skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We do almost exactly this at my company and it works wonders.

Presentations are not about powerpoint. They are about geeks geeking out with other geeks. Every talented programmer I know has a pet project he'd love to talk your ear off about.

The presentations we solicit are often little more than the candidate opening up a text editor and showing off some code, and fielding tame questions from the other developers.

As for the contract position, everyone that is motivated to switch jobs, or to come work for us, can find time to do the really simple tasks we split off for $100/hr.

It is also made clear that if you've made it to the contract, we are extremely interested in hiring you, or else we wouldn't give you access to the repo or the team. The gig is to give both sides a chance to see what working on something real feels like.

We have found only excellent developers after this process. That said, it probably doesn't scale very well, and I'm sure we've unfairly weeded out many good devs.

Also, we skip a lot of the BS if there someone comes highly recommended from current employees or other partners we trust.
Then the follow up: http://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2010/why-arent-you-using-git-flo...

and the code:

https://github.com/nvie/gitflow
I see lots of comments, but nobody mentioning Cyanogenmod, or the excellent communities at xda-developers for exactly this situation.

In brief -- if you don't want the reference Google Developer phone (soon to be released Nexus 2 / S perhaps? Right now Nexus One), root your phone, and install cyanogenmod.

I'm reminded reading the linked article that oh, say, four years ago, phone OS'es never updated, with the possible exception of Nokia's higher end E-series. Today, with a hacked Android phone, you could install nightly builds off the Android Open Source Project Trunk if you chose.

This is a big difference, and is something the poster can in fact do with his Samsung Galaxy S. So, why the complaining? All this is easily discoverable with some research before purchase of the phone.
Is startup success more difficult than tenure in a top research university?
Anyone know how the statistics compare?
Interesting, but a little too long. Besides, some of them aren't really failed, and some of them aren't really predictions.

“There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable.
It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” – Albert Einstein, 1932.

Einstein was careful with his words, and saying that there was no indication that something is possible is not the same as predicting that it's impossible.

You better get secretarial work or get married.” – Emmeline Snively, advising Marilyn Monroe in 1944.

Marilyn Monroe was dead by 36. Maybe she would have been better off with the secretarial work.

“I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone.” – Charles Darwin, The Origin Of Species, 1869.

He was right. There were no good reasons.
Compressive Sensing (video by Emmanuel Candes)
Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley had a second edition with updated (for the time) C / C++ in 1999 with the original 14 years earlier. 11 years is a long time in computing and particularly for C++. I have a copy and remember reading it, but I don't remember the example (maybe I didn't find it terribly interesting at the time).

When I think folklore, I think of stories not example problems. I think "Fire in the Valley" not "C Quiz Book".
When did getting a job become more about programming and not being a good problem solver?
I'm willing to root my Android. I've just been frustrated having to manage the process of updating my phone anytime a new OS comes out (as opposed to having the carriers do it), and the experience I detailed with doing something as simple as clearing the data from my iPhone makes we wary of doing this. Fortunately the Android community is getting better and better and producing root tools that you can simply download as an .apk, which is what I did with my Droid. This process does not work for my Galaxy, so I will probably end up manually doing this. I am worried that I will brick my phone since it is unsupported.

Hopefully the takeaway from this post was not a debate around root or jailbreaking, it was that there is a fundamental difference in the market forces playing out here. I always find that personally interesting, and personally frustrating right now.
Top Challenges Facing Humanity?
I have started writing a book on the top ten challenges facing humanity right now. Hopefully this will inspire someone to solve them.

How should I go about this project? Which challenges do you think I should cover?
Not sure about the research that went into this article. It totally missed mentioning Ravelry (http://www.ravelry.com), which is an amazing RoR site that is developed and maintained by a single developer.
This is part of the regular Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium Series. Visit http://ee380.stanford.edu to see other talks about other aspects of computer systems.
Not yet, 3 weeks is not a lot of time :) We have looked into it though and it has lots of complexities, not necessarily technically but from a business point of view. Many retailers (including BestBuy) have strict terms on which items can be price matched from other stores (e.g. it can't be an online item, or you have to include the shipping.) And every store has a different policy.

So no we don't do it, yes we'd like to do it, but assuming it really does fit in our plans, it'll be in the future.
That doesn't make it acceptable.
I am fed up of stupid HR guys coming up with shortcuts/models to the hiring process that just don't work well.
Not sure if you are using Mac or PC, but for Macs I am a big fan of Camtasia. It has been very intuitive to use. They have a solid free trial that you can play around with also. I had never done video editing and I was up and running making tour videos in a day, here is the product of my work:http://help.bettermeans.com/home
You've actually exactly made the popular case (from the UK point of view) why he shouldn't be extradited. There's a substantial belief here that the US is demanding extradition under false pretences and that there will be a bait and switch resulting in him getting an orange jumpsuit and (to paraphrase Harold and Kumar go to white castle 2) a cock meat sandwich. What needs to be understood is that what the people think is not the same as what the government of the day signs up to or even future governments of the day may have to deal with.

