skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
10 Questions to Prepare for and Ace any Interview
Interviews are one portion of the working world that many people would rather avoid. Many individuals are nervous whenever they enter an interview situation. Preparing for the top interview questions allows those nervous feelings to be put at bay and avoid freezing up when a manager or interviewer asks you a question.
Because if you assembled my years worth of comments you could probably work out who I am, which would negate being anonymous.

Might seem a bit paranoid, but I have been anonymous and using aliases on the web since the mid-90s, which mostly came from being involved in the security/hacking scene. I do have an online profile with my real name as well, I just don't get them mixed up.

It also frees me to write what I really think, with no pressure of reputation etc. No karma baiting (couldn't care for karma - obviously).

There are advantages and disadvantages to being anonymous - it is up to each person to decide which suits them more.
Ask HN: Ideas for mobile marathon?
My plan is to build one same mobile application for iphone, android, windows phone 7, blackberry, (nokia) and (bada) and blog my experience with each of the platforms.

Any suggestions on what I should build?

One of my ideas was to build a mockup viewer for balsamiq.

I will be spending around next 1.5 months on this. Only constraint is it should not be a 3d game. Anything else is fine :)

For each of the platforms I will be using the tools and sdks for that platform ie no cross platform frameworks. I will periodically blog experiences with each platform and release the code under MIT license.

So let the brainstorming begun :)

p.s. If any startup wants to utilize my marathon to get their mobile app built, I would be more than happy to do it for free as long they are fine with taking over the project once I have released the v1
Rails security fixes 2.3.10, 3.0.1 released
Yahoo Is Down
The Internet’s second biggest portal is currently down. Maybe the service couldn’t take all the “Selling to AOL” speculation and just decided to take the day off?
The problem isn't any individual 3rd grader, the problem is the nearly society-wide acceptance of innumeracy, sometimes even approval of innumeracy. I think this will be one of the factors limiting (economic) growth in the future.
Looks like a DNS issue.
It may be cheaper if Novartis wins.

On the Complaint by Novartis against Webvention, http://thepriorart.typepad.com/the_prior_art/2010/gov.uscour..., on page 7, Novartis asks for relief from the court.

If Novartis wins, then Webvention would have to pay Novartis for the costs incurred for this action, attorneys fees, and whatever the court deems fit.

Novartis could have just paid the $80k, but it seems that Novartis does not have an issue with their own attorneys working on this case, winning it (that's the key), and then getting compensated for their work and time by Webvention.

That is how I am interpreting it.
I can say only one word: brilliant.

No, two: perfectly brilliant.

I wish all the best of luck so that you are able to cover the loan and have some left for a little champagne bath. Both the idea and the implementation deserve it. Almost makes me wish I had an iPhone ;-)
How did you know? ;-)
The best "About Me" page ever
That's not really a plastic way to look at it. One of the highest predictor of success (in both entrepreneurship and life) is "rolling with the punches". So if life handles you lemon? Make a tea, and get the best of it.

You're a twenty-something. Your larger window of opportunity to "get your own thing going" is a direct function of, well if not age, then exactly things like this that builds up experience, connections, and exposure to pressure-intensive situations, that you will wish you had whenever you decide to strike out on your own.

Despite what you read on HN, there is really no rush. So use this opportunity as a stepping stone upwards, wherever it leads.
I also do not understand his

"We actually have real _problems_ due to this in the kernel, where people use "off_t", and it's not easily printk'able across different architectures (we used to have this same problem with size_t)."

I see the problem with printk, but giving up the ability to typedef architecture-dependent types such as size_t because of it? The proper reaction, IMO, would have been to fix printk. Given that gcc already checks compatibility between format strings and arguments, it should not be that hard to add a special format character (say %?), and have the compiler replace it by a correct character for the argument passed.
By the Numbers: How Android Is Taking Over
Might you be willing to share your code/approach? How does it differ from Readability's algorithm?
I think there are some things about dealing with tangible products that make businesses harder.

Look back at the dot-com bust. There were a lot of businesses that started and failed because they didn't have experience in the distribution of physical product, etc. (Peapod and Pets.com come to mind.)

If you're making stuff, then you've potentially got more fixed costs than you do than if you're running a software business. Those fixed costs alone can put you under.
The cheeseburger would most likely be dangerous not because of read meat, but because of the processed wheat in the bun. Not sure about other ingredients.
It’s also possible that older couples in the new study come from a generation in which men and women generally knew less about each other to begin with than couples do today, Hertwig says.

How is this not the more-believable hypothesis to draw from the study's results?

