skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not just the fact that he's compelling us to hear something, he's also pointing out what words we're going to hear on the screen. If he just promised we'd hear something and then not show them as it's playing, a lot of people would hear much less meaningful stuff still.
We all know the real reason -- this session's applicants were all so super awesome that it's simply been impossible for Paul and the rest to narrow the crowd down.

It's okay. We understand.
Well, I am a C coder at heart and worked on embedded systems not so long ago. This would be right up my alley as a hardware project :)
So... if you find you have some empathy for something that is non-standard for a developer (and even non-standard for the mainstream), you should cultivate it.
> Suffice it to say, I don’t believe that Google “must sacrifice user privacy to grow.”

That may be so, the fact is though that google is already in the posession of more privacy sensitive data than it probably should have.

So even if google may not need users to sacrifice more privacy in order to grow, maybe they should focus on how to return some of their users privacy and not shrink.

And the 'Eric Schimidt works for $1 / year' is a red herring, of course he doesn't, it's just that tax on equity is lower than a tax on salary, which is why plenty of big time CEOs and other high functionaries take a symbolic salary.

Steve Jobs does just the same, Larry Ellison does too, and neither Jobs, Ellison nor Schmidt are philanthropists so there is no need to try to portray them as such.

It's just clever marketing and tax breaks.
Actually sorta happy, as I noticed a few grammatical errors!
I will say that I took my Subaru out yesterday intending to try and switch to neutral, this after hearing about this controversy, and it took a monumental act of will to actually do it. I was really scared that I would shift into reverse and harm my car. Finally decided to pay heed to my fears and didn't do it until after I had tested just how much pressure it takes to do the switch while standing still with my feet on the brakes.

I don't mean this to say that I defend Mr. Sikes, but the fact that reverse is just one up from neutral is kind of scary. Just how careful would you have to be to avoid doing the shift? Is there a check in the system that prohibits shifting to reverse if the car is moving forwards?
He did not. Both Apple and Microsoft used designs originally from Xerox Parc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_i...
Yeah, but it looks a lot cooler when the orange squares real.
This book had a pretty big impact on me before I read it. Really it just serves to open your eyes to the fact that, yes, people are different. My wife and I both read the book before we got married and this simple framework was a good way for us to enunciate our preferences.

I'm not big on self-help books in general, but I found it to be marginally useful and worth the time to read.
I like how the photo that shows that their home screens look alike also is virtually identical to an ancient Palm Pilot home screen.

http://www.pdamuseum.com/palm/palm_pics/palm_personal.jpg
A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies
This is not backward-compatible. With C++98 that is.
Sprinting is a decent tactic to overcome procrastination.
Combine that with "Release early, release often." And it makes a fair bit of sense to spend a minimal amount of time creating a minimal product to show people.
You can also visit just about any university and use their resources for free. Most scholarly databases and journals restrict by IP address and many universities don't require people on-campus to authenticate.
Interview with the Silver Lining team, fan-game quashed by Activision
Modern automatic transmissions will not switch from forward gears to reverse abruptly. They even won't engage a lower gear until your speed is low enough so the engine doesn't over-rev. Even virtually all manual transmissions have interlocks preventing an accidental shift into reverse (though this is a very difficult mistake on a 6-speed).
I was thinking they could play an active role in smuggling information into China, for instance.
Haven't read it, but there is the book Purely Functional Data Structures
http://www.amazon.com/Purely-Functional-Structures-Chris-Oka...
I can't speak for the Prius, but my Grand Prix has a shifter with a button that I have to depress to go into any gear _except_ neutral. I can just slap at the shifter and pop it into neutral without any fear that I'd over-shift into reverse.
Wow, $200 a week for 40 hours. That works out to $5 an hour. Is that a livable wage even in Eastern Europe?

I think I need to find another trade.
China's new generation picky about factory jobs
The internet is made for lead-gen...

