skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow. That was truly horrible. I'm shocked that this crap is getting played. I'm also really surprised that there were people who up-modded this to the front page.

I'd like to make a motion to move this post to [dead].
why would you do that? well, incompetence springs to mind.
(i'm not talking about you specifically, but about why recruiters screw up sometimes.)

lord knows i've talked to my fair share of incompetent recruiters. they often don't speak english very well and they seem intent on blowing through the highest number of candidates in the shortest possible time.

if it starts to look like you might be a match, god help you, because the recruiter wants to ram you down the throat of the employer as soon as possible, before some other recruiter gets somebody in there.

i always find that part particularly galling. if i'm going to switch jobs, it will be a major upheaval in my life. it may involve picking up and moving across the country. yet these low-rent recruiters expect me to hurry through the process as fast as possible, so they don't lose the commission.
Input: "If I had 6 hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first 4 sharpening the axe."

Output: "Text is not likely to be stupid."

Input: "You wanna see my pics?"

Output: "Text is likely to be stupid."
Someone famous once said something along the lines of:

"Persistence isn't trying the same thing over and over. That's just annoying. Persistence is having the same goals over and over."
(In reply to the aside: I modded him up too. Some people mod up and down based on whether the comment is on-topic, polite and well-thought-out. Others mod up and down based on agreement with the thought. Guidelines for each are not immediately obvious.)
Yes its a quote from gates' book "The Road Ahead". He uses it in may of his interviews. :)
Here is a funny related quote from W.C. Fields:

"If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it."
Yes, huge flaws and easily gamed. I just liked the attempt.
Great story - good for you!
Both git and hg are very nice, you will not go wrong with either one. If Windows support in the near future is a priority, you should probably use Mercurial. It works well today. The Windows port of git is coming along, but I don't know how long it'll take to reach first-class citizen status.

That said, if you don't need to deal with Windows, I suggest using git. It has a more power-user feel to it than Mercurial, and it has a few spectacular features I can't live without: rebase, stash, and the git-svn bridge. I'm also rather fond of git's lightweight branch mechanism. I know hg supports a variant of rebase and stash using the Transplant and Queues extensions, but the last time I looked at hg svn, it wasn't ready for use.

Also, when you read about git, you'll hear a lot of first-time users complaining about "the index." Just remember to think of it as a staging area for commits, and you'll be fine. It was a bit confusing at first, but then I realized that I like using it for making granular commits and diff checking.
Jay Fields Thoughts: The Language Question
I've got to go along with pius on this one. This offends me. It's that smarmy, ingratiating racism that seems to be all over the internet. It's not funny, it's not clever.
Dupe? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=145821
Will the event be streamed on JTV Peter?
It will be streamed - you'll be able to see it at http://www.justin.tv/hackertv
for anyone who cares here's the tumblr for one of the authors of the article - http://caffeinated.tumblr.com/
Yeah, it really hooked me -- even though I haven't used it for much, every time I have a simple, quick task where I just need to get a little info online fast I think of jottit
Furthermore, if the company is willing to go around the recruiter they paid for, exactly how ethical do you think they'll be in their dealings with you? A few years ago I learned this one the hard way.
I am looking at their front page and I have no idea what they expect me to type in a very large unlabeled text entry field.

And if I click on Create, it say "see, that was easy". It certainly was, but what was IT exactly ? :)
Freakonomics covers this in their book. Realtors are motivated to do as many transactions as possible, so they are not the best negotiators. They will settle for a so-so price to get transactions done so they earn more money per unit time. There is even academic research to support this.
Thanks for the link :-)

Google does some nice stuff, and they have huge brand recognition, so I definitely worry about them. That said, I think that the whole productivity app business needs to be thought about in a different way, the way it works now you're always trying to shoehorn your project into something that almost but not quite fits. I hope to have an advantage in that department.
Early in my career I used headhunters to find a job simply because they either had a connection in the company and could circumvent some processing or because they were on "approved vendor" lists (bigger companies).

10+ years later, whenever I need work, I never call a recruiter. My first calls/emails/IMs are to my network. They are infinitely more valuable than any headhunter.

At the last startup I worked at, we used both direct hire and firms. I will tell you that there was a LOT more flexibility when going direct. I mean more pay, bonuses, vacation, etc. A recruiter makes a % of your salary. So if the company can pay up to 100k, and the recruiter will get 10% (usually it's more like 20+%) then how much do you think they will be able to pay you? I bet they won't offer more than 91k. If you'd come direct you'd've had more leverage to get that $9k as a bonus or straight salary.

