skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just another dataoint : I just got hired at a new company using a headhunter. Midway through the process of doing interviews arranged by my recruiter I received advice along these lines from my significant other, and was shocked at the typical size of a headhunter's commission. Given that it seemed like my particular headhunter couldn't have spent that much time hooking me up with interviews, 20-30% of my first year's salary still sounds ridiculously high. But ultimately, I was pleasantly surprised by the offers I received, and it seems to have helped that the headhunter made sure multiple companies were providing offers within days of each other. Also, he recommended me to companies that I wouldn't have considered otherwise, one of which I am very happy to be joining.
What kind of data and applications are best suited for monetization using data mining? Now? In 5 years?
It is illegal to wiretap someone else's phone. It is illegal to open someone else's mail. It is most likely illegal to install this App on someone else's phone.
Y'see, this is why I don't like these sorts of discussions. Suppose Fiorina were a Democrat instead of a Republican. Would you be writing the same thing (s/Republican/Democrat/), or would you be defending her?

Maybe you would be writing exactly the same thing. Maybe you're a paragon of political detachment. But in the fraught political climate of the day, I the reader am left to suspect that most people's opinions on the matter are severely coloured by whether they personally wish to see a Republican replace a Democrat in next week's California Senate election.

This is why I don't think this article is conducive to good discussion and have flagged it.
Hey, you've got it finished! For those that don't get it, think analytics for mobile app vendors. (I hope that's a proper description).
Mark Zuckerberg is quite young, and has a movie made about himself and his life's work, so I would not expect him to be objective about this. My strong opinion, considering myself hacker and filmmaker, is that both activities share the same motivation, which is exactly creating things. The process might differ in some ways, but when I create a software or a movie, I am driven by a similar passion.

I cannot imagine a movie director or writer not being fully in love with the material he or she is developing. They usually live and sleep with it, it affects their personal life very much, so it is not really something you can pretend to enjoy. If you do pretend, that shows, and you usually end up with a bad movie.

I'd advice to watch this charlie rose interview of Sorkin and Fincher: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11223 . At one point, they mention they tried to talk to Mark, in order to have a counter opinion from the one expressed in the 'accidental billionaire' book, but he turned down the offer. I am sure Sorkin, while aiming to be very entertaining, wished he could stay as close to reality as possible.
What I would say is that if they aren't figuring out a way to keep basic financial statements (which seems to be true) then you should get them to start.

I think it is important to understand what got them into the mess before coming up with a profitable pricing strategy.

Figure out how much bread/baked goods they typically sell. Is is trending up/down/sideways?

Figure out how much it costs to produce that much bread (ingredients + any packaging).

Then the other costs (wages, utilities, advertising, rent) should all be fairly easy to find out since they are typically paid once a month or so.

Get that into a spreadsheet and then start figuring out what the problem is and how to solve it.

For example maybe the bakery has been producing too much bread which has forced them to have a lot of waste. So it could be a leakage problem.

Maybe the prices are set so low that after COGS, there isn't enough left to pay for those operating expenses such as rent, wages.

It's best to think of a business like an organism where every change will have some kind of effect in response.
How to make stuff people love
Analysts on Mac Java Deprecation: "Baffled," Jobs "Makes No Sense"
Indeed. The underlying assumption that a "QA process" as traditionally conceived would have prevented this sort of problem is fairly faulty, I think.
Ask HN currently shows anything with a description, not a link.
These kinds of fires are always fun to watch while they burn. But, does it matter that much? Are MySpace and Pinterest significantly competitors?
You can order it with 4 GB RAM, but it isn't user expandable.
I'm in! I can be reached at adyster(at)gmail.com.
It wasn't even implemented into Chrome (dev channel, OSX) until recently, and I don't think I even noticed anyone ask about it.
So it answers the question "How are my mobile apps selling on various marketplaces"?
25 years of Nintendo: My 10 favorite NES games
I'm not familiar with the detailed financials, but the Xbox has at least captured a substantial market share, which is more than I can say for any of their subsequent major pushes into new market segments.

I'm actually surprised if the xbox hasn't been profitable. It can't have been that costly to develop (get a fancy graphics chip and stick it in a box), they've sold a helluva lot of them, and they only update it once every five years, and they're making a crapload of money on the games too (don't forget they own Bungie) so I would have thought it would be a bit of a cash cow. But maybe they need to sell the consoles at a loss.
I wonder if this applies to sites from outside the US? Or is being overseas protection enough from this sort of trolling?
Amusingly, I make that exact statement every time I'm presented with a printed academic paper...
I'm not sure that the exact same discussion would be had if she were a Democrat, but not because people would be giving her a free pass.