Thanks for posting the indictment. That's actually exactly the sort of info that needs to be posted here for people to understand what's really happening. It's easy to get it wrong. Just look for the indictment of Moazzam Begg. There isn't one. It makes it really easy to paint a story that the Americans do not respect the rule of law when you quote that case. Bear in mind that McKinnon was around the same time. It's a case of fear. Whether it's deserved fear or not is irrelevant, the fact is that those wanting McKinnon to stay in the UK can capitalise on it.

I'm reminded of the Louise Woodward case. This was a case where someone had been accused of doing something horrific but was British and as such portrayed differently in the British media compared to the US media. IN the eyes of the US media she was a child murderer. In the eyes of the UK media she had just accidentally committed acts that resulted in Matthew Eppens death. The fact is that her actions may or may not have led to his death, but when the death of a child is involved no-one stands up and says 'maybe we should all take a step back and think rationally about this'. Likewise with this case, it's not going to happen, there are too many vested interests involved.
Also the candidate would be evaluated on the content of the presentation - not his presentation skills per se.
There is a flip side to this coin -- for all you know, they interviewed 10 people with 10+ years of PHP experience, and the 2-3 years of Drupal were then reasonably a deciding factor.
Excellent find, super interesting. Thanks for sharing.
The unfortunate truth is that big companies can play that game - this or that is free and commoditizing software in general - they can win elsewhere. A very good example is what Google is doing with browsers and all kinds of software just to win on AdWords/Sense.

The bad news is that small companies cannot do that easily - they typically rely on a single product/service that they need to charge people for, like any traditional business out there.

Same with app stores - they are pretty much forcing 3rd party devs to give away or sell for pennies. Sure, we get this occasional story of a successful mobile product, but the truth is for each success there are tens of thousands of apps making close to nothing.

This, for me, is NOT a good trend for software startups. The whole "free" movement make it exceedingly hard to sell software nowadays.
Good luck. I hope those leads work out for you.
PDF Research & Analysis to stop PWNAGE (info. sec.)
MoNETA: A Mind Made From Memristors
Is my cookie robot really more dangerous than my [...] Jeep?

I think so. This cookie robot would have to fly at least 500 ft AGL, and other aircraft do fly at that altitude-- crop dusters, traffic helicopters, aircraft landing or taking off, etc. If your cookie drone were sucked into an aircraft engine or hit a helicopter rotor, it could be catastrophic for those aboard that aircraft not to mention those on the ground near the crash, which could include hundreds of people. So I'd say yes, the cookie drone is more dangerous than your Jeep, especially if the cookie drone were as popular and numerous as automobiles.

...conversations about failsafe mechanisms...

Personally, I think we'll eventually be able to build your cookie drone. And I think it has a chance of being very popular. But I think it will require a lot of coordination with the existing (legacy?) flying community, including things like new flight rules (maybe AFR for automated flight rules, to go along with the existing VFR and IFR?), standard and well-tested automated guidance systems that are good enough for this use case but not able to be weaponized (existing GPS + accelerometers w/ Kalman filters don't meet this criteria), and new ground systems for takeoff and recovery.

Yup, I've had the same thought experiment. ;)
"Does that mean you're only going to use them on the brochure side of the site?"

Congratulations. You're actually attributing a bit of reason to us. Conversations will be much more productive now. In any case, Mixpanel is easier to integrate on pages with secure data than typekit. There are ways, albeit ways that further narrow our browser compatibility profile.

But I can't get past the idea that you trust Google's scripts with your financial data. They're the single biggest target on the internet; if anyone wants a big score GA is going to be where they hit first. Even 5 minutes serving to GA pages could potentially result in millions of stolen passwords.
Pardon me?

Men and women are different when it comes to (at least, heterosexual) relationships, and signal their interest differently. If observing that makes me a sexist, then so be it.
Design patterns are essentially code that you have to repeat because the language is incapable of generically representing the process that the pattern codifies. For example, I believe pg once observed that most of the classical design patterns didn't exist in any recognizable form in Common Lisp because their functionality could be factored out into higher order functions and macros.

Ah, I found it. It was in his Revenge of the Nerds essay, and he was actually citing Norvig, though he goes into more detail than just that. http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html

Also, Coding Horror on the topic: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/06/are-design-patterns...
Conversely, we can think of this as a rather poor filtering technique, because it grants an a nearly automatic pass to anyone who happens to have read any of the popular programming books (or blogs) where the "problem" is presented in easily digestible form, is presented as an "interesting" problem, and it's known that a tractable and optimal solution exists.

