skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If anything, what we need is more musical cues indicating system health. From the forboding opening strains of Orff's "O Fortuna" when the system first starts to overheat, through to Debussy's "Clare de Lune" while the CPU goes through a tearful montage of the many documents and applications that it's helped during its short life, before whispering its last goodbyes to an ocean-like plane of blue screen, the system could increase the user's empathy with a musical journey through its struggles.

With innovations like this, I might even shed a tear when the host lays itself down to die, rather than hammering the keyboard in futile rage.
Ask HN: Why isn't there any feedback for job finders?
I have been interviewing with some software companies including startups and they do not wish to give any feedback to me about what I can improve after they rejected me.

Why are companies reluctant to give feedbacks for interviewees?

It is so important for us.

[ EDIT ] Second question: Does location of the interviewee really matters when you are hiring?
> Thanks for the explanation. I think part of my confusion arises from the (apparently) mistaken idea that t=0 is equivalent to "the first moment of time." But it looks like t=0 is closer to "before the first moment of time". In a certain sense, that's a contradiction, because you can't have "before" time, but in another sense it's the only way to speak of that which (logically, not necessarily chronologically) precedes time.

Yes, I think that's right. It's more accurate to say that there was no first moment rather than that t=0 was the first moment. Reconciling that with the fact that time is nevertheless finite is an important part of understanding the big bang.

To put it mathematically, the set of points of time is open on the left end. The set of times is this: (0,\infty). And not this: [0,\infty)

Edit: By the way, when I say that time is "finite", I mean finite from now into the past. Not finite from "start" to "finish". The standard cosmological model with dark energy have time being infinite from "start" to "finish"
I don't have those side effects, so Adderall my just not be a good fit for you. Have you tried something else? What did your doctor say?
Great idea -- but overdone to the point where it's only a think piece, not a utility.

An alternate presentation idea: a toolbar with both indicators for the current page, and a timeline of recent connections to Google's servers. It would make a small ring on each new connection -- but more like an IM notification than an airhorn, and able to be turned off.

The timeline could be logarithmic, with the past to the right, so the last 5 minutes or so of hits to Google AdSense/Analytics/CDN/etc. is in high-resolution over about 1/3 the width of the screen, while the next hour takes the next 1/3, and the last day the last 1/3 -- altogether showing a total of the background hits to Google servers in the last 24 hours or so. Like so...

[AX__A___X_____XC____AX____X_X__A__XA__X_A__AXC__X__XAAXCA] 121 hits
How Preschool Changes the Brain
Digital alarmists are wrong
Indeed, I think that keeping a poorly maintained car is often a clear case of being penny-wise but pound-foolish.

I would even venture to assert that this is almost always the case if one values ones time above a certain amount, though I've never estimated what that would be[1]. The aspect which is risky, and therefore perhaps appropriate to a startup, is that the car might fail at a particularly inopportune time, costing reputation or good will.

[1] I did, however, estimate such a value for driving 65mph instead of 75mph, spurred by a radio ad extolling the fuel-saving benefits of a lower speed. Based on the fuel savings and price at the time (also around $3/G), it was under $15/hr. If anything, it was remarkably revealing of the, unsurprising, attitude in government of the value of citizens' time.
“If the loan criteria says you need to have a 700 credit score, and you have a 699, you don’t get the loan,” she said. “It makes me nuts.”

Yes, it's called an algorithm. I'm guessing she doesn't understand that.

"Their bottom line number is 620 — the company will buy mortgages only if the borrower has a credit score of 620 or above. Which means, given the current state of the mortgage market, that anyone with a score below 620 can’t get a mortgage. Even if that score is 619."

The thing is regulators are looking at that number. There is a cut off there. Especially now that the regulators are going through the bank books with a fine toothed comb.

Guess what, the worse you portfolio, the higher your capital requirements become. (Your margin of safety)

A company I worked for bought a huge portfolio of debt. Turns out the average FICO was way off or out of date. Very bad thing. The original company had booked some really bad stuff and was one of many that went down in the waves of financial institution failures. Bad mortgages finally got them.
Conversations are the key to establishing a brand on Twitter
Undercover 3.1
Klous, thank you for the comment, appreciate it. For some reason many startups do not consider an affiliate program a 'must-have' but it really is an efficient way to scale.
Anybody know what OS they run?
"Why are companies reluctant to give feedbacks for interviewees?"

What's in it for the company other than a potential lawsuit if they say something inappropriate?
Who's Dr. Drew?
Amazon now connects to Facebook, suggests gifts for friends
I signed up just to post this reply.

This is also solid advice. Paul G said in one of his essays about doing something you love doesn't mean doing what makes you happy THIS second, it's something that makes you happy over a longer period (week, month, year).

