skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except that it's far more common for people to believe it and thus ask silly questions that attempt to ascertain the degree to which one has drilled themselves in said rote memorisation. Like a google interview I had a few years ago where they asked me what the number of blocks in an ext2 filesystem for a specific distribution of Linux was at the time. The irony of being asked this by a company who actually would've featured prominently in my answer (ie, just google it) was not lost on me, and it disabused me of the notion that I'd actually like to work there after all.
So he goes short on China, so what. There are enough people in the prediction business that some of them will be right some of the time. When all of them are right all of the time it starts to get interesting, probably we'll see new economic theories.

Until then this guys guess is as good as the rest. Remember the story about the monkey and the dartboard vs the analysts.

http://www.investorhome.com/darts.htm

Analyzing economies as a whole is even more perilous and error prone.

China is probably together with India positioned to create internal growth more than other places on the planet, whether or not they will succeed is a question that nobody has the answer to yet.

So, to counter the contrarian investor I predict it will go the other way round, we'll see who is right.

But on the off chance that I am don't take that as anything other than luck.
... and what empirical evidence would that be exactly? Surely, if it is empirical, you can cite it!

Could you at least define what you mean by technological progress?
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> There's nothing special about physical embodiments of control systems that should make them patentable, and the software equivalent not.

I think he's wrong, there is something special, the rate of innovation, and the cost of both change and the the initial barrier to entry. Physical machine are generally much more expensive to create, change, and startup a business with so granting the patent holder some limited monopoly on the invention makes sense. With software, not so much.
Perhaps we will just have to agree to disagree then. Personally, I would rather someone did wing it (or just use the defaults in their application/browser) rather than shove all kinds of marks out into margins, force overly small type with overly narrow leading, set lines too short for optimal reading in any standard book or screen format, use underlining for emphasis, and start choosing things like text sizes based on arbitrary mathematical patterns rather than what is most legible and readable, all of which are the direct advice given in that article.
HN was created.
> Patents and the entire field of IP law exists to give innovators and creators more incentives to take on risky or costly projects that ultimately provide value.

I don't think so, the purpose of the system was to make that knowledge open so society as a whole could benefit from it. Given innovators a monopoly was the price of buying that knowledge, otherwise they wouldn't give up their trade secrets.
How to Get Rid of Belly Fat When You Have Type 2 Diabetes
My friends have all had similar experiences, though most of them were interviewing straight out of undergrad, so it may have been a little different. Have seriously in-depth knowledge of the languages you claim to know, practice solving problems under pressure, and have a strong algorithmic foundation. They seem to have a reputation for being rude, but it's a competitive market and they're looking for the best.

Things are pretty similar where I work. We will look at most people if their resume lists the relevant technologies, but the phone screen and in-person interviews are very tough. There are so many liars out there that resumes aren't a very good filter. Even academic pedigree doesn't seem to count much in the software development world, though it counts more if you're doing more research-y/academic things like machine learning.
The 1-year cliff is normal for employee situations where someone is hired cold and the company needs to evaluate performance before being at risk of that person becoming a shareholder.

This is not the case with founders, where the norm for co-founders (at least in Silicon Valley) is 4-year monthly pro rata vesting (i.e., shares vest at rate of 1/48th/mo). I think this is because someone normally does not normally take on a co-founder unless he is pretty comfortable with him and, thus, the 1-year evaluation period tends to be unnecessary (and potentially unfair, as you note).

Still, I have seen some founding teams try to use a cliff and, in that case, the only legal way to mitigate unfairness is to provide for acceleration of the unvested stock on termination without "cause" or on resignation for "good reason." This raises its own issues but is far preferable than trying to tinker with voting issues as an alternative way of avoiding unfairness.

On the other side of this, where you have already put in considerable work on the project and your co-founder hasn't, it is normal to do your grant in a way where the portion reflecting work already done is immediately vested, with only the balance of the shares being made subject to vesting (e.g., your grant might be 1/8th pre-vested with the remaining 7/8ths of the shares subject to, say, 4-year vesting).

All that said, there are ultimately no magic rules and these issues are all up for negotiation between co-founders.

I discuss various issues of this type here in an article entitled "What is restricted stock and how is it used in my startup?": http://grellas.com/faq_business_startup_006.html.
I have heard strong skepticism about official growth (and other) figures from China for a long time from folks in equity trading.
I once applied for a job working with a particular group, going through standard HR process. I heard nothing.

