skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
who's Ayn Rand? and why must you be a blogger to be a programmer? These are silly questions imho.
Yes, this is probably meant to be a better fit for the spending structures of corporate customers.
RSS aggregation as a friend filter
My experience is the exact opposite of yours, Donna.

I never spent much time with my parents or grandparents and have no understanding of what any of them did for a living. (I can name their occupations, but that's it.)

I had a lonely childhood and was bored to death in school. I found solace in art and music, and later, in computers. I could be creative, I could have control, and I could build cool stuff without anyone else's permission, approval, or participation.

Most of the "wondrous moments in my life" have come after becoming a hacker; so in a way, I'm having the childhood I missed now.
The degree question is also silly, but has non-zero predictive capability. So do these. Certainly they rule out plenty of good programmers, but the issue is: do they leave plenty of good programmers, and a higher quality pool of remaining applicants?

If good programmers read Rand or write blogs at a higher rate than bad programmers, then it works, even if it's frequently wrong about individual people.
Web users are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go online
Normal is not easily defined. Average is. you are confusing the average person with the average hacker. which most likely the average type of person in your circle of acquaintences.

I have suggested self-teaching to many non-hacker types and they are completely opposed to it. Even those going into programming.
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs229/
I think Richard Feynman would disagree with you, and his plain spoken manner is a symbol of how to be smart without being pretentious.

Using uncommon words appropriately doesn't make them any less pretentious unless you really don't know they're uncommon, and Christopher Hitchens, whom I very much like, is hardly someone associated with being unpretentious. Hitchens certainly doesn't suffer fools well.
The original poster was asking why startups use this practice. Startups should not be looking for normal people at all.
Linus Torvalds - best programmer I've heard of doesn't write a blog.

You still haven't told us who Ayn Rand is.
Obviously, but this is a mention, not a feature article in an entertainment magazine. Engadget will cover something after Gizmodo and vice versa. It's ridiculous that TechCrunch won't.

I stopped reading TC a while ago because the signal to noise ratio started diving, but I wouldn't read it now even if it had great content. I don't care who has what first, I'll read who's comprehensive and honest.

Mike wants to be the new CNET and that's not going to happen by being a bitch about being first.
really? based on what?

it really is funny how people believe in evolution but dont accept the consqquenses of it.

we aint that bright dude, just look at the average persons ability to reflect upon themselves...
You misunderstand how the site works. I'm not republishing RSS feeds of any of the source on the site. The articles come from copyright-free press releases related to the news published by other sites (sometimes, their content is the copy-pasted press release, too, so that might have confused you).
I normally don't watch online videos, but when I saw this one was exactly "5:19" long, I knew he was talking to me :-)

01:35 "the most important possible thing you can do is...do a lot of work"

Reminds me of the time I asked Tony Robbins what made him such a great public speaker and he said, "10,000 speeches".

David Heinemeier Hansson gave me a similar response after his memorable Startup School talk.

I've written 10,000 programs and I'm still not close to being satisfied. I'll just keep plugging away.
Interest is a two way street. It's on the job candidate to be qualified for the job they apply for and to not waste the companies time if they're not interested.

On the flip side, companies need to be respectful of a candidate's time and make a move if interested or let them know early on if they're not so the prospect can move on.

I work for Sun. I had one interview, WITH my manager. She made the call, I got the job. I think AWS is a great service offering but it sounds like they may need to fine tune their hiring pipeline a bit.
The links to the source are provided as is in the press releases (see my other comment) - I think they do this to boost Pagerank of their main site, not just the article.
i know they have revenue, but does that cover the expenses so that they are actually making a profit?
Example of a RSS feed item : http://esciencenews.com/sources/science.daily/2008/05/24/fin...

Link to the source, no full content. The full content articles come from related press releases on universities websites, etc
Do you think you were doing it the best way possible?
You haven't addressed the point and you can google her.
The stats on college attendance would seem to be against you since about 70% of the population doesn't do it...

