skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His contention of "common ground" in the '60s is utterly fatuous as anyone who lived through it or like me came of age just after it and studied it knows.

In fact, it bears more than a little resemblance to the current period: what was pretty close to an effective super-majority due to LBJ's political skills that resulted in the enactment of vast swathes of the liberal agenda ("The Great Society"), the first since the time of FDR, and a fierce counter-revolution that started inside the Republican party that resulted in Goldwater, Nixon and finally Reagan (who as I recall did his first big thing on the national political scene in an item he did for Goldwater's campaign).

(Not very parallel to today, but also a sign of a serious lack of "common ground" was the foundering of the great Democratic Party crusade to "contain" Communism, which led to the party's smashup in 1968 and its eventual radicalization on many fronts.)
Amazon did run a mainframe briefly, but apparently it didn't last more than a year.

http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/brierdudley/2008/05/am...
nitpick: your
Yup, I always thought it was a spin on 'smarter than the average bear.'
Agreed. I'm not even sure what this means:

Q: What methods do you know to realize columns?
Undo also works on the region, which is amazingly useful.
Not here. I thought CSS frameworks were for people who had a less than hero-level understanding of CSS.
Alternate title: How it happened to be Perl instead of any other just as capable language that saved the Human Genome Project (in the land of Dangling Participles and Allusion Errors).
Here's a 43-character solution.

for(int x[99]={1};!x[98];++*x)*x*=!++x[*x];
Check this older thread also for some perspective and useful advice:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348774
If you could be a framework for any kind of question/response (and I think timed and interactive would be a plus), that would be great. If you could then make the "grading and evaluation" workflow on the employer side support routing through subject matter experts, a prospective team, manager, etc., based on either employer-specified rules, or some kind of policies which you suggest and which can be tweaked, I would probably use this, even without ever using the video portion.
it seems like we're not supposed to self-promote on HN, but two of my articles seem relevant to OP at the moment ...

"The similarities between being a junior researcher and a high-tech entrepreneur":
http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/research-and-startup.htm

"Advice for preparing to apply and actually applying to science Ph.D. programs":
http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/grad-school-app-tips.htm
Yeah, I agree it could just be bad password management. I've got the spam from 3 different people so far, so I thought it might be some similar and widespread attack.
Are there any of these tips that stop being true if you substitute "Google" for any other large tech organization?
IE gains market share at the expense of Firefox, Chrome
Branson has actually owned this island for decades: http://www.neckerisland.virgin.com/
To be fair, Piaw sells a book all about how to get a job at a startup (http://books.piaw.net/guide/index.html). The progression he describes in the article ("fed up working for a big company" -> startup) is probably his own as well.
In addition to Lincoln's thoughts I think one of the main reasons bioinformaticians are attracted to Perl is because it is forgiving. Biological data is often incomplete, fields can be missing, or a field that is expected to be present once occurs several times (because, for example, an experiment was run in duplicate), or the data was entered by hand and doesn't quite fit the expected format. Perl doesn't particularly mind if a value is empty or contains odd characters. Regular expressions can be written to pick up and correct a variety of common errors in data entry. Of course this flexibility can be also be a curse.
Agreed... it's supposedly one of the few remaining companies that actually respect engineers, but this post pretty much comes out and says otherwise in bold, flashing letters.

"(Exception: War-room firefighting. Google loves those, and loves heroic performances from people in war-rooms)"

The whole "war room" concept in IT has always bothered me -- it's what managers do when they have a crisis that they don't know how to deal with. It's usually a crisis that they could have avoided if they'd actually done their own job in the first place. War rooms are also invariably where the worst of the developers end up -- at Disney the war room period was one of our most product weeks as a result. Of course, the folks who got rewarded were the ones in the war room, even though their primary contribution was to strut around in front of a bunch of executives while the rest of the team got project work done and the operations team had already figured out what went wrong.
MIT top US university for study, Brown 'happiest'
And facebook engineering team's original post is at http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=409881258919
Why Do We Care About Luxury Brands?
>I hope they will follow Apple's model of having tighter control over their app stores rather than the mess that the Android marketplace is.

It is really interesting that you hope for tight control, while I am waiting for a platform with as little carrier and/or platform vendor control as possible.
They are not manipulated, and that's not what I've been trying to prove. Rather, hedonic adjustments are a distortion of what's actually going on with respect to inflation, and that's what I have a problem with. There's no vast conspiracy here, just some fancy accounting. I may be mistaken, but there's no transparency in what the gov't considers a hedonic adjustment, which leads to data accuracy problems as well.

Hedonic adjustments basically say that a product price increase or decrease is weighted partially towards inflation and partially towards quality improvement and competition.

But what happens is that economists will say perceived inflation is overstated because less money is needed to buy an iPod. That's a problem.

