skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the wonderful thing about Homininae. I also have lots of my own work and at this very minute I have a ton of outstanding issues to close on the Faux framework alone.

Nevertheless, programming puzzles are like catnip to me, so I don't mind solving them as part of a job interview process (or at least, I didn't mind the last time I was actually looking).

I would NEVER say that I have a superior strategy to you, or that you have a superior strategy, or that programming puzzles are an excellent filter, or a terrible one. Just that some people will like them, and some not.

You don't, that much is obvious. Or at least, you don't in the context of a job application. Fair enough, and nobody should ever suggest that (a) This is a bad idea on your part, or (b) on the basis of your anecdotal evidence, this is a bad idea on Reddit's part.
Ask HN: Pls. give me a hard prog. problem (re: talent wars)
This will be an unusual request for a job.

I've read Fred Wilson's blog post: 'The war for talent'. I am living in Eastern Europe (Hungary) and when I read posts like that (and similar Techrunch articles) I am always wondering: I know most people in the Valley are very talented. But are they that much more talented than people in other parts of the world?
My yearly salary is $36.000. It is very good in my country. People in the valley earn $100.000 or more.
Why are most SV companies not looking for help from other countries? Do they think communication problems are so serious that it is not worth it? Or do they somehow think that there is absolutely no talent in cheaper countries?

Here is a crazy request: give me a very hard programming (algorithmic) problem. Harder what you usually ask at interviews. (I usually very easily solve interview problems at typical companies.) Give me something so hard that if I can solve it in some days you hire me as a freelancer for remote work for $50/hour. (It is a crazy amount for me, but give me a very hard problem.)
A problem can be for example something like this: Do this and this in O(nlogn) time and with O(logn) memory.

Does not matter if I will fail. I want to know: The reason I cannot earn SV-level salary is that I am not talented enough. Also I love thinking on very hard problems, I am addicted to them. (Once I was thinking about P vs. NP for a whole month. I learned tons of math during that.)

Please don't give me something which cannot be solved in 6-7 hours. I have a day job and two small children, so I can think only for 3 hours / day.

Thanks.
What's the exit strategy for Digg? With Kevin Rose out, but a lot of investment already in it, can they just shutter it and write it off?
Error 324 (net::ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE): The server closed the connection without sending any data.

Edit: looks like it's back up!
Ah, so you're a conjunctionist, uh? :-)

Conjunctions are supposed to connect whole sentences, and while "I am" is a complete sentence, "I" is not, which casts doubt on the correctness of "than I", thereby hinting that "than" in this case is a preposition, which mush therefore be followed by an object, e.g. "me".

It's a two century old debate, but I say we settle it right now, right here, on Hacker News, once and for all.

tl;dr: "than me" and "than I am" are correct. "than I" is not.
Jobs Offers Help To Apple Employees in Japan
That's funny to me because I feel that TechCrunch was the BIGGEST twitter cheerleader for many years. I even started a twitter account just because they felt that it was so important to the web and this was before the everyday man and celebrities created their accounts.
just merged pull request and scroll is now working!
People are still using it. They could probably justify a sale. Albeit a VERY small one.
Yea, I think yours is a more realistic view of the micro-factory concept. Screws are certainly made as cheap as they are because they use specialized equipment.

However, I'm unsure of how much tooling / material blanks your hardware store would need to have the ability to produce even a small subset of replacement parts.

It's probably going to happen more when 3D printing and similar tooling-free technologies become much more mature in there ability to make precision parts from a variety of materials. You can print a stainless nut sized / shaped object right now for about $10, but the quality isn't quite their yet - but give it time...
The "Tilt" Thing and the Case for Journalist Entrepreneurs
Review: A clickable link makes it easier to review rather than a text submission. :)

Clicking through to the video is clunky. Probably should load on the same page. I click to say "i want to watch a video" and then have to click again to watch it. And I still don't know what your site does yet.

