skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"First we're gonna recess 'em, then we're gonna emboss 'em, then we're gonna mate 'em!"

Designers should look to nature. Nature has certainly created some wonderful symmetries, but a symmetry which would impose hidden and unnecessary constraints on alignment during the mating process is not one of them!
Is Twitter predicting the market or are traders moving it based on perception of prediction?
Use the rejection as motivation. Go build something that Google will want and have them buy you out. You get to become an employee and they end up paying you way more for the privilege of hiring you.

I look at a place like Google the same way I looked at grad school. A place to go where you can hopefully meet a co-founder :)
Is social media addiction a serious concern?
Yes, though we may not be typical. But I'm surprised how many blogs I run into that don't have any About. An About on HN would be nice too.
TC Cribs: Scribd office tour
I'd expect current limiting to be a feature of even the cheapest USB interface ICs. It's really easy to test and potentially a short-circuit/fire hazard. Not the kind of thing any testing lab would be likely to overlook.
From Schnitzel to Startups in Vienna
"download the UI every single page load" - Client side XSLT resolves this. I'll admit that client side XSLT has other problems though. Compare these two urls:

https://grepular.com/

https://grepular.com/?response_type=xml

Then look at the source code of each
Crucify people for asking a duplicate? When you flag a question as a duplicate, SO asks for the previous question's address, posts it as a comment, and when four people confirm the duplicate, a big link to the original question is put at the top of the page. AFAIK, there's no crucifying step.
3G is encrypted [1], so it would still have to be on an open wifi.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3g#Security
Spot on. I actually know a couple of people who have been rejected and they don't have a very clear reason for the rejection.

However, I could tell during the conversation on the interviews whether I was doing well on a particular topic or not so well. I got the impression the questions just keep coming while you keep answering; when you say "I don't know this, I actually never saw similar problems before", I guess this is when the interview begins: how do you solve new problems and try to tackle them? This is also the feedback you can take away: where did you stop, and what would it take to go on?
Disclaimer: I'm not getting this from a rulebook. This is just about what makes me cringe.

- "Where froze over?" (bad)

+ "What place froze over?" or even "What froze over?" (good)

+ "You went where?" (good, if emphasized)

+ "Where did you go?" (good, official version)

- "When works for you?" (bad)

+ "What time works for you?" (good)

Question form vs. "Let me know ..." "I wonder ...":

"What time works for you?" ("Let me know what time works for you.")

"When do you want to X?" ("Let me know when you want to X.")

"When can we X?" ("Let me know when we can X.")

"When are you available for X?" ("Let me know when you are available for X.")

"Do you X?" ("Let me know if you X.")

"Where did you come from?" (Let me know where you came from.")

etc.
I absolutely love that analogy, especially as an amateur self-taught guitarist + programmer. I'd still not be too inclined to apply anywhere with a heavy CS slant, even though all the theoretical stuff interests me a lot.
Where was a person like you the last time I was milling through resumes?
Dropquest Winner's Process chat log
The author is pretty obviously either a non-western or a non-native English speaker. Read some of the picture captions.
I think I have more than 20 components using Sendgrid. I forget what and where because it's been working like magic for so long.

Also the free Sendgrid addon for Heroku is a dream for throwaway apps.

My time is quite valuable, and the costs of Sendgrid aren't even a drop in the bucket compared to other costs. So I don't plan on switching any time soon.
There's also a sometimes interesting webcam of a building being constructed (obviously not this one) in Hong Kong: http://202.94.229.4:81/view/view.shtml?id=3418&imagePath...
The google rep at DLD said that there was going to be an increase of +1000 in Europe.
ok, added.
No offense to captaincrunch, but I think the Daemon would have a better graphics design team.

Then again, maybe that's mission #2.
Well if you get in, how 'bout shoot me an invite? I think I made a mistake with the site I linked to for my "show us something you built" link... I'm a developer, not a designer, but I linked to a demo of something I'm working on... and it really shows that I'm NOT a designer... but maybe people look at it and think "WTF, this guy's a crap designer, not inviting him." Maybe I should have linked to the github page instead, so it was clear I meant it as a representation of my coding ability not my design ability!

