skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You make it sound like it's a big deal to write 10 lines of code before being interviewed. I agree that some candidates, possibly including me, would be put off by being asked to solve a problem requiring 10s of hours before interview, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about getting someone to demonstrate 10 lines of working code.

And if a potential candidate can't be bothered to do that, how bothered will they be to make small, uninteresting changes to working code? How interested will they be to fix a corner case they don't care about? How careful will they be about details when releasing code?

Not being willing to "jump through hoops" is an indication of fit, as much as many other things. My job is to make the hoops as big as possible, and as easy to jump through as I can make them. If people can't be bothered, then I guess I won't employ them.

Yes, it biases the selection process, but it's a huge save not interviewing people who can't, or won't, produce FizzBuzz (or similar).
Being able to "vote" on something is not the same as owning something.

>> There's a difference between a GP suggesting homoeopathy, and a GP refering a patient after the patient has requested homoeopathy.

That is a fair point, but you can't say for sure that a GP hasn't perscribed or refered someone for this treatment. So kind of irrelevant.

But it remains that the HNS wasted the money. As you yourself pointed out they didn't put it to good use because they spent it on homeopathy. Anything not put to good use is wasted is it not?
My deviations would be:

- Use Basecamphq.com and/or ActiveCollab.com for project management and client doc sharing, bug reports, etc.

- Use several TK6000.com units, mixed with Grasshopper.com and analog phones, to provide VoIP numbers and a virtual PBX for very little money. Comes with advanced features beyond a typical PBX such as converting vmail to email. This reduces use of mobile minutes to some degree.
Their audience knows what a hair dryer (1500-1800 watts) and a 100 watt light bulb are.

30kw - can run 300 100 watt light bulbs continuously.

They could even throw in a refrigerator or two.
> People are weird.

No disagreement there.
I'll only like to be an expert, like Asimov, in sounding like an expert.

Meaning that I could learn and understand the stuff I need very fast and be able to explain it to others easily.
To everyone calling this spam, the author is a well respected member of the Ruby community and has already written a ton of information on the subject, for free, at his blog (http://omgbloglol.com/). He also wrote the rails-upgrade gem. I'm sure at least a few people here will be upgrading current rails apps to version 3 when it comes out so I could see it being of interest.
Really? that's it?

The fuel cell we used @ VT in 1999 was 20kW and substantially smaller (it fit within a car's engine compartment).

http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05032000-1551...

Then again, that was pure hydrogen, not methane.
Ask HN: Could you suggest how to market a proxy server?
I'm working on a side project, I've set a proxy server and I'm trying to find the best way to generate profit from it. Subscriptio via paypal (not really sure about this) , find an exclusive Sponsor for advertising , sell part of the service as CDN (or Cache) or just sell the software? any feedback on the viability? would you pay to use it?
True, but nor does it imply that you are incompetent.
I'm working at http://kiha.com/ and we've been in stealth mode for well over a year. For us it's partly about working together with partners who want a big, coordinated launch. Personally I agree that stealth mode is overrated, but our investors and leaders feel it's worth it for us.
Can you give a few more details on the site itself? I'm fascinated by the idea of "flipping" websites, and wondering what your experience has been. Even though you may not have started out with the intention of selling it to the highest bidder, it sounds like that's your best bet at this point.

-How many hours did you put into it?

-Have you tried any other business models (advertising, subscription, ad words, etc.)?
Opt-out?

Well, this person needs our special attention. We sholud protect the society from all this "opt-outs".
If this were true, it would still highlight the social problems unique to this country, to wit: Americans don't know how to plan a freakin' city.
£4m might buy a few new carpets in a few hospitals. It's a miniscule amount.

