skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I intuitively like the idea of the "supposed" but atleast in the west there seems to be a way of counteracting these pressures. It seems to me that "white" children can choose from a variety of roles: nerdy, athletic, artistic etc and although there are penalties associated with each role there are rewards as well and each role is deemed valid by society. However, the article seems to suggest a homogeneous "black" identity, which leaves no room for accepted rebellion. Perhaps, some folks living in USA can confirm if my hypothesis is connected to reality.
Dell agrees to buy Perot Systems for $3.9 billion
I think Java is sufficiently lodged in the annals of the enterprise world that there's no danger of it dying any time soon.

I'm in telecom, and can tell you that Java has completely colonised this space for OSS/BSS (operational support/billing support systems), phone switch EMSs (external management systems), large-scale user portals and provisioning (Broadsoft), etc.

It ain't going anywhere.
Craigslist is a fairly common place to try to find people. You don't mention what your target audience is therefore it is difficult for us to offer more targeted advice.
Arch Venture Opens Boston Office, Looking to Multidisciplinary Collaborations
Id agree with the above. Possibly if you can pick a community you hang out in - if you make it a personal favour/request then your likely to get a fuller response.

Also 100 testers is a HUGE number for a prototype - your just going to be swamped in constant bug reports, ideas and so forth. Getting meaningful data will be tough.

You need less than 10 serious testers for a prototype.

It's a much later stage you need those hundred; when you need to test how your code/system/hardware/site/data scales
FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit on EconTalk podcast
Motorola c359 RED
Motorola c359 RED the phone is up to dated version of the company with, latest applications and attractive features with very much good gesture. The features included in the phone are Polyphonic Ringtones, MP3 Ringtones, LCD (Color), Bar Form which let you enjoy all the way.
From the headline + url, it looks spammy but it's actually not - it's a free online book about designing search engine user interfaces. Quite interesting actually.
Thank you!

Actually, I reckon Redpoint – friends of mine – do an even better job of wringing un-Reason sounds out of Reason. They're even more in debt to Boards of Canada than I am, though. Of my stuff, "Symbolic" was written while I was listening to a hell of a lot of Ulrich Schnauss and quite a bit of 70s/80s Wire; there was going to be a cover of Wire's "Map Ref" on there for a while which really hammered that home...
I think Web Browser is a good alternative to JVM and CLR platforms.
It also makes the donors who finance Grameen feel better about themselves.

The better interest rate is a great idea, as there are many farmers in India and Pakistan that commit suicide because they got trapped into a cycle of debt that they cannot escape.

And I suspect that the better repayment rate has a lot to do with social pressure. The support groups are part rah rah team and part shame squad to guilt the delinquent into repaying the loans.

Microlending is better than what the locals have already (which are pretty much what we call "loan sharks" in the West). It isn't as good as the lending and financial industry that we have here, but it is an improvement, and in my opinion, a step in the correct direction.
The Strategic Interception
Business is a lot like football, the interception comes from over-reaching and can change momentum in an instant.
The dates shown for the blog posts are incorrect. They all say September 20, 2009, when in fact the underlying dates go back to 2008. It looks more like the time at which it was imported. It should be displaying the pubDate from the feeds.
This seemed like horrible advice to me. The gist of the article is, "... put them into your team for a day and watch them work. After the day is over get your team together and let them tell you if you should hire this person or not."

I won't even bother listing all the possible shortcomings - it's a great water cooler idea but it won't fly in the real world.

* Person comes in, doesn't work out, and then goes to work for a competitor and can now (a) talk about your processes, (b) tell them who the key people are to target

* Person comes in and tells technical recruiters who your top talent is

* Person comes in, explains (good/bad) reasons that this code sucks and whoever wrote it was wrong, and makes everyone feel like a fool for working there

* Developers A, B, and C love the guy yet manager hates him (or vice versa)

Interesting idea in practice but I seriously doubt any company does this instead of the traditional techniques he mentions. The "traditional" techniques have evolved over 100 years of working with and interviewing engineers and software folks - there's a reason those techniques are still used in 2009.
How to fetch software development project if you are an IT Service Startup
"I hope you don't have kids" is, as far as I can see, very nearly the worst thing you can say to someone, if you mean it seriously. So far, everyone dies, but at least there's a chance that part of them will live on through their children; saying you'd prefer that they never have any legacy is even worse than flatly wishing they'd die.
No, coding on the whiteboard or on paper, or even the 5 minute exercise on the laptop is not really coding.

It doesn't matter whether or not it's "really coding". All that matters is how effective it is in evaluating your candidate.

I have interviewed over 2,500 devloper candidates and every single one has had to code with pencil and paper, in a room alone for 15 to 30 minutes. This has always been, by far, the most effective thing I could have done.

