skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recommend you read "How to handle requests for a salary history" for some good advice:

http://askamanager.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-to-handle-reques...

Really it boils down to "in an ideal world they shouldn't ask you, but refusing might well cost you the job, so be aware that is the risk you take".
1. You may get paid more. Going above and beyond might be what makes you the next person promoted when an opening comes.

2. You may open up more opportunities down the road. Going beyond what is required may get you noticed by coworkers that may prove to be in important positions to help you many years down the road.

3. You almost certainly will learn that way. By going outside what what is required you will put yourself in new positions and face challenges you wouldn't otherwise. This can be one of the best ways to learn.

If nothing else, it can help you be less bored then just doing the minimum required for a boring job.
An interesting way to keep people interested in the game (during a fight, that is) would be to allow players to update the AI on the fly.

I'm thinking each player would submit an AI to start the game. At any point during the game players could "check-in" code (VCS-style) and cells created from that point on (via the splitting described in the article) would have this new code. Players would be allow, for instance, 2 check-ins per game. The upgraded cells would be represented by different shades of the player's color so that they could be kept track of.

I see this being useful for times when a player drastically misuses his cells initially or for an entirely different style of play (a different bracket on the ladder server).
Delicious Founder Joshua Schachter Leaves Google
> but it's doesn't contain any bullshit either.

Bullshit is useful - it's fertilizer. Your "about" starts out by wasting my time.

"ThinkCode.TV is a project from ThinkCode Labs, Inc, a Canadian startup founded in 2009"

Someone may care about Canada. Someone may care about 2009. (I doubt that there are many people who care about either one, but ....) However, no one cares about the relationship of ThinkCode.TV to ThinkCode Labs. (You're not Bell Labs.)

Is your goal to get someone to care about ThinkCode.TV or about ThinkCode Labs? Pick one and dump the reference to the other. Then replace ". We are" with "," and ask yourself if your names are the most important thing that you want to get across. If not, that sentence is in the wrong place.

Kill "deeply rooted", "strongly", "a viable business," ,and "in today’s ever-changing world". (That leaves an unnecessary comma.) Better yet, rewrite that sentence so it highlights your customer's needs and not your beliefs. (They only care about your beliefs so far as those beliefs have some relationship to them getting what they want.) And, when you do, remember that modifiers are like knots - they weaken. Yes, even the emphatic ones.

What's your highest priority? If it's not customer service, don't use the word priority in the last paragraph. (If it is, what does that say about your product?) Kill the first and last sentences in that paragraph and rewrite the middle one.

The contact form is too cute. Is it better than a e-mail link/address?

"screencast" should be "screencasts"
Why You're Going To Sign Up For Foursquare Whether You Like It Or Not
HTML5 is mostly based on existing de facto standards. If you stick to those, you're good with HTML5.
Well, considering the message-queue, it should be fully possible to make the cells into "animals" instead: They mate by randomly picking another cell's "genome", take 50-50 from each of the cells, and make this the basis for the new cell.

It would sound like it would be smart to start off with the extremities. Say, start off with the same amount of 100% agressive and 100% defensive cells. They mate, get a 50/50-cell, which is partly both. If a combination of 10% agressive and 90% defensive is "the secret", then the cells will eventually all become that combination in the end.

Now, the question's whether this is a tactical approach or not...
Overall Amazon gets a good grade for their handling of the incident. They responded quickly and fixed everything in short order. ~30mins of downtime.
This article is well-meaning but totally misses the point:

It doesn't matter if your POS is built on open source technology if someone has the ability to install new software onto it.

i.e. UltraSecureAwesomeClosedSourceOS is just as vulnerable to having new (rogue) software installed onto the device as any other OS. The hardware or firmware should have controls in place to prevent this or make it extremely difficult, regardless of what is running on top.
> But don't suddenly pull existing widget apps from the store as if they've suddenly become dangerous to users!

