skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lycos? How cute! I agree that the problem is power, but I'm not convinced regulation is going to do anything. On the one hand we have network effects at play creating major power hubs (The Kingdom of Facebook) but on the one hand we also have blogs run by local city-state tyrants like Techcrunch. Yes, stupid blogs are about power too. Should government regulate major blogs like Huffpost of Techcrunch because they have the power of shaping opinion in respectively the field of technology and liberal thought?
That would have required a decision, and if there's something committees are uniquely unqualified to make, it's decisions.

The fact that it's C++, where the prototypical user believes that they shouldn't pay for what they don't use just makes things worse. Everything being optional means there can be very few synergies in language or standard library design, because if feature A needs feature B to work, people who want A but not B will complain. C++ "chooses" either by omitting both A and B, or creating some low-level error-prone features and hoping users won't chop off too many fingers trying to build their own incompatible versions of A and B. An ill-designed misfit language is all but required by the dynamics of the situation.
My way to execute this algorithm is to try to get as distant as possible to the problem in step 2, taking as much experience into account as possible, and then hap-hazardly zooming in. Or something like that. And it seems to work.
Ask HN: Are you a mobile dev looking for a challenge?
For our startup www.pinkelstar.com we are looking for experienced Android / iPhone developers. We're based in Amsterdam but do not have an issue with remote working from other locations.
We offer long working hours, an inspiring and challenging environment and a possibility to become part of a great team of smart and experienced devs in a startup that aims to offer extremely useful and cool mobile services to mobile developers

If interested respond in the comments or send us a mail at info@pinkelstar.com
Seems to me the 'me too' product is optimizely.

Interesting concept. Scan HN for good stuff by people from third world countries that are unlikely to get funding, apply to YC with a similar idea, get funded and run rings around them in the media, and to add insult to injury have them labelled 'me too' by the same media that refused to cover them beforehand.

I'm sure you can do much better than that Jason.

Also, how can you write that 'you'll check out his site' if you mention them in your article already ? Don't you do that anyway before mentioning a site ?
Having read Feynman's books and descriptions of him in other places it seems to me he was supremely gifted but also willing to indulge his curiosity about seeming trivial things that is uncommon in professional scientists - the whole thing with spinning plates being a good example.
Five Robots to Watch
Eat the Damn Cookie Executive function depletion & you
There's research on intuition and the unconscious mind to back this up. Apparently, for a lot of problems the best way to solve it is by thinking very hard about it and then letting it go. Your unconscious mind will go on, especially when you're doing activities such as showering (which has little distractions), and all of a sudden you will have the solution.

I use this technique all the time, if I can't think of a solution for a hard problem I'll just leave it and go for a run, take a shower or work an another problem.

Unfortunately, I only have read a book from the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis, which is unfortunately in Dutch, but I'm sure there are people here who will have some references in English.
A newer style of interview that I quite like is to ask someone to write a moderate chunk of code with a laptop, access to the internet, and a few hours.

An amusing variation on this might be to pick the next n interviewees and tell them to spend the day working on something as a team. Observe via camera or one-way glass.
I plan to write a blog post on how the name helped us. It may sound unsexy or cheap to the startup/programmer community here on HN but for the internet marketers (who are my target customers), having the "Website Optimizer" pits the product exactly opposite to Google's tool (which was well known at the time VWO launched). It helped us position the tool, other wise we would have to educate what Wingify does.

Microsoft's first product was simply called MS-DOS and I don't think having a "OS" word in it caused them any disadvantage (in fact it helped them). But then in days of MS-DOS there were no tech blogs :)
Findmycofounder.com
It's politically illegal to say that on average whites are smarter than blacks so instead they have this little gem:

"....distance from humanity’s African homeland (novel environments could encourage greater intelligence)...."
I too share your passion for the AeroPress, and might I add, that using the upside down brewing method[1] it makes excellent americano. Best I've ever had actually.

Coffee is not supposed to be bitter, and it's a shame that so many people think "Oh, well, that's just the way coffee tastes I guess.".

I recently got my parents one, and they went "Ohh, it can taste like that? That's really good!"

[1]: http://coffeecollective.blogspot.com/2010/01/updated-aeropre...
Analyzing Apple’s iOS 4.0.1 Signal Fix & Antenna Issue
Please see my other comment on this thread. why we chose the name. Link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520656
Very creative way of finding names. This is the type of stuff I like seeing rather than the 'OMG SQUATTERS RUINING INTERWEBS' bs. Good for you.
Qualified opinions are boring and don't sell newspapers, better to ask the 'man in the street'. As a bonus, if that man in the street spews extremist ideas, you can do the 'both sides of the debate' trick.
The web is fundamentally a bunch of files.

Would you rather browse around the net in hierarchies or use google to find the files.