That said, I think that you might be too late in the process...
Apple is no different than google, ms and ibm ...I just read the extract from the book "The Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies". The author and well known academic Jagdish Sheth says that he's closely watching a clutch of hugely successful companies such as Google and Cisco and he is convinced that on their way to success, these companies have unintentionally acquired certain bad habits which might lead to their downfall. With success, Google will become arrogant and complacent. Google is today's avatar of Microsoft, which is yesterday's avatar of IBM.

"I used to think that competition destroys good companies. Strangely, I found that's not true: companies destroy themselves," says Sheth. "On the way to becoming successful or achieving survival or greatness, companies begin to acquire bad habits." None of these habits, he says, are acquired intentionally but it happens as a side effect of growth.
I've often thought about doing something like this for comments. I think it would work.

The hard part is getting the initial corpora of stupid and non-stupid text. Stupid writing is harder to recognize than spam. It might work to use sites as proxies.

Another related filter that might be worth trying to build would be one for recognizing trolls. It would be easy to collect the bad corpus for this filter, because the design of most forums makes it easy to see all the comments by a particular user, e.g.

http://reddit.com/user/qwe1234/
We moved to Pittsburgh, and we weren't troubled by the proliferation of small arms or drugs from Mexico there either.
Am I the only one that was ignorant of the annotate_models plugin?

http://repo.pragprog.com/svn/Public/plugins/annotate_models/
They said it had no effect at all on their growth. They did not seem impressed with what Google has so far.
Fake Craigslist "everything must go" ad costs man pretty much everything
BitStrips: comics-creation for everone
Yeah, I'm more of the first type. I'll mod something up if it's on-topic, well thought-out, and I agree with it. I'll only mod something down if it's blatantly off topic and rude/trollish. If I simply don't agree with what they said, but they said it in useful way, I'll just leave it be.

I'm all about modding the people who post goatse links down into negative oblivion, but I think it kind of stifles discussion if you downmod simply because you don't happen to agree. Instead of dog-piling someone for a dissenting opinion, take the extra 30 seconds to write a response. It'll enrich the discussion.
"Who says they're 30% of your market?"

I do.

In fact, that's exactly what I said, "I'll take them."

I have absolutely no problem whatsoever pursuing these prospects. I have figured out how to do it without undue limitations on the rest of my business, and I'm glad to have them.

Frankly, I'm a little pleasantly surprised there are so many who would abandon them. Less competition for me. You're obviously one of those who doesn't care about them (why else would you insult them?), so why do you mind if I pursue them?
Maybe you could start with all the comments on the Bile Blog (bileblog.org). It is a seething pit of bitterness and trolling.
Discussions about moderation are pretty boring, but I will say that I was one of the ones who modded the original comment down, mostly because I thought that the suggestion that Hollywood is deliberately trying to "brainwash" people into accepting "American values" was just plain silly, and also showed a poor understanding of what "brainwashing" really means, not to mention a poor understanding of how Hollywood works.
But, how much "extra" information is really required for these services? Do they really need me to fill out my address or some other thing? Can't they just link my openid to a username of my choosing?

If that's the case, it speeds up the registration process by a lot, and _nearly_ replaces it. (not quite since I'd need a username)
its PG, a ycombinator founder, thus - his numbers should be correct
How to write a good application for Summer of Code
"The hard part is getting the initial corpora of stupid and non-stupid text"

Can't you simply use comment votes for this - use the comments with the least votes? According to the users of a site these would be the stupid ones. Maybe comments with some algorithmic tool to include the karma of the user that wrote the comment.

The advantage of this approach is that it will work across sites where the definition of stupid might differ.
You're in computer vision, so you'd know more than me. Like you, I am a bit skeptical about it, but maybe this particular technique happens to work well enough for faces, due to the nature of face image data. Just like Bayesian classifiers assume independence when there isn't any, it works "pretty damn well".

If you do get around to reading it, lemme know if you picked anything up from it that also smell fishy.
Maybe something that could be incorporated into disqus.
Yahoo, Tata Deal Empowers Hadoop Developers
Rails - Django Comparison
That would be a really good idea. You could make a version 1 in a day.
Video Game Piracy:: Multi-Dimensional Brand-Level Security Strategies Required
yeah I know, just posted the question before PG gave the answer :-)
Firefox isnt perfect, but a lot better than ie6 or ie7. I think most developers should aim to support IE6+7,firefox 2, safari.. that should cover 95%+ of the market.
John Graham-Cumming "retiring" from anti-spam
[Video]- Interview of Clickpass founders
Am I the only one who senses a bit of a red flag in a startup using a recruiter to find their 4th employee? I could be wrong; it's impossible to tell based on next to no information. But it does suggest that they might not be plugged in to the right communities, and/or that they're already afflicted with bureaucratic thinking.