Sure, waste is waste, but the amount is tiny.
No, this isn't saying that the accusation is not an objectively verifiable fact, simply that it's not the BBC stating it. These are quotes being used as they are meant to be.
It's just TV fodder. It's not for consumers, and no business is going to plunk down nearly 1M USD per box without an engineer looking at the figures, and someone figuring return on investment, etc. There may be a subsidy angle, too ...
The next generation of ad serving for online publishers
Some people don't even have water and sugar!
Controlling Animation using CSS3
I'm another fan of text files. My system has grown a bit over the years I've been keeping my notes like this. I have a shell alias to open vim with a file in my diary subdir, named according to the current date. That stays open all day, and is where I write and record everything that doesn't fit into an organized project. Topic-specific notes go into other text files, depending on subject. Pyblosxom running over that whole directory hierarchy gives me a presentable view of all my notes in a browser (with slightly-modified markdown for formatting).

It gets synced to Dropbox, and is also a hg repository that I intermittently push to a server for safekeeping. Honestly I've very rarely wanted to check the revision history, but it's there if I need it. [and another advantage of plain text].

It may sound over-elaborate, but that's just because it's grown over the years according to what i've needed. I'll probably add some kind of lightweight tagging/search system soon, if only because at >1m words, it's reaching the point where grep is a bit sluggy. And it's hard to overstate the benefits of having a view of my daily life, year by year.
> your argument is not convincing. This is cheap dialectic.

There was no argument or dialectic: I was just giving my opinion and asking a question (ie not trying to convince you), because I was curious to know why you had this other opinion.
In the 30s??? I think not.

They started effective war on the West in general and the US in particular no later than that. (A war doesn't have to be "hot" to be a war.)

Maybe they "were largely dangerous because they were so very afraid and (by the 80s) had senile leaders" ... but perhaps they should have thought of that before starting and sustaining a generations long war?

Moving out of the Lenin-Stalin eras, was Khrushchev, who actually ordered Soviet subs to use nuclear tipped torpedoes on the US Navy "so very afraid"?
The Underbelly of Silicon Valley: VC "Finders"
Ask HN: Review My Startup: Bookhu
Scott Adams: More Problems with the Economy
Researchers demonstrate mosquito laser in action (w/ Video)l
Parallel PowerPoint: Why the Power Law is Important
Doesn't seem to work too well on webkit-based browsers. Each <h3> on http://sencss.kilianvalkhof.com/ shifts the baseline up a few pixels.
What is the deal here, that he used an alter ego at all or that he didn't reveal that he was using an alter ego to InfoWorld? Personally, I don't have a problem with it, even in the latter case. If you're creating an alter ego, you want to protect your real identity. The fewer people who know your real identity, the more protected it is. If we claim to care about technical matters, we should evaluate claims purely on their technical aspects, not on who made the claims (both for positive or negative).
"Its popularity as a bookmarking tool continued to grow, but the social features of the site were generally ignored in the face of much more exciting progress elsewhere, like Digg, StumbleUpon’s changes and the explosion of Twitter and Facebook."

I guess the trend nowadays is that every site evolves into Facebook or something... I liked Delicious the way it was: save bookmarks, access them from anywhere, look what other people are bookmarking. I didn't need it to become yet another social network type thing with lists of friends, Twitter integration, comments and whatever. There are already a gazillion sites that do that.

Anyway, just my $0.02.
I submitted the same site in November last year - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902172. Since then I've gone through several point releases, a refactor and a design overhaul (I'm hopeful it won't be compared to a domain parking page this time).

I'd be interested in your thought and opinions. I'd also like to hear any thoughts on a marketing strategy. Looking at my stats, visitors seem to hang around on the site (as measured by avg time on site and pages/visit) for a relatively long time compared to any other properties I run and I get a fair amount of repeat visitsors. My biggest challenge at the moment is getting people to visit it in the first instance. I experimented with PPC (Adwords) in December - I'm no whizz so I ended up down, but only by a margin.

