skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Office has PDF export capabilities for a while now.
Jamis Buck suggests generating mazes.

Here's the full article http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2010/12/27/maze-generation-recur...
I attended a "modest" university. I am not Internet famous. I am old.

Google will not leave me alone for all of the times I have told them "I am not interesting in working at your company." I think they assume I am kidding.

It's my experience that if you really want to work there they probably want you.
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BATS Linux trading platform to replace Chi-X Instinet following acquisition
That depends on your background and what you want to use the new language for.

For me, the best way is to solve a few problems from Project Euler and then just dive into whatever I want to use the language for.

http://projecteuler.net/
He is no different than guys at Wall street or Hedge funds. All they care is money money money.

What he does barely benefits anyone but him.

Nevertheless he get's 10 points for execution, for exploring every loophole, for perfecting the system, but 0 points for the value he's creating with his "business".
I cannot access www domain in any way. I just intercepted twitter redirect and changed redirect address by hand to appspot domain. It worked but now you're out of invites. Maybe next time...
Sorry, no API, but I can get my people to build one for you - give me a day to get back to you on this.

If you have the option to host everything (including geo DB) on your own server, we can make a self-contained sub-system (PHP + MySQL) and give it to you (with our compliments :-)).

Let me know.
By my rough calculations they're hiring 1 person for every 650 applications. That's quite the winnowing process.

If they have two pre-qualifying rounds of CV burning where at each stage they trash 80% of the CVs, then they'd be down to about 26 before even talking to anyone. Now four rounds of interviews where 50% of the people are eliminated and you still have 1.625 people left...
YC founders have been mature, with children and without a 'living expenses sponsor' and succeeded.

Quit coming up with excuses and just apply :)
I've always found it fascinating where entrepreneurs draw their moral line on other entrepreneurs. He didn't just buy domain names, he bought the whole registry's traffic. That was by far his most brilliant move. He avoided trademark issues by wildcarding all of .cm much like many ISPs and browsers do, showing their own ad pages for non-existent domains.
Ask HN: is it unfair to refuse a job application simply based on bad writing?
I just refused a job applicant simply because they had bad writing in their resume ("I have advance knowledge ..."), although their skillset actually looked relevant. I've done it before, will likely do it again. Is that unfair?
Two things to watch for in housing:
1. 7% investment return on a rented property, or p/e of 15.
2. 3.5 times annual family income.

It is mentioned again here:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f2b1a470-cbdf-11df-bd28-00144feab4...

And here is better but more difficult to access:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b5e074f4-cd88-11df-9c82-00144feab4...

And if you really want to learn about it:
http://www.google.de/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ve...
You can find some suggestions from here ("I wish there was an app for..." on Twitter): http://wappr.com/latest
Don't base your business on getting in. If it's a 'nice extra', I think that you're probably more likely to get in, and also will be less concerned if you don't.
I studied 3 letter .coms as a proxy for the overall market. Domain prices haven't just gone straight up, they peaked in 2007 (funny enough when this article was published).

http://kevinohashi.com/30/12/2010/exploring-three-letter-dom...
That is not forth. Instead (leaving out a bit of compile-time/run-time distinction magic):

- define [+] something like:

: [+] 0 swap 0 do + loop ;

- define (+ as a word that pushes the address of [+] and the stack pointer onto the retun stack

- similarly define [-] and (- , [* ] and (* , and [/] and (/

- define ) as a word that takes the current stack pointer, pops that saved stack pointer from the return stack and subtracts it from it (this puts the number of arguments to [+] on the stack, pops the address of [+] from the return stack and calls it.

With that, "(* 4 (+ 5 6 ) )" becomes executable forth.
I usually write something I want to write which is not too big. If it is some code you want to see, you'll fight with the language. If it is just training code, you may give up (this is how I wrote my first Lisp raytracer, based on Paul Graham's one in ACL... sadly I lost the source for that and the newer one never got to translucency :/ )
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I'd like to be able to consider it but I'm not in their candidate pool (around forty, no regular job for a few years, non-tech schooling, travel, no high tech work for years before that).

