skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A random observation. Many significant advancements came when someone who knew about one thing learned about a second and realized that the first applied to the second.

Generalists are more likely to do that than specialists. And in my experience they are more fun to hang out with.

However it is true that nobody can be good at everything. Therefore one of the most important skills there are IMO is realizing who is better than you at what. In fact I consider people who can keep track of the skills of people around them to be valuable in their own right. But my experience is that people who gain this ability inevitably learn something about a lot of different things. Therefore people with this key ability tend to be generalists!

Therefore I value specialists, but prefer a good generalist more. Particularly in a small organization where people get varied responsibilities.

Disclaimer: I am a generalist and hence am quite biased. (In case that wasn't obvious.)
> Punishment be damned, eliminate them from the gene pool.

If you want to do that, you'd have to sterilise all their descendants.
Actually, all three are correct. From http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/r%C3%A9sum%C3%A9#Usage_notes -- "In the US, there are three major spellings of this word: résumé, resumé, and resume. All three are in common usage and all three are occasionally contested. The usual justification for each is usually as follows..."

Update: Being pragmatic, I should probably use "resume", because that's how Google Jobs spells it.
That's not a dilemma for generalists, that's a critique of specialization.
The first thing that caught my attention was the bit about "U.S. born".

In the USA it is illegal to ask about country of origin (as well as age, gender, religious beliefs, marital status).

I've heard of hiring managers discarding CVs outright if they contain information that is illegal to ask about, though I have no idea what the practices at Google are.

Recommended reading: "Land the Tech Job You Love" by Andy Lester, published by The Pragmatic Bookshelf.
Because all of the necessities are covered? Death by comfort?
Hmm...that one's not mentioned in the mobileread wiki. Thanks for mentioning it. If I had the time and inclination, I'd add it.
Ask HN: Cassandra or MongoDB?
Have anyone compared performance of these two under different scenarios?

i.e. humongous GBs of data and amount of records, humongous amount of reads/writes per second.

I'm not interested in a feature comparison, just performance and resource usage information.
Python 2.6 Quick Reference
Ask YC: Fair founding vesting
I've been luckily enough to convince a good friend of mine to co-found a startup with me. He'll be joining an existing project, one that I've been working on alone for roughly 6 months. I've made decent progress (the site is live, generating revenue) so the equity split wont be 50/50. That said, we've found a balance we're both comfortable with.

My question is regarding vesting. In my last startup, both co-founders had an equal amount shares, so we both vested with an equal schedule (monthly over 4 years with a 1 yr cliff).

I'm not sure what would be fair in this position. I'm a strong believe in democratic voting (where your voting power is directly proportional to the number of shares), so I feel this may make things unfair in certain cases, specifically for my soon-to-be co-founder.

For example, if we both had a 1 yr cliff, I could technically fire him after 10 months. I couldn't imagine this would happen, but the fact that it could makes me wonder whether this is the usual way things go. Am I incorrect?

What would be a fair vesting schedule?
Yup this is similar to the cool thing that Chegg introduced after years of just facilitating student-to-student exchanges. I used to just sell to students directly (and usually could come very close to covering initial purchase price), but after graduating I had to turn to Chegg to sell my books. Prices weren't nearly as good as they were with direct selling, but they were much better than what the bookstore would offer.

The HUGE advantage to selling on Chegg instead of Amazon is that Chegg gives you REAL MONEY (in the form of a prepaid debit card). Some functionality on their site could be improved, but the fact that they give REAL MONEY gives them a big edge.
The movie Idiocracy explains it all.
Title should be: Apple users rank apple as greenest electronics maker.
Corel slashes 20 per cent of workforce
PragPub Issue 7, January 2010
A lot of people seem to be seriously pissed about this. One comment I've seen on an email list for (very) high-end electronics hobbyists pointed out that Sparkfun just made a few hundred friends and several thousand enemies.

It got them a lot of publicity, but whether it was the kind of good publicity that will result in return visits, I don't know. Especially since many of those valuable first-time visitors never got through to the site at all.
But they aren't. Humanity is a social failure. The number of people who go without food, shelter, and basic healthcare in this world is pretty staggering.
from article: "Finally, the NSA has a rich history of monitoring the communications of Americans – sometimes legally, sometimes not."

re: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT&T
Part of the problem is that there are too many lock-in and obfuscation mechanisms in place: monopolies, patents (ironically created to "help" innovation), and legal nonsense making everything 1000% more complex than it often needs to be. How many people have jobs whose sole purpose is to sift through this crap: be it insurance forms, etc.? The argument is always, "well at least they have jobs"; when the reality is that it's not a good sign for society to have so many people with jobs that are not directly adding value.