The Republican party makes it a major plank to support large business and to support issues that benefit the wealthy/large, while making less-than-indisputable arguments as to why the decisions benefit the rest of the company. Thus, her tenure at a large business is quite relavent to her viability as a Republican candidate, while it's less relavent (though certainly still important) to her viability as a democrat.
Thanks gosuri. Succinctly answered.
Light will travel about a millimeter in the time it takes these transistors to switch, how will this be practical?
Exactly, legacy code isn't going anywhere. If you keep your eyes open you'll see plenty of Classic ASP around. It's a lot of investment to refactor an application from one language to another, and it's a waste of time from a business perspective if "stuff works".
There are unfortunately a lot of babies that die. Many of unknown causes, and of asphyxiation. (Depending on how you define a "lot").

The only true research that I know of is the one that says to have them sleep on their backs, not on their bellies.
Why have SSDs killed this question? Seems like you could tweak the amount of data on disk and/or the size of the values and/or the requests/second requirement and keep using it. Also, there are no 1TB SSDs available at this point, so you'd still have to assume spinning platters for this, no?
No, but that's a good idea, I'll definitely look in to that when the next round of reocities improvements rolls around.
Offer HN: Medical Perspective
I am a first year medical student at UCSF. I really like the community at HN and it's a continuous source of interesting and useful information. I want to contribute however I can. I think that means:

1) I think we need more technically oriented physicians. If anyone is currently or thinking about applying to medical school, send me an email, I'd be happy to give advice or critique your application.

2. If you are interested in starting a project involving medicine, either for physicians and patients, I'd more than happy to give you my take and suggest possible strengths/challenges. This would be based purely non-technical perspective and based on my experience as a physician-in-training.
Startup Documentary: Interviewees Needed (signup form)
Sorry, but I disliked Fiorina way before it was cool.

I would dislike her regardless of party, for the way she destroyed HP culture and turned my friends at Compaq into bitter, insecure husks of human beings. (Those that haven't been fired by now, anyways) The fact that she's actually running for office on that record is just the icing on the cake.
Yeah, it's nice when a paper boils down a task into the best bang-for-buck approach you should take.

A recent such paper I'm excited about is this one on coreference resolution from EMNLP 2010: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D/D10/D10-1048.pdf , by the Stanford group. It's a rule-based coreference resolution system you could implement in a couple of days that gets state-of-the-art results. Best of all it looks like you could get it to run about as fast as the parser that's backing it. I'm planning to write a version for the C&C parser.
Do reliable price competitors to AdWords exist for niche arbitrage?

What sorts of advertising opportunities are there to yield a CTR/CPC combination ultimately yielding more than AdWords CPC?

Of course, I truly admire Google, and doubt any would exist for any length of time. Thoughts?
I think there is a big difference in an 'Ask HN' post and a 'Offer HN' post.

In general terms, an 'Ask HN' post is the HN crowd helping an individual. Everyone can participate to help that individual. An 'Offer HN' post is one person helping one other person (or maybe a small handful). I enjoy seeing the occasional Ask HN post because I can participate/contribute in some way to most of the requests. For Offer HN posts, I can't participate unless I have that specific need.

To me, there is less 'value' to the HN community from the Offer HN posts to the Ask HN ones for that reason. Yes - I understand 'value' is subjective, but this I think my point is reasonably objective from a 'whole community' point of view.
For one thing, having a crappy useless domain with ads should count as less "usage" than having just a page indicating that some project is being developed, without ads.
You don't need much. Even a planter box on a sunny balcony would yield a useful amount.
Have you used core text at all? Particularly, I'd like to implement some highlighting features inside text views. I'd also like to implement a hybrid text view / drawing canvas (ability to draw over a text view, while retaining scrollability, etc.).
Hi this is Paul from pinterest.com. To answer your questions, "no" and "no".

Echoing Ben's comment in the article, we aren't accusing MySpace of anything. None of us have even used their site.

However, it was cool that our users cared enough to tweet out their concerns. They're the best.
Free is overrated. Pay attention to SLA vs. Cost .

The most important deciding factor is going to be your terms of your SLA vs. you price.

And finally, your API . AWS wins by providing a simple API that make routine tasks easy to execute.
Of course. But that doesn't add strength to the argument that you shouldn't sleep with your baby.
What’s The Street Price Of Twitter? Nearly $1.6 Billion
When I see "the data never changes" http://cmph.sourceforge.net/ springs to mind
I sent you an email with my application attached. If you respond I will post or summarize it on my blog with a link here. After seeing those web copy slides the other day, I believe this advice can help anyone.
Since what they had was already broken and customers were down, they probably didn't have the hours it would take to correctly verify the older version of the broken component would work with the rest of their system.
I'm a first year med student as well, and there are a few other students/physicians on HN interested in tech; so you're not alone!