That hasn't happened. This guys app is still available. You can buy it [here](http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/tennis-stats/id364532249?mt=8). What Apple is doing is holding back approval for updates and new apps.
>They removed a platform from the board that was making Flash (Lala used a flash interface) a relevant technology for some users.

That is a little out there, isn't it? It would be like buying a small company because their servers used GNU/Linux instead of OS X. If they were targeting places that made Flash "a relevant technology for some users," wouldn't they target Pandora, Farmville, graphic design schools that teach freshman Flash, etc?
It might be hard work, but I'd much rather be out mowing the lawn than stuck in a cube.
Late applications for summer 2010 have all been considered
Astronomy Cast had a nice show about space elevators. It seems that there are some serious problems. I think this is the right link:

http://www.astronomycast.com/space-flight/ep-144-space-eleva...

Click here for the mp3: http://media.libsyn.com/media/astronomycast/AstroCast-090629...
> If the former owners in question leave the houses they're occupying, then they'll go live somewhere else.

> And leaving the current home they're in vacant will reduce its value.

You're assuming that these houses will be left vacant.

In almost every case (outside Detroit) there are plenty of people who would be willing to pay for those houses at the right price. Why shouldn't we let them do so?

Yes, the "right price" is probably a lot less than what the bank is owed. They should take the loss for dumb lending.
It might be fun if there were a way for humans to control a colony, so that humans could try to compete against purely algorithmic players.
Add user blogs to your Wordpress blog in less than 5 minutes
Ask HN: What do you think about invite only membership on HN?
I haven't been a part of this site for long (242 days), but since I began interacting here I have noticed the community growing via comments, votes, and news submissions.

However, I am not sure growth is always good.

Take for example the increase in popular culture articles. Not too long ago Hacker News was saturated with iPad articles, so much so that someone wrote a filter to remove them from Hacker News.

To combat this, I thought of an invitation only membership.

It worked/works for torrent sites such as Demonoid...com, maybe it can save news sites from saturation.

What do you think?
Given two systems, do you prefer the closed or open one?
While I do dislike listening to whining, I also find a search for improvement in your situation to be quite understandable, no matter how good your situation may be.

No matter how good things are, you can always work to make things better.

One important point though is to be careful about the meaning of better you use. The obvious route is through seeking more money, more prestige, more etc. But another way may be focusing on your spiritual life. Another may be working to help others through volunteer or otherwork and finding fulfillment that way. And of course, there is nothing saying you can't pursue multiple goals and multiple ways of improving your life at the same time.
If the HTML5 working draft just specified SQL92, would you jump on board?

It seems like your main complain isn't relational databases, but rather the fact that the HTML spec, as stands, essentially specifies "whatever SQLite implemented" as its database specification.
The posters also said that they were in Austrailia and couldn't post paid apps, if I understood from the comments directly.
Related: http://github.com/ryanb/ruby-warrior

I built a bot for it once: http://github.com/akkartik/brooks-ruby-warrior
How To Get Around That New Skype 3G Restriction.
I've developed an extremely aggressive AI that is able to wipe out mind1 in about a minute. It's based on mind2 but uses a better algorithm for exploration, and, when attacked, it calls for help rather excessively. http://github.com/swolchok/cells/blob/master/crawling_chaos....

EDIT: my fork also cleans up a couple real issues, including letting the game run properly when psyco's not installed and allowing the user to specify minds on the command-line (albeit in a hacky way).
Really, this is just "NoSQL for the web". And I have the same problem with it that I have with all NoSQL APIs, which is that it's not noticeably simpler or more performant, it just looks a bit more "object-y". As you note, it doesn't even have a way of doing joins. (There's no reason you couldn't support SQL in the browser that allowed you to create tables with indexes)

The reason the SQL standard exists is not because it's the absolute best way of accessing structured data, but because a standard way of accessing structured data is useful in and of itself. It has economies of training and learning and allows for some limited amount of portability between DB engines.

