skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It does make sense that successful people are more attractive to others, and that's probably not a bad thing.

I was referring more to domination in the sense of forcing your will on others, especially if it's done assholishly. A lot of people feel that you're a "real" man if and only if you're richer/stronger/getting more women/etc. than other men.
John,

I am really curious as to why you did not choose StackOverflow. StackOverflow is extremely well suited for programming related questions.
Both the article and summary sound like, "too much information is bad for me because someone else might use it to do something bad."
Bungie, the Halo developers, as well as many other developers follow this philosophy. How can you take 30 seconds of fun and repeat that throughout the entire game? That's what many studios strive for.
One of the best 1 hour 16 minutes 27 seconds use of my life. Thank you for posting this.
It looks like a concept sketch; I don't see any way you could fit a sufficiently powerful motor and power supply in that space-- and even if you could, heat and noise would still be a large problem.

In other words: I suspect it's from the same folks who promised us all flying cars and hoverboards...
That's a great link, I had not seen that article before. Though, in practice,the actual framerate to vary from the specified by much more than the -10 / +5 fps that he lists.

His final sentences might be relevant to this topic:

On high CPU load we might actually cut [the max framerate] into half, e.g. 30 frames/sec. OS X already does this in certain conditions.

Wish he had expanded on that a little more. Any idea what conditions cause OS X to halve the framerate?
These problems are well known, yet enterprise IT management seems to persist in sticking with IE, even spreading disinformation to their employees with claims that FF, Safari, Opera and Chrome are more vulnerable.

One incident still boggles my mind. A friend of mind attended a security conference last year with a corporate IT manager who had been insisting that IE is the better choice from a security model standpoint. One after another speaker stood up and presented a paper or a speech or a lecture or a round-table all saying essentially the same thing:

The security of networked systems is only as good as it's weakest link, and IE has consistently been the weakest link for years. Even with hundreds of security patches since XP was released, it's still such a threat to the network that it's irresponsible to continue using it. Not one presenter used it anymore. They continued that enterprise IT should not only be recommending other browsers, they should be enforcing other browsers as part of their security policy and disabling IE as much as possible on all systems under their control. It was damning.

After we got back to the office, he sent out a corporate wide email reminding everyone that browsers other than IE are vulnerabilities to the network and won't be tolerated.
did you read the article? "lame excuses like charity work (most likely they spent one night feeding the homeless and are bragging about it since),"

most people do very little charity, and brag a lot about it. If you have hired people and seen otherwise, i'd love to stand corrected.
SRWare Iron Browser 4.0.275 Beta for Linux
A continuation is really just a type of callback -- "go to point X in the code, with state Y".
Let me emphasize SBIRs at NIH most especially if you're serving a medical market. The money is good and they'll take you from prototype to market starting usually with less than $100k and over three stages to over $1M. The application process is a bit troublesome but no more troublesome than meeting with each and every VC. Check out:

http://www.sbir.gov/index.html

When you see an opportunity that could fit, contact the program officer. Talk to them about about what you're working on and how it fits. Most importantly, keep checking back.
I'd guess any plausible explanation would also have to account for the fact that basically every Adobe product on the Mac has gotten much worse over time with the exception of Lightroom.

See this blog post, and the comments that follow for the comments of hardcore Adobe users:

http://hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/a-big-assed-post-about-fire...
How Netflix loaded 1 billion rows into SimpleDB
"I think there's a connection. Certainly in the early days of Unix, pipes facilitated function composition on the command line. You could take an input, perform some transformation on it, and then pipe the output into another program. (...) [The mathematical approach of function composition is] exactly what I mean. (...) I think [that mathematical formalism] was right there from the start. Doug McIlroy, at least in my book, deserves the credit for pipes. He thought like a mathematician and I think he had this connection right from the start. I think of the Unix command line as a prototypical functional language."

-- from an interview with Alfred Aho, one of the creators of AWK

http://books.google.com/books?id=yB1WwURwBUQC&lpg=PT120&...
Just for that I gave you an "unearned" point for the submission you referenced ^_^.

Seriously, if you post something that provokes really good (useful, whatever) comments, you've done something good for the community and a positive reward for that is hardly unearned.
I think you're right, I overreacted. Thanks for the sanity check.
Google Plans To Buy Its Way Into Real Estate
You might talk with Mitch Altman, founder of Cornfield Electronics. Mitch has a successful hardware business now, selling the TV-B-Gone remote among other things.
http://www.tvbgone.com/cfe_main.php

Mitch did it without needing VC. Mitch is also incredibly generous and approachable; we've worked together in creating and running a hacker space. He recently led a trip to China for people who wanted to learn more about manufacturing there. If you sent him a short blurb + video he might be able to offer some useful advice.
It is an internally developed gadget.
Apple doesn't have a public API for Adobe to hook into to allow for hardware acceleration. As far as I know, there's nothing Adobe can do to remedy that situation.

