skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trivial may be the wrong word. It's easy if you fill all the requirements. In SF we had an LLC, an apartment in the mission, a lawyer to fill out the paperwork, and 8 Canadians. The canadians all did have college degrees. I honestly don't know if the border patrol even checks all of this stuff. One of the guys said it took about 20 minutes to get through. It probably depends on what border you go through. In my experience the small borders are the worst, because the border patrol are from small towns and have nothing better to do other than fuck around with you. (this is also assuming you are driving) The best driving border is BC => Washington. Flying in, the west coast seems the best.

On the other hand, I know loads of people who go from Europe, Japan and Australia to California, NYC and Hawaii simply to hang out for 3 months at a time. These are people who have no college degree or any useful skills at all. They are here to surf, snowboard, or loaf around new york. Getting into the country is not a huge problem. The threads on this topic often have a tone of excessive worrying about visas. You can easily show up in the country and hang out for a while.
The shadow internet
For the most part, yes. Would you mind explaining how that's relevant?
"appears to be due to a lack of input validation of the application name field"

They should just be sure that they _render_ the application name field appropriately. Angle brackets should be escaped, minimally. It's really not so difficult, Ruby does it with three calls to gsub:
http://rdoc.sourceforge.net/rd/doc/classes/CGI.src/M000003.h...
In my opinion, another approach (even a recommended approach) is to incubate elsewhere and move to the valley when you have some traction. There's just too much noise there, too much "flavor of the month." Examples that fit this approach that come to mind are flickr, digg, and stumbleupon. I'm sure there's plenty more.
This seems like an exceptionally high amount of money to raise for a web tools company.
I've thought for a while that people need to take hiring advice given by 37Signals and Fog Creek (Joel on Software) in perspective. It's a very different experience hiring when there are thousands of programmers who would die to work on your stuff than when you're an upcoming startup that nobody's heard of. That's not to say that their advice is wrong - Smart and Gets Things Done has lots of great advice. Keep in mind when reading these books/blogs that people aren't going to launch websites, Twitter campaigns, or rearrange their lives to get your attention like they do for 37signals and Joel.
> I got it for zero yen

Sounds cheap, but what is that in USD?
I think the incentive compounds the self-selection bias. For someone who is an expert in say audio equipment, a small monetary reward isn't going to encourage him/her to post a review (assuming they have a decent amount of disposable income). However, for those who could greatly benefit from that incentive, they'll post reviews like there's no tomorrow.

Another great example of how Amazon has succeeded with user generated content is Listmania--genuinely helpful product lists, all provided for free. I don't completely understand the psychology of why these are created, but I value the content greatly because I know that contributors are not compensated for their suggestions.
Instapaper Community text-parser configuration
These studies were done during WW2 to investigate ways to increase productivity in the US arms factories. Note that this was with a workforce that wanted to produce as much as possible, not a workforce that was coerced to.

Their conclusion to maximize productivity was to work 40 hours most of the time, with occaisional bursts at 60.
Cooking for Engineers ( http://www.cookingforengineers.com ) is pretty targeted at techies. They have an innovative graphical recipe format that shows a horizontal timeline with ingredients in rows and instructions occupying combined cells on the graph.
Yeah, new phones are fun toys and all, but you're upset because 1 phone is arriving 1 business day after the other one?

I don't think this scenario implies anything other than ATT may not process all orders in a strict FIFO queue. It wouldn't surprise me if your order was held up because you're the secondary on the account, but this hardly seems like an issue worth expending any time or energy over.

Sorry, I don't mean to be so dismissive of your question, but the world frequently operates in a slightly erratic, non-linear fashion. 99% of it isn't worth getting yourself worked up about.
Communities often often struggle to define the meaning of a user's vote.

Amazon is wise to make a separation between "I agree with the user's opinion" (via my own review) and "I found the user's opinion useful" (via my vote).
Disk access? What? I/O has stunningly little to do with this.
More power to 37Signals for having the good sense to set their own price and value for their own product. There's nothing controversial about asking $9.99 for a simple app that you can master in 5 minutes and use to sync your ideas with your team. Pricing Draft at $9.99 is no more controversial than charging $4.25 for a soy grean tea latte (a one-time use product, at that), $829 for a 64GB iPad, $2,200 for a 2-year Verizon Android contract, $51k for a Porsche Cayman, or $450 million to launch the Space Shuttle...

"There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person's lawful prey." -- John Ruskin (found on a poster in my local Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop)
you can also get a+, also by arthur, when he was at morgan stanley. thankfully, I never had to use it.

http://aplusdev.org/

I still have nightmares in which the error "kaplgallant not found" flashes in console window the lower right. My workstation did that every few minutes for the entire time I worked there -- five years.
I use the "Secret Settings" app, which gives me access to all the test screens without having to remember the test codes. I can switch all that stuff in there, IIRC.
Users report 'fault' on iPhone 4
Apple is one company. On the Android camp we can count Google, Motorola, HTC, Samsung, LG, Acer, all enjoying the shared results of the investment in Java technology, Eclipse IDEs, and the Linux kernel (on which Nokia also depends).

