donall

Learning ClojureScript is on my to do list for today, so this is a nice coincidence. It looks fairly complete (but I haven't learned it yet, so I could be very wrong!).

One word of advice: have it proof read by a native English speaker. There are quite a lot of awkward-sounding sentences and some grammar errors that seem a bit jarring and distract from the content.

Other than that, it looks good. Thanks for posting!

This has great potential. I plugged in some random numbers and the basic offering seemed to cost around $100, though, which is still significantly more than the cost of a cheap poster. Can you talk a little about the price breakdown here? Or perhaps that would reveal the secret sauce?

This was hard to read. I couldn't get the first paragraph to parse right. "the lone hacker building a billion website overnight in his dorm and here about the excitement of building a new product" reads like maybe "dollars" is missing. I don't know what "here" is doing. I suspect something was edited rendering it ungrammatical. There are also some odd homophone errors, like "higher" for "hire". Maybe the "here" was "hear"?

The underlying concept is interesting; it's just hard to follow because it's so badly presented.

Makes sense. I didn't realize you had multiple sources, but I'm glad you do!

But whispering is a deliberate attempt to conceal what you're saying. Speaking to somebody in another language is usually not an attempt at concealment, it's just about people communicating in the way they are most comfortable.

I guess I just am sensitive to the unfortunately common American assumption that everybody should speak English. My first time at SFO a hispanic woman was at the baggage carousel with her son. The son asked, in English, if he could lift the bag off the carousel when it arrived and his mother explained, in English, that he was too small to lift it. The kid didn't drop it and the mother lost her temper and scolded him in Spanish. At that point, a lady beside her turned to her and said "speak in English, please"! That blew my mind...

I have experienced a group of people laughing and suspected they were laughing at me, but usually when there was some reason for it, like having a bad haircut! I don't assume groups of people laugh at/about me unprovoked. I hope I'm right... :)

I'm curious about the algorithm. Is there a ceiling for book prices? I seemed to get very similar results for multiple different types of books, including being offered $3.21 for one that sells for $100:http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0575066601?pc_redir=1405401886...

I don't mean to nitpick, but I have to take exception to the line "don’t talk loudly on their cell phones about you in a foreign language".

Obviously talking loudly on a cell phone is an undesirable trait for a driver. No question. But I do question the assertion that they're talking about you. I speak a few common languages and have heard taxi drivers around the world speak on their phones and assuming that I only speak English. They very rarely talk about me and if they do, it's usually in a relatively professional context, i.e. "I just picked a guy up at the airport", not "this idiot doesn't know what I'm saying so I'm going to say insulting things about him".

I don't know quite why people who hear others speaking a foreign language tend to assume they are the topic of conversation. People usually have more important things to talk about. Of course, sometimes you do catch somebody talking about you and that tends to be hilariously awkward when you respond in his/her language!

I'm not convinced that it's a choice between innovation in connectivity and innovation in startups. I think, in particular, the connectivity innovation is unlikely to happen. The current monopolies offer _terrible_ connectivity (as compared to most other developed countries). Preserving that status quo is not going to do anything to help that. Allowing for "fast lane" connectivity will, in the best case, provide acceptable connection speed for a small number of services. In the worst case, they will offer current speeds and just degrade the slow lane. Because monopoly.

I think the theory is that the middle lane is only used for overtaking slower-moving cars. Perhaps the Swedes, like the Germans, practice good lane discipline and stick to the right until they need to overtake.

I think this 2+1 wouldn't work in the US because (in my experience) very few people use the lanes correctly and they just distribute themselves evenly across all lanes, regardless of speed. That strategy does, indeed, lead to bottlenecks when the number of lanes reduces.

Los Angeles, San Francisco, Shanghai

Factual is currently hiring engineers and data lovers of all levels in the SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Shanghai.

Factual’s location platform enriches mobile location signals with definitive global data, enabling personalized and contextually relevant mobile experiences. Built from billions of inputs, the data is constantly updated by Factual’s real-time data stack. We were named one of "50 Disruptive Companies in 2013" by MIT Technology Review. We have a terrific team that is still fairly small and an incredible CEO who was previously the co-founder of Applied Semantics (which was bought by Google and became AdSense). Factual has venture funding from Andreessen-Horowitz and our partners/customers include Facebook, Yelp, Trulia, and Newsweek.

There are many challenging problems to work on at all layers of the stack: data cleaning and canonicalization, storage, deduping, serving, APIs, improving data using machine learning, etc. A great example is one of our most recent products, Geopulse Audience, which stands at the intersection of high quality places data and large scale analysis of user geo-data: http://www.factual.com/products/geopulse-audience . If you love data, Factual is the place to be. Our main criteria are that you're smart and get things done, but you'll get bonus points for experience with Clojure (http://www.factual.com/jobs/clojure), machine learning, NLP, algorithm design, or Hadoop.

You can email me personally at donall@factual.com, or view our job postings and apply directly via Jobvite: Los Angeles/SF Bay Area Software engineer: http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=oQR1Vfwn&s=Hackernews

I feel like pre commit is better than pre receive.

This article ignores the fact that one region in Spain (the Canary Islands) operates on the "correct" time zone. I have lived both in the Canaries and in mainland Spain and I can tell you that there is no appreciable difference in the attitudes described by the article. Spain's problems (if indeed they are problems) are cultural and cannot be attributed to hours of sunlight.

This is clearly just an example of the Spanish parliament looking for a scapegoat for the woeful state of the Spanish economy.

You're right in saying that the anti-abortion movement in Ireland correlates with catholicism, but I think the more staunchly catholic groups are fairly right-wing (not in an extreme, goose-stepping fascist sort of way, necessarily, but more in a Fine Gael sort of way). With that in mind, I think the data in Ireland supports the grandparent's claim that anti-abortion is a right wing movement in Europe.