File systems like those we have today are fine when you don't have a lot of content. But it simply fails as a design system as soon as we move into terabytes of data.

Why do you think that Spotlight and QuickSilver are so popular on the mac?
I've long felt the key is to get the interviewee to do some real work for a day. Pair programming seems like it might work well.

You'd have to come up with some suitable toy problems that you could make significant progress on in a day.
My thoughts as someone who's been full time on C# for the last 5 or so years:

Case 1 -
His examples are toys, I don't think there's really an argument here. Better examples might convince.

Case 2 -
This is less about the language and more about the tools and the culture. The ecosystem in C# land is focused much more heavily in the business / enterprise direction which personally I hate. Point to Ruby.

Case 3 -
Half a point maybe. The .Net library is actually pretty good and each version of C# brings the language a step closer to the sort of concise code he shows. You can certainly get very close with a few wrappers here and there.

Case 4 -
Meta Programming, oh yes. 10 points to Ruby. It has been said elsewhere that C# doesn't have meta programming because it was designed to be predictable for whoever has to read it. In practice this seriously restricts our ability to express certain types of concepts that don't fit the basic OO model. Aspect oriented programming and mix-ins are the two currently frustrating me.

We try to tackle this with all sorts of hacks (e.g. PostSharp, mangling .dlls after compilation) but they don't fit well with the rest of the tools.

This means lots of boiler plate repetition we can't kill. Microsoft likes to use code generation for this which I also hate.
When will I stop hearing this story about "poor Java performance compared to native code"?
Just look at the shootout results, where Java is as fast as fastest native code compilers and and an order of magnitude faster then all other lisps there.
I actually like this actor in Adventureland and Zombieland (should this movie be Socialland then?). It's a pity, because I suspect this role is going to be not that good.
I think you are missing the fundamental point here.

The current file systems whether MS or OSX isn't made for the amount of files that the average person deals with today.

A better system would be to allow you to search on multiple axis. But more importantly a better system would follow what you are attempting to do and limit the option space quite significantly.
Saree Blouse Patterns and Designs 2010  
Get different kind of designer blouses with matching Sarees at Sareez
> It just looks terrible to their image

Comments are from "ordinary people", so why would anyone measure the quality of an article by the quality of the comments? Does an article become less true or less readable just because it is followed by some bad comments?

In contrast, not publishing comments would lead to the impression of being unable to take criticism.

By publishing even the dumbest comments, they show that they are able to handle criticism, and that they don't suppress anyone's opinion.

> and adds nothing to the story

Comments serve a completely different purpose. While the article reflects the facts, the comments reflect the sentiment of the people. That's what they add to the story.

In some rare cases comments even add some interesting facts.
Quantcast has no asyncronous tracking. If their servers are running slow at all, their javascript will block your site from loading, even if you have it at the bottom.

I know this because it happened to us. We contacted them about it but they have no solution,they don't seem to think it's a problem since "most of the time" their servers are up and quite fast. Marketing requires the tracking, so our solution is to host their javascript on our server and run a cron nightly to redownload the code from their servers in the hopes that we'll never get so far behind that the tracking stops working. So far, so good.

Google, on the other hand, offers an asyncronous, non-blocking solution. Much better.
"if search engines were forced to disclose their algorithms and not just the signals they use, or, worse, if they had to use a standardized algorithm, spammers would certainly use that knowledge to game the system, making the results suspect."

Regardless of whether or not it would be a good idea for Google to be required to open their algorithm, I don't like this reason. It is security by obscurity. Spammers can only take advantage of flaws in Google's algorithm. By opening it to the public, I'm sure the algorithm itself would be improved.

The real reason Google doesn't want to expose it is that it is a competitive advantage. They should be upfront about that at least.
Typically if you get that one right, there is a serious of follow up questions each getting deeper and deeper into the understanding of the same topic.
I agree, I have a couple of my own services like this.

How long did it take you to hit acquisition level, how did you find the acquirer?
If I'm reading fiction or something that's not too heavy, I tend to read at 800 - 1200wpm. Anything technical or with oddly shaped sentences/paragraphs slows me down to 600 - 800wpm. I'm not sure how many pages/hour that is, but I can finish off a 400 page novel in a couple of hours if I'm not distracted or interrupted.

I can only suggest what techniques work for me; I never intended to turn into a speed reader and can't recall perfectly the process of becoming one (I was mad about books as a kid/teenager and read novels very regularly from about the age of seven). But anyway, I don't subvocalise the words as I read, although I just realised I do as I write lol. I also ignore all the little words, like conjunctions and articles. My brain just seems to skip over them and focus on the nouns and verbs. Depending on the length of the paragraph (this doesn't work if it's huge), I look at the block of words and take in the order of nouns and verbs to 'see' the information being presented. That is, I don't 'read' left-to-write; it's more like observing a picture.

