skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds a lot like an engineer interview with Amazon. Very professional and very stressful.

The problem I have with these SAT style interviews though is that they're weeding out talent unnecessarily. Personally, I tend to get brain-lock when I'm under intense scrutiny, and the stress of knowing that I'm in the middle of a potentially life altering event really isn't helping any.

The reason I think this filter is unnecessary is because I'm pretty sure that "stage fright" isn't actually a problem you'll face if you work at Google or Amazon or Microsoft or wherever. You have projects and goals and you work to complete them. Christ, you're a programmer, not John McClane. Nobody is standing around with their thumb on the detonator watching you write an algorithm for reversing a linked list.

I suppose it would be difficult to scale, but I think what would be more successful for the technical portion of the process would be a Google Code Jam style arrangement whereby you're given a problem to solve, you crunch on it for the evening, and when you've figured it out you upload your code. If it's correct and fast, perhaps you'd make a good employee...
What kind of resolution do you need?
I don't get this, what is hackish or immoral about this:

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/bytestring/0.9.0...

which makes as many uses of unsafePerformIO as it exports functions, and the beautiful pure interface that is thereby created:

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/bytestring/0.9.0...

It seems to me that there is an element of hypocrisy in some of the complaints above; it is as if they were saying:

> In Haskell, it's a nightmare to define a pure function with IO. You have to use that dreadful hack `unsafePerformIO`! In practical languages, by contrast, we are spared this boilerplate, since basically every line is already unsafePerformIO.
Who remembers the golden usernames debacle? Let's not go there again.
Pinch - iMessenger, iContacts & iLocation Sense iPhone App
inch is the 1st iMessenger with leaderboard contests, cool map views with friends, locations, directions, journeys and miles traveled. Pinch makes conversations with friends more fun with sporty animations, picture messaging, emoticons available across all major smartphones.
TweetMy311 Developer explains why CouchDB is best for Twitter applications
I've been using DDG for some months now while at work. It's set as the default search engine in Chrome and Firefox. Generally get's me what I'm looking for fairly quick. The mouseover effect is a bit much (reminds me of a cheap SEO site), but the results are quick, I get good results, and I like icons and other little touches.

I really don't notice I use DDG anymore. Which is a good thing. Proof that even in a market where there is a winner, you can still put out a product.
Cosmetics are pseudo-scientific bamboozlement (surprise)
Millions in virtual real estate to be created overnight during .CO launch
I think you're exaggerating a bit here. First off, the frog thing is a myth. If you ever actually try to boil a frog you will find that no matter how slowly you do it, it eventually gets uncomfortable and jumps out.

Stupid people do stupid things. Always have and always will. The difference now is just the scale and how far their stupidity can travel.

If you get off on worrying a more interesting thing to worry about is what role governments are going to play. The more technologically we advanced the less we need them. Of course they don't like this at all. Today we've been saved because they (a) haven't fully grasp what e.g. the internet means and (b) where they have, they haven't been "tech savvy" enough to do anything about it. Both of these will change in time. What's going to happen when they decide to try and roll everything back a few notches after we've all gotten used to the convenience?

Personally I think it will work out in the end because it always has so far (and I can't do much about it in any case) but my scenario has more potential for trouble than yours I think.
WIRED knew the iPad was coming 11 years ago
Turning Japanese? Comments on the latest bank results
HN Poll: Are You a Software Pirate?
I am curious to see HN's reaction to the Pirate Party in Sweden setting up an ISP (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1531843), and the prevailing attitude to piracy. This in no way means I condone piracy! This is an exercise to satisfy my own curiosity (and hopefully yours too).
I think the sweet spot is 1920 x 1080, which is 1080p.
Yes, I use pirated software for development purposes
We use the same display as the Panic folks for this:
http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/

Aside of a hiccup upon delivery, it works well, has a built in computer(!), and is built to stay on 24/7.
Keyword here is active listening: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_listening
Raptr Leaves Beta, Makes It Easier To See Which Games Your Friends Are Playing
If you're the police, and if you have evidence that a user of this ISP is distributing child pornography, and if you ask nicely, I'm sure they'll help out.

