skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When doing contract work, you don't normally get credit for a site on the about page. Sometimes you may get permission to add a footer link. I think this is great for those situations where you don't get either. My hope would be that most companies would not mind a simple text file in the root which isn't linked anywhere but is well-known.

My portfolio of sites becomes verifiable. Yes, I built these sites, and here are the humans.txt files to prove it.

I've been at plenty of companies and built many sites and can't really prove I had hand in putting building any of them.
A Guide To How Graphics Cards Work
The last company I worked for (hot startup in NYC) was offering a $10k bonus for referring a friend. Or at least that was what it was up to when I left, for all I know it could be higher now.

It still beats the cost of a headhunter.
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I'm amazed again and again how Lance Armstrong is perceived in the US.
Not just tech companies. Investment banks also. Probably many other industries too. As the cliché goes, "Imitation Is The Best Form Of Flattery".
Opera Portable for Mac (USB)
For the most part that was completely incomprehensible to me. I read it three times, though, and I think he was saying that knowledge was irrelevant when it came to spirituality, and that spirituality has to do with how we experience life. This I will politely disagree with, if that's what he actually said.

Since he brought up Rumi, I thought I'd use him as an example. Rumi has said "I died a mineral, and became a plant. I died a plant and rose an animal. I died an animal and I was man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?"

Here he is pulling in knowledge; knowledge of nutrient cycling, maybe even evolution.

But I can respond in kind; I could answer his question, saying that "you're less by dying when you die a man and become minerals." Here I too am pulling from knowledge again; if it's true that "you" become "more" by going from plant to an animal- then surely it follows that you become "less" by traversing the opposite direction. And that is most definitely what happens when men die; they are reduced to their components by the process of decomposition.

I don't see how anyone can completely decouple "spirituality" from knowledge, since all forms of spirituality I've encountered speak in the language of knowledge. And I don't see Rumi's statement is less or more spiritual than mine, either. Perhaps his is more optimistic, but there's plenty of pessimism in some forms of spiritualism.
Exactly. You usually have no choice but to deal in electronic currencies which work in "3rd world" countries. And they most often serve scammers, porn sites, cialex pushers and so on. What are the chances of the legitimate online business which only can accept "dirty" payment methods?

Well, lucky for you then that Brazil is included. I really wish for the situation to change for the better, eventually. But it seems rather stupid, from a programmer point of view, to ban hundred plus countries because you can not fix exploitation of your system by several criminals. Somewhat egocentric, "ah fuck those countries who cares about them anyway", the problem can only get worse.

Internet does not know about borders, and you can't establish ghettos on Internet - it comes biting in the ass later.
In six months the site's traffic will absolutely improve as people link to answers. A newer site with as many pages as quora is not passing enough link juice around.
Thank you that was my point.
I've seen it here before, but yesterday I happened to stumble across it again, learned something new, and figured maybe other people on HN would benefit from it too.
Great. You just proved that TV has no commercial potential :-)
The thing is, everyone agrees with the spirit ( the blond is cute ), but not the letter ( doesn't really add value to the discussion ), of your comment. Anyways I laughed when I read your comment, because I knew it was only a matter of time before someone said the only obvious thing about the video.
The same way companies contract with other service providers without disclosing secrets. Companies do this all the time: obviously they can't give away all the details about whatever it is they're doing, so they either do it in-house, or they reveal the minimal information necessary to attract candidates, and use non-disclosure agreements to begin discussing the rest of the details. This is absolutely something that contract law could handle.

So what issues do you see? Oh right: the over-arching theme of corruption. However, I addressed that in my initial post; the only way we can get to a point where government efficiency is no longer questioned is by eliminating corruption.

I think one way to reduce corruption is to decrease the government's size, but that of course leads to situations like those we presently face. There will always be corrupt politicians who award contracts to their friends in return for some sort of illegal remuneration, but I think by reducing the number of politicians/government employees with the power to make those decisions, we will lower the amount of corruption present.
I'm not disagreeing with you so much as I'm still honestly sort of stumped as to what exactly is the "sweet spot" in Quora's audience.
Yeah. I got them direct to my iPad though via Goodreader then exported them to Kindle app for reading.
DIY MFE: pretty easy, have a 12 month track record on Interactive Brokers.

DIY MBA: most jobs are through referrals, so this is pretty hard. A blog could help, but you could also look like a dilettante if you don't have a track record. The only way to get into, say, McKinsey is through referrals or formal on-campus interviewing.
Didn't work so well for us. My boss ended up hiring someone a team-member recommended off of LinkedIn. The new guy pretty much ended up making the team go bust because of stuff he did with clients. I later enquired with the guy who recommended him if he even knew the guy. Turns out, he was just an arbitrary LinkedIn connection with equally arbitrary recommendations. Sucked big time.

