skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The job posting you're referring to doesn't simply say "you weren't good enough for YC, so you should come be one of our employees instead".

The title is literally "Rejected by YC? We want to hire you."

That's about as literal a paraphrasing of "you weren't good enough for YC, so you should come be one of our employees instead" as you could possibly get.

YC is limited by the amount of start-ups they can mentor, probably not by the quality of the start-ups themselves and if you are a 'reject' then you should take it as a learning experience and an opportunity to use any feedback provided (which YC does very little of). It may simply be that YC filled their quota and your start-up idea, team and execution so far are just fine.

Those most likely to fit the job description here most likely fit that category.
Funny. The only framework I've been heavily drilled on is Java Concurrency, oh and they make sure you know JUnit well enough to write a test case (erm a few method calls and a bunch of autocompletion from the editor?)

Everything else is: Do you know spring? What is IOC? Ok good enough. Do you know Hybernate? What is ORM?

Guess you've been looking for the wrong job or you've been giving the job search to the wrong person. If at an interview someone just whips out "Lets get into the nitty gritty details of your struts2 knowledge" I would just leave, unless I don't have food at home and no money to pay for more.
Those ordinary people will still get an Android, because it's on two-for-one offer or the salesman tells them to. And they'll be quite happy because their phone will make calls, and pick up their email, surf the web, play angry birds and give them directions and all the other things that a modern smartphone does. They'll never read Engadget and find out that they're a whole 6 months behind the software curve, and even if someone tells them they will quite rightly not care.

Because that is what we're talking about isn't it? Not BIOS problems or constant malware infestations, but geek rage at not being on the cutting edge. The intersection of people who care and can't help themselves is insignificant and consists mainly of whiny tech power-users who have nowhere to go but Android.
I don't have any models that try and explain history and I can't begin to imagine what a result of such a process might be. Stuff like Asimovian Psychohistory are fun to think about, but it is a fictional story telling device. And that's a hint. History and politics are storytelling. Often based on "true events" only as far as convenient to the storyteller.

To make any useful sense of history, or politics, or nearly any "soft" process, humans apply a variety of heuristics, some based on experience, and others on evolution, that frankly no one really understands. At least in the sense of a testable or prediction making model.

If someone makes a statement, or tells me a story, I have to examine the context and the past narrative of events in order to make a judgement about its veracity. The details of how that judgement come to pass are as unknown as the nature of natural language, and I suspect they are related.

In other words, my process doesn't get "bad" results, it gets no results. But I do get a heuristic that is somehow useful. Sometimes. Trying to argue about events like this, outside of the limited terms of those heuristics is pointless. How many angels _can_ dance on the head of a pin.

Instead, as in a courtroom drama (another story!), we look for means, motive, and opportunity. And then like any good jury, we apply our various and variable heuristics and come up with our own story.

Which is a guess.

Whether or not you believe the story I told, within the context of rather different discussion, is irrelevant, just as how you feel about the innocence of today's murder de jour is irrelevant. Unless you are on the jury. And the jury of history on this isn't born yet. Instead we are Rashomon like witnesses to contemporary events.

And speaking of irrelevant, this discussion has strayed from from its roots. While it's been fun, I'm done. Good day...
This is stock Ubuntu 10.10 Ambiance theme:

Unstable Docky from PPA (The stable version is basically identical). Docky is pure butter. It is a few features down from AWN but it's MUCH more consistent (had problems with clicks registering in AWN in weird places) and is gorgeous. It really takes advantage of the SVG icons from Faenza.

* ppa:docky-core/ppa

The toolbar at the top is standard gnome-panel with Cardapio replacing the standard GNOME Main Menu. Cardapio is easily my favorite main menu of any OS. I have the ability to change the identifier for it, search the menu, see everything grouped nicely, AND resize the menu itself. Awesome stuff.

* ppa:cardapio-team/unstable

* screenshot of Cardapio: http://i.min.us/i9sRs.png

I'm using Faenza icons:

* http://tiheum.deviantart.com/art/Faenza-Icons-173323228

* ppa:tiheum/equinox

Note, there is a conflict caused by Faenza's author overwriting PNGs in /usr/share/dockmanager which is used by the Docky DEB. I used DPKG and --force-overwrite to get them to install properly. A bit of a pain when there are updates, but really it's only one command and it's well worth it.

(The only other thing I could add is, I use dockbarx when I remote in because it doesn't require compositing where Docky does. When I do that, my setup looks like this: http://i.min.us/iErSa.png)
Evolution Paradox - Why Some People Are More Attractive Than Others (2007)
\begin[possibly failing]{humor}
Alright! Apple did something wrong! Took PCWorld long enough to bring it to our attention. I mean, what, didn't the MacBook Air come out yesterday? And it can't perform well as items already on the market?
\end{humor}
Spanish Skies Shut Down After 90% Of Air Traffic Controllers "Call In Sick"
Did you even read the article? They were mentioning weight and battery life numbers all over.
I always wondered when the Hebrew alphabet would come up.

