skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Any advice? I'm young, 22, about to graduate in May. Should I just try to take risks while I'm young and work for myself, or keep trying until I finally get through an interview process for a place that I like?

Contrary to most people here, I'd caution against "working for yourself". If you work for yourself, only a small portion of what you do will be programming. In addition, you won't learn about programming on a team (as opposed to coding by yourself). That said, if your goal is to run your own company, go for it; if your goal is just to write code in an environment you love, starting a company (itself rewarding and something I want to do at one point in my life) is neither the only, nor the best way of getting there.

Here's my suggestion: interview at a bunch of places, receive offers, "save the best for last" (don't interview for your dream job first). You may not get an offer for the perfect job, but you're also coming straight from college so the bar is considerably higher, in that you don't have a resume.

Technical interviewing is a very imperfect art, it's just (much) better than the conventional approach of hiring warm bodies based on traditional metrics (the name of the school they went to, etc...). There often isn't a great correlation between one's interview score and one's performance on the job, so once you have people who've worked with you and who can vouch for you, along with examples of your work, you're much less likely to be passed over because you didn't do well enough on a single whiteboard coding exercise.

Out of the offers you do receive, pick the one where the people who've interviewed you seemed the smartest and most passionate: interested in same things as you are, willing to mentor you. Disregard everything else.

Once you're working, don't settle. Don't give up on your asoirations, code OCaml in your evenings, keep up with computer science, hack on open source projects. In a year, try the companies you'd want to work at again.

Also, consider what you've learned doing programming problems Jane Street: quite honestly, I am envious of having an excuse like that to solve interesting puzzles in a language I love. That should give you a boost interviewing at other places.

By the way, have you looked at: http://cufp.org/jobs ? There seem to be several OCaml offerings there.
I certainly understand your point, but 25-plus years of "custom and usage" have made it hard to argue convincingly that purchasers don't know there's a click-wrap EULA. [EDIT: Enforceability of the EULA is usually predicated on the purchaser's having a reasonable period, usually 10 days or so, in which to return the software and get a refund if the EULA's terms aren't acceptable.]

The danger of the "Sold, not leased" approach is that vendors likely would stop offering such steep discounts for upgrades. Getting an upgrade would be be like buying a car: You want the new model, you pay the new-model price; and sure, by all means do whatever you like with your old model.
LA is just too big. You drive allllll the time, everything takes at least 30 minutes and most likely it'll take an hour. LA is dirty and filled with so many people trying to "make it" in Hollywood. There's a lot to like such as music, museums, beaches, but there's more to dislike.
NYC vs. SF debate continued. SF - your move
I just want to add that at home I have a treadmill with a flat panel tv,dvd player, and xbox 360 hooked up right in front of it. That is the only way I can do 40+ minutes of cardio. It turns out that for me the multiplayer games like Call of Duty 4 are the most engaging. I can get so wrapped up in those kinds of games that I forget that I am working out. It helps that often I am "running" in the game at the same rate that I am physically running. I had to cancel my gym membership because it was just so boring to be there for any length of time. I think a first step will be to allow wifi in the gyms and have stands where you can pop a laptop in front of the treadmill to watch netflix or something.

With better UI I might try surfing the net or some kind of reading if the text were big enough.
The smartphone wars: Google goes Taoist, Microsoft uses the farce
Crisp graphic design too.
Apparently yes. At the time I would probably say no. It depends on the argument being presented and not on who is presenting it. Though the messenger often times becomes the focus of the debate. In the case of Zuckerburg I don't trust his motives and - here's the rub - he's in a position to abuse trust.

Now if a dictator is in favor of eugenics and starts talking about increasing contraception one might reasonably fear what comes next. When someone is not in a position to takes things to the next level then their ulterior motives are not relevant.
There are worse memes than actually building something.
Nice try; but having more flexibility can be just as damning as not enough. Me, and plenty of others, have found that we know where, say, Python's wall is and accept it or we go around it. The wall I'm talking about is the mental barrier where you either no longer want the tradeoffs involved, or find you disagree with a fundamental axiom of the thing under inspection. Drilling through it is impossible without discarding it entirely.

Having flexibility to drill through that wall just puts a bigger, harder wall someplace else. And other people find Emacs/VIM ideas perfectly workable IDEs, and find the flexibility of Emacs and VIM horribly confusing.

You have to know, and accept the wall and limitations - it's a series of tradeoffs, and you just need to know what you're getting in the trade.

