skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Much appreciated (since I am an information architect) :)

To do this yourself, find your target audience (some of them in this thread), and call them on Skype. Put a screensharing app. Have them go over your site and speak-out-loud, focusing on what the info is that they want to find. Don't talk a lot yourself, the only words you should be saying are "why do you say that" and "what are you thinking/looking for now?". Make HEAPS of notes. Then have them go over your competitors sites. Make HEAPS of notes. After each call (don't wait, don't go for lunch) immediately have a long discussion with your team. Make a long list of things they are trying to answer.

Do this with 2, 3 people in your target audience (then send them an Amazon gift certificate of 100$), and you should have enough information to make this work.

Better than hiring a consultant :)
You're right that it is dangerous advice if used as an excuse. One of the points that Seth Godin makes—that I didn't have space to go into in that short writeup—is that it's a good habit to determine what would make you quit something before you even start, this way you never quit because the short term pain is too great. This also helps prevent you from getting blinded by pride and sticking with something too long (He uses the example of Nixon and the Vietnam war in the book).

I think the book does look at it in a objectified way, and in the signature Seth Godin way that is both simple and deep for his fans, and too obvious to his critics.

Note that The Dip is actually a super short book, maybe 75-80 pages.
To veer off topic a bit I think this in itself is interesting, and a trend I'd like to see more of. Not just because people are busier than ever, but because publishers push writers to "fill out" so many business books when the core point could be made in less than 100 pages. Some ideas are complex and require 1000 pages, many could be done justice in a few chapters.
Facebook ads use your face for free
I applied for internships at both companies. Google actually mentioned in their rejection email that I should feel free to ask questions - so I did. No answer.

With Facebook, I at least had a phone interview and could run post-mortem on what I might've messed up there. Google appeared to just toss my resume down a black hole.

I later decided that really, I didn't want to be a programmer, I wanted to found a startup. I was still in school and not 100% sure of myself at this point, so I applied to 1 programming job at a small place in Connecticut. I got a phone interview and then a rejection. I blamed my "failure" then on my lack of interest probably showing through.

Sadly, I had the same null feedback experience with many seed funders that spring. Most of the time it was a black hole. 2 (Lightspeed and IO Ventures) of them gave a brief explanation, which matches some (but not all) of my own post-mortem analysis. I think that given the high probability of rejection, rejection feedback significantly increases the value of applying.

While I don't think rejection from a place like Google is necessarily "random," I would certainly agree that it rarely provides actionable info.
"But the important thing is the concept, not the expression"

Nailed it.
The salary they offered for that position was quite low.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1654185

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1654133
Quora is killing itself.

Quora wants my information before it lets me take a peak. I have never made it past the homepage of Quora as I don't want to logon to a site without knowing what is in there. I think there are several more people like me who are avoiding it fr the same reason

I never see Quora in the results' sites when I type in a question in Google search bar. Instead I find yahoo answers, ask.com in the results.
Did they ask a lot of questions about algorithms and data structures in your interview? While they may not require a CS degree (it would actually be surprising to me if they did), they certainly have a reputation for wanting people with a strong CS background, regardless of where they acquired that background. Is this reputation inaccurate from what you've seen?
Am I supposed to be impressed by 55 minutes to cover "Hello World"? That proves the point that Java is a bad starter language, it's not evidence against it!

Python would do that in about 5, and then instead of working on the irrelevant details of Java you could be teaching programming. (They will never need to know the other stuff you covered. The soonest the 8th graders could graduate college with a computer science degree is 2019 or 2020 and Java will be far from dominant by then. All irrelevant and not even all that educational.)

Your students have no ability whatsoever to judge complexity. What are they comparing it to? You want to play fair about quoting students and beating "HN" over the head with your students quotes? Next class period, do the Python equivalent, then ask them which is "more complex". Then tell us what happens.

(And if you lead them on enough, you can convince them to say they prefer Java. They aren't stupid, and they'll say whatever you want them to say. By that age they know what to do to get good grades. So I'd ask you that you play it as straight as you can, if you're serious about this.)
IRS Announces Tax Refund App for iPhone
someone at google referred me (but never told me), so i got to the onsite interview. on the application, i didn't put down the name of the googler who referred me. that definitely didn't help my chances :(

i haven't applied again because consulting and startupping have been more exciting than working for medium-large companies. but then again, i wouldn't know :)
Ask HN: would you pay for lefkofsky/keywell visibility?
If you had a chance to pay for a 1 minute video that Groupon's Lefkofsky & Keywell would watch, would you pay anything for it? If so, how much? Curious what the start-up community thinks.
I'm glad you like it. Just to clarify, they are sometimes summaries, and sometimes just something from the book that seemed useful, and may have little to do with the theme of the book.
(I need to improve my messaging or I'm going to get people emailing me "you completed missed the point of that book!")