My advice: figure out how well the team member knows the new guy before you decide. Also check if the guy doing the recommendation is doing it because of religion, language, or some other crap. Also, I don't hire team members' wives or boyfriends any more.
Ask HN: What are the consequences of learning something by yourself?
All of the technical knowledge that I have comes from what I've taught myself. This is not a choice I decided to make; rather, it was the only option I had given the circumstances. I ended up teaching myself HTML, CSS, Objective C (and iPhone development), and Java on my own. Besides a little help here and there, I learned these scripting/programming languages by means of the Internet or books. W3Schools, Apple's iOS documentation, coding blogs, StackOverflow, and a few books is what I had. Now that I think about it, I've been leading the life the upcoming generation will have. It's all centered around the next type of learning that is emerging in the age of the Internet. Many of us who would have otherwise stayed away from programming are attracted to it via the Internet. The Internet does many things; that is,

1. It sparks interest in the subject
2. It provides the sources necessary for learning the subject
3. It gives people ways to use their knowledge of the subject
towards publishing their creations

In short, the Internet is giving children the resources needed to learn programming and publish the creations they make using their newly-found skills. All of this is great, but it has to make us wonder about the consequences of self-learning? Personally, I've seen very little benefits from this new method of learning. Formal teaching exists for a reason. In learning, I've often missed out on the basics. I learn by seeing feedback, which often means that I only strive for the results while ignoring the means. While people say learning a new language is easy for a programmer, this is not true for me. By skipping out on the rudimentary basics (due to the lack of formal training and motivation), I find my methods of learning to be counterproductive in the long run. The lack of these basics make learning a new language, or even just a new feature in a language I'm familiar with, incredibly hard.

As I'm sure a lot of HN users have taught something to themselves before, I'd like to hear your feedback. I'm especially looking for people whose first encounters with programming were by themselves, as I think that's the most important time for a programmer.
It's done in nearly every business too small to hire a head hunting firm or spend 100 man hours conducting interviews.

Contrary to popular belief, most companies, even tech companies, are not google and do not need geniuses and PhD's to write their web apps or stock their shelves.

Most of the time someone skilled who needs money to pay bills will show up and do a job pretty well. This is an old and not-very interesting concept and doesn't lead to blog hits though.
Really? He seems awfully conventional to me.

He's relying on the same worn-out altruistic and sacrificial morality that has dominated western culture for two millennia (keeping people poor and stupid for much of that time.) Like everyone of his ilk, he doesn't question it or even attempt to justify it.

It isn't good to give up something that you find personally valuable for the sake of something that you don't. What is good is what makes your own life flourish (this can be [and often is] material goods, your spouse, family and friends, your work, etc.) A sacrificial action that Singer may approve of, such as, "I'd be happiest designing microcontrollers, but they tend to be used in consumer goods that 'harm the environment', so I'll drop out of my engineering program and volunteer in the Peace Corps instead" is actually a profoundly evil action by proper morality. Each of us owns ourselves; we are not moral slaves to anyone, nor should we be.
I have found it quite useful on my 10" Android tablet for coding Javascript (especially when writing Project Euler solutions).
I have to say this matches my personal experience, at a number of companies. A few highly productive people, and a fair number basically growing their arses (literally, or, I suddenly realize, figuratively).

I worry about coming across as excessively bitter (and so useless, myself). But I've done some of the "productivity enhancing work" myself, including in Perl (lack of budget turned out, in this instance, to be a fortuitous gift in disguise). At one point, I basically replaced a five person department with myself, in the face of attrition both voluntary and forced. (This was before I learned to be one of the first rats off the sinking ship.)

Throughout all of this, my biggest hindrance has been non- and especially counter- productive coworkers. Even management's asinine budget restrictions and decisions were nothing compared to the disruption causes by the more self-serving, ignorant buffoons.

Too bitter, again. On the other hand, I had some great coworkers with whom I really enjoyed working, a great deal.

It didn't matter what department or division you were in. As you met these people, there tended to be mutual recognition and understanding. In the future, you could pick up the phone or send and email, and get what you needed, no matter how many layers of management above might be opposed to the idea (whether on some sort of "principle", e.g. the latest management guru book they read; or due to ambition and empire building; due to personal animosity; blah blah blah).

In several roles, I've set precedent as a result of this cooperation. People learned I didn't fuck things up, and I made their lives easier. In turn, I could e.g. bounce the server, despite not being in Ops. It was a lot more efficient. Gradually, they realized they could let some other people do that, as well -- often after I trained them.