I think perhaps the confusion here is due to the fact that the Irish don't see themselves as being divided according to the French tradition of left and right, but according to which side of the civil war they think was right.

It's perhaps instructive to note that the people and organisations that oppose abortion in Ireland today are often the same ones that supported Franco's rebellion during the Spanish civil war and that both things were supported for the same reason: catholicism. The Irish right wing has more in common with the right wing in the rest of Europe than it gets credit for.

The parent observation is really on the money. Hyperlocal recommendations are very interesting, but _paid_ recommendations are a potential gold mine that I think people are only now starting to catch on to.

What I find particularly interesting about it is the potential to produce genuinely relevant advertising. As a simple example, imagine I ask my smartphone where I can find the nearest fast food joint and it tells me there is a McDonald's around the corner. It might also serve an ad that says there is a Burger King one block further away and if I go there and show the ad I will get free fries and a drink with my sandwich.

There are some very interesting possibilities here that we have only begun to scratch the surface of.

Without getting into details, there was some significant mismanagement of my user account, resulting in incorrect tax being withheld until I noticed the problem and notified them about it. After an unreasonable amount of time spent resolving the problem with a number of different people on their end, the end result was a large tax bill that I had not budgeted for.

There have also been other less significant issues, mostly regarding my status as a foreign employee. I speculate that it stems from a lack of properly engineered software on their end. In all cases, my problems would have been fixed by some logic along the lines of "If (employee.status == X && !taxesApplied.include(correctTaxes)) then trigger alert Y". Perhaps I'm too much of an engineer, but I find it hard to believe that a company that focusses solely on HR can even operate without this kind of automated check.

I have had a series of bad experiences with Trinet. Not so bad that it's ruined my life, but bad like "I can't believe this is the best we can do for HR". I like the idea of outsourcing that sort of thing so we can focus on the hacking, but I feel like that particular space is ripe for disruption (to use a clichéd term).

The picture example in the article is of an Irish terrorist group. Interestingly, supporters of this group are quite likely to flag official UK government, police and armed forces groups as terrorist web sites.

Then again, an even greater number of people will flag sites like Facebook and Google, for "humour value".

If this does become a "feature", I only hope that they will publish statistics on what has been flagged.

I think this is probably true.

Empirically speaking, a lot of the guys who graduated with their B.Sc. in computer science with me saw their career paths as joining a big consulting company, working on the front lines for a couple of years and then getting into management and leaving the code behind for good.

In my PhD program, most guys in the lab saw the actual engineering side of things as a stepping stone to higher-paid positions in acadaemia.

Clearly a significant number of people with engineering degrees are engineers only by title.

I hate it* and don't use it with any sort of regularity, but I have an account. Sometimes people tag me in photos and I check them out. Maybe once per month. Also, some people sometimes invite me to events through it. I wish people would use better photo hosting services and event management services. They exist, so I don't see Facebook as a necessary evil, but rather an unnecessary and mediocre service.

*That's actually a very strong word. I dislike it, but I don't lose sleep over it at night or anything.

Shouldn't there be a vanilla "I hate it" option? Why must the Facebook-haters of the world have the opinion that it is a necessary evil foisted upon them? :)

If the article had suggested roulette or even blackjack, _that_ would be delusional. The house always wins.

Poker, however, is not especially delusional. It is unlike other casino games in that you're not playing against the house, so the odds are not stacked against you. Obviously there is luck involved but if you play with discipline over a long enough period of time you can beat the fluctuations. Really, all you have to do is learn how the game works and play against people who don't understand it as well as you do. It also helps if they are drunk, tired and on vacation. It's not a rewarding job, but it's actually pretty doable.

This is certainly interesting stuff. Can you recommend an article that deconstructs their motivations and/or comments on whether or not what they're doing is actually legal?

Security by obscurity is NOT security. If this kind of transparency results in an increased number of successful attacks, then they will be forced to implement more adequate security. This is a Good Thing.

Java is a useful language if you want to use things like Hadoop.

I thought the context was abundantly clear from the parent, although adding the title undeniably provided enough information to allow me to skim over the link altogether!

The obvious answer seems to be that the cost of production needs to come down. I wonder how cheaply today's shows could be made if they didn't have the bureaucracy and bloat of the major content publishers behind them?

This is an interesting comment. I take it for granted that the majority of readers are pretty comfortable doing that kind of thing. Is there any way of telling what the real distribution is?

I don't mean to nit-pick, but although I found the content to be very interesting, I also found it difficult to follow because it feels like the author's grasp of English isn't quite where it needs to be (although it's very close).

In particular, the phrase "back in a day" is used twice and I'm still not 100% certain whether it means that the actions were performed in a single day (which would be odd phrasing) or, more likely, if it's meant to be "back in the day", in the sense of "at an unspecified point in the past".

That said, I don't wish to put people off from blogging in English, especially considering it was an interesting article that I would not have been able to enjoy if it was written in Croatian. My (intended to be friendly) advice is to recruit native-English proof-readers. I think you won't need them for long.

There's a lot of back-and-forth in this discussion already and I feel like some people aren't understanding that it's not about _never_ commenting the code; it's about only commenting when it is absolutely necessary (which is actually quite rare if you're writing clean, simple code (which is, itself, quite rare!)).

I think that everybody should be required to read the chapter about commenting in "Clean Code" before contributing to this discussion. It's very java-centric and not perfect, but there is some really good insight. There is a pdf available here: http://www.tud.ttu.ee/material/kallik/JOOP/Clean_Code_-_A_Ha... (if it really helps you, consider buying a copy and supporting the authors).