skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right: what you do outside of work isn't your employer's business. However, I would not hire a programmer who will not program at home. That's not to say I would expect them to be contributing to so Open Source project, or to be running a side business, but that they can and do put together code in their own time, for their own reasons.

For example, the guy who runs a personal blog, and put together his own widget to display some sort of stat, seems like a good idea. The guy who runs a personal blog, and spends a day (off) hunting down a widget that someone else made, that kind of does what he wants, and costs $20 to use, would not be a good fit.

My view on it is something similar to: I wouldn't take my car to a mechanic who takes his own car to the dealer. Why would I hire a a programmer who, when he needs a program written for himself, goes and finds someone else's work?
I had thought about that but since the target audience is non-tech people, they might get very pissed/confused when their selections are no longer applicable when they return to the site because the cookie got deleted.
Actually, only blatant violations are rejected. There are a lot of apps out there that make use of a few private API calls so I wouldn't say that Google has "special access."
This also depends on the state. yay, california for protecting our rights!!
I believe Psystar runs their own updater and supplies the pre-hacked updates to users.

Is this incorrect?
Working 6 days a week with 60-hour weeks, how is a startup employee supposed to do anything other than chores and the occasional date outside of work?

Maids, cooks, personal shoppers?
Thanks Peter! I'll consult with the marketing department to see if we can't get you a promo copy :). I really appreciate you sharing your insights with us.
Thanks for correcting the voltage/current error - you're totally right about that.

Great idea about the voltage pulse! Let me see if I have this right: with a known voltage, the current will rise in proportion to the nearness of the penny? That is, for a fixed voltage, when the penny is closer, the current will be higher?
What kind of current can a dime sized nuclear battery supply and at what voltage? All the article says is "useful" amounts of power.
I've got the O'Reilly bash book, it's well worth getting.
I must say, I agree. Having _no_ interest in programming outside work begs the question: Why is it your day job?

Although I don't work on too many spare projects on my own, I read a whole lotta websites relating to programming (this site, for instance..) and catch up on relevant news and technologies.

If the title was "No, I wouldn't hire a programmer who isn't cranking out code every hour he's awake", I'd definitely disagree. But, in my opinion, in this business, you really need to know what's going on. And unless you're in a research position at your day job, I'm guessing your boss wouldn't want you to spend working hours studying every interesting story on HN. Ergo, you'd read up on your spare time.

That's not to say you shouldn't have hobbies. A three year old Norwegian study [1] shows that IT-engineers have the largest burnout-rate of all occupations. It's important to relax, find something that makes you feel disconnected (my love for the moment is mountain biking, but whatever floats your boat).

[1] Google translate of Norwegian article about burnout-rates in the IT-industry: http://bit.ly/it-burnout
Because MySQL was the first NoSQL in a way ;-)
Jim Simons retiring from Renaissance Technologies
What am I missing? all mysql calls have to go over a system call, so strace will see them (as write() or send() I guess).

Why use ltrace for this job?
Let me put it this way. You will definitely get a mail if you get accepted. If you get no mail, you probably didn't get accepted. Also, the moment one of us get's an acceptance mail, you will probably see a post here.
I wish I could empathize with this, but our project managers generally have a ton of business experience and very little, if any, technical experience.
I can't upvote you enough, your OS does not define you, you CAN (I do) regularly use both for work and play and enjoyment and like them both.
Command+Shift+F to enable flash on a page, so you don't have to click on every flash component. You can also white-list pages (Useful for hulu, youtube I like having blocked due to autoplay).
The geeks who saved Usenet
I'd much prefer to read blogs via an NNTP reader

If you use Thunderbird RSS reader to read blogs, you pretty much get the Same look and feel. I was used to Thunderbird NNTP client, when I started adding blog subscriptions to Thunderbird, the transition was seamless
More likely public release plans are something a massive public company does not want to have available.
this url is a cleaner read http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/01/07/saving_us... but you miss the picture.
and provoking him into an enlightened state

I'm unconvinced that this actually happens, so I, at least, would expect that it's very, very rare to use verbal or physical abuse in a way that produces enlightenment of any sort. Discipline, I would understand. Enlightenment or understanding? Doubtful.
Comcast popups warn customers of possible virus infections
In that sense I've seen it as similar to the BSD vs. Linux camps. BSD is correctness, Linux is (often sloppy) pragmatism. Usually the latter wins.
There are plenty of people around like me who are fine with any OS and use them all for slightly different things. Don't be married to your platform, makes you much happier.
I agree completely. I don't think it should be how many hours you put into a side project or how much time you spend coding something outside of work. It comes down to whether the person really enjoys tinkering with (new) technologies.

It shouldn't matter if you don't code outside of work and it isn't your employers business. But if you do code outside of work, it definitely says a lot about your character and how you regard technology.

