skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is great. If a customer calls up saying that their computer failed after playing a certain song it idiot proofs the detection process (assuming the user was there to hear it.) It transcends languages and even if the user can't identify the song, they can hum it (again, assuming they aren't tone deaf.)
This comment made me think that there might be a /r/startups and actually there is one and its summary point you to HN
I had a bit of that problem, going into system preferences and getting the setting to your liking helped me a lot. I find I had to do the same thing with the trackball I use and the scroll wheel.
If you're a coder, get as much of your code out there. Contribute to open source projects. Put stuff in Github, Bitbucket or whatever. Put links to your code in your resume.

The good recruiters will look at the quality of your code (and the complexity of the problem you're trying to solve) if you give them the chance.

You basically want to show that you have good coding technique, habits, etc. The smarter recruiters out there may use this info to balance out any deficiencies in your work experience.

Keep in mind that this advice is probably useless if you're applying to a larger company that uses HRBots and/or pure checklists as hiring criteria. For those companies you should read some of those self-help "ace the (technical) interview" types of books to help you out. HRBots tend to ask textbook questions looking for textbook answers. On a side note, you'd be surprised how many people out there don't know how to answer even the simplest textbook interview questions.
Ask HN: Need advice on my Start-up
Before I start playing with Adwords, I wanted to get some advice on my start-up. I am selling DVD's to people who's TV screens (LCD/Plasma) have suffered burn-in or stuck Pixels. I made it to fix the burn-in on my own screen, and it worked pretty good.

The site is: http://www.fixburnin.com/

My questions are: does it look to spamy? What could I improve on my conversion rate off the bat?
No spaces here.
... even if you were to make Facebook in 1998, it might not have gotten critical mass due to it being simply 'too early' (and also not getting seeded in a college campus environment) ... iirc, Friendster and others were started in the late '90's bubble but all fizzled out
Rethinking the iPad Browsing Experience
They obviously didn't intend it that way, but the pro-tenure arguments in the comments are among the best evidence against tenure around.
So based on that, and I am not a lawyer, google is in the clear if they just scrape the user content and republish it so long as they are able to calculate the average user rating on their own. They would do this anyway because they are pulling information from many different sources and aggregating the score there.
That's a great book, but it's about political philosophy. The two types of people described in the book are dynamists (who embrace change and believe change is a net win) and statists (who want to keep things the way they are now).
I now seriously question anything further in that article. The idea that credit scores can predict car accidents is ludicrous.

Do you find the idea that credit scores are correlated with car accident rates to be ludicrous?

I find it very plausible. Some people are careful, others are careless.

Of course, one should be very careful in using vague correlations to determine policy in specific cases. I bet I could draw up a correlation one way or the other between accident rates and skin colour, but you'd be in serious trouble if your insurance company tried to use that to set premiums. (Oddly though, they're allowed to take your sex and age into account.)
Also, flash has better shock resistance than hard drives do. This is important as we have more and more on the go laptops.
Ahhhh, that was disappointing. Here I was expecting some good audiophile pr0n, and find Larry Csonka and Bruce Jenner.
Monocle works by wrapping a single generator and translating each yield-statement into a hand-off to the event loop or reactor and resuming when the value of the deferred becomes known.

Since the code is confined to a single generator, it's not easy to factor-out the steps into subroutines. PEP 380 provides a syntax for having sub-generators which can potentially be used to factor your code into smaller, reusable components.

PEP 380 is about providing better support for nested generators including the scaffolding with try/finally, g.send(), g.next(), g.throw(), and g.close().

In short, PEP 380 lets you nest, and nesting lets you factor your code.
NYC rates, yep. I'd make significantly less elsewhere.

Three things:

NYC is expensive. A 6 pack of crummy beer is $14 across the street from my office, and a studio in Harlem is still $2,000/mo. Realistically, $100k/year in NYC is like $60k/year elsewhere. I know quite a few people making six figures that live 2 hours outside of the city because they can't afford it and I've read that you shouldn't even consider having kids in Manhattan until your household income is over $200k/yr.

