skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately China is the largest item that is currently in the database. I need to improve the response of the site when the expected result doesn't work (as in, you can't go bigger or smaller, maybe just disable the button in that case).
As a side note, to replace the large item you can use 1 of three options:
1) Click on the smaller item
2) Click on the small links on the right hand side
3) Click on either 'Something random' or start typing in the text box
I'll see if I can come up with a way of making these options more apparent.
yea could be. But chrome is so much faster than firefox especially the initial program load.
Thanks for the mentions of Recurly, we built our subscription billing engine from the ground up to make it as simple and easy to deploy subscription as possible. The untitled startup did a great unbiased review of the various subscription billing options out there (which you can find here: http://www.untitledstartup.com/2010/02/accepting-payments-on...). They ended up choosing Recurly for their subscription billing.

There are several items to consider when choosing a subscription billing option. Many have already been mentioned (cost, implementation time, the country you're doing business in) but you should also consider the size of each transaction you're doing.

Will you be doing lots of small transactions? Fewer large transactions? The answer to that question will have a big impact on the fees you'll pay for the off the shelf solutions (as well as your merchant account/payment gateway).

In addition to transaction fees, there are a number of other hidden challenges and "gotchas" to be aware of when billing online. You can see some of our suggestions on our blog here: http://blog.recurly.com/2010/01/lessons-learned-in-online-su...

Recurly also supports the largest amount of international payment gateway (you can find the full list here: http://support.recurly.com/faqs/payment-gateways/payment-gat...

Let us know if you have any other questions we can assist with, we're happy to help.
Thanks!
Tim
chewing gum needs to be at the checkouts of grocery stores to sustain its level of purchase

I don't chew gum anymore, but when I did, I always got it from the chewing gum aisle. It's cheaper there. I'm sure I'm not the only one who figured this out.
"not true, this stupid bill which will never see a vote or chance of passage, only bans the cooks from adding it. It would put the salt under control of the diner at the table."

That is amazing. The cook, who presumably has some knowledge of reasonable use of salt, cannot use it to create proper tasting food. The customer then has add salt to correct the poor flavor, and will likely do so with little subtlety.

It's as if the plan was to trick people into consuming more salt.
I'm pretty sure that people tip at, say, coffee shops because they don't want to put the change back into their pocket. When people buy coffee with credit cards, they don't tip. When they buy with cash, they tip with whatever coins are left over.

(I was told once that this was rude, so I just stopped tipping for coffee all together. If I'm going to be rude, I might as well keep the money for myself.)
"You have died of dysentery. Play again?"
Maybe I'm just slow, but this is the first I've seen of Flattr. Model is quite intriguing, but the question is how to get enough awareness/visibility to both "donor" users and "recipient" users. Anybody knoow long have they been out there or what sort of adoption curve they're experiencing?
Quicksilver Update Improves Performance & Stability
Games face bottlenecks from heavy statefulness. Animations, physics, and AI have design-required interdependencies where a change in one will trigger a change in the other - e.g., the player character throws a box, it collides with an enemy, and the box breaks, while the enemy shows a visible hitreact or knockback, and possibly changes their future tactics. Sometimes you can queue and defer all of these changes for a frame and lose some responsiveness, but other times it's really critical to have them all sync up.

The render stage of graphics benefits from massive parallelization, but most subsystems can't see the same improvement. A common fallacy of new game programmers is to think that "one thread per actor" is a clean architecture - only to discover that each actor's thread blocks the others and causes massive slowdown.
I think the notion is that the tip should more closely parallel good service, so if you get just $.08 back and drop that into the tip jar, what is the message being sent, that you just don't like carrying coins around?

After getting to know some people in coffee shops and how they do rely on tips, I've started tipping around $1 per drink unless something's really wrong with the place. I do that regardless of paying cash or credit.
I think the main problem may actually be in not setting a price. If you don't specify any price whatsoever, people will be more reluctant to donate because they'll be worried that their donation will be perceived as too cheap, so instead they just choose to remain anonymous and donate nothing at all. On the other hand if you come right out and say 'even a dollar is a welcome contribution!', then who knows...maybe people will only donate a dollar, but maybe a lot more people will donate too...
Honestly, it helps to know someone who is looking to hire.

Persistence/experience/credentials are important, but without a personal connection the job market (in any profession) is a crap-shoot.

My girlfriend had a similar situation (she's not an engineer), she finally managed to get a job by doing an internship, all the while applying to a ton of jobs. (Of course all of them were looking for 5+ years experience and a masters).

She was rejected a lot and it was demoralizing for her.

