skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like this quote best -

I’ve also come to loathe this mentality, at times. It’s the same mentality where someone whips up a two-page website and asks people to “review their startup!” I think startup is a phrase that’s been abused. You’ve made a project, or a mashup, or a hack, not a startup.

And that’s cool! Embrace that. More people need to do stupid shit. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. Don’t do it to make money. Don’t even do it to learn hip new technology X. Do it for the sake of doing something stupid
Well, yes and no. That's why there are accounting standards like the FASB that the government makes companies use to pay taxes.

In fact, almost all large corporations keep one set of books using their internal accounting standards and another set of books using the federally-mandated standard in order to pay taxes.

Hollywood revenue hiding was done using their particularly-unfair internal accounting rules. However, those same companies then did, in fact, recognize that revenue correctly using the FASB when they had to pay takes to the IRS.

As long as all taxes have to be paid using a standard accounting system, there really isn't any way to hide profits except to ship them off to another country, like in this example.
user: tiber
created: 23 days ago
karma: 1
about: Former K5er, /.er, digger

Too bad you didn't put your phone number in there, or I'd give you a call and ask for advice about how I can stay on the cutting edge of the Internet like you.
I've done a lot of interviews and the reasons are:

1. They dont want to hurt the interviewees feelings.

2. They want the interviewee to feel good about the company even if they didnt get the job. (Marketing?)

3. There might be legal reasons.

But one thing I advise now is to ALWAYS ask for feedback. You can do this by getting an interviewers email during the
interview and emailing them after. Something of the form:

---------------

Hi,

Thank you very much for taking the time for interviewing me yesterday. I was notified that I wasnt a fit by HR.

I was wondering if you could let me know:
1. Which questions I got wrong in the interview and what answers you were looking for?
2. What areas you feel I need to work on? (ie an open ended question which lets them give you any type of feedback)

Regards,

---------------

Asking for feedback is HARD. But nothing brings out more respect in me than someone who wants to know why they failed and who takes steps to fix those issues in the future.
Mobile Software Talent in Short Supply
I really hope they don't start fixing roads during the day.. you know.. so the workers are not tired.

Or major electrical upgrades.. or phones.. or local internet backbone.. or water.. or what ever other utility that is more important to my life than github (which was down today)

How hard is it to work at night one time ??
But it is giving, it's giving jobs.
My addendum to this rule is I never deploy new features a week before I go on vacation.
My Python answer for the second question, where `post` is patrio11's post as input:

from collections import defaultdict
from string import ascii_letters

d= collections.defaultdict(int)

for letter in post:
d[letter] += 1

print [letter for letter in sorted(d, key=d.get, reverse=True) if letter in ascii_letters][2]

Any comments on improvement for readability or conciseness?
What's in it for them?

I could think of a whole lot of other "good" things Google could reward for:

- HTML/XHTML that is well formed and validates or has closed tags
- Use of alt tags and other accessibility friendly features (beyond how these already benefit them)

But I don't think they'd do any of this if it doesn't benefit them directly. Sure, they have cars that drive around on their own, but what is being proposed is messing with their core business - the "meat and potatoes" that makes them all the money.

Until it causes them "pain" this seems unlikely.

That said, from "force the issue" networking standpoint I think it's an awesomely great idea.
> Or write a program which takes this post as input and tells me what the 3rd most common letter used was.

I'm going for 'a'.

And, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:English_letter_frequency_(... (via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency) your four most frequently used letters match the table for English.

Tested in Python 2.7:

s = "your text here"

import string

d = {}

for i in list(s.lower()):
if i in string.letters:
d[i] = d.setdefault(i, 0) + 1

print sorted(d.keys(), cmp = lambda x, y : cmp(d[x], d[y]), reverse = True)[2]

Edit: See my later response for something using the 'collections' module.
I'm in a very similar position - done an exit, taking some time off, have some money to invest.

I have yet to find a group that doesn't advertise that they need experience. I would guess that some of them would bend this rule if you got in touch and networked with them and their current members and they decided you were of sufficient quality to be allowed into the club.

We should start a 'newbie angels' group where we kick you out after you've done 3 investments!
This is very competitive with the free Azure services Microsoft is offering to MSDN subscribers: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/ee461076.aspx
This privacy problem is trivially solvable. Facebook should generate a surrogate key for user/app relationships, and only share that with the apps. Then my ID cannot be tied back to me by anyone but facebook, and I cannot even be tracked across applications by the same developer.
I’ve also come to loathe this mentality, at times. It’s the same mentality where someone whips up a two-page website and asks people to “review their startup!” I think startup is a phrase that’s been abused. You’ve made a project, or a mashup, or a hack, not a startup.

I think this is so true. A startup seems to imply that it will at least in theory become a business at some point. I bet that Facebook didn't even call itsself a "web startup" when it started out at Harvard until it started to spread and raised some real money.