In 5 years, somebody is going to invent some kind of meta-API that allows you to use a single common API to access all of cassandra, couchdb, mongodb, and the rest, and I'm just going to laugh and laugh.
Their app is still available in the store.

Here's a better analogy. You start up a Coke stall on the "sidewalk". You're making money. You buy a couple more and place them in surrounding streets. Now you're making even more money. You buy two more stalls, and then the local council steps up and says "you can't operate anymore stalls. The three you have are fine and you can continue to operate them and make money, but you can't expand any further." Now you feel like shit because you've bought two stalls that are useless, but at least you're still making money on the first three.
A blog post giving a little clarity on the source of the outage would not go amiss, but I guess they're still investigating.
> Because of that kind of thinking, lots and lots of people are being forced to replace perfectly good hardware just to be able to run software "designed" for newer systems.

Feature, not a bug (for the providers, anyway).
You don't grow out of bonafide ADHD.

That's not entirely Barkley's view. (Barkley is the principal investigator for some of the largest longitudinal studies of ADD/ADHD.) I'm not aware of any researcher on the subject who would say that as a global statement. I'd appreciate seeing a citation for any source you have seen that says this.
Yep I too was quite disappointed by this.

The article contained a lot of bombast about giving up on SQL and taking the opportunity to do some blue-sky thinking about creating a better API for 'structured data'.

I was hoping this meant they were going to replace SQL with a more modern relational API, correct some of the flaws in SQL while they're at it and base it truly on the relational algebra.

Turns out it's just yet another souped-up key-value store, or 'hierarchical database'. No joins, no real relational functionality to speak of. I thought we already had a client-side key-value store API?

If only people would actually read some of the theory on relational databases before eagerly reinventing a square wheel.

</old fart before his time>
I think the whole white-space obfuscation is pretty neat. You could do that elsewhere, but the particular use-cases for JavaScript I guess are more susceptible to this method.
He seems to be mixing-up value and price, or something like those. Is it bad to have more good stuff -- the choice to have good stuff? That seems wrong. What is going to zero is limits on distribution.

Banging on with words like 'illegal', 'criminal', 'stolen' makes it sound like a testy lament that the barbarians are at the gates. Things are changing, and most likely for the better. The fear of diminishing content from loss of incentive is not materialising. Between 2002 and 2007, film, book, and music production are all significantly up ('File-Sharing and Copyright'; Oberholzer-Gee, Strumpf; 2010.)

Not being able to imagine how production might be funded without distribution monopolies (copyright) doesn't mean new ways cannot be developed. The tech that is withering copyright gives us much more than it takes away.
It's a bit of a hassle, but Linux users can just buy the songs on iTunes on a different computer and then copy them to their own.
Even if they can only differentiate two states (say, below and above 60 Hz) 2^160 is a pretty large number so I don't think that would be a problem, unless I'm missing something.
Old magnetic cassette and VHS tapes didn't keep time accurately enough to extract reliable data, but now we can analyse even cheap voice recorders.

Hmm... It's been my experience that even miniDV cameras and digital audio recorders can have significant variations in their recording speed over time, which would have to be detected and corrected in order for this technique to work. I once tried to use a laptop with a USB audio interface to record audio and a DV camera for video, but could never sync up the audio and video because the video rate was fluctuating up and down. If I synced up the beginning and end of a clip, the middle would be off by up to half a second.

Though there are techniques to detect and compensate for these variations (some of which were used to restore the wire recordings of Woody Guthrie released as The Live Wire), I'm not convinced the minute variations in the mains supply would survive.

Possible countermeasure: narrow notch filters on every harmonic of the mains frequency plus a high-pass filter, or adaptive noise filtering (such as used by noise reduction audio plugins). Get those hums down into the single-bit levels and you'd need a huge sample size to extract any useful signal.

Any statisticians want to comment on how much data would be required to conclusively identify time, place, and edits?

