skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gloating about your notebook of choice just makes you an asshole. I don't want to swap out the components in my notebook every week, that's not a useful feature for me. It's objective!

Instead of lame invisible magic scrolling areas on the side, what if I want a large trackpad with lots of gestures, 2-finger scrolling & right-click? Or a slot loading DVD drive instead of a shitty tray one? Backlit keyboard? Magnet based power adapter so the dog doesn't drag my notebook off the table? LED battery life indicator on the side? 1" thickness? 5-8 hours battery life? Or just want OS X? And yes it looks good.

If you don't care about those things that's fine. I think it's even worth sacrificing an eSATA port even though I'd like one. Different people are willing to make different compromises.

As everyone says the CPU, memory and disks are the same now. Only difference is software and other hardware features. I don't understand why people have a mental block about looking at Apple's hardware objectively. "It looks good so it's clearly not meant to be useful!" ... wtf?

Let me guess, the Vaio Z isn't useful either because it looks good and doesn't have a swappable SATA bay. Even though you can get it w/ dual SSDs and a Core i7. Give me a break.
Am i misreading the article? Is the suggestion that 9/11 was a false-flag operation in so far as some actors high in the intelligence chain of command ALLOWED a very real cell of terrorists to carry out their mission by suppressing their subordinates?

It's easy to get that from your summary, but the article itself still skirts around saying this explicitly.
To save an extra click, basically the only information in the stack overflow answer is: see http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/
I don't care about this because I don't build my own computers anymore. Almost no one builds their own cars (hot rodders aside). Even fewer build their own laptops, and I've never heard of anyone building their own cell phone. So if a company can make the whole device that I buy smaller, faster, more reliable, easier to use, etc., that's going to be something I'll pay for. I honestly don't care at all how they do it, as long as it makes the device better by the standard I just enumerated.

You can talk about how open something is until you're blue in the face, and that has nothing to do with whether most users will want it or not. Walk into an Apple store and count how many customers ask about what kind of RAM is in the white plastic MacBook they're about about to buy, or about Mac OS X's POSIX compliance, or even how to bring up a shell. The number you come up with will average close to zero. What's more, this isn't a bad thing!
Thanks. Would I have to redesign everything to make it look larger as a whole?
Too bad its for that shitty device.
The problem I constantly find with all IE versions is that they render fonts much bigger than other browsers, so they constantly make things crowded and cause items (e.g. the About button on that screen shot) fall to the next time.

It's immensely frustrating.
Never in the history of American business has one industry done so much to guarantee its own failure.

Don't know about that one. Newspapers and the big 3 auto makers did potent things to themselves to put themselves out of business.
Although you could patent a step in the manufacturing process or an improvement in the formula.
That was the classic Edison stratergy for movie film, there were too many people with a claim to having invented film - so he patented the sprocket holes.

Although in the US you could patent the concept of a particular type of clothing being made from polartec, or even a method of selling it.
The article does not mention whether those were in paper format or digital. It mentioned student notes so I would think it to be more likely that they were in the former format. As such, except for actually posting the documents, I can not see how they can be leaked.

That is very different from the download and send, which protects anonymity much more I would think perhaps, as well as being more convenient.

To address the point of the parent, I do not think Wikileaks chooses which documents to leaks. It is more a supply thing rather than someone sitting on a pile of documents sifting through them to see which serves their own political agenda if they were leaked.

Though I hardly know anything of wikileaks, the wiki part in the leaks sort of suggests that it is kind of like wikipeia, so that anyone can leak whatever they want straight away I guess without going through some sort of filtering system.
Claiming it's a "simple JQuery plugin" is disingenuous at best. The critical component is Flash. JQuery is merely the wrapper around it. Without Flash, the JavaScript is worthless, and the application cannot work.
E-books are more useful to me than paper books, not less.

The quality of not taking up space and needing to be physically discarded when they are obsolete is indeed worth something!
This was due to the fact that we're targeting a lot of platforms - many of which may not be able to support those elements. For the first alpha we wanted to pick something that would absolutely work - we can absolutely re-examine using those elements, though.
1 word. BETA.
Fucking fanboys are really lame.
Those skills are not specifically for corporate jobs by the way. A typical MS shops (regardless what you build) will require at least .NET 2.0/3.5 with ASP.NET (not even MVC), WPF, WCF, WWF, Silverlight, and SQL-Server. A typical Java shops would require you to know J2EE, Servlet, JSP, Tomcat/Websphere/JBoss, Maven/Ant, JUnit, XML (with some would ask of GWT experience).

But a couple days ago I told myself to ignore the rat race. I then bought a Linux book specializing in command-line, a Vim book, and a Rails 3 book. (Why Rails? um, why not? it's better than those corporate tools). I don't care if I have to learn PHP. As ugly as it is, it's still better than using .NET tools (regardless if it's ASP.NET MVC or not).

