skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience, it's not "normal practice" but it's common enough. I don't like it, not because it's unprofessional as such but because it conflicts with the principle of removing everything extraneous. I think the best code is code that has been distilled to its clearest essence.

Edit: incidentally, profanity in code is not limited to comments. "White Like [name deleted]s Balls" is a variable name I saw once and have not yet had the good fortune to forget. I'll let you guys guess whether this was code distilled to its clearest essence. :)
I interviewed for my current position at a startup with a tie and I don't think it detrimentally affected me whatsoever.

That said, a polite, to the point email is awesome. A collared shirt is all you need for an interview, although we hire people who turn up in t-shirt and shorts.

I'd try to get a vibe from the people you speak with there. Also ask yourself if you want to work somewhere they expect a suit...
200kbps No Longer Considered Broadband In The US
Is Google your next data center?
You don't understand it at all. The idea of mirror neurons is well proven. The only thing left to understand is if the mirror neuron problems result from or cause the autistic spectrum.

It's not true that for two people thinking the same thing, their brain scan looks the same, so your intuition is flawed. They are sure mirror neurons exist, and they know where in the brain they are.
Vista Faces an Uphill Battle with Businesses
I've done a fair amount of hiring at startups. The main thing I looked for was years of experience and previous job title. I never cared what the person wore, as long as it was appropriate. A cover letter was nice, but I didn't use it as a filter...I was more concerned with the information contained in the cover letter than whether or not it was there.

The biggest thing is to give people information about you. The math contest thing would stand out because it's unique and somewhat interesting, but it wouldn't be particularly important for any of the positions I hired for. I was far more impressed by previous job titles (ie, "Intern, Google Inc") than I was any of the extracurricular stuff.

If you don't have any previous experience, the most important things are an impressive GPA (3.8+) or some kind of impressive course work, such as an artificial intelligence project or ideally a startup of your own.
I still wonder if this is a solution hunting for a problem. I'm pretty darn happy running my OS of choice.

What burning problem am I having that I need an OS in my browser? Some kind of way to store documents like Google Gears, sure, I'll take that.
Google Treasure Hunt 2008 Postmortem
Brilliant idea. Now if I could get a top for my browser, I'd be in heaven!
"I want to be able to take a batch of picture of my books bar codes and upload them and have it generate the list of my books automatically. Then, I want to be able to rate my books, easily, like on netflix, and get new recommendations based on that, and a list of local friends that might have the same taste in books. I want..."

Fair suggestions, but who's to say that's what these guys are trying to be? From what I gather they're a meeting place for those who like to read. I was able to quickly gather that from their homepage.

To be fair, it sounds like you're taking up a different discussion (Founders' Vision and the Web 2.0 Phenomenon) with these guys caught in your crosshairs. The fact is, we don't know what they're trying to become. Maybe they'll evolve into those features you mentioned... it's believable. But they're nascent, and it's their job today to release quick and iterate fast as per user suggestions.

They've done that (that's why they're here on HN). Why nitpick the details of their "vision" so early on?
Link to the best web-available paper with evidence that they exist, and some text ruling out alternative explanations, and and I will read it.
Again, no offense, but the set of people who understand child development and the set of people who would say what you said do not intersect. So I can infer that you do not know child development.
Would I be correct to say that your comments/position are not specific to how to treat children? Any sort of autistic/non-autistic communication gap would be the same if one or both persons was an adult.

PS would you like to continue this by AIM or email? curi42 / curi@curi.us
You don't want to do the study you would need to do to grasp the issue well enough to form a coherent judgement. Reading one paper won't even come close to cutting it.

I can give you a list of books on neurology and autism to read. But I don't want to hunt papers on the web, decide on the best ones, read them all and find one to recommend to you, sorry. I'd hunt down VS Ramachandrans recent work if you wanted to find one, but he is more of a theorist then the researcher who proves the theory, so I'm not sure if that's quite what you want.
Sometimes unpopular ideas turn out to be true.
Incorrect. It's possible for autistic adults to relate well to non-autistic adults in many circumstances (discussing technical things at work, for example, or discussing common interests) without the extra effort. There will always be some sort of gap, but it's not always even that big of a deal. My comments are particular to children both because they are more at risk of being inadvertently harmed, and because they have less (in some cases, no) compensatory defense mechanisms.

I don't use AIM but I will drop you an email after I get off my ass for a half hour and grab something to eat from my trailer.
warning: 5247 words.
Because they asked for feedback, and that's the big problem I see. It's not that I'm nitpicking at the details of their vision, it's that I think they don't have any vision.

If you want to build a 21st century place for people to meet around reading, those are the kind of features I think you need. If you ask me what I think of your website, I'm going to tell you. I like to think big picture and design, so I'm going to focus on that. In this case I noticed nothing compelling from a big picture perspective, so I focused on that.