It already has:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number
How To Replace a $600 Piece of Software with 100 Lines of Ruby
> * Sexism and unprofessionalism can be avoided without being prudish about the content of your presentation. This is a slide I used in one of my Italian presentations.

Actually, even something like this is still considered offensive. See http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Sexualized_environment

A sexualized presentation will most likely disproportionately offend women over men particularly in a male dominated audience.
and in such comparisons I never see categories like "surface area of trackpad" and "bulkyness of power adapter and power cable", which I've learned to appreciate more than fps in games.
What's surprising here is that the difference is so small.
Sorry.

For a development position you need two pieces of CRITICAL mental capabilities:

1) Problem solving: How you approach problems.

2) Coding skill: How you implement the solutions given in (1).

If you don't have 2, you suck. 2 is not limited to a language.

HOWEVER knowing the nitty gritty details of a language is actually very critical often. Imagine you never worked on ruby before, heard of Rails, read a book, made a hello world program, thats that. You are a good programmer. Now you apply for a job where you are expected to make an RoR application that will serve a minimum of 1 million hits per hour (they are solving the scaling problem). You got to make the code clusterable and efficient since in this case buying 100 servers is out of the question (lack of funds). Sorry you are going to need more than a ruby newbie for this one.

Now I am in no way implying that a good developer can't write an amazing ruby program having never touched ruby before, quite the contrary. That developer just might not be able to start as a senior ruby developer. Probably give that person 1 year with ruby and you got yourself a guru. But you need some minimums.

I guess what some people don't realize when hiring is that don't expect miracles from someone until approximately 1 yr after employment. That is when they understand the system, frameworks the system uses, the development strategy, problems, etc. This is when you start to see a good developer make amazing contributions. If you are hiring now because you need something shipped in 2 months, you have wrong reasons a person who knows the frameworks is going to have a better start, but its not a solution.
Mike's job is performance. His blog is about "performance, data design and game programming." In the context of the article, performance is what matters.
My apologies. I meant to say Ivy League caliber... ;)
Upvoted in agreement, although as an "Ivy Plus" Stanford is the next closest thing to an Ivy League school.
Doesn't add much on the Ars Technica article: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/11/post-8.ars/
Thanks for the offer but I'm a pretty big PHP guy (yeah, I know, snide comments)... ;)
Jacques, you are many fine things, but "low drama" isn't one of them (take it from someone who knows).

"Rejected by YC? We want to hire you." is absolutely not the same sentiment as "You weren't good enough for YC, so you should come be one of our employees instead." Full stop.
The same even happened in the chat during the start-up school webcasts. Very disturbing.
We know you're successful, we can see that and you don't really need to reiterate it. I do appreciate the tips you share but I'd enjoy them a lot more if I didn't feel you were advertising yourself.

I understand why you do it though, you're a salesperson and you are your own brand. Sharing tips gets you exposure. I'm sure it benefits a lot of people but mostly you (which is fine). I don't dislike you Jason, it's just an observation. I generally shy away when I feel I'm being sold something.
And, taking an awesome position at another startup also doesn't make you unready for entrepreneurship.
monster.com is mentioned first, seriously?
Yeah, they have. Apple and Windows 7 are going to split the market if they don't start paying attention to their existing handset owners. (Both of those are doing centralized updates).
The great thing about reading, particularly fiction, is that it's such a pleasure... so disciplining yourself to read more great fiction (and thus improve your writing and a number of other areas of your life) is a bit like disciplining yourself to eat great-tasting food or to go for walks more often. It's something you can really enjoy and build good habits around.The fact that your writing will naturally improve is just a bonus!
They think they're better than you... for offering you an executive role at their company?
Assange: The Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land...
Here is the key quote about the rape-charge:
"Swedish bloggers uncovered the full story in a few hours. The complaint was lodged by a radical feminist Anna Ardin, 30, a one-time intern in the Swedish Foreign Service. She’s spokeswoman for Broderskapsrörelsen, the liberation theology-like Christian organization affiliated with Sweden's Social Democratic Party. She had invited Julian Assange to a crayfish party, and they had enjoyed some quality time together. When Ardin discovered that Julian shared a similar experience with a 20-year-old woman a day or two later, she obtained the younger woman’s cooperation in declaring before the police that changing partners in so rapid a manner constituted a sort of deceit. And deceit is a sort of rape. The prosecutor immediately issued an arrest warrant, and the press was duly notified. Once the facts were examined in the cold light of day, the charge of rape seemed ludicrous and was immediately dropped. In the meantime the younger woman, perhaps realizing how she had been used, withdrew her report, leaving the vengeful Anna Ardin standing alone."
Good point. Procedural programming, OOP, and Functional are different. Would be a bigger mountain to climb. If you are smart though you pair up a newbie with an expert and watch the newbie change for the better (or quit).
Steve Jobs was saying that netbooks are merely cheap laptops: bad as ultramobile devices and bad as laptops.

