skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
-- (Rare?) I never applied, but was hired anyway!

Me. I came in 4+ years ago by way of an acquisition. Note that "never applied" doesn't equate with "never interviewed" - we all had to go through the same interview process as regular candidates.
Hmm, you made me hungry.
I don't have time to solve it, but translated from binary to text is
.zncf anug erggro fv abpno

Anyone want to take up the mantle? :D
It has the lowest robustness possible: it's some student's design project and doesn't even physically exist.

All the illustrations are renders or bad composites.
I applied, and was rejected. However, I had already taken another job before they rejected me. The application process made me not want to work there. More recently I have toured their offices, and I really really don't want to work there.
Nope, I'm "Limi" on Wikipedia, but I don't think I've ever made any edits there.
The biggish short — subprime student loans
Related: solicited by internal Google recruiter but declined.

Google sucked-up nearly all the Python people from Seattle mid-decade this way, just as I was migrating back to Common Lisp, so it wasn't that appealing to me anyway.

It was months before the IPO was announced, no bus from SF yet, no SF office then, and I couldn't bear a reverse-commute. (Wife doesn't drive, so living outside the city not an option)
I'm building a startup and I want to make things easier for my users.

Should I let them "sign up" with OAuth?

I read somewhere that doing that I don't "own" the users. What does that mean?

All I want is for folks to find their friends automatically, and not to force people to remember another password.
"If you have to make cuts, you really want do it once, all at the same time, and then put it behind you."

I'm fairly sure that's what Yahoo did at the end of 2008 in their "Get Fit" exercise. We were told that the cuts would be severe so they would not have to go through this ever again.

And I think this is now the fourth layoff since that "layoff-to-end-all-layoffs". I hear rumours that they are already scheduling another round of layoffs in engineering later this year, somewhere near September/October.
Very interesting -- I wonder if this is the result of having so many API access points. The documentation page lists FBML+FQL, Graph, "Old Rest API", and "Old Javascript Client Library" as options: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/ Or are we back to good old XSS attacks?
I wonder what HNers think is the way that this was done?
I was recruited and then rejected : )

To be fair the recruiter said it was a generic interview - I spent the week studying data structures & algorithms. And then I get on the phone and the entire interview was on JavaScript and how to hack around the same origin policy.
What you're talking about is having "flipped the bozo bit" on everyone that sucks.

Didn't know if you were familiar with the concept, but you should be. :)
I never applied because they don't have a Portland office.
Sorry about that. My company is waiting on a new site design and this WP template is what we're using for now. I switched up the code styling a little. Should be easier on the eyes now.
Does anyone else find themselves reading the first 1/3 of a landing page and then clicking on the miniscule "About" button at the very bottom most of the time? I think of it similarly to a deck I'd present to an investor: I'd give my problem-solution spiel and then move quickly into my bio slide. It is my personal opinion (and Mark Suster's) that the features, demo etc aren't absorbed/swallowed if that kind of detail is presented before the listener knows who's behind the product. As a consumer, I'm inherently skeptical, so I can't stomach a whole page of "the hard sell," even if it's above the fold. Do you think there's merit in placing a tiny bio block or a whole paragraph--something beyond four words at least--from a reputable press review after the pitch and call-to-action? I know it's not de rigeur but something worth thinking about nonetheless.
You think OpenID was over elaborate but want to provide the user's phone number?
I'm diluted they are/have A/B tested that. So it depends if your in the control or test group :P
Metaphorics: perhaps a copy of a Symbolics LISP machine font?
I wouldn't rule out some guy following Zuck around Palo Alto with airtools and hijacking cookies.
You just change your email on record. This is not a hard problem.
Gmail Finally Appeases The Tab Addicts With A Dynamic Unread Count Favicon
Cue criticism of name
My wife put a basket for keys right next to the front door. That pretty much did it for key loss. Now the only problem is arriving at the front door with an awkward burden in one hand and the keys in the pocket on that side.
* What problem is too long (maximum is 500 characters)
* Solution is too long (maximum is 500 characters)