Edit: What's your email address?
>Students were not allowed to have TVs

Where the hell did you go to school, Utah?
Having your baby die in the next room because you couldn't hear them struggle would be horrible too. Just don't sleep next to them dead-drunk, and put a pregnancy pillow around them. It's fine.
5 crowd sourcing sites to outsource your problems
Is it really that outrageous? Seems like pretty down-to-earth advice to me.
Wonder what the OP thinks about pink vs. blue prison walls and about striped vs. orange prisoner uniforms. I think there is some science to colors, and perhaps there is some truth behind the B.S. they were teaching.
Zynga's Mark Pincus on Entrepreneurial Companies
If your site plans to host user generated content, then it appears that this is something you'll want to address.

Not to mention an insurance policy that covers you in other various types of claims that can occur if you host lots of user generated content.
I think in Fiorina's case, the dislike in the tech industry for her trumps political parties, at least on places like HN. It's possible there are people who would suddenly like her if she had run in the Democratic primary instead of the Republican one, but I don't think such people would be very numerous in silicon valley.
Ending my 2nd year of a CS degree and I have enough technical knowledge to begin coding up websites and services like many of the other people here on HN. I was wondering whether or not it would be better to run ads on these sites, or to just try and generate large/high quality datasets and then sell those. How does someone like me monetize their data?
True, not having parens on the end of the function call makes this look better (and those parens are optional in Ruby). Extra kudos to lisp flavors because you could argue they have even "purer" syntax than Python.

Mostly, I'm just tickled by the idea of "would my dog bark at it?" as a mental test.
yeah totally. viral too.
I like this question, but I'm wondering what a good interview looks like if someone is completely blind-sided by the question because they don't have a lot (or any) systems experience? I'm imagining an engineer who's experience ends with MySQL so knowledge of stuff like tcb is a definite no. Maybe that's not an issue, because they wouldn't be interviewing for this job if that was the case.
Use the Submit link, and you will be given the choice of submitting text or a URL.
" It secretly, continuously forwards all SMS messages to a third party, ..."

It's only secret if you're not the one who installed it.

I think of spyware as apps that claim to be for one thing but instead (or also) do some remote reporting that I, as the installer, would never approve of had I known. This, though, is called Secret SMS Replicator.

If I had a need to spy on my children (perhaps I was concerned over who they might be texting) this would be quite handy.
Here's a vote for cloth diapers, especially if you're considering more than 1 kid.
I don't get it. Who keeps upvoting this meta-stuff? Are you all really that interested in another commentary or perspective on the dynamics of HN? Really? And must we have everyone rush to the submit button or their blogs to write about hot-meta topic so you can get a chance to ride the wave? I've said it before and will say it again: This place has turned into one big drama show. I know I don't contribute much, but I've been here since the early-early days, enough to have lived through several cycles, and although I have resisted saying this for some time, I really do feel the overall quality of stuff here has declined.
I worked for HP when she was the CEO. I hated her then, and will hate her to my dieing breath. It doesn't matter if she calls herself the "free beer and pot for everyone" party candidate, I would stil hate her.

I could post a Great Wall of Text(tm)(r) explaining why she was a rotten CEO, and it wouldn't be anywhere near as polite as the linked article.

Finally, I have never met a person who worked at HP who actually liked what she did to the company. I'm sure there are some, but at the facility I worked at (in Colorado Springs), there were none that I met.
Aw, how nice. Well, good luck to you.
Ask HN: When does a California Corp Commence? CA's 2 month processing backlog
I'm thinking of starting a California llc, but noticed that there is a huge processing backlog (nearly two months), http://www.sos.ca.gov/business/be/processing-times.htm .

Does anyone know when a corporation exists? Is it when they receive my filing or when they process it?
Someone suggested there should be a meta.ycombinator.com the other day. I don't really like the idea, but meta posting is hitting an all-time high. Perhaps it's easier to contain the problem than defeat it.
Advice for new questions: instead of contrived ones, pick a problem you've actually encountered in your job and ask the candidate to solve it. I've never had to implement a datastore like this -- so unless that's what you're actually doing, it doesn't seem particularly relevant. Another plus is that if you're doing interesting work, you have an almost endless supply of questions to choose from. Candidates also seem to respond better when you wrap up the question with "this is something I actually worked on a few weeks ago."

FWIW, Ning turned me down back in April 2008 so feel free to ignore my advice :)
I remember back in `95 building websites that were basically just animated gifs, (no judging i was a kid). I used some under construction ones because I had seen it everywhere and I was constructing!
I haven't thought about it deeply, but my first guess would be that the seek time of hard disks is what makes serving 5000 requests per second difficult; consumer-grade hard disks can perform something in the range of a few hundred (randomly distributed) IOPS at best due to seek time. SSDs make seeks (almost) free, so even one decent SSD should be able to service 5000 requests per second, assuming you can get a big enough one.