Oh well... you win some, you lose some...
It is slow and painful and requires you to pay lots and lots of careful attention to the behavior of the existing enterprise system that you may very well hate.

Greenfield development sings a siren song. You get to scribble on a gloriously empty page in your imagination, free of such mundane concerns as cash flow, near-term customer demands, day-to-day stability, vitally important edge cases, and hard-won but crufty bug fixes.
Need trumps shooting the shit any day of the week.

Stackoverflow serves a need and therefore has staying power, quora tries to serve that same need in a way that does not work well in the long run, I think it will simply blow over. Remember 'ask Jeeves' and all those other sites along the same line? Salons tend to go out of fashion after a while.

It's interesting how we're discussing this on a site that does both, serve a need and has people 'shooting the shit', maybe HN will outdo both of them one day ;)
Anyone in a position to allow a platform to get serious traction isn't going to give that control up and anyone that isn't can't make a system with enough traction.

InfoCard is surprisingly non-evil, and I also think Firefox is ideally placed to work on this (oh look, here's the solution: http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/identity-in-the-browser-fire... ), but they don't seem to care enough.
Never heard of Quora

Does this mean I'm out of touch or way ahead of the curve?

Or possibly so far behind the curve that I'm being lapped - but look like I'm ahead of the curve in a photo finish?
Quora is a bit like Twitter in the sense that many signed up because Bruce Willis' son was on it. On Quora there's that elite selection of superstars who draw the proles in.

It's entirely unsustainable though. It is a community destined to fail, as cool as it is right now.
I just got back from my university's career fair (Caltech). It was a bit interesting to see that while Google had poorly-advertised information sessions, it was Facebook who had people on the floor recruiting. It seemed like Google was content to stay in their high castle, while Facebook was actually willing to try and recruit possible talent. If this continues, I doubt Google is going to compete with Facebook getting the influx of talent they say they want in this post
> but I somehow doubt Zuck is logging on to his fan (not personal) page from cafes with unencrypted wireless.

He'd just have to be logged in, not specifically accessing his fan page, and there's a nice Starbucks near the Facebook campus in Palo Alto that has free (unencrypted) wifi. Or maybe that's all Starbucks these days...
Easily host multiple static sites on one App Engine instance.
"don’t rewrite the code base in businesses where time to market is critical and customer needs shift rapidly."

I don't mean this sarcastically but in 2011 what businesses are there where "time to market" not important?
I would almost argue that the Marketing team is the ONE thing about Yahoo that is actually working. It's not the lack of smart marketing, it's the lack of smart functionality that is digging the grave for Yahoo!
That seems to be a very dangerous position to be in. There is nothing stopping Apple from shipping OS X with a similar product. What if they do?
How Six Companies Failed to Survive 2010
If NSTIC works, it's likely that other countries will adopt it.
In all seriousness, the USB Spec is an interesting read (I used to keep a printout of it on my desk for reference). I've pored over the physical specifications more times than I can count - it's amazing how much thought was put into this connector.
From the headline, I thought this was a script to compare present and past Cabinets of the Prime Minister due to the ridiculously high turrnover rate. Oops.
Ask HN: Any advice on the best way to learn a musical instrument?
I agree. Both are amazingly powerful editors and seeing a nice/powerful GUI on top of it might make me switch over from a CLI. Time to branch this project.
Just my experience. When I've seen duplicates people seem to jump at them, look down at them, yell and curse and scream things your mother wouldn't want to hear you saying. Maybe crucify is too harsh a word :)

Obviously these are my observations, others probably have differing ones. Maybe mine are worsened by the fear of rejection, not following one of their fascist regime style rules, or overall timidness about sounding dumb.

