skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The reason this doesn't mean that human-level AI is impossible is that we too are designed (well, evolved by natural selection) to perform well for a particular objective function: one in which say, the standard laws of physics/optics apply."

That's an assumption no one has ever given the slightest shred of evidence for. I remain highly skeptical.
Just a note for those wondering about the content of the archive.

Having downloaded it, it's around 2GB compressed. It contains images, but most pages are nonfunctional, due to links being specified from the site root /. To view it properly you need to place the folders at the root of your web server or of your hard drive.
"a soldering iron was a legitimate debugging tool"

I knew a guy who, in the early '90s, had done some programming with a hand drill.
Next time, don't take down your country's Internet.
What's wrong with the guy? Title is provoking but the content is just fine, at least for me.
As Mark Zuckerberg would say, your startup is "too useful".

I'm surprised that everyone here seems so focussed on your landing page. It may be a thousand times better than the first, and it may still need improvement, but what is more important is the actual product. And right now from what I've seen that needs work.

I think the main concern I have comes from the fact that you spent "7 months by myself glued to a computer". How much have you talked to users in this time? Have you had any bands use some of the functionality while you were working on it to get an idea of what they really wanted?

The home video looks like you have an incredible amount of features, but with little emphasis on usability or design. I'm intimidated by your website. It may be able to produce 30 kinds of graphs, but if I don't like using it or won't take the time to learn most of them, it doesn't matter. There is some stuff there that sounds really cool; like the idea of Myspace integration. But the cool stuff gets lost with all of the features that band members may not really care for (the merch section with pictures seems quite separate from event planning).

I think it's a cool idea with potential. I'm not sure what the technical expertise and design expectations of band managers is, and perhaps they only have really poor software to do similar things. But if I were a potential user, I'd like you to select one or two really cool features, make those well designed, and take the rest away until I ask for them or put them in the back menus for the hardcore users. That would give your site a really simplistic message and could leave me demanding more; maybe in the form of an additional pay-for content. Which features should these be? I don't know, talk to band managers.

If you can find one, it would be really useful if you could get a designer to help you with this. If not, just bring it to bands that you know, get them to use it (for free), and talk to them regularly.

I really don't mean to sound critical. I'm a 20, and I've been working on a website for 4 months now, though probably not as hard as you have (because of school). It's still been pretty tough for me, and I give you a ton of credit for lasting so long while working on something you care about. This is an incredibly comprehensive website. If you did cut it down a bit, the nice part is that it seems like all the backend is already done, so most of the work is complete. I just don't know how much longer you are willing to endure on this. Websites can be quite depressing when you have few users.

Having gone seven months working on this alone, based on your own idea, is something few of my friends are capable of. In the case that it doesn't work out you have still done something very impressive and can live knowing that you've finished something original. Best of luck to you, and if you ever want more advice let me know.
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Was it in the contect of the BBC? Often known as 'auntie' in the UK...
I clicked because I read "Reddit is hiring."
Mubarak finally resigns
Tell the USTR to reject ACTA
There's great live coverage on the BBC at the moment: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12307698

It looks like a carnival erupted at Tahrir Square when word got out. It was pretty vibrant before, but euphoria is clearly evident.
My grandfather had great luck with official sounding, strongly worded, legal type letters. Unfortunately I can't provide you with any of the wording, but you should first google for this type of letter and find examples to get the general feel. Then do a little more research to see if the letter can be tweaked to reflect the laws of their state.

The best case scenario is that you have a lawyer friend who coud write and send this for you, but if you don't, it will have to originate from you.

Please avoid all threats or any actions which could scare off future customers. $700 isn't that much in the grand scheme of things.

There was a thread on here a while back where folks debated the merits of outright defacing a deadbeat customer's site with porn, etc. versus introducing a slight (deniable) bug, versus doing nothing. I think the most professional thing to do would be nothing (other than the letter I mentioned above) if you aren't willing/able to take them to small claims court.
Baloney. Some of Nokia's other options were to

1. Develop a fantastic new platform/product/ecosystem that people wanted to buy (using local talent)

2. Support Android on some or most of their devices

3. Reinvigorate their current platform somehow (new features, reduced costs, new apps, developer incentives, etc)

Keep in mind, MS's product in this space is widely considered less than successful. The only thing MS has going for it is cash in the bank, but so do Google and Apple and Nokia.

