skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it depends on your current situation. If you just need to get some code written, hire B, assuming you can cope with getting B up to scratch to write said code. If you're earlier stage -- you need to brainstorm, to have those tangents, that little spark of something-else -- hire A. Give her 20% of her time her own, and watch magic happen.

Disclaimer: I'm totally an A (although probably with more randomness and less skill), so I might be biased.
yes, it was a matt display Core Duo, and also sure 20" was the largest (sizes were 17" and 20")
Surprises in Mathematics and Theory
Grand Central Dispatch: The Sleeping Barber Problem
How Would Einstein Use E-mail?
Xerox buys ACS (Affiliated Computer Services) for $6.4B
I skimmed it - forgive me that I didn't want to read the whole thing. Given that I feel you have consistently misinterpreted his words in the main article in question, I doubt I would agree with your current interpretation if I could check it against his original words.
Try telling that to the bus driver who almost ran me over this morning when he was trying to beat a red light.
Tool of The Day: Tubeminator: Videos to Go
I love watching Joe Armstrong speak, he's so dynamic, fun, and energetic. This was my first opportunity to see Jones. Listening to the two of them together was great fun to hear their discussion.

The InfoQ interviewer was terrible though :P. He puts the breaks on a good discussions multiple times. The interviewer doesn't ask very many good questions from the context of Erlang or Haskell.
This is a great article. Written by a lawyer (I think. Either that or someone who knows the law really well) with the ability to explain things clearly (to non lawyers), it documents in a very clear manner the various problems inherent in CodePlex's corporate structure.

Well worth a read.
MySQL vs. PostgreSQL comparison by Anchor (github's migration team)
Ok, that's really cool. I'll give that a try next time somebody sends me a youtube link. Thanks!
Here's a link to a google doc I have created with the transcript.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0ATkBKEXbo6n8ZGdrNzhoM2dfMz...
same with my little MacBook; the screen's crap, but the 'calculator' keyboard is brilliant
The basic premise of the article is that a web application firewall can detect and deter all the attacks an internal mechanism can. Well, good luck with such an attitude!
SXSW '08
Sorry - it was just that HN recognized the link as being submitted before, but it had an awful and completely irrelevant title, so no one would know what it was unless they went hunting for this amazing script at random; unless they knew it existed in the first place and went looking for it.

In other words, it completely defeated the purpose of sharing the link, because they would have only known about it if it was there. A true catch-22.

All I wanted to do was let HN readers know how to enhance their user experience here on the site in the best way possible.

Perhaps, however, the real question should be "Why doesn't HN have features like this integrated from the start up?" How come some scripting hackers can integrate something like a basic search function into the site, while HN can't seem to do so itself?
This looks really great! Thanks for doing it.
"Here's a link to a google doc I have created"

Thank You! Anything that enables me to avoid InfoQ's design disaster of a web site is greatly appreciated.
Nicely done. I bootstrapped a consulting business, and ended up learning many of the lessons in this guide one way or the other. (Usually the hard way.) I don't usually find much value in write-ups like this, but this one matched my experiences pretty closely.

I'd like to see two more additions: one for figuring out what size you want to be, and one for getting help. Figure out ahead of time if you want to grow to include subcontractors or, possibly, employees; it'll change how you handle your business growth.

Also, get help. A freelancer or consultant actually has to do a lot of different jobs: you have to be a salesperson, a marketing person, an office manager, a professional, etc. Probably you only wanted to be a professional. It's easy for the paperwork to start to get disorganized, it's easy to fall behind on invoicing, it's easy to completely ignore doing any marketing (which might include things like building a nice website for your business). So, get help with those things. Despite the additional cost, you'll be glad you did.
Well, "provide" in the sentence "justifying opening android in order to be able to have a consistent platform to provide their services on" has a meaning from the standpoint of the provider. They own the proprietary code of the individual apps (gtalk, mail, voice search, youtube, etc), and in order to be able to _provide_ these specific apps written in this specific code, they needed to open source the platform to encourage other vendors to buy in.

It's actually kind of similar to their stance on the Chrome browser: the web browser itself is open source, and they are providing that in order to enable a consistent platform for their apps (mail, gtalk, youtube, whatever). Just because the browser is open source doesn't mean they need to, or anyone expects them to, open source the code to gmail. If you consider the line between the user and the service to be at the device/UI level, and not at the network level, then this makes sense. They are enabling a better experience by providing functionality that can run more locally to you. This is, however, a huge risk on their part. They know that their software is easier to reverse engineer once it is not running just on their servers -- which, considering the complexity of the gmail android app, makes me wonder why no one has done enough reverse engineering to be able to recreate the UI and still use their backend -- the desktop browser gmail service doesn't require SSL, so it's easy to take a look at the protocol (much easier than trying to network-sniff an SSL session on the android platform itself, if the gmail app uses SSL) and recreate it. And now that they've created and released an app that runs locally they are more tied to a consistent API than they were with just a browser based app, so the rationale of "they'll just change the API and we'll always be playing catch up" against reverse engineering is moot. It's most likely against the gmail TOS though.