About two months later, I saw an identically-worded opening with the same group. This time I contacted the manager of the group directly. I quickly had an interview, and was moving in to my new office in a matter of weeks.
I was implying more GPS-synchronized bomb triggers.
"He even suspects that Beijing is cooking its books, faking, among other things, its eye-popping growth rates of more than 8 percent."

That's quite likely, actually, given the lack of transparency in Chinese internal politics and the lack of access of independent journalists to the relevant data.
There were a lot of innovations in the financial sector in the last ten years, because that's where a lot of the incentive to innovate was coming from. Unfortunately, some of those innovations were very destructive, and most of the rest had no benefit to society. There were probably some new tools that resulted in more efficient allocation of capital, but those gains were swamped by the damage done.
On what land? The days of just finding unclaimed land and calling it yours are over. The world isn't as big as it used to be.
Www.mugil.info ~ Know The World
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I think there is a trade off between precision and maintainability. If you can code it and never touch it, I would go for precision. But if you are going to revisit the code often enough I would go for maintainability.
"... the blogger greatly overestimates his or her skills in other areas."

The author never claims to be great at everything; merely to be good at many things. Your point is not ridiculous, but it is mostly irrelevant. To be fair, I don't think you deserved the downvote, but I can see why it might be given.
I do the same, but then realize: by doing this, I'm specializing into programming.
I think you're being a bit too hard on humanity..

-Dozens of extrasolar planets discovered.
-Confirmation of water on Mars.
-Completed the principal construction of ISS
-Cassini–Huygens
-AIDS drug therapy drastically increasing life spans
-US elects a black President
-Lowest number of homicides in the US since the 1960s
I checked - it's pgs. 152-156. They call their utility "overwrite".

"...Many other commands could also use a -o command. For example, sed could edit a file in place: ... It would be impractical to modify all such commands to add the option. Furthermore, it would be bad design: it is better to centralize functions, as the shell does with the > operator."
That'd be freakishly cool. Definitely get some attention that way.

There's actually a secondary problem that this exposes, though: is it actually possible to submit a resume to Google as a URL?

I submitted a "cold" Google job application a couple of years ago, and back then there was a short list of supported resume formats, with a strong hint towards using plain text.

The speculation was that most resumes get computationally screened before a human even reads them. (I didn't get a call back, btw.)

If that's the "front door", you'll need to somehow get in the "back door". I suppose having your resume on the front page of HN could be a good start to that. ;)
Lifting people out of poverty is pretty important. The biggest bang for the buck in "curing diseases" is getting more out of the cures we already have. Just because malaria is old news in the USA doesn't mean that it doesn't kill 1.5 to 3 million children per year.

Remember, also, that a side effect of technological progress is complacency. These days we don't applaud when medical geniuses cure the pandemic flu within less than nine months of the first US case (have you noticed that there's an H1N1 vaccine now?); instead we complain that it wasn't cured far enough in advance. Or we allow statistically ignorant people to start moral panics about rare or nonexistent side effects of the new cure.
It's legal to disclose one's religion, marital status, and sexual orientation on a resume as well, but I think it would scare a hiring manager off.

Saying you're eligible to work somewhere is different than disclosing your nationality. One is a material part of the hiring process; the other is something people discriminate on.

Stick to the things that actually affect job performance. It keeps the process fair for everyone.
I think it may be that you simply have enough bandwidth to do whatever it is that you want to do, would you be willing to pay a premium to get more ?

I have 20Mbps here and 90% of the time I'm under 10% usage.

And I consider myself a pretty heavy internet user.

Innovation is probably not measured very well by looking at your DSL upload speed.

A decade ago your pc would have been running at 3 to 400 MHz tops (single core!), have 32M of ram and maybe a 40G drive (if you had the money).

By those measures the price of storage and of processing has come down considerably. (edit: and don't forget the SSD revolution that is about to become true, if you like spinning media have a good look at them because they're about to go extinct).

And then there are lots of fields outside computing where we have advanced tremendously in the last decade, one of my favorites is the 'camera pill'.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3606947/

But there are plenty of others.
I am too. I see that done on the online forum I spend the most time on after HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

Maybe this should be a feature request.
Google Maps is pretty cool.
Backspace doesn't work with Chrome on Windows 7. Firefox is ok though.
CES Live Streams
I agree it's a great site. Kalid is also a regular contributor on HN.
Reddit went on the cloud bandwagon not because they thought it was superior to managed servers, but because Conde Nast's IT department sucked. With the ongoing growth, they were having trouble procuring the additional servers as needed, and moving Amazon solved that problem.
Specialization is not equivalent to rote memorization. But rote memorization is a bedrock foundation for almost any specialty, because it is the very language of that specialty. The more fluent you are in a given language, the more easily you can write beautiful prose with it.
Ask HN: Enterprise sysadmin to high scale web app sysadmin?
I am a run of the mill enterprise sysadmin. The largest cluster I've ever built was 128 node oracle grid and I've never had to solve a scaling problem more difficult then "add more ram."

