skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why not spend a couple days becoming proficient hacking together a couple OS projects (or contributions) to show your proficiency (hint: the majority of Rails devs I know don't have any OS work to show)? I guarantee this will trump all the "X years experience" requirements and give you a legit shot at all these jobs.

That's a great suggestion. But why does no one put that in the requirements? "Fill this arbitrary criteria -OR- show us that you're a good programmer."

There's even a problem there in that if you've been working with a security firm or just in internal software for long enough, it can be impossible to show all the amazing shit you've done. Everything is "For an extra-good chance at getting hired, show us your GitHub and StackOverflow presence." If we want to get paid, it seems we first have to be willing to work for free. For those of us who have been out of college for a few years, are paying back $60K in debts, and have settled into a soul-sucking tech job that leaves you wanting to nap in the sun by the time you get home, it can be hard to break out of the cycle.

What I'm really saying is that "the Ruby jobs out there" should in actuality be "the programming jobs out there. Oh, and we happen to use Ruby, but since you clearly understand analogous languages, that shouldn't be an issue."
I really enjoyed the Air traffic controller interview..
If this project succeeds and brings classical music to a wider audience, demand for the real thing, live, being there will mean orchestras get more work.
'Microsoft' or 'Adobe' part isn't that irrelevant - they've successfully lobbied the Russian authorities for the system of enforcement through unscheduled police "inspection" raids without probable cause. One can't be deemed innocent when he knowingly engages in collaboration with devil to obtain benefits of its powers.
Classical music has always been cheap. Or at least, you could usually find a cheap recording of a piece, instead of going for a big-name orchestra.

Most people don't care, sure. But there have been examples of giving away free books to cause excitement and arouse interest. Classical music is not hugely popular nowadays, but this might help more people hear it and enjoy it, getting them to the place where they do want several recordings of the same piece.

Then again, this is all hypothetical. I doubt anyone can predict what effect this actually has.

Edit: One last point. You can hear almost any piece nowadays with a quick Youtube search, and that includes any quality recording you want. For people just looking to hear a piece quickly, I doubt Museopen will have anywhere near the effect that Youtube already has.
Blade Runner holds up well EXCEPT...phone booths? That really makes me pause when I've watched it in recent years, no one has a phone. The one thing Blade Runner got wrong, but understandable considering when it came out.
Those are not the kind of bugs I'm used to searching for...
That greatly depends on the nature of the original data. Some forms of data are already compressed, such as images. Most websites apply gzip or DEFLATE (gzip is built on DEFLATE) compression serverside if your browser indicates it understands it.
Me too, I think Airon is a great person. It was a great pleasure to interview him.
It's intended to provide people information so they might find a suitable co-founder based on skills wanted, common interests etc. It's a great tool to use. The issue is with both emailing everyone on the list and with putting everyone in the TO instead of BCC.

I've got about tons of emails about this all day which are people saying "please remove me". I wouldn't be a fit for your work anyways, but even if I was, I would have changed my mind by now.
This is one of those things that sounds true, but falls apart on further inspection. Aren't you allowed to genuinely like your language or tools?

Yes, plenty of people genuinely like their languages and tools. However every language and tool has warts. You simply cannot build something that complex without either making mistakes that you can't reverse, or else making trade-offs that aren't going to fit someone else's use case. Plus no language or tool can fit every good idea, so it is in the nature of the beast that there are good ideas that simply didn't make it in.

If you have not found those things yet, then you don't know your language and tools that well. Or else you don't know what is possible with other languages and tools. (That is the essence of the blub paradox - see http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html for a detailed explanation.) Either way your opinion on how your language and tools compare with others is useless to more experienced people.
No they can't http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbs-Merrill_Co._v._Straus

The interesting one is - what if Ford claimed you only licensed the software in your car and couldn't sell it used?
The answers are not important. We learn so we can ask better questions.
I just listened to a piece I like (a Chopin polonaise) and the quality isn't great.

This is a great idea though, and I hope the money helps them make many great recordings in the future.
Let's see. . . cooperative multitasking! No, resource forks! Oh, better: the lack of a minimize!

Really, that's easy: Apple Platinum (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appearance_Manager). I know, it's heresy! Still, I like the elegant simplicity of Apple Platinum. The color is brighter than the Windows grey; I like the horizontal pin-striping in the title bar; I like the purple accents which give it a soft, classy feel (rather than a more contrast-y feel) and it feels easier on my eyes than, say, Windows; I like the simplicity of the controls (such as the simple two black horizontal lines for the "shade-up" function) combined with the soft gradient of the square control. I think it made great use of space as well. The title bar wasn't big as is the current trend (damn kids wasting my pixels).

