreeBSD and Amiga ports coming?
New York City -- Grasshopper NYC looking for business co-founder for interactive game table venture

As part of our mission to revitalize face-to-face play for the 21st century, Grasshopper NYC has created a beautiful interactive game table that has potential as a standalone product and business. We are now looking for a business co-founder and leader to unlock this potential.

We’re looking for someone who knows the relevant entertainment markets (including both traditional at-home game consoles and the out-of-home entertainment market); is skilled at business and strategic planning; has experience getting integrated hardware/software products to wide distribution; can get us the right industry partners; can lead fundraising as needed; has executive management potential; and is generally a excellent person who is fun and inspiring to work with.

Our game table is being featured this month at IndieCade East, the annual independent games festival, at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image. We think it’s both gorgeous and ergonomically unique, comfortably sitting up to 6 players with plenty of leg room. (Design has been led by a leading contemporary architecture firm headed by MIT/Harvard architecture professors.) Technically, it’s a smart combination of open-source and proprietary software, including our own game framework built on Unity3D. (The core table engineering was led by an MIT Media Lab expert in multi-touch tables.) Unlikes many interactive tables, it’s cool to the touch and is seamless and spill-proof; having a cocktail or beer at the table is encouraged by design. We already have around a dozen games working on the table -- from alpha to polished, some our own, some from third-parties indie game developers.

In short, we think we’ve created a special product that enables a unique and wonderful face-to-face game experience -- bringing the best of digital technology into a fully present, truly social interaction. Now we’re looking for a co-founder to turn an exceptional product into an exceptional business.

Additional background: the founder and creative director of Grasshopper NYC is an MIT engineer with a track record of product and business innovation in new media, including high-level executive positions in business news and as as a product management director at Google. A blog post in Gamasutra, a leading games industry website, noted that Grasshopper NYC is being talked about as “the coolest thing happening in the New York game industry at the moment.”

Interested? Email cofounder@grasshoppernyc.com.
Ha, I noticed this too. It's MIT Technology Review. Excellent magazine.
The thing is, competition can signal that there is a real market for what you're doing.

It's generally not a good thing to be the only game in town over the long run.
Why Bitcoin may never hit the mainstream – decimal points
I am using Pharo myself.

http://www.pharo-project.org/home

What it offers that none other language offers AFAIK apart from lisp is foremost live coding. In case you are not aware live coding simple means to code an application while the applications runs. With other languages making mistakes is quite costly. With Pharo (and Squeak) if you make such a mistake the debugger will pop up and ask you politely :D to correct your mistake after that it wont punish you by restarting your app but rather allow you to resume where you were. Whats impressive is that this allow you to code entirely inside debugger and even introduce mistakes on purpose to see overall how your app is behaving. There are no files to compile, compilation takes place per method.

Another thing I like about Pharo is the distribution process. I have been burned by Python and really sucky distribution libraries and very buggy py2app and py2exe. If you want to distribute a pharo app, thats is very simple and require zero packaging. Pharo does not install in your OS, its a simple folder containing an executable that loads image files. Those image files is memory dumps of byte code which contain all you need to run the app. So all you have to do is zip the folder and share away. You also do not need specialized tools to run multiple versions and/or instance of Pharo. Just put Pharo in diffirent folders and voila. Also now PharoLauncher allows you with easy to download custom images and manage your existing ones with ease. PharoLauncher is again a Pharo folder containing an image containing the PharoLauncher tool and library :)

The IDE is also very , very nice. Again when I was coding in Python I was not happy with the IDE. The Pharo IDE is written in Pharo its easy to use once you figure out the main functionality and quite well documented. Most importanly the IDE is tailor made for Pharo instead of general purpose nonsense that will offer substandard support for your language of choice. I like the fact that it wont allow you that easily to make mistakes and that it comes with so many tools to make your life easier. Its the best IDE I have use so far.

Lastly I really love the community , they are very friendly with Begineers and newcomers and they really deeply care about Pharo. Its quite actively developed, bug get fixed and there is always new features coming in. There is also Amber , Pharo brother, that compiles to Javascript and can use any Javascript library.

I can go on and on and on, but thats the most important things for me. The rest you can discover by yourself, all I can tell you is that there is a lot more. Foremost coding in Pharo is a lot of fun and very productive.
Yes, but then how would they be able to mislead people into thinking their platform has a lot of apps, too?
Yup, me too. And it's the worst code I've ever written. Miranda IM. Millions of downloads, popular for 14 years. I got bigger than I ever imagined it could.