Is it that it makes for a less interesting headline?
Twiddla looks nice!
The etherpad menu seems to be disabled for me though..and I cant even see the "play " button.
Could you share information like the approx size of your customer base, and typical use-cases of your service?

EDIT: My bad- hadnt noticed 'Browse' button to enable Etherpad menu.(Replay is missing though!) I was not able to open Hacker news on Twiddla, though some other sites are going through!
I'm in the UK, but this issue is very much a European one relative to the UK, as most things are these days. Albeit that your average man-in-the-street Brit tries to ignore the EU, or simply blame it.

Here, we are quite well organized. There are open rights groups, including the aptly named http://www.openrightsgroup.org/

We are also responsible for Wikileaks, even if its figurehead is Australian.

I write personally to my MP (Member of UK Parliament) and my MEPs (Members of European Parliament), and they know who I am, which tends to indicate that they don't receive a mass or correspondence. In fact, even my previous MP knows me, and I've only been back in the UK for six months. So an individual can have direct influence. Don't believe for a second that you can't.

The system of government is not a large and impenetrable as the media would have you believe. The media struggle to gain access because of what they are, and they rarely seek to influence, despite the bluster. Voters moved to get involved often have knowledge and insight, politicians are not blind to the usefulness of these things.

Next week, the EU debates the ACTA and thereafter will vote on it. (This was announced today.) ACTA has a direct influence on this topic. With many others, I will be writing and lobbying for votes. It's also happens that an influential figure in the EU Commission will be in my neighbourhood and I am hoping to get some of her time to present what I think are broadly held views in the tech community.

So, definitely organise as a group if you can, but don't underestimate the power of the individual. Just make your feelings known. The results never cease to surprise me.
List of Startup School Events
Is the dollar toast?
Word from inside is that it is not, but they can't reveal what it actually is.
You're technically correct -- the best kind of correct. The first thing I thought about the headline as I clicked it was "that's a rather irresponsible thing to say" because it's generally impossible to prove that a given thing is impossible without taking assumptions as fact. In this case the assumption was that the only kinds of cancer in question were the ones we already know about, which is certainly not true. That said, the probability of a correlation, let alone causation, between cell phones and cancer is effectively zero, and for now that has to be good enough.
No, we would do Scala if we hired Scala people.
Sure- I'll be there (I was at the meetup a couple months ago BTW)
The Military And PTSD: A Star Wars Guide
How about loser pays except in civil rights lawsuits?
Ask HN: Does weather affect stock market?
Hi,
I was wondering if there is a way to predict how the stock market is affected by the weather patterns. A good example could be weather in India can cause havoc with agriculture/food production in general. So in some sense it might be affected due to low exports.
thanks
anyone know the last time Yahoo did go down?
Edito, Markdown editor for iPad
"all over the web?"

Do people really use URL shorteners for anything other than Twitter? (and,perhaps Rickrolling?)

I suspect you could delete every url shortener database right now, and after a week nobody would even notice. I'm pretty sure the majority of shortener uses are for Twitter (for obvious reasons, and who reads tweets more than a few days old?) and for intentional hiding of destination urls (Oh look, I'm pretending to provide useful information, instead I'm linking you to a funny cat picture!). I find it hard to believe any information or knowledge hidden behind bit.ly links is of any real value in improving the human condition...

(but I've been seriously wrong about emergent behavior amongst the general public before... I fully expect to have someone point out phd research papers with all the citations done with bit.ly links now...)
Thanks- And apologies for the earlier cancellation.
Kevin Kelly's TED talk is well worth watching: http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_kelly_tells_technology_s_epic...
I asked the same question on both of the chargify threads but was unfortunately only met with deafening silence...

Edit: I started an "Ask HN" on this => http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1792799
They can probably just do a find and replace for the entire internet :-)

I remember seeing that bit.ly and maybe tr.im had an "open" approach to URLs and formed some sort of service where they allowed anyone to easily replicate their URL database? I can't find any trace if it though, so I might have the wrong services, but that might be a possible solution, companies like Twitter could utilise that to "rescue" a large number of links.
Folks looking for a practical place to start with Lisp should consider using the Emacs editor. I just recently went down this road myself. I am now a huge fan.

For about 6 months in 2006 I made Emacs my default editor. (Xemacs, actually). But I did not learn Lisp, at that time, and there are other IDE's out there that have a nicer GUI. So I started using simple text editors like Kate, and then sometimes NetBeans.

And yet, for years, I've been wanting to work with a fully scriptable editing environment. I often have the need to grab a large amount of text data, transform it in various way, and save the finished product. I kept thinking that at some point I would learn sed and awk, but I never got around to it. Usually, if I needed to make some quick changes to text, I'd write a one-off PHP script to do what I needed.

