skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In theory it can be done, but it would be very expensive in terms of computational power. Anyway, you raised a very good point that we will keep in mind for the near future.
Thanks indeed for your feedback and the nice discussion.
I Googled for VAs from the Philippines and picked a service which looked reasonable.

I'll be happy to recommend them after they produce recommendation-worthy results, but I'm barely started with her yet. The first task was only partially successful, but that wasn't her fault. (I had her cancel a service that I've had AOLesque difficulty canceling. They wouldn't talk other about it, but she did get a direct line to a CSR with cancellation authority for me to call, so I was done in two minutes on the phone instead of an hour.)

If she can reduce my bookkeeping backlog from ten hours to one, then I'll spend an hour singing their praises on my blog. (And then figure out some more grunt work to get rid of.)
I suppose by the mathematical nature of the situation, people and their social graph end up at one of the two "equilibria". 1) either they know a bunch of people who can't find any good people to hire, or 2) they know a bunch of smart people who work at crappy jobs they'd love to leave.

I have a group of friends (from University of Florida) who mostly graduated just before the west coast was really recruiting there. One works at HP doing server stuff, but that's about as "far" as they got. Another one is the smartest dude at his job at bigco where he puts out fires of bad devs every day, cleaning up $20,000 contracting messes with one SQL query that no one there thought could be written.

To these people, trying to get a "cool" job is borderline impossible because, first, they don't know anyone (their social graph converged the wrong way), and second the combination of being far-away and having to blindly email resumes into the blackhole that is domain.com/apply is just plain discouraging (not to mention ineffective).

I don't know of a good solution to this problem, but if anyone is willing to relocate some of these people, I might be able to refer some really smart people ;)
Some of the questions don't have one globally unique answer, for example: which day is a part of the weekend, Sunday, Friday or Monday.
Where I live (Israel), Friday is part of the weekend, were as I bet the creator of the list lives in the USA and as many times happens, believes the USA==World and the "correct" answer is probably Sunday.
Some excerpts from Joe Armstrong(creator of Erlang)'s post on how and when to push Erlang in your environment (the whole post is worth reading imo)

"I have only seen three repeatable patterns, that have caused the spread of Erlang into commercial projects:

1) A Catastrophe Project X fails - totally - a total disaster. Help me - help help helpErlang guys run in an save them

2) We can make money Idea X can make money if we can implement it really quickly and get to the market place tomorrow Erlang guys think it's a programming competion that they'll do over the weekend - first product is shipped in three months. Java competitor goes bankrupt.

3) Hop offs A gang of smart programmers get so frustrated using technology X that they bail out from the mothership and start own company and do stuff in Erlang"

and

"If you're in one of these phases where things don't happen bide your time. Write an operating system in your spare time or a stock exchange - this is always good practise - like doing your scales if you play the piano "
Easy is not enough, Captcha need to be universal also.

For non native english speakers:

"Cheese, cat, mosquito, trousers, elbow and ant: how many body parts in the list?" or "Soup, dog, trousers, house, mosquito or pink: the colour is?"arent as easy as "3+1" or reCaptcha . Not everybody speak english on the interweb...
Does he even read the things he links to? The amazon page of the HTC desire says 499$, that is not "just under 600$". Why do people link to this fan-boy all the time?
What that says to me is that there is another tech bubble starting.

Right now the hiring standards (hopefully) haven't slipped too much. When the only requirement to get a Python/Django job is that you read a Python for dummies book and can fog a mirror, welcome to 2001 again.
Seems as though there are very few patterns that repeat themselves in a different fashion.

For example - it would be quite easy to solve which word is capitalized - or any of the math or series questions.
But this seems to be fairly common among the mid-to-large size companies.
Ask HN: How to price your product?
Hey HN,

For all of you who charge for your product, how did you determine your price point(s)? Any good book recommendations on pricing and strategy?

The industry I'm building my product for currently has one player that dominates the market. I don't want to price my product lower than theirs because 1) it may lead to a price war 2) lower price is not a competitive advantage

If I price it higher, it may signal that my product is of higher quality. However, some people don't use my competitor's product because they say it's too expensive.

So do I price it the same? Slightly lower? Slightly higher?

I know I'm being very vague, and price will also depend on the type of customers and market. What are some things I should consider when pricing my product? If you need more details please leave a comment.
Real-time visualization of geolocated tweets around the world
What does Facebook's motives have to do with anything? The question under discussion is whether a random stranger who can convince one of my friends to sign up for a virtual pet should suddenly be able to spam me.