Besides, on the post I came from, the person who owns the website said "Bookhuddle is a social network and book reference site created to help people discover, organize, and share book information." So it's quite relevant to say how a social network and reference site created to help people... should actually look like in the 21st century.
Solving Financial Problems with Unsecured Loans
When it comes to financial concerns, most people would want to have a more convenient means to iron out their financial problems. Easy and fast process is usually what we are looking for. And as far as loans are concerned, the unsecured loan is the ideal option for those borrowers who want to avoid the long process of loan application.
Comic-Book Master Chris Ware Does Animation
Chris Ware - comic Book artist, creates Animated Television series.
Federated Media is popular among tech-targeted sites. You can check out their publishers here: http://www.federatedmedia.net/authors/index
Alright I found this, which has various links to more.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran06/ramachandran0...

Could you give one reason to suppose that mirror neurons are a hardware feature -- a type of neuron -- not a software feature -- a particular strategy/mental-technique for using one's neurons?
sure here ya go http://metaphp.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=fp_docs&PH...

We're currently trying to build some sort of community around it. The source code should be there. If not just let me know and I'll have it fix in jiff. Feel free to contribute to the library. I use the library extensively on our in house framework. So it should help you if the need arises.
The Virtual Haircut: listen to this with headphones
Not to be an old-timer snob (because I haven't actually been here very long, but I hung onto reddit from the start until I couldn't take it any longer, and I really like the current style here)... anyway...

Here's an idea: Don't allow people to up-vote on ANYTHING (stories or comments) until they get a karma of 25.
http://inthesidebar.com is a recently-launched ad network targeting developer/designer crowds. (disclosure note: i am one of their publishers)

there is also the deck http://decknetwork.net/

http://adify.com is the head honcho but I haven't had a good experience with them.
A great read. Steve Yegge is a super smart guy.

I personally think his longish style is great. I like to be able to read an article for a good 20 minutes. I wish more bloggers wrote articles with as much depth and passion as Stevey.

Paul Graham's tight editing style is great too.. don't get me wrong. :)
Stick with AdWords initially and worry about it more later. Until you have a significant amount of traffic no one cares about you. Once you do have traffic you can try out a bunch of ad networks until you find the best one(s) for your site.
No-one behaves normally in cyberspace
Sourse? What the heck was I thinking ;)
Actually, if you start making pages for every not-particularly-interesting integer on the order of a googolplex, you'll quickly find out that hard disk space isn't cheap any more.
In this situation, there are things worth reinforcing (playing with language, initiative to name things, thinking about numbers), and some things that are not (false hopes of 'quadrupillion' becoming the next 'googol', or that significant contributions can be made so easily--the whole googol thing was serendipitous, not meritorious).

It's a tricky situation, and I'm not sure what the best way to handle it is. But neither blind, effusive praise nor cold, harsh rejection are the best ways to go, here. If you had to pick one over the other, blind effusive praise it is, but there's definitely a middle ground here, one that selects for the things genuinely worth encouraging.
I've interviewed people a bit. While I might wear jeans and t-shirts to work, if an interviewee does not have the decency to dress smartly (maybe not a suit, but at least business casual) for an interview, here is the question that would come to mind. If this job isn't important enough to this person to at least look professional, how important is it going to be after the person starts?

So dress smartly. Most companies I've been to let you know that they don't require suits if that is the case, but don't go below business casual.

As for cover letters, throw out the template. Every job is different and there has to be a reason you're interested. Right that down and do it honestly. If you feel you have to just cause you have to, chances are that it isn't worth it.
The man who walked away from $250m.
Greg Coffey - Wizard of Oz, walked away from $250m to start his own hedge fund.
It's not a useless detail; it's a bit of the company's chosen branding.

You don't want to have to teach that to a designer -- they should just "get it".

I'm sure such nitpicks would knock out some good candidates. It'll also knock out lots of bad candidates. As such, it might still be a good criterion. Only the long-term numbers could tell for sure.

(And by reducing time spent on some hopeless candidates, it could free up more looks at worthwhile candidates. So it's not a simply a matter of "this is unfair to the N good people it eliminates". It may save so much time overall that it allows another M good people, M >> N, to be considered.)
Still long, but much more coherent and interesting than "Rhinos and Tigers".

(I think I occasionally suffer from a second-order form of the Dunning-Kruger effect he references: I know I'm not that great... that must mean I'm more enlightened! The awareness of this doesn't help either; I think it's recursively deceiving.)
Agreed. I suppose the important thing is to give praise in the right way. I think ideally praise should be phrased in such a way that gives them some gratification for doing what they've done, while challenging them to see if they can do something more.