Then the video doesn't explain what you're doing? Sorry dude, if I don't know what your site does w/in 30 seconds of trying, there's no way I'd use this f'reals.

I think you need to think less about your tech, and more about your landing page experience. When someone shows up, how are you going to get the point of your site across to them w/in 7 seconds. I see I can post a job in 3 easy steps, but I can do that at a lot of sites with more cred, why would I do it on your site?

I hope this comes off as constructive and not overly harsh. I think you just need to think about it from a user's perspective a bit more.
Updated Debian 6.0: 6.0.1 released
We're essentially a nicely designed web-based irc interface with integrated hosted bouncer.

You don't usually get that for free afaik, you'd have to run a bouncer yourself on a vps or something, or attach to screen and use irssi.

Plenty of our users are former screen+irssi users, and many of them are perfectly capable of running a vps+bouncer+whatever themselves, but choose to use us because it's less hassle / more convenient.
Any programming language's flaws can be made up for by sufficient skill and discipline on the part of the developers. That does not make those flaws any less real.
It's not a money problem. We've got plenty of money. We just weren't allowed to spend it on developers until recently. Now we have a bunch of open developer positions that we are in the middle of hiring for, and will probably have more soon.
> Give someone a second monitor, let them use it for while, and then try to take it away. It just isn't going to happen. They'll never go back to a mono display.

I once had a two-monitor setup, and I dind't like it. Way too much clutter and information overload on the desktop. Managing that wide screen real estate is cumbersome. The view angle is too wide. You never know where the focus is, etc.

I peronally would prefer just one display with really good resosution.

> The first study revealed that the users' productivity increased by 9 percent. Further studies showed even greater increases - at times up to 50 percent for tasks such as cutting and pasting.

What a great productivity boost for a programmer! Yeah, copy-pasting is what we do all day long.
I think this touches on PHP's real security issue.

It's easy to get going quickly but becomes an issue fast. Smart people tend to move away from PHP, but startups find this difficult.

Hiring is then an issue and the bad practices persist.
Where the growth is: Job growth forecast map
I think Feynman also identified how rationalizations due to schedule or political pressure were creeping in to safety assessments. When o-ring erosion was initially found they examined it and claimed that since the burn through was x%, that implied they still had y% of "margin" and used that to justify continuing flights. But this was never how the o-rings were designed to operate, 0% burn through is what was expected and now they were using engineering safety margin as operational margin, on a process (burn through) that was not fully understood.
After many many disk benchmarks, we eventually found that ZFS had the best performance of all the other included file systems on the latest version FreeBSD. I highly recommend the combination.
KPCC is one of our stations.
Me too. It is a total dis-service to hipmunk to not mention Chris or Steve.

But for now I think their tech team is full, so they won't be needing my services. :)
Wow, this is really cool. Sometimes I just keep tweaking a server losing track of what I changed where (that's just me), would be so easy to just convert all the configurations I did automatically into a puppet script and deploy it on a bare-bones machine!
So, how would they go about monetizing this thing?
It depends on what you do, but if you're a freelancer, finding your own clients, managing your own projects, and paying for your own social security and benefits, then 100/hr is fair for a good programmer in NYC. It is comparable to 100K full-time, full-benefit work, which is at around what one of USV's NYC portfolio companies will offer you if you're a good programmer w/ 6 years experience.

If you feel you are underpaid, then apply for one of those positions on USV's portfolio jobs page. All of their NYC companies are awesome.
Moving from a start-up to bigco: Most important change - you can go from VP/head Engineering (in a 2-man team) to something significantly smaller, especially if you don't have many years of experience.

Career credit: Depends entirely on what you have done at the start up and how it fits with the target company/role.