A much more important (and deeper) skill is to be able to solve (or reasonably approach) problems they have never seen. And an even more important and deeper skill than that is the ability to recognize algorithmic problems embedded "in the wild" (in naturally occurring business contexts), and to tell the interesting ones from the non-interesting ones (and the trivial from the hard... and among the hard, the plausibly solvable ones from the intractable rabbit holes) without the imprimatur of having someone from a place like Google or MIT telling you that they're "interesting" problems (let alone tractably solvable).

Of course, this kind of skill is much, much harder to test for -- if it can be tested for in the awkward setting of a tech interview at all.
why don't you post a link to the different versions of your essay?

fyi, I guessed english was not your native tongue from the title. Your subject could be "Good books for writing", most people on hacker news take it for granted that you're writing in English.
I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet, but I always figured Camtasia was the gold standard for this sort of thing.

It's $99, so perhaps the better-priced alternatives are the ones being suggested, but it's really quite impressive.
Client: "Can you make it so that print box thingy pops up automatically?"

Developer: "That may annoy some users. I think most people already know how to print a document."

Client: "So can you make it so that print box thingy pops up automatically?"
I acknowledge that the fears of UK citizens are based on good faith concerns. What I don't acknowledge is that they are reasonable.

In this case you have a clear-cut instance of someone who has all but confessed to the crime --- a crime recognized by both jurisdictions --- and an extradition demand made under the aegis of an actual criminal indictment in a US civilian court; an extradition demand that would probably have passed muster even under the egregiously unfair terms of the 1970's extradition treaty the UK held with us.

The arguments being made against it basically amount to taking every bit of anecdotal evidence about the unfairness of the US criminal justice system, in the absence of any countervailing evidence about the unfairness of the UK criminal justice system, and then attempting to apply it to this case.

This case, mind you, that will almost certainly end in a guy serving 1-3 years in minimum security, as one of the most closely watched inmates of the US prison system. Again: it's not like people haven't been accused and convicted of breaking into our fabulously insecure DoD networks in the past.
Yeah that's absolutely true. Point well taken =)
My personal experience is that tech conferences tend to encourage cliquish and hierarchal (based on popularity and tech-sphere influence) behavior which feels dehumanizing.

I think there is a common thread with my observation to sexual harassment at conferences. When people relate to each other on a human (rather than hierarchal level), people tend to respect each other more.

edit

Women also bring greater social cohesion to groups.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100930143339.ht...

The fact that women are sexually harassed could be solved by having more women at conferences.
It begs the question, why don't submissions automatically get de-duped?
New [Swedish] firm start ups at record highs
Networked organisms and Habitats (Project Noah)
Updated with links on the site. Sorry.
This could be worked out by charging fees only after a certain number of domains owned.

For instance:

1-10 domain, free

10-100, $50 each

>100, $250 each

With a control on credit card or something unique enough.
Of course the problem is: who is collecting those fees?
Just wanted to say this post does not represent my preference. I'm one of those people who likes comments and context. I do get the appeal of the print version. But it doesn't represent my workflow.
Yep. Unity and iOS are coming this month, more after that.
Are you suggesting that everyone who purchases an Android phone root it?

I can absolutely root my phone. I just worry about things like the issue I detailed with my iPhone. I do think rooting is much easier than before, and there are still warnings in every forum I look at that indicate "if your phone explodes, don't blame us!"

I think it is a reasonable expectation that if I have a two year contract when I buy this phone that there should be a responsibility to upgrade that phone, and six months after the OS has been released seems out of bounds.

I don't agree about this being easy to research before purchasing the phone. When I purchase a Samsung Galaxy, is this the S? Is this some other Galaxy? Would this process work for rooting: http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/2271-how-to-root-your-andro.... (It does not by the way.) When I was at Google I/O they said there were sixty devices shipping with Android, and I am sure there are more now. It is actually non-trivial to keep all these details in your head unless that is what you want to do all day. I simply want to use my phone, and without Android 2.2 I am unable to use tethering, front facing camera for a bunch of apps, etc.
Does this mean that I can install the updates and then install Sense on top? I'm a bit confused, I'm also not clear what custom ROMs provide and what the downsides are... I read some wikis but they don't mention downsides much.
Read upthread.

What is true about the "new" treaty is that it made the evidentiary standards applied to the US more lenient than they were in the past.

What is not true is that the new treaty was designed to fast-track terror suspects to Gitmo without evidence (the treaty had been under negotiation prior to 9/11, and was changed because the previous treaty --- which was egregiously "unfair" to the US [to the extent that matters] --- had become unwieldy).

