skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually once got this question in an interview for a big search company: "Reverse a linked list, in place".

I scetched a solution on the whiteboard, drawing nodes and pointer arrows. I didn't manage to write code to solve the problem, unfortunately, and I didn't get the job...

I consider myself a pretty decent programmer, but I know that I'm not very good at discovering solutions to tough new problems "on the spot".

What does such a interview question really reveal about my abilities? I know that I could have solved the problem in about 10 minutes given a Python interpreter, but given the turmoil of an interview, I didn't.
Hacker News Chicago meetup Thursday (1/21) at 7pm
Chicago hackers:

Please join us for the next Hacker News Chicago meetup on Thursday, 1/21/2010, at 7:00pm at the Hophaus (646 N. Franklin, 312-280-8832, http://www.thehophaus.com/).

There is also a mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/hn-chicago) for future event notification.
This sounds like a great way to end up paying short-term capital gains tax on a liquidity event. Why give an additional 15% or so of your money to the government? Get your stock up front, file an 83(b) election with the IRS, and subject the founders to reverse vesting -- a buyback right in the event the founder leaves that gradually expires over time. That way you own the securities immediately and long-term capital gains rates kick in after a year.
Would you have spotted the other fraud?
I wished I had some rabbit in my hat that I could pop out to give you a boost but the 'match' between what you're doing and what I'm doing is pretty slim.

What I've found about media over the years is that it works wonders but only for the moment, it is very hard to translate that in to longer term sustainable traffic.

The way you are going about it right now is very close to the optimum, with more coverage you'd reach some more people quickly but you'd also risk killing the atmosphere that you have right now.

100k to 200k visits / month looks like an achievable goal to me, but you'll have to determine how many people you think that translates in to. You could be looking at a 'hard core' of between 3 and 6 k visitors that comes back every day all the way to 3 and 6 k visitors / day that will never come back.

The first is obviously the one to go for, so visits / month is a bad metric to optimize for.

The numbers from analytics that have the most importance for you at this stage imo would be 'time on site', 'bounce rate' and 'recency'.

Those are hard to get under control but that's where the real pay-off will be. As you increase time on site and decrease bounce rate you are increasing stickyness, which in turn should lead to people re-visiting.

Bounce rate is mostly landing page optimization as well as making sure that you're found for the right kind of stuff, as well as linked in a way that creates an expectation in the mind of the person that clicks that matches the impression your site gives when it first presents itself.

Otherwise that link is a wasted one, not that it would be better without, but the text of the link could have selected people more likely to convert in to repeat visitors.

Time-on-site is another measure of how well you are doing in this respect, a 'bounce' is just the shortest way of being on your site, increasing time on site shows that people found what they were looking for and will dig deeper to find more.

A/B testing is your friend!
Kurtlar vadisi pusu izle
Harvesting Collective Intelligence: Temporal Behavior in Yahoo Answers
Thanks for organizing this Harper.
MTV has changed dramatically from 10-20 years ago. They have moved away from playing music videos around the clock. Now the majority of their content is teen reality shows and the like. Televised music videos is limited to very few, already very popular artists.
Most recorders only record about 24 hours of video before they recycle. The really robust ones can keep about a week at once, but that's it. They're designed to help the banks out when you call and say that you just got held up--not a month later when police finally realize that a given ATM is ripping someone off. (In fact, early ATMs with cameras took a still photo, and only then while you withdrew cash--totally useless in this scenario.)
Good or lucky?
Bank it and don't sweat it until you've got $250K lying around. Starting an IRA with part of it would be good ... but rewarding yourself is also good.
TAL is actually produced by Chicago Public Radio and distributed by Public Radio International.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_american_life
Which is funny because Ira Glass specifically warns against that. Talk like yourself. But then again, maybe we imitate masters to learn before we figure out which ones of the things we're imitating are right, and which are just effects we're cargo culting.
"In a world of small programs that did one thing well and communicated via text-based protocols... One man sought to challenge the system."
Will be there with bells on.
Why Repairing your Power Tools is Economically Beneficial.
Got a passion? Helps if you have a real interest in an idea. I've found that first-round attempts I've made at sites have been successful (got a few sites that took very little time to set up, but now make $4k/mo for zero effort), but attempts to replicate that have failed (have a few more sites that barely cover their domain registration costs!). Without the passion, you would need to be very disciplined, I suspect.