The revenue model at the moment is amazon affiliate sales.
So long, and thanks for all the Hints
Who would use the proxy server and why?
I think he omitted the single biggest part of helping me wake up: eat breakfast!
This is thought-provoking discussion, even if the concepts aren't particularly new. The web has a ton of disparate information, and we're always looking for better ways to organize everything. Some things that have worked well include search engines, bookmarking tools, and [social network] aggregators.

It's an interesting exercise to imagine the future of bundling/distributing all the bits of information we accumulate online.
It will be interesting to see how these thoughts play out in the future, specifically the idea of how we treat dolphins. The line between "person" and "animal" doesn't seem to be as clearly defined as we had initially thought.

This article reminded me of when I was in elementary school and tried arguing that fire met the characteristics of having life.
Algae to solve the Pentagon's jet fuel problem
Hack the World: A Conspiracy of None
A pilot's life: exhausting hours for meagre wages
Plotting time series data with Incanter
Wireless Power - using magnets
This is a very insightful piece (typical of this author).

One inherent limit does exist, though, concerning startups that get VC funding. A routine provision concerning the "information rights" that VC investors insist upon receiving states that the company shall provide periodic financials in accordance with GAAP. This means very formal and audited statements.

For startups that do an early Series A round, then, there will always be a strong tendency to focus on the conventional financial statements, regardless of the business model. Not that this is bad in itself, but it is a fact of life for such companies.
Possible jail sentence for man who made Twitter joke.
http://www.browserchoice.eu/BrowserChoice/browserchoice_en.h...
Welcome to Tautology Club
Exactly. Not only do my young kids help with getting up in the morning (they rise at 6-7 AM) they sufficiently wipe me out during the day to the point where sleeping isn't a problem either. Problem solved.
Current Internet issues in the European Parliament
This selection dialog is going to be around for a while. Even if only 1 in 20 users does scroll to the right, that should mean millions of viewers over the coming years... Whatever the exact numbers may be, it eclipses the exposure that these browsers could get through any other means.

It's a bit like having your iPhone app in the lower part of the Top 20 on the App Store. It won't be visible on the iTunes front page, but it's still much more powerful than any other kind of free marketing you could hope to get.
If you'd like to skip all the pundits (Gladwell included) and go straight to source of all this discussion about developing expertise, look no further than this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...

It's a compilation of academic papers and was the basis for Gladwell's book. It is not lightweight entertainment reading, but it's the real deal.
I'm surprised this isn't a violation of the EU ruling -- I would have thought the randomisation was mandated for all users (server side).
I hope you do take the time to read up on the background of such stories before commenting on them.

The reason they wanted to homeschool their children is because they are religious fundamentalists and consider the mostly laizist school curriculum "anti-Christian".

This isn't about some poor oppressed fellows who weren't granted the right to educate their own children. This is about two religious nutcases enforcing their religious beliefs and refusing to let their children receive unfiltered knowledge from a public school system.

If Germany had fundamentalist Christian private schools, they would've been fine with sending their kids there.
looks cool, though i feel like etherpad (now open sourced) solves this problem
Sweet!

I'm working on something like this for Scheme... but it's in Python: an OLPC activity for Lisp development.
MonoPhix 2.0 Black & White App for iPhone hits the App Store | Embargo Zone
...so let's pay 1000x the cost for our water and sugar, because this particular water is infused with magic.
Woa woa woa, clearly MS has the monopoly on minesweeper, nobody cares about Solitaire.
I'd guess that in super-low income areas, it improves health the way the article says, via access to better food.

In lower middle class neighborhoods, it probably hurts health by pushing out the real grocery stores that are in the area.