How many people walk into the store thinking "I'd like to sign up to buy a Windows phone"? How is this going to benefit Nokia again?
Is it really that hard to figure out? Imagine an implementation that does a binary search through the characters of a file; when it lands in the middle of the line, it seeks back by one character until it finds the beginning of the line, and then compares that line to the timestamp given.

70GB will require approximately 36 binary searches to find the line you want. Assuming the lines are around 200 characters long, each binary search will require on average 100 seeks backward to find the beginning of the line. From there you can read the characters you need for the timestamp.

So your total cost is going to be 36 * (1 seek to the character, 100 seeks to the beginning of the line, a read from that offset), disregarding the almost certainly irrelevant cost of comparison to the timestamp. Note that these seeks, while still calls to seek(2), are not actual random disk seeks, because disks return blocks to the OS in 16KB chunks or so. Most of those seeks will just be a quick roundtrip through the kernel.

So you'll do, on average, 36 reads and 3636 seeks. On most modern computers, that will take maybe 100ms, which agrees with my experience in writing a similar program for some of the logfiles I work with.
and what about web.py?

EDIT: according to Pylon's homepage it's used by Reddit...I thought they released web.py?
Doesn't this just apply to retailers? If you're a social-networking start up wouldn't you really want users to create accounts rather than using their FB or Twitter accounts? Also, only something like 13% of internet users use Twitter so I wonder how useful it is. I only use my twitter account because I don't trust FB privacy settings.

I'm in stealth mode with my start up, but should I allow social sign-in once we launch is a question I have pondered for a while now. My gut instinct says to do it because it will make it easier for users to "get a taste" and then they'd want to create an account if they liked the service. But the more business minded/practical part of me says this would only defeat the purpose of a social network--why would you use one SN login to use another SN. Twitter (to my knowledge) never allowed people to use their fb login.
The question asks "Do mediocre programmers EVER create good software?"

The answer to that is no, but it really has nothing to do with offshoring. If you're going to go outside of the country to find cheaper talent, you should be looking for talent--just cheaper.

I've had brilliant results with a firm with developers Poland. It's not as cheap per man-hour as, say, India, but the results are great. I'm sure it's just a matter of some firms being better than others.

The keys as far as I can tell:
- Developers should be managed by other developers.
- You need frequent communication. Webex, IM, a ticketing system, and e-mail all have a place.
- You have to have good people. This is the hard part in any country. You need to look for quality developers who happen to be cheaper due to their location.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1699108/local-import-stat...
As a counterpoint I've written ObjC code for over 5 years for Mac OS X and iOS, and I'm not a fan. Sure it's better than C++, but that should be in the dictionary under "damning with faint praise". Header files, primitive types, and reliance on raw pointers should have gone out 10 years ago. The kicker was when I switched to Android development last year; when a language makes Java look comparatively elegant and concise, that's not a good sign.
...with no statement directly from Mubarak himself. I wonder if maybe he didn't leave of his own free-will.
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We're hiring ninja programmers at my awesome startup. If interested you must show your skills with a test. Turn malice into an adjective. ;)
Security Risks: Betting With Other People's Money
I'll work on adding the Facebook Connect login option tonight.
In Finland, where are they going to bleed to? What options do the regular (under 80th percentile) Nokia employees have? If a company of that size were to lay off 100's of technical people here in the Netherlands, that'd be a large supply to absorb for the industry, and especially those with 10-15 years of highly specialized skills (antenna design, phone chipset design etc).
I am assuming the board talked about something like this happening - even directly with Elop - before hiring him. It's not like it's totally surprising.
I tried to look at your site to give you feedback but saw "Alright HN! Thanks for the input! I get it now. I should conform to a typical landing page and not try to be different. :)"

However, I was able to see it using Google's Cache and the site design is terrible, if I was a user I would instantly close the screen seconds after loading the page - it may be the best thing since sliced bread - but there is so much information to take in that you can't instantly tell what you do AND you don't know which bit to take in first.

After fixing the design, you also need to cut down the length of the video down since especially the part where it says

"Check this out to see what RELA can do in less than 9 minutes."

You need 9 minutes to tell me what your product actually does? REALLY?! This would definitely drive a user away, if you want to have a video which shows what you do then make sure that it is only about 30-60 seconds long and if you still love the "9 minute video" then allow users to see that after they've signed up.

