skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd be more interested in knowing what Google's ad server (doubleclick) knows about me.
In my experience, the average coder dealing with SQL is flummoxed by non-trivial problems (even those that have fairly well-understood solutions) and wind up hacking in messes anyway. Heck, it's 50-50 whether they normalize their data or use transactions in the first place.

But I don't think you can fairly judge specialized tools based on the likely experience of coders using it outside their experience.
>PS Is your name calling really necessary? In your post you refer to me as a 'snotty kid' and a 'fool'

Well, you said his code looks like a hack job by a poor programmer. That's fairly insulting too.

About the actual mechanics of screen scraping, I guess your only issue is that he could have used an html parser to sanitize the code first before querying it.
What you describe sounds more like a small business than a startup. YC only funds startups (i.e. scalable and disruptive). The two are not synonymous. YC primarily funds software and web-based companies because you can create a scalable and disruptive web-based company on $20k.
For certain values of "best", yes. It's completely unsuited for many game types, but what it does it does really well.
I guess that's fine, as long as nobody has ambitions for Linux adoption to grow beyond the relatively small already-clued-in demographic. There's nothing wrong with wanting to stay small.

FWIW, I used Debian/PPC at home for years. But, then, I was also among the small set of people who actually ran NeXTSTEP on a "gecko" PA-RISC machine and a SPARC laptop made by Tadpole. That's the story behind my perspective, anyway.
Startups: Your Users' Behavior Is Not A Random Variable
We now auto-insert Stack Overflow affiliate info into any amazon book links posted on Stack Overflow

I'm curious how others feel about this. To me, it seems like Stack Overflow is taking the affiliate credit for something that a user posts. I personally don't use Stack Overflow but if I did I would be a little annoyed that they are making money off of the work that I did to find a book for someone.

On the other hand, all of the comments I saw on Stack Overflow seemed to indicate that people really liked it [1].

1. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/26964/auto-inserting...
There is so much career crap that comes through the internet, and this is the most practical piece I've read in a long time. So many decisions can be concluded by simply asking the question of the post title.

The best one to make, I assume, is if you can both earn and learn.
UBS bank fined £8m for system and data control failures
Build vs Buy, or tips for selling to larger companies/enterprise
How To Get Found
Schneier on Security : The Problems with Unscientific Security
Hey Ubuntu, Stop Making Linux Look Bad
Social Media influencers are not traditional influencers
Lets assume if an recruiter looks up my name on Stack Overflow careers, and they won't find me there because I was busy I didn't have time for Stack Overflow. Does that mean I'm not a good programmer? does that mean I don't help my fellow programmers?
How long until other sites come up with this point based resume linking? Sounds like another online game to me now. Except that you use your points in real life.
Google has 553 matches for my name and 75.700 for my nickname. I guess I should now add a Google keyword field in my CV.
Did they forget a staging link ? http://img.skitch.com/20091105-bk6g841s7gwags3y84ksf9gtgi.pn...
Mandriva Linux 2010 Review and Commentary - Linux Critic
Monkeys have parts, too.
If you want to provide access to an API, put the API on a separate subdomain. That's why api.flickr.com has an open crossdomain.xml file and flickr.com doesn't.

That's what I was referring to. OP listed domains which are probably used exclusively to provide an API, e.g. api.ebay.com, implying that the crossdomain files on these domains pose a security risk.

I was wondering if my comment is understandable, obviously it's not :) Thanks for the clarification!
And what you need, it is not a fancy representation (from a closed source program). What you actualy need is the information itself for your custom reporting needs.

May I ask if you can export all of this info (in a readable format)?

EDIT: answer of the above from the article:
Currently you can save diagrams as XPS files and it also possible to copy diagram or legend to clipboard as image

jpg is readable, but wasnt what I was looking for :(
Choice as Happiness
Reading it, it looks like a total hack job by a poor programmer.

