skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't speak to whether the business in question is real or not, or whether it's bad or good, etc. What I can speak to is that I think there's a fundamental flaw with Yelp and similar sites, and indeed even with Amazon reviews: you don't know who to trust. "On the Internet, nobody knows if you're a dog!"

Any given post could be made by a shill or astroturfer, it could be made by a competitor, it could be made by a child or teenager with no perspective, it could be made by a prankster, an idiot, a mentally disturbed person, by a spidering script/bot, or could even be fake data planted by the site's owner in order to make the site look like it has a bigger base of real users. You just don't know, in most cases, on most sites.

Therefore, it's mostly noise. You can't trust it! Crap. Some of it is not, of course. There is some signal out there. But this fundamental problem of having trusted signal buried by untrustable noise is the weakness to all these web-based systems. Even a stars-based system is useless. It's irrelevant if a particular app or entity has a lot of five-star reviews or one-star reviews if it's crowd-sourced, because you can't trust the crowd. ("I gave it five stars because I'm shagging the creator." "I found a button that had a color blue that displeased me: ZERO STARS!") At least not when commercial interests are at stake.

I trust crowd-sourcing a little more when the entities being reviewed are (a) for hobbyists, and (b) niche, and (c) with a highly filtered review demographic (not just anybody and their sister can fire off a review -- there has to be some filtering process or bias that weeds out most folks.) Even then, it's hit or miss. At the end of the day, reviews have signal only if the reader already has some explicit trust relationship with the reviewer, based on past performance. If the reviewer is some faceless random stranger, it's noise and cannot be trusted in general.

Someone else in this thread made a comment about mob mentality. I agree. I think that's another flaw to these crowd-sourced systems. Humans are prone to mob thinking. They take things out of context and blow something all out of perspective, often in proportion to how ignorant they are.
"I have the world's largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world... perhaps you've seen it. " --Steven Wright
Can we not criticize the analogy this time, guys?
Random Hacks of Kindness 2010 - GitHub
To clarify, you mean: (setf nol (gensym)) instead of (setf nol 'nol)?
I hope they'll update it with this :(
Congrats! Reread pg's essays on how to startup etc ... As u read them this time around, the words will prtain to your immediate situation and will help unwhen things look bleak.

Best of luck.
Transparency works when the problem is solvable and the only obstacle is human error. It doesn't work for rock, paper, scissors.
MailChimp has some pretty awesome integrations, goes right into freshbooks for automatic invoicing, formstack for forms, and a ton more. Works great for us.
Digital distribution shouldn't eliminate record labels; it should just revalue their services. Whereas before record labels were absolutely necessary for bands to make it big (hence the usurious contracts of the old days), now labels are (or are in the process of becoming) a merely helpful service.
Portland is easily my favorite US city. Great downtown, good vibe, fantastic outdoors, and the best bookstore in the world.
jriley: Email me paul@notifo.com Would love to intro you to someone you should meet in Austin.
KataSpace: browser based virtual world
Get details about driving theory test and hazard perception Test
Before the driving theory test starts you'll be given instructions on how the test works. You can also choose to go through a practice session of the multiple-choice questions to get used to the layout of the test. At the end of the practice session the real test will begin.
Trying to Make Sense of the Comcast / Level 3 Dispute
I kept thinking this reminded me of something...the scene water-breathing scene from the Abyss. The scene with the rat is real: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NmU7VKd3VA
Exactly. And if Yelp can't guarantee that a poster truly has been a customer of said business they are reviewing, then perhaps they should not be allowed to post it. Otherwise it opens the gates to what is effectively blackmail and lynch mobbing.
Having outputs is good too. I don't know a single smartphone owner I've talked to about it, who wouldn't love for it to have a general IR out for remote control applications.
Another SF-based startup here - I would love to know as well. We usually work out of my apartment (don't tell my landlord!) but getting a change of scenery from time to time would be nice.
2010 English Geeky Advent Calendars
If you're in San Fran, I cannot recommend looking into this company highly enough. I interviewed with them and was thoroughly impressed, and would have taken the job but chickened out on moving away from NYC. That's good news for you. Don't be put off if you know nothing about the health industry or EMR -- it's an exceedingly interesting space once you learn about it.

They're backed by well-networked investors with solid records of success, the founders are extremely familiar with the health industry and have a solid plan to take it on (not to mention, EMR is about to explode and all current implementations of it are stone-age), and the problems you'd be working on are absolutely awesome. You'd be creating a highly sought after product that's poised to create a tremendous amount of value, both in the way patients and physicians interact, and as a profitable product.

If UI and Javascript are your specialty, then I can guarantee you that you won't find more interesting work, and if you do, it certainly will not have greater possible upside or impact on an industry.
Then the Internet is never going to get back to sleep again.
i'd recommend reading operating manual for spaceship earth if you haven't already
Now is the perfect time to start refactoring and start using standard, repeatable processes. You can sell it to the CTO as paying down technical debt to bring new hires onboard quicker, make the code more robust for expansion, and give you intimate familiarity with the code base.

