skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This already happens!

I've even received a (slightly) researched, personalised Powerpoint presentation from a company out of the blue. I didn't buy, but interestingly I also didn't mind. Perhaps this is because I felt that it may have taken longer to create then it did for me to discard it.

My biggest objection to a whitelist-only system is that although emails out of the blue are very rare, they are also far more valuable than regular emails that I receive. Given my reaction above, I'd prefer a proof-of-work requirement over a blanket block. This still presents an undesirable requirement on the sender, but it would be better than a block.
True, but the minorities they were interested in protecting weren't the kinds we normally think of. After all, many owned slaves. And even when it comes to groups like females and "Indians", their record wasn't exactly impressive either.

But they were themselves minorities: wealthy property-owners. The elite minority. And I think history shows that they were themselves the minorities they wanted to protect. With every incentive in the world to do so. The "popular passions" were no doubt a frightening thing to them.

I think this is fairly apparent even in documents for public consumption, like The Federalist No. 10. (Of course, for more serious analysis, we'd want to turn away from the Federalist Papers and look instead to the records of actual decisionmaking.)

Like most nations, the US has a founding myth. Since it's so recent and there were witnesses, the Founding Fathers can't exactly have overt superpowers like levitation or divine birth, but they are still portrayed in a mythologized way. So when looking at the founding of any nation, a little extra care is needed not to be led astray.
While I agree that they should do 2 and 3, they owe nothing to anyone and don't have to fix anything. A bug report would be nice, but again, they don't have to.

I know a lot of people say that complaining isn't useful if you don't also provide a solution, but that's BS. I've often used complaints to find out what people don't like about a system and formulate a plan to improve it. And I've often received suggestions that not only wouldn't fix the problem, but would destroy the rest of the system.

Complaints should be taken with a grain of salt, but when a lot of people have the same complaint, it bears scrutiny.

If you ignore complaints that don't have suggestions, you'll never know what made people leave, either.
Why free? The value seems to be all in the database. You'd better have some brilliant FE on that if you don't want people to simply rip your db and compete with you.
so in summary.. seek out reporters who have previously written on related topics, send a personalised email to them and try to build up a good relationship..... focus on the smaller fish to then get picked up by larger ones.

simple and practical advice. i like it, and i will put it into practise.
Former technology editor (IDG) here. The problem most reporters and bloggers face is a lack of time to research and write. There are too many potential stories, and not enough bandwidth to cover it all. This problem has been exacerbated by industry layoffs and Internet-related factors that make it much easier for startups to contact news organizations directly, as opposed to going through PR people. The result: A flood of emailed pitches and inquiries (many of them off-topic) that can't be properly followed-up.

There is also tremendous pressure to write articles that will get lots of page views. This makes it more difficult to justify writing straight-up product stories or reviews, unless it's something that's truly innovative or game-changing for the public. It's much easier to simply write about some minor Apple rumor, Microsoft's latest screw-up, or Facebook's umpteenth design tweak, add an irresistible headline, and perform a little "SMO" (social media optimization -- submitting to Digg, Twitter, etc.). Look at Techmeme on any given day to see how prevalent this type of writing is.

Nevetheless, I think if you personalize the pitch and identify likely writers (like TFA says) it will help differentiate it from the pack of press releases that form the bulk of many writers' email inboxes. Also, follow up nicely a few days later, asking if the writer has had time to review the earlier email or clarifying whether or not they are the right person to cover this type of product. Some will still ignore you, but others will respond, even if it's only to say, "sorry, not interested. Try _____."

One other piece of advice if you're looking for publicity: If you get an offer to speak at a conference or participate at a panel, do it. These days, there's a good chance that some blogger will be in the audience and writing about the interesting things he/she heard, even if it's local event or meetup. If it's a big technology conference, and assuming news organizations have a travel budget to send people there, there will probably be journalists or pro bloggers (paid) writing about the sessions. Conferences are great for them, because they (usually) get to hear interesting tidbits about interesting products or trends that are not moderated by a press release or PR drone, and they can crank out many stories/posts in a single day without having to deal with scheduling/interview overhead. I have really positive memories of conferences such as Webby Connect and MIT's EmTech, as well as a YCombinator open house when they were still in Cambridge. At all of these events, there was lots of great stuff to write about, including from companies/people that I didn't know much about before I went in.

EDIT: Added background and "off-topic" to first graf. It's one of the biggest irritants to technology reporters to get a pitch that has absolutely nothing to do with what they or their publication covers.