Unsurprising, most programmers are poor.
why is this at the top?
It would be good if he illustrated his point with an example of an ad optimized for the 84%. Brand awareness? Advertising online to bring people in-store rather than simply driving clicks? What are good examples?
Thanks for the link, that was a good read! Reminds me of my days at a mid sized regional bank. The amount of money they spent on implementing "Portals" was outrageous, and included licensing, training, consultants, and opportunity costs (which were huge if you consider what they could have done with all of the developers, testers, and sys admins that were otherwise tied up in the project). I don't think they've implemented Portals yet.
Sounds like a lot more work than just answering a bunch of genuine questions.
subdomains (mycompany.theapp.com)

that's hardly a 37signals "thing" and makes sense in a lot of products.

if i remember correctly, livejournal moved users from livejournal.com/user to user.livejournal.com many years ago for security reasons due to some cookie issue with a certain browser. moving to subdomains allowed them to set per-host cookies.
Having a big house, a personal trainer, 5 sports cars, etc., is becoming a sign of cheesiness.

Hear the drums?

Yes, but I simply don't care. I don't live my life the way I do because it's "cool" or trendy. I do it because it makes me happy. I live on a small farm miles away from the nearest urban center and if anything, my lifestyle is going in the opposite direction from most people with options. They're moving away from small towns and rural areas, I'm moving deeper into it. Telling a city dweller you live in the country is more likely to invite derision than envy.

My opinion is that a person's take on all this is significantly influenced by their current living conditions. If I were living in the middle of a dense city (and I spent my teenage years living in NYC) I would worry about overcrowding, lack of resources, how expensive life was, etc. But living out in the country, I see vast amounts of resources (I mentioned in a recent HN thread that I could farm all my own food in a fraction of the land we own if I felt like it), the ability to have as tiny or as large a house as you want and a general feeling of independence and self-sufficiency that city dwellers don't have. The problems you allude to I see as a resource distribution problem, not a resource availability problem.

It's an interesting subject to be sure, but probably OT for Hacker News :-(
Jesus fuck, the first comments I see here are complaints about the code.

What about the concept? Is it any good? Is it worth working on?
No matter what you do if a recruiter has foolish assumptions that you don't happen to meet you are screwed. Just like how in many bigger companies you have to survive the buzzword mine field to be considered for a position.

All part of dealing with people for the hiring process.
Any plans to add a gui?

At some point, yes.
I have to agree with Jon. Really, once you get into the cycle, and you write them first, it doesn't tend to add much time. It does, however, really hurt your productivity when you start doing TDD. It's akin to the hit you take when you move to a new programming language. You'll feel faster if you don't do it. But as you get more comfortable and get into a rhythm, it can be fairly insignificant. Just don't get ahead of yourself, and don't let the tests get out of sync.

Rails is a good example where this sync stuff is hard. It's wicked easy to use things like associations and named scopes to query records while forgetting to write a test to ensure that those queries actually return what you specify.

But keep in mind that tests aren't just for you. They're for your team, and the next guy who follows you. You can learn a lot about intent from tests too.
I managed to reproduce the bug last night and pushed a fix. Hope that helps, and thanks for the catch!
When my wife's family gets together to play games like Pictionary her grandfather won't let couples play on the same team because he says they fight too much. I wonder if investors feel the same way :-)
my servers are either debian or ubuntu, and my laptop is a mac. You do realize that the OS isn't a single monolithic code base. It's a bunch of smaller code bases that work together, which is precisely the point I was making.
This makes me glad I don't use Google products!
Emily's Little Experiment(1998)
The more I use SQL, the more I like it. Modeling certain kinds of data in RDBMS can be tricky, or near impossible, but one you get the schema down, the queries fetch and insert the data are usually straightforward.

SQL's only real problem in my opinion is that it doesn't provide many good facilities for handling fluctuating schemas.
Thanks, I just went and deleted all my google cookies!
And I block doubleclick in my hosts file. All this paranoia is starting to pay off!
(Vimeo Founder) Jake Lodwick's Standards Experiment
I agree, nobody has orchestrated the development of products people want this decade more than Steve. He deserves the praise as well as all those working for Apple.
FTA: CEO Kenneth Lin says that the site doesn’t ever sell user information, but instead shows users offers ...

