skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My argument doesn't entail that the Chinese and US governments are equal.

Google could also decide to only partially censor google.cn, perhaps removing the Tienanmen square stuff but leaving in some of the Falun Dafa links.

That Google makes big, bold moves in China and yet does NOTHING about the US... it could even host SOME wikileaks content... suggests hypocrisy or at least a business focus rather than a humanitarian one.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Google acts bold in the one market in the world where it is losing... allowing it to leave gracefully. I'm half tempted to write some sort of wikileaks mirror on app engine and see how long it stays up.
Saying Goodbye to RunCodeRun
Perhaps you are simply younger and haven't been around as often. I am 50; I have staffed-up multiple teams in the last 30 years; I have never managed to get many female applicants much less hire them. I've solicited the local SWE (Society of Women Engineers) chapter head; I don't even get a response. I've contacted my sparse set of women colleagues from the past; never any interest in changing jobs. Maybe its just me; but I to am tired of beating my head against the wall.
Neofonie WePad has potential to be strong Android competitor to Apple iPad
Based on the Flash presentation alone - well done.

I wish however that this was HN's native web interface for the iPhone. I personally have no need for an offline reading nor do I want to use a separate app for that.
I would like to hear more about this encryption cracking, which would seem to be an impressive feat. Anyone have any background?
Hmmm ... I have limited sympathy, for it's just plain comment sense that our employees are either hourly or salaried.

If you hire someone on a salary, you don't dock them by the hour for they're not hourly workers (I believe that by the full day is OK). Nor do you pay them overtime by the hour, especially straight time (e.g. no time and a half where mandated).

By the same token, the only time keeping records he really needed to keep were ones where employees recorded how much time they spent on each particular client, so that he could bill them honestly.

Anyway, the bottom line is do or do not, your employees are salaried or hourly, don't try to blend the two.
Ada Lovelace day again
San Mateo, CA -- Caring.com is hiring a full-time, on site, Senior Software Developer

We are a really fun team to work with, just acquired our series B round of funding, Agile development/product team, Work with Ruby and Rails, looks for people who really strive to produce great consumer experiences (front-end skills a massive plus)

You should: have 3+ years of rails experience (less if you have more experience in a different language, like python or java), 4+ years of HTML/CSS/JavaScript experience (knowledge of or willingness to learn HAML/SASS a huge plus), should know your way around UNIX systems, etc etc.

read the job description here and apply! http://www.caring.com/about/senior-developer.html
I like a lot of it, but at the same time, much of it feels it's been taken (not improved upon) from the 37Signals book of design. From the sign up, to the various pricing options, the way the pricing options is arranged, through to the buttons across the site.

The video also feeds a bit "meh" i'm afraid. "Meaningful Discussion" in groups is beginning to sound very cliched.
Here is the standard framing of the print-to-online journalism problem: newspapers can no longer make enough money because (1) users won't pay for online subscriptions and (2) online advertising cannot make up for the lost print-subscription revenue. Thus, giving away content for free is not sustainable. (This argument is repeated everywhere.)

But haven't newspapers always subsisted on advertising? My understanding is that, historically, the print subscription price didn't even cover the cost of printing. So isn't true that the problem has nothing to do with giving away content and everything to do with the value of online ads vs. print ads?

I have never gotten a good answer to this question. Could someone help?
Not to make your high horse uncomfortable, but consider:

- In the US there are millions of so-called "illegals" who can't call the police if assaulted or abused for fear of deportation. This is a major human rights issue... if it happened in another country we'd call it apartheid.

- In the US there is extensive corruption. Consider Rod Blagojevich's blunder but realize that one doesn't do that sort of thing unless it's part of the status quo.

- The treatment of prison inmates in the US is atrocious. Being incarcerated is a near guarantee of regular rape and assault at the hands of other inmates. Guards do not stop this behavior. This is worse than any gulag.

edit: I love the US but I think it's fair to point out some of is flaws. I'm shocked that this comment gets modded down, are there a lot of Pat Buchanan acolytes on HN?
The grey area is using 3G and a smartphone for side project email.
Yes, I'm younger than you, but it doesn't change what I've observed amongst my own friends. Out of the four or five different (well-qualified) female engineers I've known, all have had trouble getting hired.

In any case, at least you're trying to hire more women. That's more than can be said for the guys who respond to every thread with the comment equivalent of a shrug. The voting trends here are also indicative: nearly any comment that dismisses or diminishes the solvability of the problem is voted up; all others are ignored or voted down.
Not really appropriate for hacker news.
youDevise, a small financial-software firm in London, England committed to learning and improvement as well as great web software, is hiring developers, QA staff, operations team members, and other smart folks of many kinds. See http://www.youdevise.com/careers and https://dev.youdevise.com.