Incidentally, I'd like a thirdparty gmail app because I want to access a gmail account that isn't tied to my phone from my phone (like my work account, we use google mail service for company email), however the web based interface is pretty strong. While it's interesting from a UX standpoint to have EVERYTHING tied to one google account, it's not pragmatic and doesn't work with the goal people accessing using/their services.
Again, I can't reply to your last post. Very weird.

> Okay, so if I understand you correctly, freedom of speech is violated by censorship, but censorship doesn't always violate freedom of speech.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Although I don't think it's called just "censorship" when, for instance, an oppressive government puts people in jail, or put them to death, for saying things the government doesn't like.

Freedom of speech has absolutely nothing to do, what so ever, with private arenas. You are not protected by freedom of speech in a private arena, at all. Apple is censoring their App Store content, and they are within their legal right to do so.

Generally speaking, although it is completely legal to censor content in a private arena, it is sort of frowned upon by its community. Usually. I think this is why the iPhone developer is crying foul, using the word "censorship", because people frown upon that practice.
Although I'm not living and/or working in the Randstadt (and I'm not even Dutch), can always be interesting to meet.
Did he just list his "Eagle Scout" badge under "News"?
CNN and other news organizations reporting on tweets
Mono happens to interest quite a few non-Linux developers. The Sims 3 (running on Windows and OS X) heavily uses Mono for scripting in-game events.
http://www.thesponty.com/events/242040/Unveiling_of_The_Book...
Total Immersion and the “Transfigured City:” Shared Augmented Realities
This is an ad-hominem argument. Consider his arguments for their merits. Not because you don't feel he has a good enough resume.
Understanding xVM: Foundations (virtualization on Solaris)
This could help too: http://www.nltk.org/
It wouldn't, but not because of free speech laws, but because of anti-discrimination laws.
30mph - the cost of missing every stoplight.
I am in sharp agreement with swombat.

You have taken candidate B and idealized him much more than I think is fair. You have made him into a fledging version of A, by assuming he can be taught to the roughly same level eventually, but without the attitude. You then offer a backhanded jab by saying if B is unteachable to nearly the level of A, it is the teacher's fault. This is an unfair conclusion to jump to.

A positive attitude and a brilliant teacher aren't all that is needed for training to be successful; you also need a capable and curious student. They have to be able to learn this stuff, and they want learn it for reasons other than pleasing the teacher. Where these qualities aligns, the student is bound to do some learning on their own; unless they elect to learn the exact same things as everyone else, they are bound to have something to teach others. That the OP mentioned no one really learns anything from candidate B suggests he doesn't have the drive and curiosity; these are warning signs.

Furthermore, you can't teach creativity. You can't provide someone with a list of steps to follow every time they want to create something new. The list represents the creative product, and the list is just someone following by rote.

What you can do is sow the seeds of creativity; you can inspire. You can ask questions to help guide someone's thinking, and get them past mental roadblocks. You can throw in ideas and expose flaws. But you can't teach someone to be inspired and come up with new ideas. You can't draw them a map, and then expect that with that training alone they'll be able to draw the next one. You have to rely on their brain's capability to form new connections on its own.
It is implied, but not a given that A is an a-hole. This detail bothered me too. There are a huge number of intangibles needed to actually gauge whether A or B is a better fit.

With such a sparse description of A and B, it seems like many of us are filling in lots of details based on our interpretation of the situation.
This is a great guide, and I truly thank you for posting it. I'm in the process of building my own small software business/consultancy, and one of the questions I have is how to find and keep customers. This really, really helps. Thanks!
7 advisory for 6 years? is it 1 advisory for year?
It is censorship. But it isn't illegal, or even morally wrong. Apple is within their rights to censor the content of their App Store.

However, people generally frown upon censorship, even in private arenas where it is perfectly legal to apply censorship. This is why, I presume, the article author is throwing the C-word around which such enthusiasm.
Wow, an hour walk!

I bike or take the bus or train for anything more than a mile. Walking is very boring. (I have never owned a car either.)

BTW, Chicagoans are lucky to have estimated arrival times for every bus stop in the city (http://ctabustracker.com/). It is very accurate and makes deciding between walking and waiting for the bus an easy decision. (Usually I commit to taking the bus and just sit in my apartment until a few minutes before it is scheduled to arrive. It's wonderful.)
Perhaps you should start by altering your definitions - to be a great programmer or hacker requires the ability to work with others and explain yourself coherently. So candidate A is not really a great programmer.