To call every little project that someone hacks together in a weekend a startup is a misnomer, similar to the tendency for founders to give themselves C-Level titles in their startup companies which consist of nothing more than a prototye and a pitch, rather than just calling themselves 'founders'.
Google joins in sleazy (yet legal) tax evasion
Are we missing something here, maybe? Google, as a legal entity, is really nothing more than a piece of paper in someone's filing cabinet. As a corporation, it is just a legal vehicle for shuffling around money and managing liability and ownership.

On the other hand, the people who work for Google are ... people. And I'm sure the great majority of them pay plenty of taxes (income, payroll, etc.) in whatever jurisdictions they live in.

One of the primary functions of Google-the-entity, is to get that money to the people. In doing so, Google-the-entity pays very little tax, but the people pay lots. So the money is taxed, government programs are supported, and all is well.

To put it a different way, Google's tax strategy can be considered as a way to minimize the effect of governments taxing their people twice.
Why don't you spend some of your own money directly on the causes that you like? About 1/3 of American taxes go to the military, and another 1/3 goes to non-means tested social support programs (not necessarily benefiting the poor). The amount going to better education opportunities for poor people is absolutely negligible, especially since the sitting government is hostile to school choice.

Think with your head, not your heart.
We’re in the most ridiculous industry on earth. You can whip something up in a few hours and before you know it, people around the world will be using it.

Oh how I love this field! Its exhilarating!
How's chatroulette doing anyway? They were the media darling just a few months ago. Nice work whipping up this project.
By adopting the "Don't be evil" motto Google makes this about ethics. If you say that you are going to hold yourself to an ethical standard, that means you will be judged by your ethics, not by your adherence to the letter of the law.

But really, the continuing argument that because you like Google Maps it's therefore better that Google gets to keep all of its tax euros out of the hands of underfunded public services is close to incoherent.

Unless you can show that those services are in the same sort of existential danger as high-end cancer treatment is in the UK, the argument is specious.
The link says:

'As a result, appeals to "preserving distinctions" that are "important for communication" and to "avoiding ambiguity" are baseless and indefensible in this case.'

"no matter which form you use, people will understand what you are trying to say."

That is simply not true. Case in point: when I saw the title "The language I wish go was" I expected to find an article about google cancelling the go language.
I've seen it on many free download sites (not that I visited any of them). You click to download a file (enticing!), and you get a splash page of many questionable ads. I'm sure there is some cost sharing involved.
How valuable would the answer be?

Most interviews come down to how much the interviewers liked you and whether your bearing in the interview matched the company's image of itself. They might come up with a variety of justifications if you pressed them, but it's never going to be the truth: they just liked the other guy more.
Downvotes? On my comments?

OS X runs on thinkpads, mine has all drivers but the wireless driver, see http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page for more details and instructions.

I regularly drive a 2560x1600 external monitor with no issues.
Yes, as you have learned through this thread, only very learned persons say "vulgarization" in English to mean "popularization," so it's safest in Internet writing simply to write "popularization."
I don't see how LLVM has anything to do with this. LLVM is just a replacement for GCC which is woefully bloated with almost no good way to extend the functionality and is locked into the GPL.

That being said, Apple employs the guy that builds LLVM/clang, so it only makes sense that they have an interest in it :P
Takeaways:

1) "what’s marginal to one user might be core to another"

2) APIs can afford to have more marginal features than UIs because the complexity is largely hidden. Done right, there's more API documentation but the main interactions aren't affected or made more complex.
> High taxes and the existence of bad laws is no excuse for exploiting the loop holes in those laws.

This is not a loop hole. It's called Transfer Pricing. It's perfectly legitimate, and it's done as a matter of course. In fact, I work on software that crunches a lot of these numbers.
Couldn't you use one of those rechargeable temporary credit cards? The ones they use to grant people with bad credit a semblance of a normal life..
It's been almost a decade since I had a CPU on my personal computer that seemed so slow somehow that I would have been considering an upgrade specifically to a faster CPU...
Maybe I mis-read it. I keep coming back to this line which seems to imply otherwise:
When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates
It seems that many of you suggest Amazon as a better choice. Thanks for your comments guyz.
Am I missing something, or is this nothing more than fluorescent lighting and an irrigation system neatly packaged?

Try growing your own vegetables for commercial use and then comment on how "trivial" this is. What they're doing provides a lot of value. With their system, a restaurant can reliably provide fresh vegetables to its customers without waste. You just grab up what you need, as you need it, without transport, storage, etc. Do you know what it's like to have a fridge full of rotting lettuce because you've had a slow week?