Short and useful to startup folks is the goal.
Physics major.
Only something in the sub-15 minute range would be a concern for you or me, but don't forget that this is Zuckerberg - it's not at all impossible that someone followed him around for 2 hours to crack his GSM encryption.
Review my project: WhatIsMyUDID.com
http://WhatIsMyUDID.com

After spending 3 hours trying to explain to a non-technie user how to retrieve and send over the iPhone UDID for testing, I decided to spend 12 hours on this project to save everyone's time.

1. Got to http://www.WhatIsMyUDID.com on your iPhone or iPad

2. Tap START (only if you're on an iOS device)

3. Tap INSTALL to display the device UDID.

Hopefully, this solution will help save many other developers from having to go thru the same pain :) No more 12 steps with iTunes, no more explaining how to download and install Apps, no login, no registration.

It just works.

Or, if it doesn't work well enough, please let me know your feedback and suggestions where to take the project from here! Thanks.
For years, people have been told 'don't click on "Unsubscribe" in spam, it just tells people that your e-mail address really exists'.

Except that people can't tell the difference between 'e-mail I don't want and never asked for' and 'e-mail I signed up for but don't remember', so they click the 'spam' button automatically. For a lot of people, the 'spam' button is actually the 'I don't want to get these e-mails anymore' button.

This is why companies like AOL, etc. have feedback loops. You register yourself with them, and you set your system up to handle spam complaints. When a user complains about a legitimate message, you just remove them from your list. If you don't have those feedback loops set up, then AOL assumes you're being a dick (and/or the spam complaints go to the IP address owners, who've registered themselves already).
Square is doing the opposite thing, letting you receive payments from a credit card to an iPhone. This would be letting you send payments from an iPhone to some other device.
Can nobody access "user joe"'s SMS and Email?

A. If it can, then it can send my personal info to outside world. I don't care if it can't gain root access to my phone. My phone's root account is not important, my personal information inside that phone is.

B. If it cannot. Then most of my application is useless because it can't access any information at all. Why don't I add it to "trusted" zone? Because I don't trust it. And I shouldn't have to.

So what do I want? I want it to see my personal data but not being able to send it to anyone.

We're back to permission based system again.
Yeah, it looks OK for me in Chromium (dev channel) & Opera as well.
Right - that's the business' money. It's fun for Zuck to run the business. He doesn't need or worry about cash at this point.
Thanks for the link, I did not know 3mindme.

Turns out David Barrett had that idea before, which is cool, and supports more syntax than remaildr does, which is extra cool. Oh well :)
What is a 'vertically aligned USB port?' For that matter, what side of a computer is 'up?' Nothing is stopping anyone from re-orienting their computer in from the way that the manufacturer intended. Not to mention computer cases that are designed to be able to sit both ways. I think that the take-away here is that you don't design a connector that depends on the orientation of the device.
This question comes from incompetence, not malice, but why $6m? It seems like a lot of money for what I thought was a fairly small operation.

Does $6m just not go that far, or is it supposed to last for a long time?
Drunk intern that left three months ago and no password change policy on the account (*which I assume is used by the PR department, not Zuckerberg himself) .
It already does. I use it every day. Twice a month my bank account levels up.
Due to Amazon’s lax policies, the EC2 IP blocks have been blacklisted due to spam and the like. If they maintain this lax policy, it will only be a matter of time before SES gets blacklisted and becomes largely unreliable if you actually want the e-mail you send to get to the recipient.

-useful comment on the blog page, and missing from HN comments
I wonder how much different things would be if a peer-2-peer protocol like IEEE1394 won out against USB and it's client-server model of bus communication.
Not to mention that the type system in Java is always surprising. List<Integer> is not a List<Number> but Integer[] is a Number[] (which can throw ArrayStoreException as covariance makes no sense on mutable collections - ref: http://programming-scala.labs.oreilly.com/ch12.html )

And compare smalltalks' (and ruby's and python's) everything is an object to Java's: there are some primtive things, and null is not an object.

