skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It really depends on the instrument. While there are many instruments that are fairly easy to "teach" yourself, in almost all cases it is good to have someone guide you in the learning process. There is so much information available on the internet for free, and with instruments like guitar it is easy to get started on your own - but even then you should seek advice from someone who plays. Most professional or even intermediate musicians will be able to give you some good tips just by watching and listening to you for a few minutes.

If you're looking to learn something like viola or trombone, you will almost definitely want to take lessons.

One great resource is undergraduate music students. They are generally desperate for income (I know from experience) and would probably be willing to take a few minutes to help you out.
Someone sent this around the office recently in response to an email that the "coffee break room" renovation was going to be extended an additional four weeks.
Go to StackOverflow.com and you can instantly see what kind of questions are being asked and answered. The UI may feel a little cluttered, but the information is there. Hang out for a few more minutes and you can appreciate the value of this service. You might as well sign up and start using it.

Go to Quora.com and you're asked to log in or create an account. No idea what's behind that login. Not even a search bar. Since there isn't any useful page that I can browse to, I might as well just contribute to their bounce rate. Why would I create yet another online account without even knowing what the benefits are?
Jeff, the other founder, is in El Cerrito.
BackType is hiring product and backend hackers
We're growing!

We live and breathe product and ship to production every day. We're obsessed with measurement and data to inform decisions, learning about our customers and their problems, and doing whatever it takes to minimize waste.

We hack with a wide range of technologies: from Python and Clojure, to Cassandra, Hadoop and Thrift. We open sourced Cascalog, a query for Hadoop, created a database optimized for batch exporting and serving data and are currently developing a stream processing framework (code-named Thunderlog) that will generalize our real-time work-flow much like Hadoop does for batch work-flows.

We're looking for someone to lead the development of our new product.

For the front-end hackers, our flexible back-end lets you build what customers ask for very rapidly. Features that take other companies months take us less than 24 hours.

For the back-end hackers:

- we have > 25 TB of compressed data

- more than 100 billion records

- serve more than 400 requests per second

- operate a cluster ranging from 60 to 150 nodes

- we do this with 3 full-time people (just added two interns)

We have world-class investors (http://twitter.com/BackType/investors/members) helping us out and are generating significant revenues. Drop us a line at jobs@backtype.com.
Interview with Ralph Folz CEO of WordStream
Password Party: distributed password cracking in Javascript
> With most of dedicated server providers now, you can get any server with a 1 month contract

Still not really the point. You're going to have to buy enough servers in advance to handle your peak load every month. And then you're going to have to forecast ahead at the end of the month and cancel all the ones you don't need. It might be theoretically possible but in practice it is ridiculous. EC2 brings the contract interval to 1 hour and lets you control it with API calls.
I wrote this thing and would like suggestions on how to improve it. Thanks.
"If a proposed site doesn't have critical mass, we just won't create it. Even if it does get created, it has to maintain a certain level of traffic and quality or we'll close it down,"

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for making the web a better place.
I half agree, half disagree with you. The web doesn't suck for phones, the websites suck for phones. If websites use a fluid layout or a mobile layout, nobody has to write an app for them. Posterous is great to read on mobiles due to their theme.

I hope more companies start using those tricks that let websites resize gracefully on any size screen, so you don't even need a mobile theme. Your layout just adjusts gracefully to the screen.
Big Startup Opportunity Seen In Moving Legacy Apps To The Cloud
Joel Spolsky has written a very good esay about this using netscape as example:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
I thought Quora was a Stackoverflow clone.

I never really understood wtf is the point of Quora. I go the main page and it wants me to sign up. Really? No, I'm not gonna sign up just because you say you're awesome. How about you prove to me that you're awesome by showing me the real homepage that registered users see, huh?
The Paranoia of Idea Theft
I'd think that that requires that you really understand the code top to bottom. I know I've looked at code other people have written and gone, "that doesn't look right" and redone it 'right', only to discover the hard way that there was a good but subtle reason the code looked the way it did and my fix introduced a couple of very subtle bugs.
Look deeper. Quora's magic sauce is that it only shows you questions that either your contacts have interacted with or that correspond to topics you are tracking. As a result, every time you visit you get stuff that you are genuinely interested in.
I would assume gross is before Apple's cut. Net would be post-Apple's cut
LibreOffice 3.3 Officially Released
This was supposed to be blatant sarcasm for those that missed it and are voting me down. Layoffs are in no way funny, and it's pretty disrespectful that people (on HN of all places) are cracking jokes about it.
Ask HN: Stories of non-typical hackers?
I love reading about the startup community and all of the interesting hacks and aspiring to one day do something similar. However I feel like a lot of the stuff I read about is about hackers who have been programming since high school or younger who wizz through college/university and accomplish so much by the time they are 21. Anyone know of some stories about people who did some novel hack/launched some cool startup/did something-hacker-news-worthy who didn't take up programming until post-secondary or didn't launch anything 'cool' until later in life? Someone who coasted or just ran the rat race until they broke out and started doing novel things?
I wonder why prefabs houses aren't more common.

