skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the last recruit tests I gave, it was the easiest way to discard applicants without proper C knowledge. A wrong answer predicted a bad score on pratical (and lenghty) tests like code commenting, finding bugs, etc.

Anecdote: When corrected, a guy who allegedly coded in C for 10 years even asked what was the use for main to return something :-(( So we talked about unix return values, $? in bash and he had a spark in his eye. I had a tear in mine.
please cite the link for this statement "Java is for paying customers." 'Cause without this link , it seems you are merely spreading FUD.
What I'm saying is that if you believe the system itself is the problem, then nonviolent resistance all by yourself may not be effective.

I believe you are arguing that the individual should take various forms of action based on his/her best guess as to what the outcome might be. My point was that this is an individual choice based on internal criteria: going around guessing what outcome might happen from this, that, or the other action is not a basis for the choice to take action itself (although it might be a great basis for choosing the type of action) I don't decide to attack an intruder in my home based on some assessment of the possibilities of the various legal options I might have: I attack an intruder because I believe my life is in jeopardy. At the extremes the decision to act in such a blanket manner is an internal choice.

Let's hang it up here. Thanks for the conversation! I hear us both agreeing that the thought experiment was worthwhile. I plan on using that the next time the topic comes up. Maybe we can make more progress then.
True, but it may not be the case that all of this new staff is going to increasing the size of existing project teams... they could be spinning up whole new teams for new projects - for which the idea had been stuck on the back-burner.
Ask HN: How do you write a privacy policy/legal page for your site?
I was looking at the HN legal page:
http://ycombinator.com/legal.html

The "terms of use" are extremely brief:

Terms of Use: When you click on a link, our server will send you the corresponding page.

Are you required to have a policy statement/legal page?

If so, what needs to be in there?
Free will and why I don't think it exists.
I've been waiting for someone to create this.

Since libTorrent was released, I figured someone would do something like this. No idea if Aero is using libTorrent, but the idea was a natural evolution.

This looks well executed, thanks. Can't wait to see the next steps.
So who is starting a wave hosting business?
Google's Andy Rubin live from D: Dive Into Mobile
One of many ideas
youtube was explicitly allowed to remain separate.
You're Not An Entrepreneur
I wonder how necessary the content type and length changes actually were. It seems that the blacklisted IP caused most of his problems.
The dangers in giving a select few organizations access to the Windows source is far, far outweighed by the benefits. Should evil people have access to the Windows source? Probably not, but the fact is that if you give it to some people, some of them are going to be bad.
Todo:

Move the blog/status site outside your network (linode.com)

Work on a process to try and follow if you have another outage.

- One person to handle communication (blog post / respond to users)

Work on a faster way to recover from such a failure.
Maybe have a read only version you can switch to "maintenance mode" ?

Done:

Probably the biggest outage you'll face.

20+ outages don't usually happen.

Learning from it. . .
I believe you still cannot send multi-media texts with Google voice yet.
Canned Platypus » Blog Archive » Caching vs. Replication II
Andy Rubin Shows Off Android 3.0 On Prototype Motorola Tablet @Dive Into Mobile
I'm a strong supporter of help where you live. There are enough homeless and starving people within 50km of you that your money is guaranteed to get to and help, rather than send it half way around the world and hope your aid actually goes to someone in need rather than fall into the hands of a corrupt regime.

I'd prefer to give money to something like Child's Play for Toronto Sick Kids than give it to somewhere in Africa and I know many people will disagree with me for it, but IMO it sucks greater being the 1 in 100 kid that is gravely ill rather than the 1 in 2 kid that is starving. Throwing money at a norm isn't going to resolve it, but throwing money at the abnormal can indeed resolve it.

However, if you're an orangutan I'll donate to help you wherever you are - I like them much better than people.
I had absolutely no problem switching over to the unsubsidized, contract-free account, took less than 5 minutes over the phone, but they did tell me the same thing about not being able to go back to contract.

However, another friend of mine did the same thing, then decided he wanted to go back on contract. He called them asking for it and, when they declined, said he wanted to cancel and go for another provider. They routed him off to the retention department who apparently do have the authority to get him back on the contract plan and did so with minimal fuss. Of course, YMMV, but it worked out just fine for him. In the meantime, I'm still saving money over two years by going non-contract.
Gmail Priority Inbox: Complex algorithmic solution that uses your behavior and ratings to determine which messages are important.

Facebook Messages: Tell us who your friends are -- those messages are important.

Love the contrast, and think each speaks volumes about the company behind it.
I used it extensively from the early-invite I got through to when they announced it was being scrapped. It was invaluable to me, and I was really upset that it might be going away (and subsequently am really happy now Apache has taken it up).

I used it daily for work, organising lots of small projects collaboratively with clients.

