skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I also don't think there is a bubble. The company acquisitions for talent alone have been reasonable as far as I can tell. In the IT services industry this is long standing practice for talent acquisition.

There is always a shortage for great engineers and they generally have great jobs, so acquiring the top tier will always be competitive as in any other industry. For most companies, the only way to gain access to this tier continues to be personal networks or if they are in the founding team. For other organizations, growing this talent from promise is the most pragmatic approach assuming have some really good talent to mentor them.

The middle and lower tiers are being paid upper middle class wages commensurate with education, experience, and economic contribution.

Things are more competitive in hot geographies like Silicon Valley and Seattle, but that is nothing new.
Maybe it's just a coincidence, but all 4 positive comments were by accounts created in the last month and have little history. pg: if you're listening, were two or more posted from the same IP?

And frankly, they sound a little spammy. Who says things like:

Great talk by angel investor and entrepreneur Travis Kalanick!

Travis is a great guy!
Is asking a cab if they go somewhere in a major city normal? Excuse my ignorance if it is, but I'm from a very small town (so no prior experience with cabs in general) and have lived in Chicago (city and suburbs at various times) for the last 5 years and I have never even thought to ask a cab driver if he goes somewhere in particular. And I've taken cabs pretty far within the city.

The only time I was ever refused was when I tried to get a ride to the suburbs (a mega expensive cab ride but I needed it).
There's only so much I can cover in one post. All of those are definitely important- I'll get to them in later posts, I just wanted to cover some basic suggestions I found myself giving over and over again.
"Y Combinator, the increasingly famous Silicon Valley incubator.."

What an odd modifier.
Good points as well. :) Myself, I used to be painfully shy. I was meeting someone for the first time the other day and they said that they take me to be super outgoing and confident, but this was a transformation over about 4 years — 2 years of avoiding "scary" situations, then realizing the problem and then two years of actively trying to change my demeanor. I'd like to say that those programs would have sped up this process of feeling confident and comfortable — just because someone is shy right now, doesn't mean they can't cut it as a startup founder, just means they might need help to get to that point.

Those that get over that hump of being awkward and feeling like sheep in a wolf party phase definitely will stand out more to men, and I think in a good way — more recognition from blogs and the such (since they love profiling someone who's "different"), and people might be more interested in meeting with a woman founder than a man (again, the "different" thing leading to curiosity). I think guys notice this and get rather annoyed too, since it looks like preferencial treatment, but for those women who are intimidated by the male startup culture, those people are great role models.
Plain text banners can convert incredibly well- just ask anyone who's seen a PlentyofFish banner.

There are two main techniques in banner design- clashing or blending with the site you're on. AdSense generally takes the blending approach, but you should try both.
Since some people are asking how it works, I'll explain how some of those work/fail.

Q: Which word from list "duckweed, commendations, civilised, receptionists, flours" contains the letter "v"? A: FAILURE

This one fails because it recognizes 'duck' as a word and doesn't know what the trailing characters are, so it fails to parse. Adding it to let a word be followed by extra characters makes it twice as slow, but makes it pass it, and so I didn't do that.

Q: Hand, jelly or Jennifer: the person's name is? A: jennifer

This is one of the tricky cases, because I convert to lower case when I pass to the parser. So if parsing fails and the word 'name' is in the string, then I return the first capitalized word and hope for the best.

Q: What is fifty three thousand seven hundred and one as digits? A: 53701

This one was an interesting exorcise in parsing as it is grouped ((fifty three) thousand) (seven hundred) and (one). I assume that all numbers are of the correct form, because it will parse 'one one and two' as the number 4 (1+1+2=4).

Q: If yesterday was Tuesday, what day is today? A: wednesday

This was just putting the dates in order and doing a lookup into the list.
The only real thing I have read about attraction so far is that it is probably coined by early experiences (like siblings, parents,...). Also, despite a continued effort by the fashion industry, I never had the impression that anorexia is attractive (hint, think Playboy, not Cosmopolitan). Your link doesn't tell me all that much without photos. In any case, it is obvious that there are all sorts of people (ie men who like fat women, men who like thin women, men who like old women, and so on).