I'm also just not the biggest fan of the transparent movement. I don't find that it increases my usability, but rather detracts from it by making things fuzzy. For example, the OS X menu (today) is mostly opaque - you can't read anything behind it. However, the little transparency makes it harder to read as there's fuzzy changes behind where you're trying to read. Windows Aero is the worst. Those transparent windows with the changing fuzzyness depending on how you move them - yikes! I also don't like that the menu is white. Contrast is good, but I prefer black on platinum to black on white for my eyes.

There's even a little part of me that misses pixel-based icons. Having a set canvas to work with meant that authors tried to pack good meaning into small space. Now, you're expected to waste lots of pixels. Yeah, I like my screen real-estate.

Now, nothing I've said is objective at all. It's just my aesthetic. OS X, as time has gone on, has gotten closer to my aesthetic. Some of the more garish things have left, but the horizontal pin-stripes have also left. I don't want to make this sound like I don't think OS X is nice to look at - it is. But there's a part of me that misses the simple look of OS 9 and BeOS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BeOS_Desktop.png) which had an elegance about them. Apple has done wonderful things with the OS X interface and I don't want to sound negative about OS X (plus, at least half of this is nostalgia talking). It's wonderful and so much better and I'm really happy with it.
I'm a little curious about this:

>As a general rule, women lose interest once they know the other person is interested in them.

If a girl and a boy crush on each other, and the girl gets told and loses interest, the boy is in a worse position than before. Do you feel the uncertainty of "does he know I like him back?" will help keep her interested?

When you sign up it doesn't ask for permission to access relationship status. Does that mean you're not keeping track of your "success rate"?
> "Of course he said what Rajiv wanted to hear! That's what he does for a living!"

In my mind, that marks out a bad salesman. Telling people what they want to hear is not sales. At best, it's inept and at worst it's deceiving. Simply put, you shouldn't sell something you don't have.[1]

[1] If sales people are 'selling' before a product is finished then it should be clear that it's the vision they're pedalling, not the product.
And leading to 1000s of companies having to rewrite all their asset registers and the IRS claim lots of depreciated write downs.
I have decided not to store type pointers directly in the Fexl arena. Instead, I will use a type number, which will be an integer offset into a static array of function pointers in the C program.

That way I could use a memory-mapped array for the arena, making it suitable as a persistent state for a Fexl computation, which could easily be stopped and resumed.

This also avoids the need for a special "show" function pointer in a type structure. Instead, the show functions could be stored in a parallel array of function pointers -- again, indexed by type number.
It graphed over 30,000 conversations from my inbox. Impressive for a chrome extension.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/4braham/4987527717/

[edit] It would be around 60k if I included my old address as well.
I'm a semi-professional classical musician, and while I think this is an interesting idea I think it's important to know what this is and what it is not.

This is a great way to be able to hear a performance of a recognizable melody. It serves the same purpose that sound clips in an encyclopedia serve: it lets you hear an example of the piece. And if you're creating a commercial where you want the audience to hear a piece they recognize, this will work just fine.

But this isn't something that would ever be taken seriously by real musicians, at least in its current form. Sure, there might be some legitimately good performances in there (especially if you're hiring the London Symphony Orchestra). But a lot of it is clearly quite amateur -- like the recording I found of Bach's First Cello Suite was performed on a piano! -- and no one wants to wade through a bunch of low-quality stuff to find the good stuff. And the people who are good don't want to be associated with the low-quality stuff.

Musicians fill their record libraries with names they recognize, based on other good work that artist or ensemble has done. There is such a big variation between the best recordings and the worst recordings that it's always a better bet to get recordings of names you know.
Virtually nowhere compares to Zurich in this regard. I have never seen a place that was so efficient and well run in my life. If there wasn't such a nasty anti-foreigner sentiment I would jump to move there.
I think his version of "better cab service" is different than yours. You think of better cab service as being able to walk outside and immediately catch one. He thinks of better cab service as easily summoning one from his smartphone. (Seems like a very SF-esque solution to the problem, no?)
You do not mass email people with a BCC to find a cofounder. You find someone you like individually and write a response to them based on the strengths in them that you saw.

Finding a co-founder should be treated with as much care as dating.

Sending spam to me via the cofounder list makes your idea, company, and any/all entities you so much as breathe on get the instant waste basket.

I don't know what's happened since 2000 to make people believe spam is somehow acceptable when there's an individual rubber-stamped on the front of it. Being a "startup" doesn't excuse spam either.

Let alone the efficacy of it.

This is like mass emailing women on craigslist trying to get an easy lay, except being stupid enough to mass-email them all at once instead of serially, and then they get into a reply-all mess.

There is a lack of consideration and ignorance present at every possible dimension of what you did that I don't begin to have time or patience to enumerate here.

Very bad form, the only good thing you could've done is "Sorry, I boned up, won't happen again.", instead you act like an adolescent and try to defend your rude behavior.