Step one: single step, reproducible build process. This could take weeks (been there done that) but it prevents the business entirely stopping if one of your hidden dependencies dies on you.

Step two: documented Hello Newbie guide to turning a factory defAult machine into a development environment in under an hour.
Regarding the arithmetic, the finance questions stick out to me: Arithmetic questions 4, 6, 8, and 10. Especially #8.

Regarding orthography, I find the mention of etymology, and the morphological question (#7), interesting, as these are pieces in a toolkit for understanding previously-unseen words.

The geography section is as much about meteorology as it is about placenames, which is awesome. This kind of scientific whole-world view is amusing contrasted with the Kansas Evolution Hearings.
Honestly speaking, could I pass this test if I sat down and took it right now? No.

However I do believe that, given a study guide (i.e my notes, and a test book) and a reasonable idea of what would be on the test, I could pass the test--just as I passed many tests during my own educational era. Of course, a couple of days later most answers would be gone from my memory.

I've always been that way when it comes to learning, I don't retain details, I retain general idea's. For mathematics and sciences--problem solving, and for literature and history--that rules exists and many important events have occurred, all of which I can research and reference such material when the need arises. I'll admit, I'd like to able to recall names, and dates, and formulas at will--but frankly, as I obstinately claimed as a child, I've never actually needed such detailed information in real life. Generalizations, or time willing, a quick reference to related material are all you need.
Awesome, I'd like to take one of my Lamborghinis for a spin.

Oh, wait, I can't, because I don't actually own any.

Paul Graham's Stuff essay (http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html) makes the case for not worrying about possessions far better than this hilariously bad analogy.
Patrick, as always your advice is very insightful, but it's going to be tough for me to follow it. I've become very apprehensive about sticking my neck out there for a new responsibility because in my work environment it has almost invariably been equated with being assigned blame. I'd assume you are quite familiar with the saying "the nail that sticks up gets pounded down."

The customer is quite far removed from the development team and honest customer feedback is jealously guarded by management, either blatantly held hostage or creatively misinterpreted to further management's own goals. My immediate supervisor is very supportive, but the management further up the chain that controls requirements, budgeting, and customer interaction hasn't demonstrated the slightest bit of care.
If you have read The Lost Symbol it will sound terribly familiar :)
I would go with #2, but in a non-confrontational manner.

Presumably the CTO got a lot of the existing codebase into place, and in a rush. If the flipside of that is that the company has a successful product which is attracting customers and investors, he had his priorities right.

There is a chance he'll get defensive and attempt to rationalise his decisions. The odds of this go up if you're confrontational about things.

He may also think he's right on some fronts. He could be right on some fronts. If every engineer in the company is using Eclipse, is it really a problem that people haven't spent time making sure the codebase compiles outside of Eclipse?

I would advise you to be open about the way you would do things, and to do things that way if you don't encounter opposition. Getting argumentative and/or getting into commit wars is unlikely to help your cause.

(If you want to keep your job at all costs, shutting your mouth gives you the best odds, especially if the CTO really is a dick. But it doesn't sound like that's what you want to do).
Use the courts or the legislative process is exactly what he should have tried to do. In that case, all the safeguards put in place by the constitution would have been properly applied. People would have looked into whether or not shutting down a media outlet that is critical of the government violates the first ammendment. That's how it should work.

Things should not happen on the personal say so of populist politicians, much less things like shutting down critics of the government. That undermines the rule of law and the separation of powers.

That's my opinion, but judging by the votes you get here, Russia style politics is rather popular in the US as well.
This is so far my most likely plan of action. You are a sage!
i threw this together a while ago, when i was spending too much time reading comments http://hackskimmer.heroku.com/
The more I read articles like this the more I Marshall McLuhan got it right.
Adobe finally releases a decent version (10.2) of Flash Player for OS X
if you lost years of your life and have nothing to show for it

If you have nothing to show for it, you haven't actually started a startup. You may not get a 7 figure bank balance to show for it, but you'll get something out it. Be it a website you can show off, better anecdotes for job interviews & parties or a network of new friends.
I think Andrew started out by creating The Point in 2006 which was focused on collective action, rather than collective buying.

It was focused more on supporting/eliciting action regarding "causes" than selling local services at a significant discount to msrp.
Keeping node.js servers up forever
Neat! A few quick observations - 1, I'd love to see some sort of explanation before I give my access. I'm sure it is coming.

Second, I know it might be difficult, but I didn't realize that the last ingredient/direction that isn't "+"'ed doesn't get posted. Might end up with people losing the last entry if they don't realize that.