I think you have to keep looking for candidates or assess why you haven't had better candidates apply. Hackers should be hired based on examples of previous accomplishments that they can explain to you.

I'll spare everybody the long rant I originally had planned . . . maybe I'll follow up sometime with my own Ask HN if my thoughts come together.
I don't know where you are, but how many "A":s will you have the possibility to hire in a given year?

Edit: I liked byrneseyeview's idea of giving A incentives to care about the success of the team.
Competitive services have already been created. There have been attempts to do it all: decentralise it, improve it, extend it to more characters, add video, add photos. Especially during their bad points where they were down every 5 minutes due to load. Twitter has enough of a user base that its stupidly hard for anyone to compete with it. The core system is "very simple", the user base is what counts in this game.
How Batman: Arkham Asylum Used The Element Of Surprise
is that some kind of twitter-clone?
This makes me realize I would listen to a podcast of them debating and discussing stuff. And I never listen to any podcast.

They're both pretty nice guys, always civil in their opinions (a bit less for Joe Armstrong when he talks about OOP). Their talks are pretty much always interesting, and they both have a tendency to use Comic Sans MS in their slides.
the answer is Walk
MD5 hash extension attack breaks API authentication in Flickr (and others)
"Sometimes you get spam or mail you don't want, so stop using email completely."

No thanks. I learned to use email correctly, and it's a valuable tool that I am not going to replace with phone calls or twitter.
"Now slide your pants down and sit on that gloved hand."

Well yes, you can.
If you do this often, maybe the Readable (http://readable-app.appspot.com/setup.html) or Readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/) bookmarklets would help? They isolate the main text on a page and reformat it to your custom font, size, and margins.
The best way to ensure that you never implement a cool idea is to setup a Google Group where other people you've never met can "discuss" it with you.

Just sayin'.
The example you've given is of Hot Cocoa which is a series of nice wrappers around common Cocoa UI operations

The direct mapping from Obj-C to MacRuby is quite simple. Here's an example from some code I'm working on at the moment

TPShot *newShot= [[TPShot alloc] initInWorld:world
atPosition:shotPos
facing:facingAngle];

becomes

new_shot= TPShot.initInWorld world,
atPosition:shotPos,
facing:facingAngle
I'm in Barcelona: email is in profile!
Teen Inventors Fight Tinnitus
That is a very, very superficial comparison. Half of the contras for MySql (the ones referring to MyIsam) don't really apply, since you simply use InnoDB if you need those features.
So it's no real help in deciding which DB to pick...
What Would A Chicago-style Y Combinator Look Like?
Exactly. In the real world you're always going to have disgruntled people, no matter how reasonable and fair you may be towards them. It's probably true that you could prevent some terrorism by changing your actions to stop doing whatever's causing some subset of the population to become upset, but there will always be some person or group whose demands are so crazy and far-out that no country could reasonable accede to them. Against the irrational even appeasement is an imperfect deterrent.

I don't think, for example, that it would have been realistically possible to have avoided giving Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh or even Osama Bin Laden a reason to attack their respective targets.
it's a paper on using Atom cores instead of more beefy ones.

The researchers just choose to use Bing for their test data instead of mysql or something else... and their point was that bing was more cpu intensive, so the results would be more solid.
Suicides lift lid on French misery
I have always wondered what Operating System Einstein would prefer. :/

If you base your argument on his famous quote:

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

Then I suppose some *nix variant.. maybe netbsd?
France televisions in Moovida media center
Efforts Vs Results
I know you read about Ad Hominem Arguments on several Important Internet Web Guides To Arguing, but in the real world the credibility and authority of an author does bear on their persuasive power.

If Michael Arrington, Steve Ballmer, or Ashton Kutcher wrote an article about "duct tape programming", you'd have no trouble recognizing the dissonance. You only have trouble with it here because it hits close to home: you don't yourself want to be disqualified from the discussion. Which, nobody is going to do that, so relax.

Besides, fully expecting at least 2 HN'ers to jump out from the bushes shouting "ad hominem!", I made some effort to keep my criticism relevant: it's not that he hasn't shipped real product, it's that he has a bio that makes it clear (to me) that he doesn't think shipping is as important as methodology.
Skills can be learned, it will take some time but if someone is a real team player he'll make the effort.

I think this is completely wrong. See my reply to edw519 for my reasoning why, but the abstract is that I don't think potential is a constant across the population, or even a subset of the population -- like programmers. Aptitude = effort + potential. A good teacher can help, but won't overcome an incapable student, as much as the student may want to please the teacher.

Attitude is a lot harder to change than skill.

This has been said by a couple of others, and my first thought is really that it depends on exactly what people mean by changing a person's attitude. The theme seems to be that candidate A types are just antagonistic pricks who either want it their way or no way at all.