Don't get me wrong: java is very taughtable to beginners. The basic usage is ok, while cumbersome. But Java shows its deep issues when you start using it for more serious stuff.
This comment perfectly encapsulates the value proposition.
Cool. Thanks for the resource! I've never used OSX, so I didn't know you could rebind the window manager's controls. Good stuff.
Wow, this is so simple and useful! It just works! Keep up the good work. :)
Evening Dresses, Wholesale Evening Dresses
More like the USB spec should have realized that the ports may end up in all sorts of configurations, especially on devices where they are trying to make the maximum amount of limited space (i.e. laptops, netbooks, etc). The connector was designed without really allowing normal people (or at least people are aren't 'in' on the group-think that can go on in working-groups) to try and use it.
"A new hot startup launches, and they don't even lift a finger as a counter measure."

Probably because they don't think it's an improvement and they think it will go out of business on its own if they ignore it. This is what happens to most 'hot' startups anyway, and if Hipmunk is able to beat the odds then I doubt it will be because of their current UI.That's not to knock Hipmunk at all, I just think you need to lengthen your arc a little on this.
> We need good key-management tools so I can log on to sites from internet cafes, etc (perhaps a session-lived key cache in the browser, with support for syncing it remotely?)

Giving out your private keys like that (what, you actually trust an internet cafe computer?) is a rather bad idea. Instead have a service that your local client can authenticate to (with a normal password if you trust your client, or rsa keyfob, or application that makes your phone act like a keyfob), that acts vaguely like either ssh-agent (with the connection established in the opposite direction) or a kerberos KDC (which would let you not need to keep track of privkeys).
The cost of just existing in this space is very high, let alone competing in it. We're a small operation now, but we've got a long way to go, and it won't be this way for long.
Seems nice, and I may use it in the future. Alternatively, I tend to just tell people to install this app and email it to me.

http://appshopper.com/utilities/ad-hoc-helper
Can you explain why "not from scratch" construction is a bad thing? AFAIK most houses these days are built from cookie-cutter plans.
Missing:

"The MS Employee" - Seal 50% or more of the classes in your project.
Zen - a HTML5-CSS3 Audio Player
I was working at a mapping startup that was almost hired away to Google in 2006 (cofounder depthcharged that opportunity) and have applied a few times since, never to get a reply email. Was recently recommended to a recruiter by another googler (in munich this time) and I'm putting together a more in-depth CV.

As a javascript developer, the UI inconsistencies at maps.google.com really piss me off, I'd like to have the chance to fix them.
The description says its chromium-like, not that it used code from Chrome, unfortunately.
When I taught Java (some years ago) I used Karel J. Robot. It was a great way to teach both Java and OOP.

http://csis.pace.edu/~bergin/KarelJava2ed/Karel++JavaEdition...
You can argue about this study all you want but I dont think anyone wants to stand up for processed food in general. Eat fresh.
Not being in EE, I didn't know that this was possible

Not only is it possible, it has led to many interesting failure modes in the past since visible light doesn't usually erase an EPROM, but sometimes just flips a few bits. The n00b complaint, "it works fine until I turn on my desk lamp" used to be a pretty common one in EE labs and online help forums :-)
Actually, it depends on whether you consider volume of upvotes or volume of questions. If you look at the highest-upvoted "questions" on Stack Overflow, they most consist of things like "what is your favorite programming comic" or "is perl still relevant". These are not questions that can be answered factually; they merely ask for opinions.

Now, there are a lot more "how do i replace foo with bar in a string"-type questions, but those individually do not get many upvotes or views.

So really, SO is both.
It's not their obligation to track down cheaper or free sources. That's silly. After all, the ACM isn't going to waste time keeping track of the various sources of every paper they publish. It's not their job.

If someone is motivated by the fee to find another source, they'll do so. Maybe they'll ask their colleagues. Maybe they'll search the web. Maybe they'll take the time to visit a university library and track down a print copy.

But if they don't care about the price, they'll just do the easiest thing and pay the ACM in order to save time.

It's not the ACM's job to do the legwork. If you want to save the money, you have to do the work yourself.
Joel, in fact, is in New York.
George Clooney & Google Team Up to Stop Genocide in Sudan
setformarriage.com is currently running through Sendgrid. While they have had great support and do have some very cool features (all of the ones we actually use have an SES equivalent), I think we're gonna have to switch once our AppSumo deal runs out. I imagine someone will have created a Rubygem for it by then, but if not it looks like it will be pretty easy to whip one up.
Sorry, yes most houses are built from cookie-cutter plans. I guess I meant from scratch in that they're mostly built up with wood framing (simple to do), vs a lot of prefab which may require welding and more specialized skills to assemble the panels (harder to do, or at the very least less conventional).
The problem, as I see it, is over the top access requests to access elevated privileges and personal information is the norm. This is not a user problem.