I used it personally, organising with friends the coming weekends happenings, or brainstorming ideas with them for web projects etc.

I also used it among my family to keep track of various things... errands, ideas, etc.

For a while, it had pretty much replaced 90% of my email usage.
Not as good as these guys...

http://www.heavensgate.com/
I had (varying) success mostly by selling sponsor spots. It let me (crudely) target the ads depending what that issue of the newsletter was discussing.
This blog entry ( http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/ldap-directories-the-for... ) is a little old now, but makes an interesting point - that LDAP was the original "NoSQL." If you buy that idea, lots of people have been using NoSQL - and using it for all sorts of things - for quite some time now.
How are you guys checking your email? I don't have a single unread message in any of my inboxes. That's my system. Under that system, it's hard for me to find use for priority inbox.
Seems useful for the vision impaired but... not looking forward to hiring professional movers to drag my 100gb folder to the trash.
I remember in high school my C teacher made us write it that way, even after most of the kids in the class tried to convince him against it. In his defense, he didn't know C (he was taking night classes at a local college and then teaching us what he had been taught the night before).
Vitrue is currently using an autosharded mongodb cluster in production for writing and reading analytics data for our apps. We're still adding it across the board, but so far its going great.
Here you go, buttbreath:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=tooth+decay+vaccine+in+britain

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=history+%20caries+vaccine
2010: E-Book Buyer's Guide to E-Book Privacy | Electronic Frontier Foundation
"Oracle has nowhere said Java is only for paying customers"

They killed OpenSSO, they killed Open Office, the killed Open Solaris, They where contractually bound to not kill MySQL so they just raised the price through the roof to send the message. Pretty much they killed anything that you did not have to pay for. The worst part is they did not just withdraw paid positions from working on it. They alienated the volunteer members of the community until they resigned in protest.

Sun agreed to license the TCK to Apache under non-discriminatory terms an Agreement that Oracle is not, has not and will not living up to, because they don't want JDKs to exist that did not pay Oracle or more importantly they want them to licence it under the restrictive provising that they require e.g no use on servers and no use on Mobile. How many more items do they have to destroy until people start seeing the serial and systematic behavior that is going on.

do you not find it funny that Apple gave the JVM back to Oracle and Oracle is doing everything in it's power to keep non-sanctioned VM's off of Mobile devices. That is what the Apache dispute is really about, Oracle does not want a non-oracle JVM in the mobile world and I can bet you dime to dollar that it has to do with a back room deal between Oracle and Apple. Why do they want to keep the non-sanctioned JVM's off of Mobile devices, well because a closed ecosystem is more lucrative for Apple and Oracle than one in which Apache and Google are giving stuff away for free.

There is a fundamental difference in world views between Apple / Oracle and Google / Apache. Apple and Oracle are vertical stack providers they want to provide the whole stack soup to nuts and don't want anyone playing in their ecosystem, it just so happens that Apple wants the consumer market and Oracle wants the Enterprise market so they make good bed fellows. They are about the only two tech companies left that are not at war with each other.

Google and Apache represent a threat to their world vision and they have declared war to stop them. Oracle is all about every piece of their vertical being a piece that is monetized you can rest assured that Java is no exception.

Like it or not Java and the JVM are pawns in a big game of who is going to own the mobile market. It is the future market and winner takes all, if Oracle backs Apple in wining the market, then Apple can ensure that Oracle is position to be the Enterprise infrastructure for the new Mobile market. Like it or not, Java is a sacrificial pawn in a bigger game now.

The developer in me does not care, quite honestly the return to verticals means the return to easy money for writing software for verticals but the consumer in me shudders at the though of the verticals winning. You think Apples platform is restrictive, now wait until they own 90% of the market. They will make the early 90's Microsoft look like a benevolent democracy and well Oracle will just become a technical tax to anyone wanting to do business.
Right: how do they calculate the <$1/day rate. Its nearly inverse relationship with the GDP per capita graph implies that deep down in the data the basis for this $1/day rate could essentially be the GDP rate divided by population, or similar. I.e. without seeing where that data comes from this is a real possibility. However I would assume these folks are doing a rigorous analysis so this is probably unlikely.
Nice. I like how you can eat your own dog food by using it yourself to remind and keep customers.
Since it seems that the concept of compiling code to an intermediate bytecode run in a JIT-VM seems to have proven itself pretty well (and the concept of compiling multiple languages to said VM a la Scala), perhaps it's time for the community to look at building their own from the ground up VM with associated language support?

