skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook is an older crowd of mostly college graduates.
Thus higher income and more desirable to marketers. They do a good job of helping you find friends of a friend and reconnect with high school and college friends. Games like scrabolous give the bored office workers something to do.
FCC may auction another 25 MHz of spectrum
I use Wink for all my demos. Easy, Fast, Small Size final product, compatible with all browsers, and did we mention free?
Holy shit, they actually answered my question. I'm like, famous or something.
Zoho or Google Doc?
Which one do you like more?
Sounds more like Garbage Collection in this case. ;)
but dude, machine learning! You will eat your words once Sproost makes Strong AI.
The science of keyboard design
I don't get the impression that a degree is a requirement. Sounds like they just want to get beer with people, tell them about the idea, and see if they can find someone who is also passionate about their idea.
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Google Docs, for sure. Zoho just feels strange to use, and their UI is just atrocious, to be honest. Google Docs gets the document organization on the dot (Zoho... botches it) and gets usability and lightness of the user interface correctly. Lastly, the collaboration features are better than Zoho Writer's.

I still kind of prefer some aspects of the Writely UI (http://jaman.ca/files/images/writley-snap.JPG), but the new changes to the Google Docs UI make it awesome (especially the fixed-page-width view.)
This is so spot on and hilarious. Funniest thing I've read in a while.
I use TriNet at my company, and the cost is about made up for by the savings in the health care plans alone. Factor in the benefits of someone else handling the work, and it is a no brainer for us. Note that the avg wage of TriNet companies is over $100k, whereas Administaff is around $60k. I think Administaff has a much broader base of client companies, but TriNet is higher end. TriNet's only weakness is not having an integrated 401k, but it is not too hard to link Fidelity to it.
0 points for the greatest song of all time? and it's about dreams! a particular dream.
One more element to consider.....if you hire mostly young male engineers, then health benefits are not a big draw, and a PEO may therefore not be a good option.
Just noticed the date on this, I wonder if something a little more formal than a livejournal post has been written about it? If so I can't seem to find it, but maybe someone else has had better luck?
Amateur always stands a chance...
Becks says you enjoy beer, aren't a beer snob, but likely don't drink to excess regularly in my professional opinon.

If you said Natural Ice...clearly either a drinking problem or stuck in the college days.

Arrogant bastard? Beer snob.

Smirnoff Ice? wtf?
Make it a Dew
Amazing. I bet kids would love to play with this!
Wow. I've read some of Vinoski's columns about this, and they're very good. But the following is absolutely the clearest explanation of why you can't abstract away the network that I've ever seen:

"The fundamental problem is that RPC tries to make a distributed invocation look like a local one. This can't work because the failure modes in distributed systems are quite different from those in local systems, so you find yourself having to introduce more and more infrastructure that tries to hide all the hard details and problems that lurk beneath. [...] But it's all for naught because no amount of infrastructure can ever hide those problems of distribution. Network partitions are real, timeouts are real, remote host and service crashes are real, the need for piecemeal system upgrade and handling version differences between systems is real, etc. The distributed systems programmer must deal with these and other issues because they affect different applications very differently; no amount of hiding or abstraction can make these problems disappear."
A beer snob beer, I guess, but not one of those uber-hoppy American microbrews. I'd take something Belgian or a hefeweizen.
I've been sitting here trying to think of an insightful comment I can add to this post, but I've come to the conclusion that you can't improve on perfection. It's unfortunate that this post won't be read by nearly as many people as it needs to be.
The big [Polar Rose] update we have all been waiting for!
Microsoft's Vista: New Horizon or the End of the Road for PC Operating Systems?
GD for me. :) Already integrated to Gmail and other Google services.
When PG says that children are helpless and this is a thing we are wired to like, I remembered that in japanese the word used to mean cute is kawaii, and it also means something close to helpless (it is used to express a kind of pity).
You have to know at least one hacker. Then you pay him to help you interview talent.
Merchant account.

The downside is you pretty much need to meet the huge requirements by the credit card companies to do it on your own servers. Which is why you need to find a merchant account provider that offers a way to store the data on their servers that meet those requirements. CDGCommerce is one, it gets very good reviews on all the webmaster forums and they have good rates.
You'll be the first true hire [...]

Hired people work for salary. The kind of people who qualify either command high salaries or shares.

Other than that it sounds like a nice job for a 20-year old hacker wanting to get some experience and buff up that resume in the process.
I've had a good impression using PayPal so far for subscriptions and one-time buys at <a href="http://zodlogic.webfactional.com/?pc=hackernews080523">ZodLogic Games</a>.