Here's something I just tried to see if it might help someone looking for a niche (since almost all are massively saturated, at least at first glance):

Hit Dmoz, control-click five sections on the front page. For each tab that's opened, choose a sub-sub-cat pretty quickly (maybe don't overthink your choices, but don't necessarily go for the largest option). If necessary, choose again on the next level. That should give you five things to look into further. I ended up with:

http://www.dmoz.org/Home/Family/Runaways/
http://www.dmoz.org/Reference/Knots/Fishing/
http://www.dmoz.org/Reference/Education/Instructional_Technology/Organizations/
http://www.dmoz.org/Health/Senior_Health/Fitness/
http://www.dmoz.org/Shopping/Food/Smoked/

Never know what any of these might turn up. Lack of decent, dedicated blogs, need for small widgets, simple calculators/tools, etc. With anything though, unless you have confidence in your content or idea, I would keep it quick and simple and not invest too heavily.
But does this work after you become aware of it?
That is a typical UW "minimum" salary for listing and classification purposes. Based on personal experience, the actual offer would be commensurate with experience (modulo what a University can actually pay developers which goes far above 55k but not as high as a Silicon Valley job).

Putting aside how this is such a unique opportunity and just looking at the financial compensation aspects of being asked to live in a remote facility: wouldn't this be an awesome way to save up money for a few years? All living expenses are paid while you are down there and there is nowhere to spend money.
Wish I could make it, but I'm flying to Montreal for CUSEC.

Let's definitely do one in February, and this time let's do it at Paramount Room, ok, Harper?
How to split large files into smaller chunks so it fits on a CD DVD or USB drive
What Gmail hack? China spins news of Google threat
Does anyone know if the original Google announcement (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html) is blocked in China?
Go read The Millionaire Next Door: http://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Thomas-Stanley/d... , which ought to be mandatory reading for anyone.

What do I do with the money?

Invest it in stocks or bonds.

How do I invest it in making more money quickly?

You don't. That's the problem: there is no way to reliably do this. In fact, there's probably no way to _unreliably_ do this either. At the moment, bank savings accounts and CDs are paying next to nothing.

As The Millionaire Next Door shows, most people who we might think of as "rich" don't actually get that way by being sports stars, or inheriting money, or TV, or whatever: they get that way by spending less than they make and saving as much as they can, usually in the form of investing in index funds.
The concrete example I was thinking of was, in your terms, "a developer free for all".

As in there were checks and balances, but fundamentally any developer could decide to release to production at any time for any reason. And typically this happened several times per day.

Incidentally my opinion is that rapid iterations in production and branching your code base are opposed decisions. Why? Because the whole point of rapid iterations to production is to make sure that your code and production are very, very close together. But the whole point of branching is to make it OK for your code and code in other places (including production) to be different.

This shows up in practice in the complexity and potential problems that you encounter while integrating branches. This pushes you towards a more lengthy verification/QA cycle, which pushes you away from rapid iterations to production.
That's something companies like JPMC and Citi are doing. But there are tens of thousands of crappy Tranax deli-style ATMs out there that aren't going to change.
I'll throw in my favorites: Forum and Marketplace.

Kai Ryssdal has to be one of the best financial news persons, with his rather interesting sarcasm that he uses very effectively.
Usually that stuff goes into /usr/local (d:/cygwin/usr/local, or on my machine just c:/usr/local - I'm mapping cygwin to c:\ against their recommendations for mapping in root folder - but it works fine).
Nokia hits back at Apple patent claim
This article will read really differently in four or five years once they've either made some good money or gotten funded, or both, and one of the partners wants to leave for a 'different opportunity.'