It's not arrogance, either. One of my replacements had some trouble with some concepts, but actually stuck in the job with a really good will to master it and do the best she could. So, when my lazy management wanted to can her and try the fourth friggin' hire in a year -- because she wasn't "quick enough" -- I told them where to get off. And she kept her job.

It's not just about being the biggest brain. It's about trying and doing your best.

A lot of people in corporate America only do enough to stay in the seat. And often, they get in the way of the people actually trying to get stuff done.

(As to why I stayed long enough to accumulate this experience? It's complicated, in my case. I hope that, in sharing it, some others may recognize it a bit sooner in their own lives. And realize that some of these same obstructions are the ones who are self-serving enough to jump ship early and often, frequently ironically ending up better off and sparing themselves some of the misery of a downturn in the company. That is, if the economy is doing well enough and if their BS is good enough.)
Possibly. However the studies with guidelines on whether or not I would be diagnosed with OCPD would suggest that I do not have OCPD.

Either way, for some reason that picture tickles my fancy.
The trouble with unions is that what you want is Cincinnatus, but what you get is another set of gangsters in suits you have to support forever.
I'm still not sure why I upvoted this. I think because it was surprising - high entropy. I'm not sure if I consider this "right," but you have definitely made waves.
"normal" generally means "the way how I think the world should work". Haven't you realized that yet? ;)
Yes, this is wonderful. Recently, I've been using emacs as my primary editor and because of muscle memory accidentally used the movement commands in, e.g. composing a new email in Gmail. It worked! C-a (beginning of line), C-e (end of line), C-n (down a line), C-p (up a line) in particular are especially useful. I just used C-p and C-n in composing this comment.

C-k / C-y is weird in Gmail, though. Anyone know why? Try replying to an email, C-k'ing a line, going to the top, and C-y. I can't make heads or tails of the gibberish that ensues!
Our best hires are friends of our employees. In fact it works so well when we want to hire someone we think of job ads as a waste of time. And there is some explanation to that:

Good employees (and you'll surely have one) have friends on the same level. If your company / environment / team is good then employees are happy and try to convince their friends to join so that they can work together. We have 17 employees and only 3 of them have been hired through job ads.
Can you let me know as well
This. Zuck speaks about Adam and Quora highly; no reason it wouldn't translate into an acquisition. With a $50B evaluation Zuck can very well afford back his old friends into the fold.
Does anybody have a link to the HN thread where the clone was first submitted? I can't find it, thx
That's a distinctly different question, for several reasons.

(1) Concentration of power: there's a qualitative difference between a large organization making an absolute and sustained decision on a corporate basis, and many distributed small organizations or individuals making ad-hoc iterated decisions on a case by case basis. Normal statistical variation means that in all likelihood, the market will simply be smaller, not all but extinguished.

(2) Your guess may be incorrect: I find it difficult to recollect an attempted online commercial transaction that I aborted owing to fear of a scam. Now, if you knew my personal circumstances, perhaps you'd be able to direct my attention to such cases; in lieu of that, can you be more specific in your guess, and at least give me a few examples? A few points on my behaviour: it's my personal policy never to buy anything in direct response to any advertisement or inducement, whether in person, over the phone, via email, or online, if I do not have a prior independent non-commercial relationship with that entity. I will pay more for a service or product that I have found myself rather than accept a similar service or product for a lower price if that service or product was directly advertised to me; I infer that the extra expenses in reaching me directly will be more than recouped via means that are not immediately obvious to me, such that the savings are probably illusory. Any time I have ever engaged in online commerce, it directly or indirectly started out with a Google search for the product or product category in question, or for a store name found either in a previous search, by recommendation, or an online version of a brick-and-mortar store.

(3) Freedom of action and the rewards to that action: most Nigerians in Nigeria have little scope for changing their situation to evade these policies; from the original position, I would not like to be in their situation. In converse, the problem of not being able to find customers is distinctly different: one may choose to sell something else, to a different market, and via a different medium. One of the risks of creating a business is that there may not be a viable market, but one of the rewards is profit when the market is viable. The risk / reward correspondence with consumers doesn't seem convincing: at best, the consumer can obtain what they wanted at a fair price; the upside is very limited.
Facebook requires users to use their real name.

I don't use my real name and neither do many people I know.
Tech startups are always about the tech. What's confusing you is that investors and successful entrepreneurs often focus on other essential ingredients that are often ignored.
I understand what your saying, but I am not sure I agree (at least from the US perspective) that South America has been written off as a rounding error in the last few decades. I think we have been on a trajectory from the early 1990's (starting with NAFTA) and continuing into the early 2000's (with the start of CAFTA) to today where we are near ratifying CAFTA. The next step is a full South American free trade agreement.