I doubt I'm the only person who got emailed who feels this way. Do I need to publish the reply-all furor in this thread to demonstrate that I'm not alone in being disturbed by this or are you going to apologize?

Note: this isn't the first time someone's made this mistake, just the first time they've had the cajones to follow it up with

1. A post on HN

2. Trying to defend their spam in a comment reply

As for removing my information, most people are sufficiently socially aware enough to send me a personal email. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't stop the propagation of my personal information as there are many web apps and clones of that info all over the internet that I have zero control over.

You might as well tell EA to go pull all the pirated copies of their software.
very interesting -- i love reading about decision-making science and how games also parrallel the process.

it's why gary kasparov published a book called "how life imitates chess: making the right moves, from the board to the boardroom." and probably why buffett and bill gates are both obsessed with contract bridge.

reading this article is also very interesting in light of the recent New Yorker article profiling Zuckerberg, in which it mentioned "Ender's Game" as being the only book listed on his facebook profile. the plot of the novel is in sync with this Wired article.
You're right, not BCC'ing was a mistake.
> ...funnily most of it has reverted back

What are you talking about? The pinstripes date all the way back to System 1. The modern OS X looks different from 10.0 but a lot more like 10.0 than like System 9.
1. It's not over yet.

2. The facts in this case are not insignificant: An Autodesk customer upgraded its installation, paying a heavily-discounted price (~87% discount) for copies of the new version. It then sold its copies of the old version to the "reseller," along with a handwritten copy of the license codes. See the court's recital of the facts at PDF page 6 of http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2010/09/10/09.... I wonder how many HN readers would want their customers doing that?
This quote from the article seems especially promising: "[A]n open-source music theory textbook is in the work, for instance." Would love to read that when it's made.
Well said. I think something can also be 'difficult' for someone because it's not worth their time, even if it's not technically challenging.
I think S-Q-L gets clunky with names like Microsoft SQL Server.
@alnayyir

Im defending that you accused me of scraping emails from somewhere. I emailed most of the list because I'm not looking for any specific type of help, and its not like people are mentioning classical music interests in the bios. I need technical and business people.
Heh, I understand the Blub paradox quite well. And, as I acknowledged, everything has design tradeoffs or even mistakes. Just because there are design tradeoffs or warts, doesn't mean they rise to the level of active dislike.

For instance, most implementations of Ruby are relatively slow. Do I care? Generally, no ... certainly not enough to say it's something I "dislike." It's entirely possible to build tons of web apps (for example) and never bump against any language "mistakes" or "tradeoffs" that are relevant.
I was truly not prepared for the seismic ups and downs of start-up life. On one day everything can be working for you -- big customers rolling in, order volume increasing, traffic building; but on other days (or sometimes rows of days) you see nothing, and question your strategies, or make minor adjustments to fix what you perceive to be deficient in your execution. Facing the markets, especially in the beginning, is gut wrenching, but you build up a tolerance, and move forward. You eventually learn to roll with the punches, to borrow the analogy.

Somewhat agree with the VC in-crowd idea; I mean you have to have some sort of network setup, or know someone at least that has access to available capital. The easiest thing is to move to the Valley, but there are opportunities elsewhere. I decided to stay in my home area of Tampa to take advantage of connections here, and it has gone well. But I’d say if you didn’t have any channels open at all, you have to consider moving where the action is.
Avenues Topolo Everest Graham Elliot Bonsoiree Trotters Nomades Tru mk Nomi Vie... is this even an argument worth dignifying?
So you can't type sdf in your code?
Lists are hashes on acid. The default return value of indexing in is NULL. That's a weird semantic for a list, but maybe not so much a hash. The weird part is that if you explicitly assign null to an element of the list, it deletes the element. That's particularly weird because the list has knows all the elements in it, so it's not like it can't tell the difference between a value that has been set to NULL and a value that has never been set.
See http://gist.github.com/578110 for a little transcript.
New Trend? Energy Generation from Subway Systems
I agree, I commented elsewhere that the first piece I listened to was very low-quality. But by raising enough money to hire the London Symphony Orchestra, they can conceivably move up to having lots of quality music.

One suggestion for museopen: like haberman says, a big problem is "wading through" the low quality recording. So when you start to record higher quality orchestras, make it very easy to tell between the "good quality" recordings and the cheap recordings.
You can also use Ctrl-C to get out of insert mode.
But thats entirely the point, we arent trying to replace those recordings. Otherwise we really would be threatening commercial viability.

We want open recordings that people can use and not be sued for sharing, and this project is attempting to make them as decent as possible.
I'm going to make an instant instant searcher - it instantly searches for searches that instantly search.
One thing that continues to impress me is how much bigger than popular belief Vim is. There is a plethora of options you can set in your vimrc file (just now I found out about wildignore, and I'm kind of a Vim addict) and there are fucking lot of commands (try [I ), and that's not considering Ex mode.