It misses: voting control vs ownership of financial benefits, the absolute preference of capital over labor in how funders and the government think about businesses, LLC vs corporation issues, dead-weight partner problems, title-related compensation issues,governance and a few other things I can think of.

I tend to think of a simple best-practices setup in a situation like this to be:

a) 50-50 voting control e.g. Class A Stock for the partners.
b) if one was deemed to get '60%' by the article's method, that owner would get the remainder in Class B non-voting stock.

c) If a corporation: a valuation should be chosen upfront, and all non-labor soft or hard contributions should be recorded as giving additional non-voting stock, or (a bit easier with a partnership), as paid-in-capital.

1) if an LLC, paid-in-capital gets returned first, always, no exceptions (until they're funded)

d) Lock salaries until the two owners are a non-majority on the board. All additional money can come out via distributions.

e) If either partner leaves, company can buy out at fair valuation, with some sort of note, or can convert up to 100% of leaving partner's stock to non-voting.

That's a start at a workable situation in my opinion, I'd be interested to hear people poke holes in it..
The unique location is the big plus, especially considering that the absence of geostationary satellites over the poles means this is likely the ONLY developer job on the planet that can't be done offsite, until they run fiber to Antarctica.
Well, since we're all piling on with our clean, simple, straight-to-the-point weather websites, I'll give the one I use.

http://thefuckingweather.com/

It reminds me of Ollie from Family Guy.
Best quote about working in Antarctica and it's psychological toll:

The first time you come down for the adventure.
The second time for the money.
And the third time because you can't function anywhere else anymore.

http://60south.com/about/faq.htm
p.s. post-hoc equity contribution conversations (e.g. a few years in) don't work very well in my opinion: who got the equity benefits in the meantime? A two-person review of equity later in the game is just going to cause problems. It's better in my opinion to negotiate like a man up front, get all the advice you can, get the best position you can, and live with the consequences. My advice on this is wildly different if there's one founder and he's bringing in a second partner later in the game, by the way.

p.p.s To elucidate the 50.50 vote option: typical valuations for minority stock that does not come with good leverage, meaning one founder has majority voting rights, discount the value by roughly 50%. Therefore, if you are not protecting your right to vote, and shave off 1% to your founder, you have ended up with about 24.5% of the economic interest if you ever need to get rid of your stock. Also, good luck keeping your job if your partner decides he hates you.
Firstly, congratulations to Posterous. They are one of my favourite startups.

It's impressive how their platform lets you post via email, but at first I didn't quite see how this was special, besides the ease-of-use angle.

But use cases like this (Coca-Cola) clearly show that by factoring out the common entry-point of email (which everyone understands), they not only have an elegant unique value proposition, but a viable commercial product too. :)
Workshop is free.

If you want to ask questions during the workshop you will need to purchase a Questions Package. Our Basic QP is $10 and allows for 5 questions. The Premium QP is $20 and allows 15 questions (a $30 value!). Finally, there's the Unlimited QP which is $45 and allows unlimited questions during the workshop PLUS gives you the instructor's phone number so you can call him with questions at any time thereafter.

*Overage Questions will be billed at $2.50 each.
Prices sound awesome, man. Apartment looks great. Good luck with your move! Will you have a blog or something?

No I'm not in Sydney (I was born there though), but I know what you mean, housing prices are pretty screwed up in many places around the country these days. I'm lucky that I found a pretty good deal for myself, but good deals are getting harder to come by, that's for sure.
I don’t need to see numbers [data], I need to see clothes [information]. Do I watch out for ice, or can I be the care-free, reckless driver I always am? Do I bring an umbrella? How many or few layer do I need? These are the things I want to know. ∞

Or maybe, rather than 10 pieces of information which may or may not be right or complete, I can just get 2 pieces of data and draw my own conclusions.