I never cared what they actually wrote. I never once found out if it would even compile or run. But I never cared. The only purpose of the coding problem was the discussion afterward. This told me volumes.

Given a person, a discussion, a problem, and 1 to 3 pages of written code, I could ask many questions focused on a single issue and take it any direction I wanted. And learn what I needed to know about that person...

How did they attack the problem? What did they feel comfortable using? How did the deal with the situation? What kind of attitude did they have? How much did they enjoy dealing with the problem and discussing it? How well did they defend their choices? How willing were they to take criticism? How willing were they to stand up for what they believed in?

These are the things I want to know now. Not 3 months after they start working. Programming with pencil and paper and discussing afterward is the best way I've ever found to find these things out.
Its even worse than a controversial headline. Its lazy blogging/reporting.

In the actual world things don't have to die for new things to appear. In the world of blogs and newspapers - each product must slay the ones that have gone before: "will this product replace all iphone sales?" - and then of course "product fails because all iphone owners didn't sell them and buy the new product".

I guess for programming languages there is also some one up-manship - "I'm better than all you people over there because my language of choice is still alive".

I could perhaps understand the articles point a little if Java had just stopped being flavour of the month - but it stopped being that years ago. It might not be the "sexy" choice but there is a huge amount of the worlds IT infrastructure running on Java and I don't reckon that's going to stop any time soon.
Most consumer web sites don't require brilliant coders to be honest, just someone competent enough to quickly get the first version of the site out, with pleasant UI and a decent set of features.
Java's not fashionable. I guess to a lot of people that's the same as dead. These people will eventually grow out of this view.
I would like comment on the economic and social aspects[1] of this article.

.. * I) Underacheivement as a group Defense Mechanism ::

Some social-groups actively encourage what I call "Perennial-Underacheivement". This is in my opinion based on a group defense mechanism[2].

This defense mechanism is to ensure the weak and sick and those unable to care for themselves are not left behind. They value support for the less-able and believe that informal community support is far better than State supplied support. The reasons are a topic unto themselves but my take is that this group behiour ensures those with latent talent don't leave the community and thus those who cannot care for themselves. Some talented people may not reach their potential, but they may still lead a happy, fruitful life. Some members may take the lack of excellence to extremes and die in prison as hopeless drug-dealers.

Basically, in these groups, overacheiving and commercial gain is downplayed. Here, to be rich is to "Sell Out" and to move out of the neighbourhood it to betray your "Roots".

.. * II) Acheivement is better for the Acheiver and the Group ::

The opposing view is that each person tries for themselves and their immediate family and this works because everyone "succeeds". People who cannot care for themselves are kept at a distance, cared for by the State which is paid for by tax. Individual families may still take care of their own, but it helps to be a "successful" family.

.. * Evidence of this divide ::

My data point of a divide link here would be to consider Immigrant versus 3rd generation Locals. This is touched on in the Article, where a Black Man (but immigrant) is in conflict with American born African-Americans. I offer an explanation that some of the American born blacks are using race issues to form the defense mechanism which conciously or unconcsiously they know protects their group.

First I will state the obvious. Immigrants by definition cannot belong to the group-care mindset. Why? Because by definition they have left many, many compatriots behind to fend for themselves in a different geographical place. They may not like it, and they may send every penny back to their village. But in their mind the gain overall to themselves and the group behind is clear: immigration is better than remaining.

------------

[1] I am not a black, and I am not American. But I wish to say something on this topic because I am an immigrant (to Oz, then UK) myself and part of an oft-picked upon ethnic group (Jew). This issue is complex and there are many commingled ingredients, economic-social-racial-ethnic-familial-historical

[2] I am not making a comment on the rights , wrongs of this defense mechanism
BTW, has anyone tried to port COBOL to the JVM? Sounds like an viable idea for a startup.

edit: it seems a company called Veryant already did it (http://www.veryant.com/products/)
Most comments about this article when it was originally submitted weren't too positive either:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=755833
Considering how popular PPK's site is and that the first person to reply is Hixie, the author of the HTML5 spec, I think they'll already know his feelings by now ;)
Biological explanations, while non-PC, do a rather good job of explaining the available evidence.
Could you provide some more information on what changes you are referring to?

Are you saying that before the DMCA, Scribd's standard operating practice would have been more illegal or more legal?
Not with Instapaper/iPhone combination. When you saving links to read later when you'll be at your computer, you'll probably never come back to them (in most cases "getting to your computer" means "starting working", not "starting reading yesterday's links").