I'm sure Mr. Lin is sincere about this but I don't see how anyone can trust him. If the site is a success, who knows but that (e.g.) Equifax might buy the site and implement a new, scummier policy?

Not to mention loss of privacy due to poor site data security (MySpace/Facebook, anyone?) or simple employee theft...
Thank you. The Chicago Community Trust announced in August it was handing out half a million dollars to new initiatives aimed at improving the local conversation. The winners circle includes a mix of universities, local blogs, and even a few big dogs like the Chicago News Cooperative, a new local news org started by well-known Chicago journalists with deep pockets and lots of connections.

It's great to have some no-strings funding to work with on top of our growing ad revenue...
Kinda like how the PS2 'forced' GTA III to be dumbed-down to run on its inferior hardware? C'mon. Developers write to the platforms they can sell on. That's not a sign of some malicious intent on the part of the platform owner.

And I'm still not buying your argument about exclusive DLC vs First Party games. Buying and maintaining first-party studios takes a hell of a lot of effort. And the entire goal of those titles is to increase the value of your platform (relatively decreasing the value of your competitors). It's the same thing. The only difference is that buying exclusive content for a multiplatform game is far, far cheaper and much less risky in this day and age.
Most online discussion are behind nick name, not the name on the resume. I do not put my nick (sometimes I think I should LOL) on the resume. So, searching by resume name might not give you much results and give you false negative
Brand awareness. An ad for a BMW for example. You're not likely to click and buy the car right there, so it works the same way as their TV ad does -- it'll keep the brand in your memory until you need to make a car purchase decision.
You should probably assign an object to the underscore, otherwise any argument which is undefined will match:

js> var _
js> _ == undefined
true

Just doing "var _ = {}" should be sufficient.

edit: however, this conflicts with Underscore.js (http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/), but if you put an "if (typeof _ === "undefined")" around the assignment you should be ok
A while back, I did everything I could to clear my YouTube account settings. Something I did apparently broke their code, and now YouTube viewing history is disabled.

There is no option to disable YouTube viewing history in the preferences on either YouTube or Google, but somehow, thankfully, YouTube no longer records my video history. :)
New Web Based Collaborative Outliner
Yikes -- we just inquired about the pricing and it starts at $50k per year for 100k products. Looks like it's targeted at larger retailers with poor search implementations.
I agree the best should already have offers.

But the premise of the SO careers is that 75% of the elite are not "delighted" with their current job.

So for many being happy with the job isn't a priority?
> geolocator.getLatLng("Forest Park, St. Louis, MO", function(center) {

> displayMapAt(center, 14);

> });

To my eyes, that solution is just fine. I don't think I'll ever be swayed to believe that adding on layers of indirection to JavaScript code for the sake of "syntactic goodness" is rationally motivated by leading to more practical power for actually solving problems.
How to create slideshows on your BlackBerry
Even if you don't get into the TDD stuff he evangelizes, it's a pretty darn good read. It has some really thought-provoking things to think about in terms of how to write your code. I wouldn't dismiss it offhandedly.
Data Exhaust from web services
"Mudge submitted an early version of AtD to Y Combinator Demo Day, Spring '09 and was promptly rejected."

I imagine that YC rejects EVERYBODY that applies to YC DEMO DAY.
Free A/B Split Testing Resources
The difference between "fool" and "looks like it's a hack job by a poor programmer" is that one critiques the actual work, and one assaults the person. Insulting or not, critiques of work improve discourse and name calling usually doesn't.
Startups.com Becomes a Q&A Site For Business Questions
agree - imagine inheriting this code and then having to figure out what the underscore is doing. ugh.

Sometimes brevity isn't the right solution.
The question isn't whether you buy the argument, it's whether VCs buy the argument.