I understand the general point of the post (I think), but this example just doesn't do it for me. It bugs me for a number of reasons:

- can it ever be always right, or at least right more often than I am? What if I'm sick and need to bundle up more - do I have to give it health updates? What if it's the first sunny, warm day after a long period of cold days, and I FEEL like running around in a t-shirt? I still have to make these decisions myself, but now I no longer have accurate raw data.

- it assumes that every time I go outside it's for the same purpose (probably going to work?) That makes me sad.

- it triggers my mistrust of making things too easy. Oh, what a wonderful world where none of us know what 60 degrees means (or 15, for us Celsius fans), and where we have to depend on a computer to tell us how to dress.
Oh is that what it is? I have been wondering why my local Wells Fargo ATM was taking the card in in such a jerky fashion.
I've started to pull and wiggle the card slot a bit before sticking the card in. From these photo's, I have the impression these skimming devices should be a little 'looser' than the regular thing. However, it may be completely useless.

My second countermeasure is screening the number pad with my hand while entering my PIN. They can probably make out the PIN from hand movements, but I'm hoping it'll be too much trouble for them and they will just move on to the next, easier, target.
Both posts can be true. "music business" is not only about record sales. It's also about ads, gigs, licensing, etc. Even if direct sales are lower, the business itself can be alive and well. It's only the amount of money spent by customers that went down.
It likely would be difficult to do a transaction and modify the ATM at the same time however.
no problem. ;)
sounds good. don't you owe me an email?
Actually now I wondering. It looks like GPLv3 is not compatible with the iPhone (the anti-Tivo clause: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/why-free-software-and-app... ) but I am less clear if GPLv2 is incompatible (or if people just hope it is, see: http://www.geoffeg.org/wordpress/2009/10/07/the-iphone-and-t... ). So you may want to look a bit deeper into the license of the library you are using (LGPL, GPLv2, GPLv3 ...).
Interesting, I called my bank about this annoying "feature" and was told it is for security reasons, but never understood why (and they were unwilling or unable to inform me). Enlightening. This functionality is very common in Australia, at least in Sydney.
Though he's certainly the most oft-imitated, it's not just Ira Glass who's mannerisms have been copied. The folks on Marketplace all sound alike - even the women sound like Kai Ryssdal. Additionally, the very odd cadences of Robin Bloom on WHYY have caught on to some degree amongst other voices on NPR.
IPhone software sustainability and the death of Mac software
Amusing: "Must be authorized to work in the United States."
Ask YC: Please recommend a Magento dev
Dear YC - We need someone to help setup and slightly customize a Magento cart. Anyone looking to do some work on the side? We might also need ongoing support in the future.

Many thanks.
I whole-heartedly agree! But sir, you forgot Radiolab! http://wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/
This whole case seriously pisses me off, the 'world we live in' is the one we make.
Sounds good I'll give it a shot.
But I never used textmate (mac hardware user, linux lover :), how is it that popular ? And how is it different from the regular fuzzy finder ?
Were the Iridium/Globalstar satellites de-orbited? That would be such a shame: to have a true global wireless communications network deployed and to let it decay...
Don't worry about it, you've given me a ton of help already.

For me media, is mostly link juice. Q&A sites are very content oriented, so the more link juice I have, the more traffic I can get. Even if I get a jump by one search engine results position, it'll equal thousands of people long term.

Yeah I'm focusing on uniques too, right now with 35K visits, I had 28K uniques.(I just use visits since it's a a bigger number hehe). My return/recency rate seems to be about about 22%, which isn't that bad since people who come through Google tend to have a horrible bounce rate, so they screw up the results.

I'm not sure I can use time on site and bounce rate to track progress. The Google people tend to throw numbers off. Since most people who come through there, are only on the site to find the answer(don't really care where they get their answer). So when they find it, they just close the page and move on.

+ I think my current design is too polarizing, it's about 50/50, half the people love it, and the other half think it sucks. So I'm probably losing a lot of people on that one aspect alone. So a more streamlined web design should help improve the bounce rate big time.