I am not in their candidate pool, either by your standards. Quickly approaching forty, dropped out of 'society' for 5+ years, non-high tech work during that period, no Ivy League degree. And, yet, despite the fact that I have made -exceptionally- clear that I have no interest in working at their company, they will not stop recruiting me.

I think you should go for it and put in that application. It's way more likely that they want you to work there than that you want to work for them.
It's not arbitrary. "Because it can't fall in the hole" is a compelling geometric and safety reason. The circular manhole cover is the simplest shape that has this property.
Somewhat. They might not be a native English speaker, and granted while some would argue that should be mentioned very early or at least at all, I tend to say what employers ought to be looking for are the things that directly impact the candidates ability to prove they're worth the salary the position offers. This does involve communication, but it's not, nor should it serve as a be-all-end-all.

If nothing else, it's worth it to the employer and the employee to invest in a course audit at a local university to help improve those skills. You might be surprised to see if that helps improve retention and reduce the attrition of human capital. Especially if you include those types of programs to your organization to improve key skills.
I'm a web developer, so my sample app is either a blog or a Twitter client. This shows me:

* URL handling

* OAuth

* The HTTP client module the language uses

* The storage model

And other common webby things.
Ah, I see now though that if the bulb passes at 8 then you have reduced the problem to a 92-storey building so the "step size" upwards should be reduced. You don't even need to do that to get a good answer though. Ridiculous.

For 100 storeys, you drop the first bulb at floors 9, 22, 34, 45, 55, 64, 72, 79, 85, 90, 94, 97, 99 and 100. If the first bulb breaks, iterate over the gap that's left over. Worst case is 14 drops total.
Forgive me but this article seems to generate more confusion than it clears up. Statements like Cantonese and Mandarin speakers both use one of the writing systems mentioned above, and on paper, the languages can look quite similar are quite inept. Except a few subject matters (that do NOT get sent through five-cent-per-word web services --- like advertising slogans and written instructions for verbal Miranda warning-equivalents), clients NEVER need translations into Written Cantonese. They need translations into Standard Written Chinese.

Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Mainland all write in Standard Written Chinese. Hong Kongers do not expect to see Cantonese in materials translated from a foreign original, and largely do not want to. HK/TW/CN have a few vocabulary differences (e.g. "taxi" is HK's "dishi", TW's "jichengche", and CN's "chuzuche"). Orthogonal to the vocabulary differences, HK and TW use Traditional characters, SG and ZH use Simplified. But I can write "chuzuche" in Traditional, or "jichengche" in Simplified. They still mean the same thing and are still understandable to all.

While we hope to offer translations into Traditional Chinese by Cantonese speakers in the future, currently our translations are not ideal if you hope to sell your product in Hong Kong.

Traditional to Simplified mapping is perfectly surjective. That is to say, it can be done by computer with 100% accuracy. Having a Traditional Chinese and a Simplified Chinese version of a document does NOT require two separate translations from the source document, as you seem to be implying.

Let me draw an analogy, Britain says "boot" and "bonnet" and "bobby" where America says "trunk" and "hood" and "cop". That does not mean everyone needs to get separate British English and American English translations, nor separate Taiwan Chinese and Singapore Chinese translations. In one extreme, if I were a high volume group-buying website looking to expand globally, yes of course I want the whole interface and the terms and conditions done up separately for each English and for each Chinese. In the other extreme, if I ran a boutique hotel and just wanted to give my Chinese customers directions from the airport to my doorstep, I have no need for separate translations.