In this case, the kid has exercised enough creativity to realise that he can make up his own numbers, but not enough critical thinking to realise that the space of large numbers is huge enough that not every number should have a special name. Ideally, you'd want to use this as an opportunity to challenge the kid to see if he can work this out for himself. Ask him what other numbers he can think of, like a googolplex plus a thousand, or a googolplex minus one hundred, and see if he can figure out that there are far more numbers than there could possibly be catchy names for. Since the "interestingness" of that particular large number is apparent only in base ten, you could even use this as an opportunity to introduce him to other bases (or better still, to see if he can surmise their existence for himself).
You should recognize that you need the help of a person who doesn't share your mind-blindness to make appropriate judgements about children and how to relate to them. You absolutely cannot figure out how to treat kids on your own if you are on the spectrum.

So suppose we take the list of all the people who have similar views to me, on these issues. Then we go through the list and check if each person is autistic. If we find one who isn't autistic, then can we count these as valid positions?
There are two questions here: (a) what's the actual value of this idea, and (b) what's the right thing to say to a child who has come up with an idea like this, in order to give them the correct amount of encouragement without over-praising them?

As the cold-hearted over-educated curmudgeons of the internet, we're allowed to answer part (s) without worrying about part (b). The kid's dad has to worry about part (b) for himself, but I hope the kid's dad has enough perspective to realize the correct answer to part (a) is that it's worthless.
> Seriously though, what do you expect to gain by posting this here?

Karma? ;)
Real eye opener for (re)evaluating yourself and the people around you.
There really aren't a quadrupillion of anything. not anything physical anyway. The number of particles in the visible universe is only on the order of 10^80.

Of course there are some examples. There's a quadrupillion ways to organize N balls into M separate piles (for some values of N and M which I'm too lazy to figure out now). There's a quadrupillion possible English sentences of less than M' words.

A six-year-old, even a clever one, doesn't really have the capabilities to understand these kinds of scales though. In fact, you can see from the fact that he chose "a hundred" as a big number which could be added to a googolplex that he's still at the age where he thinks "a hundred" is a huge number. I remember being that age too.
No, because a non-autistic person can use their mirror neurons to imitate the behavior a person who has it. (This is the mechanism by which all of human culture evolved).

I'll drop you that email, maybe we are getting too far off topic.
Because Ramachandran thinks so?
I don't really think any reasonable reading suggests the kids dad was asking question a. Do you?
There's also interesting affiliate programs. Everyone knows about Amazon's affiliate program. There's also Linkshare.com that represents a large number of web sites as well as numerous web sites that have an affiliate link.
I love this game. This is exactly the kind of game I want to play when I want to kill time but not learn something complicated. It's easily the best flash game I have played.

You should have some bosses, and some retro zelda dungeons or something though.
Tell your son that, for what it's worth, he's convinced some computer programmers (some friends of mine and I) to call that number Quadrupillion.

People he will never meet will forever refer to that number as Quadrupillion. He's already changing the world in odd, creative ways.

See?
http://quadrupillion.com

Keep up the good work!
PG subscribes to the "build something people want" and "figure out business model" later.

The YCN community largely agrees with this mantra because it is much harder to build something people want than to find a business model.

Perhaps DocSyncer is an anomaly? Hmmm...Facebook, Friendster,...
That is also why it is so much fun ;-)
An appeal to authority? That's not very persuasive.
"37 Signals, LLC" may be the legal name, while the preferred branding is something different. (Their preference is pretty clearly "37signals" on their homepage, much like the lowercasing in "eBay" and even "craigslist".)

A designer should be very sensitive to such presentational choices.
My MacBook Pro's trackpad is totally awesome. No more mouse pains in my hand from using my computer a lot. Most trackpads suck, but a good trackpad beats a good mouse, I think.
I thought of some more things:

- inputs are usually callback events, so the thing I usually did was accumulate all inputs in the callback events and then processed them in the processInputs() method. Accumulate was something simple like pressedKeys |= pressedKey

- updateScreen() is usually just a call to repaint() or something like that, which makes the Operating System call your applications paint() method. My paint method looks like

paint(Graphics g){

drawBackground(g);

drawCounters(g);

drawMonsters(g);

drawPlayer(g);

}

and so on... Flex does things in a slightly different way, so it really depends on the technology you choose.
The Deep Question:  A Talk With Rodney Brooks
I would suggest that "imagination" as a mere flight of fancy isn't the only thing to be considered here. I would imagine it took considerable imagination for Einstein to develop the theory of relativity, or for Bach to write the St. Matthew Passion, but neither did so without referring to a lot of structure and knowledge that they already had.

"Quadrupillion" implies four of something, when actually it's a googolplex plus a hundred (This actually is a pretty damn useless number unless the number (googolplex+100) turned out to be very important to some particular idea or occurrence, but that's less important to my point). It would be better to tell the child this, and explain about the quad- prefix, and suggest a better name for his number. As for its uselessness, I imagine that this will become apparent to him quite quickly, so that doesn't matter so much in terms of what to explain to the child.
I looked at it for 30 seconds, didn't figure out why I'd want to switch over from shelfari and left.