</gut_feel>
Works now, thanks.
How many people in the NHS could have kept their jobs last year with that £4 million do you think?
Browsers are hardly a new market.
Hey, browsers are hardly a market - they are free as in beer.
the target audience is the average internet user , and peoples in countries with Firewalls and censorship, and probably people that have concern about their Privacy. If you leave in china , iran , myamar...you obviously need one, if you leave in other western countries, you may need one for facebook, you tube , twitter, and to stay under the google radar
Cheap flower delivery
Cheap flower delivery and flowers by post with 321 Flowers. Send flowers across the UK and London via 321 Flowers.
The carbon is being vented. Just a lot less of it than the equivalent in combustion systems. Why less? Because fuel cells have a lot less heat loss, and so that means more electricity for the same amount of fuel. "Half the emissions" is relative to the amount of energy produced, not the amount of fuel put into it.
Please stop it with the James Randi defense. He's just as biased as the people he claims to investigate. He's a pseudo-skeptic as much as a pseudoscientist is a pseudoscientist. Just because Randi is offering 1million $ for anything is not proof that homeopathy (or anything else for that matter works).
http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-08-26/news/the-demystifying-adv...
I am not sure my intent was to debate it per se, but to identify with my personal opinion in relation to yours.

However, from where I stand the cold war spurned on the space race, millions was spent by either side on the space race. Technology and the economy surrounding it grew as a result. Perhaps that is not true?
I put enough time into it that I don't think I'll get my money back, but I wanted to at least give it a try, and see how Flippa worked out, and I do want to get rid of it, because I don't live in Innsbruck anymore, and don't speak German well enough to really get the most out of it, and not having it will mean one less thing to worry about maintaining (although it doesn't require much time at this point, it's one less thing on my server).

I put some adsense on the site, and it made a bit of money, but not that much. Subscriptions might work out, but I think you'd have to invest more time in promoting them and the site, which brings you back to doing stuff in German...
Do most professional programmers not ever work on personal projects?
I like mint for general, personal money tracking but would not use it for anything like a business.

I've found it too unreliable and inflexible to be anything more than a supplement for my needs. They do not track all institutions, their ability to login to systems frequently breaks (for me), I find their "trends" charting really lacking, and you cannot add your own documents.
That is unless they start acquiring companies with the talent they want to build a cloud experience that really works. They have acquired multiple companies to build out a suite of products in the past, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition.... That being said this might be how they start utilizing their recent purchase of lala.com and they might be looking forward to complete the iLife suite on the web.
I thought that this kind of smug remarks was reserved for Lisp weenies, but apparently not. ;-)
In 1996-7 I worked for a firm that had retained one of the two best headhunters in the D.C. area and our experience was that 1/2 of the people they referred to us couldn't program their way out of a paper bag.

My boss mentioned some time after I was hired from an ad in the paper that I was the only one who passed his programming test. Which was sufficiently generic and easy that I couldn't rememer it in detail, e.g. it was something like reverse a doubly linked list and find errors in some C++ code on the white board, none of them hard.

There are indeed a lot of posers out there.
What kind of tech related skills that makes one obsolete pretty quickly?

Take Rails and Merb as examples. Both are using the well known enterprise patterns (despite the crowds hatred against the word enterprise, the ActiveRecord and DataMapper patterns came from Fowler's Enterprise Pattern book). These enterprise patterns dated back since early 2000. Unfortunately there are many developers who do not want to take their time to read books and decided to write their own frameworks.

Java is a 15 years old platform and these days it is still relevant. Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra, Hudson, and other infrastructure stuffs are being written in Java. Scala, Clojure and Groovy are written on top of JVM (and the idea of VM, which is roughly 15 years old or more, is still around).

LISP has been around since late 1950 yet these days some "elite" still considered the best language out there (or at least the paradigm of functional programming is considered the best one out there).

Object Oriented Programming has been around since early 1980 and I don't see it to be obsolete anytime soon.

The practice of data structure and algorithms (list, binary search, sorting, tree, graphs and so on) are still relevant until today.

The concept of distributed VCS has been around since early 2000 (probably even earlier than that) except that it's not F/OSS. (Remember BitKeeper?). The concept of VCS itself has been around since 1990 or maybe even earlier than that.