But what paid off were the personal connections that she made during the internship and interviews (she made a good name for herself), eventually one of her acquaintances gave a colleague her resume (who then offered a job).

I'm not really a people person, so I know that this can be a difficult road for us introverted folk, but I think the best thing to think about is 'where can I meet people who would be looking to hire someone like me'.

Then go to those places, meet those people, and get them on your 'team'. Eventually you are a proven commodity and are able to get something.
Even the "paying real money" bit is unnecessary.

Having some working, usable sample code - whether your own project or participation in someone else's - obviously provides some gauge of what you can do but also indicates that you can make a program, maybe work with other people, maybe understand the various things involved in the process. Quite a few people come into the workforce only knowing how to write code, which while a prerequisite is nothing like actually programming. If you know the difference, you have a leg-up already.

Networking is important, and even someone like me can do some of it sort of incidentally by joining the local <Technology> User Group etc.
I was in a similar situation just two years ago -- newly minted college graduate, didn't have a CS or related degree, trying to find work based on a couple of programming classes I took and a meager handful of outside projects. I used Monster, recruiting firms, and Craigslist to get work; surprisingly, the two jobs I've landed in Austin were both the result of Craigslist posts, and I couldn't be happier with my current position.

Just keep at looking for open doors, and work on independent projects when you're not actively engaged in job hunting. In my personal experience, the projects don't need to be exceptionally unique and amazing -- find something that's a manageable size, and prove that you have the chops to see something through to completion with solid code.
Surely you could just use logs with rsync?
The other advice about doing something open source or building something you can sell is great and all, but it's March and you're a senior which means that you're probably looking to land something in the next 3-6 months, which isn't a lot of time.

In that case, your answer is: network!

I've seen so many qualified candidates get passed over for someone equally or even marginally less qualified because they had an inside line on the position. It's probably too late to do much networking at school (i.e. joining clubs, etc.), but the thick part of conference season is just getting started. Get a student rate to something while you still can (JavaOne seems to have been free for students in the past...not sure what Oracle plans for this year, though). I'm guessing that your 2 years experience has come from internships, so that would be a good place to start too. They might not have been your ideal place to work, but they'll give you a paycheck while you plan your next move.

If you are going to work on an open source project, pick one that's sponsored by a big name company (i.e. not an academic project or start-up). No matter what the project leader asks you to help with, do it! If he says they need work on documentation or fleshing-out the test suite, don't complain. I know it's not sexy work, but when the project leader gets a req. to hire someone, he'll know that you're someone that can be counted on to get the job done.

Finally, learn something new. I recently saw a very qualified developer get passed over for a job not because he didn't have the skills listed in the job offer, but because he didn't show an ability to work outside of his set of core competencies. Since you're new, nobody is going to hire you based on expertise. Your secret weapon will be the fact that you can learn whatever new skill or technology it is that the hiring manager needs next. In other words, you probably want to branch out from Java (it's a skill area flush with "experts" and hiring managers who are only looking for people who can spit out code quickly).
Can We Design Cities for Happiness?
These coffee shops should just charge a dollar more. I do not shop around for the best price on coffee. I want good coffee.

The time I was yelled at, btw, was for giving 3 quarters as a tip for a $3 cup of coffee. "It would have been more polite" to give a whole dollar, and not as change, but as a dollar bill, I was informed (by some other customer). OK, but I don't have another dollar bill, and I really don't care to carry around those three quarters...

I did try for a few days to have an extra dollar and tip with that (carefully saving up the change for use in wishing wells)... but nobody said thank you or anything, so I gave up. If I have to go to a lot of effort to give someone money and they don't care, eventually I am going to get tired of doing it. And I did. (Did one person ruin it for everyone? Yup.)
Yep, we talked with you guys as well and liked a lot of things about the organization and product, but honestly, the terms aren't very early-startup-friendly. (Multi-year exclusive contract and high base rates are the ones that come to mind.)
Hey Paras, I'm one of your beta testers. I can assure you that you will go a lot further if you put in a consistent 40 hours a week for the next five years around the core idea of website conversion optimization rather than abandoning the product at some point in the future.
As Minsky has said, parallelism isn't worth a damn thing if you don't have better heuristics to prune the search space.

If you have a million processors to play chess with, and your search tree still has a branching factor of thirty, you're only looking two moves ahead.

The human mind is amazing because our pattern-matching-based search heuristics are great.
About a year ago, they said they were doing "lots of stuff", whatever that might mean. http://processingjs.org/blog/?p=77
some hackers hack simply to find out what's on the other side
Startup Seed Raising Skilzzz
Facebook Game Idea Generator
Get inspiration for your next Facebook Game! All content is distilled from existing Facebook Games. Web app satire :)
Run a large ant farm.
http://clojure.googlegroups.com/web/ants.clj
An interesting comparison.