I'm sure they don't - I mean, who's ever accused VCs of groupthink?
because it is interesting.
I actually did a === check for just that reason, since if you define _ = {}, then passing in a real object that is {} will also return true for _ == {}
ESR is a well known hacker who has maintained several large-scale OSS projects and done lots of coding for several decades. He literally wrote the book about OSS. If ESR's code was markedly bad, it would be news.
This is not obvious to me at all. I admit I have difficulty conceiving of advice so compelling I'd travel to America to receive it.

Fair enough I guess. People pay what they think it is worth. That's capitalism; no argument from me. I am not trolling. Carry on.
I disagree. Any alignment in interests is temporary at best. Inasfar as the alignment exists and results in a good product, people should stick to that alone: "this is a good product". It's a mistake to generalize or extend that sentiment to "therefore the company is a good company".

Given the opportunity Microsoft would absolutely erect a walled garden ecosystem of DRM'd media and 'blessed' hardware. Hell, they tried. Several times (with varying levels of success). Even in the midst of their anti-trust problems.

And given the opportunity, Apple absolutely would lean on its partners and conspire against standards the way Microsoft has in the past. They also have tried (with varying levels of success). Several times.

The only difference between Apple and Microsoft is that they can only afford to put their interests ahead of their customers in the fields they dominate, which, by definition, are different fields.
Evaluating an Industry that Doesn't Exist
New ocean forming in African desert
Top IT and DataCenter Monitoring Mistakes
He's one hell of a visionary, and he rightly deserves the praise.
thanks for the pointer. the site wasn't affected by that.
Just put an X25M G2 into my 17" Macbook Pro. Boots and program loads are super snappy. Don't do anything too serious with the machine, no gaming so other then that it just seems snappy.
Twitter did facilitate the Iranian protestors. And facilitated getting the word out to the world. Twitter did help make the Kogi Korean BBQ Taco Truck a sensation! Twitter did keep us updated about Balloon Boy in real time.

Do you have any substantial proof of those claims? I know for a fact the first one is at least misleading (Every news outlet had people on the ground in Iran and they certainly reached far more people than Twitter did).

The point of the article is that people who use Twitter ascribe accomplishments to it without proof so you making the same claims without offering proof only makes the author's point.
Wow, 12 recipients out of 86 requests? A 14% chance of winning? Not bad at all.

Congrats to you WindyCitizen.
What is of interest is does that 8% comprise of the same people? Or does it change?

When Michael Dell was young and selling newspaper subscription, he found that only 2 kinds of people bought newspaper subscriptions. Those who just got married. Or those who just shifted homes. Out of the total population, maybe 5% fit this criteria. But the people who form this 5% change constantly. (I don't know if its 5% or 7% or 10% - pulled it out of thin air to make a point.)

So if the % of clickers fluctuates or even goes down, but the people who form the clickers group keep on changing, then online advertising makes a lot of sense.
Enterprise 2.0: Novell, SAP, ThoughtWorks Ride Google Wave
I'm not sure if this is your question, but divided differences are a way to do polynomial interpolation, with efficient updating to account for new data points: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_polynomial
Back when I worked at Doubleclick, the answer was "not much". We were not legally allowed to store your IP address, for example. (But, of course, we could store the md5 hash of your IP address. I love the legal system.)

I am more worried about Analytics, which provides details of everything you do on nearly every site on the Internet to one centralized source. Needless to say, this is the reason why I have NoScript installed.
Thanks. Everyone and their brother applied for this. The Chicago Community Trust is the biggest philanthropy in Chicago.
Yeah. I can't believe Google has the calendar entries I typed into Google Calendar. They could show up at my next dental appointment and serve me a targeted advertisement!
I love anyone who writes about ignoring conventional wisdom and popular belief or advice.