In what country? Citation?

Here's some numbers from the UK: http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/faqs/showFaq.asp?l1=2&ID...

According to that, 43% of 17-30 year olds enter higher education in the UK.
they are generic and poor filters. for example do you read person x. If person X isn't a household name (e.g. Bill Gates) Then it says nothing about them other than none ever introduced them to that person. I'm willing to bet there are a significant number of good C++ programmers that don't/can't care or know who Bjarne Stroustrup is. I had to look up the spelling of his name (although I don't consider myself a good c++ programmer).

The ability to write blogs is irrelevant here too as what we most likely care about is the ability to program. Hence, the programming test.
That's the supporting theory. The problem is that this eliminates both the majority of the unqualified applicants and a large number of the very top applicants. Suitable for a big company? Sure. For a startup or more ambitious company? Unlikely.
Did you RTFA? BSD isn't Linux.

I think the reason it's used in a lot of hardware and OS X is because of the licensing. They don't need to release the source code after they've used other people's work for their own product.

I suppose that's OK since the developer agreed to the license but the rapid explosion of Linux is in my opinion indicative that developers prefer the GPL even with its flaws.
I just think it's fascinating how technology could drastically impact our lives. I now can't imagine a world without Google.

And I want to be part of that change!
I've stopped visiting milkingthegnu.org, as the inflammatory always outweighs the insightful...both are present, but I always have to fight my way through every post.
seems like every job (CS or Sys Admin) I see requires a Bachelors, here in the US which means that almost everyone else I'm competing with has one.
It's pretentious to say that it's pretentious; in fact, any use of the word pretentious is extremely pretentious, including this one. The use/mention distinction also breaks down for the word 'pretentious': it's not even possible to mention the word without being fatuously pretentious. This is especially true if the criterion for pretentiousness is whether "most people" would know what it is.

'Autodidact' is another matter.
Thanks, I saw the first episode on iTunes but didn't want to pay for the rest.
Reaper (Justin Frankel's latest app)
In the real world, I would think all JSON would be produced by code (there are easier to read/write formats for human generated data, like YAML or key=value or INI style config files, for which there are numerous parsers in every language I can think of).

Perl has JSON::XS (my favorite) and the compatible pure-Perl JSON::PP, as well a few other options of varying degrees of quality and performance.

use JSON::XS;
my $json_reply = JSON::XS->new;
print $json_reply->encode(["Hello", "World", [123, 321]]);

We use map and grep extensively to produce the JSON to build our GUI elements, and it works like magic. I'm sure Ruby and PHP have similar libraries.
on [rails-business] this was addressed as not a problem as they are trying to break into the subscription market in a big way. 
My apologies for the U.S. cultural assumption. See http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/p20-550.pdf for what it's like here. I also presumed we're discussing those who finish college, not those who just enter it. What percentage actually finish college in the UK?
Take the group of programmers who have written more than 30 blog posts about programming. X% of them are good hires, and 100-X% are bad hires.

Now take the group of programmers who have written less than 30 blog posts about programming. Y% of them are good hires, and 100-Y% are bad hires.

Is X > Y, or X == Y, or X < Y?

That is the issue.

And that is the way degrees are used (when used rationally). The claim with degrees is that X is more than Y, not that most good programmers have degrees or anything else. That may be so. Then someone defended using degrees by saying there is a lack of alternative tests that are sufficiently cheap. That's not true. There are lots of cheap tests, and I have suggested 2 for which I believe X>Y is likely, and which, if studied, might turn out to have a higher X than the degree test.
Bill Gates never wanted to buy Yahoo
OS X isn't even really FreeBSD, parts of it are based on FreeBSD (but the kernel isn't).
I actually have a friend who was asked if he has read Ayn Rand while interviewing with an insurance company.
It's sort of like slash and burn agriculture on the web. Spammers permanently destroy a resource for a short term small financial gain.
Can we add the keyword "Twitter" to the Hacker News blacklist? This is getting ridiculous.
It's IGNORANT to refer to that word as pretentious.