But if you want blanket surveillance, or if it involves some teenager downloading music, they'll (rightly) tell you to go away.
Saving the art of bookbinding in a digital age
No, I don't pirate under any circummstances
Unrevoked - simple root tool for Android phones
Yes, I use pirated software for personal use
My understanding is that Google totally agrees that they are weeding out talented people. However, given the number of applications they get, they are wise to be more concerned about false-positives than false-negatives. Most companies don't get so many highly-qualified applicants and so would probably be foolish to copy the Google model.
Google is taking a similar line:

http://gawker.com/5419271/google-ceo-secrets-are-for-filthy-...

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-12-07-n83.html
Those are the measurements for Mike Pall's LuaJIT - not for the standard Lua implementation.

Here's JavaScript V8 :: Lua
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...
Not quite the same thing. Taking photos of your children running around having fun in that state of clothing is probably a fun, proud moment for a parent, documenting their joy in their family.
If something is effective and has been for the past 50 years then it seems like it would be easy to run a scientific study that proves it. If the science disagrees, or at least doesn't conclusively prove that it works, then it seems to me that our common sense assumptions may be wrong.

Case in point would be running in modern running shoes. Almost every coach and doctor has claimed that modern running shoes are the way to go. Yet in the past 40 years since they have been used there hasn't been a study proving that you will run faster or get less injuries than if you just ran barefoot.
Yes, I use pirated software for both development purposes and personal use
They Will Steal Your Idea. They Cannot Steal What Really Matters.
If you don't care about getting reelected, being a member of Congress is more like running a small company. You're given a million dollar a year budget and allowed to basically do what you want with it. There are no real requirements, although obviously there's a lot of pressure to show up for key votes. You get special attention in the media because of your position and lots of people want to sell you stuff.

Getting elected in the first place is more painful, though.
'Are you a software pirate?' poll

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1532394
Graphs were also flawed - scale grossly exaggerated to make the point. Why not zero-based vertical scale? See "How to Lie with Statistics".
This is mind mapping 101, only using an iPad. I've tried any number of mind mapping programs and they've all come a distant second to using a pen and paper (a whiteboard is even better). The one thing that would be better than pen and paper would be if it also did an audio recording at the same time and synced the handwritten notes with the recording (so that you can quickly find the audio that related to a particular part of the map).

This is an incredible killer feature in Microsoft OneNote but I'm not sure how it could work in a non-linear mindmap.
This case isn't about a traffic provocateur; it's about a traffic provocateur being charged with wiretapping laws for taping his police encounter.

To be more exact, the problem is that instead of facing a speeding ticket or (at most) a misdemeanor traffic violation, he's going to have to fight a charge that could carry 16 years of imprisonment.
I'd like to look at a different facet of the issue. My employer mostly implements COTS; our vendors drive our technology choices. The vendors of our two most critical systems decided on JVM based languages - Java and Groovy - so we're moving in their direction.

Java is new to most of my department. Currently people use C, SQL, and PL/SQL. I started with Java in 1998: it's not very exciting for me anymore. I'd like to use languages with greater abstraction capabilities. Despite being a really attractive language, Clojure is a tough sell because of its Lisp-like syntax: being a JVM-based language I can probably still get it in house for small apps.