Adobe wants to bring better video performance to the Mac, but Apple is not supporting them.

Here's the source:
http://theflashblog.com/?p=1641
I disagree. While I think copyright laws are overly draconian, the creator of the intellectual property deserves to have control over where, how, or if its distributed.

Its not Mr. Ellis's prerogative to introduce a new business model around their content.
I agree in principle, I just feel that the reward is totally out of proportion. Anyone, including the author, could have submitted exactly the same link for a huge reward. the 'A new approach to China' post by Google did the same thing for someone else, catapulting them from ~50 points to well over 1000.
How to brag
'Commenters'. Your English is fine, but could you please clarify what you mean by "defend commonplaces"? I'm guessing you mean "agree with / repeat common views on the site" as opposed to informed disagreement - sometimes called "groupthink".
I don't buy that. Flash can do everything Parallels can, and - like the article said - inside Parallels flash is running faster!
The motor to move enough air to repel rain while fitting in the bottom of that umbrella would be incredibly loud. Think vacuum cleaner cloud. It'd also only last a few minutes on any battery portable enough to carry around.

The concept also ignores the fact that thunderstorms are associated with high winds. It's air movement that creates the rain in the first place. The umbrella would be ineffective in anything more than a sun shower.
Funding innovation and various creative peaks
Some already exist. Check out Cappuccino (which I use and has been amazing) or Sproutcore (which Apple now owns, I think). There are others as well.
How To Add Captions To Your YouTube Videos
So, the "best hiring tip ever" is a question that's easy to bullshit once you've heard it, and that puts people whose proudest achievements relate to their careers in the uncomfortable situation of inventing a response that dresses up the importance of their hobbies? Brilliant.

Advice like this makes me realize why employers believe that qualified applicants are so hard to find. If this is the garbage that passes for best practice in interviews, they might as well be sacrificing chickens to the gods of employment.
Adobe is really hurting themselves here. If most of the use of Flash on the web is video, content creators now have raw Theora or H264 in <video> as stable alternatives, with Flash becoming an IE-only fallback mode.
Personalized Porn [SFW]
The unfortunate thing, which your examples actually perfectly illustrate, is that everyone has a different idea of what's important, relevant, or necessary in any circumstance. Your examples are actually all situations where you and someone else DISAGREED on what was a issue and what was a detail. Bikeshedding naming conventions is an easy one, but shouldn't QC have well laid-out guidelines so that they don't have to rely on judgment calls by individuals? Was it as obvious to your friend as it was to you that arriving at a party at a particular time is a major priority, whereas table manners once you get there are trivial?

Examples are everywhere because all human beings prioritize and act on their priorities. But we tend to have different ideas of what's important, relevant, necessary, or good. Hence... discord.
http://www.omniglot.com/
The Quicktime C APIs have been written nearly 20 years ago for a different OS. The primary goals back then have been performance and economy, not abstraction and clarity.
I've had things like "management will stay onshore" and "capital work will stay onshore" given to me too. Given that at least in India, there's a career path from programmer to tech manager to ... and in the US there isn't, I don't see how "management" and/or "design" will stay onshore.

My only option is to believe that "management/design stays onshore" is a way to keep current mid-level managers from pulling the ripcord right now, and at least getting all the programming and the technical managers offshore before everyone below director-level wises up.
Although what about the people who, misguided though they may be, haven't done anything outside of work because their passion is their work?
Because if there's one thing Boston does well, it's massive construction projects.
From the 'Brief Timeline Of Google’s Real Estate Efforts': "January 16, 2009" - wrong year, buddy!
It's 2010, not the 'early days of Unix'. Yes there is a connection, a useful one, if you are sitting in front of a PDP-8.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.functional/msg/8476...

http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247#comment-3085
Reporting in.
Different culture, different market I would guess.

SpringSource (platform) and Zimbra are in the enterprise world. Also keep in mind that both SS and Zimbra have enterprise customers.

Startups these days aren't producing CRM, ERP, HRM, and CMS... and most startups aren't platform providers.
The linked blog post gives more details on how he did it and the throughput he got.

http://practicalcloudcomputing.com/post/284222088/forklift-1...

Very interesting that Oracle became the bottleneck.
SSL is completely and utterly useless without CAs. If there's no way to verify and trust that a given certificate belongs to the website it is being used on, any would-be-man-in-the-middle can just grab a random certificate and use it to completely eliminate all of the security that SSL provides.
You probably shouldn't even have to ask a passionate person this; at some point in the interview, they probably would've told you what they enjoy doing outside of work.