I hope this makes it big - fresh vegetables with less waste means cheaper and more appetizing vegetables. If this works out, it will make people healthier. Hooray for capitalism and the innovation it enables!
Medicine? (Although your hand is usually forced into doing night procedures--it's not so much a choice, I agree.)
If you have a Bank of America credit card, you can just use the ShopSafe feature. Log in to your account online and you can generate temporary card numbers to purchase something online (allocating as much allowable spending as you want), so you don't have to expose your real card number online. These are temporary numbers that get a new number, new expiration and new CCV...but behind the scenes they're tied to your real card, so they show up on your bill like normal.
Sick? Read this before you Google
there is some fallacy in such discussing of the precise state of chaotic dynamic systems.

It is not possible to exactly reproduce the state we have with life on Earth, like it isn't possible to get precisely the same weather in 2 different days - both are results of unimaginably many values behaving and interacting in unique way and even minor change will change the resulting outcome . Yet there are a lot of days that look and feel very similar and there is 99.9999999% chances that tomorrow, for example, we wouldn't have 150 F in San-Francisco while we can't be sure what precisely it will be - 60 or 70 or 50?

Does the life evolution system have such bound-ness and attractor-ness properties - well, as of now we can only guess. My guess is "yes".

Btw. Uniqueness because of complexity, in the sense of "evolved only once", stinks like Creationism/ID
Here's a blog from one of them: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/
Nobody can touch the iPod Touch. Except--I'm serious--Microsoft.
Because we get together and solve a design/implementation problem and hack around the issues. It's as close to a real issue as we can get, and the objective is to get the candidate to lose himself/herself in solving the problem with us. If they can then we get a good feel for how they work and communicate, if they can't then we put it down to interview stress.

My work can be pretty stressful anyway, though, so it gives us an indication either way. If someone gets to that stage we are looking for reasons to hire them, and no longer looking for reasons to exclude them.
Confusing? Users either run a package installer, basically identical to installation wizards on Windows, or plop a *.app in the Applications folder.

Under what circumstances is either of those options "extremely confusing"?
Wow this is remarkable. This is simply the best time in history to be starting a new business, particularly an Internet based business. The barrier to entry is extremely low and the ability to change & improve is as flexible as Mr. Fantastic.
The awesome thing about holman, is that he did this app just for fun and the love of "the hack". In my opinion he will gain much more than a chunk of ad revenue. A very well-respected reputation. This to me seems much more valuable than even $5k ad revenue. I don't feel like we would be talking about him near as much if facelette.com was some spammy looking "made for adwords" app.

When you go to the site it is just so pure and honest, it doesn't make you question what you are doing, or who is doing what with your information.
One of our ongoing projects on the Yelp search team is improving the quality of our own review snippet algorithms. The paper behind this went around the team a few weeks ago, and we all agreed that it's pretty cool.

If this kind of stuff interests you, send me your resume -- my HN user name at yelp.
That's a pretty negative image. I'm sure most people would just call that person a loser.
Revenue streams are interesting to consider with these sharing focused start-ups. If the values of these users shift to "collaborative consumption", does that decrease or raise questions with advertising as a source of revenue (ethically or effectively)? It seems that a possible underlying value of these ideals is less (or anti) consumerism. Would these users be more open to a 'fee for service' model? (That would be refreshing.)

Side note: Profounder.com is another example of a social lending platform that does not require a fee.
I'm curious how Linode and Slicehost will respond. This is pretty hard to beat.
Not to take away from Facelette, but for others who want to be on TechCrunch: make something with any new Apple product this week and the next.

The first guy who makes a Mac Book Air case-mod WILL be on TC.

Mark my words.
Moving to Intel was the best thing that ever happened to the Mac. Literally — look at the sales charts for the past decade. Apple would have to be insane to drop them.

Beyond that, Apple has already done more to make devs standardize on an API than the App Store ever could. Cocoa is the sole API that can create 64-bit apps on Mac OS X, and lots of system APIs are now only available through Cocoa. I don't see how the App Store adds any pressure at all, to be honest.
Link to the paper summary for the sentiment analysis used in this app: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/rbg/code/content_structure/index...
free*

* = after spending a minimum of $5,469 on a subscription
"Like the Ministry of Truth, it appears that Apple is deliberately attempting to usurp the meaning of the word Flash in the computing industry and redefine it."

Were Apple attempting to bring new meaning to the term flash this would be (at best) a passable assertion. However, the term "flash" has been used to refer to silicon-based NOR and NAND memory since the beginning. I don't know the exact date, but I know it was around in the early nineties ('91-'92) when I started messing with computers.

Macromedia Flash didn't come in to existence until the late nineties, and I'm certain that flash memory existed for a long time before I was even aware of it. That means flash memory easily pre-dates Adobe Flash by a wide margin.
Since someone needs to call bullshit on this discussion, I would like to point out that GS's 2008 income was roughly 94% lower than its 2007 income. In 2007 its tax liability was roughly 35% of pretax income. Good tax accountants can lower your liability, but there is no magic "get out of taxes" card besides losing money.

