skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
+1 for Driven Developer-Driven Development. This works with small teams where each contributor has a solid track record, or with a group that has worked well together in the past. Open source projects can get by with a few bad apples as long as the core contributors are solid. I think you can use this model within small companies, but only if you are confident in the reliability and talent of each team member.

If some percentage of your team is unreliable, requires training, or likes to do their own thing (unavoidable at larger companies) - this can backfire.

If the team has signed up for a goal or deadline, the vision bit is important - it can be difficult to keep a loose team of rock stars on target without some structure.
Which countries match the GDP and population of America's states?
The Social network was good and all but Inception was a masterful, intelligent film that was original to boot. Far better IMHO.
What is the advantage of Redis over something like memcached + a RDBMS?
Ask HN: Anybody know how to compare two colors in JS?
A feature in our system allows our customers to edit the background/foreground color of a page. But we need to have checks in place to make sure that the text is still readable.

Given two hex colors (eg: #ccc and #999), what is the best way to compare the colors in JS? Need to return an int 0...n (where 0 is exact match).

I have tried converting to decimal and checking the difference...but this isn't ideal. Couldn't find much on Google either.
There's no way to share information with another person and be sure it is protected, but if you do trust that person, then you can encrypt the data so only he can read it. All these new supposedly secure social networks still rely on the server admins and such not to look at or "lose" your information.
It's not quite like that. It's more a case that since you're aware of how knowledgeable everyone is, you feel a bit intimidated by it all. I've never in my whole time at Google been made to feel inferior for not knowing things. Being a person that asks lots of questions is considered "Googley," and a respected trait of a good Engineer.

What I think is being referred to is the insecurity that comes from within. A lot of engineers come to Google from an environment where they were often the most knowledgeable person in the room. It's tough to adjust to being the most ignorant.
I can answer a lot more than that, but, err... I don't use POD much thanks to Google and my bookshelf. And my programs live in places where the only people who ought to be reading the documentation are other programmers, who will be looking in the script itself.
On your comment about parents guiding their girls into certain careers, I don't see that as being so prevalent today. Part of the issue is that coding isn't viewed as a social experience, so it isolates - especially - girls, as teenagers feel peer pressure to be doing social activities. I strongly remember being 15 and wanting to be in the computer lab, but it was deemed unseemly by my peers and at that age it's more important to keep your relationships intact. So I started coding in my early twenties when my peers were busy studying or working so the social aspect was less of an issue.
Yes. Non-technical single founder (kiss of death) didn't make it in. No worries though, I'm raising seed capital & continuing to design the site. Should be hiring a back end architect & coders in the next month or so at this rate.

YC would be a great resource but not getting in is not the end of the world. In any case, the posts on HN have been a great learning tool.
I would like to apply for YC in the future but not being a citizen of the USA makes it more difficult.
Jurassic Park in 2015... yesss! This is exciting, I'll be one of the first to buy a ticket when these end up in zoos and theme parks.

My only question, if anyone can answer, what about their immune system compared to our own, will they be more susceptible to diseases/infections/sickness etc?
Also best director and best screenplay? That seems like a pretty big snub to Nolan for Inception. Social network was a pretty good movie, but it's hard to believe it would have done so well if everyone wasn't so gooey in the pants for facebook.
http://www.hgrebdes.com/colour/spectrum/colourvisibility.htm...

Web Accessibility Guidelines from the W3C (and inadequate)
Color visibility can be determined according to the following algorithm:
(This is a suggested algorithm that is still open to change.)
Two colors provide good color visibility if the brightness difference and the color difference between the two colors are greater than a set range.
Color brightness is determined by the following formula: ((Red value X 299) + (Green value X 587) + (Blue value X 114)) / 1000 Note: This algorithm is taken from a formula for converting RGB values to YIQ values. This brightness value gives a perceived brightness for a color.
Color difference is determined by the following formula: (maximum (Red value 1, Red value 2) - minimum (Red value 1, Red value 2)) + (maximum (Green value 1, Green value 2) - minimum (Green value 1, Green value 2)) + (maximum (Blue value 1, Blue value 2) - minimum (Blue value 1, Blue value 2))
The range for color brightness difference is 125. The range for color difference is 500.
I kept getting "invite code not found" errors. If you have any more invites, I would love to get one.
Thanks for documenting this process. I appreciate the opportunity to learn from your experiences.