Second, IME a lot of startups in NYC have deep pockets. I believe this is because most of the startups in NYC are funded by big companies with NYC HQs. Otherwise, they'd start up elsewhere because everything about running a biz is expensive in NYC (employee wages, taxes, rent, etc).

Third, there's a talent drought in NYC. If a tech savvy type of guy wants to be on the east coast, they usually end up Boston/Cambridge.

High cost of living + startups w/ lots of coin + talent shortage = $$$$ for devs.

Also, I made some broad generalizations. There are plenty of self-funded startups in NYC too.
Brazil does have a social safety net. It has a universal health care system, unemployment benefits, benefits for families with children, and a few other things. They may not be great, but they sure do exist.
"I am sure that 1999 is inspired by your site."- I'm not sure what you're talking about there.

I think I'm confused about what your service does, it looks like the service levels are delimited by number of affiliates and payout amount(to each affiliate? or total to all affiliates?). If you're doing that, it might make sense to be more flexible with pricing and scale costs linearly with clicks/payments.

Anyway, we're veering way off topic here, feel free to shoot me an email if have any questions about attracting people running affiliate programs, I keep in touch with a lot of the major players in the affiliate space.
even if the user can't identify the song, they can hum it - I've always wondered what a computer equivalent of NPR's Car Talk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Talk would be like
Strong disagree. Korn's response is at least funny. The rest of the responses are petulant, somewhat ill-informed, and orthodoxical. The argument over whether C does or doesn't have a runtime is particularly tedious. You get the impression that these people would all be very, very upset at the Detours paper, except that Detours works so well they'd know a priori they'd lose the argumet.

The original commenter --- despite his very fragile code --- is right: for what he wants to do, he needs to create temporary stacks. What he doesn't have is a mechanism to allocate and swap in and out of those stacks (he's hoping that switching stacks is a 2-liner that just relies on knowing the inline asm incantation for changing ESP).

Regardless, it is a uniquely and flagrantly bad way to educate (both the questioner and the world who's reading the thread) to start from the premise that "you're not ready to build the thing you want to build" --- at least when "the thing" we're talking about is systems code. 90% of C programmers are not "ready" to build production C code that will get deployed in hostile environments, and as a result, in every web project we ever do, we have to embark on a tedious inventory of all the 3rd party stuff our clients use to find the horrible C ZIP library they accidentally included. No C coder is blameless.

Unless I missed a whole leg of this thread (the part where they explained temp stacks and stack switching to this guy, who, in challenging the notion that C has a real runtime or the notion that the OS should [heh] be controlling ESP, is demonstrating more on-the-ground systems programming knowhow than several of the commenters), I think this is a remarkably douchey example of a programming help thread.
I think the real issue is that we're trying to use a single number (well, three numbers, but they all purport to mean the same thing) as a predictor of whether or not an individual will pay back any given loan (or continue to pay any given bill). The lenders (or, specifically, their employees) want a single number because they want a single thing they can point to when asked to explain their decision. "How could I have expected him to default? His FICO was 750!"

Imagine if we tried to apply this approach to other areas. For corporations, instead of reporting total assets, total liabilities, earnings, payments, and such, they instead give all this information to an "Accounting Disclosure Bureau", who produces an "Expected Profitability Index" based on those numbers. While the report contains other information as well, people usually just look at the EPI. Would that be a functional investment climate?
Well, they certainly achieved the "make something people want" part.
Thank you that's very helpful.

Maybe hedge funds need to get into this business. Or maybe I should find a way to show hedge funds that my new risk assessment is better.