How is the 11" Air compared to a regular netbook?
There are a few things I like about that job post:

- They're for equity positions

- They separate the person writing marketing material and the person selling

- SaaS for enterprise is quite lucrative (if you say businesses don't want SaaS! consider that they can provide a firewall product, and that unless I'm mistaken, GitHub's firewall product is much less popular among large customers than their SaaS product)
Job postings from YC companies aren't stories. Think of them like ads. They're a kind of ad only YC companies can make. The notion of "discussing" them doesn't apply.
its little to do with "whats hot", I just thought it was a good idea to sit down and quantify exactly what you have been spending your spare time doing and what skills you have learned.

If you dont find things interesting, please just dont upvote, there isnt any need for snarky replies
The good thing about desktop software is if the vendor goes away, the software still works.

Not too keen (as a customer) on putting my time and effort into a SAAS hobby project that doesn't scale.
Random Hacks of Kindness: Dec 4-5 in ~ 20 cities
Firefox Live (baby red pandas)
This is the original link: http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/mo...
I didn't say the police didn't care, I said they didn't file charges. The difference is instructive.
"Shouldn't diplomatic staff be able to send back accurate assessments of political figures in countries where the US has interests? If internal comms are sanitised for potential public exposure, who benefits?"

Why do you think Wikileaks is only about the US? Right now the cables leaked out are from the US, but the point is to do this to every government. Everyone opposed to statism and nationalism benefits.

"Were he actually to take on tyranny he knows he'd end up in a London clinic with radiation poisoning."

Except Litvinenko wasn't interested in revealing state secrets, but in making schemes with Russian oligarchs. Which is probably why he's the only Soviet or Russian defector to have died under suspicious circumstances since 1959.
It's a surefire way to kill your project though.
They are important for factorising prime numbers. For example

17 = (4+i)(4-i)
It seems odd that comments are allowed to be disabled on some of these posts. Isn't one of the main functions of HN discussion?

Sure. Another function is to help ycombinator make money by providing a place where YC-funded companies can advertise for employees. pg runs this site only partially out of the goodness of his heart.

I guess the reason for not allowing comments is that the comments would almost invariably contain a lot of nitpicking negativity about one aspect of the ad or another. (Job ads are particularly negativity-inducing, since folks who don't meet one of the stated requirements tend to get offended and whine that said requirement is completely unnecessary, while other folks no doubt like to whine about whichever variation on "rockstar", "ninja" or "pirate" the prospective employer has used to describe their ideal candidate.)
Are you going to be as happy when someone makes that same argument about baseball?

"What if a baseball hits a car or a building?

I mean, those things aren't even under the operators control after they've left the hand (or bat). And my god, think about it! They could fill one with high explosives!

Quick, we need to regulate this. Every baseball needs a registration number so we can identify it's owner, and every baseball bat and throwing arm needs to be licensed!"
Zed Shaw: Tir Web Framework Officially Up
I can't help but wonder whether you would have equivalent support for Amazon if they were taking down a site that was hosting classified materials leaked from Iran, China or North Korea. I suspect you'd have an issue with that.
I dunno guys. Shouldn't the C++/C#/Java dudes be ready for this? I am an SQL Server Dev/DBA and the code/design something on paper type questions are expected for us. Plus it goes even deeper with DMVs, system stored procedures, etc. I just don't get why the dev folks are surprised when an interviewer asks them to implement a doubly linked list or something along those lines.
Interesting. Earlier I've made a few small game prototypes, nothing that can compare to a real, full blown game, but it's where I'd like to go someday and I can totally agree with most of the points.

However "OOP rules" is a bit dual edged for me. When I started out with prototyping these games I tried really hard to do it "the correct way" with loads of abstractions and with proper encapsulation and what not. Sure parts got good but I a made a lot of bloat along the way and now I could have made it a lot simpler (and better). Maybe it's because I've been spending time with Haskell and lisp (functional lisp that is) and now I'd like to "go back" to a more functional approach. Maybe it's because it's just a personal growth as a programmer though?

I might agree with the step by step approach, although I personally think it's funner (and thus more educational) to just dive in head first and make shit happen. I don't think I've ever learned as much as when I sat down and decided that yes I would finally make a working game and just jumped in head first. Break things - it's the way we (at least how I) learn.