My coworker said to me once, "There are those who do technology as a job, and there are those who do it as a passion. We want the latter"
Putting America’s Diet on a Diet
MySQL is easier to use in that it has a shallow learning curve compared to PostgreSQL.
Very valid point.

I suppose as the boss you need to know how to act and when. Some people will react in different ways and you need to be aware of that. Based on my reading I interpreted that Steve thought the CEO's tactic was useful.
Twitter in French, Italian, German, and Spanish
Compiling Ruby with MacRuby 0.5b1
Why can't blind people have browsers with javascript?
I've never thought about it, but text to speech and the like should not require that the browser does not have javascript?
Good article... if the server's up!
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 106 - The Homoneizer
It's true, we have no SEO at this point and are just starting to work on it. Would love to know what search terms you expect Everlater to show up under...
America's Smartest Cities—From First to Worst [The Daily Beast]
(Update: Google has begun fixing the Usenet archive in response to this article)
Right. You can also look at it as a type of hack ... an emotional hack, if you will. It tends to work well with men. It is similar to the cliche teachers use: "you will never amount to anything". The idea is you will get so angry, you will self-motivate just to prove them wrong. The army also uses these tricks in boot camp.

A good leader will figure out a priori which techniques work with which people and apply them appropriately.
Good info.

Any pointers to details?
None of the top programmers I know code outside of work. They all have other hobbies and have been coding for long enough that they no longer find it challenging. They enjoy coding, but passion burns out before you truly master software development.

PS: There is a tendency to start doing side projects if there job stops directly involving coding because they start managing people, teaching, or just retire.
A bit more than 200, probably over 600 accounts with the same password distribution and you're looking at close to a certain chance of hitting at least one account with that password.

One thing that keeps bothering me about this story and many others based on the same data is that those 64 passwords are such a minute portion of the total set of accounts. Perhaps if they had done some further analysis like comparing password sequences composed on contiguous letters in various keyboard layouts then passwords like "qwerty" or "asdfgh" could similarly be grouped together.
Yes and yes! :)
Click and hold on Console in the dock - a preview [with window titles] of all 4 windows will appear - click on the one you want. (Snow Leopard -- don't remember whether it was there on Leopard or not]
The biggest problem would seem to be either liberating the raw data from Google or finding someone who still has readable archives.
I do it every day using Cygwin. Certain tasks are so much quicker when you can for/while/do/cut/grep/sort/uniq/wc/>< and so on.
Google Groups used to be a great service when they first took over Deja News, but things have been gradually deteriorating ever since.

They used to be read-only; now, they allow anyone with a fake account to post. They are a huge source of Usenet spam. I have been kill-filing posts from Google Groups for about a year. It's not a pleasant thing to do, since there still are quite a few people who I like to read but only see quoted in replies now because they use Google Groups.

Whenever someone posts the same article 10 times in a row on a Usenet newsgroup, I always look at the mail header, and every single time it is from Google Groups. I don't know what is wrong, but there must be some user interface bug that causes people to resubmit their post. Maybe they don't realize that Usenet has a lag between posting and seeing your post. Maybe there's something wrong with the submit button. I don't know, but I've been seeing this phenomenon for a few years now.

Initially, Google Groups made a clear distinction between Usenet newsgroups and Google's own groups, but they've been blurring the two more and more over the years. The result is that a lot of people don't even know they're posting to Usenet, and are unaware of the different etiquette and social customs there (real names, top posting, etc.). Lately they've started including third-party forums as well, so now it's basically a free-for-all, and there is no way to just search Usenet anymore. You have a choice between "Google Groups" and "all groups", where the latter includes Google Groups, Usenet, and random bulletin boards on the web.

If Google isn't interested in supporting Usenet with a decent archive anymore (and I can understand their reluctance, since I'm sure there's little to no money in it) I wish they would pass the responsibility to someone else and get out of the way, because at this point I wish Deja News was still around - I'd have no need for Google Groups anymore.

And I know everyone loves to bash on Usenet, about how it's obsolete and dead, but I have to say that at least when it comes to programming language newsgroups, it's still hopping. I follow about a dozen programming newsgroups, and I can't keep up. About once a week I have to "mark all as read". As long as it still causes information overload, I don't think it can be fairly declared extinct.
The intersection of chronic, treatable conditions and low probability, high cost events is not empty. You could find a condition with any combination of being chronic, acute, low probability, high probability, low cost, or high cost.

What you're really looking for is getting insurance out of covering expected medical expenses, but the problem is that doctors and hospital charge higher prices to the uninsured. I had a medical bill once that was denied by insurance, and the hospital wanted something like $12,000. Later we got the insurance to pay, and the hospital only charged them $2,000 or so.