Though one of the challenges is getting new types of hard-to-fake data. If my risk assessment looks at a person's email account or does machine vision on their facebook photos, those things are easily forgable.
Ok, despite my earlier dismissal, this is kind of interesting. Has anyone here hired a speaker that demands these sorts of fees? Are these realistic, or are these their "negotiations start here" prices? I can't reasonably see paying Jeff Dunham the same amount as Alan Greenspan, for instance... how much do these folks actually get in reality?
Well, doing terrible things is sometimes necessary to perform magic or to get a better understanding about how things work. From the less flamey parts of the discussion, I gather his ideas weren't all that unsound, just extremely hard to pull off.
Similar experience here. My old roommate's name is Khanh and he found a clip of William Shatner yelling "Khan" from a Star Trek movie that he put on his voice mail and as start up sound for his PC. Every so often he would leave his speakers turned up and in the middle of the night his computer would restart due to a windows update. I'd just hear William Shatner yell KKKKHHHHHAAAANNNN randomly in the middle of the night.
Thank you slantyyz for the excellent feedback.

Honestly during my last three years of college I made a huge wrong journey. I spent all my free time by solving general algorithm puzzles posted in the web such as top coder practice, Facebook coding challenge, RapLeaf coding challenge and their nature. I thought that was the best way to score an interview.

Now that I am interested in applying for a startup, I realized that real projects that involve a diversity of technologies actually gives you more credential rather than technical knowledges. But it is a bit too late.

I better start grabbing some of my small algorithm codes and put it online now.
This seems to be similar to the article from last month's Atlantic Monthly about Paul Romer's plan to have developed countries run microstates similar to Hong Kong or Singapore in developing nations.

It was discussed at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1426429
Drug Wars was my introduction to programming (probably not a good sign).

I started tinkering around with values and ended up making a notecard retrieval system that also simulated the OS clear programs function so my friends and I could cheat in geometry class even after the teacher caught on. There was also a tasteful Simusex-style easter egg game built-in.
While setjmp/longjmp is a good trick (it's how Hanson did his thread library in CII), it's actually an even less good approach by the standards of this mailing list; there are even fewer constraints on how Cygwin needs to implement longjmp than there are on how it manages %%esp.
No, but I'll start now! That's a great link.

Pigs are also nature's rototillers. Instead of a cover crop, my wife and I put the pigs on the garden and let them go to town. They turn over EVERY corner, pooping as they go. By next May, we're all good to plant again!

We've also got meat birds, which I can say I've never had better meat that what we've raised the past few years. Also can't beat that we slaughter them ourselves. From chick to oven without ever leaving the farm, perfect!
In case you haven't gathered from other responses in this thread or are only reading this in your 'threads' view: yes.
Does anybody know the dimensions of this trackpad? I've been looking for a way to accomplish something like the image below with 2-finger scrolling (either above or below the thumbkeys) on my Kinesis Advantage:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/robert-p/4408732537/
Far From Iran, a Struggle to Stay Involved by Web
Looks like fun, I'm going to try to make it. And I'll bring my WinPhone 7 Circuit app with me. http://icircuitapp.com
Building an Android app as a startup
Thank you for the post, it was interesting and made me think. I especially liked this point: "but rather that this factor needs to have a seat at the table before we have a chance of working out a balanced approach."

I agree that I would like to see how functional approaches can benefit large systems, in concrete terms, since almost all of the examples I've ever seen involve micro-code like this article. I'm especially skeptical that it can make a dramatic difference for the kind of messy business code that today is usually solved by large object-oriented systems and modular libraries.
Instead of trying to walk "indignant demand" back to "passive aggressive way to demand" inch by inch, just concede that all the guy did was ask a question and make a case for why he thought Cygwin's behavior was broken. Nobody's saying Cygwin has to agree with him, but you've simply mischaracterized the start of the thread.

My interpretation is that Korn was trying to be funny (and he succeeded), but as usual the peanut gallery ruined the joke.
Two interview strategies I've always wanted to know how to hanlde.

How do you handle not knowing something in a trivia centered interview? For example; what datastructure does a database index use?