No. Apple can devote the whole company to the iOS platform and it will still be less than the companies I mentioned will combine in developing both Android and the technologies on which it depends.

Apple can out-innovate Microsoft. It cannot out-innovate the whole world.
That "guy doing IT at law firm" might be the best programmer for your project. Using life circumstances to judge talent is equally as stupid as looking for bullet points (Stanford, Facebook) on a resume. Maybe his/her family needed the money, the health benefits, or some other event prevented him/her from pursuing their dream job/education. Hire a person, not a list.
The smallish town was/is Waterloo. The RIM HQ is close enough to the University of Waterloo campus that the two entities have sold buildings to one another. In a speech he gave once I heard him draw the analogy about putting the refinery right next to the well. He also had this interesting bit about how it was more important that the "RIM" logo on the building be more visible from the campus than the street.

Most places have to convince talent to stay whereas the Valley has it come to them, I can see it being an easier battle.
Google wasn't interviewed in Founders at Work, but they stress the importance of location starting with Noogler orientation, with periodic reminders every time you try working on a distributed team.
"There are still a huge number of video, audio, and design professionals that need the power of a Mac Pro and are willing to pay for it. Why would Apple intentionally drop this market?"

They might, if they believe they can make more money investing the same resources in the iPad II.

However, I suspect that won't happen any time soon, because, as long as they're maintaining OS X, they can update the Mac Pro in their sleep. It's all standard technologies, in a pretty ordinary case. They could reduce the Mac Pro department to a handful of industrial designers and one engineer to turn the design into specs Foxconn can build, and still charge $2500 for it.
I don't know if I'd say they have a particularly impressive history of "being right". There are some things they do right, and of course the last several years have been huge for Apple, but success now doesn't translate to historical success. They had a pretty hard time through the 90s, and I think that most of their stuff from that time was inferior to the competition.
I have the same relationship with the cheap clock radio in my bedroom. It sounds great when I'm in bed (to the side of the radio), but as soon as I get out of bed (in front of it) I have to turn the damn thing off because the reception gets terrible.

I wonder if this means I shouldn't get the iPhone4? ;-)
Is she certain that it is not another PhD student one floor above her experimenting with X-Rays?
I'd like to clarify because my comment is ambiguous. It's scary either way. Either we end up with a fragmented internet like the article suggests, or end up with a heavily regulated internet like the article suggests. Both are scary outcomes.

and someone playing the false dichotomy card in 3...2...
I don't think anyone notices Javascript execution performance at this point, but without the hardware acceleration capabilities of Firefox and IE9, HTML5 canvas has no chance of replacing any use-cases of flash.
Quick Question: was there any fallout when your removed your "badge" implementation (from people who'd earnt a badge)? Fear of this makes me reluctant to try new things, but I think it's good to try them. Did you do something to handle this, or was it just a non-problem?
Rejoice Ngwenya: The folly of African entrepreneurship
Yeah, it's a bit over-designed. The giant purple signup button draws the eye so strongly that at first I didn't notice the existence of a video and screenshots, or the little strip menu along the bottom.

It's kinda like a sales assistant that rushes up to ask if you're finding everything before you've gotten halfway from the door to the shelves...give me a chance to indulge my curiosity first, eh?
Like what exactly?

I've found ffmpeg and OPENrtsp both pretty easy to setup and use for basic video conversion and simple stuff. Not sure though if you're just trying to convert to a different format, add watermarks, detect scene activity, or something different.
RF Happens
Yeah, I've seen that phenomena too - there are an awful lot of people that think moving to Silicon Valley will magically make their startup successful, instead of it just being one of the first steps in a long, long journey.

The nice thing about SV is that there are folks here that actually work on tough technical problems and have the skill to match - Googlers, Yahooglers, Microsofties, researchers at Stanford and Berkeley, etc. Not to mention all the repeat entrepreneurs who have money to invest and are looking for their second big idea. It can sometimes be hard to convince these people to found a startup (well, hard to convince the tech company employees...the repeat entrepreneurs will jump on anything with a reasonable chance of success), but there's talent here.
I wonder if they'll also fix dictionary implementation to be O(1)* instead of O(n)

* actually hash lookups are O(inverse ackerman) but that's kind of silly
I was always taught that saying "In my opinion" was bad form. You're making a statement, of course it's your opinion! To say so is just repeating yourself.