Facebook has good reasons not to open their social graph -- and Google's lecturing them about noblesse oblige on this front is silly. Google should make decisions about its data portability policy based on its own needs. If they don't like this kind of access close the API. Keeping it open but shrill and insensible like this is amateur.
I've never done business cards through Printrunner, but their Matte-finish postcards are super high quality
It's a true eye opener to see someone making 500$ an hour working a 40 hour week and know they could raise their rates

Right some how we make the moral argument that one person should not be making that much. But when you realize a good developer can do the work of a team. Because the how you do it, is more important than how much you do of it. Couple that with the fact that a developer can automate 100-1000 peoples jobs and the true value of their labor starts to take form.
Er... having an agenda or topics that will be covered in the conference will be useful for anyone interested. Just a thought.
Interestingly, screenshots cover adsense after you click loupe icon to activate them. http://i.imgur.com/IpuYY.png I guess this will probably change soon.
Apache threatens to quit Java in Oracle licence row
Ha! Might have been all local calls, conducted in her native language.
Typically recruiters just use adverts to obtain CVs to put into their CRM system and match them to a range of roles they have available. The specific role you apply for isn't that important to the recruiter, as once they have your details they'll try and match you to any job they have which they think might be suitable.

The cost of advertising (which is high) is amortized by the long term value created by the CV database. Giving third parties access to those CVs is something I would imagine most recruiters would be reluctant to do.
The final recommendation based on cost is Vistaprint, when their price was $25 compared to Overnight's $9?
LimeWire is Quietly Resurrected: It's Baaack
I think you could have these solutions when dealing with lots of data, but I'm not an expert in either:

MySQL: replicate the database to one or more slaves, and either run mysqldump on a live slave (which should have sufficient capacity, since it's only keeping up with the INSERTs on the master and not handling queries) or take the slave offline, make a backup (EDIT: somehow - I don't really know MySQL all that well) and then make it catch back up (which may not be easy).

rsync: sensible people only create paths of the form f/s/myfile if they are expecting a ton of files. In this case, keeping track of file attributes may be extremely valuable (if UNIX ctime hasn't changed, rsync doesn't need to look at the file at all, which saves a lot of disk I/O.) (EDIT:) I just remembered that rsync tries to preserve hard links, too - and therefore remembers the inode of every file. I'm pretty sure that you can run a machine out of memory with enough small files.
What made you do CS in college? What made you stay longer and get a MSc. ? Was there a specific subfield that really grabbed you? If the problems you're facing are too easy, consider going somewhere that would make you solve hard problems (more grad school, maybe?) ? I think answering those questions would be helpful in you eventually re-find your passion for coding.

But right now, you sound burnt out. Forcing yourself to code more probably won't help. Get out and do something different for a while. I bet you'd find the programming itch coming back after not too long.
thanks a lot for this... always thought it would be cool to learn!
You can't hire an H1B unless you are willing to document that you were unable to find local talent that had the required skill set. HR departments usually work around this by wording the job requirement in such a way that only their hand-picked H1B applicant has every exact skill. "Oh, you need a Python/Django/Ruby/Java guy with 2 years .NET? I just happen to have a resume with that exact skill set in front of me; so strange that we wrote the job opening like that...<wink wink>"

Expect to pay about $10-20K extra just to hire an H1B because of all of this extra paperwork and documentation, as well as hope he wins the H1B lottery.
I second this. I was looking at the ncaa website and it seems that grabbing the stats from there would be trivial. I'm not sure if they have any kind of licensing terms for that data but I could find it while doing a quick look.

I was planning on playing with those stats to see if I could beat the BCS at rankings ;p
It will only be little harder to reverse than it was to develop. Unless the generation of patterns can be distributed to attain a scale that the attackers can't match, this will fail as soon as it's protecting something worthwhile.
that's for 250 cards from vistaprint in comparison to 25 cards from overnight's
as chipsy said, the more targetted it is, the better. you're designing a page that will show up on the top of some specific search terms.

you target search terms that are as popular as you can get without having major competition for top spots. its all about getting your content to the top, so that people will click through to your site.

many just use adsense. most people don't break the adsense TOC. these sites are smallish, but the sites built by pros usually are filled by original (or at least, originally worded) content. well done sites are done in such a way that the average reader looks at them, gets informed, but still finds something lacking, so they click on your ads or go buy the book you're pushing on the topic, etc.
I've always thought it's a fools errand to try and go against what you feel. If you "go to work and _try_ to be successful" you'll end up burning out.

My advice would be to find problems that you can't instantly think of the solution to. Whether that be a startup or whatever, you need more challenge.
And the cards are visibly terrible. That suggestion made me really question this review.
Here is a rebuttal to that article by a prolific polyphasic sleeper:

http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/2006/11/01/an-attack-on-p...
Ask HN: Thoughts on strategic investments from partners/customers?
We're in the process of raising money and considering different options. While the VC / angel route is being explored, I'm also considering a strategic investment from our first customer. They clearly appreciate the work we've done and see it's potential.