PS- I love the homepage video, did you outsource that? If so where? Design is also very good.
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Great to see a curated collection of resources about RESTful practices. Hosted on code.google.com... now if only Google would uniformly adopt REST for their own APIs. Google is still using SOAP for the AdWords API and I get hives every time I have to dive into it.
Ask HN: Can we apply to Y-combinator if we don't have an idea?
Myself and partners have been the team responsible for building several successful startups from scratch - but always built on someone else's dime - and marketed using their connections. We tried our hand at our own a while back, but realized that without being personally well-connected, we really need something like Y-Combinator to get access to the kind of funding and strategic partnerships you really need to be successful. (it's not enough to just build a great product).

Now the summer applications are rapidly approaching, but this time we find ourselves curiously out of great ideas. Or at least ones that we can really develop in the meantime.
On the plus side, we have an unbelievably talented team - and a track record of success.

Does it still make sense for us to apply to Y-combinator? Would they accept a really talented group of founders in search of an idea?

(posted with a throwaway account)
He may have just been more active about hiring women and provided an environment that was more appealing. I've turned down jobs before where I considered the environment hostile (for example, centerfolds on the wall, servers named after playmates - seriously!). Younger establishments and startups have been far more interesting for me to work at, so I avoided applying to companies who had an 'old-school' IT department.

I now run my own company and it's really hard to find women to hire as developers - out of every 100 resumes I might get one girl, who doesn't have the qualifications. I'm hoping to see that change over the years. I feel I need to help on that and do outreach, speak at highschool classes maybe.
--

They can say something so simple as "Oh don't you know that command?" but in an inadvertently condescending voice

--

"Condescending voice" is a matter of perception.
It's quite possible that these engineers were totally ok that she did not know some stuff.

Still it's possible that females are more sensitive to [imaginary] condescending tone, so they shy away from the field.
I dont think it works that way - in centralised cooling spaces, they have to keep their cooling machines running. So, it costs the same whether you are generating that amount of heat or not.

To cut down on cooling, you need to architect your farm to have smaller, independent cooling systems. However, your system must also be architected such that weird things like "only machine is active in my cooling cluster, so I cant shut down the cooling for that area" cannot happen.

I'm not sure if things like that have been solved.
Indeed, everyone should learn who the key people are in their industry. It's almost unfathomable that bruben25 didn't know who Matt Cutts is, though. B Ruben seems to be on another plane of obliviousness. Everyone knows who Matt Cutts is. I think this speaks more to the fact that the guy really didn't do any legitimate SEO. People who are legitimate in SEO generally keep up with the trade publications, talk to people, and make connections.
Another interesting read. Not sure where they were going with the anti-liberal tangent, but ignoring that, it's quite a clever look at things. I would say that it needs to be a bit more in-depth than simply discounting 1st/2nd generation immigrants, but as I said, interesting nonetheless.
I'll second nlh's comment. My relevant credentials: I've worked on the car rental side of a couple leading travel industry businesses. I know a lot about how it works behind the scenes. Plus I've been renting cars, as a consumer, for over 20 years.

I think the traditional car rental business today pretty much Just Works (tm). It doesn't have any huge flaw. Or rather, what flaws it does have, I don't see how this startup's feature set is solving.

I think the basic idea is exciting, and I wish them the best. But I think it's full of prickly complications that won't get magicaly solved by being able to throw up a sexy Rails website or by having an electronic widget in the vehicle. It doesn't really need this sort of technical solution, more of a people/legal solution. Their solution is orthogonal to the actual problem(s), is what I'm trying to say, if that makes any sense.
no probs.

I guess to make my point more relevant in a business sense, I recognise the problem being solved here. In fact it's not just users who have the "is it down?" question, it's non-technical coworkers in a large organisation too. I'm the web director at a medium-sized company and I've had my fair share of "is it down?" phone calls at inconvenient times in the night :)

However, for me to put my faith in a 3rd party service where I could refer coworkers or users to confirm the uptime instead of contacting me directly, and - more importantly - for my to get my wallet out and pay for it, I would need to know first that the data is as accurate as it can be.

Perhaps that's your freemium model right there:

Free - a simple uptime page

Paid - a more detailed uptime page with multiple nodes, OS service status via API, latency from various locations, response times over the last hour, etc.
Pardon my ignorance but are there any iPhone apps that convert speech to text (Dragon etc.) in real-time? It doesn't need to be 100% perfect but it could help a lot. I personally wouldn't have any problem whatsoever speaking clearly/slowly into a phone if it meant someone else could understand me. Everyone loves to talk. You'd be a walking proof that someone wants to listen.
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I'll probably write a blog post laying this out a bit more clearly, but responding to a few of the comments here:

* I don't think 'rock star' programmers is important. I think that most programmers got into the game because they love programming, not because it's what they have to do. There are exceptions, but I believe that more programmers love doing it then have to do it. The point is to setup an environment where you as an employer can get the most out of people of a range of talent simply by setting up an environment that motivates in the best way possible - through autonomy, mastery and purpose. I think people that don't seem passionate will become more passionate if given the freedom.