Thank you for telling me after crafting the text, rather than before. Why 500 characters? Why a limit at all?
"That woman was sexy...Out of your league? Son. Let women figure out why they won't screw you, don't do it for them." -- @shitmydadsays
I always put my keys in the same place. Very simple. Works.
Binaural Beats with SbaGen Developer Jim Peters – Technoccult Interview
I applied and then rejected them.
Probably because it's just really, really simple. Short of audio jacks, it's one of the simplest computer plugs in existence. That's a good thing when you're trying to achieve universal adoption.
Indeed, I used to love MS Paint when I was using Windows on a daily basis.

It's simple, fast, easy to use, and does its one thing very well.

It wasn't until Paintbrush 2 came out that I didn't have any individual software from Windows that I missed when using OS X. I've never tried Pixelmator however so that might be a better replacement.
For one, I'm a student. I could go the internship route (I'd actually like to at some point), but also, I have a pretty sweet job right now :)
I should have made that wording clearer... by "like a firewire plug that is bidirectional (ie. not tapered)" I mean a symmetrically shaped firewire "style" plug, only with the same pins arrayed down each side... so no matter how you plug it in it's correct.
I genuinely wish you the best of luck, and hope that your decision to use Facebook doesn't have repercussions down the line. And your point about Haystack is well taken -- from what I remember reading, it was more hype than security software, and almost bordering on fraud.
What? You didn't notice the mark clearly embossed in black plastic on the black plastic background while holding it in the illuminated space between the back of your computer and the wall?

Or maybe yours doesn't have a mark at all like the mouse I'm using now. Or maybe it has one mark on one side and a slightly different mark on the other.

Who came up with this stupid idea anyway of making a plug that looks and feels to the fingers completely symmetrical externally yet is definitely oriented in its insertion? Why are we still using it?

I went to buy a USB cable for charging something the other day. It seems I bought a micro instead of a mini USB end, or vice versa.

Really guys. What we needed was a smaller RJ45 without the plastic tab thingy that breaks off. HDMI isn't doing nearly so bad.
Don't we also need:

I applied and heard nothing back
I applied, had a phone interview and was rejected
I applied, interviewed in person and then was rejected
I applied, was offered the position and turned it down.

PS I fall in the applied and heard nothing but crickets back column -- i feel so ashamed, HN hold me and tell me it will all be okay :(
If you were to tell people in 1985 that they would be able to see their credit card balance on an LCD of a mobile phone while jogging, you'd completely lose them too.
If profiles and e-mails are public (like at GitHub), it's not revealing anything new. Does make it easier though.
1) Unless the app was evil and changed your password for you.

2) Or unless you wanted to let some apps keep access to your account, but not others.

3) And if you can easily deal with remembering new passwords (most users can't).
Same.. I've never lost them that way.
My other wish has always been 'uni-sex' USB plugs, but I don't know if you can easily have both 'uni-sex' and invertible together.
I never applied, but they approached me. I went to interview, and they said "we'd like to hire you". Then about a month of waiting later, they said "nevermind". Now I can't apply for 6 months to a year from November because of their policy, so I guess I miss out on 2011 being their biggest hiring year ever. Oh well.
I lived right next to a construction site a few years ago, and even "normally", some things move pretty quickly. The lot was a parking lot. One day, I looked out the window, and it was a pile of dirt with a fence around it. The asphalt was removed in a workday. Then the lot sat for a few months. Then a drilling machine came in, and they spent a few months doing something with that and some concrete, presumably some part of the foundation. Then when that was over, the workers got busy and constructed 7 stories of parking garage in a week. (That was when I stopped paying attention, because now the new building was blocking all light.) In another few weeks, the whole skyscraper was "finished". Then it sat around for a year, finishing the interior.