In the case of frameworks, it's just a bigger set of tradeoffs as they tend to be a lot more opinionated, which means you're trading more for comfort.
One nice thing about this idea is it lets people jump in and participate when they have time and not be beholden to a schedule or have to rely on a team. It's sort of like an FPS where if you have 15 minutes to kill, you can log in, get some headshots, and log out. It's a team thing but the players can come and go without too much of a structure around it.
Would you be willing to be more specific? That's not very helpful.
Here's my code -- I would have contacted you directly, but I can't find your email. It's as simple as this:

http://gist.github.com/578226#file_gistfile1.py (sorry, that's an editable link, so please be nice)

Anyway -- the machine is not swapping -- python grabs ~20GB of ram, there is another ~100GB available. It pegs one of the cores. Nothing else was running during this test so there was no competition for the fsb. This is on a recent-gen 16 core xeon server. The bit with the pipe and the popen is just me writing the header for the matrix market file in a separate file because it's simpler to dump it from hadoop that way. My time measurements above did not include file reading time -- just the experience of running the norms code (which is just a dot product of each column with itself, essentially). The matrix file is 2GB uncompressed on disk; dimensions are [5e5, 13e7] with 1.2e8 nz.

I rewrote as a sparse, column major matrix in java, running on the same machine, with a sparse dot product implementation. I was off a little before -- the time to stripe the entire dataset is ~2.7 seconds, averaged over 1000 tries. I was confused because I'm spawning 5 threads which gets the time to compute a dot product of one column against every other column down to an average of 1 pass through the data per second. If you contact me, I'm happy to share the code, but it's rather more lengthy.

One more edit -- the java code is not particularly optimized and doesn't batch columns. It just spawns 5 threads that bang on my giant array. Where the data is stored as a column major array of sparse vectors, and each sparse vector is an array of integer indicies and an array of integer values.
I'm really quite tired of the arm chair quarterbacking that occurs when a startup decides to exit.

Ron Conway said it best in response to Arrington's "Dip shit companies" comment. Ultimately it's up to the founders. The founders have put the blood sweat and tears into the company. It is the founder's life, their equity and their company. If they decide to cash out, then good for them. If they decide to stick it out and work towards an IPO, good for them. The founder is the gladiator in the arena, fighting for their company and their lives. Who are we to publicly criticize and belittle them.

Being a founder is hard enough as it is without other founders publicly criticizing their decisions while waiting for the delivery of their custom Pagani Zonda[1].

ref:
[1] : http://www.autoblog.com/2010/09/07/pagani-zonda-hh-commissio...
Don't your arms get tired from being held up in front of you for so long?
When I closed the tab, the music kept playing for a while.

Great job other than that. Judging by the code it looks like you have a game programming background.
From Adam Smith:

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public." - Adam Smith
Hello! like in most Redis benchmarks, without concurrent clients you are measuring latency in this way, not real performances! You need to spawn N threads, and if you do it the wrong way (N ruby scripts for instance) you'll not be ale to actual meter the performance as the clients will use all the CPU...

I think the normalized method is faster indeed but it's not possible to tell from this benchmark.
Well, they do draw a distinction between first sale by an owner of a copy, and sale by a licensee.

You buy a book, generally there are no preconditions on your opening it, whether in the store or at home. So since there are no apparent constraints, there's no scope for an agreement to exist between you and the publisher.

But if I publish 'Secret strategies of ____ industry leaders' for $1000, and require prospective purchasers to agree not to distribute their copy for 5 years before I accept their order (many industries have such expensive trade publications), that's very different from a regular book purchase - you don't get the information until you've acknowledged the conditions of sale, so it's a lot easier to say I only licensed that readership of that copy.

I don't like this decision at all, * but the Court is not just rewriting things on a whim - rather, it addresses specific holdings in other cases about whether a transfer was a grant of license or a sale, and relies on those to conclude Autodesk issued a limited license and was entitled to enforce the agreements that underpinned it.

* Indeed, the court doesn't sound too thrilled about the ramifications either, probably because they judges foresee an avalanche of tediously similar cases as a direct consequence of their holding.
Refusing To Answer The Feds
The thing is: the Dopplr founders, early staff, and investors all likely made money. Whatever you call it, that's hardly a bad result for them...

OK, bad day for Nokia. Dopplr's fault? Nope.
I'd leave it. Being a different source the details will differ, I only put the cross-reference to try to avoid any ensuing discussion being split across two items.
I have a really hard time being sad about this.

Human beings create. We have new ideas daily. When some of them die, it's okay. And it's okay if someone made a LOT of money from the deal.

People will cry. That's fine, meanwhile the people who just got bought will go on to create more, interesting, new ideas.
Probably, it's really as simple as challenging your assumptions, and striving to be better, or make better things. Hell - it's what drives most entrepreneurs.
Ask HN: what's the easiest way to implement login using x account?
For example, what Stack Overflow is doing: http://stackoverflow.com/users/login

ClickPass (YC 07, http://clickpass.com/) was doing this, but their site says not to develop against them atm.

JanRain does it, but costs money (http://www.janrain.com/products/engage/get-janrain-engage).