Easy to learn, simple to integrate and test. No horror stories but my needs are simple and traffic small.
i signed up for paypal's website payments pro but eventually switched to braintree for my corduroy (http://corduroysite.com/) application.

the problem with paypal's solution is that you either require your customer to create a paypal account which is a hassle and looks a bit unprofessional, or you store the credit card information yourself to do recurring billing. if you store credit cards yourself, in order to be PCI compliant you have to store them on a separate machine on a separate network from your web servers. if you're starting out small, that can be a big pain. paypal does offer recurring billing to an extent but you don't have much control over the process.

braintree offers "securevault" which lets you store the credit card info at their site and they return you a token for each customer. when you need to do recurring billing, you just submit the request to their server and pass a token instead of a credit card number and they take care of the rest.
How I got hired by Amazon.com
Jaegerbomb = worldly, likes red bull, can hang with the corporate jocks, likes to mix things up, can handle the ups and downs of everything (you know upper and downers).

thats enough
fwiw, i think explaining each move after its been made and progressed from is a fantastic idea.
Vaguely off topic - but this is a screencast savvy group. Does anyone recognize the software being used for this screencast? Note the real time insertion of a webcam.

http://www.accuweather.com/mt-news-blogs.asp?blog=meteomadne...
get a cheap vps in the US and setup a ssh tunnel. Hulu sucks anyway but you can listen to pandora.
I've tried Kayak and most of its competitors has always found me the lowest price except for last-minute flights where I was forced to use Priceline's name-your-own-price mechanism.

These were flights between Thailand-Chicago, Japan-Iowa, Iowa-Houston, and Houston-San Francisco. Maybe Mobissimo works better for European destinations?
Google warns of Microsoft monopoly risk
I agree to a certain extent. All sciences specialize as they mature. Computer scientists looking to make their mark are inevitably driven out from the core into security, bioinformatics, robotics, data mining, distributed systems, what have you.

I don't know Knuth's mind exactly, but it seems to me he decided to set up shop at the core, at theory and algorithms, to set the science on a solid foundation going forward. So it's fundamental algorithms, arithmetic, searching, sorting, and lately graphs and combinations.

There are enough people writing in their specialties, and there will always be incentives to go baroque and novel. That's how we get stupid stuff like my thesis, or 8% faster neural network training, or the paper on implementing a Turing machine in C++ templates.

http://ubiety.uwaterloo.ca/~tveldhui/papers/2003/turing.pdf

It takes a special kind of person to forge ahead slowly, for decades, on the field-defining work that he does. The other kinds of scientists (and software engineers, for that matter) are all too easy to find.

http://edward.oconnor.cx/2002/04/don-knuth-sells-out
Rate-My-Housing?
I had an idea about doing a website, similar to Rate-my-professor using college housing (apartment complexes, rentals, and such) instead of professors. My dad says it's a good idea, but I have no idea how to go about it, and he says it's my brainchild, so I should do it. Can anyone help me?
Upon further reflection, how about:

(if (pointy-haired-p boss) ...

Ah, coding by committee. How pointy-haired of us :)
Yes! We have plenty of events in NYC outside of "Internet Week" as well. Check also check out http://alleyreporter.com or http://nyctechevents.com.
personally i just go straight to the rubbing alcohol
3 Ways to Win the David vs. Googliath Fight
Ask YC: Machine learning course recommendation.
I know there is a ton results for a google search, which is precisely my problem. SICP is a 4 letter word that everyone would understand here. Are there any such reputed courses for machine learning that jumps to your mind? Any help is much appreciated.
This has definitely been done before, but hasn't really hit critical mass. So there is a definite marketing challenge to getting something like this going, once it is built. There's some money to be made, but unless you got huge I don't see a multi-million dollar exit as likely.

http://www.landorslum.com/ is one that has a bunch of reviews in Pittsburgh.

The best way to do it is to program it yourself, but then you have to learn to program which is hard if you don't already code. http://www.hacketyhack.net is a good way to start. This type of thing job could be outsourced, but outsourced programming is either really expensive or really mediocre and people here generally recommend against it.
i like that justification a lot, you're hired
I don't understand most of the arguments centering around "single point of failure."

Not too long ago I was a victim of partial Identity Theft; somebody gained access to my credit card information and started making random charges. My credit card was a single point of failure for my finances. It took me a long time to figure this out and to fix it considering I was stuck in Afghanistan at the time, but a phone call and explanation to American Express is all it took to get my card reissued and the charges removed.

You can't do this when you're using passwords. If somebody compromises your "strong" password and changes the password at important sites before you find out, you're pretty much screwed. You could use "I forgot my password," but that same password is likely on your e-mail, so forget that.

With OpenID, there are fixes for this. Say, for instance, the ability to completely disable it if you've used it recently and have the browser cookie. Okay, so now you can't get to your bank account, but neither can the person using your OpenID. You could then use some sort of other verification method to ensure you're the actual owner and reset it.