A friend of my parents was building a house. I asked him if he considered prefab, he had no idea what I was talking about.
Well, assuming I will get downvoted into oblivion when I would rather just discuss it, but what is the basis for your argument?

Since I'm arguing the opposite, I will throw my argument out there. I use various Yahoo functionality in production sites, including YQL, Yahoo's Upcoming, Flickr, and though I no longer use it, I did at one time use Yahoo Pipes. Granted, I use a lot of tools, but that has what kept me coming back to Yahoo, despite the marketing pieces which have driven me nuts over the years, especially the rebranding effort for the "New Yahoo Mail". It wasn't the functionality that drove me away from using it, it was the in-your-face you must use the new Yahoo mail cause it will blow you away marketing that pushed me off. As for the amount spent on marketing and its return value, I obvioulsy dont have Yahoo's financials, but if someone does and wants to discuss that would be great.
I have been as frustrated as anyone by trying to plug in USB plugs both ways. Or by finding that USB plugs make a rather neat fit in RJ45 jacks.

But really, looking back on the history of common connectors (DB plugs, DIN plugs, 10BASE2, etc.), USB looks really simple, safe, cheap, reliable, and easy-to-use. I've never had a USB socket go bad. I've never shorted out any equipment by brushing a USB plug with a conductive object. I've never needed to clean a USB connector to get it to work properly. But all those things have happened to me with USB's predecessors.
We may be splitting hairs here. The point is that you are free to use BSD code in your closed application without incurring the risk of being asked to choose between removing the code or open-sourcing the whole thing, which is the fear of some.

I imagine they don't mind complying with BSD terms.
Possibly. Worth an experiment, at any rate. I suspect the behaviour in question would depend upon the phone, unless the iOS/Android/BB apps are all functionally the same.
'We're f..king bringing it' on May 6, Duke Nukem Forever's creators promise
How about Verisign's Firefox extension: https://pip.verisignlabs.com/seatbelt.do
That os x UI design is pretty bad. If you do it only in the menu like suggested there, you have to make a window active to actually see what profile is associated with it.
I applied to Google and got rejected.

Its a pretty interesting story so I thought I'd share:

I applied through the traditional on-campus recruiting at UC Berkeley. Got past the first round of interviews on Berkeley's campus and then was taken to the Mountain View campus for 4 interviews and a bunch of events. That night, I got a call saying that the interviewers really liked me and recommended that I be hired. At most companies, that would mean that I was made an offer. Instead, they have these "hiring panels" where executives from various departments take a look at your resume, the notes from interviewers, and your transcript / other related documents. 3 weeks later I got an e-mail saying I was rejected during one of these panels. These people never met me; in fact, the 6 people who had met me all recommended that Google hire me. It was kind of weird, since no other company I had applied for had a process where people who hadn't interviewed you made the final decision on whether you should be hired.

Obviously, I am a little frustrated by it - so take this with a grain of salt. However, I think that my experience was emblematic of a few specific issues with the hiring processes there (though they have some amazing processes as well):

1) People who've never met you should not be pontificating in large panels about whether you would be a good fit. That just doesn't make sense.

2) Google has a very strong academic focus on hiring. It is clear when you interview with them that they care a lot about top-brand schools and top GPA's. They seem to believe that the best students will make the best employees. I am not sure, but I think the reason I got rejected may have to do with two C's on my college transcript (which is not indicative of my inability to Ace calculus but rather my lack of interest in attending class). Personally, I think the academic focus is much to their detriment - and a major part of the reason they've struggled at social. That said, Google has some brilliant people who I'm sure I would've loved to work with :). Take this answer for what it is but hopefully you'll find it valuable.
I bet Mark Zuckerberg made that post, masquerading as a hacker. It wouldn't be the first time he's pretended to be one.
Yup, you could sum it all and simpl say:

"With the ubiquity of USB, here is a plug design that makes connecting more hassle free {pictures}"

HOWEVER,

This guy has been beat to the punch by guys at CES this year.

There was a guy handing out samples of a USB adapter that you plug into any existing USB cable and i does what this guys design does, except it doesnt have any moving parts. Rather than the sliding plastic thing, it is simply the contact board center-mounted in the metal shroud, regardless of which way you plug it, it works.