Is there a good way to say you don't know without looking unqualified?

Also what if you used a certain technology A LOT say 5 years ago and now you remember nothing about it off the top of your head. How do you say "Yeah, I can do that, but I can't tell you much about it"? This is assuming you didn't know about that requirement before the interview to refresh your memory.
Maybe there's something as simple as a happy dog wagging his tail and smiling at you that could brighten your day.

Amen to that. If your lifestyle enables you to have one (and you're not allergic), a pet can be extremely therapeutic.
It's a shame they don't play Beethoven's 5th Symphony: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4IRMYuE1hI
Wrong Korea.
>>>Most, as usual, miss my point or are trying to argue some other point.<<<

You know this happens a lot in real life too. It's as if people don't listen to listen. They listen to dash off their own insightful reply. Maybe it isn't this forum or any other thing, but simply a cultural bias that exists in most of us and is magnified on the internet.

On the other hand, you're absolutely right and it's time for me to shut down this machine.
Fair enough. The Magic Mouse hardware supports a three-finger click, and any of the various inexpensive third-party packages like jitouch et al make the Magic Mouse a viable input device.
Of course after it has been fixed it should play Also Sprach Zarathustra: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/71/Richard_Straus...
A ha! That's what happened to those two chains. I used to love going to them when stuck at the mall. Had forgotten all about them.
It so happens that "negative time", or even time t=0, is equally as meaningless as Elephant Time or Verb Time. They are all undefined

But Hammer Time is still okay, right?
I have to upvote you here, not particularly because I agree with your sentiments, but because of the relative depth and ability that you express them.

Even if you are 100% wrong, this type of questioning and reasoning is the essence of what it means to be a "hacker" and should be encouraged on this site.
With a Trackpoint-equipped keyboard and a Cintiq (or a tablet like the Intuos if you're using a laptop) you can rule the world. (Well, unless you're a gamer.) The only thing a Trackpoint can't do well is draw, and frankly touchpads, mice and trackballs fall short there as well.

EDIT -- I'm not certain you can find a keyboard with a Trackpoint that isn't part of a Thinkpad anymore. There used to be a couple of licensed versions in addition to the IBM-branded ones.
Ask HN: recommendated approach for getting a homepage design on a budget?
So far I've done the design myself for my site http://cookblast.com/

After doing a little experimenting with Stumbleupon ads, and having a horrible bounce rate (>90%), I think my homepage needs improvement.

My current plan is to use Elance, following patio11's example http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1551817

Any good alternatives to getting a nice design without much of a budget?

Any specific tips on how to improve my homepage would also be appreciated!
The Atmosphere team have a good slide titled "Scaling the Asynchronous Web" which has a few pages one threads vs NIO https://atmosphere.dev.java.net/conferences/2009/JavaOne/200... .
This is a great point.

In the recent past, many people's credit scores were artificially inflated due to the low perception of systemic risk in the economy.

Now that that risk is better understood, the same person who had a 750 score might have a 650 score, etc., even if all payments have been made on time.

I'm curious about the incentive this creates. Suppose someone had a score of 680 and was paying everything on time and had $5000 of available credit. Now, he/she has a score of maybe 640 and no available credit.

What is the benefit to this person of continuing to care about any no-recourse debts in this case? He/she might imagine paying the debt off over 5 years as originally planned, or may consider abandoning/defaulting on the debt and saving the money instead, which would improve the person's financial picture over the next 5 years, and by 7 years out the default would be expunged anyway.
Thank you—this is very helpful.
Just a quick review --

I like the funky look of it. Reminds me of how-to sites from the late 90s, before spam overrode everything. The one thing that bugged me was the $29.95 crossed out, with $9.95 written in. Whenever I see a discount that isn't "special" to me (due to a code, or a link clicked, etc.) I think, "this person is trying to anchor the price higher" and it feels a little underhanded.