Any open source implementations or other alternatives?
If you like this post upvote please, that way more people find these case studies.
Homeland Security to test iris scanners
There are actually other motivations than having a shot at significance. Maybe the founders want to retire on their $20 mill. Maybe they want to go on to building bigger and better stuff with the money they've made. Maybe their investors are prudent and actually expect a return on their money sometime this decade.

This is rather one-sided, but as always from 37signals great linkbait.
Unless the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine applies, under copyright law you're not allowed to distribute copies without permission from the copyright owner. See 17 USC 106(3), at http://goo.gl/ySAs.
A series of articles like this over the years: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/25/arts/music/25ravi.html

If that is inaccurate reporting, then I plead being fed bad data.

The other problem is that market behaviors are typically nonlinear. If you cut the demand down by 50%, that doesn't necessarily mean that you get 50% less output. If the going price based on the supply and demand curves sinks below the cost of production for some of the players, production can drop dramatically, not just linearly proportionally. Unless something drastic changes in the demand trends I don't see how this fate will be escaped.
I need to contact you, but your contact us form is not working. Any other way?
I was in SF for 3 months on contract and the city was not a fit for me. I grew up in NJ/NYC area and now live and work outside of DC. Portland is more my feel and where I'll be going next.
cdavid -- see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1688694
Very helpful tool for 1st level support teams
I use a wireless controller for the xbox, so I just hold it up in front of me. It hasn't been an issue, my legs get tired first.
Gabe Newell: next-gen game engines will be ten times harder [to write]
Some comments on this from two weeks back:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644192
The argument isn't that some people don't make money, it's that the users and probably the founders are better off building a company that lasts. The users get a great product and the founders get to build and run a profitable business. Part of their argument (which is referenced but not explained in the post) is that it's not personally fulfilling to get rich and retire early but rather to continue to build.
The odds of nobody understanding probability is near-zero...
My understanding was that an issue with quotes lagging behind at the NYSE precipitated a kind of "order avalanche" where NYSE's quotes appeared to be better than the rest of the market, thus inviting more order flow, thus pushing their delay even further back until the NBBO spread was big enough to kick a spaceship through.

I'm not an expert but I do love studying all sorts of systems and this seems like an extremely plausible explanation. Pinning it on the HFT bogeyman, less so.

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/08/nyse-tech...
If there's a scoreboard for the assignment of blame, I would put it 98% on acquirer and 2% on "acquireree". It's hard to fault someone for taking a $20M exit too harshly, but it's quite easy to fault a share-holder backed corporation that should know better.
Way to go Kord!
Wordpress 3.1 Features
Ask HN: Where could I find a Ruby developer to make a prototype?
I am currently looking for a Ruby developer to make a prototype and not entirely sure where to look. A freelancer (>$30/hr) is a bit out of the price range. I am looking for somebody who has great communication skills, possibly a student looking for a paid internship or one with some free time? I have heard some not so great things about the rent-a-coder sites and was hoping that the HN community could help me out. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a ton!
Great things happen at hack.a.bit

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/visualizing-the-wik...
For each prefix, which app are people eventually satisified with?

E.g. if "in" often leads to instapaper, predict that, while if "ins" often eventually leads to "instantapp", that's the prediction for that prefix.
I say 'sequel', I write 'SQL'.

The former has one less spoken syllable, the latter has three less written letters, and everyone knows what you mean either way.
I haven't had Dim Sum in the bay area that even approaches the best in NYC. Where are you going?
Bad for the startup, but what about the founders? If they are not allowed to cash, they can end up with nothing: condolences to them.
As for J.Fried, it's easier to get a few millions from Bezos, then take money to the founders WITHOUT selling, then advocate others to take the risk he didn't have to.

See DHH interview on This Week in Startups #46:
"Money taken from (Jeff Bezos) went to the founders and wasn’t to grow the company"

http://thisweekinstartups.com/2010/03/twist-46-with-david-he...
R needs it's own language because one of the most important factors in it's widespread use is the language itself. First, it is very similar to an older language that is one of the first widely used statistical packages. Second, the syntax is very easy to use at a simple level. For example, to read a csv file and compute a linear regression with betas, p-values, the works, all you have to do is:

# read a csv file with headers into ram
data <- read.csv(file='blah.csv', header=T)

# compute a linear model with dependent variable income, explanatory variables gender, education, and ethnicity, with automatic creation of (n-1) indicator variables as appropriate for categorical data
model <- lm(income ~ gender + education + ethnicity + age)

# if instead, I want to use a glm family of models, this is also trivial..
# note this is nonsensical statistically with respect to my data, but I just thought of this off my head, and it demonstrates how easy it is to do sophisticated things in R
model.glm <- glm(income ~ gender + education + ethnicity + age, family=binomial, link=cloglog)

That's it. So you can see why stats people love it -- it's easy to pick up and use to get productive work done. It's easy to show students. For what it's meant to do originally -- desktop statistics -- the language works quite well. It lacks as a programming language in many regards, don't get me wrong, but simplicity and ease of use, particularly in the beginning, are critical.