Then I got interested in Clojure, and through Clojure I got familiar with Lisp's syntax.

Then it occurred to me to go back to using Emacs. So now it is my main editor, again, my default programming environment. I use it for everything. And I've learned Emacs Lisp. Every single day, the combination of Emacs and Lisp helps me be more productive.

Way back in 1999, I started to learn PHP. One thing that made PHP easy to learn, back then, was that I did not need to compile it. I only needed to put it on a server running PHP, and that was most servers. It was an easy programming environment to step into.

Lisp is like that when you are working in Emacs. You can write a line of Lisp anywhere you like, then invoke it with a special key command. You can write quick one-off scripts to move text around inside a file. Or, if you like some code and want to reuse it, you can just save it as a function and put it in your .emacs file and then that function is available to you whenever you are running Emacs.

I have heard of Emacs greatness since at least 1999, and yet somehow, not till this year did I dive deep and learn both it and Lisp. I realize now, everything that people have said about Emacs over the years, it really is true - to have a programming environment where every element of the environment can be programmed and re-programmed using the language of the environment gives you an extremely powerful tool.

If anyone is looking for a simple place to get started with Lisp, I would say, simply, use Emacs. We all need to edit stuff, and so your work will provide you with a practical place to practice your Lisp, everyday.

Those of you who prefer some kind of GUI, look into Xemacs. It can be set up to respond to your mouse-clicks.

Also, if you'd like to learn about Emacs and Lisp, the book that Robert J Chassell wrote is a very good introduction:

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Programming-Emacs-Lisp/dp...
Proof that love makes you blind.
your personal blog @ http://blogs.balsamiq.com/peldi/ asked me for a login...screenshot here http://imgur.com/FInKN.jpg
Kissinger do this, too, apparently.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-15/l... - scroll down to the last paragraph on the page.
Why Is White House Against Freezing Foreclosures? Fed's Worthless MBS
I think I said that in the article :)
Show HN: too long; didn't read, the website.
Sorry, cannot reproduce, now.

The root domain was where I got the error. I can access two urls now, but I can't exclude the possibility I couldn't when I saw the error (my network is occasionally less-than-reliable)
Apple Cracks 10% PC Market Share For First Time in Decades
Yes, it's true, there's not a whole lot to it. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so I made it. I'm honestly not sure if enough people will find it useful for it to gain a community.

Feedback, criticism, questions, are welcome.
Unfortunately for the author, they can't see the wood for the trees. His first example shows a complete lack of understanding about how incident response at the Cyber level works, the problems of attribution and deterrence.

The comments about comparing cyberwarfare to conventional warfare again show that the author doesn't really understand what cyberwarfare is, and is instead getting (rightly) frustrated by the marketing spin being put out by the snake oil machine.

Cyberwarfare is a horrible dirty word in civilian life because it's hijacked by marketing people who think it sounds cool. The term 'Cyber' in a military context is standard shorthand for things happening in Cyberspace. Cyber Warfare is a covering term for 3 different areas - Computer Network Defence (CND), Computer Network Espionage (CNE) and Computer Network Attack (CNA). That's all it is. Nothing more. There's no magical vendor box to do it. There's no magical vendor box to stop it.

The reason people are getting all worried about Civil Defence in the Cyber arena is because the attacks are being targeted at industry, not the military forces. While the military and intelligence agencies of a given country may be prepared, the industrial complex is not and the gap between adversary and victim is so huge that it's not a level playing field, they're not in the same ball park, it's not even the same ball game.

Cyber Civil Defence shouldn't work for two reasons:

1. It encroaches on civil liberties in a manner that is genuinely open to abuse.

2. It's too much for too few people to take on.

That's the only real reasons I can see, unless anyone has any more.

If anyone in the US wants to know what's really going on in their country, this is probably the best place to start:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5geX8ZAvu4&p=A2E99F5EE69...
One thing I took away from my SICP experience was the idea that it is languages/abstractions all the way down. You can play in a super high level language like Lisp, or you can mold silicon. Somewhere you have to choose your level of abstraction.

If I am teaching somebody how to think about an algorithm like sorting an array, worrying about memory allocations is tangential, an inconvenient burden C delivers unto us. If I want to teach them about working with memory, pointers, and so forth, C is an excellent language for the job.

A crazy thing is happening here when we look down upon beginners who want something that feels like a natural language. Why CAN'T we simply say, "I want an app that opens two windows: one with a list of my music files, and the other with cassette controls. Make it so."? Someone could develop a language that does this; AppleTalk, for example, has some crazy high-level stuff similar to this.