So my conclusion is that the hard part of building a building is not erecting the steel skeleton and pouring the concrete. It's the foundation and details that take all the time, and the article omits any details about how long that process took for this hotel.
Facebook Acquires Mobile Advertising Startup Rel8tion
Solicited by Google recruiters but never applied:

a) I don't think Google is a place for me in terms of age and society.

b) I don't come from a CS background, am self taught but have over 12 years of professional experience behind me - I know what I am doing but can't rant of algorithms off the top of my head.
Perl 5 was a complete rewrite of Perl 4. Great success.

Git was a rewrite of BitKeeper. Great success.

BIND 9 was a rewrite of BIND 8. Significant improvement.

In 2002 MediaWiki was created as a complete rewrite of the previous software that Wikipedia was running. Astounding success.

Mozilla is a famous rewrite disaster. I have my opinions on it, but this is not the place for that.

PHP 3 was a rewrite of PHP 2. I hate to say good things about PHP, but that rewrite has not been bad for PHP.

Project Xanadu went through a rewrite. This seems to have been a bad thing.

vBulletin only became popular after a version 2 rewrite.

Zope 3 is a rewrite of Zope 2. It does not seem to be a success.

I generated this list by taking the first two off of the top of my head, then I went to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewrite_%28programming%29 and clicked through to the links to all of the listed projects. If a quick scan for "rewrite" followed by information about how good it was gave me an opinion, I added it to the list.

Other than the obvious effects of survivorship bias, this should be relatively unbiased. From this it doesn't seem that rewrites are necessarily a bad thing.

Incidentally in my personal experience I've been involved with a number of rewrites. Most succeeded. I've seen a number of other rewrites from a distance. Most failed. I consider this mostly luck.
here's a direct link to where the short url was pointed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_business?h=d044aeb71f4e4...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_business?h=d044aeb71f4e466a552708fc6e3863ef&thanksforthecup=https://www.facebook.com/photo.php%3Fpid%3D393752%26id%3D133954286636768%26fbid%3D170535036312026
Reject here. Pretty discouraging at the time, but in retrospect, best thing that could have happened to me. A year later, I landed a great job at a local startup, and the Google branch closed up shop.

All in all, it was decent self-learning experience. I say apply anyway. Even if you don't get it, it might sharpen you up enough for somewhere else.
Highly efficient != totally efficient. If you think you have some place where you know the market is inefficient, and you are right, you can go make money. (Or rather, your counterpart in the financial world will.) Now the market is that much more efficient again.

I think people citing the fact the market isn't totally efficient aren't always proving what they think they are proving. The practical difference for the vast bulk of us between a market that is totally efficient, and one that is only mostly efficient but it is very very hard to find the inefficiencies, is pretty much zero. I often see people try to leverage this into the idea that markets are efficient as somehow being "touchingly naive" to score political points in various political fights, but, well, there's a reason you have to reach for that emotional trick, because the facts don't really support the idea of some grossly inefficient market in practice. (Instead, the problem is that efficient doesn't mean what you think it does; it certainly doesn't mean "good" or "moral" or "stable" or anything like that.)
Off topic:
Is there a reason why all the words start with a capitalized letter instead of just the first?

Or is it an accepted convention?
End the frustration of broken USB connectors and end-user support issues

I'm afraid to ask... do any significant number of users actually break their USB ports by trying to insert the plug the wrong way?
How to Set Up the Ultimate Home Office
With more and more people working from home setting up the ultimate home office is what could make all the difference between a productive day and hours of wasted time.
Sure, HipHop gives a fixed percentage increase. It feels a little strange to compare this to a software re-architecture though, since fixing something Fundamentally Wrong can have compoundingly good effects down the road.
I tried it for about 4 months. Spent some time at the hospital a few weeks later. So yeah, probably not the best idea if you plan to last.
Depression link to processed food
Yes, people losing their jobs is hilarious.
Strangely enough, being a dropout sounds sexier than having a BA in English! This all happened waaaay back in 2007 when my resume wasn't as impressive. Since then I've really fleshed it out, and I can get hired places on the strength of my accomplishments regardless of what I studied a decade ago. It's too bad working for Google doesn't sound as appealing now as it did in 2007, or I might just try applying.
if you were the main source behind the movie "the social network" you can make a door handle and you will still get press.
I hope your job is safe from that round. If not run while you can.
I'll mention a related question I've been pondering on lately: how does one assess his own skill level?