(I exaggerate a little, clearly. However, it does push me to the point of doing a good fifteen minutes of digging up permutations and variations before asking a question to determine it has never shown up before. I understand that is along the lines of what they want, but always feels like they go overboard.)
Who still uses USB regularly enough to feel this is a problem? Memory sticks are irrelevant in todays Gb ethernet as standard world, printers are wireless or networked, scanners don't exist for all intents and purposes, mice and keyboards are bluetooth... the list goes on!
I really enjoyed this interview. However, In my own business I am always uncomfortable with building the kinds of sites this guy builds.
TLDR; Yep.
Like Starbucks? You might be in their next (Facebook) ad
SO made available a CC'd database during a period when many -- including many on here -- were arguing that there should be an open-source, wikipedia-like alternative, coupled with a lot of nonsensical "I could make that on a weekend" claims.

That movement disappeared once SO started making the DB available for download.
He was addressing the idea of the poets' that he could not appreciate the beauty of the stars because he understood why they worked. His delight in understanding how things worked increases his enjoyment of them.

The reason he was interested in things that hadn't been explained yet is because he wanted to find explanations - not because there is an inherent advantage to their remaining opaque.
I'd chose linux if it was cheaper. MSDNAA is free so there is no reason for me to pay any money for another copy of windows.
Just made my day, ty =)
Seriously, you think Quora is cool? No. It's already uncool and getting more and more uncool as we speak. You can see how the quality has degraded over the last month or so, before they made it invite only again. You already see mega-important SV people like Scoble posting inane images on questions in order to game upvoting, &c.
http://www.pianofundamentals.com/ has important advices
They should have used a layoff shortner.
Look really nice. Too bad it's just OSX and as jjcm and xtacy pointed out, too bad it doesn't support vim or emacs bindings/integration in some way.

I really like your UI choices borrowing so heavily from Chrome, though. Really do... updates personal notes
I'm aware, but that doesn't mean I can't question the robustness of the (hypothetical) final interface. If a man looks at a blueprint and asks, "will it work?" he's not asking if the ink on paper has structural integrity - he's asking about the final product.
Don't wait.

The usual effect of such misdirected management behaviour is most of the good/talented/valuable people leave earlier than later, as they smell blood in the water.
If any HN users want to chat about integrating Qwerly, I'm the founder and available at max@qwerly.com. API is here: http://dev.qwerly.com/.
I really don't remember the exact numbers, anymore. A few times slower. The slowdown certainly is significant enough for number-crunching code, but end-users wouldn't notice the difference for simple calculations. I haven't yet played with per-module compilation flags, but it would be possible to compile performance-critical modules with a higher optimization level. Such a solution might require a little wrapper to convert between the data types, depending on the chosen compilation options, but it's the same when talking to raw JS code.
If you have a model trained on 2009, and it also does a great job the first time you run it on the Q1 2010 data that you've never looked at before, I'm now interested, even though every data point is in the past.

So, you have a model trained on 2009. You try it on the Q1 2010 data and...it doesn't work. Damn. So you throw it out, go back to the drawing board, and try again. And again. And ag...hey, this one works! Trained on 2009 data, and it predicts Q1 2010 perfectly!

Do you trust this model to predict Q2 2010?
From TFA, "1 million rows in a spreadsheet"
They called me, made me endure multiple long phone interviews and it all ended up with a 1 line rejection email 1 month after the last interview. Some of the interviewers were ugly and just trying to find a weak spot in my memory of obscure acronym names.

They contacted me again the following year and I asked never to be contacted by Google HR anymore. They are unprofessional and almost disrespectful. And for jobs paying below industry average. Don't waste your time.
One way to avoid the stalking issue is to require active players to wear something very easily identifiable and unambiguous.

And then hope the police don't think it's a gang symbol.
Words not found on this page: “Design”, “UI”, “UX”.

Compare to: “Engineer” (3), “Develop” (1+) and technology name-dropping.