In between is a giant grey area where full-service Language Service Providers generally try to provide some guidance to their clients. As a low-cost LSP maybe you are not aiming at the kind of client who needs this kind of guidance --- in which case you shouldn't be purporting to offer it. You should define yourself clearly.
Sounds like a feature to be promoted, then.
Nokia's Burning Ship Strategy
Not at all... if part of the job they're applying for requires good communication skills. (And these days, even the most heads-down programmer needs that... bug reports, support docs, etc.)

That said, I think grammatical errors from an ESL speaker aren't the be-all end-all of good communication. It would really depend on what else I had to go on. Was there a cover letter? "Responsibilities" section of his/her resume?

Often extremely clear thinkers more than compensate for non-native language skills with incisive, compelling expression.

tl:dr Bad writing (communication) is just cause for putting a resume to the side. But one-off grammatical errors wouldn't be the only think I'd go on.
Acquisitions? Where else can you find people with entrepreneurial talents?
I had a startup idea last night that was hoping to address this very problem, though it was more focused on call-centers than other things.
From Wikipedia: In his essay "Homesteading the Noosphere", noted computer programmer Eric S. Raymond opined that open-source software developers have created "a 'gift culture' in which participants compete for prestige by giving time, energy, and creativity away". Members of the Linux community often speak of their community as a gift economy.

Hence in my opinion; recognition is the currency of hackers, and thus while it is the unfortunate case that in many areas women are under-recognised... it is particularly egregious when this happens in the technology arena.
If you were hiring them to write documentation, then yes. If you were hiring them to understand and build complex systems, where the occasional grammar error in a comment is not only forgiveable but extremely likely, then your nitpicking may have just cost you a good candidate.

My resume gets tailored as often as once per application, and the occasional mistake does end up on there. I fix them when I find them, but I expect their presence should not impact the essence of the resume for a manager with a clear understanding of the requirements they're hiring for.
I am wondering what hardware they use that they have do develop printer and scanner drivers..
Easy, just add a layer of indirection. Then carpet bomb it back into the dark ages with patterns. :D
It's not unfair and I've done the same thing. A resume is the first impression you give to a prospective employer; if you can't bother to make sure the details are right on it, how likely are you to bother with details on all the projects you'll be doing over time when the boss isn't necessarily looking over your shoulder?

That said, "I have advance knowledge..." isn't necessarily incorrect, if they are talking about their prophetic talents and not their level of expertise. :)
Time for "server-side browsers" came long time ago - check out headless web application testing frameworks (htmlunit, for example).
This may not be applicable for everyone in all situations, but I got a merchant account in a few days with not too much effort, by simply going to my local bank and talking to someone. They put me in touch with their regional person in charge of merchant accounts. That person asked me a few questions, then came out to my local branch a few days later. She asked me a few more questions while we sat in a conference room, had me verify information, and then we were done. I had the merchant account details within the week, ready for API integration. My short term need for it went away, but I'm planning to integrate it as an option on existing sites next month.

Online applications were ridiculous, and the "oh you can't sell subscriptions" thing was crazy too. I had the exact same experiences Rob did. But those were all people over a phone.

I went to my local bank - they knew me, knew my history, asked for a bit of paperwork to verify existing sales, and we were off. Now... I'd asked what they'd have done if I'd had no sales. She said they'd likely still approve me based on my banking history, but my rate would be higher, but in all likelihood it would go through anyway. Talking with a real person who was in charge of making decisions like this, she explained they had the power to set up all sorts of edge-case merchant account scenarios for people, all various combinations of transaction and monthly fees. Most people just don't investigate their options enough.

To be fair, they could/should have more of this process on line - I didn't think I'd want to go through a manual human process. But... they made it pretty quick and painless.
Just wait.

Soon, they'll put shit (err-- a chip) in your brain, then follow you around for 6 months.

"Its just a trial."
Kurzweil: Solar will meet 100% of energy needs by 2030
SimpleRL is an ultra-minimal seed for a roguelike game: https://github.com/nrkn/SimpleRL . It'll make you look into doing an application with an interactive UI somewhat less trivial than what you can do with bare stdin/stdout.