Also, I tend to subconsciously force myself to maintain/improve my reading speed quite frequently, by being aware of how long I'm spending on a book or article and setting a deadline for when I want to be finished then speeding up to make sure I meet it. This is a result of me not really being able to justify the time I spend reading books and articles 'for fun' instead of studying or working.
Watch more movies and listen to more music that makes you feel good about you.
We offer long working hours

How is that a good thing?
Thanks for clarifying. Thanks also for your blog, from which I have learned much.
On Android, you have to 'root' the phone in some fashion in order to install firmware. On a couple Android phones, the rooting process is 'supported', but on most models, rooting relies on exploiting the phone in the same way a jailbreak would.
There are so many supremely gifted people out there, but almost none of them reach the Feynman-ian stage of problem solving. I just remembered an extremely interesting thing I can't remember one example of his "gifts" in childhood. He messed with radios and had a personal lab, but even I did stuff analogous to that and I am certainly not "supremely gifted" or gifted at all. So did you and almost every HN reader.

His "gifts" become apparent in mid adolescence, and the interesting thing is that these are more a combination of hard work and his environment than gifts. Let's stop talking about Richard Feynman for a moment, did you know he had a sister Joan Feynman who became an extremely senior scientist at NASA? {see: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2002-04/my-mother-scie... I'll put it up separately too it is worth it. [edit: It's up over here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520685]}

She was brilliant too and had the same characteristics as her brother. Now one would assume that his gifts would be unique, a genetic lottery. It is quite often that siblings of famous scientists achieve next to nothing in life compared to their brothers/sisters. However, here we have someone who fought her way up life pretty much the same way Feynman did.

Perhaps it wasn't a genetic lottery, but an environment constructed by an amazing father who taught his kids that in order to do anything in life you need to work hard at it until you fail, and then you try again.

You know it is so difficult to accept this, but Feynman the phenomena was nothing more than dollops of hard work and persistence with an open mind. No wonder he used to scoff at IQ tests. I have a higher IQ than Feynman's reported IQ and this being HN it is highly probable that the person reading this does so too, but am I "smarter" than him? No way.

However, there is one thing he had in him that most people don't have; creativity, but this too can be cultivated slowly over time...
> Like SBCL, Clozure, Gambit/C, DrScheme/Racket, Franz, Lispworks? These, and others, are very solid tools.

No, those are quite solid tools. Regardless of that, his point still stands -- most lisps are toys. I'm pretty sure that with a little looking I could find 10 toy variants for each practical variant you can name.
Thanks for providing an alternative view, I'm going to be using SSL for sure. The more I think about it, the more I'm amazed that Mailchimp don't make a bigger deal of getting people to use SSL.
Growing Up With Joan Feynman
I read your stuff. Awesome.

I want to be something like you as I grow up. :)
Its a startup, better get used to it now then discover it later. Don't get me started on the pay ;-)
That blow out preventer was federally mandated. As was the dead backup battery.

The thing about mandates is they are easy to write. It's the enforcement that has the problem. If you look at every airplane crash, exclude pilot error and rare weather events, you will find the remainder were due to lax maintenance. Federally mandated lax maintenance.
I thought it has become a meme because it is so annoying.
Thaw&#8217;s Monthly Meeting with the Gods
Ask HN: resources for training for IQ test?
Spurred by someone in my social circle I've taken on the vanity project of trying to get accepted into Mensa. I've taken the preliminary test on the Mensa website which says that I could be a candidate. They host testing days where you take a different test which is then used to measure if you are really, IQ-wise and according to Mensa's testing standards, within the top 2%.

The online, preliminary test is a typical 'intelligence' test as I've taken before for assessments. It measures, from what I can tell as a non-expert in IQ testing, your spatial, numerical and verbal pattern-cognition skills. If you take that as a definition of intelligence that's fine I guess, but I do think (and judging from my online research this seems to be widely recognized by the experts) that this can be trained quite a bit. In particular, what I found irritating about the online test is that some questions were much harder than others, but there was very little indication on how the speed at which you take the test is weighed against the correctness of the answers. If I would've known more about that I could have made a better judgment on whether it was worth to spend a lot of time on one question (the test I did was 30 questions and took me 27 minutes; there were 2 questions that I spend more than 4 minutes each on).

So my question is: does anyone have any advice on how to best train for an IQ test? Books or websites or other resources. My use case is the Mensa test but I assume it's largely in line with the test as administered by e.g. HR assessment agencies. I've searched Amazon and the internet but most books or websites claim they will 'train your IQ' which to me seems nonsensical; I want to train 'IQ test taking' which is a different skill.

As a tangential question, any Mensa members here? Do you find your membership advantageous? Just for fun or has it ever helped you professionally?
Concur. When I head Gell-Mann talk about Feynman (probably this was in 1994) he seemed to think he was about equally smart, but Feynman somehow had much better PR. Probably Feynman writing a series of books of stories about how smart he was had something to do with it.
How does it pit it against?