We have been mentally shackled by our languages. We think in them. It is hubris to suggest that this the canonical way to think when programming, that, for example, "i = i + 1" is the idiom for incrementing a variable.

I do believe, to be truly effective in our line of work, that our beginners must eventually come to an understanding of the platform upon which they develop. They must understand memory concepts. They must understand timing concepts. They must understand multiprocessing concepts.

But there is no reason to ram C down some poor soul's throat as a first experience. What a terrible language for teaching beginners, full of syntax and slopped-together features. And what a great language to teach somebody in order to prepare them for the industry.
Thanks so much for the encouragemnt!
That calculator sharing thing seems to me like instacalc.com (great tool by the way)
An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp is also available for free from the author's website:

http://www.rattlesnake.com/emacs-lisp-intro.html
When your restaurant's review has your mom crying
FTA: "A common fear about loser-pays is that the side who loses a routine dispute will get handed a bill for 10,000 hours from Cravath, Swaine & Moore. But European courts are well aware of the danger that successful litigants will overinvest in their cases and gold-plate their fee requests. They carefully control the process to prevent that danger, giving the losing side a full chance to dispute a fee award, requiring that work be reasonable and necessary, providing that elite lawyer rates not be paid if a Main Street lawyer could have done the job, and so forth."

"One way Europeans have adapted to the residual risks of loser-pays has been through personal legal expense insurance, which covers a variety of legal risks including that of finding oneself a plaintiff in a lawsuit. The aggrieved party takes his case to his insurer, which, if it finds the case strong, provides a lawyer and absorbs the risk of owing the opponent a fee....If the insurer screens cases carefully, it will collect more in fees for its lawyer than it will pay to winning opponents."

I don't know if these claims are true, having no experience with European legal systems. If true, they would appear to address your criticisms.
So, the strongest and most common objection against the English rule is that it would prevent the poor from suing even if they had a good case; they just couldn't afford a 10% chance of owing thousands of dollars. I am very sympathetic to this objection.

But can't this be (mostly) solved by having the lawyers take on the risk?

Already, lawyers will offer to work for free unless the plaintiff wins. ("You pay nothing unless we recover on your behalf.") That is, they risk their own time--but will do so only if they think there is a good case. This makes sense because it is the lawyers, not the plaintiffs, who are best able to assess the likelihood of winning.

So then couldn't lawyers also take on the risk of paying fees if the litigation is unsuccessful? Is this legal in the US or elsewhere? Is it done?

(Also, I think I heard somewhere about a guy who couldn't afford to sue a large company which stole his invention. Apparently, he had an IPO to offer stock in the lawsuit. He won, and both he and his investors were paid. Anyone remember this or have a link?)
Feed bundle for food lovers
Cool and potentially brilliant as my cousin mentioned APA and he understands that system well. I just recall that there are 500,000 odd members in the usa paying monthly fees.
I'll pass this along to him. They are currently in New York prepping for the USA Open. If you are in New York or wherever the USA open is, then get in maybe you can meet them!

I initially suggested 2 things to him
1. A very very simple / addictive app
2. Go for the big picture - an app where there are ladders/leagues connected all the way to the major players i.e. you keep score in local pool halls and the best play the best till they then meet these top players.. That would involve a well organised and funded company (probably)

I'll forward this to him and see what he thinks.
Ask HN: Does chargify's pricing make sense to you?
http://chargify.com/pricing-and-signup/

Start - 500 customers - ~$100/mo - ~20 cents per customer

Launch - 10 customers - $39 - $3.90 per customer

Why are they gouging the little guy's so much? They aren't the only ones that do this either. I know there's support costs and such, but there has to be a more sensible model, like amazon web services'. As customers utilize more units (i.e. storage) each unit costs less.

I'd much rather pay for what I'm using than getting something for free or feeling ripped off. What are your thoughts?
Oh, and "fixing it in the DNS or browser" is just wrong wrong wrong.

Are you _really_ suggesting that IANA or Microsoft/Mozilla/Apple/Google ought to be allowed to "hijack" some of Libya's .ly domain space, just to prop up the flawed business model of some <soundfx accent='Arrington'>dipshit little company</soundfx> ???

That way lies madness...
It's not as simple as that.

Firstly, money isn't everything for most people. Enterprise work can be interesting and rewarding, because you deal with problems that are quite different to the consumer space. If you can escape the toxic situations somehow, that is enough for many people

Secondly, enterprise work can be rewarding financially. Contract rates of $70-$150/hour mean that you make pretty decent money very reliably. Those rates let you hire pretty talented people, and if you can firewall them off from the wider issues in the company you can do pretty good work.