Part of the problem is the end of the Cold War. When the U.S. was interested in "beating" the Soviet Union to space travel, etc. there were lots of things going on. Now, perhaps China and India will step up to compete in this way and drive future developments. If there aren't superpowers, things slow down.

Part of it is that some people just don't care where we are, versus where we could be. As crappy as life can be, the average quality of life still seems to be higher than at any point in the past. It seems that the majority of people stop demanding something better, once they are basically comfortable. (There are exceptions to that, of course.)

These things all have side effects, such as fewer jobs, less chance of receiving a good education, etc., so that after awhile, a small problem becomes a big one.
I agree. A large-scale web company should care very much about power.

Designing your own hardware also, incidentally, lets you control power consumption.
It's all well and good getting rid of your army when you have a superpower (with whom you have a free trade agreement) just up the street and which would be unlikely to let an invasion slip under its nose. It's even better when your country has hardly anything worth invading for..
I'd be weary of plastering a cell phone # of one of your references all over the internet...
The Constitution is second only to the Bible when it comes to being able to read anything into it that's convenient to the people currently in power.

This is usually considered a feature rather than a bug, but I'm becoming more of a skeptic over time.
Microsoft Outlook Web Access
"This is the best list of vim tips online "

When does a collection of items go from a list of tips to a lengthy compendium of details?

Like others, I started looking over the page and got discouraged; there's too damn much.
Pc dubai
Purplelines.ae is the favourite UAE online shopping portal with a wide variety of products and a full classifieds section. You can also send free e-cards from Purplelines. See it here!
Hacker News | Jobs
Killing them does not have to cost a lot of money. There are cheap ways if they choose to use them. There is pretty much no way to house an inmate in a modern prison for 30+ years cheaply, unless you provided no services, had no guards, etc.

I think the "what if they are innocent" angle is the strongest argument against capital punishment. Not cost.
Hmmm, interesting point. I wonder if it really matters. I put that there only so they know I'm a U.S. citizen and hence have legal right to work there. Can you suggest a succinct alternative?
You are correct. I am a very humble business owner (of 12) who recognizes, appreciates and praises my employees’ skills. I find it humbling that out of all the businesses "out there" they choose to work for me.

It comes down to two things. If he went about the questions differently, I would have answered all three sheets with a lot of thought and care (like I did on sheet one). It also was, that he could not read my signals and start wrapping things up. If he could not read my obvious signals, there is no way he could interact well with our clients. I have noticed over the years must clients will not inform you if you are speaking in lingo over their heads.

On a side note... let me share another story... my FAVORITE story...

I come from humble beginnings. My dad was a union work for a city and did his 40 hours per week. I started my business nine years ago on October 30th. My dad asked at our Thanksgiving dinner, "What are you doing again?" in front of our twenty or so guests, knowing darn well what I was doing since I was talking about it for a month or so. I said "Dad, as I already told you, I will be creating websites, assisting companies in database development, helping them install workstations etc... He responded, "I just don’t know" my dad had a business, you have to deal with taxes, lawyers, payroll, finding work etc etc... you are just better off working for somebody else...

My response... and it was without hesitation... "You are exactly the type of person I want to hire!". I don’t think he found it as funny as most of our guests.

It wasn’t until last year that he visited our office space (7,000 sq/ft) that reality sank in that his son has been somewhat successfully and he started to tear up.
Avoid the extremes. Don't do one thing, don't do hundreds of things. Find a distribution that makes you happy.

Go for depth. Go for breadth. Just don't be shallow and narrow.

Scour the earth for things you love, then plumb their depths entirely.
Katrina Kaif Hot & Sexy Wallpapers, Photos
Well it's about fucking time. I posted a link to wikipedia in mid-December showing that treaty negotiations are set to conclude in January, and I tripped the spam filter. I said it there and I'll say it again, we've got to do something.

It doesn't matter if you're not interested in politics. Politics is interested in you. If you don't want to get f*d in the ass do something about it. I called and mailed all the congressman for my state. If I knew how I'd set up a site with free VOIP + contact info so people could call and complain.

I think Skype has a HUGE interest in making sure this treaty isn't signed. I emailed them asking for VOIP to help. Any other HN'ers have ideas/have done anything?
Book recommendation: the geography of bliss (http://www.amazon.com/Geography-Bliss-Grumps-Search-Happiest...) Among other things it includes a now-interesting perspective on Iceland.
I didn't have a part in it.
Ok some I'm a member of modlife.com specifically the angels and airwaves site. And I have to say it is the perfect site for a dedicated fan, who enjoys social networking online. It is a site for people to have a more intimate look into the band members lives. We also get to hear insider news, have access to presale tickets, get to participate in private sound check parties and get VIP status at shows, we usually have live chat or webcam at least once a day with one of the members, etc. I enjoy the site very much, because I am a loyal fan.