Perhaps https://www.parrot.org/ ?
I hate to say it but I would use this if my peers were just my Facebook friends. not that I don't trust 1024 bit encryption, I just don't like my info on strangers boxes even thought it is encrypted
I'm not sure what you're looking for. You want a link to an attitude or pattern of behavior?
previous discussion

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1054791
Both companies are integrating the other's approach to have a more holistic solution. Facebook prioritizes news messages from your closest friends, by measuring your interaction with them. And of course Google Me is going to be something interesting.
(old) How to build a read/write Javascript API
I am starting to believe that we both essentially believe mostly the same points, but we're using different nomenclature.

You stated previously that most of these real-world, high-scalability, high-availability systems use ACID databases as a backing store, something I echo'd in the context of Dynamo's use of BerkeleyDB (and MySQL/InnoDB) as an underlying data store. I agree with this.

You state that a Dynamo-style key-value store wouldn't be that great for a financial institution's accounting system. I agree with this. Dynamo is terrible for "log" data.

This doesn't change the idea that these system as a whole aren't ACID, and do not require ACID semantics. Financial systems are often based on networks (in the conceptual sense) with varying degrees of trust, and are batch-reconciled logs of transactions. I'm talking about stock and commodity markets, electronic transfer systems, and traditional banking. They may be built from ACID building blocks at the low level, but that does not change the fact that systems that manage my checking account, credit cards, and stock market transactions are not functionally ACID or that they even need to be ACID. Dynamo itself is built on ACID databases, but it is not ACID itself.

The balance of an account can be calculated by adding all credits and debits, which is what makes a financial account radically different than say, a Facebook profile. Each transaction is essentially immutable. Even if the transaction must be reversed, it's reversed as an additional credit (or a unique reversal transaction), not a deletion of the original transaction. While transactions against the account are almost always immediately available, they aren't ALWAYS, and this is alright, because the bank's customers understand this. Banks still reconcile accounts on a nightly basis, using batch processes. This is when accounts are officially settled and consistency is applied, which is why it's eventual. However, financial accounts are somewhat unique because their date-sorted, log-structured nature makes them quite suited to eventual consistency.
While I love JavaScript, I shudder at the though of using it as a systems integration language. For the verry reason that it shines as a UI development language (flexibility), it makes me cringe to think of using it for system integration work where items like guaranteed delivery and transactions are far more important that flexibility. As well, I just don't see .NET doing it, it has very little adoption amount the unix camps and the next language will most assuredly will come with the blessing of that camp just as Java did. I mean it was the unix guys that adopted it because they could offer there server offerings on their platform of choice while not ignoring the Microsoft juggernaut.

As for LLVM, I have had the same thought and I think you are on to something, I keep thinking whatever it is, it will crop up on LLVM.
This reminds me of the plentyoffish article that said that that site has purposefully distorted portraits in order to make users spend more time clicking through to profiles...

I guess that's why one company is plentyoffish and the other one is Google.
I was always afraid that it would remain mostly google-centric and without other servers or desktop clients. Now Wave really has a good chance for adoption anywhere, and a mass of individual servers will really ensure that the cross-server protocols aren’t neglected.

Now, just for Apache’s version to get really popular, and Google to introduce the leading web-based wave service...
I would settle for a link -- from an analyst or a press release to back up that claim. Otherwise , this thread (not the parent article)is just FUD.
Google's Andy Rubin Dives Into Gingerbread - Mobilized | AllThingsD
IPv6 - No longer optional
15% sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

You've got to remember, while you may manage your inbox well (through being wary of who you give your email to and utilising email filters), not everyone does. A lot of people simply give their email to anyone who asks for it, whether it's a family member or a company offering them a 25p-off coupon. Now imagine if that type of person turned on Priority Inbox, and all their personal emails from family and friends instantly popped up to the top, they're quickly going to stop scanning the bottom "Everything else" section as well as they used to, aren't they. I know I did, I only check those email once or twice a day now.
Uhm, they define poverty as living on less than one dollar per day. Then they show it dropping over the last 20 years ... but don't control for inflation. They show 10% improvement against a benchmark that (aside from being meaningless as a way of measuring abject poverty) lost more than 50% of its value and label it progress. This to me suggests basic innumeracy. It's entirely unclear from the data presented whether real poverty has been reduced at all.
While a good description of Big O notation in relation to time he doesn't mention that Big O notation is also used in relation to other factors such as memory.
> but since email addresses have to be roman characters, it's actually a pain for non-english speakers.

Er, no, not at all (well, possibly for the very old?). Roman characters are everywhere in Japan, no-one has any problem dealing with them (pronouncing the words they form? different story).

It's more that exchanging contact details is a lot more work in Japan - number, mail address, name in kanji, name readings (yes, you need these, even if you're Japanese/a native level speaker). Mail addresses are frequently really long and sprinkled with non-alphanumerics. Name kanji are a pain too - there's lots of homophones, so if someone tells you their name you often need to check with them which kanji it is.