Instapaper gives you your saved links when you have nothing else to do (e.g. commuting), and this makes a huge difference.
Hackulo.us
Hi I can't put hackulo.us on cydia it says it's forbidden is it
I rolled my eyes at the headline, thinking it was clearly cashing in on the Java deathwatch and a controversial headline. But this is one of the more sane articles on the topic that I've ever read. It's not just a fanboy of some other "trendy" language pointing out Java's shortcomings.
It's perfectly legal if you do it for your own personal use.
Dell to Buy Perot Systems for $3.9 bn in Cash
I suspect you need to be over on the Hackulo.us forums.... rather than, um, here :)

http://hackulo.us
Ha, I searched quite hard to see if it had already been submitted, but didn't find it. Obviously I searched the wrong terms, or not for long enough. Sorry about the Dup.

Even so, the discussion at that other article was enlightening, probably more so than the article itself, so I think that submission - and sort of by proxy this one - was worth while.

Thanks for finding the reference.
And how exactly do you expect to generate the content for that web browser?
When I moved from Canada to the U.S., I was surprised how segregated the country still is. It's not legally enforced, of course. It's just that there are black parts of town and white parts of town.

So although I've lived in both Pittsburgh and Boston for a total of 16 years now, including grad school where I was very social, I haven't had much of a chance to have African American friends because I've met almost no African Americans.
Stupid user tricks 4: IT horror never ends
FWIW so do Komodo Edit, which is free, and UltraEdit, which is not. I used to use UltraEdit until I got pissed off because I paid for a newer version only to get more (instead of fewer) bugs than the one I had. On top of it, these guys do their support by e-mail, instead of having a ticket system.

That's what made me switch to Komodo and I've been pretty happy with it, except for the fact that it's so slow to start. At this point, it will take an editor with a very compelling set of features and really good support to make me switch, especially if it's a commercial one.
I was going to post this as an "Ask HN", but since I see someone with the username bayes writing in a probability thread- I figure why not ask here (if its all a coincidence, sorry!)

Would you happen to have a recommendation for a good probability textbook for a first year grad student?
You can have a legacy without having kids.
The most interesting conspiracy theory in this lawsuit is that Scribd might be doing the whole PDF-hosting business as a loss leader in order to enable an automatic infringement-detection business.

In other words, Scribd's document-hosting is sort of a honeypot, designed to attract both legit and infringing uploads, as well as complaints from publishers regarding infringing uploads. Collecting all of this, they have both a document hosting site and a database of stuff publishers have claimed as copyrighted.

You couldn't very well call up every publisher and say "hey, send me a PDF of everything you have a copyright on so I can start a business doing automatic copyright-checking." But if you have a popular document hosting site, you can rely on the publishers to incrementally develop that database for you. And your business goals line up very well with your DMCA legal requirements.

This would be a very clever hack. I doubt Scribd chose to pursue it intentionally, but either way, an "Is this blob of text copyrighted by someone else?" API would be a very valuable service.
Best quote:

"'I find it useless to argue with people like Ogbu,' says Urban League educational fellow Ronald Ross, himself a former school superintendent. 'We know what the major problems in this school system are: racism, lack of funding, and unqualified teachers.' Although Shaker Heights is in fact an integrated, well-funded, and well-staffed school district, Ross is nonetheless convinced that it suffers from other problems that contribute to the achievement disparities between the races."

Reading this, I was reminded of some of the things that were described in "Common Ground," the book about the Boston school bussing crisis in the 1970s, as well as "All Souls," a book about the struggles of an Irish-American family growing up in South Boston in the 1970s and 1980s. For those families -- black and white -- that had parents who were uninterested or unable to push their kids in school, the kids' peer circles tended to take over, with predictable results.

In the 30+ since the bussing crisis, Boston has spent huge amounts of money and effort to improve the schools and teaching quality, yet some of the high schools still have huge behavioral and crime problems. And guess what? Many parents still aren't invested in their kids' education, or even their extracurricular activities (there was an article in the Globe a few months ago about how few Boston parents show up for games, even when their kids are on the teams).
I've seen precious little research on biological explanations. I'm betting all my money on culture. I'm in eastern Europe, and I feel parts of black culture familiar. And to be honest, I don't like it. We have here too a subculture in which people display gold chains and like songs about money and enemies, and pretty much to everybody's surprise it's socially determined, not ethnically.
"Sell them at auction"

In which case there are enough millionaires wanting US residency that these will all go to millionaires setting up boutique companies just to get residency. See the EB5 visa.
"At some point I just said, 'screw it, I’ll get a high paying job.'" - I guess that was the job.
With strong support from companies like Oracle and IBM, Java code will likely be around as long as COBOL. Java may not make sense for small companies and startups building webapps. However, it works extremely well for big companies with large tech budgets, many developers and that only run software with support contracts and SLA's.
"I hope you don't have kids" could have two completely different meanings:

1) I hope you're not a parent at the moment.

and

2) I hope you never conceive!