I don't think US industry has ever dismissed South America as a rounding error. They get the huge economic importance it has. Rather, we've had some feet dragging from unions (and to a smaller extent a little xenophobia, but I think this is really really small when it comes to Free Trade Agreements). Give the US another decade or two and there will be a full on American Free Trade Agreement.
There is quite a lot of logic and I'm sorry that I was so brief that my point escaped almost everybody here. Both merchants and customers are "statistically" equated to criminals, forced to do any online business in a closed ghetto. Which does not leave much business opportunities.

Going to an analogy which might make it easier to understand, say you live in Oakland, CA, and by law you can not open a bank account or possess a weapon because your neighborhood has statistically higher crime rate.

I understand people usually don't care much being on the other side of the fence, you lose what, 10% of sales maximum. But please try the mental exercise of being a well-intentioned business on another side.
You could encode a fingerprint of a signing key in a comment tag and offer to sign doubtful peoples' nonces with that key.
Well. He said "fuck off," not "fuck you." To be fair, there's less interpretation. It's a rant, not an argument.
How Quora could get huge without pissing off its early adopters
I agree with the importance of delegating, but perhaps the work-at-home, not getting any questions after two months was also related to a major employee problem Derek mentioned somewhere in another post: employees began to feel as if he was too distant, they were doing all the work, etc, etc.

If I recall correctly, there was mutiny brewing among the employees and was the main reason he decided to sell the company.

This doesn't take away from what I think is great advice in this post, but maybe those employee issues were inevitable side effects from the super-delegation approach.
Try joker.com. They're at least European and might have heard of Romania.
Excellent! I just loaded a few on my Kindle, and they work great. Thanks!
Show HN: PilarHQ, The Posterous of Customer Support
Hmm, I guess that is a little misleading. What I meant was to bootstrap by working "on the side" instead of "working in waves" (long stretch of full-time work to build up funds and then a long stretch of full-time on startup). That's the "way" I was talking about in this article, by contrast to my previous article on "working in waves" - http://joel.is/post/2106915988/bootstrapping-waves
What I meant was that to assume there was no incentive was to assume complete psychopathy on everyone's part. What you are saying is that while the basic empathy incentive may exist, it isn't enough. I agree with that just fine.
Physics is a rabbit hole and we are going deeper every year, but I doubt we will ever hit its bottom. One of the main outcomes of the 20th century physics was that it was shown that this hole is deeper than anyone has ever imagined. I don't think that any mystery has been taken away by this outcome, and I think that something much bigger has been added. The reason poets of the times past wrote verses about stars and not quarks is because they could not see quarks.
First of all, non technical people have no idea that something like demand media might be "bad" for the internet. There's certainly nothing obvious about it.

Secondly, if Google ranks based on certain factors, is it wrong for a business or charity to take advantage of it? Would you rather a charity got the income or a random person?
Every investor I've chatted to about Quora since it's been created has been all a-twitter because of who the team is. Because they're valley royalty the earliest users of Quora have been Valley nobility which has raised it's profile even further.

I used it once or twice but found no reason to go back and haven't been directed to go back by Google either because the site doesn't answer questions I have.

It's helpful in daily life to day that Quora is awesome because you're agreeing with Valley nobility. At least it was until Vivek's blog entry.
It would help if these were timestamped. One of my first questions with such resources -- particularly when getting up to speed in something -- is: Am I looking at this year, or at five years ago?

I suppose I can dig into the resource dates, history, but please: Just include a published/last updated date on the page.
Why you should read academic papers
1. Some of us on occasion prefer to program the way the Old Ones did--work out the complete solution to the problem, then conceive of the complete program in our head, then finally type to complete program into a computer. Only at that point do we try to actually run the program somewhere. Why not do this on the couch in comfort?

2. Code reading. I have a huge amount of code I need to read for work. Right now what I do is run it through a formatter that can turn it into HTML with nice syntax highlighting, and put it on a private web server. I can then read it on a mobile device (iPad) in comfort on my couch.

While doing this, I occasionally note minor errors or places that need minor improvements. If I were reading in a code editor I could go ahead and make the minor changes. This would be quite convenient.
> As for Python... Everything else in the language is inefficient scripting crap.

Would you elaborate on how this applies to Python and not Perl?
Agreed with you on the crappiness of Techcrunch.

However it's a bit low calling someone out as an ex-alcoholic. Call him out on the quality and integrity of his articles by all means. But his alleged alcoholism - true or otherwise - is nobody's business but his and his family's.
I don't like it when my CPAN tests fail - and there are some test rigs out there running on 5.6. In practice, this has actually only resulted in my rewriting code once in a part of a module that is standard in 5.8 but wasn't earlier (one of the Tie modules, I think), but still. Using a whole new control structure isn't something I'll be doing soon, no matter how attractive it is.
The Ghost in the Machine