So when I read REWORK, I see it as "Here's how I built my business. You could do the same." When I read Crush It, I hear "This is how I, @garyvee, built my business. You could do the same." I don't hear, "This is always the way that it works in every business ever." Maybe that's just me.
Based on going through something similar myself right now...

If you don't have to show live video (ie: just video clips), your best bet is probably to convert the video to a number of different formats and/or sizes when it is uploaded, then detect device type from the request info and then serve the appropriate video stream/size.
I think it definitely does. If you understand Programming Language fundamentals, it tends to be easy to understand a new feature in any language, as you can usually figure out how it really works underneath. You know "why" more than "what," which can be really helpful if you're changing things up all the time.
FTC satisfied with Twitter security fix, will end probe of company
The very, very short version:

During the Gilded Age, as the industrial revolution was happening, a small number of people controlled all of the money and infrastructure. Then, there were no laws against collusion or antitrust or any of that. If you owned the railroad line to Denver, you could insist that you'll only ship your brand of widget to Denver, and everyone loses except you. You win big.

So they routinely fucked everyone else over, and life is much better now that we don't have a few massive trusts dominating the whole economy.
I know it's coming, but until Google Reader importing is functional, it's of no use to me.
While time stamping solves the problem of inconsistent quotes, it does not do anything against bogus trades or somebody accidentally adding an extra 0 when typing in their data.

A circuit breaker would prevent the absolute free-fall that happened during the flash crash. At that stage, nobody knew what the "real" price of a stock was and everybody was guessing, the algos could not handle the situation. If a circuit breaker was triggered, it would lead to a trading halt on the stock and an auction to set the price.

Time stamping quotes solves system errors, but not mistrades or market panic.
In Smalltalk, everything is an object.
Take a look at http://www.personaltelco.net/

It may not be exactly what you're interested in, but they have set up a large amount of equipment and may have information that would be useful to you.
Are you an engineer? I didn't quite understand what your major was.
Reports sent to Gizmodo seem to indicate that the bumpers do fix the problem: http://gizmodo.com/5571171/iphone-4-loses-reception-when-you...
This seems a good time to mention interpolique: http://recursion.com/interpolique.html

I'm curious what people here think of that idea, ie, preventing string injection attacks at the language level.
They stress the importance of location of team members relative to each other, or the importance of being in the valley? From my understanding, Google has a number of engineering sites outside of the Valley, even in the USA.
Um, right. So you're saying that if iPhone and iPad sales were lower, that would raise your estimate of the economy's health?
They're just implementing his brilliantly conceived research program. As long as they have their hand-eye coordination, they can continue to churn out the fruits of his vision. All the names on the following his on the resulting papers and patents are the scientific equivalent of "sent from my iPhone."
Another demo video, using a more stable, conductive test sample, a key: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvH-i7rKPJc
I certainly agree that coming up the learning curve with R has greatly improved my working knowledge of statistics. However, lately I find myself becoming increasingly frustrated with the language itself as my projects grow in complexity. Of course this could be due to my lack of skill with R or programming in general... Does anyone else have this issue?
Your first if statment = false. Most specialization doesn't require increased training. You're thinking of brain surgeons when most specialization means operating a cash register or pushing a button on an assembly line. Therefore most specialization doesn't need increased training but a numbing of ambition.
Good post. Although one thing I don't get. You comment about not being being happy with (potentially) being employee #20,000 at Google. But why did you attend Harvard? Harvard is a pretty large school, and certainly far more than 20,000 students have graduated from it.

I've met many great people who skipped college altogether. Do you think that you were pushed into Harvard, and if you could do it again, you'd skip it? Or at least attend a far smaller school?

It just seems like to me Harvard (or most any college) is a big company where you pay them, rather than them paying you. Of course at Harvard you get to learn a lot. But I expect you'd learn as much in four years at Google (or even Microsoft or IBM for that matter).

Just curious...
Why the drug-discovery model is broken
There shortly. I'm the Australian guy in a brown t shirt with a chandelier printed on it.
I strongly disagree. Find a good programmer that will do a good job out of love and money, and will help you with more than just being a code-writing monkey.
Fyi we're in the backroom, spot the guys with beards and glasses. I'm the asian guy in a light purple shirt and glasses if you're completely lost.
Some people are way too accustomed to the consumption-driven lifestyle and think they'll perish if they make less than $60k/year.
Come for three months at a time on the visa waiver program. You'll be surprised at what you can get done in that time.
The latter is a slightly different (and in my opinion more interesting) approach. Tourist visas are actually good for up to 6 months. So as long as you have enough money saved, you can do it that way.
Thanks! I always enjoy reading Derek's pieces.
Agree with the point of there being no Facebook constitution or guaranteed rights, but with the line: "You’re a Facebook customer, not a Facebook citizen", I thought advertisers are the customer and the 500 million fb users are the product.
> Hire a person, not a list.
One thing you (and others here) may be overlooking is that chemistry is largely an experimental science. Performing experiments takes a lot of time, because the experiments take time, but often they take on the order of hours and you can use that time for other stuff. When I was graduating in physics, I often went to the lab on evenings, in weekends, hell, even on Boxing day. However, when I was there, I usually wasn't working on my thesis; I was just running experiments. In the meantime, I read books, went to the gym, surfed the web, etc. It's far from ideal, as 'the job' is on your mind 24/7 and it ties you up a bit, but it is not as bad as it may seem to an outsider not realizing what actually went on when I was at the lab.
Well I appreciate the summary.