Basically: it's almost impossible to convey your contact details verbally, so without IR, you usually wind up just swapping phones for a few minutes (luckily, in Japan you can be pretty carefree about handing your multiple-hundred-dollar phone to a stranger).

Contrast with the situation until recently in the west, where it was usually just a person's name (that you probably knew how to spell already) and a number, and you can kind of see how IR would be a big deal in Japan and not elsewhere.

iPhones have seriously broken contact exchange for young people in Japan, since almost everyone has one, and thus no-one has IR anymore. There's probably money to be made fixing it but so far the only solution I've seen other people actually have on their phones is Bump, and it's never really worked well for me.
yeah, because laying out facts in a sterile and objective manner is going to compel you otherwise? don't confuse being presented truth with a guilt trip, sometimes we need a wake up call and it's not always comfortable.
I agree. Assumptions galore. But keep in mind it was written by Bill Ackman - a director and major direct investor in both General Growth Props. and Howard Hughes Corp. - two huge master-planned development companies.
Finally, the government oozes into action.

Hopefully, this fine fellow will be DecorMyAss in his next residence.
Priority Inbox is great for me because it segregates "nice to know but not critical" (sold another copy of BCC, comment on blog, CC charged successfully by one of my dozen service providers) from "attention required" (customer inquiry, metrics hit a yellow alert, Slicehost couldn't charge card and I've got 48 hours to call bank before my business dies). Red alerts, obviously, don't even bother w email.
Best of luck. I'm feeling the same brand of anxiety.

Prof. Raskar has a good set of advice on the Camera Culture page http://cameraculture.media.mit.edu/join

I'd recommend reading all of the pages relevant to the groups you want to be a part of. I second Storborg's advice to read some recent graduate papers.

I'd also recommend working on your site specifically for the eyes of MIT professors. Highlight your work and how it applies to the world outside the field in which it was made. Talk about what inspires you and what you want to pursue in your own work. Think of it as an ad campaign with your professors as your target audience. You need to sell them on why you are right for that lab. Ask yourself the question "why should I be at Media Lab versus anyone else" and then answer it through your portfolio.
Thanks. Care to elaborate on some of that stuff? Did you upload documents for collaboration? or did you work through google docs and link it into wave conversations?

How did you get your family on board with you to work with wave?

What was your first impression when you came online (and probably just like me) and found no one you could interact with immediately?
Scientists store 900,000GB of data in 1 gram of E. coli bacteria
this is awesome. not suggesting tumblr handled their situation poorly, but even the refund alone is stellar service. when i just read about this, i got the same feeling i did when netflix resolved a missing dvd on the phone with me in less than 5 minutes.

though, "We didn't earn your money with this service." is a little harsh. actually, lots of it seems harsh. cheer up dhh, we still like you (and i even got a few 500s i think).
There was a CLI proof-of-concept app, but nothing else.

Probably should crack open Photoshop and do a couple of studies to get a discussion on a native client going...
Thanks Dave.

Following up on that. Did the whole "see your friends type as they go" feature ever really benefit you?
The sentence After only a short period of time we were able to determine with 94% confidence that the variant was performing worse... sounds like they might have fallen into the trap described here: http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html
Dark forces gunning for Google
1) Sounds like you agree with Wikileaks - they didn't just dump everything, they've released stuff selectively in stages (and therefore been accused of being manipulative ringmasters)

2) Even if their selectivity has not been at the correct point on the grayscale, I don't see how you get from there to the necessity of lethal force.

If the survival of the free world were at stake, or even the lives of its supporters, quite possibly.

But if an American embarrassed a foreign government that couldn't hold on to its secrets, I don't think we would consider it justified if it used lethal force. We would rightly consider such a government, that thought interfering with its efficient operation was punishable by death, rather extreme and fascist.
I would suspect that users are responding to your headline message "Get 5 tip emails on how to use Skritter" with concern that your product has a steep learning curve - I have to read 5 whole emails to figure out how to use the product? Yug.

The difference between a good headline for opt-in vs. a bad headline will account for decreases like you experienced, but a good one can actually increase your conversion rate.

Trying something less offensive, or even pushing in an active voice would be a better fit:

[X] Get free tips and bonuses from the Skritter newsletter.

or

[X] YES - I'd like the most recent news & updates on Skritter delivered to my inbox.

The following article about some of the resorts we drove is not perfectly relevant, but it demonstrates how the addition of a checkbox bumped results up by 11%:

http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/11-conversion-rate-...
These guys are hella productive. A new code browser, new features page, and a new API all in the same day.
The small things really do matter when dealing with fickle users. I wonder, though, how much of the 17% might be due to the placement of the checkbox. Putting it below the credit card info would make me think "wait, I'm paying these guys and they are telling me it isn't easy to use?". Perhaps moving it up by the email address field would yield different results.
http://llvm.org/