What have I worked on since: ACDZip, ACDSee, Tracktion, EAW Resolution, SPIN Review. ACDSee was a brief success, but the rest - meh.
Testing Rake Tasks with RSpec
Well if an ad from 1985 is not representative of today's Apple, then people should also stop praising the 1984 ad, since that is also not representative.
Every country by default assumes that they have an understanding with neighbours about it's borders. Of Course that doesn't stop anybody from trying to grab a piece.

As far as the two arguments go, I don't see the incompatibility. Can you share your thoughts about this?

Chinese approach was rather brute force, they just poured a lot of soldiers there, far from efficient.
In what way is this relevant, pointing out that the competition may be similarly flawed?

In order for Microsoft to succeed in this market (and to satisfy its customers and legitimate app developers), Microsoft has to step its game up, in general, as high as possible, not settling for whatever will be perceived as about as decent as Android.
DDB is a patent cases, and, therefore therefore isn't interpreting the "work for hire" provision of copyright law -- the issue isn't whether an employment contract could transfer exclusive rights to the employer, but whether the employer was entitled to treat the work as a "work for hire" by policy (in copyright, there's a pretty important distinction between a transfer of exclusive rights by contract and a work being a "work for hire" where the original copyright is with the hiring party, this distinction does not exist in patent law); Medsphere wasn't an IP case at all, it was a case about breach of fiduciary duty by a corporate officer; and DSC/Alcatel involves a case where employee conduct at the time evidence that the employee thought that the work was within the scope of an inventions clause (including asking bosses for a waiver of the inventions clause), even though in court assertions were made (but, from what I can find, weakly supported) that would indicate the work was outside the scope. But, also, most of the reporting is around a "duty to disclose inventions" clause, and none indicates anything about work for hire in copyright -- its not at all clear from anything I can find on the case that it addresses scope of employment/work for hire issues, just scope of an enforceable contract clause which may effect a transfer of ownership.

So none of these cases seem to be on point here.
The Social Media Generation Animated [video]
Analyze how well your resume matches a job
Eh...forgive me for saying, but this is a bit of a cop-out. Especially where the author notes that you then have to supplement this "one question" with 20 min of follow-up. It's essentially saying "the only interview question that matters is having an interview".

I'm not saying that this doesn't work. I've been through my fair share of interviews on both sides of the table, and focusing an interview on various dimensions of a single project is a far, far better strategy than the typical haphazard array of semi-related questions on people skills and technical ability. Really, I think it's not even so important that you focus on the "that you're most proud of" part. This tack would work just as well, I suspect, with the interviewees second or third most notable accomplishment. What's important is that it is a project of sufficient size that you can ask the follow-ups, and in doing so construct a consistent picture of the candidate as an employee.

If you really want one question to get the most information from someone, my goto has always been:

"What is your current favorite language/framework/technology stack? What do you hate about it?"

Ok, so technically that's two (or one two-part question), but I've found that this question will very quickly reveal how able someone is to think critically and to assess all facets of the decisions that they make.
Hocus-Pocus, and a Beaker of Truffles (2007)
They (well, in this case Facebook) did request it:

http://www.wpcentral.com/facebook-windows-phone-store-tradem...
Belgian professor in cryptography hacked
Through a Face Scanner Darkly
The "software is mathematics" argument has a few flaws:

1) It is reductio ad absurdum, like saying "machines are metals". It is not the naturally occurring metals that are patentable in physical inventions, it is how you configure and use them. Similarly it's not the mathematics that is patentable, it is the application thereof to a practical problem.

2) More importantly, it misunderstands what abstract math is from a legal perspective. People will invoke the Church-Turing thesis and several related theorems to prove that software being executed is math, but they miss the point.

An abstraction, by definition, cannot affect or effect anything in the real world. An idea in your head is abstract. The moment you act on it in the physical world, it is real. Similarly, if you can run some piece of software and get useful, practical, real world results, it is not abstract.
It's ironic because initially that was their marketing message (even though it wasn't true at all). They said they have fewer, but higher quality apps. When in reality, they probably had a higher percentage of crappy apps to quality one than the other platforms. A lot of developers were releasing simple useless apps because they were getting paid to do it by Microsoft in the early days.
This will get you a successful candidate who can talk at length about something they might have done. If talking is the bulk of the job, congratulations. If the job involves actually doing something requiring some skill, perhaps you should be testing for the skill, rather than ability to tell a (possibly true!) story.