The answers aside, life decisions are not popularity contests. You need to do what makes most sense for you and most importantly, what sits right with you. Outstanding HN karma does not pay anyone's bills :)

Early stage companies are much like relationships, they don't always work out. You need to know where the invisible line that demarcates your being good for the company and being bad for it lies. Sometimes, the propensity of things/people you love and care for the most to cause you more harm than even your worst enemy is incredible. Stay on the right side of the line.

Not everyone will like you all the time, you can't do everything right all the time, nor will good fortune follow you all the time. When it is bad, lie low, survive, find your way out. When it is good, pay it forward and make up for the bad you have done.

Good luck :)
Whoever writes the code that makes it possible for the Hammer to be used when Screwdriver is called for during execution is introducing a bug into the codebase... It's a bug caused by a human, not necessarily the same one that created the Hammer.
I'd like to hear more about this line from their job listings:

http://www.quora.com/jobs

"You should be ready to make this startup the primary focus of your life"

That could mean a wide range of things - from social engagement and occasional dinners at work (as described in the post) to

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html

or

http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
Just in case… I'm really really sorry in case I shouldn't have done this. I think I already said that, but when I saw this I wasn't as lucid as I am right now and just thought about dropping it here as nobody in my twitter TL would have done anything.

Yet I have worked in a lot of different environments with PHP over the time and this never happened to me (but I was close to). It's a big, big mistake, not just a tiny error.
Yes, I do dev too. I just haven't done it in a long time.

A lot of our sysadmin time is spent tracking down bugs in the stuff we use (like Cassandra) and doing tuning and automation.

Also, I do a lot of the other business stuff, so at best I'm a part time sysadmin right now.

We do pretty much do "devops" though. A lot of the work of Neil, our programmer, is tracking down bugs due to data inconsistencies due to hardware problems.
Wow. Thanks for the criticism. (No, I'm not being sarcastic. One of the great things about the Internet is that people say what they honestly think.)

I have settled into "just a developer" mindset, because every time I raise issues, I lose. I pointed out things that were screwed up a long time ago, and they never changed. I guess, subconsciously, I've just accepted that I'm not an alpha male, at least not yet. I'd love to be wrong on that, but I've felt "beta" for more than a year.
Invisible heroes: The life and times of sysadmins
Both are important. A lot of work of a reddit programmer is finding bugs that come about because of the unreliable disks and also finding scaling inflection points and fixing them before they take the site down.
Actually it is a neutral topic for me. I know there have to be both types of companies, and no one is more aware than I am that startups aren't for everyone, because every 6 months I have to pick, from a huge pool, the people I think are suited for it, and it's painful for all involved when I pick wrong.

If you're going to be so nasty, you should be sure first you're right. Though frankly, if you're right, you don't need to be nasty.
Capital Factory Seed Incubator 2011
Also:

4. Prevent people from switching nicks arbitrarily.

5. Cap message site / rate. It's incredibly to just spam the room to hell with massive messages.

6. Don't call it "social". It's chat. It's been done a million times before.
Yea, I think you're right. You need a real version of a GECK* really. A lot of this is a material science problem I think - making the Martian soil into some type of metal / ceramic building material using just solar / nuclear energy.

GECK: http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Garden_of_Eden_Creation_Kit
Gr.com - Selling third level domains under second level domains?
Be a Startup Punk
Over a long period of time (say 10 years) I could see this working as intended. All current .com domains would probably have to get their identical .xxx domain for free however so they could re-direct traffic to their new .xxx domain. Why would they do this? I don't know.
Wouldn't it be nice to have your voice heard?
Re: differences - I would say Reddit is 1) disorganized and 2) has its focus primarily on front-page. I don't know many people who know how or have to time to dig through all the sub-reddits offered to maybe find something they like. This structure does work for many of us, and that's cool. I think it can be improved upon, though.

Same with your argument about untapped markets. I'm sure Hackers had a preferred method of communicating pre-HN (IRC?), but something better and more structured came along and displaced it.