A related problem is that the tax code favors insurance companies by providing a tax break to employers, which is why most Americans get insurance through their employer.
No doubt there is still some flexibility in the US, but unfortunately the US is also A, not B. I'm assuming you and your parents did not receive exemptions from taxes, legal credentialing requirements, and the like.
It is hard to k ow where to begin when addressing all of the delusions about building a successful and worthwhile business that you seem to be suffering from. If you want to create a business that operates with integrity and honesty that lasts for generations you start by creating one that can last for a month. Get feedback from your customers and the environment in which you operate to see if you can make it last for a year. Rinse. Lather. Repeat. No one who creates a worthwhile multi-generational enterprise starts out knowing exactly how it will be accomplished, and most are honest/knowledgible enough to admit this.

It sounds like you are not cut out for entrepreneurship in any culture; I would suggest a return to academia...
Medtronic made some nuclear-powered implantable pacemakers in the 1970s. Supposedly, they worked fine, but adoption was hindered by the word "nuclear."

My biggest concern is disposal. I don't like the idea of millions of these things ending up in landfills, even though I'm sure there would be an aggressive recycling campaign associated with their introduction.
I really like the AMA series on Reddit. I would suggest we do something similar here, but I suspect Reddit is a little more, well, diverse.
Well, not quite ask me anything--so long as it is not specific enough to figure out who he is.
I was a huge fan of that entire series (though 4 was kind of buggy).

It is hard to find games in that same vein anymore. Planescape:Torment and KOTOR came close, but even those are several years old now.
The conversation is about compatibility, not portability. ie: what is the best way to store ipv4 addresses so that they are compatible with ipv6 addresses when you need to start supporting those.

At any rate we are talking about two different things.

if you have the ipv6 address 1234:0000:5678:0000:0000:9212... you can write it a number of different ways, using the :: abbreviation for the various runs of zeros. ipv4 really doesn't have that pit fall in the string representation of its addresses.

So, if you store it as a string one way and then latter when you get input that has the same address written another way you are going to have problems if you don't normalize. Since we are talking about storing in a database, as the parent to this chain was you would likely want to normalize to the most compact representation to save space in your database. The precise type semantics of your language of choice are irrelevant.
Google Begins Fixing Usenet Archive
Google Begins Fixing Usenet Archive

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/usenet_fix/
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/usenet_fix/
That's not really how email works.
My usage of windows over last 5yrs has been as you describe 'a dumb terminal to access a Linux box'. [ A long time ago I was very much into the COM electric cool aid, so have used it as a dev platform commercially, but not recently. ]

To be fair my use of OSX over the last year has also been around 50% 'dumb terminal' due to web work.

I just never see people hacking on windows laptops anymore, and on balance I think its a good thing.
Not from taxes no, that's a must I'm afraid and a big downside to the whole situation.

legal credentialing requirements in Texas at the time were almost non existent so we didn't have to worry about that, my parents were considered pretty radical by peers back when we started, because homeschooling wasn't fleshed out nor well received at the time.

I still remember my parents not letting us go out mid-day by ourselves due to them not wanting everyone thinking we were just a bunch of hoodlums skipping school. Instead we got invaluable experience working at the family business.
Good to know. Mostly I've just been hitting Toys R Us and similar places and haven't found any basic blocks available there. I'll look harder:)
Hey intellectronica. I'm definitely not claiming that business is predictable; you can do certain things though to hedge your bets (hopefully I mentioned it in my post below, but let me know if I'm still sounding unclear since I tend to to do that).
This post actually presents two premises.

The first, that programmer hacking on their own projects, I agree is a very positive indicator. If they don't, it may or may not be a negative indicator, depending on the circumstances. However, I've found the combination of someone who really has the itch to hack in their own time, and that same someone who honestly can't find the time is rare. More often, after enough prodding, they'll admit they just aren't that interested, and that it is "just a job like any other".

The second, that selecting candidates based upon social connections is an optimal strategy, I approach with some caution. This is not to say that it isn't the best way for raganwald to do things, but I have seen people develop insurmountable confirmation biases simply because someone they know gave a candidate the thumbs up. A lackluster interview performance wasn't enough to overcome this; poor performance once hired wasn't enough either. The trust the hirer puts in their network to suggest the right people must be for the right reasons. This, in a person's profession network, is rather rare. More often, two people knowing one another is the basis for a referral, rather than what the two people know about one another. This works ok in situations where the primary goal is to find a good social fit, but it is like throwing dice when determining if the candidate is capable of performing the required duties. In a lot of cases, both parties just don't care; the referral is a social, not economic or professional, transaction. Luckily for both parties, many companies don't care that much either. Mediocrity is not really affected by the introduction of more mediocrity, so neither party ends up with a tarnished image. This sort of politicing sucks.