One of my favorite businesses on the planet buys adwords ads for specific car searches ("blue honda accord 1997") and offers the searcher three competitive quotes-- just fill out a form. They then sell these leads to three car deals who have the vehicle in question for $20/per lead. Last I heard they were bidding on 750,000 adwords and making millions per month.
wow, this is really interesting to hear; See, I thought that nearly all work on these type sites (my experience has been with e-lance, many years ago) had mechanisms for paying people through the site, but from what I saw, only the first transaction was done that way. After that, the contractor and contractee worked directly, so it's interesting to read that some people found enough value in the structure provided by the site to continue using it after meeting a person.
You weren't in any danger though. If your car were stuck at full throttle you might feel differently.

A few years ago my car's throttle did get stuck (not a Toyota, due to my own stupidity) and after a few seconds of shock the thing that seemed most rational to me was to pop into neutral and apply the brakes. It worked just fine.

I remember hearing somewhere that cars won't let you go into reverse above a certain speed [citation needed].
Heh, the title is a little link bait-y given the recent Mahalo debacle.
Thanks, I'd like to see people start putting a [sub] tag or something similar in the title for pages that require a subscription.
I'd be really cool if they support wildcard subdomains, as my current project relies on it.
have you hired anyone from overseas? have you hired an American for overseas wages?

I've done both, and the amount of money a person can charge has a lot less to do with skill and experience than you think. Several people who worked for me for sustenance wages now make more money than I do because other people noticed that they are pretty good.

Selling yourself is a skill, and it has very little overlap with the skills required to be a good Engineer.
Whichever of those you choose to use it's going to be spam in some form or other if you don't have a prior existing relationship.

How did you get this data in the first place ?

Did you buy it ? Did they sign up with you for something else ?

If the first then you're out of luck, you will have to use something borderline or even illegal if you wish to use that data, depending on where you live. Especially email is fraught with danger. If you really insist in that case on doing it I would take it very slowly, and approach a couple of them (say 5 or 10) on a personal level, email from your real publicly visible email address, asking them that exact same question, and then use the feedback to formulate a strategy.

If they are already in an existing relationship for another product then you might consider sending out an email about the other service, where you can legitimately email them, and add a line or two about your new offering at the bottom.

It's a tricky thing you are trying to do here. The best method of all would be to try to figure out where these people hang out as a group and market to that channel. That will cost you but it doesn't have a 'bad taste' associated with it.

Good luck, let us know how it worked out!, It's a problem that more people are trying to deal with here.
I hoping we'll find out this guy shorted large amounts of Toyota stock the day before or works for a competing car company...
I find them just as annoying as the "How I Did Some Simple Task" posts that finally seem to have died down.
Why do you think this information should be kept private?

Maybe because, as with the demise Netflix Prize, the data can be correlated with some other dataset to identify individuals who ride in the cabs.
So you want to hack Haskell for the Google Summer of Code
I think it's very difficult to build something that you yourself don't want to use - and this is IMHO a great reason for being "well rounded". The more demographics and groups you can identify with and understand, the more versatility you have as an entrepreneur.

For one thing, your "cred" with that demographic would be real, and you won't have to hire half-assed "insiders" who may or may not know better than you.
TV Listings - Are You Watching This?
do you have any link to that landing pages?
I think Bingo Card Creator is well known because the author writes a lot of comments, and very often mentions his product in his comments.

Not because he's "loved".
There wouldn't be much to 'clarify', only a single bit change somewhere in a google table would do all the clarification needed.

Yes, we do enforce our terms of service across the line, and no there are no exceptions even when there are investor ties between companies.