It seems to leverage on what google created.

I am not saying that is a bad thing, but I fail to see the "pitting against" factor.
How to Convert and Burn Flip Video to DVD with Flip to DVD Converter
How to burn a DVD from Flip camcorder?
When I was in college, I wanted to work in the music industry as a booking agent or concert promoter.

"I like music," I reasoned. So I would love working in the music business, right?

The trouble with that reasoning was that my day to day wasn't spent listening to music or hanging out with bands. It was spent calling people on the phone, or creating marketing, or negotiating, or writing contracts.

"Scratch your own itch" is good advice, but not because of the motivation or energy it will provide. It merely grants you a ground floor understanding of the pain you're trying to solve. Because you are, presumably, among your target market.

As far as motivation is concerned, however, you would be better off focusing on a business with day to day tasks you love to perform.
Because you're too busy waiting for all that C++ code to compile before you can be too busy debugging it ..

FtFT! :)
A necessary precondition is to define a good problem. Speaking from experience, this is easily the hardest step for physicists.

For example "What is dark energy?" or "Are there baby universes?" are not good problem definitions, but to my surprise "What is the radius of the proton?" is still a good problem definition today [1].

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/07/08/the-inc...
How do you market an offline product?
I've built a solid offline software product geared toward restaurants and retail. It seems like it's be hard to reach small businesses and harder to reach corporations. Does anyone have any experience in this area?
There's a hidden gem in this article, a link to an excellent talk by Gerry Sussman: http://www.archive.org/details/arsdigitacoll09
I started using ErgoEmacs today and it looks very promising :)
I was hoping that was for networkworld.com since the comments on there are useless. Great idea though, especially for the context of a paper.
I like Java, but more than that i like JVM itself. From my experience, Scala works just perfectly for high-load data processing and frequent calls, serving critical data.

Groovy / Grails is a great thing, as for me too. You get a JVM and a whole lot of Java Libraries accessible from Groovy code, but also dynamic typing and, more or less, lightweight framework. That's if you're already familiar with Java. I think that it's going to be pretty easy for you. There're way more things laying around, such as JRuby that runs on JVM. But that all highly depends on what you're going to develop, or what tools you're most familiar with...
Conflating "few" and "a few" or "little" and "a little" is a common Indian English-ism, I find.

/Indian
Probably a good idea, but thanks anyway for introducing me to another cool feature of Clojure!
I agree that SOX alone is not enough to explain the dearth of IPOs. A least for 2008-2010, the housing/financial crash seems a much bigger culprit.

At the margin, though, SOX's costs cause private companies to delay going public, and provide a relative advantage to older/larger/already-public companies -- acquirers -- for whom compliance costs are proportionately smaller.

And since the cycle of IPOs depends on emulating prior successes, even a small initial effect could depress the follow-on rate for years.

Google is sui generis, the most successful venture-backed company of the past 30 years. If being 'like Google' is the yardstick to IPO, the system is seriously broken.
Apple to Give Education Rather than Resolution for iPhone 4 Antenna Issues
CAL-MED EHR Transcription 
Dial 1-877-323-4707 for medical transcription support to CAL-MED EHR/PM applications provided at a cost of just 9.5¢/line and narrations documented with a 12 hour turn-around-time.
How about a women-only hacker space? That might create more female founders (of any age) in the long-term.

Also, one thing Tereza mentioned, that "women who start businesses like to know what they’re doing", could be seen more as a problem to be addressed than a constraint to be worked around.
What Apple will announce in iPhone 4 press conference
Oh, should add, the specific version was not one I had had any experience with, nor claimed to have had any experience with.
yeah, but attitude alone doesn't build products. If we are talking for just some simple web app, then that is fine, but if you are doing anything that is technically challenging, you better have somebody experienced on the first 2-3 employees you hire.

You need both energy/passion, but also somebody that is good and has experienced a lot, both successes and failures.

One thing I noticed really good engineers with experience tend to be a bit more pessimistic/opinionated by nature, and also more pragmatic. They can anticipate problems down the road (where a junior engineer would think everything is jolly), while avoid over-engineering. Junior programmers are more likely to either over or under engineer; brush potential problems as "insignificant", or grossly underestimate what it takes to get something done.

Most of us have been there at some point. But also a junior engineer might bring your fresh energy to the mix.

But remember, really good engineers, with experience,and with passion and great attitudes, are hard to find. Mainly b/c they have no problem to find a job.
Haven't found a solution yet but I'm in exactly the same boat, down to the target industries. My strategy at the moment is to find a partner with experience in that industry who can do sales. I think it's crucial to get out there actively, cold calling, not just in the beginning but as a fundamental part of the business. I don't see myself doing it though, I need a partner to make this work.