skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love PPK's new writing style.

Most of the comments so far seem to be arguing a few specific details; I think that misses the point. PPK is arguing (in an over-the-top way, which makes it more fun to read) that convergence sooner rather than later is a good thing. For some of the more clearly defined properties (like border-radius), the time is NOW.

His characterization of the goals of browser developers seems to be right on as well. It will probably change again over time, as most competitions do, but today the top competitive advantages seem to be performance, stability and standards compliance. So, the mindset from the last generation of competition (differentiation) is no longer appropriate.
On the subject of "don't get informal before the formal interview but I'm nervous unless it's informal", why not use two people and clearly delineate their purposes to the interviewee: one person to be informal and get them comfortable before handing them off to another person to conduct a formal interview. If you're up front about the second person and the fact that it will be a formal interview, wouldn't solve both problem to some degree?
i think your parent means that attitude highly correlates competence, and is easier to evaluate.
You should add the option "I'll upvote any comment that contains TL;DR". My vote would go there.
If you must work for a consulting firm, go work for ThoughtWorks (I am an ex employee) . Developers get respect, decent projects(as far as consulting/enterprise sw) is decent) , great colleagues, roles are fluid, 8small* (but awesome) company etc. Like all companies TW has its dark side, but it is mostly methodology/language fan boism, not much backstabbing politics.

If you like writing "deep" code, avoid consulting and get into something that interests you (for me it was MAchine Learning and AI) or work for or build a startup.

Good Luck.
There's a difference between asking someone else to do something and doing it yourself. Don't listen to people who tell you what you can't do.
I think I probably have enough transparency-is-groovy street cred to say this: they don't owe you a number, and they don't owe you an explanation, unless you are credibly trying to buy their company. (This is the generic "you", not the specific "you" here.)
I work on NLP for Chinese text with the Adso project (http://popupchinese.com/tools/downloads). This is a natural language processing engine that handles segmentation, sense analysis and semantic regexp for Chinese text.

In my experience, the complexity of most NLP applications work against them in the sense that they're competing with simpler approaches that are less computationally intensive. Good technology will let you do things other people can't do, but if you want to make it a business you'll need to know how to compete against Google doing 80% of what you can do with simple pattern matching. Your results will need to be orders of magnitude better before you have something people will use, let alone for which they'll pay. And be careful not to get trapped in a field where you'll be competing against companies paying serious cash for commercial databases to which you do not have access.

I'm personally skeptical there is much of a market for sentiment analysis incidentally, but the same tools are pretty useful for search (preprocessing, etc.). I think you'll find it difficult to get third-party adoption unless your product drives direct revenue for someone or can very visibly improve their product. But the problems are important and worth solving!
I don't think not buying a product they've never heard of automatically makes a person "controlled by marketing". Making someone aware of something they might like is different to controlling what they buy.

I do think the amount of marketing and advertising in our lives is a bit scary, but I don't think this is an example of why.
I agree - if I saw "sponsored link" in a review, I would assume that the review itself was somehow sponsored.

Perhaps some other type of notice would be more appropriate, but I can't think of what that would be.
The funny thing is, the implementation isn't faulty either. Not on any real machine, at least. You don't have enough address space to hold an array large enough to trigger the overflow.
Google Voice is not VoIP. You still need a voice plan to make phone calls. It is not a substitute product for AT&T's call plans.
Second Sourcing, Application Interfaces, and a 16 Bit Static Ram
7 Ways to Legitimately Build Backlinks
So Alex is correlated with Compete.com in this case. I'm still not convinced they represent actual reality though.

But I guess that is a bit more convincing than just the one.
Not so fast. When the equity bubble collapsed we were near deflation, which the Fed headed off with a generous credit policy that helped fuel the credit bubble.

