welp's comments

While links are never impossible, I am ever optimistic and hope that their employees actually do watch out for the red flags they just spoke about on their blog two months ago.

"Every Palantirian is trained to look out for “red flags” at deployments that might indicate activities that are antithetical to our commitment to privacy and civil liberties."

http://www.palantir.com/2013/04/dont-just-trust-us/

I'm deaf, and almost every company I've interviewed at which was going to perform a phone interview was willing to either a) skip the phone interview; or b) perform the interview over IM instead. (Even IBM was flexible enough to set up an IM interview over IRC on one occasion, and GTalk with a couple of their engineers on another.) Don't be afraid of asking to interview using over IM rather than over the phone.

Using lein2, you can run the following:

  $ JAVA_CMD=drip lein ...

For some more modern auto-complete functionality in vim, clang_complete is worth a look: https://github.com/Rip-Rip/clang_complete. It uses clang for intelligently auto-completing C and C++, and I am constantly surprised that more people haven't heard of it.

As another deaf HN reader: I agree. And in answer to some of the comments saying that "it's too hard", it can actually be quite easy using services such as Universal Subtitles: http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/

[edit: Just saw somebody else linking to this same site. Sorry.]

Hah, that's a fair approach. From what I can understand, obesity is more about the lack of opportunities to exercise rather than the amount of calories eaten (see http://dc.streetsblog.org/2012/01/17/maps-show-striking-corr... for an example, although obviously correlation != causation). It seemed to be the case that as the number of cars on the road increased, calorie intake actually went down.

That depends, I would be more than happy if they were limited to 20mph. If they were limited to something more like 40mph, I would just make kids stay the hell away from roads: http://humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm

That said, I would be interested in seeing how driverless cars perform at stopping in the case of sudden and unexpected obstacles compared to human drivers?

Whether or not you believe in the climate crisis or global warming, I strongly recommend all proponents of driverless cars to read The Energy Glut[1] in order to get a good idea of one potential scenario of how America will end up if every man and his dog can use a car to get anywhere. If anything, the studies which are referenced in the book are rather hard to ignore.

As a quick example of the sort of thinking in this book: more cars on the road means that there will be fewer people willing to risk being outdoors anywhere near a road (i.e. most residential areas in this day and age), resulting in higher levels of obesity. As more people become obese, fewer people are willing to walk or cycle ever-decreasing distances, so they get a car -- increasing the number of cars on the road. After that, we enter a rather vicious circle. The average weight of the world population will increase rather quickly, and we will end up like the people in Wall-E. I'd rather ride my bike, but thanks for the offer.

[1] http://zedbooks.co.uk/paperback/the-energy-glut

In his defense, it looks like julien_c is actually French... but the logo is what got me!

Wow, this article has hit be pretty hard as well -- I have been profoundly deaf since I was about three and a half. The fact that my deafness hit quite late means that I'm pretty proficient at oral English (thanks Mom and Dad!), it does mean that I miss out on a lot at work or in my social groups.

I have had to put so much effort into getting out there and meeting new people, but now that I have, I wouldn't give up any of my friends for the world as they are pretty amazing and make sure that I'm included in everything. As in anotherdeaf's story[0], if I'm at a pub or MacDonald's or something, and they know I've not heard something they will quickly step in to sort it out. None of them get embarrassed or anything when I asked them to repeat what someone else said, and all of them are happy to say the same thing over and over until I've got it -- I guess what I'm trying to say is that when you've found your friends and trained them up, they'll stick right by you. People always ask me how I got to be so confident, but the truth is I'm really not, I'm always terrified of meeting new people but I put myself out there and make a huge effort to talk to them, ask questions and just get on with them in general. It is horrible and I'm always exhausted afterward, but the rewards make it worth it. Just stick at it, talk to people, and you'll be good to go.

Have you taken lipreading classes ever? If not, you should definitely consider it. It means that I can happily talk to people in swimming pools, e.t.c., when I can't wear my hearing aid.

Insofar as work is concerned, I've never had any issues with special arrangements for interviews -- I tend to email recruiters directly, but IBM, Google and Twitter (as well as other smaller companies) have been more than happy to make special arrangements for me. Always, always ask, the only tip I would give you is to put an obviously fake telephone number in (e.g., 000000000).

Oh, and don't worry about the girls. If they're worth it then they will come to you :) And definitely have kids. Even if they ARE deaf, they will still get a lot out of life, and things have been improving so much since I was at primary school all those years ago.

Also if (any of) you want to just shoot shit or have someone to chat to about deaf stuff, my email address is in my bio, so feel free to send me an email or add me on gtalk.

[0] http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4002231

EDIT: (Also I have just sent out that article and links to some of the comments in here to my best friends, partly as a way to say thanks to them for all the trouble they've put in for me over the years, and also to help them understand where I'm coming from some of the time.)

I second this -- even if it doesn't stop you thinking about work, period, it is usually enough to jerk you out of "the flow", which (for me) makes it that much more difficult to get back into whatever I was doing 30 or 45 minutes ago.

I wonder whether these guys will end up working on increased integration with other acquisitions (e.g., Instagram, assuming that all goes well with the antitrust investigation with the FTC), or potentially even on other other services themselves? I'm looking forward to seeing Facebook's plans with photo sharing -- especially after Facebook's post earlier[1] highlighting the increased prominence of photos in their mobile app.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150978179604009....

This talk[1] by sogrady (originally presented at FOSDEM 2012) has a lot of interesting statistics demonstrating the popularity of JVM-based languages, and how they have been growing. The numbers come from sources including HN, GitHub, Indeed.com and Ohloh. Definitely worth a glance through.

[1] http://redmonk.com/public/fosdem2012.pdf

It was my impression that that was Jobs' way of backing down and admitting that others are right. But I may well have misinterpreted that.

Regarding #1: "Taking their beautiful hardware and subjecting it to Windows users must have been controversial inside of the company. It just didn't seem like something Jobs would do." -- Having read Jobs' biography, it wasn't something he would do: he argued against it, and even said that Windows users could use iPods "over my dead body." However, business sense prevailed, and Jobs realised that it made sense to open up the iPod world to Windows users.

Jobs was a proponent of porting iTunes to Windows, but Schiller didn't want this. As a result, Apple joined leagues with MusicMatch, and they made a music player, but Jobs said it was a terrible piece of software:

"To make the iPod work on PCs, we initially partnered with another company that had a jukebox, gave them the secret sauce to connect to the iPod, and they did a crappy job. That was the worse of all worlds, because this other company was controlling a big piece of the user experience. So we lived with this crappy outside jukebox for about six months, and then we finally got iTunes written for Windows. In the end, you just don't want someone else to control a big part of the user experience. People may disagree with me, but I am pretty consistent about that."

So Caldwell appears to be right in both points: it was understood that it would bring a lot of value back to Apple, but it also took a lot of smart people to convince Jobs to let it happen.

While I do enjoy the odd game from time to time, I do have a penchant for using IRC at work. This game reminded me of an old irssi theme I used to use: http://irssi.org/themefiles/c0ders.png

I think that this[1] email thread between Torvalds and various other kernel developers sums up the use of goto in C the best.

I find that those who think that any given programming concept is "inherently" bad to be dangerous, especially if they were just taught that way.

[1] http://kerneltrap.org/node/553/2131

I'm profoundly deaf, and wish I had thought of making this post. I've lost track of the number of times I have been put off a product because their only description is in video form.

I sometimes forgive start-ups for not captioning videos, but I think it's inexcusable when a large multinational corporation publishes a video with no captions -- especially if they pay for live captioning for employees in meetings (e.g., by using http://www.captionfirst.com/).