Do note that this sort of adjustment is not a point of contention right now as we went through a recession, but back in 2007 when oil was skyrocketing and the price of milk was running, hedonic adjustments were used to understate actual inflation.

Keep in mind, I'm not an expert in this stuff and if you need more evidence, the google should help you.
SVN: file-based, delta-storage

Git: content-based, snapshot-storage

The systems are completely different.
Q: What methods do you know to realize columns?
A: cleardiv
clearfix (better one)

WTF? I'd expect floats, faux columns, display: table-* , *-column-count being the answer but get some cleardiv/clearfix instead. I never liked those, especially cleardiv. Often you can do simply reusing next element (#footer {clear:both}), but sometimes that's not enough, alas.

In my opinion any competent frontend developer should know these, not enough for the hero. On the other hand, to be able to interview hero you should be at least on that level yourself, which is not the case there, imho.
Summary: do it if you want to become a career researcher, but if you want to do creative hacking than cut out the middleman and just do it. Gradschool is the hotbed of timewaste and procrastination so don't do it to get yourself focused. If anything, taking some undergrad courses in some topic that is new to you could be much more useful that way.

Even if you want to get into research, leave all ideals and preconceived notions behind. As others have said, doing a phd is depressing as hell. You will have smart people to hang out with every day, but especially if you are thinking of real world applicability of things, you might have a hard time connecting with most of them.
fixed, it's because i was adding an apostrophe on the following word, a little grammar slip. My deepest apologies.
just note that you can't nicely reverse proxy 3rd-party blogs (tumblr, posterous, hosted wordpress) if they aren't using relative links (which they probably aren't); and even if they are your server will still be bearing the bandwidth load and increasing the page latency, of which the former is undesirable and the latter could reduce your pagerank.
Thanks - appreciate the feedback from everyone.
Top lessons for budding angel investors from YC's AngelConf
That's very aptly put.

Unless you need many thousands of servers the majority of funded web application companies could very well afford the best of what the OTP world has to offer them. But since that isn't 'sexy tech' they want to re-invent those wheels.

Twitter has since switched to Erlang, I think they've realised that customer satisfaction beats new technology any day.
That's still not unambiguous. Turn -Wall on and you'll be told the operation on 'i' may be undefined.
Echo what everyone else is saying here -- you won't truly grasp anything until you apply it as a solution to a problem you care about. That's how self-teaching always works best for me. It's the difference between driving around aimlessly and driving to a specific point on the map.

Imagine something like API documentation. What's going to make you an expert in that API? Reading through the API docs end to end or acually building some projects?

More importantly, which is more fun? Solving your problems activates feelings of reward, which is important positive reinforcement when you're learning something new. There's very little learned without fun.
Nice... so can someone knock up a load of chef scripts and make installing and configuring this as simple as it should be?

What would also be good would be a summary diagram of how this looks as an architecture. Just how should it be implemented in small/medium/large configs, and what is the definition of S/M/L in terms of data size/complexity?

Basically... if I want to use it, where's the simple intro and the quick start? That's the advantage LAMP has, you can be up and running in 30 minutes.
A link that might interest you: Where does spam come from:

http://www.google.com/postini/threat_network.html
Amazing iPad e-books for children
It means "If the design calls for having text flow across side-by-side columns (like in newspapers or magazines), what ways are there to code it?"
So what is the effect of promotions? The article hints at one thing: Higher salary cap. Are there other things?

So far in my own career, I have recognized a few situations where I could choose to climb the career ladder. In all of those situations, I have chosen not to. The new responsibilities did not seem to be worth it. I believe I have a much more interesting job as a consequence, and as far as I can tell, my salary has not been hurt noticeably (I do fight for my pay rise).

Do you really have to add "flare" to your title in google to be successful? Makes me not want to work there.
6. Availability of Google Checkout (unless there are other ways to pay for the app already).
It looks like at least one company is trying this: https://www.banksimple.net/about/
I am skeptical. Personally I am still in college, and want to get something going before I graduate so that I never have to work for another company, but if a company asked me to record a video clip as a response to their interview questions, I wouldn't do it. (Its a personal decision). I think it is really impersonal, and though I wish you guys good luck, and it seems it like the idea might catch on with big corps/YC-start-ups to screen candidates, it really reminds me of "Up in the Air" (a movie released earlier this year), wherein the company that the protagonist works for replaces live people with videos, and they just take the personal element out of the equation.
A million hours is more than a century, I think that is somewhat unlikely.
How does the top 10% receiving an increasing share of GDP imply that the bottom 90% are underpaid? If the top 10% are also creating an increasing share of GDP, then that would imply that everyone is being properly valued.
Security hole in Mobile Safari PDF support a bigger story than jailbreakme
Are there a lot of non-phone Android devices out there? Do they sell well? If it's less than 40 million units, it doesn't change the result.
Ah! It's certainly not a problem. Forgive me if I came off harsh. I am bleeding karma these days...
We support questions with a few different types of answers (video, short, medium and long text responses, file uploads).