There are very few people when asked if exercising right now would make them happy yet these same people would tell you they would be delighted to be 10-15 pounds lighter and have more energy in 6-12 months.
"If I burn plant derived ethanol the same hazards exist."

You are claiming that burning alcohol releases fine particulates?
I believe there is an app called "Candy Wars" that is essentially a remake of dope wars... but without all the drug references so it would actually pass the approval process.
IFont Maker: Create your own hand font in 5min with iPad
No kidding especially when you consider that in the Northern Hemisphere because of prevailing winds the poor half of the city lives on the east side which is where the pollution blows, and it's been shown many times that IQ correlates well with income.
I've long felt like Salon should move this historically important niche community to another domain and remake this as a health and wellness portal.

Considering their stock has a market cap of 365k, it couldn't hurt.
No, and none of the clinicians I've seen have any idea what's going on. They just know I've been tested 6 times and my levels haven't moved to acceptable levels even as I've been on supplements pretty regularly. I've experimented here and there - like the 3 weeks of hiking and being off supplements and while I was outside a bunch last summer - but it seems either I'm not making or I'm not storing. They could do more invasive tests - like a biopsy from my intestine - but I feel so good on the supplements, I don't see any reason to change anything. My nutritionist thinks my levels will bounce back after sticking with the supplements and I think that's the best course of action.
Special edition bag of weed? I've been promoting all wrong...
I just want to thank you for this amazing blog post. I was literally having epiphany, after epiphany, after epiphany. Now it's time for me to turn these insights into actionable items. Thanks again!
From HR's perspective, why spend time writing about why you didn't hire somebody? There is nothing positive that can come out of it, it takes time and effort, and it's possible that it will create a whole prolonged dialogue about something that is done and done.

However, there's no downside for you politely asking for a reason why. On one occasion when I thought the interview went great but wasn't hired, I sent a polite and well-phrased e-mail to the HR department. It stated that I understand they didn't feel I was suited for the job, and that I was perfectly OK with that, but if they could provide me with a reason why it would aide me a lot in my job search. I got an excellent response back citing reasons why they didn't think I was a good fit, and it was actually quite helpful.

So, try asking in a respectful manner that shows you are not resentful and are truly seeking to better your future prospects, and see what happens.
You said: it certainly violates Occam's Razor. Your "initial state" has no explanation. You in fact vehemently object to any attempts at an explanation, deriding them as "undefined." This is faith in its purest form.

Occam's Razor says to go with whatever the simplest model is that accurately predicts everything, not just the simplest model.

The Razor is a rule of thumb. If you have multiple theories / models that all accurately explain all observed phenomena, then they're all correct. In fact, since they make the same predictions, they're all equivalent. Occam's Razor basically says "don't waste time with theories that accurately explain the world but also make unfalsifiable / meaningless predictions."
From that article: "A number of people (Slacktivist, Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias, Megan Mcardle) are debating the use of credit scores in employment. Credit scores are useful at predicting all kinds of things including, for example, car accidents so there is good reason to believe that they are useful in employment."

I now seriously question anything further in that article. The idea that credit scores can predict car accidents is ludicrous. The author probably meant that credit scores can be used to predict claims on automobile insurance, but that, too, is just as incorrect. Consider that many people with low credit scores are going to buy the least expensive vehicles and insurance they can find. This means carrying liability-only coverage, which does not pay to the insured, just to anyone the insured might hit. That means that the insurer is now using the credit score of the insured to "predict" the decision of a completely unknown third party who may or may not even exist.

Credit scoring, when used outside the context of granting credit (and, often, even in that context), is simply a way to continue to gouge people who have, for whatever reason, a damaged set of credit reports long after that damage has occurred.
I have an idea for neural networks that is different from everything else out there. I've been thinking about it for years.

Finally going to start on it in September. Expect the rise of robot legions next January.
"Should be fixed" is a passive aggressive way to demand it to be fixed.

His reference to Linus doing the same thing in kernel (not) sounds very much like a smack response.

Also he claims he knows what he's doing since he has done the same thing in DOS so when it's clear that he has no clue of what's going on just irrates people.
> It's not censorship

I think that limiting people's freedom of speech is exactly what censorship is.

Whether they have "no chance in hell" of understanding it is besides the point.
Yep, I just downloaded Candy Wars because I was looking for a Dope Wars clone...good luck with the project, though. I'm always interested in hustle games :D
Wow, The Well still exists. I better check to see if Prodigy is still up.
Because he had the same attitude with this guy: http://bugs.php.net/52435
I'd imagine that people who'd arguably "deserve" it more don't care about it since they already have a ton of it.

Just point news.ycombinator.com to 127.0.0.1 on your hosts or something.
You sound like a crackpot. You don't sound like you understand physics. You also sound cranky. If you want to have a discussion, you should stop using grandiose language.
OpenStack: Open Standards Meet the Cloud, by Jim Zemlin
If you actually read further along in the thread, it looks like this guy is trying to implement coroutines. However, he cut some essential part of a sample code that he was initially looking at and then assumed that the problem is with cygwin. And then came some silly flame war.