C# could be a better language, but I just want to use light-weight tools (even if it means I have to learn many-many tools). No more heavy weight tools.

I noticed that the people who choose the lightweight path (C/C++, or LAMP/RoR) seems to be able to focus on what matters the most: learning skills that can last longer than .NET version 2.0.
HTML5 vs. Flash is a very short-sighted argument. The real fight is mobile where it's yet to even be proven Flash is viable. Those native platforms are Objective C, Java, .NET, Unity etc... and those platforms are strong and the vendors are building enormous revenue streams developers can tap straight into by filling out some paperwork.

As business models emerge and if the technical barriers erode down to something players will accept HTML5 will probably end up coexisting alongside Flash games on major portals. SPIL Games is very committed to that outcome and doing what they can to propel it onto mobile devices through http://www.html5contest.com. I've got my HTML5 api almost sorted out which will provide JavaScript games some pretty cool tools they can build on top of.

But if it's going to actually win then it needs to conquer iOS or Android. The rest will fall from that because that's where the Angry Birds and Doodle Jump sized success stories are coming from, not Flash where there's just a phenomenally big audience that's not monetized as effectively (excluding social which is so hyper-competitive the platform you build on is the least important decision you'll make).
The term for this is "anchoring," and some of the most interesting work on it I've read is in Dan Ariely's book _Predictably Irrational_. He shows that a) no one actually knows how much they should pay for anything until b) they get some kind of reference for it, which becomes an anchor.

He tells an entertaining story about running an experiment in some of his classes: he asks one group of classes how much they would pay to hear him read poetry and asks another how much they would pay to not hear him read poetry. Ariely notes that reading poetry is probably, how shall we say, not among his greatest strengths. The classes primed to pay pay; the ones primed not to, don't.

His experiments do, BTW, get more sophisticated than that, but I'm not at home right now.

People have "anchor" prices for books based on hardcover and softcover. Many don't realize that physical printing and distribution costs something like 10 – 15% of a book, and eBooks are not 0% by comparison. So you get lots of stuff like the OP.
That's true, but in an all-ebook model you'd need to price your product to cover those costs too.

My point was that those costs don't change, but they're frequently not considered when consumers are thinking about the 'cost' of what they're buying and the perceived cost impacts on people's perceived value for some items.

Arguing that pricing your product based on its cost is mad doesn't really change that consumers feel that digital downloads should be priced less than physical media versions, even if the digital download has greater utility.
I'm a total novice but I've been meaning to publish an ebook. How do we get a ISBN? Moreover, what are good websites to market your ebook? Any other good advice on selling ebooks? Apprecaite your help in advance.
Just curious, is there some sort of GNU for patents? If I were going to not patent my invention I'd want some way to make sure nobody else came along, filed for some trivially new derivation, and then managed to extract most of the value of the original invention.

Maybe some central licensing organization that would license patents for free as long as the licensees agreed to some GNU-like terms... or is this not an issue in patent law?
You're never going to have 100% test coverage. Any complex system is going to have bugs. It's pretty much impossible to write even a small library without bugs, let alone huge websites with the complexity of Facebook or Google.

Look at cryptographic libraries. Often they've been gone over line-by-line by hundreds of experts in the field, have extensive testing both unit and field. Yet bugs still get found in them.
I don't believe in DRM; I would just have liked a way to attach personal information to the person's e-book to discourage them. I neither will nor can't prevent them from spreading them, but I can try to ask them nicely and make them think twice.

I think most of my general concerns have been answered, so in the spirit of proper interview etiquette: Is there something important I haven't asked you?

Is there anything to consider with e-books that no one thinks of?
This is simple to explain, Facebook isn't anywhere close to its revenue potential, many people think it has the capacity to make Google type money as brand advertising moves online. If you look at their stock price in that light its not overvalued at all. Google's 2004 P/E was around 100, even in 2008 it was 46.

EDIT: oops, I pulled revenue not earnings. Its irrelevant in any case. By the time Facebook IPOs their earnings should be on par with Google's IPO earnings.
This suggests an interesting reformulation of the original query:

Would you rather have a great-grandfather who made $70k/year in 1900, or a great-grandfather who made $70k/yr in 2010?
Delivering Happiness LLC – A Life Of Its Own
Ebooks may be more useful, but they are also much more ephemeral and fragile than a physical copy.

I just convert the ones I want to keep to ePub and put them into Dropbox. Then they are backed up and instantly available to all my machines as well as being backed up by my computer's normal backup mechanism.
From Prototype to Community: Forrst Founder Kyle Bragger Shares His Path
I hate to say this, but it seems common to compare price based on the hardware alone. Good software and good design cost money too. A lot of money. You pay for the development, testing, and design of all the prototypes discarded before the one you get.