Which brings me to #5:

"Don’t just jump at any problem and start writing code."
Well that's a little how I do things. Maybe I don't even know exactly what the problem is before a few attempts? How would you for example solve a path finding problem in a modern RTS? A bit of forethought is vital of course, but can you really think of all the subtle problems that will come up? Or even all the big ones? I think iterate early and often is the key to game making, and it's a bit similar with problemsolving.

But of course that's also what he's getting at later with "Write some basic functionality and then expand it."
It's just that I think when I'm coding, not before.

Now after I wrote this I realize I agree with almost everything he said but with minor differences.
I have something that meets all those requirements. You can contact me at admin@sleeperbot.com.
At a minimum, Android needs to organize the base OS with a package system, so they can ship incremental updates which the OEMs can test quickly.
PG, how about creating a 'hall of infamy and repetition' list for submissions that seem to find their way onto the site every so often? Once a link makes the list, all new submissions are redirected to a page listing the previous submissions w/ points/comments listed.

Some links like this and the comments that ensue are 'evergreen' material, but by continually being resubmitted at a later date the chance of conversation happening decreases and its time on the homepage shrinks while it creates a sort of broken window effect for those of us who haven't seen it for the first (or 6th) time.
I think you misunderstand my point. The range of effects is a gradient. At some point in the late '70s early '80s, when the controversy was fast and furious, I read an article that indicated that depending on the size of the bomb and the size of the target (with this type of weapon the target is usually a group of soldiers of some type) you end up with a gradient of results ranging from dead to something like what you describe to something like I describe to people who'll die months to years later to those statistically unaffected.

The point of the article was that, from a tactical viewpoint, such a weapon could be as dangerous to the user as the target.

Of course if your use case is simply to clear out a bunch of civilians from their land of milk and honey and move in, then, well sure. YMMV. Cows and bees weren't immune to neutrons that last time I checked.

As to the morality of the weapon, well, let's just say that I'm glad that, for now, it doesn't seem to have many advocates.
What does that even mean? Yes, whatever startup you were going to attempt is going to die... when you take the full time job that turned out to be more attractive than starting it.

It's not like going to work for Comcast, dude, and you know it. I don't get why you're trying to stir this up.
I just use Google Apps for Domains for email. For domains, GoDaddy is decent, but I prefer Namecheap.
Interesting. I stick with default backgrounds (white, usually) but I tend to turn my screen brightness way way down when I'm working... which ends up looking indistinguishable from your screenshot.
however spot instance prices run very close to reserved instance prices.
Selling your Mad Skills online. The Micro-jobs are here to stay.
Hi, Ty (the author and investor)here, I should have been more clear. This was how I was rating this deal and other recent deals. It is clearly a bigger factor when you really like something but don't have the nerve to make the plunge. And for some new investors it might be 80% of why they invest--just jump on the bandwagon, and you can brag you're in a deal with XYZ. The bandwagon effect is most pronounced when people hear that a deal is about to close. But then it's not so much WHO is doing the deal, but rather that something scarce is going to slip away, and you just have to COMMIT NOW or lose that hot deal. An entire advertising industry is built around this human need.

I love AngelList, (www.angel.co), it's a great source of well-vetted deal flow, but the inflow is huge, and every deal has already been sponsored or invested by someone or other. So you have to learn to tune that stuff out. I may be kidding myself on the 5%, though. If I knew that Jason Calacanis was going to be taking a piece of some new deal that would go through the roof as soon as they generated some inbound traffic...I would really want to know more. But that goes more towards Team and Sales strategy, as opposed to Investors.
An interesting experiment would be to test with close captioning which, in North America at least, uses white on black. Another side experiment could be conducted to see if it has any impact on how much attention the show receives (if white on black is simply better at retaining attention than black on white).

While this only tests a certain setting where subjects are used to seeing black and white it would provide what you are looking for. A long term experiment where people recognize black on white as the norm would be difficult to carry out.
I assume the actual journal paper makes more sense, but I don't think this is much of an explanation of it. As I understand it the "Lek paradox" doesn't apply to humans, it only applies to animals that mate in leks.

A "lek" is a kind of display where all the males compete for attention among all the females. The one who wins the lek gets to mate with all the females, while the others go home frustrated. The supposed paradox is then the question of why, if the females always pick the best-quality males, doesn't this erode genetic diversity within a number of generations to the point where all the males are indistinguishable awesome?

While weak analogies between leks and certain forms of human behaviour are obvious, it's really not the same thing; in a lekking species only a tiny portion of the males in any generation will actually procreate. For humans, it is (I assume) well over 50% (varying by culture, no doubt) so the persistence of ugly people is not puzzling.
Möbius loop music box
> That's rude. Following up with threats of violence now crosses my line of "non acceptable behaviour".

Yes. But perhaps 'catching' him crossed his.
I for one support your use of PHP. I'm thinking now my donation request will consist of you putting up some permanent ice monument in support of PHP in Antarctica.