I dont think people should hate on the site, because it is cool that the guy who used to sing about sex with dogs is trying to adapt to the changing times. It a shame more bands won't have such an open mind.
No, doing something is a good idea. Bitching about it in an online forum does nothing. Call your senators, set up a website, do something!
Agreed. Despite what you see in movies, a guy with a knife (even if he isn't very good with it) can very easily injure an unarmed opponent badly enough that he can't continue to fight.
Historically speaking, those people haven't been the main engines of innovation. The well educated and necessity-fulfilled crowd has apparently lost some of their competitive appetite. China and India should close the education gap in a decade or so and things should get interesting.
It's illegal to ask but it's not illegal for you to disclose that you are eligible to work so there's nothing wrong with keeping it.
I really hope someone, someday, can successfully cut the legs out from under the racket that is the textbook market. Forced bundles, superfluous editions that do little but change the page numbering, etc. I suspect a healthy enough used-textbook market could do this: As a teacher, if you know students can obtain an older edition easily, you could freeze the version of textbooks you use.

I don't know to what degree university politics would forbid using older versions, though.
I don't have a source for this on hand, but I've read that Kynikos' Associates' average annual performance is negative. Since they're net short equities, that's quite an accomplishment (it means that if, for example, you made leveraged investments in an index fund, and additional leveraged investments in Kynikos, you could end up with a higher annual return with lower risk).

But keep that in mind. The average result of a Chanos bet is that the entity in question goes up less than the rest of the market, not that it goes down.
In terms of medical advances, there may not have been any major blockbuster disease cures found, but there were several very important advances & innovations. I'll crib from ABC News and call out a few that I think are impressive as a layperson: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Decade/genome-hormones-top-10-m...

- Heart disease numbers dropped considerably: so many heart-related diseases and emergencies that previously would be fatal or have many more severe consequences are now survivable and livable.

- Stem cell research: even with the lack of US/federal funding, stem cell research started to bear fruit, and looks to only grow from here.

- Improved cancer survival rates for many types of cancers: Huge. We're a long way away from a real cure, but survival rates have never been higher.

- Incredible advances in arthroscopic & noninvasive/outpatient surgery & procedures: In 2004-ish I blew out the "terrible triad" of knee ligaments; my surgery scars are just little dots. My brother had similar surgery just about 6-8 years prior to that, and he bears the ugly long scar over his kneecap.

That's just gleaned from one decade-end retrospective article, and is just focused on medical advances.

But also, stop and think back to the internet in 2000 versus where we are now. There's been a hell of a lot of innovation there, as well; think of all of the things that are now possible or even commonplace to do online that were merely a gleam in our minds a decade ago...

If anything, just thinking about the pieces and foundations that were put in place throughout the 00s excites me for the possibilities of this next decade even more. It should be a very exciting time.
One thing that was particularly annoying, given the expected server troubles, was the use of images inside of links for stepping through the checkout procedure. So even after the page loaded I couldn't see the link until all the images loaded on the page.

Then to verify shipping, a piece of Javascript had to be loaded. The request for this file always timed out. So even when the link to finish checkout showed up I couldn't because the Javascript wasn't there.

In the end, I wasn't able to fill my order and I started wondering if Sparkfun hosts static assets on the same servers as it's shopping cart software.

EDIT: My cart had: Arduino Starter Kit, Arduino Motor Driver Shield, iPod Breakout Connector. It came out to a total of $99.85
I wish you great success.

FYI, on Chrome with a window size of 1280x800, the t-shirt image covers up the last word of your title. ("Cheap college textbook rentals just got [t-shirt]").
You mean wary. The person in question will be weary of being called.
I use branches called feature/foo, feature/bar, etc, and bug fixing branches named after the bug, eg. bug/42. Before a complicated rebase I often back up by branching to a branch named backup/foo, and I also have bits of experimental code in branches like experimental/foo or deadend/foo.

I rebase feature branches against master before merging them, so they are always a fast-forward merge. Then there's no reason at all to keep them around after the merge, so they go away. Same with the bug branches.

Do you know about "git branch"? It gives you a list of branches. What are you storing in your text file in addition to this list?
U.S. Citizen
They are all issues that distract you from your appointed goal, to build a company from scratch. You start spending
your time getting back on track and not going forward and your are done for.
Do you realize yo posted a link to http://localhost:8888...?

http://localhost:8888/woorkmash/facebook-for-iphone-3-1-is-g...
As a society we put a lot of effort at the moment into incremental improvement rather than completely new innovation.

When TV, Cars, Computers, The Internet were invented they were all breaking new ground in innovation because they were big areas that helped with life.

Now I think more smart people look at the way things are and can't see as many obvious things missing, so instead choose to incrementally improve what we have, either that or the goal is very ambitious and puts people off attempting, such as manned spaceflight beyond low earth orbit and a cure for cancer ect
> Right now I'm looking out the window at a frozen sea.