I've often been interested in how some things get chosen for tipping and other things not. I think one of the criteria is how convenient it is to actually tip. It would be hard to tip the producer of my favorite television show, effortless to tip my waittress. I think the other criteria is how personalized the experience is, in most things we tip for we are receiving a very personal close to one-one interaction.

But I think most blogs come closer to the waitress side than the television side. At least on blogs set up to receive them, it is relatively easy to tip (though I think it can and should become much easier in the future!). And the experience can be fairly specialized (I tend to read niche technical blogs rather than mainstream news ones), and fairly personal. After all, if I leave a comment on most blogs, I have a pretty good expectation that author will respond directly and intelligently to me. If I write a letter to the producers of a tv show, I might, if lucky, get a form letter and maybe a glossy photo of the cast back.

As to whether there is an "implicit contract" to tip bloggers, I think that particular piece of society is new enough that those rules are still being established.
A startup is a business designed to scale dramatically. That excludes most individual retail stores and service businesses.
Well... that's fun and all, but surely it's better to use the optimal solution and see how far you can take things? I personally find building meaningful products that my customers love hard enough without handycapping myself for my own amusement!
The little donate buttons we were supposed to click on to support our favorite bands as we gave the finger to the RIAA never panned out. It turns out we really were just cheap bastards that didn’t want to pay for music after all.

This is tangential and potentially destructively off-topic, but when exactly did music become something that we all need to pay for?

It seems to me that historically music has been something that people have done in addition to whatever it is that they do for their day job. (You sing while you are doing chores or you sing and dance at the pub at night).

When did we become this grotesque soulless crippled race of humans? It seems that there has been a proliferation of a myth that you need specific musical talent (and anointment by a benefactor) to create music. Why is this? It clearly isn't true... If we are all such cheap bastards, why don't we make our own damn music and give the RIAA the finger in that way?

I almost feel like there is some sort of institutional loss of music from our culture that almost warrants 'music theft' and is the real reason that people have been so reluctant to pay for their albums. It is as if everyone can make music, but there is some societal obligation that forces the majority of us to believe that we can't.

(Bonus: Why guitar hero and not a guitar? The guitar is cheaper...)

But please, feel free to ignore. Something about that phrasing simply rubbed me the wrong way and I felt the need to rant.
Sling streaming TV onto Blackberry PDA
Proving that you can do everything—and that you understand a business' lifecycle—is going to be incredibly valuable in an interview, especially in a smaller company (but certainly not limited to them).

Being able to point to a real product being used by real people who had paid me real dollars for it has made a significant difference for me in job interviews in the past, especially for my first real job out of college at Microsoft.

Today, I'm a startup co-founder. If I'm looking to hire a developer, and I see that a candidate knows how to not only create software, but also market it and sell it, AND that they recognize the value in those other two steps, I'm significantly more likely to call them in for an in-person interview.

And besides, with any luck you'll generate enough money off your own software that you can tell all those companies you're looking to for a job to piss off ;)
"Sparingly" was not the best term for the link, but the intention was to communicate the idea that self-control is not infinitely supplied. Like any finite supply, it can be depleted; therefore, use it on things that that you find it to provide the best return on investment. (Whether or not self-control can be cultivated is not really address in the article.)
Those are on-campus jobs, which are often part of federal work-study program. They are meant to pay less than regular jobs.
How to Be Brilliant
I teach introduction to programming for electrical engineering freshmen. There is no test; only weekly assignments, and I make it clear that they can get off the lesson plan and get full credit if they do something interesting. I try to encourage this, and I've never been disappointed by someone who takes me up on this offer.

But, yeah, a lot of what I do is de-conditioning. For one thing, people need to get out of the habit of waiting for all knowledge to be spoon-fed to them, because that's ridiculously inefficient. They need to learn to use the Google instead of sitting there staring off into space whenever they don't know something.

It's hard getting people to take a more active role in their own educations when they've been taught to be so damn passive, but I hear from a lot of graduating seniors that this was a very influential class for them, for precisely this reason.
No money to buy cigarettes? That must be deeply upsetting.

I don't think it's right to have "no money to buy food" and "no money to buy cigarettes" in the same sentence.
Nobody outside of HN cares if your software makes money. They just want some proof that you can write code. Being able to show working code at an interview puts you in the top percentage of candidates; most have clearly worked on interesting projects, but can't show you anything they have done. This makes hiring them a big gamble.