But forget all this; consider probability! A SSN is basically a single point of failure for your identity; it identifies you specifically and could not possibly represent somebody else. That doesn't mean that the military actually worries about the fact that your SSN is used for everything, including signing into chow. I can't even fathom how many thousands of documents out there have my Social on them. The reason they don't care is because being a victim of identity theft is pretty rare, even when hundreds or thousands of people see your SSN every single day.
I'm guessing that's not going to be the best job ever. Maybe it's Second Life stigma, but I don't think so.
"Perhaps it's getting falser as techies increasingly don't need business guys as cofounders."

The reason the barriers to starting a business are falling is because the tech side is getting easier and cheaper. The business skills one needs remain unchanged.
You should ideally support: MasterCard, Visa, Discover, AmEx, and PayPal
That's a neat little tech and it reminded me of something I saw on Gizmodo a while back called "smart scene resizing."

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/innovation/smart-scene-carving-re...
Google Docs. All the little Microsoft-friendly touches and branding tie-ins of Zoho just rub the wrong way. If they are spending that much time making things work well with Outlook, Office, and, ugh, MS IE, that's that much less time they have to make things work well for better platforms, so I don't trust them to keep improving it at the same pace as GD can maintain.
Great post. The original TechCrunch article is another instance of talking about how things fail (miserably), rather than talking about how things can be improved to not fail. Poor journalism.

The real issues about Twitters scalability are best covered in a blog post @ http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2008/03/on-scaling-a-mi...
Facebook triples the number of services you can import into your feed — moving in on FriendFeed?
I agree. My own experience is that entrepreneurs tend to greatly underestimate the difficulty of selling. Particularly on this forum, we talk a lot about "making something people want" as if that's all it takes for a startup to succeed but we don't talk enough about "making customers pay for what they receive". My own experience is limited to selling to enterprise customers. In that case, the necessary condition is to provide a solution that puts out a fire that is burning someone's butt. But it is far from sufficient. In the end, it all comes down to convincing someone to risk their career and the financial future of their family on an unproven product from an unproven startup. Having a killer product is only the first step.
Heck, I would love to play with this!
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Note: there is also desktop software like ICVerify that will keep track of CC numbers and run them on a regular basis for you; I believe that it can also handle subscriptions.
To be completely honest... that lost a ton of integrity as soon as I read "I showed up at the Amazon.com’s booth, with my well-dressed and custom-skinned avatar which, as a bonus, has my same name, Simone Brunozzi (don’t ask me how I got it because it’s a secret)."

Cmon now... what is this virtual ^&*#$@! coming to? Really Amazon.com? Really??

Edit: Not only that... but look at the view from his office... I'm practically speachless at how BS not only that job position and article, but Amazon.com's participation and movement in that direction is...
Like PayPal, FPS requires an account with another party (an Amazon account in this case) making it unsuitable for many, including us. We can't introduce another step into the process.
I've worked with Java and C++ for several years, but I need to learn C for a project I'm doing this summer. Having heard many good things about K&R2, I picked it up and I'm astounded at the clarity of the piece.

By today's standards, it does have a few fairly academic examples (if I wanted to convert fahrenheit to celsius, I would use google), but otherwise it has excellent examples of functional code written in a concise style to clearly demonstrate how to use the language to get things done.

The author mainly seems to be implying that K&R2 is "totally not related to what [the author is] doing right now as a programmer in some company."
This is mindblowingly great. I guess it goes to show how intuitive [physical] models can be if you choose the right thing [energy function] to do [to minimize], and design an algorithm to successfully do so.

It's beautiful that they chose rigidity too -- it is an extremely natural behavior that most biological things would default to. And it's great fun to play with!
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Which social networks make money and how?
it seems a lot of social networks and "hot apps" receive a lot of funding but which do actually make money?
flickr for example launched in 2004 so by now it would be dead if it didnt make money right?
http://www.flickr.com/cameras/ ok some ads but does that cover all of that bandwidth?
youtube i read costs 1million a day in bandwidth.

which of the social networks make money?

how do they make money?
Worth a chuckle. Although most "translations" in this style I have read seem to have at one point: "I am high as a kite" - shame they didn't continue that meme.
Interior decorating meets machine learning... I'm laughing right now, but I'm kinda interested.
How to make money on image search?
How to make money on a search engine that finds images?

would an adsystem like googles work?

i guess ofc someone(like google) would actually pay large amounts for a very good image search system but if you dont want to sell...
who comes up with these lame questions
You'll become part of the founding team; together we'll architect and realize Sproost's vision.

Suggests that a considerable amount of equity compensation could be involved.

But yeah, when they said "first hire", that was my thought as well -- they basically want a technical cofounder / chief architect sort of person.
Neat idea. Now go convince those who make money out of privileged information that this is a really good idea.