* to be clear, i said every 'developer' makes the same. or, better said, every role makes the same - there are roles that make different amounts, but it's still pretty flat and people are not individually offered different salaries by some subjective determination of their merit, but rather equally by the general role they are hired to do. it so happens that most of our employees are either developers or designers and they're all paid the same out of simplicity. the main point is that salary is less important than environment.

* finally, i'm not saying that the way that github does it is the way that you should do it - we have the difference of the C-suite being open source developers, so it's easier for us. the point is that even this somewhat radical example works surprisingly well, and that if you try to optimize for autonomy and purpose in the lives and working environment of your developers that it will most likely result in a much more productive output.

again, i'll try to do a more comprehensive post on what i specifically was talking about, rather then just the slides out of context, but i wanted to quickly address some of the comments. thanks! also, it was a blast doing the keynote, so thanks to everyone that attended and argued about it after.
Agreed. Being forced to condense your brain-child into a 60 second pitch really helps you make a better first impression as well as focus you on which aspects are the most crucial.
>females are more sensitive to [imaginary] condescending tone

I have male friends who are also very sensitive to criticism, and female colleagues who can be very insensitive. Please be careful of applying a general personality issue to a gender - I understand how this could make sense at first glance but it's too vague and comes across as reductionist.
But H.264 would not be immune to that either.
This is off topic but it reminded me that the book Mammoth by John Varley (http://www.amazon.com/Mammoth-John-Varley/dp/0441012817/ref=...) was a really fun read, though it has nothing to do with cloning.
I'm always suspicious when I see something that is known to be a limitation of a tool is held up as the reason it's better than all other tools, including those that don't have that same limitation. And, as I understand it, redis is specifically designed to work with data that fits in memory, which is definitely a limitation that will prevent its use in a lot of places.

It strikes me that redis has some cool concepts...but you can't just wave your arms around and say that because redis is a memory-based database it solves I/O and performance problems of databases that normally operate in larger than memory deployments. If redis falls apart when memory can't contain the entire data set, that's a limitation, not a feature.

Since I know Tokyo Tyrant (and its successor or sibling or whatever, Kyoto Tycoon) are blisteringly fast in memory only workloads using key-value datasets, I'm highly suspicious of claims that redis is naturally and obviously faster (or something...I can't tell if this is a claim of speed, or architectural superiority because redis somehow solves I/O in a different way, I can't tell from the slides what is claimed, really).

Personally, I'd like to see some more meat to the argument that redis is superior, or at least some clarity about when and why redis is superior. It's obviously not going to replace MySQL for my CMS or OpenLDAP for my directory services, but it might have a place in other types of deployments. I couldn't figure out what Plurk is, so I'm not sure I understand what it was developed for. (I'm old, though...Plurks purpose might be obvious to someone not afflicted with my particular malady.)
Joakal, you may not meet many people in your area, but definitely check out #startups on freenode (http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=startups).
UPDATE: day 13 It's been a while since they escalated the issue.

01/06/2011 12:23 PM
This issue has been escalated to our system administrators for resolution. More information should be available shortly. In the meantime, please let us know if there is anything else we can help you with.
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Weird. The link definitely had it wrong an hour ago. Appears fixed now.
Want to make it viable & non-commercial? I can think of a killer game architecture for a venture like this. Folks interested should email me djon0158@uni.sydney.edu.au Warning: it won't make you money, but it might just address social inequality.
No, Inception had a mediocre direction, atrocious dialogue, wooden characters, overcomplicated-without-being-deep plot. Not that I take the Golden Globes seriously, but I'm certain that Inception did not deserve the award.
My question is: what is it about the naivete of the uninformed/the queries of the inexperienced, which incite such revulsion in the mind of a programmer? Aside from the fact that obviously no one wants to waste time filling someone in on the basics, or do their work for them? Something about being an outsider is, sometimes, inherently looked down upon in this field, it seems. These aren't isolated incidents, is it some sort of reflex? Could it be an assumption of stupidity, because how could any cognizant human be unable to think in that way?
As it happens, I saw both of these films for the first time in the last week or so.

I'd say that Inception was a hugely ambitious film which didn't quite hit its mark, while The Social Network was a much simpler, much less ambitious film which just happened to be nearly flawless. Inception was a fifteen-course lobster meal where a couple of the courses were a little salty, while The Social Network was just a dish of masterfully-prepared spaghetti, far better than spaghetti has any right to be. Which of these you think is more worthy of recognition is a bit of a broader question.
In the abstract this is true, but can still be daunting.