Edit: I think I'm probably just being prejudiced here. But I'll leave the comment because I'm curious to know what others think.
its funny; im reading "founders at work" - and it seems all startups have that "miracle" / I would call it a tipping point; for google it was their first 100k investment. For many people it is the point at which you get others behind you on your idea.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143955

Yeah, I submitted that a couple days ago and no one voted that up.

I think that if you come to depend on hacker news for your news, then you only visit the front page, and stop visiting the new pages. And given that you can upvote on the front page, people just do it there, rather than peruse through the new articles and upvoting them. So what you end up with is that an article just needs 2 or 3 votes to make it on the front page, and then there's a positive feedback effect. This makes it more of a hit or miss sort of thing for articles. I think if you can only vote when you're on the new scenes page, it might help.
Sun Researching Super Fast Laser Processors
640k is all a person needs, and other apocryphal computer quotes
Ok, I went overboard with an arbitrary and mostly irrelevant statistic. 25%, 50%, whatever. Does that really invalidate all my points completely? I'm shocked you're getting all that karma for such an obvious refutation while I get almost nothing for a view that might not be common sense or popular but not that far-fetched and more thought-provoking than "oh, poor guy".
Interested? Of course I am! Talented enough? Doubtful :(
It's not that developers don't want these users. It's not that developers don't respect these users. It's that supporting IE 6 takes a lot of time. That's time I'd rather spend making features to help ALL users. Is that asking too much?

Whenever I work in IE compatibility I always think 'how much further on would the internet be if these hours were spent on making progress'.

Having said that I won't be installing the code to popup that window because users don't want to see this. They won't understand the intricate development reasoning behind it. We've made our bed (as developers) and we shall be in for some time to come.
For me, that day is in the past. One of the most satisfying days in my life was when I installed Rockbox on my iPod and was able to eradicate iTunes from my PC. Slow, bloated, DRM-infested piece of uselessness if you ask me. Now, I can simply copy MP3 files to a removable drive, just like God intended.

Their actions regarding AT&T lock-in, auto-bundling Safari in iTunes updates, and forbidding Flash or Java on iPhones have only confirmed my impression that Apple would love to abuse its monopoly position, if only it had one.
it's good to know that some of the somewhat/to outright discourteous comment threads aren't the norm...
No problem. I did later try it out, and it looks like those 6 languages are all that's offered; unfortunately, the language I'm learning right now (and the previous one) are not among them. Maybe I'll try back later.

Right now I've got a stack of flash cards I carry with me everywhere. Whenever I'm not being productive at work, I pull them out and flip through them for a few minutes, sometimes many times a day. If I can learn (and remember) 5 new words, it's a good day. So I'm still skeptical if the trick is simply "repetition".
Is Your Software Development Organization Mainstream?
Ask HN: Stock my ipod--share your favorite podcast episodes
I listen to podcasts while I jog, so I'm hoping Hacker News can help stock my ipod. I'm looking for favorite podcast episodes as opposed to just a pointer to, say, the IT conversations website.

To get the ball rolling here are a couple of mine:

Steven Levitt (Freakonomics)

http://www.chicagogsb.edu/multimedia/audio/2006-06-28_XP_Levitt.mp3

A PGcast

http://cdn.itconversations.com/ITC.OSCON05-PaulGraham-2005.08.02.mp3
Welcome to web development, where you WILL support any and all browsers in use. End of story.
Eddie Izzard on Computers
I think this is a trait common among entrepreneurs and other high achievers. I have a similar story, and it's good to find, test and expand your limits. It's good to know that you can crunch in the short term without fear if it's necessary. And it's good to improve your ways of going about things so it doesn't happen again.
I think the real problem here is: bad submission headline, "Loren Feldman is hilarious but cruel at the same time".

The link goes to a blog post where a software hacker -- the creator of a early piece of Mac software I really liked, DayMaker -- comments on Feldman's work and Feldman's inclusion in a tech industry panel. By mere virtue of having open comments, that was an invitation for other discussion. And, as the issue relates to tech bloggers and the online video market -- popular topics here -- it arguably fits at HN.

But the submission headline injects a strong opinion -- that the Feldman work is 'hilarious' and 'cruel'. (Even 'cruel' can imply some level of affirmation; nonsensical insults like "your mama wears combat boots" aren't 'cruel'.) That initial spin has polluted the later discussion.

At the risk of offending another group, I will also point out the original submitter does not reside in North America. He may not be familiar with North American sensitivity taboos, and may mainly know about American race relations and ethnic groups through the distorted lens of exported entertainment mass media.
That was posted almost 2 years ago...
Facebook Hires Google's Social Media Director Beard (Update1)
Python httplib Performance Problems
OSBC Report: CBS Interactive, open source, and innovation
How can we get in touch with you ?