I honestly don't know how to argue with you since I am not sure I agree with your assumption that women are valued solely based upon their attractiveness.

As for biology, there is a difference between men and women - the latter can bear children. Hence the "pairing" market is asymmetric.
poker sites where bots are welcome http://www.nyse.com/ and http://www.nasdaq.com/
Resurrecting a Village by Buying Up Main Street
Did Google Adwords have advertising opportunities like this back when it first started getting traction? Is it still possible to get impressions on bids this cheap for very long tail keywords in Google?

Would love to hear some input from someone more experienced than I.
A more subtle example involves advertising. You want both to remain at the table. One is getting low. Then they both bet into a pot aggressively, everyone else drops out, then the richer one folds and the poor one shows the bluff. Now money has been transferred, and the table thinks one of the bots is a loose player.
I agree. Fame and competition - especially for limited resources, whether that's featured placement on a site, elite status, or a limited pool of other rewards - tend to be much stronger motivators than simple financial rewards.

Not to say that financial rewards alone can't work (unless I'm missing something, that seems to be how eHow farms most of their content), but my last company (Revver) focused primarily on rewarding users financially for creating and sharing video content.

It's not the cleanest example because of some of the related implications of that decision: not including copyrighted content for fear of negating DMCA protection, having large media companies uncomfortable with the reward structure around dispersing content freely, etc. While some content creators really treated the endeavor as a business and looked to maximize profits as much as possible, most were really in it for the fame - and Youtube had the built-in audience we couldn't build (especially without stolen, copyrighted work early on).

I still do think there's a happy medium between the two - with fame / competition being the primary motivators and financial rewards being included as bonuses or perks. At Revver we had that priority order reversed, thinking that financial rewards would be big enough motivators to bring traffic and content.
It depends on their privacy settings if you can get to it or not through the api. Your app can request explicit extended permission for it. http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissio...
That wasn't me.
I bet a lot of it will find its way into proprietary closed-source applications on the WinMo 7 platform...
For those in the US, a googly is a way of delivering (pitching) a ball in Cricket. The American equivalent terminology would be 'throwing a curveball'
Also the hotkey software is explicitly allowed by poker sites, as long as no automatic moves are taken (e.g. auto-folding).
Doesn't work in Chrome. Tried in FF and then it worked.
It's not actually true that Sass and Less have the same features. Each has some features the other doesn't, with Sass having substantially more than Less. Notable examples include the ability to use variables in selectors, the @extend directive, and a wealth of useful built-in functions. It's because of these and other features that Compass can be built on Sass, where it couldn't be built on Less.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of Sass.
Let's put it this way.

If people wanted something naturally, the government and industry wouldn't have to run ads incessantly promoting it.

Personally, I've made the discovery that breakfast is the only meal of the day I can skip. By the morning, my body is adapted to running off my stored energy reserves and it's not screaming at me that I need to eat.

The fact that so many authorities are constantly screaming "eat breakfast", "eat breakfast" suggests to me that there's a hidden agenda to push breakfast foods, just like the U.S.D.A tries to push cheese on people.
Maybe their emails are set as hidden..
APL, k, and similar languages are terse. No need for loops, verbose variable/function names, etc. It's far more productive.

Plus, since all actions are based on arrays, the compiler can very easily target vector processors (including SSE) and make cache-effecient memory allocations. And since the language is small, the interpreter is usually small enough to fit in L1 cache.
VHDL, a hardware description language can be used in the dataflow style and models the parallelism found in hardware.
I certainly don't on things I can easily afford to replace.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Here's the thing with review sites; the reviews are not made by people qualified to write reviews. I've seen one-star reviews on Amazon because the person bought the wrong item and they didn't like the return policy. I've seen one-star reviews on Yelp because the restaurant didn't use recyclable takeout forks.