My buddy ordered 1000 to give away to customers.
An untrusted application is handled in running it as a dedicated user, like 'httpd' or 'nobody'.
How to Do Almost Anything Faster
When I worked in academia I did one project with Scottish Nuclear and one of their team had worked on the project to build Torness. He had a story about one of the failure modes they had to consider during the design.

AGRs can be refueled while they are operational by a huge machine that moves across the top of the reactor and allows the fuel rods to be extracted from the extremely high pressure environment of the reactor core. The refueling machine is basically a long thing container that fuel rods can be raised into or lowered from.

They had to consider the case of what would happen if the refueling machine wasn't properly pressurized before the connection to the reactor core was opened (which can't really happen for a variety of reasons). However, if it did happen they realized that the refueling machine would basically act like a very large gun shooting hot fuel rods through the roof of the reactor building powered by the high pressure CO2 from the reactor core.

Every time I pass Torness on the train I can't help looking to see if there are any fuel rods flying into the air. So far, so good....
That might be because your father's computer has the usb ports mounted upside down.

It happens very often though. And in some laptops you even have all combinations at once: some mounted right, others upside down and one or two mounted vertically...

It's a mess...
Learning a musical instrument as long as you are willing to practice is easy. Really.

I would recommend against hiring a undergraduate music student. The may be economical option but these folks may have the "The Curse of Knowledge" as per the book Made To Stick. They will not have the patience to understand what it is like to learn something since it has been a long time since they were in the same shoes.

A seasoned teacher will understand where you are likely to get confused and need to really focus on to help you with the bumps and learn more quickly. They will have also reasonable expectations. This is along the same lines as Sir Ken Robinson stated in a TED presentation that college professors and TA are the worst teachers since everything came easy to them so they never fell into the same pitfalls that most students are stuck in. And so are unable to really help these students who initially struggle.

Hope that helps.
PS Pick someone who really enjoys the instrument. Yes there are teachers that hate the instrument they teach.
We update AisleFinder on a 4 Month Cycle by verifying product/aisle info. We have done analysis/focus tests to find that we have a 97 % accuracy in our info as well. The only reason for that 3% is items like Honey (which can live in many different places in a store) unlike some people we dont speak before we know something for sure.Thanks for your feedback though. I will let HN know when those numbers change.
The Startup Daily — Great Ideas from Great Books
Inspirational stuff for your daily RSS Feed.
But where would the business incentive be for the app writers? If they can't spy on you for later extortion techniques, how will they make money?
I think he was suggesting extra poll options, but the markup in the comments collapsed his line endings.
I'm pretty sure PSD is handled by QuickTime.
How Finder manages multiple selections
Why can you only refactor one application?
Wakemate - it wasn't the cable, it was the "wall wart" charger. When I got mine (and discarded it) I noticed it was curiously similar to the iPhone 3G charger that was also recalled. Of course, my current iPhone charger looks identical as well.
Historically untrue.

What's untrue about it? While SO had a CC policy since the early days, the actual CC database, which was the subject of my post, was made available well over a year later, coinciding with a outpouring of foolish developers claiming that they could recreate the site on the weekend. I recall the timing simply because it was interesting seeing how that momentum disappeared.
Added memory to the server and added apache workers. Site should be a bit snappier now. Sorry for the slow response times earlier!
Firesheep.

The way iFrames are used by so many 3rd party sites to pull in likes, you don't even need to be on Facebook to be vulnerable.
I would very much like the checkboxes in Android too, although obviously they'd place a greater burden on developers.
For example, I tried installing the official XBMC remote app a while back; it requested all sorts of crazy permissions ("read SMS" etc) which they were intending to use for debatably useful features but I ended up not installing it because of the privacy concerns. In the end I installed a third-party remote app which didn't ring as many alarm bells on installation, but I'd have been happier to stick with the 'official' one if I could selectively disable some of the permissions they wanted.

I can certainly see why that isn't an option; it'd make things much harder for developers if they suddenly have to test against different sets of security permissions. But it's on my wishlist.
This is how I have always felt. I think Facebook's best move is to be that "popular hub". Turn from evil to good. But, of course, they wont. Zuck likes money.
Google does not necessarily require a CS degree.

Google hired me with 10 years professional software development experience and no CS degree. Google hired my friend with similar years of experience and no high school diploma.
Don't sell yourself short. Just having a working prototype can be a god-send, no matter how inefficient.
Very clean interface. Are there any plans to have an ajustable font size in a future release?
There are many people here who are very supportive of the Marketing team. However, the numbers don't agree with this position: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870332220457522...