I've always romanticized the Winter ice skating on canals. What's it really like? Or is my geography off and canal skating is done primarily farther North?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elfstedentocht
Care to share what list this was? (I noticed a ton of gripes on time-nuts today.)
Access to knowledge through things like open courseware and one laptop per child. These movements are in their infancy now as they get bigger the 00's will be known the decade they were born.

Mobile phones (and the related communications) have gone from first world luxury to being more common than clean fresh water in many third world countries.
This has been a great decade for computing. 1.4MB removable storage was the norm 10 years ago. Right now I have incredibly fast 4GB removable storage in my pocket. Ten years ago we didn't have USB 2.0. Wireless protocols weren't as good. Digital cameras were mostly toys, and digital video was almost nonexistent. CVS was state-of-the-art version control. Hosting was expensive. I love 2010.
What is with the weird Music comment at th end of scheme.c?
Mixergy Backstage – with Cedar Rihani
I didn't see anyone else mention it (sorry to repeat if someone does before or while I write this).

But it REALLY helps if you have a friend who is already in there refer you. If you have none atm, either network or use http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...

Having a referral pretty much lets you skip the majority of the line at most companies. It also lets you get by even if your resume is not particularly stellar but your skills are. Google, in particular, makes an effort to do onsite interviews with most referrals (unless you disqualify yourself via a variety of different ways).

Having a friend there also means you get a lot of help along the way, advice about what to study for, hints, etc. So all around, its a good idea.
Agreed! Technology has continued to march on, and entirely new product categories have gone from "an idea"to gain popular usage. I mean, even just the advances in pure hardware and technology manufacturing are pretty impressive and have opened up so many more possibilities than what we had a decade ago.
Apache Mahout - A Java-based machine learning library
Researchers store working memory in brain slices
I'd like to ask. Was it latitude or attitude? Or just being free? A perfect confluence of circumstance?
I don't know how that works when it's a personal web page.

If I hypothetically wanted to get a job at Google, I would have two versions of example.com/resume -- one for general consumption, and one which told the user that I've determined their IP is in the Googleplex and have customized the content to fit their needs. I'd probably also put a discussion of cloaking, Google's user experience guidelines, and why this is solidly within them as an aside in a lightbox or maybe a link to another page.

For similar reasons, I'd mention to the user that they are participating in an A/B test of my resume. (Honestly, it doesn't matter what the results of the test are: this is purely theatre to demonstrate to the user that I'm the kind of guy who would A/B test his resume. It also tells you that I'm the kind of guy who thinks his resume is a engineering/marketing challenge rather than a desktop publishing task.)
MD5 Crack GPU (The fastest LGPL GPU MD5 password cracker)
The # of people lifted out of extreme poverty in China/India is pretty substantial.

The Human Genome project and sequencing.

Wikipedia is pretty substantial. All that information for free for everyone.
i second this. know basic data structures and algorithms. they are not going to ask you to implement red-black trees but they'll probably ask questions that require you to use hash tables or priority queues. know how to implement these and their running times.

and definitely practice solving problems on the whiteboard. its completely different. if its within the realm of comfort also get used to thinking out loud in the interview. some people really can't do this but i've found, both as an interviewer and interviewee, its really helpful.

your resume will basically get you a phone screen, beyond that i suspect its irrelevant.

(for the record, i've interviewed with the GOOG and was offered a job)
Are you looking for jobs at startups, who want to build web-apps. We're a Ruby + Rails shop, but there are many python startups doing wonderful things in SF.
Evolution, Immunolgy and Religion in James Cameron’s Avatar
Using Visualization to Kill a Hoax
I don't really think so. You're really trying to measure the scale of your work. Better metrics would be what specifications you implemented, features you added, scalability (# of users or servers). You wrote 21k lines of code, but code wasn't your end result. That code did something beyond getting piped into wc, I hope. :)
Thanks for the headline, llimllib! http://twitter.com/llimllib/statuses/7502975524
I would love to see the single-use Rube Goldberg contraption that costs two million to kill someone. But nien, that is not what your parent meant by saying that it costs a lot to kill someone.

It is the process of appeals and prosecution that is expensive. Your last two sentences are ironic in that light.
An anecdote about noninvasive surgery and such.

My mother had a similar injury. She blew out ligaments on her right knee in 2002, and then one her left leg in 2008. Look at one leg, you see a big scar from the top of the knee to the bottom. Look at the other, you see pretty much nothing. (Also, it's great. You can endure that type of trauma twice, and still be participating in intense sports such as alpine skiing and such.)
I agree completely- I don't know why so many people insist that technological progress is improving at an exponential rate when the empirical evidence seems to contradict this so clearly.