LOVE the typography. Might be cool to export the recipes it somehow.

Good job :-) I'm going to send it to the GF and let her play around with it!
You do, you just haven't got enough money to pay the "storage costs for them up to this point."
Can't believe this Reddit quality comment is getting any upvotes. Google AI Challenge is "Yet Another Contest"? Though you may not be surprised, he is, http://quotenil.com/Planet-Wars-Post-Mortem.html/.
What kind of PI am I?
This very short article mentions the winner's views, as he sees it, on the suitability of Lisp (used by 0.7% of the contestants, surely interesting) for the job. Half the article never even mentions Lisp. And this amounts to a 'promotion fest'?
Ruckus Smart Antennas May Be Key to Nationwide Wi-Fi
Yeah, absolutely.

You're probably right about everything here. I'm the third engineer, and you guessed correctly that everyone else is using Eclipse.

I think the best way to go about it may be to formulate my opinion in a way that makes it clear that I only have the company's best interests at heart, and this is nothing personal. It's just an honest assessment of the situation.
personally I think this is what it is all about : http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf
The title's a bit misleading, it's not actually water that you'd be breathing.

Water normally doesn't have enough dissolved oxygen

The new suit allows its wearer to breathe a specialized liquid chock-full of oxygen molecules; called a PFC or perfluorocarbon, the liquid can store large amounts of dissolved oxygen.
You can easily fill up the largest iPhone out there (32gb?) for $5/mo on rdio. And it's completely legal (no threats of legal jihad).

I do work for them, so I'm a bit biased, but there's a reason I left my old job to work on it. It really is the best music service out there, in my opinion.
What, specifically, is incorrect?
Bocsimako is the proof that Lisp is best for AI algorithms

Cargo cultism at its finest
That statement was very tongue in cheek. I'm from Ohio originally and love driving. I brought a car with me to college, and will be living in Northern California with a car (I actually plan to buy a new one soon). Having lived with a "convenient public transit system" in NYC for 3 months, I can safely say I far prefer driving, if only for the purely selfish and capitalistic reasons :)

You're hitting on what I was getting at though, which is that it's just not that big of a deal to the average American, because we drive. Next time I will leave being clever to the professionals :P
That's similar. What I'd really like to see is a string API that doesn't let you separate the letter and the combining accent at all, whether it has a precomposed normalization or not (unless you dig all the way down to asking which codepoints a grapheme is composed from).
It's awesome how science developments follow their creation in science fiction. Remember Star Trek and their communicators? We have cellphones that surpass those by leaps and bounds...talk about progress.
Twitter feed on Python using YQL and BeautifulSoup
So is it okay to covet having enough money to pay for storage costs?
"No the real problem is that you fail to understand that Java gets to call these things what ever it likes because language has context."

This is silly; "pointer" and "reference" both had meanings before Java came along. If Java called pointers "names" instead of "references" it wouldn't mean that its function call semantics were pass-by-name either. And besides; if your argument is that we should use the Java terminology to describe all the aspects of Java under discussion, the fact that the all the Java designers make explicit that the function call semantics pass references as values, not objects as values.

"And your example fails to compare apples to apples. In Java Integer is an object, but int is not. You are confusing Java things with C++ things."

The argument applies if you use int in place of Integer just the same; or if you make a C++ Integer wrapper class analogous to the Java one. Any comparison here will of course be apples to oranges because C++ supports pass by reference and Java does not. The swap function is impossible to write in Java because it requires allowing called functions to change the values viewed in the caller, which is almost the definition of passing arguments by value.

"As you can see, Java is not C++, and so your C++ terms and definitions do not apply here. Thank you for playing. Move along."

Leaving aside the childish and insulting tone, the definition of "pass by reference" has nothing to do with C++; if the code were in perl it would still be pass by reference, because "pass by reference" has a meaning that exists outside of any particular programming language and describes a concept. Java function calls are not part of that concept; "there is exactly one parameter passing mode in Java - pass by value".
I've toyed with doing an "easy game maker" but have always ended up leaning towards making high-powered "real" tools (whatever those are) instead.

My current goal is to make a game IDE that resembles a Smalltalk or perhaps Emacs-esque system - highly reflective, image-based, extensible, but more specifically game-focused, with the core features and main loop hardcoded, but everything else being part of the same system. The current state of the art in these tools(Game Maker, Unity, UDK) tends to stop just a little bit short of this "build tool and game very closely together" idea, but the way I see it, that's nearly the last major win for iteration times, within our current understanding of the development proces.
Crypt anyone?

Just finished Stephenson's masterpiece last week.

I bet that's Randy in that last pic. ;)
My question was sincere. Please share.
New York, NY

If you're at all curious about how over 4,000,000,000 requests are handled (over 120k/second at peak) each day, with each request having to return in under 50ms, and how all of this revolves around the almighty dollar, then perhaps you should consider AppNexus. A leader in real time bidding (it's OK if you don't know much about online advertising), we recently got $50m of funding and are looking to spend it on talent.