I've always been interested in larger systems and with the success and volume of web apps there are more and more 1000 plus server deployments out there. I want to start applying for these types of jobs and was wondering:

What books, blogs, forums, groups, whatever can I read or join to start coming up to speed on how the top tier web app infrastructures are built, maintained and scaled?

thanks.
I just can't understand this "Developer Program".

To make an app for the Palm you should use HTML, CSS and Javascript. But then, I ask, why not use these same technologies and tweak a little your app into a generic Web application, available also for iPhones, Androids and Blackberries? Why would I want to limit myself only to Palms?
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Full solid stainless steel .
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Triple wrapped 18k solid gold jubilee links.
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Here in Australia I know people who stayed up until 5am trying to get an order in, but ultimately were booted out in the checkout phase.

These people are dedicated electronic hobbyists, and long term sparkfun customers.

So that's 1000 happy customers, and probably something like 100,000 really pissed off ones.
Thanks for the link to that Steve Yegge post -- do you know if he's still batching up and submitting resumes as per the bottom of his post? Do you have any other suggestions for networking into Google (I don't know anyone directly who works there)?
You can get a hint of what is happening by looking at the countries around China. South Korea real estate prices are
back up to where they were before the crash, Australia has
had to raise interest rates to cool down their economy. There
is even talk the Japan might be coming out of it's funk. With
that type of growth China's books have to be pretty messy, but I don't think they are blowing smoke.
Can you suggest a succinct alternative?

"Authorized to work in the United States." Yes, I am a lawyer, and I used to practice immigration law.
Quite right.

puts %w{apple pear banana}.map {|f| "#{f} is a fruit."}.join(' And ')
In the case that level of general inflation actually happens and other large companies grow as much as well, one of the companies with higher valuation than Amazon today would be first instead of Amazon.
About ten years ago I read a book about the Great Chinese Famine.

One story I remember is that the so-called scientists of the Communist regime claimed they had produced a new way to grow wheat so that it was much denser, both as a way to prove the superiority of the Communist system vs. Western capitalism, and as a way to head off any rumors of famine.

This wheat was so dense, the Chinese government claimed, one could stand on top of the wheat field without falling to the ground.

In the book was an old black and white photo of two Chinese children apparently doing just that: standing on top of a wheat field. But the caption explained that actually there was a step ladder underneath them placed there to produce the illusion.

I'm not trying to draw any parallels between the above story and the linked article, besides the fact that the latter made me remember the former.

It's hard to say whose economy is most like that wheat field these days.
Cheaper food, better cars, faster computers, improved life expectancy, cheaper energy, better education, enhancements to human intelligence, better public transportation, more efficient manufacturing, better understanding of biology, better understanding of physics.

Empirically, it seems to me all of the above have seen noticeable, but merely linear improvements in the last decade. (admittedly, computers are much faster for parallelizable algorithms, such as 3D graphics, but not for the majority of software which is serial in nature)

"access to information", "density of storage" and "communications tools" are three that I think could be argued to have improved by an order of magnitude in the last decade. I would guess though that out of those, only "communications tools" will see similar dramatic changes in the next decade (cell phones and other communication links are still pretty crappy right now) I think the amount of information on the web in the next decade will increase, but at a surprisingly modes rate.

(BTW- I hope I'm wrong and we have more exponential improvements to look forward to)
Online Chat Rooms and Your Privacy
Most people while making use of online chat rooms try to make use of a different name and sometimes even take a completely different identity. This is mainly to protect their privacy. No one likes to receive intrusive marketing calls that try to sell various products and services. Moreover, when we are interacting with others it is not possible to know what kind of people we are dealing with. Not everyone comes to online chat sites with good motives.
The weather is nice...
Ask HN: Git Hosting
I am on the fence about hosting my private git repos. I have used the public repos in github and it has been a pleasant experience but seems a bit pricey for what you get. Does anyone here have any experience with http://repositoryhosting.com/ for 6 bucks and unlimited projects with a limit only on the amount of data stored(1GB + $1/GB after) they drive a decent value proposition. But I am interested in the wisdom of HN.