EDIT 2: Added last graf about events
And one day it will be the only viable occupation for us Humans, its the ultimate profession in my book.
Why software patents are a joke, literally
I doubt that actions of quality raters of non-Indian nationalities would differ if they were paid the same wages.
Try Espacenet or Google Patents instead. USPTO has been the worst of the patent search sites for a long time.

Go to http://ep.espacenet.com/ type in "us20080270152" click on the correct number, http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?DB=EPODOC&... .

Note that A1 tells you it's a first publication. B patents are granted.

http://www.google.com/patents doesn't appear to have this application yet.
You can apply for a patent on anything you can put into text. The barrier for printing the application (A1 docs) is exceedingly low. Indeed for a time in the UK you could apply for free IIRC, not anymore.
Very interesting that someone really uses his social network like that. I like to keep up with professionals via their blogs and twitter. As a student (final year) I find it helps me learn what's happening in the tech world from a better (for me) perspective than a purely news oriented site. I usually learn something which helps.
In my mind, programming outside of business hours is a part of ongoing education. Often, you learn a lot programming on your own time even if it is related to a work project. Extending a new function or exploring how something could work better with a new technique after 5pm is one of the easiest and best ways to pepper in some regular education.

Sometimes however, a programmer who isn't deeply interested in technology can be a valuable addition to the team. If you have a lot of code that needs to be transitioned, complicated logs that need imported, regular "do this, then" work or other labor that a deeply motivated programmer would find tedious, a different style of programmer may find this work comfortable and easy.
I find re.pl more than just an usable REPL and considering its a lot younger project than IPython then I'd have to say its progressed/progressing extremely well.
What people do outside of 'business hours' really is no business of their employer. The angle is 'I would not interview them', not 'I would not hire them'.

The difference is subtle, but the title suggests that it is the one whereas actually it is the other.

Think about it, if you actually did what the title says then you'd be open to legal action almost immediately.

Imagine an employer that would not hire a bookkeeper because they're not busy with bookkeeping in their free time.

I understand what the author is trying to say but the title is not really appropriate, the author has filtered out such applicants before the interview phase, so he does not hire them as a consequence of that.
It's meaningless to add temperatures in any circumstance. You can average temperatures, and you can add amounts of heat energy, but it is semantic garbage to try to add temperatures.

I'd say what it's doing--converting to an absolute scale then adding--is an interesting bug.
Naah ... their dumbest move was circa-1987, when they sold their license to market a product based on System V UNIX called Xenix to a then little-known device driver shop run by a father-son duo called Larry and Doug Michels, in return for a stake in their company. Who subsequently used Xenix to grow their start-up, the Santa Cruz Operation, into a $200M/year multinational.

(This was before the dark days in the late 90s when, having been spanked out of the desktop market, the board of SCO sold their IP and the company name to a linux startup from Utah called Caldera, who renamed themselves the SCO Group and went into the IP troll business. Thus indelibly blackening one of the names on my resume.)

If M$ hadn't sold Xenix to SCO and focussed on OS/2 it's possible they'd have moved wholesale into UNIX circa 1988 with the advent of the ia32 architecture. And the whole history of desktop OS development through the late 80s and 90s would have been unrecognizable ...

(Somewhere I have some old PC magazines, circa 1982-84, with advertisements by Microsoft promoting "UNIX -- the operating system of the future!")
That was half of my point; the other half is that the copy will be compared to the original.

When you steal a design and reimplement, only Microsoft (ten years ago, not now) got away with doing it worse...
How do you downvote below -4?
Corsi ricostruzione Unghie
Corsi ricostruzione Unghie l La cura delle mani e la ricostruzione unghie in generale assumono sempre di più uno spazio fondamentale nel campo della cosmesi. La scelta di un corso di ricostruzione unghie taranto è essenziale. Essere delle brave tecniche delle unghie però, il più delle volte non basta.
Crowdsourcing Project – Summary of Best Practices
It reminds me a little bit of Tchibo Ideas https://www.tchibo-ideas.de/ (German). Tchibo was originally a coffee trader (I think), but now they push weekly special products at supermarkets (a trend that started in Germany some years ago). So if one of your ideas is adopted, it could be sold in huge quantities.