It's really dumb to put any value into the star-rating system, and yet people do it. I only look at the stars if there are 40 or more reviews. Then at least a few people with some common sense got a chance to weigh in.
That's funny, I actually use Basecamp for this right now. Specifically with the To-Do lists. I've never really had a problem with keeping track that way, interesting that they wanted something more dedicated to the task.

That being said, if they offered this as a product I'd get on board.
I haven't done Facebook API stuff for a while but it used to be that the emails it would give you were @facebook.com proxy addresses.
...and this wasn't even UBS LA.
"Well, isn't the enemy of your enemy like, your friend? Or whatever? Can't they team up?"

"Not exactly. In this setting, the enemy of your enemy is still a floating, greasy, armored brain."

"Well, what about his enemy? Maybe you could be friends with him."

"No, because that guy is a mechanical horror in an undying battle shell. He sails from world to world in a flying tomb, serving gods who eat hope."

"So, probably not."

"Odds are low."

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/03/05/
There's a great book on NY cab drivers and their tricks from someone who worked there a while, the one catch is it's written in Russian as it is authored by an immigrant from the Soviet Union:

http://fictionbook.ru/author/lobas_vladimir/jieltiye_koroli/

It came out in the late 80s but the rules and the medallion system haven't really changed. The book describes the business and the psychology of drivers in-depth.

The book helped reinforce two opinions I hold:

Cab drivers are for the most part scumbags. I can't wait for self-driving cars and automated cab service.

"Political exiles" from the Soviet Union are for the most part scumbags (the author of the book is a "dissident" who worked as a propagandist at Radio Liberty but took up cabbying because that wasn't paying enough).

Now as to how this relates to the parent:

There are four reasons why a cabbie won't pick up passengers in NYC (these have been mentioned in various replies here):

1. Going from the city to the boroughs is a waste of time for cabbies.

2. Cabbies parked in front of hotels only want airport fares.

3. Cabbies racially profile for certain categories of people that have a reputation for paying their fares, tipping well, and unlikely to be muggers. This also depends on the time of day and pickup location.

4. In the 80s certain parts of the city were unsafe (going to Harlem meant being pelted with rocks and getting carjacked; not an exaggeration). Again, depending on who is going and time of day, there is still risk even today.

Yeah, robot cabbies, can't wait for them.
Edit: The number of people jumping on board with this "theory" in his blog comments makes me despair for the state of nutrition and health education.

Most people on the internet have no idea what they're taking about when it comes to food, nutrition, and diets. The same applies to medical advice.

Many people read one thing and repeat it elsewhere, which is an issue if the source was incorrect. Also people love talking about their personal experiences. That's a problem seeing as it's not scientific (no control experiment, only one individual involved, etc...).

A big part of this is that the nutritional industry is not regulated by any body, such as the FDA. You end up with lots of products and advice that adds up to little more than snake oil. Hence fad diets.

What's the best advice to take? That from a doctor, dietitian, or nutritionist. Not some yahoo on the internet.
> bumping the version so we look hot, fresh, and new to our new friends

You will look old when hit version 10.
The magnitude of the numbers matter -- significantly!

I actually tested this out, too: http://joshua.schachter.org/2008/09/amateur-economist.html

See also: prospect theory.
Fun things to do in Dwarf Fortress:

* Orbital Magma Cannon - Build a roof over the world, with hatches remote controlled by levers every few squares. Pump magma up there. When enemies come, use your lever to open the hatch above them and drop magma on their heads.

* Sacrificial Trade Depot - Don't know what to do with all your caged goblin prisoners? Tired of waiting for your dwarves to take their stuff one sock at a time? Build a tower above your Trade Depot, then drop prisoners onto the depot. They die from the fall and all their goods are ready to trade. You may want to at least take their weapons first / station some nearby military to clean up any survivors.