From a game development perspective, it's perhaps a bit too minimal (given that the spec can be implemented with static HTML), but it does serve as a sort of hello world for GUI interaction.
I write "snake" when I learn a new language. (for now, c64 basic, qbasic, borland pascal, C, C++, C++ with OpenGL, Python, Haskell, Javascript).
It works.
Write a compiler of a subset of one of those languages in another of those languages targetting one of the other languages. I guarantee you will learn all 3 deeply.
I really like the first-time visitor overlay.
I would look at the intensive application and rules as it would explain what's expected of you. But you should have something of what's expected of them too.

/IANAYC
I think the problem with this approach is that it's forcing you relying on a web framework and eventually on libraries.

As an exemple a lot of people know how to make a blog in rails but only a part of them really understand what's a class variable.

I'm not saying it doesn't work, just that you could ending up knowing a framework not a language.
The table in the article was designed to be clearer and simpler than the above explanation for most users, and also not to represent that Simplified Chinese is suitable for all customers, which would be a misrepresentation.
They have specialised scanners that allow them to scan passport booklets and other special formfactors without the need of manualy opening and lying them down on the scanner.

The german Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives has special setups that allow them to enter bags of torn apart papers to scan... so i wouldn't wonder if they really need to write special drivers for their hardware.
It was bad writing more than the occasional grammatical error :)
There was a similar discussion a year or so in stackoverflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3247812/toy-projects-for-...
This smells like bs. paypal is one of the worst companies ever to have to deal with, both as a merchant and as a consumer, and their policies are horrible pretty much across the board. I'm sorry that you had bad experiences with authorize.net, but we've used them for years without issues. We started by using paypal's pro merchant account years ago but they would refuse to accept about 2-5% of our credit card transactions for unknown reasons. When we finally hooked up with authorize.net the payments all went through.

paypal may be better in certain circumstances, but overall it's not a great leap forward and really falls short of its potential. But what do you expect from a startup that was sold to a large company like ebay? they were doomed to be mediocre as soon as they decided to sell out.
For those who can read German or use Google Translate, here's the original article: http://www.oliver-kaczmarek.de/2011/02/bundesregierung-zemen...
Worlds Largest Ship
100% ? There's a lot of weird stuff in those, I don't see it happening in a year - there could a lot of improvement probably. I guess some sort of automated testing that loads documents with tests in both and compares the rendering would a great step forward.
Show HN: A different interface for reading Hacker News
I would just write your next proper (non-toy) project in the language you want to learn. That way, you learn the language and you've made something.
You don't say what "bad" means.

My experience at larger companies is that, beyond providing the basics, (payroll, benefits), an HR department exists to protect the company from being sued by current and former employees.
our wives would kill us! :) and sell organs to pay for kindergartens, schools and huggies
Having to do account recovery to recover the cookie is a perfectly valid technical response I guess. However since cookies are invisible, and account recovery is normally a big scary thing, it boils down to this:

(a) the end user has lost something invisible that they didn't even know they had

(b) the method of recovering the invisible token is to go to what is probably the last place they are going to look

a + b = full retard

// and you should never go full retard
Thanks I agree completely. What users don't realize is that a graphical element that only shows up for a second or two on their screen, something that they might not even think about consciously but that enhances their overall perception of the site, was pored over for hours and hours by designers and programmers trying to figure out the best way to do it. I'm glad we were (moderately) successful in that.
>>>So, in an effort to boost literacy, the People's Republic of China attempted to make learning characters easier through a series of simplification rounds that took place between the 1950s and 1970s<<<

The fact is that people in Hong Kong and Taiwan have a much higher literacy rate than those in mainland China, yet they use Traditional Chinese. Mainlanders' low literacy rate is mainly a sign of lacking education, not Traditional Chinese being a barrier to literacy. Moreover, in a digital world, they make no difference in input speed.