Edit: another question: could it be possible to detect sample rate jitter caused by periodic variations in the voltage supplied to the sample rate clock generator, even after the noise is filtered out? Could it be counteracted by randomly resampling sections of the audio up or down by a few Hz?
Add beautiful fonts to your Posterous with Typekit
If the workload isn't much, can you work on your side project during the day after you've gotten your work responsibilities taken care of (or while you're waiting)?
They've never actually used their remote "kill switch" for any apps; if an app is simply removed for a change in policy or after-the-fact enforcement, deployed apps have remained.

However, there is most definitely a remotely-controlled kill switch for apps. The URL containing that list is here:

https://iphone-services.apple.com/clbl/unauthorizedApps
2600 has been sold in B&N for a long time, so I'm hopefully that eventually this could find its way into B&N as well.
Forget the bit about brain size. It's a distraction from what I was trying to get at. Sorry.

To rephrase my question: are you smarter than most (and in all likelihood all) non-human animals?

The answer is yes, and in the case of humans vs animals, I deny that it's because of culture or upbringing or all the other stuff that gets lumped into the category of "nurture". If it were just that, well, my cats would by now be speaking about as well as human five year olds do.

It's clear to me that nature plays a role. How much of a role is unclear, and, as I said, I suspect it varies.

For historical reasons, we're stuck with both racist pseudoscience and politically correct pseudoscience to contend with. I bet the truth about these matters, if ever found, will be somewhere in between. (And, FWIW, closer to the politically correct side of things.)
JavaScript often runs in a trusted environment, same origin policy does not save you from accessing certain kinds of information so you can cause mayhem even on private networks, you can overwrite built-in functions to sniff things out, there are CSS exploits (the history exploit for example) which allow you to de-anonymize a user, obfuscating code is easy.

Also, don't implement public key cryptography in JS, because that's stupid.
tl; dnr

Just kidding. In reality, this is a very helpful read. I'm wondering whether I have an attentional disorder myself, and many of the same questions the author closes with are my questions.
Lala's streaming catalog was huge (>8 million songs) and included music not available on iTunes. I enjoyed using the service and have since lost any infatuation with downloading and storing MP3s. Being able to listen to anything once was great but the day has already come where you'll be able to rent access (cheaply) to an entire collection and listen to what you want, when you want (e.g., mog.com). Still to come: better tools for organizing the music you're interested in, learning about artists, and finding new music.
Ask HN: A TL;DR Macbook Buying Guide?
If this is inappropriate, please delete.

---

Hello fellow HN-ers.

I am looking to purchase an Apple laptop and would like to call upon the hive-mind of Hacker News to save a bit of time (and possibly save the time of others in a similar situation).

I will be starting a 3 year CS degree later this year so I'll be looking for something to fill the following criteria:

-Document creation

-Web browsing

-Multimedia playback (Hi-def video/ music)

-Design (Photoshop/Illustrator)

-Java, C/C++, Obj-C, Ruby, Python

-iPhone /Android Dev

-Output for at least a single external monitor

-Enough graphics power to play the occasional game of Half Life 2 (at least)

The reason I'm looking at the Macbook is mainly for the iPhone development capabilities. An alternative would be to buy both a Mac Mini and a more powerful Windows laptop but I would rather have an all-in-one package and in terms of power, I doubt I would even need something much more powerful than a Macbook.

I'll be buying a used machine and I'll have a budget of around $1000.

This will be my main machine for both home and university.

Thanks!
That's exactly what the dissenter in the article is asking.
They usually don't do blog posts, but do put significant detail onto the status page.
The front page being saturated about a particular topic isn't anything new. The content has certainly changed as the community grows, but we've had trendy topics for years. A couple years ago I wrote a little ruby script to determine the top words and phrases in headlines, so I'd have an overview of what the community was buzzing about on weeks that I was too busy to read.

If you're not happy with the articles on the front page, go to the newest links page and vote up articles that you think should be on the front page. I try to do this at least once a day.