Another thing that helps is knowing something other than Java and Oracle, or whatever other combination of brand-name technologies is popular this week. A team I work closely with is trying to hire a Java developer. They got 50 resumes, most of them "meh". Nobody was really exciting. This is probably because after reading 48 resumes, you are not going to be in a good mood, so even if someone is really good, you are not going to notice.

Conversely, they also needed another Perl developer. They got one resume, and the guy was awesome. It was easier to spend time on him since he was the only applicant, and being the only obviously qualified person to apply is good for your odds.

The other team is thinking of changing the language requirement from Java to Scala, since people that know to put Scala on their resume are more likely to have a clue, and it will reduce the applicant pool enough to spend time talking to everyone on the phone. Plus, who wants to do a Java project when you can do a Scala project instead? ;)

Anyway -- working code + unusual skills == you getting the job.
The no venture capital thing is getting to be a bit much for me. Some businesses and some situations require outside money, some don't.

In the hypothetical situation described where Basecamp grew as fast as Youtube or Facebook DHH says he wouldn't raise external financing. I call BS.

Businesses with recurring revenues and upfront capital costs that grow fast enough will need to raise money. You need to convert the future cash flows from those customers into cash now to pay for the capital assets to serve those customer today.

Sure, a single customer may net you $150 in a year and only require $15 in capital investment. Unfortunately you need to spend the 15 dollars on day one and you only make 12.50 on day one (month one). If your growing slowly you can self finance it off previous customers or a small founder investment.

If your growing Youtube fast you get fucked to the tune of that 2.50 shortfall x however many million users you just signed up. The only way to do it is leverage or vc. Take your pick, your raising money.
I believe the next version of Firefox will be able to run flash in its own thread, so having a bunch of extra cores would indeed isolate the evil from the rest of your browser.
He has never asked for anything like that, and his decision not to accept the Fields was made long before the controversy with Yau. He is a purist who doesn't see the value in that type of recognition. The work is reward in and of itself. His choice to quit mathematics, however, was based on his complaints about its politics and lack of integrity, but even this was not directed at his work on the Poincare. Since this is so far off the mark, I thought that that article you cited must be really bad. It isn't. Why don't you try reading it again?
Sam Morgan - NZer who created an EBay type site for himself back in the day by hiring a coder to build it. Sold it a couple years ago for $750M or so.
I'd run 48 instances of Rosetta@home.
Anecdotally, the company for which I work (big financial research company, fortune 500) really likes people with 2-4 years of professional experience and has been having a hard time finding them.

Talking to our HR people, the majority of programming candidates they see are either fresh out of school with zero professional experience, or they're consulting refugees (Avanade, IBM, etc) with 10 years of experience who are just going to bolt as soon as the consulting industry recovers.

Honestly, two years of real world experience and willingness to take a junior position makes you kind of a commodity.

Are you not getting to the interview stage? If that's the case, I would echo what the others say, check craigslist in bigger metro areas.

If you're getting to the interview but not getting offers, well, that's another Ask HN in and of itself.
I have a Mac Pro too, and I know the feeling. Have you looked into distributed computing (BOINC, etc)? That's how I rationalize it. I see the electricity bill as part of my donation to science.
The lesson I took from the MS Office XML fiasco is that a poorly abstracted single-client data model remains impenetrable no matter how you serialize it. It's not impossible to commit to a documented and stable wire format behind a web app, but almost nobody has the diligence to actually do it when it's so much easier to make random changes and then tweak your own client code to handle whatever you did (instantly making your client the only one that still works). Before javascript happened, HTML wasn't that easy to scrape, but it at least had the virtue of forcing everyone to generate output that made some kind of sense without first being munged by one idiosyncratic piece of code.
Weight-lifting does weaken you. Rest makes you stronger :)
Learn on your own and hang out in the social circles of other programmers.

Help answer people's questions on SO or irc. Learn the other JVM langauges. Learn about tools that J2EE people like, such as Maven and Hudson. Learn algorithms. Present at conferences.

Do this, and people will find you. Last time we needed to hire someone, I visited my favorite IRC channel, said "anyone want a job?", got a privmsg, and had the person interviewed in person and given an offer in just a few days. (A few because the weekend was in the middle.)

What you want is a friend who will talk you up to the people making the hiring decisions. What you don't want is to be another boring resume in a 50-resume-deep stack.
One other thing I would like to see from games is the ability to go very fast. I wish I could find a statistics course that has the feel of working through a long campaign in a video game.
I really feel like certain subjects could have that repetition concept blended with the idea of getting somewhere.
For languages there are flashcards but with computers we could make that so much more general.
For me the main thing is the speed and the idea that I have an extra 15 minutes here and I want to sit down and be so immersed in my subject of study that I actually learn something.