Re: HN business model - paid job board, paid newsletter, hacker conferences, hacker news apparel, regular old google ads, etc. there would be many paths to take if this was a for-profit endeavor.
Ask HN: Any start-ups looking for remote or Austin based .NET developers?
Any start-ups that use C# or the .NET framework looking for remote or Austin based team members? I'm considering a change of pace (even harder problems with people that work equally as hard), but need to remain in my current geographic location. This is risky, but if you are interested based on my work, LinkedIn, personal site, or blog, please contact me.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathangill1
http://www.jonathangill.org
I love this, and am sharing it with the rest of team reddit right now. Thank you.
I am interested in the same issue.

There seem to be various service providers for doing the actual payment, i.e. https://www.x.com/community/ppx/mass_pay or http://www.arvatodigitalservices.com/fileadmin/case_studies/... .

However, I would like to know in which countries a business could be legally do something as mass paying thousands of individuals without going into the hassle of signing contracts with each of them.

Are you based in the USA or elsewhere?

If you pay an individual, aren't you supposed to pay to the fiscal authorities any tax for the wage you pay?

Which are the startup-friendly countries where this kind of mass payments are possible without bureaucratic hassles?
UK scientists make important blood clot discovery
Example app built using the Smood it Ruby gem
I've seen this interview with Feynman before, it is very good. I've also seen the Insane Clown Posse video that mentions that they don't know how magnets work, and observed the backlash against them, that their video celebrates ignorance and so forth. My take is that those criticizing ICP are the ignorant anti-science ones.

I don't know how many physics or calculus classes ICP has taken, but let's assume the lyricist has a PhD in Physics. It's not an unreasonable assumption, to presume knowledge rather than ignorance.

I understand Maxwell's equations. I know what a dipole is and what flux is. Just this modest knowledge by itself is well beyond the educational attainment level of most ICP critics. This becomes rapidly clear when one attempts to discuss physics with them. That is not surprising, but it is surprising how many will criticize another for being ignorant when it is themselves who are ignorant. Maxwell's equations describe some relationships, but they do not tell us what magnetic fields really are. What is a magnetic field? No one really knows. We can describe with these equations what effects they produce and how magnetic and electric forces are interlinked. But what is really causing this stuff? What is it made of?

As Feynman says in the video, in iron you can line up the atoms so electrons spin in the same direction and thus so many induced small magnetic forces are aligned in one direction and thus amplified to the point they are noticeable, but what are these magnetic fields made of?

Nothing apparently, since they can propagate through a vacuum. But matter itself is made of bundles of these same e-m fields. In wave packets, they pretend to be something we like to call particles, which can travel through a vacuum as well but which don't really exist since they are made of waves which are nothing but vibrations. In the end there is nothing traveling through nothingness and all is nothing and no one knows anything. To those who understand physics, ICP comes across as pretty wise and observant. As Feynman says, "It is a very good question."
The question about mice seemed sort of neat to me at first. I figured the desired solution was splitting the wine into two groups, taking the group that turns out to be poisoned, and then recursing.

Then I came up with an alternative solution.

Step 1: Kill 9 mice.

Step 2: Have the mouse drink from a wine bottle.

Step 3: Wait to see if he dies. If he dies you found the right bottle. If he doesn't take the next bottle and go to step 2.
There's already enough of a disconnect with using foreign TLDs within domains (even though I have 3 domains like that) - this just seems even worse. At $19 they are selling hard to find "domains" - and the sad part is that various third party registrars are selling .gr.com domains for them. Additionally they are showing various big brands as endorsements, when those brands are simply protecting their copyrights.

Almost seems like a clever way to make easy money with no value add to anyone registering with them...
Yes, they could. It is an option.
Chats.io, new HTML5 / Node.JS-powered social group chat, launches... and crashes.
I've never heard of suntools before. I googled it and found sunView on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunView.