What Hong-Kongers and Taiwanese are opposing to is not the communist simplifying Chinese Characters, but simplifying them in an ugly fashion. In most cases, it breaks the consistency in word formation as seen in Traditional Chinese. In other cases, it's not aesthetic and even absurd. There is a joke saying that the word factory(廠)in simplified Chinese (厂) explains why factories in mainland China are subject to collapse.

Speaking of economics, simplified Chinese indeed appeals to larger potential customers. However, PRC put lots of restrictions on foreign corporations. That's why even Google and Facebook failed to (and will continue to) dominate in China. On the other side, Hong Kong and Taiwan have the goodies of free markets.
Wow that sounds awesome my email is dan (at) danshipper.com I would love to hear from you!
This is something I hacked up in about two hours using the iHackerNews API, serve, haml, and jQuery. It was inspired by the view many apps use on tablets in widescreen mode - list of items on the left, expanded content on the right.

The UI is not polished at all, but I wanted to get this out to get feedback.

On my TODO list for Pyxis:
- Better UI
- Load more pages (currently only the first page of the frontpage is loaded)
- Use the history API to make the UI state shareable.

The source is on https://github.com/moeffju/pyxis, so feel free to fork it and improve on it.
Yeah, I'm wincing that it's getting the HN traffic juice.
More cognitive surplus has been spent here than went into the article :D
Or as Futurama put it: "Bureaucrat Conrad, you are technically correct -- the best kind of correct."
Economic charts that may indicate what is wrong with the U.S. economy
- Are they good people? This is harder to be
specific/definite about and probably applies more to
the interview stage but a common trait amongst YC
founders is that they're always described as good
people

How should one go about being good people? I ask not because I have no clue, but because I'm curious about what others have to say. (Other than being less abrasive when someone on the Internet is wrong.)
"it's worth it to the employer and the employee to invest in a course audit at a local university"

Really, you think that's worth it?
> And "sausage party" deserves a flag, imho.

Why would you say that? We're all adults here.
There's a "flaw" in the hot algorithm, which doesn't really impact Reddit any way in the current use cases. However, there could be a possibility that an old story gets upvoted a lot, and should turn hot, but in the current algorithm, the time of upvotes don't have any impact.
Amazing. I would love to do that too but first of all I need to know how to write snake in a language I already know.

I will try that out in Python and let you know how it is going :D
It wasn't 1 tiny mistake, the resume was full of bad English.
Another one is "Envjs": http://www.envjs.com/

Quote: "Envjs is a simulated browser environment written in javascript"
Who's Afraid of the Boss? Culture in the Global Workplace
Tanu Weds Manu Movie Pics, Tanu Weds Manu Images
Tanu Weds Manu is a romantic comedy film starring R Madhavan, Kangana Ranuat & Jimmy Shergil. The Movie is directed by Aanand Rai, and produced by Shailesh R Singh. The Top Bollywood star Madhavan & sexiest actress Kangana Ranaut and Jimmy Shergill in the lead roles. The story of the film has been written by Himanshu Sharma, Music is directed by Krsna and the lyrics penned by Raj Shekhar. The film is set for release on February 25, 2011.
Then by all means, put it in the No pile.
Love it or hate it, email is the place employees spend most of their days. Good writing makes that time both shorter, and more worthwhile.
(Not to mention blogging, announcements, support materials, bugs, documentation, and meeting requests.)
I believe Basecamp, and by extension Ruby on Rails, was written by dhh to teach himself Ruby. Not exactly a toy app though.
I assume this is difficult to demonstrate in the written application, except maybe in the negative by displaying questionable ethics in your answers.[1] The video probably isn't great for this either as it's more likely to convey charisma than quality of character.

Not being a dick on HN probably helps. Other than that I suspect it's mostly if they a good feeling about you as people at the interview.

[1] e.g. admitting to outright scamming people in the "non-computer-hack" answer.