If we had gone into deflation then, that would have been bad. (Not as bad as the cure may yet prove to be, but still bad and not well contained.)
Silicon Valley is losing foreign-born talent
Early stage theories
A Sneak Preview Of Dropbox’s (YC S07) Upcoming Android App
I wouldn't say the hardware blows. It's not perfect by any means, but I think it's comparable to the competition. The screen is nice, but I apply a Skinomi plastic skin to any phone so it's all the same to me. The keyboard's not bad, better by far than a virtual one, but it's not really good like a Treo or Blackberry either. The battery/usb compartment door is hilariously shoddy. No idea how that one got in the finished product.

There are some great things about it too though, like the slider up top to mute the phone (standard Palm feature). And whatever flaws it may have with hardware are made up for tenfold by the Touchstone. As far as user experience goes, that simple item makes phone ownership so much better than you'd intuitively think. Before I got it I thought "do I really need to spend money on something that makes me not have to plug my phone in once a day? How hard is that really?" Now I think I'd gag if I ever had to plug a phone in again.

But really, the joy of using that OS is worth almost anything. I can't really explain it other than to compare it to owning a Lexus. It's a total experience that's greater than the sum of its parts.
For this same reason, I have decided to completely boycott Experts Exchange. I never purposely choose links leading to them, and when I reach them, it is always by accident. You can often find answers by going down a few more results within Google. I am not against premium content or even limited content, but their practices seem underhanded to me.
"Discover your Real Voice" FREE Vocal Training Workshop in Hollywood, CA 
I'm Roger Burnleys' assistant, and I'm sharing this with everyone that I find in Los Angeles. You MUST RSVP for this FREE workshop, as spaces are limited. If you would like more information on Roger, you can visit his site by clicking here: http://www.rogerburnley.com

Here are the details from Roger, for "Discover your Real Voice"...

FREE Vocal Training Workshop in Hollywood, CA!
Join Us Saturday, March 27th @ 2PM

Exciting News... With the ongoing success of my "Singing-Made-Simple" vocal training program, I've been flooded with questions from all over the world. It has made me realize that I must travel and share my expertise with singers everywhere. However, before I go to some distant country and share my techniques, I wanted the first event to be in Los Angeles. On March 27th, I'm hosting a free vocal training workshop in Hollywood.

Do you have questions about singing that you just haven't found the answer to?

Would you like to know how to instantly increase your range?

Do you want to know how to improve your tonal quality?.

If you join us at this event, I'm certain that I can help you with answers to these questions. During the workshop I'll be sharing some of my best techniques as well as providing you with a personal evaluation. In addition, we'll also be filming the event, so it should be a lot of fun. The event will begin at 2PM, and will last no more than two hours. Space is limited

Contact my assistant Kasey, to reserve your spot RSVP by sending an email to kasey.thurman@gmail.com

I'm extremely excited and ready to help you with your singing voice, so please join us!

If you appear on camera, we will need you to sign a general release.
Digital Gastronomy - could 3D printing be the next revolution in cooking?
I really wouldn't trust Alexa on that either. As far as I know, their sole source of data is a toolbar.
You must not be an Apple fan.

Folks around here recognize and appreciate the true value of constraints in design. In the real world, this is often a tough sell. My boss always wants to have a superset of every feature of every competitors' product. It takes some subtle argumentation to overcome this.
It's not so hard to extract usage metrics from iPhone applications. Companies offering help with that include Flurry (disclosure: that one's partially mine), Motally, Mobclix, Medialets, and Localytics. Pricing is generally free with the companies making money off of additional, primarily ad-related services. Or you can just roll your own.