C and VHDL are still the strong players in embedded/system programming. Yes, there's "Go", but it's a newcomer/niche right now. People who program in C are still programming in C if they are in the embedded world.

Linear Algebra and Statistics which have been around since probably forever are still relevant today and I don't view them as a moving target.

Though I do understand your point of view of certain technologies that are considered as moving targets. Here are a few examples: .NET related frameworks (WinForms to WPF, WCF, WF, Silverlight), C# from OOP to mixed with functional, Flash to Flex/Air, Windows specific development, JS/HTML/CSS.

Though one could argue that since 1996-1998, there aren't too many changes in the HTML/CSS specs except between HTML4 to HTML5.

Another point of view as to why Technology is a moving target is that if a programmer/developer is moving from one ecosystems to another: Embedded to Web development, Desktop App to Embedded, etc. But one could argue that it's like a Pianist decided one day that Guitar is his/her next playground.
FlashPhix 2.2 Photo Lighting app hits the App Store | Embargo Zone
Clojure Slides from February Berlin Lispers Meetup
I would like to see scribd links banished from here.

Please, just link to the PDF, not to an idiotic site that puts a login barrier and other barriers around downloading the PDF.

Every time I land on scribd, I make a throwaway account (with mailinator or whatever), and use that to download the PDF.

Edit: ... and I can't help but notice the irony that breaking scribd, makes it more obvious to more people that just providing the data (in PDF, in HTML, whatever) is better than burying it inside scribd. Thus nudging the world in the right direction.
i built corduroy (http://corduroysite.com/) after getting fed up with trying to use quickbooks for my small business, and most other web-based apps at the time were just project management or invoice creation.

i use my business debit/credit card for almost everything, and send checks out for my monthly bills. with corduroy i can receive a bill, print a check for it, and then automatically download the transactions from my bank to mark that check cleared, and quickly categorize all of the new debit card transactions. at tax time, i just go through each of the categories and put the totals into the tax software.

of course it does invoicing and project management, too.
Google Earth for Android available on Android Market
I would make the "How Bookhu works" box stand out a little more. One thing I've noticed with all of the "review my startups" is that we have no idea what we are going to initially generally, and when we get there the first thing we want to know is - what does this site do. You explain it well enough, I would just make the box pop a little more visually so I don't spend as much time hunting around for it.

I found the site interesting enough to poke around a bit. Visually I thought it looked pretty good. I would probably make the call to action more obvious as well. Don't be afraid to tell people what you want them to do. The buy links are pretty small and not even very clear that I am buying them by clicking on them. Make them very obvious.

The "Leave a Reply" at the bottom doesn't make sense to me. What am I replying to? Is it just a spot for people to leave their thoughts on the book? Again, tell me what you want. Perhaps you could form it as a question. Try some different things and see what gets people to start submitting comments or reviews or whatever it is you're looking for there (or just take it out).

Overall thought I thought it looked pretty nice and it will be interesting to see how you do.
Tell me more...
Ask HN: post your productivity tips/hacks in 160 characters or less
I only allow myself to code between 9-11PM each night. It's quiet & most nights I'm chomping at the bit to get started. Productivity has gone through the roof.
Do climate change sceptics give scepticism a bad name?
Demo of the technology was performed at TEDGlobal 2009: http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_giler_demos_wireless_electrici...
William Langewiesche on American Snipers
Nmap 5 cheatsheet
your site looks good, clean interface but not selfexplaining , I don't know exactly what the site does either, and there's no about page where you could explain that. After sometime spent there, I then found the short description, well you yould make it somehow stand out, so when someone land on it, it doesn't feel and look like a Galerie showcase. Great Idea.
This is hilarious in context of the other posts about programmers not knowing how to program.
Low-cost, 90% efficient solar cells mostly made of plastic
Junctionless transistor could simplify chip making
Not doing something simply because people will criticize you is a terrible approach to anything.