No remote working, but we do help the right people move to London (having a master's degree helps those outside the European Union).
The Sophisticate: "The world isn't black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It's all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else."
The Zetet: "Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view..."
-- Marc Stiegler, David's Sling

http://lesswrong.com/lw/mm/the_fallacy_of_gray/
Five ways to beat the Great Firewall of China
My hand's up, yes.
As the article points out, you just can't work on your startup while at work at your day job. So if you're not answering emails, blogging, coding, testing, whatever, than you should be fine :-) Also check your non compete, some employers get a little crazy about it and may try to claim ownership of anything you do, even in your off time. Of course IANAL.
Well yes, of course Google is a self-interested corporation whose likely reasons for acting are much more complicated than the public story. All the do no evil stuff is marketing and self delusion by Google'ers. Does this surprise you?
How Java needs to become cleaner
Dark Horse Comics is hiring UI and Python/Django backend web developers:

http://portland.craigslist.org/clc/eng/1651760592.html

http://portland.craigslist.org/clc/eng/1651753399.html

We're launching 2-3 new substantial web projects this year, and need some great hackers to help us.

We're based in Milwaukie, OR -- just a couple of minutes south of Portland. On-site strongly preferred, but c'mon, you know you've been wanting to move to Portland anyway...
A serious job is a job you get paid for.

I can't tell how many times removing that tree or expanding that picture just 50 pixels can mean the world.
uses the Android OS and an Intel Atom... yet another testing target for developers - should be fun with native code.
Clickable link: http://braintrust.io
This is going to be really nice when cleaning up old photos with dust and scratches
I did get into UCLA though. I am going to be hearing from Berkeley tomorrow, but I think I'll go to UCLA. I really, really like Los Angeles, and know a lot of security hackers there.
I think that's the "compatible mode" (i.e. an old IE6 engine) ?
I am a big fan of readability (which ClipR cites as inspiration). Teachers love it since they can make clean pdfs out of web pages.
I'll admit re-reading my comment it is a little harsh and has an insulting tone, which wasn't my intent.

I'm more disappointed; I don't really feel twitter and like applications really add any value in the long term. Their sphere of influence barely extends outside of a very vocal and visible extended SV community.

I respect and value both YC and all your applicants. Everything I've seen highlights the enormous amount of intelligence, creativity, and 'shutzpah' that you all have.

Because of that, I find it very disturbing that a lot of your collective effort goes into problems that are 1) barely issues for 90% of computer users and 2) are insular to SV and the particularities of that community.

There are a whole host of areas where YC and those it funds can make huge inroads. I just find it disappointing that I see one or two offerings to 80% of the market while the majority of funded focus on the 20% - albeit a very investor friendly 20%, perhaps making my disappointed grow - that an insular community has dictated to be the "trend".

ADDED: I'm your typical customer. It's views like mine you should be listening to, not discarding. If I say "Meh, no value add" your response should not be "You simply don't understand how wonderful we are". That's a failure in your message delivery.
Today is Ada Lovelace Day In honor of the Enchantress of Numbers.
Don't worry, I like the direct link to the video better :)
Leaked Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
Full Text of ACTA Leaked [pdf]
I guess poor build quality, too long between announcement and delivery, wrong network, and poor handling of developers had nothing to do with it.
Out of curiosity, which school is this? (I mean the party school)
When did Firefox turn into Netscape? What I loved about Firefox was how it was lean and simple to use. If it wasn't for a handful of add-ins I would have switched to Chrome or Safari by now... and it's only a matter of time until those add-ins are available in one of those browsers.

This seems to be a problem with lots of open source projects, features keep getting added and added and added. It's easy to add new features, it's hard to take a stand and keep things simple.
> They are selecting students depending on SAT results

Your summary is simply wrong. There are obviously limits to how much you can learn about a person’s life from school records, test scores, application essays, recommendations, and lists of achievements, but these schools care a lot about getting the most ambitious and accomplished students they can, and spend extraordinary effort reviewing applicants.
No techs please, we're British
Bruce Schneier interview, page 6
37 signal's audience seems to be made up largely by graphic designer/art director types, who are less experienced to the field of usability or user experience, and very far removed from a/b or stat analysis type business practices. While some of these may be fairly obvious to us, you would be surprised how many very skilled graphic designers are clueless to the effects of the size of a button, only caring how nice the button looks, often making it too small.
Review: EliteBook 8540p (ThinkPad competitor)
You should explain why you applaud Google and yet demand nothing of Google for the anti-censorship cause when it pertains to the US.

My hypotheses would be:

- you do not like China's regime and so any anti-china propaganda is good.