However, measuring conversions from marketing campaigns is still brutal, when it's possible at all - it's very difficult to buy installs profitably at volume. And the 'big killer' statement is largely accurate, although I've seen higher-priced niche applications grow more like your business did.
Show HN: My new app - Penolo: Sketch & Share on Twitter
Alex. Proj. #10:  Good Boy, Carl
Inventor of the Web Gets Backing to Build Web of Data
Ask HN: Could someone explain [dead] topics
Could someone please explain [dead] articles to me. What is the purpose of killing articles, I thought that was what down-votes are for, and what criteria do you use when deciding to kill a post, is there any method for "un[dead]ing" a post (if that makes any sense) etc. Thanks in advance.
I like this a lot, but I have to wonder how many dishes are made up entirely of ingredients which qualify as "printable" in this extruded-gel fashion. Possibly it could be combined with a pick-and-place printer for discrete/solid components?
With New Kylo Browser Convergence (with television) is Another Step Closer
In cover letters, I've made clear that I enjoy and welcome interview puzzles. You may never actually be asked such a puzzle; but since the vast majority of interviews are non-technical pageants, it "signals" some confidence and that you "get" what position the interviewer's in.

I've been asked twice to solve out-of-interview puzzles, and once an in-interview puzzle. In each case, I asked for other people's (anonymized) solutions/times. In both cases, this was with Common Lisp using companies. Your experience may differ, but:

* Everyone else took shortcuts in out-of-interview puzzles. Most wrote almost no comments (a couple had overly chatty ones), nor was the code packaged in an easy-to-run way. Even most good solutions would cut a corner by (for instance) assuming that the input was magically pre-parsed from strings into symbols.

So, there'd be a couple of good-but-somewhat-unpolished answers, a few which were visually messy and over-simplified the problem, a couple where it wasn't really solved and the programmer maybe apologetically produced a best-attempt, and one which wasn't even in a known programming language. (The last one deserves the most sympathy, as he/she almost certainly had mental problems.)

In contrast, imagining that everyone else was a hyper-professional Programmer O' Doom, I packaged it all with ASDF (including instructions) and polished it as if, say, generations of island-stranded maintenance programmers would use my solutions to figure out where to sit in order to not be eaten by a cannibal.

One thing that probably goes over well is to point out a possible problem with a part of your code -- and a justification. Like a comment saying, "Note: Some Lisp implementations don't perform tail-call optimization. However, for real-world inputs, they would nevertheless suffice and be more maintainable than alternatives."

* People are human, and often have problems with in-interview puzzles. Part of my mind mysteriously blanked for a short while when asked what I felt was a trivial question -- permute a list of 3 elements (performance irrelevant, run the solution in Common Lisp). My imaginary Programmer O' Doom no doubt typed it from finger-memory in seconds, after whimsically sketching a solution where she randomly permuted the elements until enough unique ones were uncovered, or enumerated them all at read-time or something.

So, I stammered out an apology because I took a few minutes, jarred and ready to crawl into a hole for being unmasked as a fraud. Well, it turns out that the previously fastest solution took over an hour. (Of course I remained a fraud, albeit a still-unmasked one...)

Maybe it helps to think of such interview puzzles as a symptom of society's diseased way of working; then there is less stress. They're fundamentally mindless and people often derive an elitist thing from them; it's hard not to. I may welcome them, but it's also the case that each side whores out natural curiosity for the sake of filling some corporate job.
57, 91, 179, etc. I am talking about mathematical classes, some of these schools have been offering more (biological, journalistic, etc).
I searched google help for how to block a website from google results. ALL complaints were because of experts exchange. I don't know if anyone voluntarily goes to EX. SO I go to regularly. Check for how many requests a single user does to EX. Basically a person might go to EX's 3 or 4 pages in a day by accident then never again if possible. A unique ip is not a good factor.
Commandline generic web service tool
Ruby Scales, AND It’s Fast – If You Do It Right
You're absolutely right. Though, I still think that Google Voice was more dangerous to AT&T than Apple. I don't know how blocking the Kindle App would benefit Apple in any way, except if they want to exert complete monopoly over the platform/market.
Yes. If they aren't profitable, I would hesitate to pay them for my backups, since I might doubt they would be around N years from now.
Bringing people on that are great at passing the typical interview questions is a great way to get a team up to speed on passing typical interviews.