Regardless, there's no perfect way to interview someone for a development job. It's equal parts experience, your feeling about them, how they fit into the existing organization, and a ton of other variables.
Yes I read your post. That's why I was able to quote from it. If you want to hire a good programmer, ask them about programming. It's that simple. Set up a few scenarios and let them talk and whiteboard their way out of it. Ideally you'll be able to come up with a range of problems that range from familiar to totally unknown. The familiar scenarios will tell you if they are bullshitters, and the unfamiliar scenarios will tell you how quickly they can adapt to new environments.

While it is true that people who program outside of work tend to be good programmers, it is not true that all good programmers program outside of work. And your note about charity work is outright insulting to anyone who has spent their free time helping those in need.
Firstly, I quoted the average age of prostitutes as 13; apparently the claim, even in the documentary, is that of the age of entry into prostitution. My mistake.

Secondly, I've been trying to track down the original reference. The Justice department has a page here:

http://www.justice.gov/criminal/ceos/prostitution.html

Listing a reference to a report by Estes et. al. which was located here: http://caster.ssw.upenn.edu/~restes/CSEC.htm

But is now not available. The specific claim is supported to be on page 92.
my comment was not meant to be insulting to those. It was meant to insult people who tend to blow hard and do little real good. There are lot more of those out there, sadly. No offense intended.
I was running a website that was doing millions of writes a day to SDB for real time analytics. The biggest PITA feature of SDB is that it throttles writes in a very horrible stringent way. You can barely tickle a domain and it will throttle you. I never had any consistently good batch puts - they all eventually fail.

After talking with SDB folks, they recommended that I shard my data because each domain maps to a different network computer cluster. I'm glad it's the first recommendation in the OP list because it seriously is the best thing you can do.

Another trick that I experimented with: use multiple EC2 instance to write to the same domain. I managed to convince myself that the throttling is per EC2 instance per domain, not a global per domain. However, cost ruled this solution out.

Reading was much more consistent but was also throttled, especially at high write-loads. The solution was two-fold:

1. Cache everything "indefinitely" and break the cache when you know its contents will change. For the real time stuff, you can't cache. I used memcached, and looked at other solutions like Tokyo Tyrant, memcachedb and redis. Use what you feel comfortable using really.

2. Read as little as possible. Doing a "select * from domain where..." is horrible compared to doing "select attribute1, attribute2 from domain where...". Once you read, cache.
I agree - it's really a great tool for questions and there already exists a vibrant jQuery community there. Unfortunately Q&A isn't the only form of communication that the jQuery community has: We also have bug reports and development discussions. We seriously considered going with Stack Overflow (or even with a Stack Exchange) but in the end we would still have to set up a separate site for having general discussions - and that would fracture the community even further. We looked for a tool that would unify both discussion and Q&A under a single site and of the ones that we found Zoho Discussions was the best. It'll take a little bit of work to get to the normal level of polish that one typically associates with the jQuery project but it's "just" user interface concerns and not a fundamental difference in the software's structure.
The God Equation.
The Kindle displays 16 shades of gray.

When you read on your iPhone, are you able to read novels for extended, contiguous periods of time (more than an hour)? Just wondering how comfortable that would be on such a small screen for a long period of time.
Someone lacks sense of humor...
This is a great list. David McCandless' recent book The Visual Miscellaneum does not quite fit in with these books - it's not instructional and has no "theory". But it's a beautiful book full of great examples of data visualization, enough to get any designer's creative juices flowing. I highly recommend it.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/the-visual-miscel...
"CV's (people lie) and reference checks (everyone knows 2 people they like) "

Marissa Meyer was asked on the Charlie Rose show about Google's hiring process, and she answered that they had done the numbers and the only correlation there was between the hiring process and how well new employees worked out was their CV. People that had prior experience in the area they were hired for did better than people who didn't. Except for that there were no significant correlations to be found.

I believe Marissa Meyer over Zaki Mahomed(the author of the article)
More likely than not, the electronics inside were meant to detect the motion of the water. I'd be willing to bet there was something floating in the water that detected the motion of the water. Perhaps more of a vibration / proximity detector than motion detector, but that's what 'half empty bottle of gatorade and some electronics' says to me.
Disclosure: I wrote the linked piece.

That said, I think the above argument works if you're looking at Zimbra purely as an acquisition of technology. My view, as might be gathered, is that this - like a lot of enterprise acquisitions - is as much or more about the business that Zimbra was doing. Where business reads as: the account inroads they've made in small hosts and service providers everywhere; the kind of accounts that are crucial to VMware's future.

Whether it justifies the valuation is a question of revenues, which we don't have a good sense of, but if this helps advance VMware's larger ambitions it's certainly worth a significant multiple of an early stage startup.
Funding Innovation
Are you really using an editor that doesn't let you define your tab widths? I couldn't name a single modern IDE that lacks that feature.