Customization is way easier than in Emacs, you just unzip an archive in your .vim dir and (99% of the time) it works. I have plugins that do everything I've seen in Emacs that has to do with code, and then some.

Vim is no more the tiny start-quick-edit-close editor that it used to be.

Edit: I don't want to start a holy war here. Emacs is great, and I in fact have it opened right now. It's just that it's supposed to be able to do amazing stuff that Vim can't, I'm saying that that's probably still true, but to a way lesser level than before.
Chinese Remake the ‘Made in Italy’ Fashion Label
Consider it a reverse screening function. The worthwhile employers won't give much weight to what you know[1], they'll be more concerned about your ability to think and learn. I've gotten several jobs at places using a language/platform I didn't know because I proved I could think and learn what was necessary. I don't think you'd be happy at places that are busy drinking the kool-aid of one framework or language.

Edit:
[1]What languages/frameworks you know.
Disney Hates On HTML5
You mean to say "No they couldn't, until the courts decided to revisit the issue", which is exactly what is happening now.
It is fast on my fiber optic connection.
And Robert Gentleman has always been one of the strongest proponents of reproducible research, which includes being able to create packages that can be shared and freely distributed.
I would go so far as to say it was more painful for the last PPC buyers than it was for the first Intel buyers.
I can see that you're providing a prediction, and it was actually spot on accurate for my search term very early on ("golden retriever"). How do I actually have it use that term?
I agree but its a balance, if you want to use Mendelssohn's Italian symphony for an animation, bad or not, you NEED something free. This happened to an animator entering a contest. Its not a perfect recording, but it did the job and is a great example of what we do:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvUweYbXY9I&feature=playe...
Thanks, coffee.
The facts of the case are that software is being Sold, with a capital S, at retail stores in exactly the same manner as all sorts of goods are sold, and that in some fine print which is totally unavailable to the purchaser at the time of purchase, the software creator is then retroactively revising the agreement to be only a time-limited, restricted lease rather than a sale..... and the courts are buying that argument.
I don't know, 20 seems rather high. Maybe 3?
> But there's a part of me that misses the simple look of OS 9 and BeOS

Have you given HaikuOS any time ?
Best Career Advice from Programmers
I know, who puts bananas in the refrigerator? Ridiculous.
Yes, we are going to publish the book once finished. You will still be able to read it online in HTML tho.
From the original NYT report "Interviews and a review of law enforcement documents show that in recent cases, Microsoft lawyers made statements describing the company as a victim and arguing that criminal charges should be pursued." (note that Baikal Wave says it purchased and installed legal Microsoft software)

In another section 'In southwestern Russia, the Interior Ministry declared in an official document that its investigation of a human rights advocate for software piracy was begun "based on an application" from a lawyer for Microsoft.'

Microsoft corporate has ignored complaints about this for months (yesterday's NYT report has made them change their policy)

Why do you describe concerns as "kneejerky misdirected anger at Microsoft".

Do you consider Microsoft's actions as ethical (or not an obstruction of justice) ?

[edit: to answer pvg's follow-up, in this context, by "obstruction of justice" I'm referring to Microsoft helping prosecutors commit a crime or Microsoft interfering with "proper" operations of a court]
You're correct, parent misspoke. It's not tyranny of the majority.

It's market failure, which has different causes and solutions but is just as insidious.
It seems to be missing some of the apps that I can find from the itunes store. We Rule isn't showing up. While another of the We series is.

I like the design a lot simple, fast, and calming.
Doesn't matter. If the other person gets a message then it has already stuck.

Plus, think long term: if people feel that this service can be abused, then they're not gonna trust it very much.

"Oh, it says this girls has a crush on me, but I wonder if she really does? or was she just fooling around with the app?"
Lodge: HTTP-to-Syslog Proxy w/node.js
The App Store Gets Instantized
It's worth noting that when you submit your resume/cover-letter/application for a job, it goes to 1 of 2 people. It either goes to some administrative assistant whose sole job is to filter through all the resumes that don't meet some arbitrary requirement (simply a function to arbitrarily cut down the number of resumes they actually have to read). Or it goes directly to the executive hiring for the position. If your resume makes it to this person, pretty much nothing is set in stone (including their own requirements).

Case in point, when I first graduated from college, I landed an engineering job that had "10 years industry experience" as a hard requirement.
How is that different? Either way, we have someone wishing for a handicap. Just because one can actually fulfill his wishes while the other can't is immaterial; in either situation, we have someone brainwashed by media/society/interwebs/himself to think those afflicted are better off than he is.
These guys spammed me (and another hundred or so HN members) this morning in a very annoying way.
Although I've got "instant overload" too this is the first of the instant apps with a built in, scalable business model - each of the links on this site is iTunes / linksynergy affiliate enabled - that's truly smart :)