I doubt anyone can reliably figure out in a few hours if someone will be a productive addition over a few years.

A lot of my ideas run aground when the issue of matching the interviewee's expectations comes up. If good interviewees won't take a job without a broken interview process, perhaps all you can do is supplement it?
Well, slightly OT but my work is actually in the green field (employer shall remain unnamed for this one).

What we've found is that there's a huge difference between opinion polls on consumers' desire for green stuff, and their actions. Everyone says, for example, that they'd be willing to pay X% extra to buy a similar product that is environmentally responsible - but in reality that number is actually very, very close to 0%.

This is very frustrating to me - consumers talk a lot of shit about companies needing to be environmentally responsible, but from the metrics I've seen first-hand, even making them pay a single penny extra for it is too much.
That depends on a couple of things. First it assumes as fast as C is the goal, for my project the goal was faster startup than Perl and more safety. Also I remember hearing the requirements of the benchmarks had to be changed to prevent Haskell form lazily evaluating it's way to first place. I know in my case lazy evaluation is part of one of my optimizations.
There is a difference between fraudulent (purposefully misrepresenting something) and wrong.
I think it comes down to motive and the degree of selfishness behind actions.

For example, when someone buys green, or votes Obama (or Ron Paul or George Bush), whether they do it for themselves or for others. If they feel that they've made some sacrifice in taking the action - then they're likely to feel that something is owed to them. This could be social recognition, the license to get away with something questionable .. whatever it is.

If on the other hand they do it for themselves - "I vote Obama cuz I want healthcare" or "I bought this green bag cuz it serves me better / lets me dump it anywhere knowing that it'll just disintegrate after a few weeks... " whatever it may be - then they're less likely want something more to make up for the "sacrifice".

If I'm right, then we should try to make our customers feel as if they've won whenever they buy / interact with us ;-). "You clicked on THAT button! AWESOM!!!!E!" =)
James White’s Rules for Infrastructure
The Difference Between Planning for Success and Planning for Failure
Tracking user engagement on Facebook fan pages with Google Analytics
And there is a negative option $1 trial, $79 monthly rebill: stay classy SEOmoz.
The overflow error is certainly not a reason to dismiss a candidate. The excerpt from the Wikipedia article doesn't imply that everyone had the same error.

Also, the page provided by sanj contains a recount by a Google employee where he and most of his fellow CS Ph.D. students at CMU were unable to provide a correct implementation of binary search.

Sometimes smart people make dumb mistakes, especially when rushed or stressed.
Germany warns against use of Firefox browser
Financial Intelligence is the best book we found for teaching managers (or anyone really) accounting without all the crazy talk of credits and debits. But I am going to definitely check out both of the titles you mention.
as for "do affiliate links alter your writing" I can't really answer that for you. For me, I think they might. (now, I think that I might actually point out that I'm getting paid, and I might point out flaws in the service more than I normally would. I'm good at selling to nerds, and to no one else.)

As for "do affiliate links make me look dirty" it depends on your writing style and your audience. If, say, I wrote an article on kuro5hin.org and included affiliate links, even with my usual self-deprecating tone, I'd be castrated as a spammer. Hacker news has a fairly positive view of advertising, so as long as your page had some real content and wasn't obviously made to only push the links, you are probably okay.

(Now, I have slipped affiliate links on K5, but only to my book; It's my book, so affiliate link or no, I'm expected to be biased.)