* Underwater Depot: A great combination with the sacrificial depot is to create a drowning trap at the Trade Depot. If you make sure to have a hatch to close the top (and another hatch at the bottom to drain things, both with remote control levers), you can drown anyone or thing that goes into the depot. Including, say, the elven traders. Their caravans get a little too snobbish over the trees you cut down, anyhow and this way you can get all their stuff.

* Programming: It's possible to build computing devices in DF, too. See: http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Computing

More fun ideas can be found listed as 'Megaprojects' on the wiki: http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Megaprojects
Unclear how effective this would be when you need to target more narrowly on a certain demographic (i.e. only USA). Still very interesting - will have to try something simple myself.
As I said in another comment, i tested this exact question out on mechanical turk: http://joshua.schachter.org/2008/09/amateur-economist.html
PB is going to work full-time though, at least in the spiky sense that Harj and Jessica and I do.
I have car insurance because it is legal mandated. I don't have health or life insurance.
I run into this problem and my solution has been to block distracting sites. This gets me 90% of the value of being offline without taking required APIs offline.

I wrote this to help: https://github.com/bradjasper/focus
You think it's hard to drive while texting? Try fighting a war.
"Principles can be expensive things"...

You had me confused there.
Only when it's legally/contractually required (car/financed-house), or comes with negotiated discounts (health), or handles a catastrophic/risk-of-ruin situation (chronic disease/business liability).

Insuring against small losses is a net financial loser, or else the insurance company wouldn't offer it.
Very true. The person writing the questions has the advantage in this one because they can always throw in more variations and I would have to figure out all of the new ones.

There is, however, an inherit limitation to question-asking, and that is it must be understandable to a general population. So I would switch from using a parser to just looking for key words and then matching from there. (Which is, for example, how I find names in a list.)

Even if they made it so I only get one fifth the number of correct answers, a 20% success ratio would be high enough for concern. The attackers can just keep trying and trying and if 20% of the time they can register a new bot, then they win. The defender must win a much larger percent of the time.
Congrats to YC, Paul and Harj!

I'd love to sit down with Harj one day and see how much he's changed since our school days. I'm really inspired by how much he's accomplished. Although, he's obviously worked very hard for it and it's well deserved!
Choking The Recovery: Why New Growth Companies Aren't Going Public
This guy has also made a CPU in minecraft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sNge0Ywz-M
I have no idea what Paul was working on at Facebook, but I believe the timing has to be coincidental, because we drove it. The reason this had to get announced today is that interviews for w2011 start on Monday.
I abhor gambling - risk assumed for Nothing - except entertainment. Shudder.

I'm a serial lifetime Entrepreneur.
in other words, they didn't bother to think about the risks of reinforcing their blindspots (or the opportunities to counter). a couple of guys were there and doing the job so they formalized it.
The questions are so abstract that they don't say much about me other than if I understand standard economics theory.

In real world situations I always have a measure of difficult to quantify control over the situation, which is completely different than the raw random chance gambling the test checks for.

For example, I would never buy a lottery ticket because that is stupid, but I would definitely spend 3 years of my time working obsessively on something that everyone in the world other than my self says has a one in a billion chance of succeeding, because the fact is that I will succeed.
If you hit the front page without JS enabled it will automatically submit to the html version. And similarly, if you hit it with a textmode browser it will automatically go to the lite version.
Or just increase your font size and use a window that's not full screen. Ctrl-+ increases font size in Chrome, shift-WheelScrollDown in Firefox, Shift-WheelScrollUp in Konqueror.
The one thing that's made me apprehensive of using CL for a project.
I must not consume enough advertising, as I haven't noticed this campaign =P

I personally tend to have trail mix and a low calorie sports drink for breakfast, but I'm weird like that.
our build is now using this, thank you. discovered some nasty io.
Infographic: Poster illustrates a vision for the future of Enterprise IT
"1.) shift change in 15 minutes. So they can take you 15 minutes away but they can't drive an hour into Brooklyn and miss their shift change. 2.) Car maintenance, refueling. If the car is running low on fuel they can pick people up on short drives towards the gas station but it wouldn't make sense for them to go the opposite way."