- you feel that all US censorship laws are good, thus you have no issue whatsoever with the US approach to Wikileaks.

- You think that all governments censor a little, but only the ones that censor a lot are bad.
I have a good friend who's been part of the MIT admissions process in times past (on a time available basis). They look at lots of things.

Before the SAT changes in 1994 that made them worthless, they found that class ranking was strangely enough one of the best predictors of future success (MIT does longitudinal study of the admissions and resulting success of failure, the number one imperative is to accept no one who they don't think can do the work (which is a pretty high bar for MIT, with it's core math and science requirements)).

And, yeah, having an almost published paper probably helped me (I sent the original draft with a note that half the results were unusable due to a contaminated culture that was only discovered after the work). Plus a well designed (structured programming) program (this was back in 1979).

My SAT (very high verbal, OK but not so much for MIT math) and class standing weren't too great, but they correctly said yes. My friend said that being from deep in flyover country certainly made a difference in terms of a desire for geographic diversity.

Anyway, a bottom line today for MIT is that if you can do the work, you have a raw 1/3 chance of acceptance (self-selection of applications is fierce).

The very most important thing you can do is to demonstrate to them that you're a "go-getter", the sort of person who naturally does projects and the like. Mens and manus (mind and hand) as the school motto goes.
Hands on Android 4G phone
To be perfectly honest, I don't want IE to iterate very quickly, because then there would be 30 quirky, borked versions of IE to code around rather than 3. Granted, the last few may actually be standards compliant, but dealing with the 25 intermediate stages that aren't would be the seventh circle of development hell. Even though conditional stylesheets means you wouldn't have to rely on CSS selector hacks, that would make QA an order of magnitude more onerous than it already is.

I guess it's a chicken-and-egg problem, they aren't compliant because they don't develop iteratively, and they can't iterate often until they're more compliant unless they want to saddle everyone with a dozen inconsistently non-compliant browser versions. Even if they tried, all but the very largest web properties probably wouldn't QA for all versions of the browser. The drop in IE support from websites would result in a worse experience for their users.
Ain't No Mountain High Enough...Google Maps API now has Elevation
That's kind of nice that you post your salary ranges online, but do you really think you'll get quality engineers for those salaries?

Position	Salary	Stock Options
Intern	50K - 60K, prorated	N/A
Engineer I	65K - 75K	0.25% - 0.75%
Engineer II	80K - 90K	1.0% - 1.5%
Engineer III	95K - 105K	1.75% - 2.25%

For interns, that's a great salary, but your senior engineers will probably expect 1.5 times that.
Jl Dropbox interview now online
Vs.net editor with autocomplete + diagnostics for ndjango
GEICO is hiring a Senior .NET developer. We're looking for someone with experience with WCF and XSLT.

This is an on-site position in one of our Virginia/DC area locations.

http://bit.ly/amL04L
I don't think there's a grey area at all. You're still on the company's time whether you write support emails or are on the phone doing a deal.

I wonder if there's any grey area with regard to working during a lunch break.
I take it you haven't tried content aware scaling in CS4.
Ha! Until you quoted it, I totally missed the reference! I guess he's not feeling lucky :-)
True, true, I was just reacting to the "this is the only market segment anyone is ever allowed to go for" tone.
What is your basis for asserting that your female friends are in-fact equally qualified as the male applicants? Do you believe that you are being (or capable of being) completely objective in that evaluation?

In my experience, which spans 2 companies having what I judge to be remarkable software engineering talent, several women at each place feature prominently on the "lifeboat list". At each of those places, the stars had a much higher percentage of women than the general population at those places (though still short of 50/50). Said slightly differently, given you were a woman at one of those places, you were disproportionately likely to be a star.

If far fewer women than men enter computer science (at the university level), I don't think that it's likely that workplace discrimination effects are the dominant effects in the final population biases we all see. It's also no surprise to see that those who do enter are disproportionately good, because they are disproportionately likely to be intrisincally more motivated and interested in the work than the large set of "unwashed masses [of males]" who enter comp-sci because it's a relatively easy way to make a comfortable and secure living, even if they don't really "care" about it.

I know for my own account, I'll hire every qualified candidate I can find, without regard to gender or anything else unrelated to their prospective job performance. As I think back to the college recruiting I've done for my current firm, I can think of 2 men whose candidacy I championed significantly and 3 women in that same boat. That's against a candidate pool that is probably >5:1::male:female ratio.
I would say that what most people are doing in this thread (using all information available to them to make a best initial judgment), is exactly what you should have expected. This is basic human understanding - taking the available information and drawing a conclusion.

I think it's a bit unfair to poke fun at names and such, but the commenters in this thread are performing the exact same process of evaluation and understanding as yourself, except the only difference is their information is quite limited.