Haskell, however, is non-JVM and has unique features by comparison with Java. This combination make it impossible to make an argument for despite all the goodness that it has. Unfortunately for me, it's relegated to the category of a language I'll play with periodically and someday hopefully use in industry.
If you like physics simulations, there were some very cool papers at this year's SIGGRAPH:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMsc48e41AQ (A Practical Simulation of Dispersed Bubble Flow)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyfB_vQHMAo (Physics-Inspired Topology Changes for Thin Fluid Features)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Who8EpbvCY (A Multiscale Approach to Mesh-based Surface Tension Flows)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHH8N_lNZzI (Rigid-Body Fracture Sound)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx80u6hJT6o (Efficient Yarn-based Cloth with Adaptive Contact Linearization)
Very cool. Removing the need for the computer definitely makes the increased price much more palatable along with the more industrial design and use case.
How to unmix: Just e.g. close your files explicitly, but let the memory of the data structures that represent your files be garbage collected normally.

For patterns of usage similar to RAII, Common Lisp uses unwind-protect. I already mentioned Disciplined Disciple Compiler that extends Haskell to give static guarantees for following certain rules for resource management.

Why would you bother: RAII only covers some cases for resource management, and most garbage collectors can take an arbitrary long time to collect an object that's no longer reachable. Which is fine for memory, because memory is fungible, but the attached resources, say mutexen, are not necessarily fungible.
This would be so very easy to push down the obvious slippery slope. Imagine a movie with a progression... painting of a nude male and female, then a picture of the subjects of that painting, then a sequence of paintings of them going from something like a slide-show with a transition every 10 seconds to a couple paintings per second so they do a little stop-motion dance. Then repeat the slide-show with pictures of the subjects. Next introduce another layer, a shot of a TV showing the painting, then the pictures... how can you tell the difference between the TV showing picture of the nudes and a paused video of the nudes? What if two people repeatedly hold up a black sheet in front of the two nudes while they are moving and then drop the sheet for a second as the nudes hold still... how is that different from the slide-show of the pictures of those nudes. All this could be done integrated with the plot and dialogue, maybe something about what is real and how you tell the difference between a real and fake photo/video of something.

So in the progressions, when would the censors put the black boxes over the "naughty" bits? Would there be a difference in that for the man and the woman?
Jolly Rogers! The answer is affirmative.
Thank you for the factual correction. My point still remains, however, that driving wasn't invented here.
My answer is the exact same one as roc's. Maybe I should take this as a sign to not post at 2am, and use more words to explain myself better.
"How many people here on HN have used pirated software to help build a web app? Quite a few I'd bet. If your fledging web app is a success, whose software are you gonna buy when you are successful? The one you 'test-drove' as a pirate of course. "

Possibly. But there aren't really any real stats to back this up.

"Why do you think the tech industry and the web grew out of America and not some other wealthy country? It's because America tolerates a certain amount of rebellious, anti-authoritarian behavior (among other things)."

The GPL is becoming its own dictatorship and when people like Chris from thesis go against the ideals, he is treated like a criminal. The GPL is no different than proprietary software licenses. Companies and people involved in both want people to abide by their rules. However, only one seems to be supported here on HN and other communities. It's very hypocritical and it's one of the reasons why I can't take the community seriously.

"I'm not pro-piracy per se, but I believe a certain amount has to be tolerated as the alternative is a police state on the web."

This is a little extreme. The alternative is not a "police state". The alternative is respecting someone's rights, even if you don't agree with it (don't pirate something you don't want to pay for).
spam for nutritional supplements
And the next two examples are tail calls of even and odd thanks to shortcutting of ||.
Unfuddle has unlimited SVN repos for free.
"I would expect this number to be close to 0. What does this even mean?"

What do you even need to pirate to make a web app?

Rails, php, apache, mysql are all free
Scattered all over the place... scraps of papers, text files, archived emails, notebooks, margins of books... Sometimes I try to go through them and pick something to work on, a few ideas which I don't want to pursue but don't see the obvious problem with them, I post at lkozma.net/ideas .
Evernote.
Sorry Jason, but you have no idea what you're talking about here. Having been in the real-life version of that movie for the past six years I have a pretty good notion of what can and cannot be taken away by another, and it's a lot more than what your post would lead people to believe.
I've always been obsessed with this talk. He's such a good, honest guy. When I first saw it, I wrote up some thoughts here: http://clayschossow.com/2010/03/great-talk-by-entrepreneur-j...
The phone industry is way too complicated to be able to assume that cause and effect can be simply described.