When one has people around who are clearly more able programmers, one can take the chance to learn from them and try to achieve their skill. But when you believe you might be the top programmer around your office, how do you determine whether you're really good, or you're just in a not-so-great environment?

A lot of entrepreneurial advice mentions trying harder: if you aren't failing, you aren't trying hard enough. Applying at a very competitive company like Google, Facebook or Apple is, IMO, a good way to assess how you "rank" next to very talented peers. Failure there is failing at a very competitive level, and the interviews will give you a sense of how far you might be from them, and perhaps energize you to try harder.

I guess a method to determine your current "level" could be to keep trying to be hired by harder- and harder- to get-into companies, until you fail; that's the level you should strive to get to in the future. If you were never rejected, how do you know whether your current "level" is your highest?

Another common advice for entrepreneurs: "you only fail if you fail to learn the lesson." The reason for failing to be hired is invaluable feedback on your shortcomings, which are much harder to self-assess.

In short: don't self-reject yourself.

(note: I don't have any startup experience, and just 4 years of professional experience as an employee. I guess the more entrepreneurial people around here would propose shipping something and see what happens to make your self-assessment :-)

(2nd note: I was recently hired by Google in Munich, and can't wait to start! :-)

EDIT: this was longer than expected. I totally forgot to address your question: I was afraid of rejection, but I also thought I could do it. I never thought of it as trying my luck in a lottery, and wouldn't apply if I didn't believe I could deliver once on the job.
If facebook needs money, instead of going to the banks, why doesn’t Facebook let its users invest in Facebook in a social way?

Unnamed hacker reinvents IPO, tells world.
Конкурс в Китае. Музыка Нью-Эйдж в Поднебесной..
This explained the issues well. Thank you for posting it.

Other reading material that may be of interest:
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lady-Tasting-Tea-Statistics-Revolution... Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century <a/>

Taleb's The Black Swan
and
MoneyBall (especially if you enjoy baseball)
QR code fails here in UK: "Not Found: The requested item could not be found."

Downloaded from the Market but I can't find the login! The new menu gives me Post x2, Comments x2, Refresh, and About.

There's no version number in About, so can't provide any info.
OmniGraffle is based on graphviz (and costs $99 vs. MS Visio $200.)

With a bit of learning and patience you can draw graphs with graphviz by yourself. With the added value of being able to script the graphs and perhaps use templates. It's not as hard as it looks at first.

http://www.graphviz.org/Gallery.php
Looking in from the outside I'd agree with you, but what's next then? Slow death? Buy-out? (at a valuation lower than the bid that saw Jerry Yang get ousted).

They still have some really strong properties (though I imagine flickr to be feeling the heat of Facebook), a 2 minutes to twelve turn-around can't be completely ruled out but it's not going to happen under current management.
Dropquest
Nobody does. Quora is just a new club where the owners have some celebrity friends. Give it time.
I listened to a guy talk about people with ADD. Most people that have mild ADD have memory problems also but for some, they sub-consciously overcome that problem by finding places in the house to store things.

For instance, I have one place in my house that I unload my pockets everyday when I get home. When I walk in the house, I don't do anything else till I've went to my spot and put my keys there. I've always known that I have a spotty memory but I've come up with my own ways to make sure that I don't lose stuff.