We're working on the grading/evaluation features on the employer-side right now. This is something we're excited about, because it allows for more people to give input in the hiring process and opens up the possibility for coordination among companies as we're doing with the YCommonApp.

Always happy to hear what real people find useful :) Feel free to email me (nick [at] hirehive.com) if have you any other suggestions or questions if you try out the service.
I imagined reading that aloud in thick Swedish accent to get in the mood for how serious Erlang is :) (just joking: I'm refering to the famous Erlang demo video)
I do not see how any of these questions reflect the ability to be good at the front-end. If I didn't know one of those answers in a real world scenario, I could easily just Google it. Design sense and a good concept of usability are much more important IMO.
Just curious as another mech eng guy (just bachelors though), what's this open source library?
I don't know either this is good for employers/customers but one thing for sure: this makes me feel even more terrified of failure, of becoming a "candidate" again. This company is making the world even more hostile for people who need jobs for reasons stated here by others.

Let me explain: my wife is looking for a job now. She's not an engineer so the progress has been slow: hundreds of resumes emailed, no response, constant thoughts like "something's wrong with my resume??". Now you're telling me that she needs to sit down and film herself hundreds of times and then stare at the empty inbox and think "something's wrong with the way I look/talk?" That's just disgusting.
Function composition is obscure? Did you take Algebra 1?

(I used the term "Kleisli arrow" so that you could Google for something if you wanted to learn more. All you really need to know is that you can use . to pass the output of a regular function into the input of another one, and you can use . to pass the output of a monad into the input of another. Saying it that way is very imprecise, though, and the goal of people explaining things is to say them precisely so that you have some hope of eventually gaining an understanding.

You have to bootstrap understanding. Assume you know what a Kleisli arrow is. Then read the rest of the post. Now your assumption is correct!)
I just finished up a PhD in Information Systems & Technology, which is related to CS, but much more user-land/application-land oriented. Be careful which type of program you apply to, if you go CS, it takes a lot of math. Look to see if the degree department is part of a business school.

Your real focus is the dissertation; the rest of the courses essentially act as a MA/MS. Make sure your dissertation is marketable (biological stuff is probably the best bet to be hot in 5 years, security and games are hot now, but I'm not sure how much longer).

However, I'd really recommend against a PhD unless it (a) directly helps you in in a major way in your existing career, or (b) you want to become an academic. The latter is a tough field to make it in; go to a high-level university or don't bother. You'd better like submitting grants as well, and relocating is pretty much a requirement. I've enjoyed it, but it's incredibly stressful.
Parbo already pointed out F3 and F4 for the first part. For the second part (repeat it 40 times) you could use:

M-4 M-0 F4

Which is only 4 characters, the same as VIM.

Of course the F keys are a bit further to reach which can slow things down a bit. But it does leave it as not that great an example of the VIM being better. I'm sure there are better examples. Although I'm an Emacs user I've got learning VIM in more detail on my todo list.
That doesn't say anything about their tech, and they're not open for business (yet). It will be interesting to see how they fare.
Could not have said it any better myself. Every time someone mentions that money isn't a motivating factor to get more productivity, I want to scream! For YOU maybe not, but for ME? Yes please with a bonus on top!

I wonder how long it will take before Java becomes the next COBOL (unless it already has...)
Actually it is on occasion quite cool. For example, it will take a ZFS snapshot before doing package updates, so that if Bad Things (TM) happen you can simply reboot into the system snapshot taken before the update. And it's all copy-on-write, so you only use the disk space for what changed.
Ask HN:  please review my site - Marrily.com
Hello everyone,

Please help me review my site at http://marrily.com

Please use the code "hackernews" when you sign up (this is still a close alpha release so I put in a code to help me track the signup users)

If you are planning your wedding, or just got married recently, please sign up and test Marrily out. I'd love to hear your opinions.

I'm the single founder for Marrily, and today is the result of an intense 3 months of me bootstrapping and developing the app in a cave then finally come out to see the sunlight, and shouting from the top of my lungs that Yes, Marrily is out!

Marrily is a word I came up with, it means to "Marry Happily." I wanted to help people getting married easier and less stressed, and the existing sites aren't all that great (I'll write more about this later in Marrily's blog.) Even though the real development took 3 months, it actually has been 3 years since when I came up with the idea and actually built and release the app. If I'm to learn something from releasing Marrily, it's probably perseverance and grit.