I have seen that attitude from the room temp IQ crowd - never thought I would see it here.
Craigslist too (as of 2006):

http://www.craigslist.org/about/pages.and.peeps.html
Ask YC: What to look for in a marketing person for employee 002?
So I'm a solo founder with a somewhat successful software video training startup (http://www.learnitfirst.com/). I've done the gamut from programming to some of the videos and the marketing but I'm "full" - I don't have time to focus on everything now and instead I need to pass off some tasks to someone else. I am actually very competent in Photoshop/Illustrator but my real talents are as a trainer and developer.

Now that I've decided that I need a marketing expert, I'm struggling with what specifically to advertise/look for? I'm looking in the range of a $60,000 salary and I can offer a bit of equity for the right person. The idea of a co-founder has occurred to me but, at this point, there is just too much history and success to hand a large percentage to someone without a personal investment of a sizeable amount.

What do you suggest I mention in my job reqs/ad/posting? Should I be verbose or quick and to the point? Verbose is good in that it weeds people out who don't meet the pre-reqs but "quick and to the point" is good in that, since I'm not 100% sure of what I'm looking for, I may put the wrong pre-reqs in a verbose post. Any advice?
developers prefer the GPL

Speaking as a FreeBSD developer: I prefer the BSD license. :-)

In all seriousness, while Apple hasn't set a great example for giving code back to FreeBSD, they have been very good at sending bug reports back -- and really, a report of "it looks like you're doing bazzle wrong on line 234 of foo.c" is often more useful than a patch which fixes the bug but doesn't explain why.

Looking at FreeBSD commit mail for the past 4 years, I see commits which were marked as "Sponsored by:" ActiveState, Apple, Chelsio, DARPA, Dell, Ensure Technology Ltd, Ethon Technologies, Google SoC, IronPort Systems, Isilon Systems, Juniper Networks, McAfee Research, Myricom, NetApp, nCircle Network Security, Nokia, Pair Networks, Sandvine, Seccuris, Secure Computing, Sippy Software, Soekris, Sophos, SPARTA, SPAWAR, Timing Solutions, and Yahoo (and I know committers don't always record who sponsored their work in commit messages, so there's certain to be more than just these companies) -- so the notion that the BSD license somehow means that companies don't "give back" to the community is quite ludicrous.
Besides referring to Rails as a language rather than a framework, it's a valid point.

Twitter doesn't seem like it's the kind of thing that fits cleanly into Rails way of doing things.
A more common problem is lack of said taste - when people don't know their stuff sucks.
So anything beyond what's common is pretentious? As I read the definition of the word, that's just wrong. On the other hand, looking things up in a dictionary to find out what they mean is so far from common that, by your definition, I'm being pretentious just for doing so.

Edit: your invocation of the name of Feynman strikes me as gratuitous (oops, I'm being pretentious there) and a textbook example of appeal-to-authority (or rather, it would be one, if you actually were quoting him or had the right to speak for him).

Edit 2: what on earth does "suffering fools well" have to do with being pretentious or not?
I like YAML for actual editing, JSON is more of a "machine language" than something that's human-readable.

To convert YAML to JSON, something like:

perl -MYAML=Load -MJSON::Any -E 'say JSON::Any->new->Dump(Load(do { local $/; <> }))'

should do the trick.
I was talking about college-age people, as in to enter college when you're 18 or get a job and hope to become an autodidact.
What lead you to believe that posters here have high IQs? Certainly not the articles or comments ;)
I think a better way to state it is that the major differences you're picturing between humans and chimps might actually be social in origin.
I think the UI version one is the best (not generic html). the new ui they've done is slow and bloated, and seems to have little improvements.
anyone else think this study is just intuitive analysis and completely specualtive. i wonder exactly which means were used to deduce the report.

its like saying people who go to restaurants are becoming more choosy as to which restaurants they go to and what food they eat, having become accustomed to the whole eating-out dealio.

i hope no-one got paid for the findings and if they did, i want that job.