If you're looking for a smaller community, check out the recent Ask HN thread about alternatives to HN.

And most importantly, on the days when the front page is all about the latest overblown controversy, just say 'this too will pass' and go back to work.

[Edited to correct a spelling error]
Awesome House in Vietnam
I think this house is fantastic! It's beautiful! Don't you think?
What's the extent of the damage that everybody experienced from this outage?
1. It is a very useful habit to be in.

2. It is a great way to establish good relationships that will help build your personal network for the future.

3. It may lead to unexpected good things happening with your current employer.
Seems like they're trying to do the CFA project more like a "startup" style:

- SF -> checked

- Small team -> checked

- 2.0 -> checked

- Web (?) -> checked

- Ramen wage -> checked

- Tight deadline -> checked

- Unknown requirements -> checked

Plus health benefit and travel tickets.
Minus bureaucracy (probably).

I don't think it's a bad idea. If you were to work there and be successful in 1-2 projects, you would get the following benefits:

- Connection with government agencies

- Experience delivering govt/municipal public solution (portfolio)

- Having stayed at SF for a while (maybe stationed yourself there)

- Probably connection to the startup scenes there (if they go to meetups)

You can join a startup afterward and get a bigger paycheck. Of course all of these are probably more suitable for fresh-grad looking for an opportunity in Silicon Valley.
Fuck yeah, joshu! Make something awesome -- you know you want to :)
Raskin - Zoomable desktop for Mac
Google I/O 2010 Session Videos
Delicious founder Joshua Schachter already leaving Google
Oh, I acknowledge it's out there (ergo the tinfoil hat comment). However, to your specific examples: Pandora already agreed/decided to build an iPad/iPhone application, Zynga (creators of Farmville are in a financial position to turn down Apple's overtures, plus Zynga's business model/content is a bit of a poison pill. Going after graphic design schools would be political suicide, so it's off the table.
I've had jobs ask for pay stubs.
My problem seems to be finding a way to prime the pump[1]. Where do you find users from? My difficulties trying several alternatives -- finding people to talk to, using ads on facebook, google -- show me the importance of picking a good idea.

[1] My project: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1306313
After some thought, I agree with your assessment. You could set up a server to make people mostly play nice, but in the current stage of development, a gentleman's agreement is probably the right choice.

If you sandboxed the Python process running agent code to limit the mischief to that particular process, that would go a pretty long way, and that sort of thing is certainly possible by restricting syscalls at the OS level.
Yes, but you need to ask Twitter nicely to see if they'll let you use it.
And while SQL is not the absolute best way of accessing structured data, the theory which it's almost-but-not-quite based on, the relational model, DOES have demonstrable and very well-researched advantages over hierarchical database models when it comes to working with structured data at a high level.
Why stop at a ladder-based tournament system? It would be awesome if we could have all submissions put into a persistant world and go on until they all die out. Kind of like a mmorpg for AI robots.
one can also ask the question whether its you that want to continue coding in java, because you think in java, or because you want to avoid learning something new. But yeah, if the customer don't grasp Lisp, you are pretty much settled with java.
Is tautologyclub.com registered yet? ;)

http://xkcd.com/703
Indeed.

It's absolutely trivial to write an reasonably-performing key-value store on top of even the most minimal subset of SQL.

The reverse is most certainly not true.
non-profitability

>One person with knowledge of the deal, but who was not authorized to discuss it, said that the negotiations originated when Lala executives concluded that their prospects for turning a profit in the short term were dim and initiated discussions with Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president in charge of iTunes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/technology/companies/05app...

Lala started at least five years ago. They received $35 million in venture capital. They were bought by Apple for $17 million. They had $14 million in cash. The effective price was $3 million. They were burning through $500,000 a month. I think it's pretty safe to say that now a team has explored this dark cave and found a gigantic killer bear, no one else will be stupid enough to follow. If they do, I don't know if they'll find too many VCs who want to throw away their money.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/07/lala-was-bought-by-apple-fo...