I think you should make it much easier for people who arrive at your website understand why they should stay.
There is no higher praise for a video game then "a well-executed dungeon crawler with style"
"... Done, and Gets Things Smart ..."

I'm wondering if this is the Steve Yegge 20% time for google? Sure reads like, "come work for us ... it's one of the only way you will ever get to meet these coding gods & convince them to be co-founders" (DKE#2)
I wish I'd read these comments before I wasted my time.

Wow, what was with the leeches example at the start? Way to kill a book from the get-go.
use pubmatic.
This is great. This is exactly the type of game I loved as a kid.

It must feel good to have your game to such a good spot and just have to tweak it and add cool bosses and a few more mechanics like level editors or retro zelda levels. Already a great flash game and also a lot of room to grow with a bit more work. I wish I could play it full screen.

I will buy it, but not tonight. I am looking forward to seeing the next version, where you take it from pretty damn awesome to totally badass.
I've met a lot of Indian female devs. -- I actually don't know a single white dev. software engineer.

Asian born, Indian, one Turkish girl (she does hardware engineering), yet I have yet to meet or work with a white american woman engineer.

I still keep in touch with some of my classmates, and the only white girl we had in class, (and she was my really good friend), is doing project management now.

I know for fact, that many indian women, if they are still with and H1-B, or going thru the green card process, can't switch jobs.

But it seems, that the women that can switch, at some point will. It is just an unattractive profession to them.
This is one of the most valuable things about going to a good college. One day you're the top of your class at school without even trying, the next you're merely average - or maybe you (which is to say, me, in this story) need to work hard to even get to the level of average. It's a real eye-opener.

Unfortunately, this effect wears off by the time you graduate, which is when you need it the most.
Come up with a witty name for this second-order effect and you too could join the ranks of the 'business consulting intelligentsia'.
It’s persuasive if you fill in the unstated extra bit, which goes something like “… and can explain why in great detail, if you take the trouble to read his writing about it. But such detail is excessive for this comment thread.”
For paid ads, I like searching the Adbrite.com directory for bargains. Find sites with 500 to 5000 hits a day. Pay the default .05 cents per CPM and you will be paying .05 to .25cents a day to reach all of those people. Finding the right sites is a bit of a challenge but you only have to find a few sites and stick with those to drive new traffic to your site every day.
Well I was just reading some of his writing, but so far I am not persuaded. Further, I have noticed some critical flaws in his writing caused by his lack of understanding of epistemology.
Fourty-Two More Creative Business Card Designs
You should check out right media, their ad exchange (soon to be Yahoo AMP) pulls in multiple ad networks. http://www.rightmedia.com/
Is -23 really necessary? It was an honest mistake, deserving of -1 at worst...
In my experience women are less involved in FLOSS because they gravitate more heavily towards institutional jobs where IT staff learn whatever systems the company uses. FLOSS expertise is concentrated in people who use software independently before they use it organizationally.

This is not intended as a sexist post or a comment on differences in capabilities between genders. I've seen capable women who find it harder to get employment than their male peers, and think there are sexist pressures in the workforce that make it a lot harder for women to work as independent consultants. So I know a lot less who worry about Hadoop.
Blogger's Silicon Valley clout gets politicians talking
Stephen Morse: Father of the 8086 Processor
Still no dice
Bootstrap Montana Offers up to 20K for Rural Montana Entrepreneurs
Birth of a Standard: The Intel 8086 Microprocessor
Yeah, you noticed flaws in Ramachandran's thinking.

That'd be like me going up to Buckminster Fuller and saying "I don't think those dome things will work because I played with legos as a kid and don't see building it out of legos."

Or going up to Einstein and saying "I don't think your special relativity is good because I threw rocks at each other and then away from each other, and I didn't notice it happen."

You're a bit out of your league here, is what I mean to say. The point of Ramachandran's writing is to persuade people who know neurology, not to teach it to laypeople who don't have the intellectual integrity to admit they are out of their league.
You don't know what my league is, or what my areas of expertise are.

I do know that your arguments from authority are invalid.
Multiplayer mode would be beyond awesome. Flash-based MMORPG, maybe?
Top 100 Web 2.0 Sites (Are you listed?)
Young Girls Are New Super-Communicators
Whenever we think of a typical net user, the image of a pasty-faced male geek comes to mind. But things have started to change now. Now a days, the prolific net users are now girls and young women.
I use the YUI CSS framework(not just grids). I've also used blueprint as an experiment.

Frankly, i am no longer interested in writing my own css for layout when something like YUI grids exists. Unless there's something really special. Cross browser css is a PITA without one of those.

I highly recommend it.