From the perspective I've gained, it's rarely that simple. When an employee gets branded as having an attitude problem, I'll see as often a problem manager as I will a problem employee.

In the cases of the problem manager, what I'll find is a manager who believes that the hierarchy is as hard as stone, and that employees have absolutely no place to question their judgement or the judgement of those above them. Any employee who might offer any sort of commentary or criticism are immediately branded as an attitude problem, and threatened into submission. The subsequent rebellion may take multiple forms, including them just going off into the weeds without listening to anyone about anything. Immature, perhaps, but in a pot and kettle sense. If you find disrespect going in one direction in a relationship, it's worth seeing if that same disrespect flows in the other direction.

Asserting more absolute authority, which seems to be the most common response, will only make this worse. Not everyone's value judgments are subject to overridding by fear and a desire to please others; I don't think we would want them to be, either.
it seems you are already working with both. so it's not a hiring decision.

Keep A and learn how to motivate him. it's more effective then keeping B and making him smarter.
I can't find a source in english, but today another employer commited suicide, leaving a letter in which he blames the climate inside the firm.

http://www.repubblica.it/2009/09/sezioni/esteri/suicidi-fran...
Oh, c'mon. It's easy to say "strip down all the cruft" ... but people actually use all of those tools. You'd be pretty unhappy if they removed a feature you use every day because people thought it made the menu bar look too crowded.
Based on the assumption that you really need to hire now and can't wait (which I find unlikely, I believe it's always better to have no one than 'anyone'), candidate B. At least they can be a solid member of the team, if not a superstar. Candidate A is just trouble waiting to happen.
Well, for McVeigh, apparently a large sign saying "Day Care Inside" would have worked for that particular target, but not targets in general.
When Fireworks CS4 was first released it was easily the buggiest piece of major software I'd ever tried to use. This bug was just insane:

http://blogs.adobe.com/sarthak/Text_Issue.png

I immediately downgraded back to CS3 and only reupgraded 9 months later, when they finally released an update. Unfortunately, I use Fireworks for all my front-end work and it seems buggier than ever in Snow Leopard.

I've experimented with every app that looks like it could be a potential replacement -- most recently Opacity (http://likethought.com/opacity/) -- with none quite hitting the web design niche that it was able to fill. Usually because it's only one or two guys working on it. Why a company like Panic hasn't tried to take advantage of the obvious demand is beyond me.
Go to meetups. Find ways to give presentations. If there aren't appropriate meetups in your area (or the area where your target market works), start them. If you can't start a meetup, you'll probably have a hard time marketing a company anyways.

Don't talk about your service offerings at meetups and network events unless you're asked, and keep it brief. Make friends and connect re: services offline.
I would recommend downloading the .key (Keynote) file from Slideshare and viewing it on your own, if possible. The slide notes are useful, more of the presenter's ideas shared (via http://twitter.com/importantshock/status/4430454006).

I initially thought that was the reason why it was in flash; so slide notes would be visible somehow. Thats not the case though.
If it weren't for Lightroom (truly great with its very own style - not Mac-like, not Win-like, just plain cool) I would long have despaired. Maybe there is some hope, but the task would be huge.
That's terribly naive.

I challenge you to find one person in the world that there isn't at least one other person who wants to kill them. You can't. No matter who you pick, someone wants to kill them for their race, or because they are mixed race and therefore traitors. In fact, you can find someone for each component race. Someone wants to kill them for their religion, regardless of what it is. Someone wants to kill them for their economic system, regardless of what it is. Someone wants to kill them for their position on abortion, regardless of what it is.

And don't forget the crazies, because some of them are actually capable of pulling stuff off, despite their crazy.

How much more so for entire countries.
This is very cool tech. Hopefully it finds it's way to pretty much everywhere. It's a mystery to me why it hasn't shown up in every Border's and Barnes & Nobles yet. I'd gladly pay a few bucks to get some classic literature printed on demand.
Joel Spolsky, like all frequent writers, can be full of a great deal of hot air but the case study in his piece is 'a guy who was instrumental in writing and shipping the first widely usable web browser'. The 'debunking' is supported by someone's comment on twitter and a reference to a guy who writes books rather than software. Spolsky might have oversimplified, glossed intricacies over but you're hardly going to refute his point by oversimplifying further, digging through your tweets or summoning the persuasive power of a popular methodology to your aid. Because, you know, the other guy wrote Netscape.
I don't know about Linux, but on FreeBSD you can use pmcstat to instrument a running process; see pmc(3) and pmcstat(8).

Linux probably has something similar.

kldload: can't load hwpmc: Exec format error

Meh, need a custom kernel from the look of it, HWPMC_HOOKS isn't in GENERIC :(