So much said with a single bit...
How on earth is building a server/computer... that's just inserting the cpu/ram and plugging in sata cable while everything is already screwed and in place. Lame...
PDFmyURL.com - Convert and save pdf from any webpage for free
I think that's him 'showing' instead of 'telling'; consciously or not.
prediction for this years' hottest xmas present - arduino
Are brakes more powerful than an engine at full speed along with the car (large mass) moving at high speed? Brakes are designed to slow a car not under power.
Very cool. This would probably work for any tile-based game by assigning a unique color for each tile. The original NES Zelda comes to mind.
Ask HN: Anyone good with business plans? I could use some help.
I'm currently a semi-finalist in a University sponsored business plan competition. The deadline is Monday March 15, but I could still use a few more eyes to look over my plan for a start-up in the recording music industry,

If you're interested, shoot me a line: abrandt <at> mail <dot> bradley <dot> edu. I'd love to get some of the collective HN wisdom behind me.
Still, the video explains some outages that I experienced while I was a customer at the planet :)

No esd protection, dropping parts in to the machine, sitting your unused RAM on paper (one of the best insulators). It's really enlightening.
I still think this is one of the best demonstrations of the ground effect ever in a vehicle:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSYmSnpQ360
Great Personal Advice from a Silicon Valley Veteran
Professor John Glynn (http://bit.ly/JGlynn) sadly just retired after 20 years of teaching at Stanford GSB.
In his last class, he shared with us a number of personal wisdoms learned over 40 years of investing in the silicon valley. His investments include Intel, Intuit, EA, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, Cypress Semiconductor and even Facebook. Yet, he's so humble in person you would not have guessed how influential he is. Here are some of my favorites:

In an era of commercialism and rampant greed, you need to be reminded about the powers of idealism, community, diversity and self-respect.

1. Begin with an end in mind. Know where you are going to understand where you are now.

2. Accept responsibility for yourself. Put the monkey on your back. Obstacles to success are usually not external.

3. Embrace the unknown and distrust the known.

4. Understand then be understood. Listen to how others see things. Try to put yourself in the other person's shoes.

5. Focus on implementation. Organize and act around priorities.

6. Make commitments and live up to them. Do what you say you are going to do.

7. Never ask people to do something you would not do.

8. Continue to learn. "It's what you learn after you know it all that really counts." John Wooden

9. Obey the absolutes of right and wrong. Adhere to your principles even when it hurts to do so.

10. Develop some humility. Most entrepreneurs are long on ego and need more humility.

11. Don't take yourself too seriously. Learn to laugh at yourself.

12. Focus on the glass being half full and not half empty.

13. Play to win. Do not fear failure. Fear of failure is often worse than inertia. Take risks and embrace failure. There is no disgrace in failure if you have acted in a fair and honest manner.

14. Be aware of the shadow you cast.
a. Avoid the total focus on what is good for me.
b. Look at how your actions affect others.
c. Put your ego in place so people can communicate with you.
d. Show your commitment to your people and their importance to your organization. Create a sense of belonging.
e. Be genuine and natural with people and be honest and consistent in dealing with them.

15 Finally, get your priorities straight:
a. Family is #1
b. Wife or husband is #1. Spend time with them.
c. You need a balanced life. Take vacations and breaks to stay sharp.
d. Enjoy life before it is gone.
e. Give rather than take.
f. Do rather than talk.
g. Say it can be done rather than it's impossible.
h. Inspire others rather than discourage.
i. Light a candle rather than curse the darkness.
j. Do more than exist - LIVE.
When I hop into a cab in NYC, I generally spend a lot more than the $4.55 this article implies the average fare should be - since $4.55 is the average overcharge, and since the overcharged rate is double.

If this was just user error I'd expect the overcharge to be near the average fare - looks to me like the cabbies are deliberately ripping off people who want to go just a short distance, probably out of irritation.
This is the situation patents and IP law where designed to deal with. The real cost of innovation includes all the the failed ideas. When people can wait for a first mover and then copy them there is little to no value in being a first mover.