I personally haven't done anything with coroutines but looks like from a low level perspective, ultimately what he is trying to do is not insane… aka do some form of task switching. Arguably, he shouldn't be doing this by himself and he should've resorted to something that is already available. Just a quick look at (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coroutine#Coroutine_alternative...) should've been sufficient. Yet.., maybe he had some reason to try and do it himself. Looks like at the end he managed to figure out what he wanted to do.
Wow, you're welcome Josh. It means a lot to me that it's that useful. Feel free to contact me if you have any more questions: j@jasonlbaptiste.com
For the Apple ][ fans there was Taipan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taipan!

I spent many, many hours playing that game.
That's not called lock-in, that's just service. Lock-in would be if they didn't provide an easy way to get your data off, forcing you to continue to use flickr (you're locked in). But they provide a clean API for you to do just that. There are lots of tools you can use to pull your data off easily.
If someone is searching for "how to make a blueberry pie", and they get an article entitled "how to make a blueberry pie", they're happy. Are they actually going to make a blueberry pie? Probably not.

I skimmed the immediate replies, and people seem to be taking the "Yes, and" approach, so I'll ask. What the fuck are you talking about, man?
Regarding the name "86". Back when I worked in a restaurant and we were out of cobbler (for example) we'd tell the servers to "86 the cobbler" so they'd know we were out of it and to not take anymore orders for it.

I suppose the meaning is for you to "86" your to-do item meaning to 'get it done.'

Seems Urban Dictionary has some plausible definitions:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=86
:).

From the comments:
I get this problem too. It only seems to happen if your IQ is less than 70, though.
I had read about it in the past in mostly glowing terms. A community of well-regarded people with insightful things to say, posting under their real names and keeping a civil tone in their discussions. I was still surprised to see it's still online.
see http://c-faq.com/malloc/mallocnocast.html
How about a user interface that learns as the person interacts with it? Not just context based menus, but a paradigm where stuff changes as the user plays with it and the machine becomes uniquely suited for you.

The advantage of something like this is that we can accommodate every type of user from the technophobe to the power users.

Has anyone over here ever tried to make something like this?
I assume the PC speaker actually means the one connected directly to the motherboard, not whatever is connected to the sound card (which may be part of the motherboard). The voice recording would probably sound something more like:

Krrfhrhfhfbhorg. Krrfhrhfhfbhord.
The Chinese/Korea/Indian people come here mostly on 12 hr/weekday and weekend indentured servitude via PhD or post-doc program; a few also come on the H1B servitude program.

The FOB immigrants owning stores in Chinatown have either relations to U.S citizens (e.g., uncle, cousins) or they were born in the country and never bothered to try to learn English well (which is fine by me, since I speak Chinese as well).

Also there are quite few bars in Chinatown; they are just in the basement of the restaurants where illegal gambling takes place.
is there any problem with going outside before you have lunch, taking off your shirt and running a mile? this should allow for at minimum 5 minutes, at maximum 15 minutes of sun exposure.
I think that's what the writer expected. On x86 the stack starts at a high address and grows downward to a lower address.
The difference is: 1) how much they expect to pay monthly after the initial months where you are bound to the contract (6 in Denmark, 24 in USA), 2) you can bring your own phone and start out with the lower monthly price, 3) you can buy a new phone without any changes to your contract, 4) and it is much more visible what it will cost you if you loose your phone, and how much you will save if you keep it more than 6 (24) months.

Google did not officially sell Nexus One in Denmark, the only price I can find online is ~$420 excl VAT. (BTW the $453 price above for Wildfire is incl VAT and is $362 without).
How to Keep Employees Creative
if you had already read the academic literature for yourself

The burden of proof is on you, and you have yet to cite a reference :-)

Or did you just want us to do our own research, and somehow find that paper, which you might be talking about and come to an agreement with you?
Now in United States Jailbreaking and Unlocking is Now Officially Legal
Definitely a mix between Rhapsody and last.fm - I told everybody that I was going to do this: mp3s in the cloud with sharing capabilities. Now everybody asks me "What happened to that idea, did you hear about last.fm etc.?" - kinda bitter, but it would have been a big project + you would need good connections to the music industry to pull that off without getting sued, so no regrets :)
Ah the melancholy of the corporate life. Paid well enough to make you sit around bored and not accomplish much. I've been through that. It's time for a change, I wish I had spent my 20's working for startups or forming my own instead of working for the man (large corporation, government...).