Also, it's not clear from the beginning that you're selling a product. I'd make it clear that the only way to fix burned in pixels is by using your product.
Kabul War Diary Couch App
Benoitc has created a CouchDB App that is a view into the recently leaked Afghan war data
Michael Jackson Estate Forces 'Plants vs. Zombies' Update
Ask HN: How do you figure out initial pricing?
My startup provides an enterprise software product. I've spent a lot of time over the last couple of months determining the minimum viable product and am pretty happy with where that seems to be today.

The piece of information I don't have is pricing. I can't just do A/B testing to narrow in on a price because the sample size is too small and the cost of each sample is too high.

What strategies have you used to price enterprise software products previous to sitting down in a sales meeting?
It might seem like a big scary test, but it's not. Sure, that's how things were in academia where you've been most of your life, but interviews are only superficially like tests. So the first thing is, stop worrying about the outcome and focus on the problem you are trying to solve. Not, 'how do I pass this interview?', but 'is this the right job for me?'. As soon as you start thinking like that, you'll see that you and the interviewer are there to solve the same problem, and you are on an equal footing.

The question 'is he good enough?' is just one among many - and at this stage it's the one you can do the least about, so try to let go of that. Sure, you can study long-term and increase your chances of passing certain types of technical interview. But if the job is really a good fit for you, you'll already be doing that kind of study because you're interested regardless of whether you need it for an interview.

Of course, practice is still useful. Don't just practice being interviewed, practice giving interviews - then you'll get an idea of what the interviewer is thinking. Will this guy fit in my team? Is he going to stay interested in the job?

One other tip- try and make sure you have other possibilities before you go into an interview so you don't have to feel like everything is riding on this moment.
Say what? Nothing you've said here makes sense.

First, he's writing a nonportable language runtime. For Cywgin. It's not a fair critique to say "he's making the mistake of writing x86-specific code".

Second, you don't have to initialize a stack before you use it. The stack isn't magically cleared before it gets used. In fact, that's rather the point of having the stack implemented with a single pointer, and is also the reason that in C you have to explicitly initialize (say) integers before using them.

Third, there's nothing "dangerous" about what he's doing, in that what he's doing can't ever work. He created a temp stack, write code that attempts to switch into it, and never wrote the code to switch out of it. That's not going to slip into production. But that's also not a fundamental critique of the approach.

What he's trying to do works fine, including under Cygwin, when completely implemented. Despite much peanut gallery whining that it can't possibly work, or that this guy should give up on doing inline/threaded/coroutine stacks and instead implement some CS101 interpreter instead.
Usually, we generalize from other research: there is no reason to suppose CS is miraculously free of discrimination against women, considering the variety of areas in which this kind of discrimination has been shown exist.

There is also no reason to assume that all or most of the gender gap is caused by discrimination. If we generalize, we discover that lots of other fields (e.g., medicine, law) have sexism, but they also have 50% women.

Remember, we are asking what makes CS special.

Why do you have to outperform others before you can be discriminated against?

Suppose you are biased against green cars. You want to buy fast cars, and you generally only buy a car if it drives at least 80mph. However, since you hate green cars, green cars must drive at least at 100mph before you will consider buying one. Therefore, you will have plenty of slow (80-90mph) red cars, but your green cars will all drive at least as fast as 100mph.

Substitute "women" for "green", "men" for "red", and "productivity" for "speed", and you'll see the same conclusion applies to workers.
http://speakerwiki.org/speakers/Sarah_Palin

Rating on the right made my eyebrow raise. Shouldn't there be a "No Rating yet" or something like that?
What on earth are you going on about? Saint-loup suggests arxiv papers should not be talked about on [HN] and you start ranting about censorship?

You are dealing with censorship when an entity uses his authority and power over you to prevent you from saying or hearing certain things. There are usually ideological reasons to prevent freedom of speech and information. We are not dealing with any of that here. At most, we are dealing with a democratically, self-imposed, self-maintained censorship, whose origins are not ideological in nature.