Nielsen: "Search engines rule the web"...they do huh? gosh he has a point there.

me: web users are increasing their activity and are becoming more and more accustomed to manage their affairs online with very user-friendly apps...keep building.
Not reading advertising copy is called being "selfish" now?
Very good point.
But it's not completely ludicrous either.
The "sponsored by" usually means that the developer is actually employed by the company (hence the sponsor) and that he contributed in this capacity (i.e. ebing paid working on BSD for instance).

However the code itself often amounts to patches and the company itself (Apple in this article) has chosen not to condemn officially FreeBSD by making a direct financial donation to the foundation.
It's amusing that people still avoid JavaScript for absolutely no reason. 1998 called, they want their unfounded fear back.
This also affects Massively Multiplayer Online games as well as Web 2.0 sites of all kinds.
A sign of this is not loving other people's work. People who love to write, but not to read, produce dreck.

There are lots of people who love to program. But how many people love to read really good source code, or learn from books that teach difficult concepts in programming?
It shouldn't surprise you. The search for ways to make $$$ is a part of seeking $$$. (The meta-level, if you will.)

As for the people who ^%&#$& things up for free, they are seeking to profit in non-monetary ways.
Well, it's not really worth arguing about, but my appeal to authority was in response to an appeal to authority (Hitchens). If you don't agree the word is pretentious, fine, but to me and many others I presume (since I didn't start this thread, someone else called it pretentious first) do find that people who use uncommon words are being pretentious and trying to sound impressive with their vocabulary. Given a choice to say something plainly or with fancy words, the unpretentious choice is plain talk.

As for the reference to suffering fools, I was merely pointing out why I think Hitchens can be pretentious, but it wasn't really relevant, I agree.

Maybe ostentatious is a more accurate word, but it is a synonym of pretentious. In any case, I really don't care that much, so I won't bother arguing further, if you disagree with me, then let's just agree to disagree and move on to something more productive than arguing about words.
"Autodidacta" is the most common way to say "self-taught" in Spanish.
yep, and mistakes that do not negatively impact functionality or form are collectively called "character."
I've also met someone who thought it would be neat to be lumped in with the pseudo-intellectuals, because she thought it was a neat sounding word.
Breakdown of web-developer salary by experience, employer and location.
How do we encourage true meritocracy? Open Source is one thing that can do this for programming. It enables a programmer's output to be evaluated in detail by all. Blogs might do this as well.
I wish there was a voice recognition program for smartphones that kept a running log of uncommon words within earshot. You could then click on the log to go to a definition. (Which would be pre-fetched and cached.)
There is a set of skills and body of experience that applies to working on large bodies of code. In fact, there are different skill sets for working on bodies of bad code and good code.
This needs a 'download as MP4' link so I can watch it on my Video mp3 player
I don't have a CS degree, but all else being equal a good education trumps not having one. The same person with a degree and without a degree will be more effective with one, especially if the degree is a meaningful one (i.e. not just to get a piece of paper).
Should Facebook Acquire FriendFeed, Twitter and/or Digg?
The article didn't say anything about advertising copy, it mentioned that web users typically ignored highlighted promotions and editorial gimmicks.
Ok, but I can't resist adding one more! First, it seems we do agree on what's "pretentious": not using uncommon words as such, but doing so to sound impressive with one's vocabulary. Also, I brought up Hitchens not to invoke any kind of authority but rather as rich source material for the inventive and pitch-perfect and endlessly entertaining (and, yes, unpretentious) usage of all kinds of words. It seems we agree on most of that :)

Lastly, I'd like to add something to this conversation that isn't merely being critical. The thing about less common words is that, often, they are not exactly synonymous with more common alternatives. There are often nuances that, consciously or otherwise, add to the meaning of what's being said. While thinking of this I remembered a brief post from Language Log a while back that I thought was brilliant. It takes several examples of forms that have been claimed to be interchangeable (and thus superfluous), and susses out real distinctions between them:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005487.h...