Wondering if anyone out there has gone down this route and has words of warning or words of encouragement?
What kind of work have you been doing? Find work that is much harder.
Apple cheap - hmm, not sure I buy that.

Why does an iPhone cost more than an iPod Touch, a standard 2G phone and a 3G USB dongle? That's all the hardware is.

Why does an iPad with a 10 inch screen cost twice as much as a netbook with a 10 inch screen and a keyboard?

Apple may have found some good niches to milk for cash with some attractively designed products, but cheap they most definitely ain't.
Ask HN: How does Odata compare to REST?
I understand the importance of CAPTCHAs, but I wouldn't put anything that required a reasonable level of thought in between my users and something I wanted them to do (for example, buy something from me). The more complex CAPTCHAs get, the less likely users are to try to complete them.
"People will visit once" is a nice problem to have. Realistically, by the time you have nontrivial traction that way, your software will probably be less crappy. Plus, the kind of people who will subject themselves to sites so new they aren't on The Googles have, ahem, unique expectations about product quality.
I think part of being a good system administrator is knowing about how far your solutions can be pushed. It's Google; it's not surprising that they want to be sure that you don't reflexively do things that will break at scale.
The dynamic array is only amortized O(1) instead of guaranteed O(1) (do you have real-time constraints?), insertion mid-list/queue is always O(n) instead of O(1) with an iterator for the linked list variant. I was just disagreeing with "everything else is better with a growable array", the array implementation is indeed better for many common use cases, but splice is not the only exception.
Decades ago, lots of programming languages were created that hardly anybody knows now, including some that would definitely be considered very specific, research-oriented, etc. This isn't really a new thing. See for example Jean Sammet's _Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals_.

Edit: Bergin & Gibson's _History of Programming Languages, Volume 2_ is pretty good, too, but that one covers more recent languages: Prolog, C, Forth, Lisp, Icon, etc.

It's not a bad idea to read about old experimental designs, particularly those that didn't work out because of limited hardware. I think there's a lot of potential in the APL and concurrent / constraint logic programming families.
What I get from reading that post is that some interviewers are just looking for trouble.

If you're going to ask probing questions, you have to probe correctly. Rsync is the correct answer, and mysqldump is the correct answer, for the problems as given. If you want those not to be the correct answer because you're fishing for something else, you have to be specific as to why not: "But suppose the patient has lupus, and that treatment will kill her, what would you do THEN?"

These are interviewers that are blowing the setup for their joke and then expecting you to laugh at the punchline. If you're going to be a "smarter-than-thou" interviewer, you have to at least set your questions up properly so that "rsync" and "mysqldump" are not, in fact, the correct answers.
There are several apps like this one that claim to export your friends and email address to CSV format.

http://apps.facebook.com/friendstocsv/
Is the Archos 10 actually available anywhere? B&H says "Approx. Arrival December." It's not even available on the Archos store:

https://store.archos.com/archos-internet-tablet-p-5005.html
The trouble with anchor links in email newsletters
It is already clickable.
I'd be worried about intermixing work + life like that. I've recently tried to be better about keeping my mornings and nights work-free, and I feel better because of it. Do you find that to be a problem at all, and if so, how do you deal with it?
Looks cool. Just out of curiosity, do you have permission to use team logos? I know the NFL is super protective of their trademarks.
Apparently not all Australians know this either. I talked to a couple of placement firms in 2008 about the possibility of temp or perm work in Australia as a US citizen and was politely dismissed - "too difficult, no jobs, preference to locals", etc. I had 15 years of software development skills at that point - mostly webdev (php, perl, etc), but some other non-web software skills too.
> Easy is not enough, Captcha need to be universal also.

Perhaps on the long term, but solving the captcha problem for the english-speaking (or any language, for that matter) subset of the internet population is still a very worthwhile undertaking.
On the plus side, these captcha are much easier on people who can't see.
I'm not, but http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/ is a program that gives startups 3 years of product licenses, including some Windows Azure and SQL Azure credits. I don't know too much more about the program, but its at least worth checking out if you're thinking of using Azure.
Patrick Vlaskovits, Explains CustDev & Lean Startup in a Nutshell | Foundora
The world is already filled with hundreds (and probably thousands) of programming languages, most of them fantastic in one way or the other.

Some people will prefer to stick to one language, some will dabble in others, but... most of the time, if the language is not radically different from everything you knew before, learning a new one isn't that hard.

I don't see this pattern changing in the foreseeable future. I mean, some areas always had their niche programming languages (heck, most areas do, anyway).
It's a big "F U" to Facebook because they don't reciprocate.
Who cares? Why is this important? Because I can avoid typing '-color'?