This post can be summed up by Mark Twain - "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
Microcontroled knock lock door
This is a controlled lock door by knocks. It works with Arduino. It´s very creative.
The credit reporting agencies don't actually verify any of that information, so most of it is junk. Apparently my "legal name" is "Johnathon Rockway". Yeah...
Is there a way change the openID account associated with your Stack Overflow account? Mine is associated with a name I'd rather not have potential employers seeing.
I don't have any information about any searches I've done on google.com (and I definitely have done them!). Is there something special I need to do to see that info?
Basically right. And I would also use "the problem with unscientific ___" in a lot of other areas.
But it's not a corporate web site. Thank god...
This question is not well-defined. Any number can be a solution.
The U.S. has awesome walls: the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. They saved our butt numerous times in WW2, and arguably are the reason that we're a global superpower today.
I've never been particularly good (or confident?) at math, but this actually piqued my interest, it's a very cool trick/technique. Maybe I should enroll in a math class at the local community college just to try to improve myself a little bit. Besides, I have so many more ways to actually apply what I'd be learning now then I did when I took my last math class (which I think was back when I was 16 or 17).
I think there is a reasonable chance that the number of non-"shithole" employers (using Joel's term from the article) that know the difference or maybe even care that they are not getting the top 10% of talent is overestimated.

I hope that StackOverflow Careers site does turn the job market upside down for the best software developers. I completely respect the idea they are trying to get across to employers looking for good candidates. But pointing at some online reputation and technical question forum isn't going to help the people who wouldn't know a great hacker from a turnip. Which, as discussed here many times, is the vast majority of people, including other hackers.

I think that it is more effective for hackers to offer up portfolios of completed work to potential employers. Projects the hacker designed, implemented, integrated with the work of others, in X time, that serve Y customers.

I also don't buy the idea that charging people to post their resume/CV before it will show up in potential employer's searches helps filter so that only "active, serious job applicants" show up (from the FAQ). Its a bit on the slimy side - you're charging us for the content you're selling to someone else?
Ah I see, something called "Google Web History" exists to explicitly track your searches. I never knew this before, and I'm glad I'm not signed up!
This is really neat looking, but ... how exactly do you execute the code? It appears that the release from semacode.com targets cellphones exclusively, so I can't get it to run on the command line.

wget http://semacode.com/download/semacode_reader_me-1.6.zip
unzip semacode_reader_me-1.6.zip
cd semacode_reader_me-1.6
java -jar semacode_reader_me-1.6.jar

Failed to load Main-Class manifest attribute from
semacode_reader_me.jar

A tip here didn't solve the problem either: http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=951...

java -Djava.awt.headless=true -jar semacode_reader_me.jar -f cropfield.jpg

Anyone out there having more luck with this one?

EDIT: Okay... I tried compiling from source, and the problem is that you need the J2ME SDK for the MIDlet libraries.
Reading stuff like this makes me wish I had a wheat field too.
I might be among those that got a flawless Ubuntu upgrade. The poll now says ( http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1305924 ) 18.25% had flawless upgrades, 15.19% had flawless install.

Of course Ubuntu has bugs, but I bet its a lot more user friendly that other Linux distro's out there. The processes will certainly improve a lot from here.

And Ubuntu certainly doesn't make Linux look bad.
> don't actually verify any of that information,

> so most of it is junk

How is this a logical progression? And does google "verify" any of its information?
I can't imagine paying to have a searchable CV. I already hear from recruiters about 2 or 3 times a month.

Other people have made a lot of money finding me and placing me with good employers, or I've sought out specific positions at specific companies I was interested in. While I can see some value in linking CVs to SO accounts, it seems like the wrong group is being asked to shell out.
What's lacking in the java programming language
In the spolsky article referred to by the top post, spolsky says "I had to wonder. We do have a large competitor in our market that appears to be growing a lot faster than we are. The company is closing big deals with big, enterprise customers. And the wheels are falling off the donkey cart over there as the company stretches to fulfill its obligations. Meanwhile, our product is miles better, and we're a well-run company, but it doesn't seem to matter. Why?"

Does anybody know what fogbugz-competitor product Joel is referring to?

UPDATE: probably jira.
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/01/we-now-support-multipl...