Yes, it's stupid and unwise to draw conclusions from incomplete information, but for the most part, that's what people do and (given the information), that's all they can do.

If you want to avoid this in the future, I would say better PR and more information would help people avoid making such silly initial judgments and help to properly manage their expectations.

Besides, if most people have low expectations for these startups, underpromising will only help in the future when they do deliver. And then you can deliver your I-told-ya-sos.
I have also tried to hire women, but it has been very hard. The last team I assembled I hired about 20 programmers. Not a single woman. Everybody was hoping we could hire a woman, but the few I interviewed didn't pass the basic test. I'm not implying they are less capable. They are just hard to find. My guess is that few women are interested about programming.
I think we're wasting our time because we're all past the phase in life where women first develop their aversion for technical topics. The people who should be having this conversation are adolescents and people who work with them.

Besides, it just makes me feel guilty for being one of the awkward teenagers who reinforced the stereotype that math and science are for unattractive, unpopular, socially retarded people. Who knows, I may have personally turned a few women away from technical fields by being the shining, shambling, pimply, slack-jawed, poorly-dressed, sex-obsessed, socially blunderous face of math and science at my school. Damage done. WTF can I do about it now? Treat female candidates who have already entered the profession fairly? That's easy (if you have a consistent and systematic interview process) and also not particularly useful for improving the demographics of the profession.
Cassandra in action
I recall reading a report that was published on wiki-leaks that was by the US government about wiki leaks itself. There were some worrying things in there, the foremost of which was the summary at the top of the document, written not by the US government, but by wikileaks.

In the summary they claimed that the US was recommending trying to fire/expose anyone who posted on wiki-leaks. However, all the article really said was "If people are fired or exposed for publishing on wiki leaks, this will probably serve as a deterrant." Two very different things. The summary was full of exaggerated claims like this one that really, in my opinion, made wiki-leaks look stupid.

The point is that wikileaks has a really awesome ideal, which is to expose bad things that are secrets. However, I worry that they are trying too hard to make everything into a conspiracy theory.

We need to step back and say, "Ok, so in some movies there are conspiracy theories like the ones we're presenting. And those movies are highly entertaining because they are so ridiculous. So, do we believe this because it is true or because we want it to be true?"

In the end, I would really like to know if the US government, or any government, is shooting journalists. But only if it really is true. Otherwise we're no better than schizophrenic conspiracy theorists and it really won't make a difference.

So to tie it in, is something really up with wiki-leaks? If it is that would be good information. But I would not be surprised to find out tomorrow that these claims were highly exaggerated.
Is this really worth making a big fuss over? The only time most of us would interact with personas is when Firefox upgrades and we see the update splash page. Aside from that, it basically stays out of the way and you can use the browser normally.
You don't actually do Android development, do you?
"Another telltale sign is that instead of going directly to web pages, they use the search bar."

I've seen this as a 'test' for the unsophisticated user a couple of times, and I don't understand the reasoning behind it.

I do almost all of my web navigation via search-bar and auto-complete.

It works quite well (this particular Facebook page is weird though).

This is mostly because I don't like managing bookmarks (Bookmarks get too cluttery if you actually use them as bookmarks... I only use them for temporary stuff like saving pages for a product i'm researching).

If I really want to find something and I can't remember the name of the site (which is a rarity), I'd just use browser history or search for keywords anyway...

I think that there is something ergonomically wrong with the way that we name websites. http://news.ycombinator.com/ does not stick in my head (it does not come to mind first anyway). "Hacker News" totally does, and it is easier to type.

I think that implying people are unsophisticated when they are really just lazy/apathetic about specific technical details leads you to the wrong conclusions about what type of things they can handle.
adding the numeric keypad, then not centering the trackpad make me think I will be sitting to the left side of the portable. It just feels really weird.
Looking for security engineers interested in consulting, penetration testing, development, and research. Experience with C, C++, Java, .NET a plus.

Positions open in both London and NYC offices (candidates must be willing to relocate if not local)

See http://www.gdssecurity.com/g/ca.php for more information.
That's a great vaccine against missed expectations!
I don't believe any amount of technology will ever remove a human out of a creative task. Technology can offer tools and speed and power, but it is worth nothing without a creative mind to make use of it.

I mentioned this in another comment thread, but there was an article about Gary Kasparov discovering that a human supported by a computer can beat both a human or a computer alone.

Technology simply makes mundane tasks easier so more energy can be spent on creative possibilities.
There are places that do care. Google, for one. The entire finance industry (look where that got them!). Law, academia.

A top degree can make a big difference for the right kind of person, in certain fields. But doing something awesome usually makes a bigger difference, even there.