I'd like to be convinced that I am viewing the numbers the wrong way or some other objective data that validates the position that the Marketing Team adds the most value to the company. Anyone care to take a stab?
Never applied. They've never come calling and I don't feel any particular inclination to work there, so I haven't sought them out either. I probably wouldn't be a good fit anyway. At 37, and more of the college dropout / autodidact type (although, strangely enough I do have 3 college degrees. Weird.) I don't think I fit their culture of "youth from Ivy League schools."

Anyway, I'd prefer to work on doing my own thing, and build an awesome startup, than go to work for any big company, Google or otherwise. Hell, even Lulu felt big and bureaucratic to me when I was there, and they were only about 100 employees at the time.
Depends on what you mean by stable, and what you mean by rewrite. If your end result is buggy and unstable, it's sometimes worth using it as a rough draft and starting over. Ground up rewrites in a successful environment (which was the subject of the article) are usually wrong.

Planned, incremental refactoring or re-architecture can be quite beneficial if done right.
And we wonder why the rest of the world think us IT people are a bit strange :-) Never read that but pored over enough other arcane material in my time.
It happened to be my second time ever coding in objC, so I'm fairly certain it was crap.

My later patches (think I've made two or three so far) got accepted without change :)

Hope I have time soon to make the automagic indentation feature that's possible with the new AST thingy. Also hope somebody hasn't beaten me to it yet :P
I'm leading Postmark's API development. Amazon SES is clearly going to be the low cost provider; nobody's going to compete on price. Time will tell what their actual deliverability rates are, what their spam handling really looks like, etc. I agree that price is a weak argument in any market. Now that we're at bottom, we'll see lots of innovation in this space, and everybody will win as a result. We have a great roadmap ahead with Postmark.
Does Youtube count ? I managed to get past the phone screens, they flew over from east coast but didn't make the final cut. Oh well.
I had a similar experience using Jekyll. I really like it, but I suspect it's more hacker-oriented. I did toy with the idea of making yet-another-blogging platform that was Jekyll based, simply because going flat file gets around a lot of the scaling issues we frequently see when the big sites go down under load, or get fireballed/farked/dotted, etc.. It would make it easy to support multiple methods of post access as well.
Walled gardens can last a long time. You could argue that if a walled garden lasts as long as a technology is relevant, before open source competitors can come in, the walled garden has 'won'. I'd argue in this sense, Windows won: it was never bested by Linux on the desktop, even though it is now largely irrelevant.

It could turn out that Facebook stays prosperous until the world shifts to the next big thing, but well before any open source alternative takes hold and dominates.
Same for me. I went through multiple rounds of on-site interviews only to be rejected in the 11th hour without any real explanation. It's especially bad when you've been there a few times and start getting familiar with the place. Won't stop me from trying again, though.
Which is now almost 15 times as expensive as Amazon SES. (Almost, because Amazon also charges a small data fee.)
"It's only profound if you insist on believing that the world is classical."

That's like saying heliocentrism is only profound if you believe in the geocentric model. By your definition, is there anything that can be said to be profound? It seems to me that your definition not only ignores history, but ignores what makes science worth doing in the first place.
> What could have been done better?

I'd have tested the UI on my mom.
You're missing the point.
I'm advocating for a general direction ... I don't have specifics..

Its not crazy. Facebook just announced something along those lines today
http://marketaire.com/2010/12/23/facebook-registration-tool/
Help Crowdsource the Galaxies
I'm pretty tired of this sentiment. Yes, Google might value engineering above UI, but that doesn't mean they don't value UI at all. Look at the piece on Chrome Tab behaviour that was on HN earlier today [1].

Chrome has by far the best UI of any web browser I've used. Google Search has the best UI of any search engine I've ever used.
Google Calendar has the best UI of any electronic calendar I've used.
And so on.

Do they have as good UI as a specialist graphic design company? Maybe not. Against any tech company however, they stack up pretty damn well, despite what Gruber might claim.

[1] http://theinvisibl.com/2009/12/08/chrometabs/
Part of the reason for quora to do that might be to limit their user base to people who already know what it is (people who are referred)

Exposing what it is and making it really easy for anyone to sign up will make it degrade into yahoo answers in no time.

Stack overflow on the other hand embraces new programmers asking and finding answers to questions because they're all going to be related to programming (if not it gets modded down really quickly). Quora doesn't have that niche/topic restriction and is much easier to troll.
Before git, I never understood version control. svn seemed way too mysterious, and I was supposed to use commands without understanding what's going on, and it just never settled with me.

With git, the system is so simple to understand, and so finally it makes sense. The commands are rather clean and friendly. I don't have anything to complain about.

With hg, it's almost back to svn. I didn't really know how things worked; I never wrapped my head around it, so I never used it.