skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Obviously, games "looking then times better" is poorly defined. Even still, I would argue that PC gaming actually is many times better graphically than the 360. Most PC gamers have at least 1080p resolution, and even modest PC hardware can handle that. Modern "HD" consoles, however, almost invariably run their games (especially the blockbuster action titles) at a much lower resolution like 600p or 660p. Also, PC games have had antialiasing for many years, something many (if not most) console titles noticeably lack.
Offer HN: I optimize your speed bottleneck
If you have a speed bottleneck in any of your code and you are not an expert of speed optimization or you don't have the time for this stuff, I can offer a service for you:

How it works:

1. You identify the part of the software which has the bottleneck.
2. You isolate it: copy out only the code which need to be optimized. Ideally this is some kind of independent component.
3. You write a small benchmark code.
4. You send me the package.
5. I optimize the hell out of the code really professionally.
6. Using the benchmark we will exactly know how much I helped.

Or I can of course write an independent software component from scratch if needed (highly optimized for speed.)

I optimize both algorithmically both on the bit-hunting level. (I have both math background both low-level ASM coding background.) I can optimize with different levels of 'agressiveness'. If very much money depends for you on some percents I can use exotic data structures and I can go into research-level deepness. (If serious math is needed I even have researcher mathematician contacts who can help me.) Other times I just do such trivial things as use standard data structures cleverly, do some caching, precalculations etc...

I mostly optimize JAva, C++ or C code. If really needed I can optimize codes written in other languages, I can port critical parts from a high-level language to C/C++.

I can not only optimize the code for speed but I can professionally compress your huge data.

If I cannot optimize your code I don't charge anything. Otherwise I would like to charge something like $50/hour, but we can decide the price in advance as a function of the performance increasement. If you are a serious customer I may do the first gig for free just to prove you how you can benefit from this service. I ancourage you to try this out, you cannot lose anything.

I live in Hungary, I work remotely.

Use my service if less milliseconds can mean more revenue for your business.
Concentrate on your core stuff, I can do speed optimization for you.

Contact me at:

nadam60 at gmail
You could --- and I'm not just saying this to be argumentative --- say the same thing about parts of Webkit.

I want to be clear that I agree that Flash adds more than a banana-equivalent dose of insecurity. I just worry about the notion that the rest of the system is much better.
Lots of unsuccessful people work very very hard as well. The trick is not to just work "smart" or to just work "hard" but to work both "smart" AND "hard". If you observe highly effective successful people, you'll see they work smart and work hard.

Can you develop a work ethic? Of course you can. Human behavior is very malleable. The military makes many lazy people into hard workers. For others, perhaps all you need is a really desirable goal that overshadows everything else in your life. I doubt there is a magic bullet, single solution. As with so many things, different routes or different techniques are probably more suitable for different people.
We have already received 4 pull requests and merged code with new features and a new UI today! The power of the crowd is amazing!
A fantastic simple idea. Video interaction is brilliant through gaming add-on. 3 comments:

1) Find a way to MAINTAIN gaming during the video (e.g. live comments adds of people in the room to the images?). That's because right now its fun to vote every 1:30minutes but then kind of boring to watch.. Althrough I stayed 3X more than initially planned ;-) This would allow maintaing people on site too since many people left/stopped voting after 1st video.

2) POINTS need to be prominent & STATUS linked: it's not about the money for me but the challenge & game. Many sites followed this model. When I win, the reward of points would need to incenvize me somehow. Make it big/prominent? What about leveraging STATUS with points too: status changes with results from say commoner to king to rock-star...

3) Consider Consumer Goods ads for site monetization: FMCG would pay to have their ads displayed (what about an ad of 10'' every few where people vote too???). I know that's old model but still there is something in the voting that could be a way for consumer research or brand 'interraction' of sort

Overall will be big, well done and keep it up!
You make a good point that I wouldn't want to try to disagree with.
Indeed. However, the hiring part IS brutal. We interviewed 90-something people, made one offer.

There's a huge difference between engineers and developers.
Methods that do clustering on similar web pages are mostly too CPU intensive for processing larger sets (we're talking millions of web pages). They are also harder to scale from data-locality perspective, you need to figure out which pages to put together and then get the data together.

Looking at pages in isolation is much more horizontally scalable. You can take a look at Webstemmer (http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/python/webstemmer/index.html) for a method exploiting similarities.
You say that as though the PlayBook actually has a chance of catching on in a big way. Even if it did, it wouldn't hinge solely on Flash support.

RIM has never done a great job targeting the consumer market, and their enterprise customer base is still pretty loyal. Even if the PlayBook fails to change that, RIM will not go bankrupt before they have time to try again.
SPJ: Managing parallelism: embrace diversity, but control side effects
I find when going to sleep is the best time to code like this. No distractions.
robots to access the dangerous areas

They would need to be hardened, otherwise the radiation messes up the electronics within days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VVx9gRS3ug#t=1m5s
One of the best lessons I learnt from my first boss was: “when your code doesn’t behave as expected, don’t use the debugger, think.”

Can't entirely agree. I'm not a grizzled programmer, so sometimes when I'm coding for microcontrollers the debugger winds up teaching me about some new quirk in architecture. It's often something I was aware of (endianness, some of the finer details of addressing) but had not yet actually dealt with in person.
Oh, that kind of phone screen. For a moment there I thought we might have some interesting discussion about Gorilla Glass.
While databases are powerful, to think that they are a necessary component for all types of work is a rather limited point of view. I have to say that less than 10% of my programming work involves or interacts with databases of any significant kind.