I decide that when I launch Marrily officially, it will be a premium app (e.g. pay-to-play, as apposed to freemium). The reason why is I believe that if I build a solid app that is useful and easy to use, and can potentially save people a lot of time and efforts, then it's fair to charge a small fee. With the freemium model, it's harder to code (limiting features in code can make things a lot more complicated) and can affect negatively the revenue (if the free one is so good that it doesn't make sense to upgrade). But I welcome your ideas and suggestions.

However, there's no subscription mechanism in the alpha release (I stil have not implemented any of the subscription handling code yet!). I estimate that it will take a few more weeks to finalize the app and have everything in place for the official launch.

Since you're one of the first people to see the app in its entirety, I'd love to have your feedback as you use it. More specifically, I'd like to know if you run into any issue navigating the application, and if something does not make sense to you, I'd love to know. I have tested as much as possible to make sure it is stable and ready for production use. But being a single founder, it's sometimes a challenge to keep track of every changes in the application.

It's been an amazing journey, and a life-changing experience, so I'd like to share this moment with all of you, and many thanks to the HackerNews community for being so awesome. I learned a lot about myself and entrepreneurship in the past few months, and I promise that I'll give back to the community to help more entrepreneurs fulfill their dreams.

Alex
alexle@marrily.com
Aside from the odd blog linked to from HN, the vast majority of blogs I most engage in are the ones to whose RSS feeds I subscribe and that regularly tick over. I can't remember ever getting to a blog as a result of a google search.

For me, it's the opposite, though probably the most common way for me to find a post is through HN. I wonder how popular RSS feeds are for blogs, compared to sites like HN/Reddit, or search results.
Re: age. This is a big deal. Younger (<30) have a large advantage, particularly with respect to the amount of free time you have available. Don't start a family during school. It's certainly possible, but slows you down, which is the major killer of graduating. If you're >50, your odds of a full-time teaching appointment are not good.
I've read this book last summer to learn git and I pretty enjoyed it. Mainly because it's succinct and because the author does a wonderful job explaining why he really like git.

However, I don't get why it's on HN front page...?
Re: part-time. I was able to finish part-time, but did a ton of work full-time for the first couple of years. My research suffered, but because my job linked with the research, it worked out well.

One thing that's not well known is how much you'll be working while in school on grant-funded projects. You'll be working no matter what, it's just a matter of getting a good one to work on.
"the iPhone is a smartphone "family". iPhone 4 would be an smartphone model."

You are absolutely right. Perhaps it'd be better to compare the iPhone smartphone family to the Droid smartphone family then?

(EDIT: that is what @andreyf already suggested earlier)
Alan Kay: Significant new inventions in computing since 1980?
Also, we currently let you set a time limit for a questionnaire overall (e.g., expire 30 minutes after page load). Is this useful to you, or did you mean timed on a per-question basis?
> I'll copy it to my SD card and delete it within the 24 hour return window.

That should be fixed with the new Android licensing server that Google recently announced.

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/07/licensing-ser...

Edit: Well, fixed when developers update their apps (which they have a big incentive to do).
Rapportive (YC S10) Raises Over $1 Million From Gmail Creator & Others
It sounds like the OP is asking "is a PhD a good way for me to actually accomplish something in my hobby area?" In which case the answer is no.

A PhD is a way to obsess about a highly particular part of some field to the point that you can finally gain entry to academia where you can continue to obsess about particulars while balancing teaching students for the rest of your career.

If that's what you want, more power to you, the world is a better one because of people like that, but that doesn't sounds like where you want to go.
the url in your description above is missing the :

quick link - http://marrily.com

Will definitely check it out - starting to plan our wedding just recently
> join a well-run open source project (not-so-commercial).

This sounds like the best advice here that answers the question.
YCommonApp - Apply to 30+ YC-funded startups in under 10 minutes
Honestly, I'm tired of explaining monads in every HN article about Haskell. I've written detailed explanations for newbies 100s of times. If you want to learn more about something, Google it.

Remember, you understanding Haskell will improve your understanding of the Universe. You understanding Haskell will do nothing for me. So you can see how the incentives are aligned...
Short and Tweet: Experiments on Recommending Content from Information Streams
The Influence of Everyday Objects
Principle #6: Make your design MIMIC the proper ties of an object peo ple are familiar with. This allows peo ple to engage them selves with your prod uct in meaning ful and memorable ways.
Uhm. iPhone is the only phone running iOS, but there are other devices running it too, so if you count instalations of iOS you should consider iPod touch and iPad, if you count only iOS on iPhones then the remark is valid: it's comparing apples to oranges.
Merchant Account Comparison
Had to look up "SRE":

SRE: Site reliability engineer

SWE: Software engineer
Best 4G iPad With Benefits
Posterous Founder: Management Lessons I Learned Working At Apple
It's just one app, it's a third party Instapaper client (there's no official Instapaper app for Android [yet])

http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.tonycosentini.hardcopypro