If multiple storage devices (hard disks or otherwise) are allowed, RAID (or just splitting the data across multiple disks) would ameliorate the seek problem somewhat, since seeks can then happen in parallel. I wouldn't see this problem as requiring a distributed solution, unless the bottleneck is the bus or storage controller rather than the single-disk seek performance.
Did anyone else see that movie and feel that this had been portrayed? The Zuckerberg in the movie obviously wanted to be part of the social group, but I also got that 'building' vibe. Maybe it is just because I compared the entire movie to The Fountainhead.
> Hey, you're part of the Secret Cabalistic Society of HN Worship now, you're not allowed to disagree anymore! Get in line!

If there's any secret cabal activity happening here, it's a conspiracy to maintain top-ten leaderboard positions by means of random sensationalistic debates.
She was the one who started the policy of bugging employees and board members to find leaks. I'm sure the WireTapHawks would love to have her in DC.
Someone on HN linked to to a piece that stated Sorkin preferred good drama over the truth when it really came down to it which resulted in disagreements between him and Fincher (who supposedly wanted the truth first and foremost). And based off my own bias views of both guys, I find this to be most believeable.
To your point about PIMCO, I agree. They make a living offering people a way to own bonds. The call must be past obvious to them.
If anyone on the east coast needs the same, hit me up. Not sure that there is anything I want or need in return, but we'll figure it out as we go. Similar to the OP, I have a pretty good complement of Canon gear and lights and have been doing photography for ~20 years.
Just found that the code says "The existence of a limited liability company begins upon the
filing of the articles of organization." Can I read this literally, the corp exists once I mail the docs in?

http://law.justia.com/california/codes/2009/corp/17050-17062...
> Does no-one in the legal system see the injustice of current copyright law?

See it? They're leveraging it for personal gain!
Hopefully the OP will be able to answer your question, but I thought I might offer my 2 cents:

I'm currently working on an MSc in IT. My actual project does not involve NLP directly, but all the 'related research' does (ie. all previous systems which achieve the same goal as mine)so I had to read up on it. This was a struggle... YMMV. I find a few good resources along the way though - recommend reading this first
http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/hermann.moisl/ell236/manual1.htm
then on iTunesU/YouTube you'll find a good course on computational linguistics from MIT, watch the first half dozen lectures at least (don't worry if you don't fully understand them all). A lot of the theory can be traced back to Chomsky's work on grammars, so I suggest reading some of his papers (his style is quite clear). I found I needed to do all this just so I could properly follow the recent papers on NLP (specifically NL interfaces to DBs) that I must review. I really had to start from the beginning, light wikipedia'ing wasn't cutting it. I'm currently reading The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics to consolidate my knowledge, it's pretty good.

So anyway... tough subject, try not to get bogged down. If all the reading's too dry, then 'Godel Escher Bach' is a fun alternative that touches on similar theory.

If I were to choose a pure NLP project myself, I'd maybe do something like 'How NLP can add value to existing systems/software.' ie. look for imaginative practical applications, rather than theorizing yet another parser with some new trick/quirk
Looking at things from a legal standpoint, how do you go about creating your database? What are you must conservative about when using APIs for data mining?

How do you approach social websites without APIs about scraping their data?

What criteria do you use to determine whether an algorithm you are developing qualifies for legal copyright protection?
This kind of social programming interests me.

Have you written about interacting with the community on that level?
This is lame, please don't submit this garbage to Hacker News.
Actually does it break any of the rules listed? It's very upfront about what its doing. It is sending your text messages to another phone number. The issue isn't the app per se, but the fact that the person installing the application is not the owner.

For example, an app that allowed me to browse my SMS messages wouldn't be blocked, but clearly if someone stole my phone, they could then browse my SMS messages.

The app isn't deceptive to the person installing it.

And can Google remove the app if it wasn't installed from the app store? I can sideload it can't I?
Of course they do, but everyone in the political system seems a-OK with it. There may be a way to challenge current law on constitutional grounds, but it would be a very tough sell.
Does your Air have 2gb of RAM or 4gb? Does it ever feel sluggish?? I'm also a Flex developer :) so for me it's usually Flash Builder, photoshop, a browser and terminal.
What in your opinion is the best and most extendable open source toolkit or library for machine learning?

NLTK? Weka? Other?
I read it on Wikipedia, but apparently it may have been fake: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/harvard-university/91141...
if you need someone "to make a game for iphone" we can team up
Huh, I was just looking at Pinterest recently and it has some neat stuff on it (I spent a while exploring http://pinterest.com/shashashasha/ for example), but I'm a little confused about why Techcrunch calls it "stealth mode" when most of it seems public.
Thanks for the comment. That point has been noted and would help me approach bloggers better.
It looks great! Congrats on releasing! I'd definitely give it a try except I have to finish and release my iPhone app first.