I understand that if I have multiple definitions, I can collapse them -- but if that's the point, the title of the post shouldn't be "stop using background-color".
Where do you get the idea that this is just a case of filling a form in?
If googles philosophy is data openess they wont close their API, but instead they can warn their users about something that non of them knows.

As for what you say is the question under discussion, as somebody said over here, facebook can perfectly distinguish between a user exporting his contacts and an app trying to scrap personal info. They wont do it because they dont want anybody to export his relationships (in email adresses terms) so that they can rebuild their social graph out of their webpage.
Facebooks leverage is users, and that action would make possible for users to migrate.

In any case, facebooks behaviour only damages users ability to control their data (or at least have a backup of it)
Indeed. I confess I remain baffled how the Mac managed to beat the Amiga to the not-PC slot in the market. More expensive, slower, less capable hardware, vastly more primitive operating system and not an enormous delay between the two.

If Commodore had done their job properly we'd be saying Steve Who?
Strategy Tips for the Game ‘Give & Take’ | DailyTechPost
I just ordered 1k business cards from Overnight Prints in preparation for RubyConf. I was impressed by the quality, given how cheap they were. They were thicker than I expected.

My one complaint is that you either pay a lot for shipping or get them fairly slowly. (I upgraded one level from the bottom and it took from Tuesday to the next Thursday.) Even that shipping was expensive--it was $8 shipping plus $4 "handling". Others may be just as bad though.

Overall, I was quite happy. I paid $40 with shipping and CA tax for 1,000 high quality, double-sided color business cards thanks to a half off coupon I found on retailmenot.com.

And if you're coming to RubyConf, find me and I'll give you one.
As an engineer from the NYC market myself, I know what you are going through. We have a hard time finding good engineers because the banks are paying $50-100K annual bonuses, plus six-digit base salaries.

It's hard for a startup to compete with that.
China shows space skills with satellite rendezvous
I really hope that game and other performance-dependent development moves to Go or something like it, rather than being stuck in C/C++ land.

The advantages of modern syntax design coupled with a fast native compiler would be a potent and exciting mix.
Indeed. The lack of persistent data structures in a Python is a much bigger barrier to a functional coding style than the lack of tail call optimization.

You can mostly get around the missing tail call optimization by using combinators and avoiding naked recursion---a good idea anyway. And then implement your combinators, say map or foldr, with a loop. It's ugly, but nobody has to see it.

There's no real way around the ephemeral nature of python lists and dicts---short of implementing your own versions. To say something positive: Strings, numbers and tuples are immutable in Python, though.
There already is an option not to show your email to friends. Just set the email field to 'Only Me'.
Plain old {background:#fff;} is even shorter than {background-color:#fff}, too.

The only reason to use the verbose declarations is in jQuery where a specific part of an element attribute is updated, and resetting everything else is not wanted. I.E. {background:#ddd url(somefile.png) no-repeat} => {background:#fff}

In the above case, the image background would be dropped.
1. People will visit once, see that it's crap and never come back again, no matter what you do.

Most of your cases are valid and important, but this point is unworthy of your concern. It's unbelievably hard to produce Internet content that is hated AND widespread. More often, crap is filtered and forgotten. Scroll to the bottom of any large HN thread to see what I mean - there's always a long tail of posts that are practically unread, some written by well-respected members of the community.

Irritating some fickle people is a small price to pay for getting feedback from someone who likes your idea.
Who makes the moral argument that one person should not be making that much?
WSJ M&A 101: A Guide to Merger Agreements
I agree. The questions in the example may be easily solved by a technically minded person, but they could also confuse a large part of your audience. I would find it very difficult to generate questions that are appropriate no matter what language, culture, math or literacy background my visitors have.
Haskell also gets it right. Look at Data.Map and Data.Set.
I actually presented this (http://www.slideshare.net/mattmichielsen/how-to-make-beer) at a local BarCamp a couple years ago instead of the talk I was planning to do on mercurial vs. git. I got a lot of people excited about it and at least one has been brewing himself lately.
I think that eventually some programming tasks will become highly specialized, yes, and use custom and very specific languages depending on the field and the problem at hand and may end up with their own degree programs, etc. There's already hints of this sort of thing right now. It's very hard to transplant a programmer from (for example) web development to 3D game engine development - it has nothing to do with language, though. There's just a huge set of knowledge required for each that has very little overlap - even if the languages used happened to currently be the same in some cases.

It doesn't make sense to forever expend the effort required to force every problem into just a handful of languages' structures - even if it is theoretically possible to do so.

I think that things like OMeta (http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/) are an important piece and the other work being done by Viewpoints Research (http://www.viewpointsresearch.org) could help.
Post a correction as a reply at the top level. Users will typically vote it up.