Perhaps some sort of short term look and feel right with a mandatory licensing agreement might be the best way to deal with this stuff. You can make as many iPhone / iPad knockoffs as you want but you need to pay 10 cents a pop.
I think these ideas are probably true in every era and culture, blackswan, being based on universal truths about human nature. Applying them mechanically I am sure you will agree is a terrific idea. Don't you?

Thanks for the post blackswan. Each of your posts is better than the last. Even the ones I didn't understand why you posted, blackswan, not being of such a high caliber as yourself. I have modded you up blackswan. Keep up the fine work, blackswan.

Now I must be off to my Toastmasters meeting.
Practically speaking though, I doubt that another 200 or 300k in base salary would make a dent in these guys' tax liabilities.

You also have to concede that it is conceptually appealing that their compensation is directly tied to the performance of the company.
Chatroulette Data: Help Compile (NSFW)
I've compiled a bunch of scraped video stills from chatroulette, but I need a human review of each photo to identify the gender, estimated age, and certain attributes of what appears in the photo.

Since these are from chatroulette, some of these photos will undoubtedly be NSFW.

Once all the data is compiled, I'll publish the results to HackerNews. If you can donate a minute to profile a few photos at the link provided, I promise the result will be super interesting.

Thanks in advance (and please forgive the awful UI).
Yeah it is sad because Netbeans was just starting to gain momentum. Allot of people that I have known for years, and where Eclipse and IDEA users where beginning to convert over because as of 6.5 Netbeans had put all the pieces together. I have not used Eclipse in a couple of years now, I really hope they have good REST service generation tools, with NB I am able to generate my services off of my JPA annotation classes this was nice and fast.
Car and Driver magazine had a great article a few months ago in which they tested breaking several different cars (including one of the recalled Toyotas) from 70 mph down to zero -- both with the throttle behaving normally and with it forced to full on. In most cases, the brakes are plenty capable of stopping the vehicle at full throttle (the exception was a 540-hp Roush Stage 3 Mustang travelling at 100 mph with the throttle locked -- in that case, the breaking distance was tripled to a total of ~900 feet).

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/09q4/how_to_deal_with_u...

One of the interesting points in the article was that the Toyota Camry -- with throttle forced wide open -- stops in a shorter distance than a Ford Taurus without any issues.

On the other hand, the article also points out that at 100 mph, it wouldn't have been immediately obvious that the breaks were working, even though they were (though at 70, you would have felt an immediate effect).
FYI Simon Singh has lost the last couple years of his life being sued by the UK's chiropractic association for telling the truth - ie, it's a load of codswallop.
Most of the data is collected from publicly available company websites from yahoo directory.

In that case is it legal to call company numbers and ask to speak to somebody in the related division.

I think I will start with adwords once I somehow signup 100 beta customers talking to them at a personal level.(Linked In might be a good way.)
I will keep some free promotion to these intial 100 customers to encourage them to send invites to others for signing up.

Regular Mail marketing is also something I will have to try.
This is a very niche field but I will look up if they have some related magazines in which I could advertise.

Trade shows may be expensive for me in the beginning.

Thanks for your suggestions.
Turning around a startup
Hi! A year ago, my friends and I started a company based on a big (relatively) project referred to us by a friend. Now the project is complete and we've gotten deals with several companies to build software for them. Though the deals aren't necessarily big, we get by day to day expenses and operations from the income from that.

My problem right now is, we've build several applications but we don't have a product at all. Our operations right now is really all about developing customized applications for small to medium companies. We oftentimes accept projects at a really low price in hopes to gain customers and connections. This has been happening for the past several months.

We have some ideas but we haven't got the time to implement them due to several ongoing application development projects with clients.

Our plan is to reject all incoming projects so we could focus on our ideas.

What advice would you give me?
That's called 'cold calling', depending on your jurisdiction there may be a 'do not call' registry, that should be fairly easy to check.

I think that the best person to answer here on HN would be 'grellas', but asking a good corporate lawyer where you live would be even better.