Because the US and UK have different criminal justice systems, the resulting treaty does not apply exactly the same terms to each country; doing so would apparently not make sense. It is less clear that there is overt unfairness in the resulting treaty to either side (again: the previous treaty was overtly unfair to the US).

I'm commenting about this because it's interesting and (I think) fun to talk about. I don't think it's particularly relevant to the McKinnon case.
A decentralized/p2p model would help. You could think of a system in which you register a domain associated to a GPG key and you need the key to take it down or change DNS record. This way you get the cloud resolving addresses and you avoid the obvious risk of DNS hijack.
It's an imaginary number, not a jimaginary number.
So, wait, why did you click "print" if you didn't want to, you know, print the page?
Another really good point. I never thought if it this way. I had assumed that pointing out I had worked on large projects for a few large companies was enough.
My initial comment was about the headline, not the article, which doesn't mention the phrase "office building".

More headlines like saying "Google bought an office building":

- "Netflix offering $100,000 an hour for color video"

- "Google spends $6M stock to keep computer user from Facebook"

- "Joe Lieberman demands Amazon.com take English-language documents offline"

They're true, but they're not the point.
Go for it mate.
I wonder how technically difficult it would be to utilise 3G mobile phone networks for cheaper remote control?
Manhunt for assange ... because of sex without a condom
It's not a big deal because they have the plane. It is a big deal because of where they flew it.

I'm sure it wouldn't be news if they were flying around a field, but the alternate reaction could have been "Oh my god! a plane! around the statue of liberty! terrorists are trying to blow it up!, ARREST THEM!" and thankfully here nobody over reacted.

I'm of the mind that they should have no fly zones (around airports) and a ceiling (a few hundred feet so as not to interfere with airplanes) and a floor (a hundreed feet so as not to interfere with powerlines) and then allow people to fly their own UAVs, but thats just me. There are probably too many reasons why it is a bad idea.
Two: .NET for server-side and jQuery for client-side.
Sorry, I don't buy it. Performance is not the only thing that matters in software development. And certainly not to the point of calling fundamentals software design - note the emphasis on the word design - "big lies".
Get More FREE Space In Dropbox
Referring to the suggestive title of the article, which seems to cultivate a negative knee jerk reaction to those outside of Hacker News.
Depends on usage. I bought $5 or $10 worth of GB traffic few years ago and I have most of it still left to be used. Even just 1gb is plenty for the occasional browsing at starbucks or at the airport.
I wonder how much of the effect is because black on white is actually superior, and how much is because people have so much more practice at reading black on white. It would be interesting to see the studies repeated, using sub-groups that are used to black on white and white on black, respectively.
Ask HN: Advice in collecting dues from a membership organization/club?
I help out with a 500 member organization, an alumni-type of group. Everyone in this organization is a volunteer. We don't have a lot of funds at the moment, we are just now moving from a loose unorganized collection of people with a similar background to an actual orgnization.

* Can you please recommend a service to automate the collection of dues from members of an organization? We'd like to offer them the option of having a $5 - $20 per month taken out of their checking account. Obviously participation is voluntary and opt in.

I have seen what PayPal and BlackBaud have to offer. Other options? Can we get a better rate than having the provider take 4.9% and $.30 per transaction?

I'd love to hear your recommendations and experience if you have had it in this area.

Thanks!
Fun fact from the NYTimes article: this building has more square footage than the Empire State Building. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/nyregion/03building.html?_...
I'd assumed that at first but your statement about how absolutely every rich site should be using MixPanel hinted at something so unreasonable that it made me "take you down a peg in my estimation".

I don't trust Google that much, I just trust the others far less — there are degrees of infinitesimals! Besides, an untargeted score on GA would be such a hueg firehose that y'all would be way down the list of people to sift through data for much less prewrite an exploit for.

Even you writing your own code to ship specifically detuned events to MixPanel makes me somewhat uneasy.
Not really, some of the tech on the predator is not cheap.

The easy part is making the plane, I'm sure you could rig up a cessna like Hollywood rigs up stunt cars for remote control and you'd have a "UAV" (didn't Iran do that already?).

The guided missiles, the communications, the optics and sensors, those are the hard parts.

I honestly think a bunch of boots on the ground with rifles is the scariest way to do ethnic cleansing, if you just want to level houses you have artillery and tanks too. The predator is good for surgical strikes and intelligence, which a lot of enemies really don't care about.
Why do you say they are out of tune with reality only after a hundred (or whatever) men asked her out? It's not like women advertise how many inappropriate requests they have turned down.
This is an awesome post. Here's an accompanying awesome NANOG message:

http://seclists.org/nanog/2010/Nov/1058
Please don't submit short URLs (or anything more about WikiLeaks, but maybe that's just me).
Meet the people who want Julian Assange "whacked"
Cool! Why should amazon.com be the only ones that get to have the domain amazon.com?