I remember early in my career I had done a fair bit of C. I'm in a meeting with some architects and they start writig up structs with bitfields. For some reason I must've skipped that section in K&R and never seen it code. My first thought was, "you can't do that in C", but then I noticed that no one else was having a problem with it. Then I realized I didn't know for sure what it was.

I wanted to say, "What is that thing after the colon?", but I feared hearing, "This is 'C 101'. You haven't seen this? It's not possible to write good code w/o it. We need to revert all of his changes. Please escort him from the building now".

In other words the concern is not that you'll feel dumb relative to smart people. But rather people thinking that this is so basic, how could you possibly not know that.

With that said, I did consult at a place where one guy didn't know what free/delete was. He had only worked with garbage collected languages, and I was tracking down tons of memory leaks in his code. When he asked me why he had to free memory (in a C++ application) I did have to pause to avoid saying something I might regret. Everyone has their experiences, and I'm sure he would laugh at my naivette when it comes to Lisp macros.
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I don't use Facebook. I'm that friend everyone knows as the one that refuses to join. I like Reznor's work though so was familiar with that and perhaps somewhat predisposed to liking that aspect of the film.

I thought The Social Network was excellent and, though I really liked Inception too, would've picked Social Network as the better of the two. The introductory scenes were excellent. The characters were solid and believable, the tech side of things was handled very well and those involved collectively made a boardroom-and-laptops film into something impressive and enjoyable.

After the first time I saw Inception, I had a sneaking suspicion that my opinion of it might evolve a bit like that of The Matrix - huge at the time, but a bit cheesy down the track. I know the sequels amp the cheese, but they are mostly cringe-worthy now when repeats show up on TV.
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Alternatively, if you know you're going to want to do this beforehand, check out the 'nohup' command. It does basically the same thing with any command it's given.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nohup
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That would be pretty useful. I was reading something like that a while ago by a different company to dragon. Here's Dragon Naturally Speaking iPhone App of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qsge4iM-FTE
And Black Swan was a masterpiece too, way better than The Social Network IMO.
IMDB seems to agree that Inception > Black Swan > TSN which makes me wonder who are the judges of golden globes ?
The movie itself (I saw it twice) was excellent. Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross' score, in particular, blew me away - I saw it a second time just to enjoy the soundscape (note: You can buy the 19 tracks, in your preferred format, for $5 from http://www.nullco.com/TSN/) - the only other score I've ever enjoyed so much was Vangelis's Blade Runner. Reznor/Ross will win the Oscar hands down.

In terms of fairness, I thought that it was a little harsh towards Eduardo Saverin's contribution, and probably made Mark Zuckerberg out as a more sympathetic character than what really went down. Ironically, my "non-valley" friends saw the movie in a completely opposite light - which, too some degree, is a huge credit to the great direction, acting and screen play. So many people could see precisely the same movie, and come out with entirely different conclusions. The screenplay didn't pander, promote, or manipulate - it told an entertaining story in a way that allowed the audience to interpret based on their own background. I really think the Social Network deserved to win Best Picture, here's hoping the Academy thinks so as well.
can anyone explain how that works anyway?
But you're right that Stuxnet is a dirty move that erodes trust, that's why I'm conflicted.

"Big satan" and "little satan," the Iranians have entrusted us with that title, so we are also building trust here by reinforcing the image they have projected onto us.

They were right.

But I'm all for eroding trust: trust that should have never been there to begin with. Erode as much trust as possible.
I thought "The Social Network" was decent, but I was actually expecting more from Fincher and Sorkin. It could have been a student film, in some ways. I thought many of the characters were fairly two-dimensional and the "two lawsuit" structure was a little forced. It made me think of the examples in a screenwriting class I took in college. (Oh, and it's not a world I live in or aspire to live in.) My expectations must have been too high after all of the great press it received. It had so many raving critics and fans that I had a long period of people telling me I "had to see it" - but I didn't see it until it came out on DVD and then was fairly disappointed. If it is THE film of 'this generation', as some claim, then I think we're in trouble.

I think "Inception" should have won. It was much more creative and thought-provoking, and I thought the acting was also better. Of course, I had no preconceived notions about it - other than a general idea that it was apparently a goldmine of meme material for sites like Reddit. I've only seen snippets of "Black Swan," but the acting looks better than both "The Social Network" and "Inception."
"The Social Network, I'm really happy for ya and I'mma let you finish, but Inception was one of the best movies of all time."

lol yes, i'm easy to amuse :D