(and extra points to the grandparent for the ironically mis-spaced "tabs vs. spaces" chart!)
I'm not entirely sure how this can claim to be more "eco-friendly" than a normal umbrella given the energy costs required to power it (not to mention manufacture a battery and the entire device itself). When you're making a normal umbrella, the only energy cost comes when you manufacture the metal skeleton and fabric and put them together.

It's still a pretty neat idea though.
Thanks, yes, I meant "repeat common views" - without necessarily meaning "groupthink" though. For me, groupthink implies uncritical thinking, whereas repeating (and repeatedly reading) common views is only inefficient. So I might down-vote examples of groupthink (if I had down-vote rights that is ;)), but I would just skip over common views without bothering to vote.

edit: although in all likelihood, I wouldn't know groupthink if I saw it, being part of the group... :)
I would posit that having strict liability laws, in this case, might be the best of bad options. If you can get an out by looking for an authentic looking ID, pimps will find ways to issue fake IDs. It's not hard.
Injustice usually begets injustice, but that shouldn't be the case in a court of law.
I just got done doing a 4 hour long programming problem as the first start in the interview process at a company. In my long history of finding jobs, this is the way to go. It was a well thought out, challenging problem, and the solution really flexed a lot of different aspects of what a good programmer should be able to do.

It has the added bonus of me thinking this might be an above average company and I'm more interested in them than any of my other prospects.
Remember - schools tell us that they teach judgement.
You're on your way... Come join the rest of us in the world of IDEs. Once you've seen your "editor" autocomplete a member from another class (in a namespace you haven't even imported), there's no going back.
Here's a common route:

1) Get provisional patents

2) Build a protoype of the finished product, if not possible then graphics showing the final product when polished.

2) Go to a couple of big customers and show them your product + graphics and get some letters of intent (we'll buy x many of this product)

3) Go to a bank with your letters of intent and get a loan against them. Banks are experienced with this sort of thing, it's a pretty common route for new inventors to go down.

4) Use the loan to tool up and get the product manufactured in a smallish quantity

5) Fulfil the sales you've made and make more sales.

You don't need VC money to take a hardware product to market, most inventors don't take VC money to get a product to market. But if you decide you do need it for whatever reason then the more of these steps you take before approaching the VC the more chance you have of getting funded.

Especially getting a patent and getting sales on the table.
Ok I know I am going to get many down votes for no apparent reason for this comment but I think this was ridiculous that this post made it to the home page of HN. There was nothing of value in this post, the author just told some vague things about the movie (3 idiots by the way is a fantastic movie). No opinion was put up, no analysis was done just nothing was there. It was just like saying "I like 3 idiots and its about failing education system".

There are way better posts than this that could have made the front page.
Hmmm, I now feel we're at a "What's your price?" level of agreement (the old "Would you sleep with me for a million pounds?" joke), in that I agree 1,000+ points for forwarding an item is beyond ridiculous (and for something like that a "please drop my karma" option would be worth it ... although I'd assume 1,000 point boosts are very rare).

Your case of a bit over 50? Out of proportion, very possibly (I don't pay close attention to this level of detail), but maybe not "totally".

Then there's the "this rewards one for other worthwhile items forwarded that got lost in the crowd" theory. For those driven, at least in part, by a desire for more karma, this encourages them to continue to forward worthwhile things. If it encourages them while not discouraging you from continuing to forward items....
I'd say it's a very easy to verify question. If someone is experienced in interviews (you can usually tell that's the case) they might talk a lot about the stuff they did, but they will have nothing to show. Usually when you're excited about something you will have some proof, or will know enough details that it's easy to confirm. For almost all people I work with, it's enough to google their name to find their projects / blogs / ... everything the employer would be interested in.
Web designer wanted for a YC W2010 company
We are a YC company in the (current) W2010 batch. We're looking for a designer that can make our application at least 10 times more beautiful and 10 times more usable than it is.

We believe that user-interfaces should be so obvious that users never need to click the "help" button. We're looking for a designer who considers that a minimum quality benchmark for his or her work.

As our designer, you should be:

- Comfortable with the technology (HTML, CSS, web standards, jQuery, flash, etc.)

- Competent with the tools of the trade like Photoshop

- Knowledgeable about design and typography

- Passionate about user experience and willing to defend your opinions to us

- Flexible with your hours, your patience and your willingness to learn new things

We use HTML, CSS, blueprint, jQuery, and occasionally flash and expect you to be familiar with these tools. Be sure to mention it if you had a working knowledge of Ruby, Linux or you happen to be an SEO expert as well.

This position comes with equity; if we like you, we want you to be personally invested in making our company better.

We prefer someone in the bay area because we do our best work face-to-face.

To apply please send us a few sentences about yourself and a link to design that you think will impress us enough to want to give you part of our company. Don't send us a resume; we can worry about that after we've decided that we like your work.

E-mail us at yc2010job@gmail.com