This business is exploding, and it's still relatively an early time to get in on it. The current position of the company combines the positives of both being a start-up, but also undergoing predictable growth and stability. Start-up pace, atmosphere, people, promotions, and equity, but excellent compensation, full benefits, and stand a very good chance that two years down the line your options will be worth something.

There's a wide variety of both junior and senior positions available. Front-end, back-end, sales, management, analysis, optimization... if you consider yourself an expert and are amicable, we're looking for you, and promise no shortage of interesting problems that we need you for.

As long as you're capable and motivated to learn on the job, you should probably apply. If you mention HN, we promise we won't ask you any questions about manhole covers.

Shoot me an e-mail if you have any questions. I'm not a recruiter, I merely work here, and a lot of this was my reasoning behind taking the job.
That reminds me of a joke of how a mathematicians catches a lion.

"You see, I go and find the lion and I put a fence around myself. Then I define the area near me to be the outside."

A obvious exploit of jordan curve theorem; tee hee.
Actually I'd be impressed if they were just 1x better. But in Europe. That alone would be full of win.
I really enjoy http://hackurls.com/ and Claudio if you're here, thank you.
Ugh. Cargo cultism? The full quote is:

After seeing Gábor’s performance, many participants commented that they would be taking a new look at the 50 year old language. “Bocsimako is the proof that Lisp is best for AI algorithms,” quipped one player.

one player.
Original source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/into-the-abyss-the...
> The floors are also unusually strong, designed to carry 200 to 300 pound per square foot (10 - 15 kPa) live loads.

This is pretty much the coolest thing I've seen all day. I'm not sure what kind of standards buildings are held up to in terms of load-per-foot-squared, but that seems like an awful lot to me. That building is incredible.
Wallpaper dinding indonesia
Basic Guidelines for an Opinion Essay
An opinion essay provides the writer the ability to state his or her opinion about an issue. However, the opinion presented should be backed by sound evidence. This could often be a very challenging task. With knowledge of how to write it, students will be able to submit good essays.
I'm in a very similar situation to yours: A startup using java, quite profitable, outside funding, bad code, stubborn CTO, database used as dumping ground for everything: logs/stats/messages etc (this is very wrong when you're working at the kind of scale that we're at).

(Hey...! Are you the new guy that sits by the water cooler?! I hope thats not my code you were talking about!)

Here's what I did:

- I ended up getting into a small argument with the CTO. He now knows that I'm smart enough and treats me with respect. I stood my ground but also offered solutions to improve and also accepted some of theirs.

- After working for a few months, I've realized that even though there are bad parts, some parts are actually good. New/other devs are improving the codebase.

- I file bugs with regularity- I didn't do this at the start but just picked it up. This way things that I come across go into a bug tracking system and can be handled eventually.

- Now that I'm involved in more parts of the code, I can refactor small bits as I come across them with my daily tasks/projects.

- There are other things that I'm collecting in a document which I'll converse with the PM etc about. Most importantly all these will be things that I can do and will not blame the CTO. For e.g. setting up a wiki, documenting the setup process for a new dev (win/unix both), common errors, people on the team, machine ips, purpose for each machine etc.

You have to realize that the world isn't ideal. Because of whatever reasons (bad coders, managers, deadlines etc) projects end up in a crappy state all the time. Make small changes to help and improve that, and you'll be worth 100x more to the company rather than if you just whine about it and blame someone else.

Note that this isn't about accepting crap policies just so you can have an income- this is about realizing that a lot of this stuff is common and being able to improve it. Also realize that you dont know everything in your first week. Your views will certainly change in the coming months.

Finally, the company is profitable. A lot of companies get that way by making compromises in the short term (one of those might be bad code quality). This is a situation that can be improved upon. Bad code and a profitable company is a better combination than elegant code and a bankrupt company.
... of what could have $0 value. And we'll pay you!

shrug :)
Lighting for Wedding Photography 
Wedding photographer is required to adjust lighting to different poses need to be adjusted according to the lighting to the different poses and get the best of the poses. This is a must for great photos.
There really isn't any magic to it. To get the data someone has to do the Primary Research (Grunt Work). It's either in a report that an agency has put together which you can purchase (Good ones are expensive), or you open up the marketers best friend, Excel, and start collecting data.

Last year my co-founder and I spent a good month basically doing data entry trying to quantify our target market. I'm very confident that no one knows as much about it as we do now. It's hard work, but it's worth it.

Just keep your scope and data points the same across everything you're quantifying otherwise the data is useless. Check the same months in the same years, use the same tool (Compete, Alexa, etc. all report different numbers, we stick with Compete which generally underreports actual traffic but it's consistent).