As a programmer, you can always go get a job working for the man. It is often tedious, doldrum, and boring. I often think of Thoreau's statement that "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." I imagine start up life is never that boring and there is always work to be done. Go find a start up job.
An explicit cast of the result of malloc() can mask an error when you haven't included its proper definition in stdlib.h.
Vaporware. It's probably not going to get approved by Apple, unless they're easing up on their approval requirements these days.
Unless you are going to become obsessive about it, exercise should be done for fitness, not weight loss. You'll be much more effective at weight loss by working on what is known as "portion control." That is, change your eating habits.

Yes, it's true that exercise can help suppress your hunger. It can also make you hungrier. Yes, it's true that adding more muscle increases your basal metabolism. But building muscle makes you hungrier. A famous and record-holding power lifter scolded me when I was young: it's a fool's game to try to build muscle and lose weight at the same time (his version was stronger than what I've stated here).

Lose weight through diet. Get fit through exercise. Don't confuse the two goals. If you keep this in mind, then you could have the following strategy: Lose weight, doing only light or moderate exercise that you find fun and distracting enough to keep you from eating. Then, once you are at the weight you like, start exercising for the fitness level you desire.
Sure. I had both a job offer from an employer who scouted me, and I got in while the developer category was still open (I think it's still open, technically). However, during the process, my wife spoke to the border agents (these are the people who actually do the final approval), and they informed her I would also need what essentially amounted to a job offer check. Basically, something the company did to demonstrate that the existing local job marketing couldn't support the position, and why my specific skills and experience couldn't be replicated locally. There was a bit more to this, but the result was the same, everything was good.

After going through this, and paying the fee, we found out that the border agents had informed us wrong. Really, it was just a case of confusion. They didn't realize I was applying under a special category. However, even if that hadn't been the case, we would have done just fine.

The entire process, and all the government officials we spoke with were incredibly helpful. This isn't the first time I've gotten a visa, either. It's just the first time we decided to go through the process without a lawyer. The Canadian government, as well as the Quebec government, were very reasonable and quick about the whole thing.
WPA Cracker cracks WiFi passwords in the cloud
75-90% of working adults would be able to start a business (remember business, not a startup. Cutting peoples lawns, fixing toilets, cleaning windows, picking kids up from school, etc could be the basis of a business)

They could sell to the others who where starting businesses, and to the 1% who would have to buy what they want from the 99%. It would also be the 1% whom they get their initial investment from, given that they would want their monies to grow.
Still a terrible thing to do. I think it's possible just calling printf() itself could do wacky things if printf is depending on the stack being set up a certain way by the C runtime startup code prior to main.

But the real issue is that what he's doing is completely unnecessary, because you could manage multiple stacks yourself using ordinary C data structures and ordinary C code. Evidently he thinks he's gaining some kind of speed advantage by doing things this way, but the risk is very high versus the gain. This kind of optimization may have worked OK on a DOS machine, but it's neither safe nor obviously faster to do things like this on a modern CPU and OS.
I'd like to point out that I made hacky iphone web app back in Jan 09.

http://iphonedopewars.com/

I chose js/html because I knew that apple would never approve it. However, I wasn't really happy with the performance so I never did any marketing.
I didn't realize. I apologize. Nice to meet you. Feel free to email me if you need me to point you towards textbooks or other such resources in the future.
How to respond to customer emails
Intel Claims 50-Gbit/s Laser Link Is a Breakthrough
The code was critiqued as it was posted, not any other version.

Also depending on how the compiler sets up the runtime environment, setting ESP is not sufficient. Intel also has the segment registers. EBP is the stack segment pointer. I'm pretty sure the heap is not in the EBP segment.
Yes, arithmetic on void * is disallowed. However, gcc accepts it as an extension: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-2.95.3/gcc_4.html#SEC78
Hckr news: chronological interface to hn, plus chrome/safari5 extension
Review Me: Speaker Wiki, the encyclopedia of speakers
Perceiving the difference between liking and wanting is, indeed, useful.
Street-Fighting Mathematics
Direct link to the PDF: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/full_pdfs/Street-Fighting_Mathematics.pdf
Well, no and the author agrees. The US is much larger than the Greek economy, much more innovative. and much more robust. The US controls its own currency while Greece code not.

>> Meanwhile, the current trajectory would suggest a different kind of debt crisis could manifest sooner or later, and over-confidence, a "Too-Big-To-Fail” mentality some of the nation's leaders seem to have adopted, will only lead to a dangerous path of no return.

Well, yes. The stupidity of politicians could overcome any advantage a country might have.
FWIW, this page has a very poor reading experience on the iPad. The text is oddly "grainy", scrolling is sluggish, you have to keep scrolling up and down due to the columns, and when you do scroll, the text flashes on and off. I hope Apple gets Safari Reader integrated on the iOS devices one day, Readability isn't quite as good :-)
Direct link to the PDF: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/full_pdfs/Street-Fighting_Math...