You don't have any contact info on your profile page.
Safari support is painful..
Don't bother watching this...
The iPhone SDK: APIs Apple Didn't Want You to Know About
New Google Search Tool Causing a Stir
I keep hearing people talk about this Ender's Game book. Should I buy one to read? It's gonna be a hard endeavour since I will have to import it (can take up to 2 months to arrive), so is it worthwhile?
Nix v. Hedden: in which the Supreme Court decided whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable
The title is slightly deceptive, as it was for the purposes of applying a tariff act, but the premise of the case is still whimsical IMO.
You could probably also use all the comments on Youtube as a good 'stupid corpus'.
Microsoft to Support Two Eclipse Projects
Is there any evidence, at all, that YC "sponsorship" improves deal quality? "Most" YC startups don't take A rounds (Graham). About 50% of those that try to, fail (Graham). If YC takes 20, and we generously assume 9 of them go for A-rounds, and 5 of them obtain them, what percentage of them get good valuations?

How many YC "sessions" have there been so far? If each produces 4-5 funded companies 6 months later, this isn't a hard question to answer. For instance, most companies publish their boards of directors. Let's see which ones got screwed.
My project: Twitterate: Rate stuff via Twitter
//USER COMMENT REDACTED BY STUPIDITY FILTER//
Google is today's avatar of Microsoft, which is yesterday's avatar of IBM??
I just read the extract from the book "The Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies". The author and well known academic Jagdish Sheth says that he's closely watching a clutch of hugely successful companies such as Google and Cisco and he is convinced that on their way to success, these companies have unintentionally acquired certain bad habits which might lead to their downfall. With success, Google will become arrogant and complacent. Google is today's avatar of Microsoft, which is yesterday's avatar of IBM.

"I used to think that competition destroys good companies. Strangely, I found that's not true: companies destroy themselves," says Sheth. "On the way to becoming successful or achieving survival or greatness, companies begin to acquire bad habits." None of these habits, he says, are acquired intentionally but it happens as a side effect of growth.
Smart thinking - and an excellent example of good unobtrusive usability design.
Sigh...I emailed Trevor last year about my desire to work there but never heard back from him. Now that I'm going to Stanford's ME grad program this fall maybe I can weasel my way into some other robotics startup...
"He couldn't have spent more than 8 hours working with us and working with our developer."

How many hundreds of hours did he work without pay to get to that point?
True, although that would conflate stupid with spam unless you took further measures.
I don't get the name, it makes no sense from a marketing standpoint at all.
Gentlemen: I give you the Internet's first and only way to rate things on a 1 to 5 scale.

To use, just send a tweet reply to @rating in this form:

"@rating 5 "Thing Being Rated" and some comments here"

This is a pretty rough draft -- wish I could say it was a weekend project but it took a few weekends; but it was fun and I learned a lot about Rails, and Rails deployment especially.

So, here's the releasing early part. Should I iterate or abandon? What features would make this cool?

Note: the part of the app that scrapes Twitter is an hourly cron job, so if you don't see your rating immediately, that's why.
I think elite ad networks like The Deck are awesome.
When your "Final Destination" comes-You never know what causes it...
Some homeschoolers form communities and share their strengths.

Also, the benefit of the division of labor at a public school has to be balanced against the teachers not being able to pay attention to the particular needs of each child. It's been shown that the colleges with smaller student to teacher ratios do much better than the converse.

Personally, I'd say most of the classes I've ever attended have been a waste of my time. For jr high, I switched from homeschool to public school, and I was quite ahead of the rest of the students. I hardly had to try to get an A. Then I went to British grammar school for high school and got my butt kicked.
On the one hand, you really miss the talk that these slides were attached to. Browsing the slides by themselves is kind of tedious and lame.

But the split-screen format really drives home the message that Rails and Django -- apart from a few minor differences that will probably converge over time -- are the same thing, implemented in different languages. There's just not a lot in there to hang a flame war on. Emacs vs vi, this isn't.
Not all of them, but you should only need to hand-pick a few before the classifier starts to make the job much less tedious.
Ask YC: How many people here were regional BBS users back in the day?
Just struck me that maybe the BBS era aligned with a lot of news.YC's hacker beginnings with online computer usage.

I, for one, began initially with a national Commodore community called QLink. I ran up ridiculous bills before hopping into the regional BBS scene, where I met my eventual wife and almost all of my most enduring friends.

What about you? Or are all of you too young for that era?
Yes, it's more about the community than whether we can regulate submissions.