Additionally, I can see that you say this landing page is based on the whole framework of the site, and if that is the case as you haven't provided us with a login to test//the site is now down I can't go further into the site and check out if the framework design is suitable for the rest of the site because, it may require you also altering other aspects of the website to make a more fluid design which has a better UI so users can use it better.

Afterall, user number is nothing these days, its all about the active user numbers!
It has been known to happen in public sector places that work flexitime. If enough people coordinate they can effectively stop business/service for a couple of hours without breaking any hard and fast rules being even bent. There are usually fluffy-wuffy rules regarding reasonableness being broken, but they are so vaguely worded as to be practically unenforceable and anyway no individual can be got by them as they could all make up perfectly plausible reasons to need those particular couple of hours off (as it permitted by their flexitime contract).

While not nearly as effective as a day-long strike or other such, it has the advantage of not being covered by certain laws (so a ballot of the union is not required) meaning it can be implemented quickly to send a very visible message if enough people agree strongly enough with the message.
This is very interesting. I realize I'm in the minority here, but I would love to use something like this for editing English-language text such as articles, letters, and so forth. This requires decent support for line-wrapping, proportional fonts, and configurable line-spacing. I write my documents in markdown and convert it to whatever is needed - ODT or LaTeX - using the fantastic pandoc. I don't actually write a lot of code; I do write a lot of articles.

I also really like vim keybindings, which makes my usecase even more exotic. Web apps might make this niche interesting.
I like "Underline hyperlinks, always. Your grandma needs them".

Interesting proposition, although it's not so cool :P
Scoble misses an important point about Nokia logistics. Nokia doesn't do all its manufacturing in China (my Nokia was made in Finland). This removes a lot of the uncertainty around evolving political, economic and trade relationships.
My experience is it can work well if you give complete responsibility over to the remote group, regardless of location, it doesn't matter if they are a building away or 8 time zones away.
Google Censoring Torrent-Related Searches
>We want you to build a reddit clone entirely in HTML, Javascript, and CSS. It will maintain its state entirely client-side (HTML5 localstorage, cookies, whatever), and it's fine for it to be single-user. In fact, we want to leave as much of this challenge open to interpretation as possible.

...

>For this challenge, reimplement tgrep.

...

>Some of you might be thinking, "I can't believe reddit is going to make all these poor applicants slave over a hot emacs for two weeks just for the privilege of being allowed to apply for a dumb old job." Well, first off, it's supposed to be fun. If you don't see the joy in either of these puzzles, please don't apply.
Is it? The way I see it, the patent may not hold up to appeal, but that's not the same thing as not being patented by someone else.

And appealing a patent? That isn't cheap. :(
How do I hire you guys?
How Jack Dorsey used Square to con VCs
Sorry, but reflexively mentioning 'the BSOD' is pretty much a red flag for me when it comes to taking an argument seriously.
That's a good comment, but bear in mind that the MP support in the 90s was Pentium Pro only (and expanded to x86/64). While multi-processing algorithms can be generalised, they're best when they're optimal for the architecture they're running on. MP on Arm is quite different when it comes to things like thumbing and pipelining compared to x86.

I only know this because I did some work on Arm 7 after doing some MP work on Pentium Pro 200s a few years earlier. It's amazing the crap your brain collects over time!
I may be in the minority here but I think that it is asking a lot of someone to build out a UI just for the prospect of getting hired. I think it borders on exploitation there are a lot of young individuals with wonder-lust that see a name like Reddit and will put in significant hours just for the possibility of maybe getting hired. In their mind that possibility is greatly inflated (after all who would not want to hire them).

Now as a person that hires and specifically hires technical personally and is technical himself, I am sensitive to the fact that it takes a trained eye to spot talent and that their are a lot of posers out there. But in my personal opinion you guys are offloading the task of being good at spotting talent onto the prospective employee which I am not totally in agreement with.

Personally, I would not ask an up front prospect to code anything other than a 10-15 minute exercise (in interview) and if I where to have someone build something, it would be the final 3 prospects, it would be a real business problem, and I would compensate them for their time. I think the practice of competitions for a job borders to close to exploitation for my comfort, further I have seen better talent selection from a skilled interviewer than I ever have from an arbitrary competition.
This kind of behaviour makes me wish golden parachutes for executives weren't the norm throughout the world. If you can't make money for the company, quit or be fired.