There must be a way for :

1. third-party developers to use the api to access information for their app in a kind of handshake mode - without the ability to use that information externally - or to access elevated privileges in a kind of sandbox arrangement.

2. for the api developers to use their control of market places and warnings to make these low level access privileges the norm, rather than the exception.

Getting these two things in place would mean developers would have to make a case to you, the user, if they wanted to do something more powerful or dodgy with the api.
Battery that charges from air (translated)
Watch Tux Flying Over Adelaide In A Balloon
I tell a good number of people about 3mindme but I have yet to tell someone who knows it exists. Although I find it useful and sure many others would as well people just don't know its out there. Perhaps that is something you can capitalize on if you can figure out a way to make your service more marketable / mainstream.

I am going to try your service out later tonight.
"If I have to pay $15 for that paper, and then pay over and over again for each additional paper that I want, the costs quickly become unsustainable."

That's a clue as to who the pricing is geared towards: staff of deep-pocketed corporations and institutions, not individual web users.
Facebook does a decent job of this, with the exception that you don't get to have a line-item veto. Users deserve a line-item veto.
Thanks arn, we were trying to do the same -- explain how to install an app, but had problems explaining it over email (search "udid" in App Store returns way too many results).

It was much easier to say, "Open Safari on your iPhone and go to http://WhatIsMyUDID.com.

We actually wrote a simple AdHoc UDID as well, but decided that a single-function webpage was more straightforward.
Education Still Pays
Ask HN: How should early-stage companies recruit great software engineers?
Hi, this is my first post on Hacker News, but I read Hacker News pretty much every day. My name is Josh, and I'm the CEO of Omedix. Our company's mission is essentially to deliver Web 2.0 to mainstream healthcare.

I am a geek, as are many of my coworkers. We're based in Scottsdale, AZ which has a decent concentration of technical talent, but nothing close to Silicon Valley or Seattle. We're looking for engineers who are exceptionally talented and shine particularly well at architecture. That is, the engineer should be able to take a problem presented by a non-technical person, and translate it into a well-defined and simplified problem that can be solved with a deceptively simple elegant architecture.

"Architecture" is just one skill we're looking for, but it seems to be a proxy for most of the other skills we care about. We've posted on Craigslist and tried networking around the city. We're about to try posting on LinkedIn. Posting on Monster.com was pointless. A friend of mine who's also recruiting tried posting on Dice.com, but again to no avail.

So here's my question to the Hacker community. The readers and contributors of this community are pretty much the kind of people we're looking for -- passionate about technology, smart, entrepreneurial, excited about the possibility of making a difference, motivated by the belief that you can do it better than most of the others out there. So the community is actually a perfect audience for this question, and I believe all of us would benefit from hearing the responses:

What is the best way for early-stage companies to recruit great software engineers?

For further feedback, you can see the current job posting in question at:
http://www.omedix.com/careers/software-engineer/

I appreciate your responses, and nice to meet everyone!

Josh
Sorry, they are less efficient not more. Getting 43% from a nuclear power plant is incredibly difficult.
It would be nice if Apple's crash logs actually worked as advertised in iTunes Connect. That would save me the trouble of needing UDID's from my users in the first place.

This works great for clients though.
# The Multitasker – Have more than 50 source files open at the same time

Why should the user distinguish between "in memory" and "on disk". That's a performance optimization for the program to decide on.

(Incidentally, I would really enjoy a "national force-ide-programmers-to-use-vim day". "Wow, you can switch between files without your whole system crashing!?")
I'd say it's a bit early to call Windows irrelevant - certainly one look at Microsoft's bottom line would suggest that Windows is still very relevant.

In some ways, yes, the choice of operating system is now largely irrelevant - if you mainly use web based stuff. But then again, walk into any corporate office in the world and there is a massive, massive probability that the only operating system you will see on desktops is Windows.
I think this would be a great plug-in for teams of developers to install. Especially early career members. You could make the rewards visible to your team members in TFS so you could rag on the guy who always submits "Spaghetti code" or the "cowboy coder" who never tests their stuff.
Unambiguous colors for colorblinds and non-colorblinds
Great article about what colors to use for presentations and website. It shows good examples to show what works and what does not.

If you do presentations, this can be very useful.
On average, I use a USB connector about 3 times a day. I have yet to see a Bluetooth device that isn't a phone (I literally don't know a single person who has a Bluetooth controller that isn't one of those never-used phone features, nor anyone who actually owns a Bluetooth gadget, and the only ones I've even seen for sale are headsets for - you guessed it - phones).
Didn't hipmunk file some silly patents regarding their UI "just in case"?