Losing the iPhone exclusivity might actually end up being good for AT&T. One possible mechanism to explain that:

- All their high usage, low profit (and vocal) iPhone customers go to Verizon.

- Their generally oblivious, high ARPU, low usage customers don't bother to switch... especially since their service will be much better after the high usage people leave.

- Their high-profit business customers get happier since they get the benefit of all the iPhone-driven network upgrades without actually having all those iPhones around to kill the network.

- They get a chance to throw marketing money at pulling in Android customers, which right now has a higher volume and better terms for carriers (better share of revenue, lower handset subsidy) than the iPhone anyway.

Of course it could also end up being awful for AT&T. Or it could wind up being generally neutral. Certainly losing exclusivity in the UK doesn't seem to have killed off O2.

To get a 'tectonic shift' I think it would be necessary for Apple to start selling unlocked, cross-network devices only with no subsidized options. But they have shown no desire to do that to date - they pretty much had to be forced to do so in the parts of the EU where it's a legal requirement.
What do you mean by "setting all the particles"?
My "PHP friend" has already done several profitable projects with the least amount of perfection. He knows how to do it right, has already the traction to bring already paying users over to his other new projects. Unfortunately he lives ~500km away.

When I ask my developer colleagues about feedback for my "crappy alpha", I'm just getting totaly bullshit responses like "you need javascript input validation before the user sends his form" despite the real problem I try to resolve.

So I asked serveral of my ~100 developer contacts on different projects, unfortunately feedback was kind of the same.

But only few of them managed to release something in their spare time. So they probably have the same problem as I have.

It's hard to get in contact with people that made it, some of them just tell you "I was lucky" which is cool, but not really helpful - It's easy to say that when you've made it :)
You forgot user page sorting. :)
A year from now there will be 2-3 times as many iPads in circulation as there are Kindles. 2 years, way more. Most of these people obviously will not have prior Kindle accounts and they will buy via iBooks rather than a third party app. The size of the pie is increasing, Kindle's slice can't keep pace.
Pssst http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

:-)
The interesting thing is that Charles Wilson had been CEO of General Motors before Eisenhower appointed him Secretary of Defense. (Google "What's good for General Motors".) Was GM doomed that far back?
Don't know that it's that simple. You could look at this as a server farm for encoding. If I bought a rendering engine, would the company allow me to use one license for all seats in the farm? No, I'd be buying bundles.

It's not an exact analogy I know, but it's the world that Sorenson live in. They're almost certainly unused to selling $800 software to consumers, and they are used to the world where you buy seats for production farms. It makes sense in that world. Is it worth their while to try and cater for a tiny number of potential customers who don't fit it? I doubt it.
"Earlier than the Other Guys" Award or the Airline with Least Delays
I would rather judge and be judged on the merit of a comment, not by who is making it.
I don't think so. Their whole opus is exceptional, because they are inspired by broad range of bands and the other way round and know how to create soundspheres.
I don't like their last album "The Incident" very much.
ToneCheck Checks Your Tone Like A Spell Checker Checks Your Spelling
Cognitive Surplus Visualized
VC Economics – Why Your $50 Million Exit Means Nothing
Unfortunately you are quite wrong.

Fortunately by the rules you apparently play by, I need not provide any evidence or explanation to such a declaration, just the smug empty statement itself.

Edit: the original parent said (from memory, maybe not 100% accurate): "Sorry Jason, you don't know what you are talking about here." I wouldn't be so snarky about the edited parent.
Poll: Are you a software pirate?
Simple as that. Yes or No. It's mostly anonymous. Right, PG?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1532453
I wish I could win at the lottery and start something on my own..