Isn't it amazing how "at will" seems to apply to both employees and management, but somehow management's version of "at will" is considerably lower risk than the employees, even though the manager has considerably more influence over their future.
Ask HN: Please rate my GF's startup
My girlfriend does fashion blogging on the side and had been wanting to tag her blog photos for a while. Eventually, she decided it'd make a good service and asked if I could help her code up a site for it. In the past few weekends, we've put this up:

http://tag.loudly.com

For a demo, here's a blog entry where she's using it:

http://www.phosphenefashion.com/2011/02/today.html

Want to try out the actual site? Just use the invite code HACKER or follow this link:

http://tag.loudly.com/welcome?invite_code=HACKER

Anyway, I know the HN community is always ridiculously insightful when asked for its advice, so here I am.

* What do you like and dislike about the service?
* How might you extend upon it?
* How would you promote it?
I like the idea, low friction for people that want to help a cause. My concern is getting people engaged when they land on the page. The graphic on the home page doesn't really tell me enough in just a glance. It's relatively small and hard to read.

Very cool concept though. Watched an ad to help buy new schoolbooks for some kid in NY ;)
Partnerships with Microsoft very rarely work out to the other business' advantage, unless it was their goal all along to be acquired by MS or be nothing more than a commodity hardware vendor.

We'll know this is the case if Nokia announces "the new Nokia Online Superstore where you get all your WindowsTM-compatible accessories at discount prices".
There is nothing preventing someone else from patenting something you have invented but did not patent. They may not be able to stop you from using your invention, but patents are first-come, first served.

Please, if you are going to make an assertion like that, you need to explain exactly how it is an incorrect statement. Maybe you misunderstood me, or maybe you misunderstand the state of the law. Without an explanation, you leave no opportunity to respond to the specific issue you have, forcing the person who have called out to take a stab in the dark and try to guess why you say this. I feel this is disingenuous.
A developer who is so dependent on one language/framework that he cannot learn another in a reasonable amount of time is one I have no sympathy for.
I learned LaTeX last semester with the Wikibook on LaTeX, which is fairly comprehensive: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX
WP7 is a failed platform already?
click, click, click

http://tag.loudly.com

http://www.phosphenefashion.com/2011/02/today.html

http://tag.loudly.com/welcome?invite_code=HACKER
offshoring has worked wonderfully for my employer, details in an older comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1879786

like literally everything else, the trick is doing it right
Classic startup cartoons made using Xtranormal - a collection
I just used vworker on a project. Wasn't absolutely perfect, but was pretty good value for money. I'm happy with the result, and now I have an ongoing relationship with the developer.
I really wouldn't be surprised if the decision to shut down work on their own software platform had already been taken and he was hired and told to decide between Android or WP7 - with the expectation no doubt being that as he was from Microsoft he'd favor the latter.
People too lazy to read don't hang out here.
JDS Uniphase promoting gesture recognition technology
The one point of contention I have with the article is about older programmers 'thinking more slowly'. This is again reiterated in the comments below the article. This is not true, we actually learn faster as we get older as long as we stay mentally active. In other words, we 'learn how to learn'. There are things that I can grasp now so easily that eluded me when I was 20. If you can't think faster and learn easier when you are 40 than when you were 20, you aren't exercising your mind enough.

There's a reason why the best lawyers are NOT those right out of law school as a general rule.
If you are afraid that this decision means that your job is in danger it's quite okay to show protest in my book.

And - they even did it on their own free time (using flexible working time), not 'stealing' paid time for their protest.

I like that move a lot.
The layout of the site and the diagram in the forefront makes it clear what the premise is. Nice job there.

It seems like the revenue generated by watching ads is very small. How many viewers of a 30s ad would someone need to raise $500?
If it takes a candidate more than an hour to implement tgrep, he's not a rockstar.
Flagged per the guidelines: if it's on TV, it doesn't belong here :-)
The number of upvotes you get should be a good indication of the difficulty, perceived or otherwise.
I think the point is that if you don't already do this stuff for the fun of it, you're not who they're looking for. I just spent a few minutes writing out some pseudocode, and I have a slight adrenaline rush. Even if I don't submit anything, I've got to play with a neat problem.
Wanted: American Ex-Pat and Canadian software developers with a passion for changing the world. Are you self-motivated and fascinated by the idea of applying nano-statistical modelling to the problem of online dating game mechanics? Are you interested in remote work? If so, send us your github profile and we'll be in touch.
Looked like it might stabilize around lunch, but closed down almost 15%!. Market definitely not liking this deal.
Brasil from an US viewpoint (report)