Yeah A/B testing is good. I'm doing that right now for ads to see what type/positioning converts best for me.
I think a slot for a credit/debit card isn't terribly intuitive, especially if the reader only accepts one orientation of the magnetic stripe, in which case a diagram is almost necessary.

There are readers that have asymmetric widths on the entry mechanism (strangely worded, but looks like [1]). This is an extremely subtle hint regarding the orientation (magnetic stripe goes with the wider part), that I would imagine the majority of people don't pick up on.

You might also look at this article [2] to see that legitimate ATMs do offer diagrams indicating the proper orientation of a magnetic stripe card.

[1] http://consumerist.com/images/31/2009/04/041909-008-shell-le...
[2] http://consumerist.com/2009/04/heres-what-a-card-skimmer-loo...
2 suggestions:

1) Why not ask the question you asked here? "How much of this role will be new feature development?"

2) Don't assume that the /manager/ really has the low-level information that will dictate how your time will be spent. Ask to meet the coders you'll be working with (not a bad idea in any interview process!) and pop the questions:

"What state do you feel the codebase is in? How does new feature development tend to get divvied out across the team? Which part of the product are you most proud of? ... and least proud of?"

HTH
"... Until the rating agencies' statistical models decide that not being on Facebook is correlated with high credit risk ..."

Believable.

If you don't define your online presence you risk being defined by someone else. The worst case, identity theft or at best some reported or leaked half-truth bit of information leaked from someone else. The key point is control over your online persona ~ http://seldomlogical.com/2009/08/20/digital-doppelgangers
As fine as a Windows box can pretend to be Unix-like ;-)

I share your pain. My company makes me use Windows. Cygwin made it bearable.
From the github page: "Once in TextMate mode, completion is done against the entire directory tree at once, using partial matches."

Can't you do the same thing with fuzzy finder using /filenamepart ?
And doing this in the regular fuzzy finder in a relatively big directory tree, does take some time unfortunately :/
I hear the South Pole is the Silicon Valley of Antarctica.
What's your opinion of OfBiz?
What's your opinion of OfBiz?
You shouldn't ever invest in a company you know nothing about. If you're investing in the stock market you should do you research into the company before buying in.
I am both an alumni of the UW and former employee, and have been keeping an eye on the UW job posts for a long while now.

This gig, or gigs very similar, have been posted for years now. I believe the expiration date of the job post is just a limitation of the UW's recruitment system/process; you could quite likely still apply.
Exactly, getting paid for learning is the sweet spot.
Simple answer: almost certainly not. That article inspired me to audit the last few months of my checking account. Scary.
> 2) Don't assume that the /manager/ really has the low-level information

If the manager isn't a "real programmer", even if (s)he doesn't actively code anymore, I'd be nervous about working there.
In Europe, they could do away with the magnetic strip on cash cards. All terminals from recent years support the smartcard interface to the chip on the card. Presumably they keep the strip around for when you visit a country that doesn't use the smart card interface, so they can charge you an arm and a leg for exchanging currencies. And that recent case in Germany where the chips didn't support the year 2010, so you could only withdraw cash when you masked the interface with tape.

The smartcard mechanism hopefully uses some challenge-response setup that makes it impossible to read out by scammers. (aside from the difficulty of interfacing with the chip during the split second it's in the right position)
1: I am not sure you understand what the App store is. The page you reference is not the App store; it is just a page where apple promotes URLs of web applications.

2: You probably are the best to judge whether your clone complies with those requirements. Who wrote the code? Who created the graphics?

3: Finally, there is the issue whether cloning an existing application infringes on somebody's rights. On the one hand the right holders probably are aware of the existence of freeciv, and haven't acted against it yet. On the other hand, you are saying you want to charge for using it. That may mve you over a limit the right holders have set.
Get yourself a woman. Problem solved.
A Code Workaround for a Busted Furnace