Also, the data frame is the single best data structure I've ever used for manipulating tabular data. Finally, the excellent repl makes working in R and exploratory analysis absolutely awesome.
Google App Engine Datastore is experiencing writing problem
Could this be any more self-righteous?

Here's the deal:

You build value in a startup. A company comes along and sees that value, decides it's worth some cash to advance some internal mission. Company offers you something that feels like a good deal.

Boom: sold. Right?

Who better than the people who built the company can judge the quality of these offers?

Moreover, let's say stodgy old company absorbs an awesome startup and puts their tech forever in the basement (a la Nokia here, or Microsoft with Danger). So what? It's not as though these bright minded founders simply evaporate into the atmosphere, forever lost to the future of human civilization. Now these guys are smarter, more experienced, and hopefully even better capitalized than when they started. If they're truly so bright, off to build a new idea they will go.

And if not, no big deal either, the world got what it could from them. Who's to say their idea/technology isn't in better hands now, held by a company with perhaps steadier revenues or a more mature infrastructure for distributing or selling the product?

There's value in independence. There's value in seeing things through with the long view. Absolutely no disagreement there.

But as long as you're not running an elaborate scam, how you make your money, who acquires your company and what they do with it afterward is none of my business. I hope you got a great deal and that you're in great shape for your next stab at the next big thing. (edit: if you end up making a dominant yet shitty product, though, I reserve the right to pine for the next big disruption.)
Yes, please complain (although be nice about it) :)

The design is continually in flux based on user feedback, but recently I've been stepping back to take a more holistic approach and really push it forward.

I will be working with a professional designer on this and the duck.co community (if anyone wants to participate). I hope this will become evident (and useful) within a few months from now. So by all means, give design feedback!
There is so much that can still be done as computational linguistics makes its way into how search queries are understood and how content is indexed and retrieved. Faster machines will make some things possible that were not (like instant search) soon!
As I'm developing on GAE, I'm wondering how reliable it is compared to other cloud services like Amazon EC2? I know they are quite different in nature, but I guess for reliability measurement it's fine to put them side by side.
I'm with you. If I was using Sequel, I'd call it Sequel. Alas, I'm using SQL, so I call it S-Q-L.
All the more reason to say 'sequel'. :D
Thanks kmavm. I love a good business page-turner (think 'Den of Thieves' and 'Barbarians at the Gate' as classics in this category)... but also appreciate books I can learn from so I can apply those lessons to my own business. Sounds like I might get something out of The Facebook Effect.
jordan (at) appoftheday (dot) com

EDIT: Fixed the contact form, thanks for pointing that out!
I think it went a little more smoothly than the Motorola 680x0 -> PowerPC transition. Notice the ppc and i386 directories that were in Mac OS X from the get go.
There are not that many organizations that are able to engineer and scale projects like internal networks, one would think that the navy has enough expertise to design and run a Cisco/Linux network for decades to come. Poor people at all levels doing the best job they can, only to have it squandered by their pathetic and corrupt leaders.
Reading the article, you can certainly argue that Dopplr didn't have the adoption curve they hoped for. They get money, they get to do something new (one founder's a partner at BERG London, who are pretty kick-ass).

The users? Sure. But it's a free service. Like the recent quote says, the users are the product. (http://www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent, top comment.)

DHH's hating the players when he should hate the game.
I think this is a great question to ask. I feel the same way, and unless I missed it in the comments so far, I don't see any specific examples that would give me pause.

I'm loving Rails so far, especially after being able to start from scratch and build a viable, working, commercial, revenue earning app in just a week. I'm sold, but scanning the horizon cautiously.
No magic bullet. Here's the process:

--All feedback gets pushed to my personal email inbox--gmail :)

--I try to do 0-inbox, i.e. keep my inbox at zero messages. This is usually not attainable, but means it functions essentially as a to-do list.

--I respond to all feedback ASAP (unless anonymous).

--If it is something simple that I know how to fix I try to do it that day.

--If it is something a bit more complicated, I respond, and put it on the bug queue. I'm currently using http://speckleapp.com for that, made by an HNer (http://elliottkember.com/).

--Every few days I set aside a large block of time to go through that bug queue. If easily fixable, I fix it and respond back: "Fixed!" If not, I put it in another category, and explain why it is a complex issue and how and when it might get fixed (or not).
Anyone know of a Kongregate-like website that accepts HTML5 games?

Kongregate looks like a fun way to try making a buck, but they only seem to support Flash and Shockwave, and I'm allergic to Adobe. :-P
May I help you? No thanks, just looking.