Better grow a very tough skin before undertaking this, and expect a very low rate of conversion.
Agreed that, in some senses, I was trying to force a square peg into a round hole, but the comments on my blog suggest that others share my experience and they're mostly from planet.haskell.org. So I think something is missed if my experience is entirely chalked up to ignorance.

My post was written fairly quickly and got more attention than I expected. Looking at it again and looking at Turbinado's code, I can see how you could suggest that I don't understand monads. And I probably don't understand them to your level, but the code reflects the result of trying to compose together a number of libraries into a sensible system. Wrapping those libraries in composed monad transformers was vastly more complicated than just dropping down to the IO monad, so I stripped down...

w.r.t monads: they're lovely for constraining code behavior and for building DSLs, so other languages have added monad libraries. They haven't forced the entire language to live within monads...

w.r.t incremental data structures: I mentioned in my post that I wasn't happy with multiple data types. Multiple constructors sound even less productive. Currying is a solid suggestion.

- Alson
Hmm and $99 for a Sheeva Plug and you have a very nice combo....
Their 'base salary' could be in the millions, and then it definitely does start to make a difference.

I really think that given the amount of publicity around these 'symbolic' salaries that it is really a marketing ploy.

"performance" of the company is in the hands of many people, not just the CEO, that's just symbolism.

And it also is a risk to portray it as such because that would mean that if the CEO should have an accident or become incapacitated that it would be curtains for the company.

edit: in 2006, before the $1 symbolic payment Steve Jobs for instance took home a whopping 647 million $US.
I'm surprised this article doesn't mention scams from the affiliate industry.
Well, you can't have it both ways. You have to do that with MySQL or any other database server, if you're being your own sysadmin. If you really don't want to deal with it, then you need to hire someone to manage it or use something like Heroku.
Why are we helping you annotate this data set?

Are you going to share the annotated data set?
Adding label tags around the text for each icon would make it easier and faster for the user.

Larger area to click = faster and easier to use.
I can relate to some degree, certainly some of the big hits on the iPhone seem completely useless to me. But not all of them - just find something useful and implement that. Not everybody has to write fart apps.

On the other hand, as I recently started Android programming, of course the idea of a fart app occurred to me. But to make it "cool" (if it ever could be), I was thinking it should become some kind of fart synthesizer, with lots of knows to twist to find the right fart sound. Not sure if the iPhone apps already do that, they just might. Off the top of the head, I wouldn't even know how to code it, would first have to read about wave table synthesis, Fourier analysis or whatever would work best. So at least I would learn something along the way.

Meanwhile somebody else will probably become rich by just playing back a recording of his own bowel movements...

Anyway, luckily I have lots of other ideas, so I don't think I'll tackle the farting problem soon. Maybe better to not have that on one's CV.

Edit: just checked in the marketplace, and some of the fart apps have creative ideas. One has timers for time bombs, and can even be triggered by SMS.
Watch the Pacquiao VS Clottey Live Stream
It is in fact such a good batch of applications that we are having trouble narrowing it down. But even so we would have by now if I hadn't been out for 3 days.
Yes, I'm going to conduct analysis on the data and publish a report.

Thanks to everyone who has been helping out!
One thing I didn't realize until now is that the "0x" is not some reference to 0x1234568, but rather, it was supposed to be the last two digits of some year between 2000 and 2009. Oops.

Anyway, I still don't see the point of C++ anymore. Is C++0x just for making legacy C++ codebases slightly easier to maintain by adding a few features over C++ + Boost?
Do you have plans for the data? Are you going to give others access to it?

I pitched in a little, until I couldn't take it any more :) A way of hiding/blocking an image while you answer might be helpful for this sort of thing.
I think they are just saying: I'm testing lots of ideas and it's cool how quickly it can be done now.

That's all. You make a valid point though that these comments can rub some people the wrong way or be misinterpreted.
I wish elementary school / junior high science text books read so excitingly.