The first is a lament over the fate of any children that the addressed might have parented. The later is wishing ill fate upon the addressed.
It sounds like W3C has been listening to usability critics about as sympathetically as MS did with IE6. [pops antidepressants]
At first I thought this was the training manual of French Administration personal...
You've seen precious little research? I assume you've actually looked? Read things like The Bell Curve, etc.?
Open-source vs. commercial grade Web content management
Joseph Bachana, the President/Founder of DPCI, an interactive technology company based in NYC, blogs about the pros and cons of Open Source vs. commercial grade Web content management sytems.
I'm afraid my username doesn't reflect any deep knowledge of the field. I studied probability at an undergraduate level many years ago, and still use it in my hobby (writing 'bots' that run automated trading strategies on one of the sports betting exchanges here in the UK), but that's all. I'd go for an "Ask HN" thread if I were you.
You have to realize that Java isn't just important for the enterprise. It's also really important for academia and mobile.

I remember seeing a figure which was in the billions, which basically represented the number of non-pc devices reliant on Java, and that number was comprised mostly of mobile devices.

On top of that, most schools around the world begin teaching their computing undergrads in Java, which is a pretty big deal in terms of where development is headed in the mainstream.
Can you make a Java -> PHP compiler next? I'm obviously joking, but finding reliable, inexpensive Java hosting is nearly impossible.
Another distinction is that the EB-5 requires that the person desiring a visa personally invest $1M (not raise it from investors). Additionally, in areas where the limit is lowered to 500K, the person still needs to have a personal net worth of $1M.

Linking a founder visa to a personal net worth in high six digits will defeat the purpose of the visa.
tezza, a most profound statement this is:

Some social-groups actively encourage what I call "Perennial-Underacheivement". This is in my opinion based on a group defense mechanism[2].

But I must really disagree with you wrt to African American youth addressed in the article and its subject research: they came from well off families that didn't need to hold their children back.

What you're speaking of is something widely practiced against women, specially in the Middle East: girls are often talked out of higher education and told they will need to care for their little siblings, elderly, husband and whoever is in need.
if the default action of these drag & drop events was to enable drag & drop, then you would not be able to select anything on the page (using the mouse that is), because, wherever you push the button down and move the mouse, you will initiate a drag operation and not a select operation.

This is why drag & drop is disabled by default and the method in which it is disabled is by making the events fire but have their default action to not allow drag & drop which then leads to the selection action being used.
Like Your Junk Food w/ Your Hacking: You Are What You Eat
Understanding business development
Cory Doctorow wants to have a word with you. :)
I've seen the claim that black academic test scores are consistently one standard deviation below the norm regardless of the test: sat, gre, lsat, mcat, erb, afqt, whatever. Always one standard deviation. Unfortunately, that lends weight to the genetic argument.
Ask hn: Merging Clickpass with my HN account
I've tried to merge my OpenID (via Clickpass) with my HN account but I keep getting "Unknown" as a response. Is this something I'm doing wrong?
Switching jobs introduces a risk of not liking the new job. If you enjoy your current job and it pays you more than enough to make you happy, switching for $30k sounds like it would be a bad idea to me. Money can't buy happiness.
We've come up with a new idea to try out in the next round of hires (I might blog about it at some point).

Basically we think up a tiny but worthwhile project related to the area were hiring in. i.e. a supporting app to go with our current software, or a feature extension (without going too deep into our source code :D) etc.

Then we pick the most likely candidates (maybe interview them) and hold a week long coding sprint. We plan to pay the candidate expenses and a fair salary (something like £6-7 and hour).

We'll have about 10 candidates maximum and pick 2 or 3 of our current development team to work with them. Spend one day of the week making sure they are roughly on the same page in their work practices then just let them come up with a solution and build it.

And actual final product doesnt matter too much: but it's a quickfire way to see them working as a team and figure out who would fit into our process.

Plus some of our current developers get to work with them and will be able to advise who they would find best to work with.

It will either work really well or fail miserably: but it's a nice idea nontheless!
The percentage of founders that immigration issues cause problems for is a flawed metric. A very large number of potential founders do not go beyond seriously considering starting a startup once they look into how complicated the immigration issues are. So you need to look at potential founders.

I know, I am personally going through this right now and went to grad school with or worked with 10 different people who had the technical chops and a strong desire to start a startup but decided against it when they saw the risks it entailed from an immigration stand point.
Navigating The AppStore
Is it just me, or have these names been getting more and more disappointing? I was personally hoping for something along the lines of Loquacious Llama.