My perspective on this is much the same as Joel Spolsky's -- or at least the perspective he used to have. If a particular candidate comes pre-recommended by someone, I'm really hesitant to know that. If I'm the person doing the recommending, I always wonder whether I'm doing it because this person is a genuinely good fit, or if I am just feeling the pressure to be a good friend. If I was both introduced to him and one of the one's vetting him, I'd be really concerned that my bias is way too strong for me to make an honest, objective decision. Hiring people based on a blind resume submission sucks, too, and I don't know of any other alternatives. But I worry we have a blind spot to the biases of this method of finding candidates, simply because we want to believe the best in everyone we know.
I mostly agree with you, but it's not hard to create a karma system that isn't just a reward for hyperactivity. For example, Hacker News could change its system so that nobody got a point simply for posting a comment.

But however fine-tuned the system, no point system is immune from gaming, and no-one can expect points to be any more than vague clue as to someone's true worth as a participant in the community.
Getting MacRuby's compiler to work
Hey sivers. I mentioned it below, but throwing your marketing dollars entirely on the 30M probably won't be the best idea because you don't know your initial conversion ratios. You can try it on a sample size to get the ratios, and then build up gradually as you're hitting your numbers profitably.
None of the top programmers I know code outside of work.

Ironically I've had the exact opposite experience. In professional life, the best I could say about any programmer who doesn't code in their spare time is that they're "ok." And more often than not, I'd call them pretty mediocre. I've yet to meet anyone great who doesn't do at least a little programming on the side. It's a great predictor of ability in my experience.

No offense to anyone here.
Bizarre, instead of simply hiring a couple of translators at $0.10 a word, they build a tool to let users translate the site. How many words of copy does twitter.com have anyway? I count less than 100 on the frontpage.

And it's not just twitter - Facebook did the same - with painful results.

The truth is, being a native speaker isn't enough to produce good translations. And while the English creators of a site can't tell the difference, its users certainly can.
Another good article on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870102
Actually that's a nice way of filtering mailing lists nowadays. Posts worth reading and posts signed with the full name are almost the same ones... If you missed something really interesting from other posts, it will most likely be quoted later on anyways.
Google has a 'captcha' on Google Groups which prevents mass copying. There is a guy with those tapes, but they're the early 80s - I don't know where Dejanews got their original archives. But that guy would be a start.
Nuke the Moon: A Realistic Plan for World Peace
If people start posting AMA links on this site, then it won't be "this site" anymore.
That's complete, and you'll have to pardon my language, bullshit. If you want to find deep meaning in a guy's lost temper, that's fine and your prerogative.

If I sat at the foot of some exalted spiritual man for long enough seeking meaning, I too would probably start finding meaning in his every act. It's a completely self-fulfilling prophecy.

That's great that the author learned a life lesson by being summarily embarrassed in a room of his peers. But realize that is totally a function of how he chose to process it, and not of some great teaching technique of the CEO.
How To Enable The Super-Spartan, Totally Buttonless Google Home Page
This is an old post, but the news about the moon rocket explosion scheduled for early tomorrow morning (http://www.seanpaune.com/2009/10/08/nasa-moon-bombing/) made me think of this.
Wherein Peter attempts to establish his testing cred
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870126

In reference.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=869681

In reference to here.
I've been using Apache Qpid for some time and am pretty happy with it. Unfortunately I get the feeling that development on the draft 1.0 spec has fizzled out. It's kind of a chicken and egg scenario with developers not wanting to implement a spec which is still in flux and the AMQP workgroup not wanting to ratify a spec which doesn't have at least two compatible implementations. I really hope this isn't the case and we'll eventually see the 1.0 spec ratified, because right now compatibility is kind of a crapshoot with different vendors all implementing different pre-release specs.
This would be way better if it was available in a list of some kind. There is no way I'm going to click through 56 pages to read their list.
Hey Nate. Sorry for the clarity issue. Running a $1M one-man operation is definitely pushing it; it's possible, but that's probably too much to put on one's shoulders. A typical $1M company probably has around 5 employees, which I should've mentioned. (The exact revenue per employee however should be based on your industry's averages to see how you fare with your competitors/industry)
A bit off-topic, but I just read the features list for mosaic (http://groups.google.com/group/alt.hypertext/msg/7fde2f6d4d5...) and was really surprised how close it is to browsers nowadays. The only serious improvements that current firefox has over that mosaic are: tabs, JS and blocking stuff. (I'm not counting stuff that's just a simple improvement - like rendering new html+css, ability to use icons for favourite pages, etc.)

It's a bit sad :(
This is why I get completely pissed off when I see some schmuck in a suit flattering their would-be employers during an interview, or some overcompensating upper-level worker playing territory / power games. It gets in the way of business. I don't think it's quite as black and white as you put it, but I agree nonetheless.
He should do this here instead.