I expect 2011 to bring more of the same from Google.
The preamble that talks about how USB is increasingly important in our lives is hilarious: typical hyperbolic introduction to student projects that try and fail to justify the importance of the project.

It is especially funny because it falls back on the "increasingly important" trope, when it is not only false but subsumed by a far better argument: USB is ubiquitous.
Hipmunk Surfacing New $6 Million Round
I can attest to the awesomeness of both Kod and Rasmus.

Especially Rasmus, I coded up the whole indentation feature and he had to completely rewrite everything I made because of efficiency issues (I'm not that great with objC yet) and he didn't even complain.

Great guy.
Segfault in java
I'm from Europe and I know SO. I didn't know Quora until I forced myself to click on one of the Quora links on HN.

To me it looked like a SO knockoff and I guess it looks that way to most people.
I can already see the early adopters: Russia, China, France, Germany...

Even if you do it so that the actual data stores are separate and you manage to keep the APIs the same, lots of countries will have huge issues with adopting U.S. policies.
Your point about Android is half correct, yes I like seeing what the app needs to access, but I don't see why. Why does your calculator app need access to the internet? I know the author can just offer some bullshit excuse, but it's better than nothing...
> Plus there's a reasonable paper trail in the event of something going wrong

How would that help you if you're transporting a suitcase of heroin across the city?

"No, look, I paid to transport this heroin! I mean, I didn't know it was heroin! It was all anonymous, to, uh... well... can I have a lawyer?"
Exactly, that's the core of the issue: it is very easy to overestimate the advantages of the new design/rewrite. But even worse very easy to underestimate the advantages of the old design. Because in a bad system (the ones you want to rewrite), things are generally not that well specified.

That's also defines what may work as a rewrite and may not work: if your application has a lot of external dependencies, and is used by customers in a very tightly way, rewriting it will take forever unless you don't care about losing your existing customers (because you lose what works and what does not). What makes matter worse is that you are more likely to make those mistakes early in the business.

If your application does not have tight integration with the customer, then it becomes much easier to replace it, one part at a time. Otherwise, you are likely to just recreate the same monstruosity anyway once you managed to support half of the features from the old version.

I think rewrite make sense in some cases, but the natural reaction should be don't, especially when you don't have that much experience. Successful rewrites are the exception, not the rules. To make a dubious analogy, that's like the junior programmer would think that his bugs are actually in the libraries/compiler he is using. The senior programmer knows it is almost always his own fault, and the very senior one has a few stories about long night debugging caused by compiler bugs in the old times.
I disagree. Don't mix it. Just make port for linux so normal people can use it.
My morning key/mobile/wallet finding delay was ended when I began placing these necessities in the same place each evening.

I still misplace other things constantly. Wrenching on a vehicle is a nightmare of misplaced tools and parts. I've noticed that the primary cause of this is not being mindful. When I set something down, it's because I've mentally moved on to something else. If I simply pause to look at and recognize an item before letting go of it, I have no problem finding it later.
He was talking about "speech or handwriting recognition, recommendation engines, or natural-language processing".

He got the custom MVC framework for free — they built it for Tumblr, IIRC.
Wasn't there a problem recently with a USB device, that was popular on Hacker News, getting overheated and becoming a fire hazard. The sleep/time one. I believe they recalled them. Granted, I don't know which side of the cable was at issue.
It’s a steep hill for SendGrid and any other email service provider to compete against Amazon SES. If the price if your only factor you are a loser in this fight; if you cannot justify the price difference with tangible features you are also a loser.

We were looking around for an email service early this month; Amazon SES seems like the reasonable choice for us; hard to beat.
Deskstop platforms
Historically untrue. Stack Overflow promised that its data would belong to the users from the very beginning. The data was created by its users and belongs to its users. We saw what happens when a commercial entity starts to try charging for content generated by its users (mostly experts-exchange, but also imdb and cddb) and wanted to ensure that could never happen. Our creative commons data dump is a promise to the community that the content they've created can never be locked behind a paywall.
At one company, I went through two rewrites, one bad, one good. Sort of.