There must be a few people here who find language as interesting as I do, and would enjoy parsing out the examples they give. I'd post it as an item to HN but can't think of a title that could possibly convey the point. Oh well, maybe I'll just post it anyway...
Any other acquisitions that make sense for Facebook?

I think Twitter and FriendFeed make lots of sense.
Digg is also intriguing because of the traffic and news articles.
The evidence used to back up the claims made were very suspect. Saying that parrots have "language" and chimps can make tools so we aren't that different is a huge overstatement. Comparing the IQ of a 2 year old to a chimp is also ridiculous because one of the things that make humans different is an extremely long maturation period.
It's great idea. Youtube sucks for finding actually something educating. Arrington, I know you see this! You should cover this in TC.
Blame FriendFeed
so, about 2000 hits. (<200 * >10x)

It sucks not to be featured on TechCrunch, but this is not a pivotal loss in the life of your startup by any means.
That's not exactly true. xnu/bsd/kern, the "Unix half" of the kernel, is FreeBSD. xnu/osfmk, the "Mach half", isn't.
Seesmic or tokbox would be perfect with facebook
Simple Living Manifesto: 72 Ideas to Simplify Your Life
I'm not so sure about this guy's policework. For instance, NetApp ONTAP is decidedly not FreeBSD. Juniper uses FreeBSD as a control platform, but neither the core functions nor the user CLI are FreeBSD. I'm not sure why I care what IronPort uses.

From several years commercial reversing experience, my guess is that even if you lump NetBSD in with FreeBSD (NetBSD is the preferred BSD OS for non-X86 BSPs), you still see more Linux than BSD in embedded and appliance apps.

From several years shipping appliance products, I'll also suggest that while there may be apps that FreeBSD excels at (due to a better tuned filesystem and VM), for things where raw I/O and compute are the bottleneck, Linux tends to win.
Not really -- I use plain HTML because otherwise the AJAX requests eats 50% of my CPU and a huge part of my memory. The HTML browser is just plain faster.
Not related to the original question (I agree with the above answer) but in my experience HR departments/managers are more likely to read a CV not sent by the usual channels. The easiest way to bypass it is simply sending an email. The most efficient - leave it in person. Don't know why, but from (limited) anecdotal evidence seems to work.
Should I use a girl or guy to sell a product/service?
I am starting a search engine marketing start up and I need help from someone to make me a professional video about my service.

Something like: http://www.pepperjam.com/

Do anyone know where I can get someone to make it.
Any web 2.0 out there offer this type of service?

Where do I get someone to make me a professional video?
Many companies take their character from their founders and hire accordingly.

For instance Microsoft focused on hiring high IQ people that went to good schools because that's where Bill Gates came from.

Google same thing, high IQ individuals with post grad degrees, hence google looks to hire people who fit this mode.
Bravo. Well done with the interviews and the tips to new grads and interviewees. Perseverence and studied methods to distinguish oneself from the crowds is the way to land any job. I'm glad he found a job of his liking in a great location.
When I worked at GE I was very suprised that _every_ computer had an ip adresses like 3.xxx.xxx.xxx even though we were on intranet.
His series on the Chicago radio is great. It's called "This American Life". I caught an episode of it on Showtime, the TV series is equally brilliant. It's good to see good TV like this at the time when cable's dominated by nonsense like The Hills and all the dumb reality shows.
10,000?

10,000 is a large number. For instance, 10,000 days is about 27 years, 5 months.
Most job ads I see say "Bachelors degree or equivalent experience" In those cases, definitely apply even without a degree. And even if they don't, apply anyway. A lot of time stuff gets put in job descriptions by copy & paste, or because it's common, not because it's an actual requirement. Yeah, HR might filter you out for not having a degree in some cases, but you'll get past them to the hiring manager in other cases, then you have a chance to sell yourself.