I'm not going to spend more time looking through the 2008 quarterlies, but I would guess they lost money in some of those quarters, creating a tax benefit. If you find that shocking, well I can also give you amazing advice to lower your tax rate to 0% but you may not enjoy it.

In 2009, Goldman's pretax earnings returned to its historical range and the company again paid ~30% income taxes. These financials are all public, you can look at them on the internet.
That reminds me of what my cabbie said when I asked if there was much crime around here (this was in Jamaica). He responded, "there is crime in every country." He was clearly offended, so I decided not to press on with discussions of statistics.
"and I can't get started without experience"

No, no..that's not universally true. Don't let yourself to be affected by this concept. You can get employed without formal experience, some bigger companies also hire newbies. You will just get lower salary.
Do More Faster (Grab TechStars’ Best Ideas) – with David Cohen
Ah, your use of the collections module prompted me to read the docs for it (who would've guessed :) ) which leads to a revision of my other response:

import string, collections

s = "your text here"

print collections.Counter([i for i in s.lower()
if i in string.letters]).most_common(3)[-1]
Company taxes are, in most parts of the world, levied on company profits, not company revenues. So if Google paid higher taxes, company expenditure would be the same, but dividends and / or share price would be lower. So the only point that still stands is 'giving liquidity to founders'; I'm sure the founders already have enough capital to bootstrap practically any innovative tech business they want.
The risk of sending the UID of the user to ad networks is that it's possible an unscrupulous ad network will store and use or sell the data.

However, if an ad network wanted to get the UIDs they can still easily get them. Just about all Facebook iframe applications use the Facebook Javascript SDK, which provides methods that can easily be used to collect the user's current ID or other information. Most ad networks require developers to load a remote javascript file on their site, and this javascript file can simply make calls through the SDK to fetch whichever information it wants.
Indeed, this seems like the wrong matching model if you want either (a) expert review; or (b) representative user review. A random other website-developer isn't especially likely to be either. There is great value to the ad-hoc, user-driven matching of people with topics that occurs on sites with a public new-queue and topic-leaderboard.

And so this reminds me of an idea for a more focused version of HN I'd had a while back. Let's call it 'Bluntr' for now. All stories are requests for review of work: code, designs, websites, products, whatever. All comments are supposed to be brutally direct feedback, with as much concrete backup-data/recommendations as possible.

Note that this does not mean 'nasty': no mockery or vague insulting filler words would be permitted. But it also means every thread can jump straight to the point, without traditional 'attaboy!' or 'I like the X but...' niceties slowing things down. Essentially: at Bluntr, empty compliments or insults would both be flagged/downvoted to oblivion, while steely-eyed evaluation would be promoted.

The community might not gel without those normal verbal ticks and grooming-activities, but then again these ground rules might help the really focused, strong contributors cut to the chase a lot faster. You are not allowed to be either nice or nasty, just honest -- and so you are free to be more productive. That's the initial theory to be tested, at least.
I love this feature, do you know if its possible to do that without logging into their website? I would love to be able to create temp numbers from my phone (without having to log in and expose the rest of the functionality).
aye ye ye. Yeah I was definitely reading that wrong. That's a helluva claim! I guess I am out of my league to say anything about it though.
Yep.Yahoo still uses BSD, but earlier, a lot of work was put on BSD. There were BSD kernel teams, and teams which managed BSD ports. AFAIK, almost all of the new development is on RHEL and there aren't any BSD dedicated teams now. A lot of BSDs are still around - some have been running for last 10 years or so.

Some new teams use BSD for their webapp deployment and database servers; can't confirm (no links) but I think the teams were of the opinion MySQL on BSD was more stable.

But as said, earlier Yahoo was big time BSD, investing in it and submitting patches, which no longer is the case. Search team did a mass migration to RHEL about 2 years back. BSD is still used here and there as deployment platform. My personal preference would be to go with BSD and save some buck but apparently management views it differently.
It would be a case of "This will affect a relatively small number of hugely important apps that we can't afford to lose from the platform".

They're not going to feel free to lose Adobe, Matlab, Steam, VMWare, Parallels, and AutoCAD just because they have a million fart apps.
I didn't really get the name at first, but really it's the content that counts. 4/5 stars!
750 hours EC2 linux micro = $15

750 hours ELB = $18.75

15GB ELB data processing = $0.12

10GB EBS, 1 month = $1.00

1 million EBS I/Os = $0.10

1GB snapshot = ? (varies a lot, but less than a dollar)

5GB S3, 2000 PUT, 20000 GET = $0.79

30GB transfer ~= $4.20

The remaining items are always free.

Total: $39.96

(Marketing value: priceless)

FYI, you can calculate any bill here: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html