99% of the time these are not the circumstances when a cab driver attempts a pick-up but refuses when he hears the location.
YES, Google's CPCs were far lower in the past.

NO, it is not possible to a purchase a meaningful number of $0.01 clicks on AdWords today.

I can't view the blog post (HN effect?), but I can say that we used to routinely purchase consumer electronics keywords (ipods, razr) between 2003-2005 and pay between $0.08 and $0.12 per click. Those same keywords today fetch over $1.00 or more. (Well not RAZR, but you get what I mean.)

Whereas on Facebook, I have yet to see CPCs of higher than about $0.45.

So yes, Facebook has a land of low-CPC opportunity. The challenge, of course, is conversion. Google has a proven track record of turning AdWords clicks into conversions. Whereas your average Facebook user who clicks on an ad is less likely to convert. (A good portion of the clicks seem to be accidental, in fact, judging by how quickly users hit the back button.)

My personal feeling is that Facebook advertising will one day grow to rival that of search advertising, but due to this issue of conversion (and purchase intent), other very smart people disagree.
Haha, no, I don't have this answering questions for any bot anywhere.

Actually, the reason those are solved isn't exactly what you'd expect. When it fails to find an answer, it checks to see if any word is upper-case. If it is, it cuts out all non-letters (to remove the comma at the end, for example) and then returns that word. The reason it does this is because it will occasionally asks questions such as "Which word IN this sentence is in all caps." So that's why G-B-R-D gets turned into 'gbrd', and why it says 'th'.
It's not uglier than Perl.

Can't be.
IDump4U.com: when you just can't dump someone by yourself
Protocol handlers and 2-way App integration for iOS
He doesn't always get them, maybe that's why? Maybe if the zombie spawner and water block were in an inner room with a door. He could simply close the door, which would dry up the room, and collect any stuck feathers. There could even be a button that opens the door from a distance, for safety.
I toggle between b-yew-kite and b-yew-shay followed by, "you know, the gmail guy."
Keep in mind a bot player would not need to be hugely successful - you can launch hundreds of them that sit just above breakeven.

It's a lot like algorithmic traders, BTW.
Long time lurker, first time poster.

This is a proof of concept version of our new collaborative development environment for the Web called collabacode.

We've only been working on this for 7 weeks and would appreciate some feedback.

Thanks HN!
Anybody know how to set this? I tried to figure it out yesterday but gave up after a minute or two.

EDIT: Account (top-right) > Privacy Settings, click Customize Settings (lower middle, small text), then very last setting is your e-mail address visibility.
First Time Users: Installing Linux Mint 10
Node.js Camp
Fair enough. The site is http://getpunchd.com; new landing page coming tomorrow.
"Hurting someone hurts yourself", bullshit. Revenge is sweet.

Revenge has nothing to do with self-defense.
Yeah just like those video game mag writers who got to go to flight school for their reviews of an air combat game. Ohh wait, paying people in things of value is similar to paying them in cash, even if they would have never bought those things in the first place. Especially if said perks can be sold for cash latter( free laptop for review etc.)

Paying for reviews is paying for reviews integrity compromised, trust lost.
BH is more like a conglomerate than an investment firm. They're just a super-disciplined conglomerate, unlike the random ones that gave the term such a bad name in the 1970s.
It's strange that no one has done this yet so I wrote up an explanation of how the languages compare. It's too long to post here so I made a gist. I hope this will help you learn the differences and evaluate the two projects:

https://gist.github.com/674726

I am the author of compass so I definately understand Sass more intimately than Less. Please feel free to correct any misunderstandings I might have. Also note: I am comparing the versions of Sass and Less that they suggest on their main websites -- both have some very cool features and enhancements in the pipeline.