... maybe if you stopped wasting time and money on domain squatting
Ah, lame. I found a canvas rendering bug back when Chrome first came out. I blogged about it and they fixed it, referencing my blog entry in the steps-to-reproduce portion of the bug report.

I guess I should have held onto it for a couple years and cashed in!
Other kinds of conversational rules, perhaps of more interest to linguists, programmers, philosophers, etc.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicature

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gricean_maxim
Having retail stores (or at least a space in retail stores staffed by your company) has really helped Apple sell a lot of product. There is no real substitute for being able to play with a device and see how good it really is. I think Google didn't get those type of buyers and Googles trouble with people calling them to resolve issues didn't help.
It would be nice if they ran a facial recognition algorithm or something on their pictures. I've been forced to guess which one of my friends got tagged as their pet or as some beach.
I have my doubts on people preferring iBooks. Amazon.com is a much better place to shop, and as long as I have any other type of machine, the kindle books are more flexible for me.
I understand your predicament, I myself don't have kids but I understand what it would feel like to take your children away. But I also understand that you have time and a lawyer who already knew about the case. I'd ask him if there's a statute of limitations on this sort of thing. You may have a chance to fight back, and at least help sort out this unjust system.
The real title is "Why Apple Doesn't Deserve Your Trust". Nor does the author ever state "Jobs is Nixon" (he merely likens their attempts at a coverup) or that Antennagate really is like Watergate, which ignores the fact that with Watergate, a real and serious crime was committed. Please do not add gratuitous editorial spin to submission titles.
Key concept is that if people want to submit themselves to a one-way stream of communication, they have TV and the internet for that. If a conversation isn't two-way, you're alienating someone.
It's funny Anandtech forums went through this many years ago facing the same problems that Reddit is. It was pretty much the same thing, I think $30 made you a subscriber and you got some benefits that non subscribers didn't. THen after only a couple years they removed it. Wonder if reddit will do the same?
Agreed. We abandoned an Omniture integration recently after about 10 months into it. Far too expensive, a crap load of extra javascript in the code and a terrible user interface.
I don't count my dayjob, since I just use whatever they tell me to use... I'm assuming we have valid licenses, but can't swear to it one way or the other.

That said, as far as my personal life and my startup project go, then no. I use exclusively F/OSS software and maybe a very small amount of "proprietary but free for use" stuff. So, Fedora Linux, Java, Groovy, Grails, Bash, Eclipse, JBoss, PostgreSQL, Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, RSSOwl, Vuze ,Emacs, etc.
I made the edit before you posted, though I guess the statement is still smug and empty in your view.

All the evidence you need is in my profile or pretty easy to find on Google...whereas I don't even know who you are because your profile is blank.
What are some great examples of customer acquisition strategies by startups?
Looking for a discussion around some different successful or unsuccessful customer acquisition tactics (anything from viral to complete busts) that startups have implemented after a beta release of your MVP.
I'm always curious to know why every startup launches with a "Most Popular" plan.

Isn't that lying to your customers?
But there have been persistent rumors that the US T-Mobile operation has been up for sale.
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I'm in canada and pirating is the only way to get the content on my phone.
Any ideas how this could work? Is it some kind of machine learning? I can't really picture it.
>In many ways, I think the issue here is not the crime but the coverup.

I think the issue here is that there was never a crime to begin with.

And what's worse is the fact that people are saying that Apple never acknowledged that it was a problem, even though they did as early as the first (text) press release. The second press release was cheesy for extending blame on all manufacturers but the overall message was this:

"We screwed up. But we really did try! Look at these facilities we built to try! Ok, here's the fix."

That isn't a crime. Or a cover up. It's a design oversight followed by a publicity blunder.
"But if you want blanket surveillance, or if it involves some teenager downloading music, they'll (rightly) tell you to go away."

And sadly, they would currently be breaking the law in doing so in Sweden.
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