Android phone vendors save a lot on the development of the system because Google and many others paid for it. And frankly, based on the make of the majority of Android phones, I don't think they spend as much as Apple on the design part either. That might explain the 20~30% "premium". You get what you paid for.
>"Had connections with a foreign terrorist group" could be anything. And which foreign intelligence service? Britain? Israel? South Africa? Mexico?<

French authorities began monitoring Moussaoui in 1996 when they observed him with Islamic extremists in London. In 1998, he attended the Khalden training camp in Afghanistan, allegedly returning the next year as well. In September 2000, he visited Malaysia and stayed in a condominium owned by Yazid Sufaat who, in October 2000, signed letters identifying Moussaoui as a representative of his company. Two of the September 11 hijackers lived in the same condominium in January 2000. Jemaah Islamiah leader Riduan Ismauddin sent cohort Yazid Sufaat to provide Moussaoui with $35,000 and travel documents in Malaysia in October.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zacarias_Moussaoui#Militant_tra...
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He is an idiot which is why he has gone bankrupt. As much as people here do not like patents because they have some negative side effects, on balance it is only fair that the inventor benefits from his invention. If the inventor is a scientist, he can license his invention to the men of business. Giving it free for all does no one good. That is not how we have advanced to this day and age. Laws have reason. They are made by people of reason. Not congress mind you, but the very rational and experienced judges who are imminently familiar with the intricacies of every day circumstances.

If a man who invents something beneficial ends bankrupt is to be applauded is anything but fair.
It aren't individuals that purchase such books, but rather universities, companies and research institutions.
Yes, but most high growth publicly traded companies trade at 20-40x earnings (profits).

Now Facebook has grown tremendously year over year, but this growth has to stop. They already claim 500M active users which is about 1/12th the world's population so their user base is really close to some maximum (3B?). How much higher can their profits actually go in order to match their current valuation?
So by your estimation Google is also overpriced? Google's first year as a public company their P/E was around 100 ($193.85 at $2.07EPS), if Facebook IPOs at 33x their stock is a bargain in comparison (if you believe FB has the revenue growth potential of Google, as many do)

EDIT: oops, I pulled revenue not earnings. Its irrelevant in any case. By the time Facebook IPOs their earnings should be on par with Google's IPO earnings.
I wonder if Android is competing more with the iPhone or with the generic phones that aren't branded anything in particular.

Remember those graphs of user's current phones related to the next phone they bought? Apple users were happy to continue with Apple, and even BB users wanted iphones.
I feel that Google has been taken for a ride by Motorola, HTC

That's fair play tho' - Google sought to commoditize handsets.
Having handled books from that series, I can assure you that a Kindle edition with proper search capabilities is definitely worth more than the physical version.
You're conflating revenues and earnings. Their valuation is at 33x revenues. Their P/E right now is likely somewhere in the hundreds.
I'm not sure I follow. I seem to remember being given various algorithmic and data structure related problems to solve in 1st year of University - both the implementation and appropriate application of algorithms - that I tend to find myself using as fundamental building blocks in my work. Granted, I haven't had to write a sort function since 1st year, but knowing when to use various approaches to representing and processing data and their limitations is pretty much fundamental stuff.
This title is missing the !. A shebang is #!, a # is a hash. The OP has both chars.
That would probably be a great improvement. It'd still need something to signify that you interact with it by hovering.
Is this the one you had in mind? http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/
hmmm.. I interpreted it differently especially when he says "This is exactly the type of system I want". Netbooks have been offering computers without optical drives I think since the beginning, so no innovation there. My comment is based on the fact that, the Ipad was deemed the netbook killer and this system that he is talking about is basically a netbook running Mac OS. So when the Ipad came out they convinced people, they needed a gadget that sits between your desktop/main laptop, and mobile device.. and this would kil the netbook. Now MG is stating that the Ipad really is good for just certain things, and now he needs another gadget for when not using his Ipad or Laptop. I think Apple's message works well on their loyal fans, and that should be congratulated.
Their were a bunch of articles late last year where they we're claiming that they were cash flow positive

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/09/facebook-makes-money-...