Unfortunately most of it is the antithesis of lean living (useless special case household tools), but some things they make are nice.
Sequoia Invests Rs 60Cr In Quick Heal
Thats nice. I wouldn't want to work with someone who did nothing but program, use computers, 24/7. There is this thing called life, I hear its pretty interesting.
I've never used Microsoft Flight Simulator, but I've been very happy with X-Plane (http://www.x-plane.com/). It's cheap, available for Mac, Linux and Windows and has a very active community. And it lets you use your iPhone/iPad as a controller w/flight instruments.
Apps vs. the Web
Filverlight?
The only thing silly about the bookkeeping example is that people who enjoy bookkeeping are rare, and a manager with that policy would have trouble finding anyone for the job. If I were hiring a bookkeeper, and I actually did find someone who enjoys bookkeeping in their free time (say, for a local chess club or a non-profit charity) I would consider that a plus. If nine out of ten resumes came from people who do free-time bookkeeping, I would be inclined to hire one of them over the one-in-ten minority that doesn't. If this is illegal, the law is wrong.
Dopplr turnover in 2009 only 754 euros
Tests are great. But a lot of my coding is experimental and not all of it ends up in production. Writing tests take time. If I wrote tests in advance, then a lot of experimenting wouldn't get done. So I often tend to write tests afterwards.

My reward? When an experiment is a success and the new feature works. My second reward is when the feature ends up in production, which can only happen after tests are written.
I pointed this out in an earlier discussion, but the difference between spam and ham is only that the value of the information in spam emails is very low.

Now it would be possible to increase the value of the messages to some degree, but the problem is that most of these offers are for medication that doesn't work to solve issues you don't have -- and therefore the maximum value of that is nothing, at best.

The only way to make spam worth more is to not sell scams, but sell goods that are actually worth something, in a way that the recipient values. A great example of this is the John Cleese Compaq ads (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlmzwZXa-Ww) which adds value to the company and the user.
RIM Halves BlackBerry Torch Price to Boost Sales
Am I the only one to think that Mr. Wolfram manages in few words to appear to be both pretentious and unfriendly?
Are you rich? If so, how did you get there?
I'm not sure about the confusion... the question to W|A is not well-defined, but lets say someone asks you "2 + 4?" and you answer "the difference is 2". Does it make any sense? Not to me.
I think the point is that good programmers are constantly tinkering, trying things out, learning new things, etc, outside of the 9-5 work. I call it "passion" and other words apply too.

It's a lot like driving: good drivers are fanatic about it. They are always itching to go for a drive and push their cars. If you wanted to hire a star driver, would you want want to hire someone passionate or someone who learned it on the job and gets by?
Muscles retain memory of former glory
You're absolutely right that two different things are measured in degrees: temperatures and temperature differences. And they work as you said: you can add temperatures differences, you can add a temperature difference to a temperature, but you can't add two temperatures. (This is like pointers and ints in C.) Mathematically temperature differences form a group under addition and temperatures (idealized to have no minimum temperature) form a torsor for the group. A good introduction to torsors is John Baez's Torsors made easy: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/torsors.html
If you're considering this work/business then you count your time.
Parking Minimums Significantly Distort Land-use Decisions [pdf]
The answer to this would be a contact centered (as opposed to message centered) emailing system, like Hobson Files is http://redis.hobsonfiles.com/
As an employer you pay your employees for their time. What they do outside of that time is completely up to them and literally no business of the employer. So whether someone goes skydiving in their spare time or collects stamps or works on their hobby projects in the same field as their profession should have no bearing on their employment, or on their hiring.

The law is in my opinion totally just and I'm saying that as a former employer.
The pain developers go through
There was literally a flood of those in Russia about a year ago, whole Russian Internet was filled with ads about those. It's nothing, seriously, it might affect in some way some of more impressionable people with self-induced hypnosis ("this is a drug, so it has to work"), but other than that - no one here have seen any state of "being high" due to any mp3 (and there were hundreds upon hundreds of them advertised)
> It's easier, cheaper, faster and less riskier than asking SAP to have some type of API or access to its DB.

Less riskier? Really? I'd be worried about accidentally ending up making changes on a completely unrelated screen, or accidentally hitting "delete" instead of "modify" or something like that after some ordering somewhere changes. Or perhaps some unescaped data ends up manipulating the GUI instead of being entered in as data (eg. a tab).