Reminds me of Haiku OS (open source BeOS clone), Amiga, and Linux Framebuffer. All sit directly (afaik) on the kernel, fast.
We have ~130 servers at Amazon right now. We could probably do it with 50-75 or less, depending on how big the boxes are.
Jolly bit me - منتديات قروب الساهر
> I don't believe PHP's ini_read caches anything.

so check if the ini file key is in memcache, if so get it from there, if not, ini_read it and populate the cache. Not hard.
What Happens When We Die? Time Reboots.
Have some faith. We'll pull through. :)
Wow - I liked this part:

"This discovery is being released into the public domain without patent protection in order to encourage additional research."

Let's hope this works!
Kinect Hack Helps the Blind Navigate
This has been posted before, and there was much interesting discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2041675
If recent history of the mortgage market tells us anything, it's that lenders are not too concerned with making financial sense.
Of course it is, just not the monetary kind.
Chaos Monkey causes chaos, it does not fix it. :)

But yes, you are right. The goal is to have a system that scales itself. Not an easy task for sure.
I hope mobile web apps really take off - although Apple provides a fantastic distribution mechanism, the restraints they put on developers are unreasonable. Web apps let you (or your company) dictate the release cycles and determine what is or isn't suitable for your customers.

The HTML5 apis (especially the offline cache manifest stuff - my favourite! http://www.mrspeaker.net/2011/03/17/generating-cache-manifes... ) can let us do some pretty "native-esque" stuff: though it seems like every iOS version something gets broken - multi-touch in 4.2, and the nitro bug in 4.3... Though I'm sure I'm ascribing to malice... ;)
If this is for real, the implications are huge. Seems odd that news like this would be broken on a weird page like this, and not on arxiv, for example.

Not holding my breath.
This was a great article. I don't read many posts that illustrate a simple concept like this so well.
نتيجة الاستفتاء
I've recently been on the other side, trying to interview and hire people. It's difficult.

My primary concerns are: Is the candidate going to be competent and capable of solving difficult problems and contributing to the team? Are they going to work efficiently and be productive? And perhaps most importantly, are they going to be enjoyable to work with?

It is less important to me that a candidate has a particular skill with a particular technology because those things can be learned easily by good programmers. I'm looking for more of an intuition, problem solving ability, and the ability to cleanly translate the solution into code.

To that end, I try to get candidates to code with me, usually by asking a challenging problem and then sitting down next to him or her to work it out. The whole process has been more difficult than I anticipated though. I find many candidates unwilling or unable to write code in an interview.

I'd love to hear some suggestions on hiring tactics and questions to help me better find my next co-worker.
Ubuntu 8.10 for us.
There is also an option to go for mediums-sized companies that have validated business model and revenue stream: Eventbrite, Chegg, Twilio, Palantir, etc...
Is Carl Sagan right saying we are at high risk of self-destruction?
It is probably just me and my overly pessimistic and cynical point of view, but sometimes I think this "war for talent" is basically synonym for "search for very good engineers willing to work 70 hours a week for less than 100K" (or something like that).
I do understand the need to for these creative idea (good setup, etc.), but unfortunately these tweks and ideas work only and only after salary is good, challenge is there, and team is great.

And there is one more problem: some of startups struggling to hire very good engineers are not aiming big - the prevalent business model is: we hope to be acquired by Google/Apple/Facebook/Intuit etc. Stories of Digg, Reddit, and Delicous don't inspire a lot confidence for engineers to join these companies.
I'm in the UK. I'd not considered it could be an issue tbh. I'm not intending to employ people. Google and others manage to pay amounts to advertisers I assume without these hassles. I'm not at my pc atm to investigate that further right now.
I think it's better to say that in science, many of the primary sources are closed. There's been a huge boom in open access publishing in the last 10ish years, so now well over half the journals I read are open access, and PNAS has an open access option.

Especially when one of the egregious distortions mentioned was from PLoS One, there's just no excuse not to go back, glance at the article, and maybe any linked News and Views type articles.
My Worst Phone Screen