In January 1999, I was hired by appoint.net (which became eCal) to be their Chief Scientist; my main job was to rewrite their Web calendar in C++. (The original version was in ASP.) It was a disaster. I started by building the infrastructure API, but I made it much too complicated. The team working on the rewrite got up to about 5 people before they admitted that they just couldn't understand most of what I had done. We canned it sometime around November, having spent something like 3 hacker-years on it.

The team then went off and implemented a bunch of API features that talked to the existing application's database, but were written in Perl. They discovered they loved Perl, and were highly productive in it.

About June 2000, the company decided to pivot. The company's business was an OEM calendar; the whole app ran on our servers, but anybody could pay us to get a custom skin, accessed through their own domain. It was popular with dot-coms who wanted sticky features to keep people coming back. One thing that we billed as an advantage was that all the customer calendars were actually running against the same database, meaning that someone who had a calendar with Foo could send invitations to someone who had a calendar with Bar. (What we didn't emphasize was that users could switch back and forth between Foo and Bar at will. That was less sticky.)

But, in mid-2000, we started losing customers--not to competition, but to bankruptcy. Management decided we needed to switch to the enterprise market--and, in the enterprise market, Foo did not want Bar users being able to see their calendars. We needed a packaged solution; but our ASP implementation couldn't do it.

So, we started on a rewrite. All Web stuff would be done in Perl; all database transactions would be stored procedures. I was asked to build an infrastructure for the team to use. I made a template engine--fairly standard stuff these days, but nice; the team loved using it. I eventually got it pretty fast, too, by compiling the templates down to Perl on demand. (We had a budget of 140ms on the Web server and 140ms on the database, which was computed to support 1,000,000 users on 4 Sun ES-450s--about $16K, I think. We hit both budgets easily.)

It rocked. Technically, it was a complete success. Business-wise, well, no--we released in June 2001, a time when enterprises were just not willing to spend money. Our pitch was that it would save them money compared to Exchange or Notes, and we were probably right; but they already had Exchange or Notes.
I never said they did not. I said I did not feel any sympathy. Though, I would argue, if they added so much value, why are they being cut?

Let's argue that point. I say the Marketing effort has been misguided and not a good return on value. Do you disagree? Or are you saying the blame lies elsewhere. Would you rest it solely with higher management? I certainly wouldn't shield them from blame, but I think the Marketing arm deserves some valid criticism. I point you to this from last year: http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-should-put-ad-budget-into-...
I read a poignant comment on YouTube (I know, I know) the other day:

"I have a theory, that USB cables have three sides: Wrong side A, wrong side B and right side. Geometry would tell us that the first side would be the same as the third one, but I know the truth."
Maybe you'd be willing to accept the foreign currency, and exchange it on your end?

Or, hell. $5 isn't that much - you could actually incorporate the physical foreign currency into the game.
Reading MS's Office Open XML is no trivial exercise without having code from previous versions of Office built into your own program. Not many companies can do it that way.
ha you beat me to posting this
One way to get around that is to find live online webcams - traffic cams, for instance, with a good enough resolution - and get the spies to leave something visible in front of them. Player 2 then just has to locate the area on the web, and view it through the cam.
I find some of the comments here strange.

Everyone bitches about keys until they pour their soul into trying to start a software business. I thought the hacker news crowd contains more value creators and not a bunch of power users complaining about the cost of software. I stand corrected.
It doesn't matter if "most users" don't care about this level of information as long as they still click "allow", but it does make difference to the minority that do care. So what's the harm?

If they don't care about the information then it's presence doesn't hurt them.
Almost everyone still uses USB as the baseline for almost everything. Few people use Bluetooth mice or keyboards. Networked scanners and printers are expensive when compared with USB appliances. Gb network is only standard on high-end components, most are still 10/100. USB drives are the most common form of data transfer because of the assurance that they will be compatible with most machines.