This has been conflated with profitability. (Not that its too different)
"It doesn't force you to program or organize your code in a certain way"

Yes it does. JQuery calls it "new wave JavaScript", but really it's just an anti-pattern. JQuery forces you to select all elements using $() before being able to use any of the methods. And you have to call $().get(0) to get the
selected element out. It is this unnecessary process that
gets very tiresome. Let's see if this makes it more clear:

$('#elm').color('red');
/* do some stuff here */
$('#elm').text('new text');

To simplify that (and not require a redundante DOM call) you'd use a local variable to store a reference to the element:

var d = $('#elm').get(0);
$(d).color('red');
/* do some stuff here */
$(d).text('new text');

I argue that this is unnecessary when you could just write conventional code instead:

var d = document.getElmentById('elm');
d.style.color = 'red';
/* do some stuff here */
d.innerHTML = 'new text';

The way the $() function operates just doesn't sit well with all coders, regardless of how solid JQuery is in other respects.
And the one-touch purchase button has never been more terrifying.
Although it's a technical requirement in the current implementation of #newtwitter for the back button & crawling to work, I think part of the attraction of twitter was having your own simple URL. Now http://twitter.com/ev becomes http://twitter.com/#!/ev, which I can imagine confusing non-technical users.
> Hint: there is no safe answer.

I'd be interested in hearing what you're thinking of -- but if you're right that actually makes it a perfect interview question. The baseline implementation is simple, but you can keep pointing out deficiencies and observe how the candidate attacks the revised problem.

The point of interview coding problems isn't to produces production-quality code with no preparation, it's to gain some insight in the way the candidate attacks a problem, particularly when approaching the edge of his abilities.

At one of the interviews I went through for my current job, I completely tanked on a question that fished for a particular design pattern. But while I didn't figure out I needed to use that particular pattern, I was able to participate actively in the discussion on how and why the solution I chose wasn't optimal.
Its useless. What I want that feature, which someone correctly points out is quite similar to the site overlay, is to tell me the percentage of clicks on each ad, rather than pure links the webmaster has set up only.
This is really surprising. The volume for teens completely blow everyone else out the water. At this rate, they're sending 7 texts per hour ALL day and night, assuming they take 8 hours to sleep.

What the hell are these kids talking about?
But irrational attachment to physical objects is a major factor in book pricing right now. Putting that aside because it favours your argument is like setting aside irrational attachment to designer labels when discussing the price of clothing.
Are you trying to get him into legal trouble?!?

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1791718)
I don't know about the ajax crawling answer, but I did that in one application to make the back/forward buttons and linking work with AJAX content.

It was a major PITA because you basically have to implement URL routing both client and server side.
Tips to Get Your Ex Girlfriend Back – Learn Reverse Psychology
She broke your heart but you still can’t move on. All you can think about is how she made you feel whenever you were together.
To try out the BBS interface for yourself:

curl -o client.py http://dpaste.de/xtDj/raw/
python client.py mongrel2.org 80
Yes, you should make the font size larger.
See this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1798951
It's inevitable that the mobile phone backed by the cloud is going to take the place of the Personal Computer. A pocket sized device will be your personal computer. Larger form factors will only exist to provide input and display facilities that can't live in the pocket-sized one.
Correct your grammar:

"from a couple books"

Should be:

"from a couple of books"
The hash lets you change the URL without the browser actually switching pages, too. People can bookmark pages even though they're "fancy-loaded".
You shouldn't need graph theory to simply reason your way to an answer using a bit of thought and some basic arithmetic. Anybody how looks at a problem and goes "oh that looks like X and I don't know X" and then shut of their brains is probably not a great hire.
I liked the quoted job description (i.e. the one _not_ to do) better.
I love the I'm going to pay myself on Friday line. Never heard it boiled down so tightly.
In case you're interested, there are many comments from the last times this was submitted. Here is a selection:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1656044

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647759

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1256516
My problem with this job post is that it is long. Very long. I'd start by cutting out the "key attributes" section (is it really a good idea to include "If you were hit by a buss tomorrow it wouldn’t matter." in a job post, regardless of the point you are trying to make?) I would then cut down the requirements section to something digestible.

I had a look at least one job listing from each of the five current posts in http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs and I think that they are all better examples of good job listings that don't suck. Most of them are succinct -- they say what the future employee will have to do, a few actual firm requirements that they have, and why I should apply (sometimes including some perks). They are formatted too.
Think of all the time they will be wasting with this person if she turns out not to be a good fit.

You presumably want people who will enhance and help your top talent.
I disagree with what you're saying, actually. While I know I'm biased as an Ubuntu user at home, I think that MS Windows and Apple OS X are far behind the Linux world when it comes to - for example - window management. In Windows 7, there's no way to make a window stay on top, if you hook up two monitors, you only have one taskbar, etc.

Another example is package management. If you want to mount an ISO in Windows, you have to scour Google for a while attempting to find a spyware-free available download. It's a garbage situation in Windows.

Linux, however, has amazing window management capabilities as well as package managers.

Now, if we turn to ease-of-use, I'd like to remind you that Google Chrome OS is coming out in one month (ish). While it is a proprietary OS, there is an open source / free software version called Chromium OS. This is a Linux OS that looks totally easy to use and will be natural for non-Linux people to handle.

I very strongly disagree that the Linux desktop is "a good distance" behind its rivals.