But I also think losing your keys is more than simply memory loss. It's about not putting forth enough mental effort when you do set your keys down. When you walk into your house you are almost on cruise control. Everything is winding down and you don't really care about what's going on anymore. I would assume for most people simply taking the time to notice where you put your keys would be enough. I mean, besides the key to your house, it's the second most expensive key you own. Pay attention!
Gabriel, do you have any stats on proportion of zero click clicks (so probably page views where they don't click any results + clickthroughs from zeroclicks) vs use of standard search?
For me, it was the news (in 2005) that they were hiring JavaScript-specific engineers - JS was my true love, and though I didn't think I was anywhere near the CS-Genius stereotype I'd read about in the press, I felt I was pretty good at JS, so I applied on a whim, thinking that it was an outside chance, but the best I'd ever have.

By the end of the interviews, I felt I did well (considering that I'd read up on complexity theory for the first time the night before and had told an interviewer that I didn't know what a hashtable was), and felt that even if I didn't get the job, I'd had an awesome day, but still didn't really believe that it was really going to happen. Then it did. I think I worked out OK for Google (I'm still here 5 years later, at least).

My perspective was that of a foreigner in a land where CS was a path to becoming a suit-wearing enterprise software automaton - at the time, Google seemed like this romantic faraway wonderland, so the whole process was very removed from reality for me; the perspective of someone who went to a school like Stanford or Berkeley is probably very different and more realistic.
It works like this:
1) You port your number to GV. That has the effect of cancelling your carrier plan - you're no longer their customer. (Same as if you ported from Carrier A to Carrier B.) You may have to pay early termination fees.
2) You then start over with your carrier (or a new one) - say "please give me service with a brand new number. Oh look, I already have a phone."
3) Once your cell phone has a number, you put that into GV as a forwarding number.

Now the number that everyone already knows is your GV number, and you can keep your mobile number a secret if you like.
Never applied because I didn't want to live in the US. I'm sure Google is very nice and all, but I like decent health care. ;)
Tokyo Cabinet - Comparison Functions
I was approached on LinkedIn for an SRE position (Unix admin). Got through 3 phone interviews and did 5 on-site interviews, but I managed to make a complete arse of the scripting one so no Google job for me.

No hard feelings, though; the interview process is fun. And if anyone interviews in Dublin, have the pizza for lunch. It's really good.
Quora's terms ostensibly do allow republishing, but not by any standard license, and with a number of custom conditions, such as:

• not if the original contributor ticked 'not for reproduction'

• no modifications

• pledge to remove an author's name, or update or delete content to match Quora, upon receiving a request

I can understand what motivates such conditions; I recall writing similar ones into a homemade license a decade ago. But they do prevent the easy and wide reuse a standard/CC license allows.

(Quora also has this perplexing statement: "[C]rawling the Service is permissible in accordance with these Terms, but scraping the Service without the prior consent of Quora except as permitted by these Terms is expressly prohibited." In common parlance, 'crawling' and 'scraping' overlap so much as to be nearly synonyms. So this statement makes these terms, like many others on the net, seem engineered to be vague enough that Quora can object to anything they don't like after-the-fact.)
Really? Why do you say that? What do you mean explode? IMO it's a really bad first shot at an idea that people have done over and over again. Not trying to be negative but it really just does not look very good to me and based on the quality of this product I would not trust any of the feedback that I received.

Fact is that if you want to build something then build it for fun or talk to your customers (aka: customer development) not to other startup founders and random "alpha users" that my and may not be a part of your target audience.

See: http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development-manifest...
Quick blog post:

http://shapea.posterous.com/
Getting Started with GWT
What didn't you like about their offices?
For the record, I now work for ClearChannel (a pretty big company), and it is by far the best place I've ever worked. You do feel the size of the company when it takes 5 separate IT guys to set up your workstation (hardware, software, email, phone, VPN), but as far as the actual day to day operations, I couldn't ask for a better environment. I am the only non-CS dev on the team, but I can hold my own.
Am I the only one that read this headline like a resolution to a 'hostage situation'?

Seriously, Yahoo.. what have you done right since 1999?