Surely everyone has worked with that person who is confident and charismatic, who inspires confidence in everyone who hasn't (for example) read their code, but who produces negative work every day on the job. When that person eventually leaves (perhaps after spending months or years being shuffled around to the places they can do the least harm by their peers), they will have no problem finding a lucrative job elsewhere, because they are easy and fun to talk to, and can go on for hours about the very important projects they were on.
I haven't heard of that, and it would be great if you could remember where you found it. It sounds to me like it might be an apocryphal corruption of the following:

Fortran passes arguments by reference. If the compiler uses a constant pool, and (lazily or efficiently, depending on your point of view) passes the constant pool location as an argument, a subroutine could inadvertently modify a constant.

FORTRAN 66 (the first ANSI standard) and FORTRAN 77 forbid passing a constant or expression as an argument that will be modified†‡, thereby blessing this implementation. (Fortran 90 and later are tl;dr.)

† http://www.fh-jena.de/~kleine/history/languages/ansi-x3dot9-... §8.4 p26

‡ http://www.fortran.com/fortran/F77_std/rjcnf-15.html#sh-15.9...
Can anyone recommend some cheap hardware to hookup my TG-UV2 [1] to my PC?

[1]http://www.eham.net/reviews/detail/8931
Shameless plug: We are developing a tool to try to analyse the not provided keyword. You can use for free here: https://keyseo.io/users/sign_up?plan=demo (Don't mind the landing page, still a awful draft, we are working on a different one.)
no fast VM (compared to JVM), no multithreading

Back in 1996 Smalltalk VMs were still outperforming Java VMs on real workloads, in large part due to not having multithreading. (Makes GC simpler and faster.) Also, there were multithreaded Smalltalks around.
It's not about quantity. It's about quality. And every big player is trying to crush Windows Phone platform. Google is so ridiculous that they're willing to lose big money by not making its glorified ad service on the platform. Google made Youtube and pulled back, Google search on WP is ridiculous. Not even Maps, which has great social network potential, much more than Youtube.
Ask HN: What would you like to see college hackathon organizers talk about?
This weekend is Hackcon [0], where the organizers of most of the college hackathons in the country (including PennApps, HackMIT, MHacks, etc) are meeting to talk about best practices, community building, the future of college hackathons, and more.

There is still room for talk proposals, so, HN, what would you like to see us talk about?

[0] http://www.hackcon.io/
I would have called it Objective. That way, when the press asks, "What is your objective?" you just show them.
It requires you to enable Javascript because it is a broken website. Oddly enough there is pretty much no content then anyways. ;)

The question is "What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?"

Big whoop!
Nested functions with GCC- What happens if you try to return a closure
I read this a lot here about probationary or trial periods and I agree that it's a great idea, in principle. However, the reality of the developer and system engineer ecosystem right now is that it's an employee's market. Good people are already employed and probably get a couple job leads every day via professional contacts, LinkedIn, or other channels. Those people aren't going to be willing to jump through these kinds of hoops, quit their day job, or generally want to deal with putting this much effort into an uncertain outcome when there are so many lower friction and equally rewarding positions. I realize that I'm generalizing and that you may be able to come up with a few anecdotes to make your point, but no one I know would deal with this. This might be a great way of hiring college interns or people trying to break into the technology field, but not practical for hiring established or senior positions.

I like your idea about contributing to some open source project (paid), though even in that case, you will likely run into qualified people who are unwilling (or legally unable) to do this and as an interviewer, you need to be careful not to exclude those individuals.
Whitehouse.gov Net Neutrality Petition Passes 95k Signatures
Ask HN: Will you pay to download a fast/secure/privacy web browser?
App.net is gambling that some of us want a paid ad-free/privacy social network. Given that we now do most of our computer usage inside a browser, wouldn't some of us pay to download a broswer that:
Sandboxes each site/session/page
Blocks ads by default (and learns to block new ad techniques)
Runs adware/spyware on each request (and auto-updates threats database)
Warns/blocks phishing
Blocks 'tool-bars' install
Runs TOR
Securely stores usrnms/pwds

And yet does not sacrifice standards and compatibility.

I know that I can setup any browser plus download some tools to fulfil this wishlist but I was thinking an out-of-the-box-no-geek-only solution.

I would pay, would you?
Argentina is in trouble, but this article is not very insightful.

A better one, out of many options:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/world/americas/as-argentin...

Another: http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21595471-latin-americ...
Getting an empty dark gray page on iOS.

I realize Mobile Safari may not be a supported browser, but a graceful failure with some sort of explanation wouldn't hurt, would it?
Sounds like "Pick some job from your resume, and let's talk about it." Which is pretty effective.
Less than 5k needed to require a response. If you haven't signed it yet, please do.