As an aside: I have the capability of hosting the git repos on my linode server but I figured it was not worth the hassle of configuring all that and securing it. (I don't want to spend that much time thinking about source control when I could be doing something more profitable.) If it is not too much of a trouble to administer and setup I can go this route too as the server is already a sunk cost.
So my understanding is limited, and only applies to the US as far as i know, but it goes something like this:

The power grid involves a few distinct parts -- generation, transmission, distribution. Distribution is the aspect most people ever deal with, its the "last mile" part. Generation is self explanitory, and transmission is the high voltage lines between the generators and the distribution.

Some companies only do one aspect, some do 2 or all 3. The "deregulation" of the power market, was actually the creation a wholesale market of a commodity. This means that A generator operator in michigan can "sell" electricity to a utility in florida. In reality, the electrons never get transported that of course.

The way the market works is -- Various generators place a bid on the market: x watts for y price/watt. An official, neutral party aggregates all the distribution loads, and does some fancy analysis, and puts out an official number -- how many watt of power the peak draw will be for that period. All bids are sorted, lowest price to highest price. Like this (very very fake nubmers):

5W $1/W

10W $2/W

3W $3/W

In our example the peak draw is projected at 13W. Starting with the lowest bid and working up, the available power is used. in this case the first 2 bids. The highest bid under the line sets the price for power. So in this case power is sold at $2/W. This is the price for the whole market, it is what wholesale power costs to distribution companies for that period. The company that can provide 5W at $1/W makes a healthy profit. The expensive company doesnt make any money, their electricity is unused.

The regulations keeping metering groups separate from the power market groups are there for market efficiency. First the generation only companies lose out. Second, if some companies had extra data, they could start playing with things, arranging for thier power bids to be raised/lowered in ways that are market inefficient. This enforces everyone to try to bid as low as possible to try to get their power sold at all.

So to answer your question: no it sets up the stage for price gouging on the power market. the data is used intelligently for various long-term forecasting, efficency determinations, and for reporting to the markets, but the markets use the data intelligently for setting loads. Note, the data reported to the market by a utility is in effect statistical prediction, but the people who determine bid price for electricity never see this data. (people means algorithms here too).

I'm pretty free-market, but these regulations make sense, in the same way that insider trading regulations make sense, and regulation against monopolistic competition. If it is not clear they are the same thing, it is more likely my explanation than the alternative.
I hope that was a funny joke and not a sad truth... :)
Backspace doesn't work on Opera too. Up arrow should bring forward the last line typed ---- that doesn't happen here.
I will take the other side. Running an entrepreneurship club, I have found that the biggest challenge was deciding who we were. Were we startups? Mom-n-Pop small businesses? Work-from-homers? The key to your question starts with asking, "what do you define entrepreneurship?" Once you answer that, the original question will likely answer itself.
Are you betting that it will go up, or are you just posting to a forum about your opinion? Big difference.

I agree with your assessment of the difficulty of macroeconomic analysis. But it sounds like his details are more specific than that.

I wonder if there are more interesting plays here; are there invest-able vehicles that we have access to that are going to do well if China does well AND if it does badly? I wonder if WMT would reap a profit either way.
I read a Readers Digest article along these lines a while back and found it increadibly fascinating.

From what I remember, our DNA is riddled with bits of ancient virus DNA. Explanations as to why these have lasted so long were uncertain, but researchers have made some pretty impressive speculations.

For example, viruses, in order to survive as a species, must not only feed of their host (the human), but must ensure that the human survives in order for it to keep living. Furthermore, viruses compete with other viruses for food (the human), and so if another virus ourbreak occurs then the resident virus will, if you like, work with the human immune defence system to kill off the new intruding virus. So they may have even been crucial to human survival at some point.

There were further discussions about how these ancient viruses may have affected human development (ie - the larger, tumour like brain, etc), but I can't remember much of it.

I guess the only concrete point I can contribute here is that this is definately nothing new.
Skype on TVs: Start of HD video conferencing ?
You can infer a lot about the underlying causal processes from the "pile of correlations". Humans do this all the time. If flipping a light switch correlates highly with the lamp's state switching from "on" to "off" and vice-versa, and in every observed instance the light-switch was flipped before the light changed state, wouldn't you assign a higher probability to the causal model "flipping the switch causes lamp to change state" than "lamp changing state causes switch to flip"? In other words, we can do a lot better than to just say that "lamp changing state and switch-flipping are highly correlated".

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-probabilistic/

(Sorry for being pedantic.)
IME git configuration on a decent host is pretty trivial. Just do it over ssh not http. Its a little bit of effort to set up, but not really. If you want the fancy web fontend, things are a bit different, and I can't offer experience there.