At least with an API data is parameterized (cf. bobby tables) and the operations that you are doing are fixed.
Android apps I've bought:

- AndChat (great multi-server IRC client with support for SSL, handles connectivity changes far better than any other client for Android)

- RoboDefense (which btw doesn't have a screenshot because it's targetted at Android 1.5)

- Flight Director

- Hard Copy (excellent Instapaper app by an HN fellow)

- Locale (amazing contextual settings application, well worth the high price)

- Smart Keyboard Pro (supports Dvorak and a million other options)

- Titanium Backup

- TivoRemote (allows me to control my Tivo while upstairs watching from my second TV)

- Twidroid (was my main twitter client until the official client was available in Froyo)

Apps I would have gladly paid for if they weren't already free:

- ConnectBot (SSH client)

- K-9 Mail (best IMAP client I've found for Android that will actually work with my own mail server)
It simply isn't a criterion for fitness for the job. I can see that it would be an advantage and you might be able to get away with this on a small scale but if say Microsoft made it policy to only hire programmers that program in their spare time as well they'd be in hot water in not time flat.

If you want your programmers to continue to be educated for the work that they do and for new technologies applicable to that work then you can provide them with courses during work time. If they do such stuff in their spare time it's great but that can never be a discriminating factor during the hiring process in anything but the most unofficial manner.

Anyway, you don't have to believe me, passion is great but you can't mandate it of an employee.

If you are looking for a co-founder that's a different story, but people that are employees do not fall in the same category.
No, swapping them gives the same value.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=0+degrees+celsius+%...

Google always convert temperatures to Kelvin for this stuff.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=0+degrees+celsius++...

The assumption is if your doing math with temperature you are using it in a physics context.
The thing that struck me in this post is: "it's all about money". (the goldmine aspect)

I think money is an especially a bad motivation for starting your own product.

So if its about being creative, doing lots of different projects, having an influence on what your working on and where the product is going: you can do this working for the right company as well.

Of course the level of control is higher when you're running your own company, but so are the risks.

Isn't the important question: is the process important, i.e programming & working on interesting ideas, or is it the end result that counts, i.e having a successful product that is generating an income for you and where you have total control over?
Sharp increase in global patent filings for satellite based technologies
Data Driven Journalism: LA Times measures teacher effectiveness
Philosophy is all about "figuring out a way to live in this world" at least the philosophy I have studied anyway, which includes Aristotle.
Yes, this is exactly what I was trying to say, though I would never want to say it so bluntly up front because, well, some people love SICP. Of course, some of us loved statistical mechanics and vector calculus as well. There is no accounting for taste.

Learn PHP. You know more than you are letting on, because you evidently understand exactly why PHP is a big success. Get some stuff done. I assure you that the websites you build with PHP are real websites, and the money you earn with them is real money.

Given that I work at a Drupal company, I would be remiss if I didn't suggest that learning to build sites with Drupal is a great way to learn to work with PHP, Javascript, a web stack, et cetera. The community has lots of people who are coming from just the same place that you are.
So basically if a good programmer is spending his time with family and kids or doing something other than programming in his non-work time, then you will not hire him?

Programming outside business hours is great way to learn new skills and try out things that will never come as part of your day job. For example, my day job would never include any mobile app development. So I do it as a side project. In fact lot of people have developed lot of cool projects this way (outside work).

However saying this is the only way to tell a programmer is good is taking it too far. Like Jacquesm mentions people might have other interesting things to do or on the other hand people can suck equally bad in their 'other' projects too :)
Education Reform and Technology
The problem isn't in looking for someone who has "passion" but it is with judging candidates based not upon their ability to do the job, but on other factors.

Companies in US are not allowed to discriminate based upon things like commute time, family situation at home, age, etc. - none of which factors into how well they can do the job once they are at work and on "company time" - and the argument that what someone does on their personal time falls into this category of judging someone based on factors beyond "Can the applicant perform this job?" is pretty easy to make.

So it's fine to look for passion - but people hiring and doing interviewing should be very cautious about what they say (and especially what they tell applicants) about how they are going to judge your level of passion, unless they want to open themselves up to potential discrimination suits (or so my possibly overly cautious corporate HR department would have us believe).
Most likely not. He actually manages to do that time and again, examples aplenty.
I'll second that. NetTuts has a nice video series on jQuery that is pretty lucid to understand.
It's also available natively on iPhone and is a lot of fun to play around with.
ilamont, great feedback; can I repost your comment in the blog? would love it to be there for others to read. - DROdio
I think two things are at play here:

1. The chances of discovering a potential employee are much higher if they are passionate about their field. Passionate people make a lot of noise. The OP acknowledges this.

2. I never said you should always higher passionate people. For example, some passionate people are unlikely to get things finished (they're more likely to be excellent at starting projects).

I agree with you about this being a rubbish (and potentially illegal) HR policy.