It's interesting that you should bring up the railroad industry as an example of why anti-trust laws are necessary....

The railroad industry was extremely corrupt and was heavily subsidized by the government. They received special treatment and competition was forbidden.

Corruption in America's Gilded Age
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3614.html

Are you noticing a trend here?
Secret of AA: After 75 Years, We Don’t Know How It Works
Sure. You could have a PhD grad from Caltech A and a community college grad B such that B is more skilled for the job than A.

But if you have a very small amount of information and time to make a decision, where would you place a bet? It's certainly very unfair for the many talented graduates from lesser known universities. However, I find the idea of recruiting based partially on these bullet points valid from a expected proficiency optimizing perspective.

The talented guy doing IT at a law firm has some options to signal his talent. For example, he can create or become a top contributor in an open source project. I am sure many talented people who feel unfulfilled in their jobs do this.
Jason's point was a great one - historically people focused too much on resumes, and that is often a mistake today because their work speaks for itself.

You're probably objecting to the all encompassing way it was said, which I could understand. I think Jason would agree that resumes aren't 100% useless in every case.

But writing from a "lets tell both sides of the story" perspective is boring and accomplishes nothing (everyone knows there are two sides to every story). If you think the pendulum has swung too far in one direction, then writing to push it the other direction is all you can do.
It's not the main point of his post, but would you really want both founders to be heavily influenced by and involved in the Hacker News echo chamber? I suspect some diversity of thinking might be more valuable.
Segfaults from Outer Space !! Duck and cover
Ask HN: Would you be interested in a hosted continuous integration service?
I'm part of a small startup (www.activesphere.com) based in Bangalore, and we are about to launch a hosted continuous integration service - www.buildcop.com. I am interested in knowing what the community here thinks of such a service. Would you be interested in such a service? Which technology stack would you be interested in - Ruby/Python/Java/.Net/Other? Do you think you will pay for such a service? Thank you in advance for any help/input on this.
They didn't have Steve Jobs for most of the 90s.
It's a little off topic but I would like to take a moment and profess how much I LOVE the fact that hacker news has so many articles on all languages, popular or not.
My experience working with large companies is that the work can be boring, non challenging and with lots of politics. That said, if you know how to work within the rules of their game, you don't have to work that hard, make easy steady money and still be considered a great employee. My theory is that good coders tend to be awful at office politics, so we suffer more than necessary when bounded to the inflexible rules at large companies. I learned to handle that from manager who couldn't code his way out of a paper bag, but really understood people.

Someone should come up with an office politics for dummies.. and this would be my first entry: nobody can treat you like shit unless you allow them too.

(feel free to add your own entries ) :)
This guy seems to have precisely the problem he accuses Fried of demonstrating: He doesn't do things a certain way, so he assumes they just aren't done like that.

When Fried warns against growing your business too fast based on pipe dreams rather than actual, quantifiable needs, this guy says, "Oh, come on, who does that? He's arguing against cartoon characters!" But a lot of people really do get caught up in the ideas of what they should be doing to grow their business according to some blueprint and don't stop to consider whether it's best for the business at this stage. I think Paul Graham has written about this too, where too much venture capital will put pressure on startups to become big business-y in a hurry, to their detriment.
It's a little weird that the iPad-ish device on the homepage appears to be running the Windows version of Firefox.
Hi imasr, it's not that I don't want to hire someone who's talented, smart and motivated to help me with my project(s). It's just.. I'm a student. I can't hire a programmer on a full-time basis for obvious reasons.

My situation is that I hope to save money as often as I can and from time to time maybe outsource a part of my project every so often when it's more beneficial to review and integrate outsourced code than it is to write it myself.

It's not like I'm going to put out a request for something like "build me an invoicing system." I think it's agreeable that it's too much for one inexperienced developer to try to build large, complex and robust systems. And, I don't want to be one of those guys who pays you in equity or IOUs. This is the closest I can get to what you're telling me to do.
You are just being an informed and literate reader

If someone says "this is the way it works in every business ever" you can immediately know they are full of it.

I found Rework mostly unremarkable, but I do appreciate the way they are saying "you don't have to do things the same way everyone always has" so loudly.