Reminds me of the cases of life insurances and real state business as explained in Freakonomics: "experts" are usually just people with privileged information. For them to give it up, something aweful (from their perspective) must happen, like the internet. Perhaps there is hope.
2nd that.
I do a lot of, for lack of a better term, "geeky" things, but I would never write about anything involving Second Life. Perhaps it's unfair discrimination and perhaps I am just ignorant to SL's real worth/usefulness, but... I can live with that.

I disagree with you on your edit, however; "evangelists" can be very important to an organization.
Read Norvig's introductory text, but don't feel you have to know it all - use it as a way to pick something you really are interested in (genetic algorithms are always popular) and read academic literature on the topic (citeseer is a good resource here). Use Wikipedia, Scholarpedia. Get an intuitive sense of dynamical systems, problem spaces and landscapes, and chaos theory. Get a grip on combinatorial explosion, and just how much it can suck for optimization problems. Learn theory of computation, and glance (more than once) at symbolic logic.

That will set you on your way! Good luck, it is fascinating stuff.
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And uses it to, um, make interior design accessible to everyone. Just like we all secretly dream to do.
true...

i wish it were a bit more structured and let you view subsequent submissions as diffs of previous ones...

very cool concept though, i agree..

perhaps as someone mentioned above it should have three rating possibilities, clarity, performance, loc.
I agree with edw159. A past is the only thing one can hold against someone else. A damaged reputation is one of the prices for being evil. Grudges have a basis.
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Of the "I just need a hacker" posts, it's among the best.

Maybe it's still damned by its genre.
Hi guys,
this is Simone Brunozzi, the "new hire" at Amazon.com.
Second Life is not the new holy grail, I just said that it was a key factor for me. Second Life is still in its infancy, and it's useful only in specific situations.
I consider evangelists very important for an organization such as Amazon.
They don't have an explicit position on Second Life, though.
Best,
The Origins of Nerd
"Right, that was one of the problems he mentioned, and it's one of the problems I pointed out getting worse in your "solution." Your moderators would be those prolific posters: people who had time to be on the site regularly. The casual votes or submissions would be lost, and the system would continue to favor prolific posters."

You see, right there. You seem to think I was being nasty by suggesting your maths was subpar. And yet... Here, let me give you a nice simple, concrete example:
Poster A only posts once a month. A casual poster by most definitions. But his posts are always interesting and relevant. He averages 30 points for each of these posts, but in a three month period only gains 90 points. However, as he has only made 3 posts, he finishes with an average of 30.
Poster B is a prolific poster (by the way, maybe it's your understanding of the word 'prolific' which is the problem here - it means 'producing in large quantities'). She is on the site every day, posts messages at least 5 times a day, and gets about 2 points for each message. Over the three month period, she makes about 900 points. BUT, her average, due to the fact that she has made about 450 posts, is only 2.
So, under the system I propose, is it the prolific poster, or the quality poster that gets moderater status? Well, seeing as my system works on averages, it's obviously the quality poster. Which of course shows that when you baldly asserted :'Moderators would not be, by definition, "quality" posters, but rather "prolific" posters', you were just plain wrong.

I dont know, maybe your maths doesn't suck, but if that's the case, you have a serious problem with reading comprehension. Either way, you're just plain wrong in what you assert. Sorry if you don't like hearing that.

'And if only moderators could submit content, we'd lose any casual "quality" submissions.'
Ah hah! There! I knew you could do it! A valid point! This is indeed a downside to the system I proposed. The idea was to stop the forum being constantly flooded with techcrunch articles etc. But I'm willing to concede that this isn't perhaps critical. You probably could trash it, because in theory, the high quality moderators would vote down boring crap, and vote up interesting crap, providing an effective filter against rubbish submissions.
I've had this on my wall for months.
When people get nerdy about clickiness, I always worry that they're optimizing for the wrong thing. Maybe getting this tactile feedback right does allow people to type faster, but how does it interact with RSI?

For me, small, fast movements seem to be a bigger problem than larger, slower ones. Long key throws might slow me down, but they do seem to be easier on my wrists.
I'm always surprised by how poorly non-hackers can judge the abilities of hackers. If they are all non-hackers, they may not know who among their friends are even competent enough to help them identify a hacker.
Memory Fragmentation in Firefox
Must I have a boss?

(if (and boss (pointy-haired-p boss)) ...

coding by committee. How pointy-haired of us

I object. This is sarcastic pair programming!
Does it really matter if they find the right candidate through Monster.com, on SL or while they're shopping at Costco?
Agreed. K&R is one of the best teaching texts I've ever read. It's paced wonderfully, and explained extremely clearly. I had tried numerous other C texts before getting K&R, and never managed to get very far...pointers, in particular, seem to be very poorly covered by everybody else.
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