I've been thinking about this some, as I've been considering signing up for the affiliate programs of my competitors; I mean, I do certainly recommend my competitors to some of my potential customers, so why not get paid for it? The worry there is that it could increase the feeling of prgmr.com being super tiny, which I guess we are, so maybe I should embrace that?
Not really sure why you're getting downvoted. I agree to some extent. I've always had a love-hate thing for Mr. Nielsen. I've come to terms with him in the regards of treating his philosophies as baseline rules. Kind of like overriding laws in the real world we are recommended to abide by. But as in real life, rules are meant to be broken when it makes sense, such as not crossing a street when you have a don't walk sign. That would be a law. But when you don't see a car for miles around, it just doesn't make sense to abide this law. Jakob spells out these simple laws, but there will always be occasions where you say, well in this instance, it doesn't make sense, because of so-and-so. And that's where it will make sense to get creative and deviate.
> found it was much faster than python and ruby.

But it seems that Haskell, because of static type checking and compilation should compete against C, C++ and Java in terms of speed. Because if it is competing against Python, I'll just always use Python when I need to get things done.
With respect, isn't it normal to start with something less than would satisfy customers?

I think the difference you're describing is in direction, not position. On the side you prefer, you figure out what someone wants, and heads toward that. On the other, you head towards something you want or feel like doing. I assume you've found the right project for you when the sides are the same.
The book came out in 2009 and was written in 2007. Most books were at least five years ago. Our only exception was Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
Big consulting firms = long hours, lots of travel, lots of exposure to "enterprise" software. A lot of actual code development is being outsourced, though there are clients that require the consulting dev team to me onsite. Also, these bigger firms tend to be slow moving and very risk averse, so be aware you may not be using any cool new tools and technologies (though this all depends on the clients/project/management team etc.) I would not consider these large firms to be thought leaders in the industry as it takes so long for them to vet new technologies and methodologies (at least in my experience).
I'm no Ruby fanboy (I once wrote a little GUI app in what was probably horribly unidiomatic Ruby). I think that he gave terrible reasons for not using Ruby (fanboyism & not enough code?). Plus he's on the JVM, so JRuby gives you access to tons of code.

If you want to use language X, then use it - there's no need to justify your choice by slating language Y.
"It's like twitter. Except we charge people to use it."
I thought this was a useful reminder that there are always 2 sides to every coin. It is useful to understand your opponent's motivation as people are rarely motivated by simply "being evil".
No bet really, don't have enough data to decide ;-)

Apple is building a bookstore, analogous to the iTunes music store. Google Voice was a poor analogy on my part, a better analogy would be an app that was rejected for trying to sell music or ape the iPod functionality on the iPhone. Sure, apple wants to sell more devices (razor/blade analogy) but they're also very anal about protecting their monopolies.

But anyway, at this point this debate is pure conjecture so we're gonna just have to hold out till the iPad comes out and the app gets approved :-)
Average Price for iPhone Apps Keeps Falling
With my own sites, this is what I ended up doing: I've typically linked to Amazon and eBay regardless, from time to time (I run news sites about NIN and Tool). When I finally decided to sign up for affiliate links, I started getting money when I linked to Amazon and eBay. The prices weren't any higher for my readers - at worst, Amazon or eBay get a little less of a profit, but in exchange, get traffic from my site.

I haven't changed the main content of my site - the news portion - and if an album comes out, I'll post pre-orders for Amazon, Best Buy, and anywhere else that takes pre-orders, and I continue to emphasize the cheapest one, even if it's not Amazon.

With eBay, the affiliate program got me interested in utilizing their API, with which I built some smart filters and created a page on my site where you can buy secondhand records and posters (which aren't available new) from a list that I maintain, keeping out bogus vendors and counterfeits. I built something that I as a reader would actually use.

If you allow your affiliate links to dramatically change how you post, that's kinda crappy. But I think I do an okay job of integrating affiliate links in an appropriate fashion.
In The 100 Best, we recommend another 200 or so other books through sidebars and additional recommendations at the end of the summaries. Art of War appears on page 199 with The Price, The Origin of Species, and The Wealth of Nations. We kept the primary list to books that had been written in the last 100 years.
Intelligence Squared and reddit collaborate on "The Future of News"
Seems like the "bars" could be substantially thicker, thereby allowing more space to write in details of appointments and such.