Perhaps your experience, despite your claims, is insufficiently broad to recognise other possibilities.
It's not just clueless recruiters who ask these kinds of questions. I've had technical folks (including YC founders when I've interviewed at their companies!) ask me if I'm a rockstar developer, to rate my skills from 1-10, etc.

Other horrible interview questions:

1. Describe your strengths/weaknesses/creativity. (Dunning-Kruger pops up again. The first time this happened to me, every time I was about to mention something I was probably good at, I kept on remembering someone else who was way better, so I ended up saying "umm..." for about a whole minute. It's emphatically not false modesty, it's just that for many things, there aren't objective ways for me to know if I'm good at it. Also, if I knew what my weaknesses were, I'd try to improve them so they're no longer weaknesses! All these questions do is evaluate your ability to bullshit.)

2. Name as many data structures as you can. You have 1 minute. (This happened to me at Palantir.)

3. What does X.Y.Z. (some acronym) stand for? (Without asking me anything else about X.Y.Z.) Interviewer then proceeds to ask me 5-10 more acronyms.

4. Do you prefer working in teams, or do you prefer working by yourself? (Sounds like a false dichotomy and a stupid generalization. Sometimes, the person asking won't accept my answer when I say there are aspects of both I like.)

5. Questions where the interviewer has no idea what they're talking about. For example, when I interviewed at Google, I got asked to describe how the normal distribution converges and how I would use this to build a text classifier. (The Googler who asked me this admitted he didn't even know what a normal distribution was, the question was just something he heard somewhere, when I said I didn't understand the question.)

6. Asking me if I use Python, and when I say no, asking me to estimate the runtime of a Python program to calculate the first billion numbers in the Fibonacci sequence anyways. (Also at Google, by a different person.)
Ask HN: is there an opportunity for a non commercial search engine?
What do you think of the idea of a search engine that does not include results for anything commercial such as products, services or companies? Madness or market opportunity?

The reason I have been thinking about this is because when wikipedia first became popular it was very often the top ranked search result for many searches. Now Wikipedia is rarely on the first page - Google is dominated by commercial interests, whether Google's own interests or that of companies who optimise themselves to the top of the rankings. Google gains nothing commercially from Wikipedia being in search results so it has been algorithmed out.

I was wondering if a non commercial search engine would bring Wikipedia back to the top.
I'm curious as to how you to determine whether or not there is beer available at places listed. I live in Salt Lake City and the Utah State Capitol, Mormon Tabernacle Choir, LDS Chapel - Downtown, Utah State House of Representatives and Washington Elementary School are listed as having free beer.

I don't know if there is any legal problems with declaring that an elementary school is serving beer, but I'd check up on it.

Otherwise I like the idea. It's almost relaxing to build something just for the shit of it.
I can't begin to express how much more productive and clearer I think when not behind the computer.

I do most of my outlining away from the computer, with pen and paper. UML is your friend! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language
My latest project, is building multiple websites, to test product ideas, that I would someday like to start up into a business. Due to the fact that I left my day job, this is proper usage of the terms...I think =)
I actually stumbled upon your piece earlier this week - awesome.

I've been trying to dig up as much as I can on Metafilter precisely because Matt has had 12 years to try out various moderation/management ideas.

If you have the time, I would very much like to hear more about how you manage your community.
I try to make sure Posterous attributes them to me (see the end of this post for an example).

If people don't find them interesting, I can stop posting them. I had been under the impression that self-posts were fine. Most of the time, we're trying to be an advocate for job seekers (currently just developers) in a market that is very company friendly.
> all of these OSes are vulnerable to the same classes of flaws.

They are. It's an unavoidable fact of life for the kind of computer we use (read x86 PC). But don't confuse being potentially vulnerable to a type of attack to actually being vulnerable to a specific attack of this type. In order to be vulnerable, you not only have to, say, allow a user-mode program to write on a page marked as executable (something I remember some high-end processors from the late 80's could prevent) but you actually must have a buffer overflow to go with it. Unless both conditions are met, you are not at risk.

As far as actual complexity of the implementations are concerned, I can't evaluate Microsoft's, as the implementation is secret. I cannot, however, imagine how the Windows implementations can be simpler, for Windows is a much more complex operating system than either Linux or *BSDs. As alexandros pointed out, a larger surface means more to defend.
And in the shower!
"POINTS" - how are they shown ? Chromium here, I do not see them...
I was told years ago by an older developer that "90% of code is written away from your computer"

I adhere to this adage and find it to be true
Oracle doesn't have a sailing team. Larry does, paid out of his own pocket. He just sticks the Oracle logo on his boat because it's his boat and he can stick whatever logo he wants on it.
Yeah, it's the "constantly trashed" that I never see. "Lifestyle business" isn't an insult-- it's a perfectly valid label for a lot of businesses (those that prioritize lifestyle over growth). Bootstrapped is another good label-- for those that don't necessary avoid growth, but don't (or can't) raise or borrow money.

And other that Alex's post, I can't recall anyone taking the time to write a post trashing lifestyle businesses or bootstrapping or whatever you want to call it (I guess the latter could imply more ambition while the former might imply maximizing reward for as little effort as you can get away with).

Granted, we celebrate "go-big-or-go-home" folks (in the news and on HN)... That's nothing new-- humans have celebrated daring forever. It sells newspapers and generates pageviews.

On the other hand, I feel like I can rattle off a long list of "VCs will eat your baby" bloggers. Yours, 37s, the LessEverything guys, the folks at Jackson Fish Market, etc. I love all of your blogs and all of your products-- but I just don't get the rage (though I think you were perfectly justified in blowing up at Alex, btw).
You could actually make the voting along the video, before it ends, so there will be no waiting between them and also people can play the whole time.

EDIT: Also, I would add the possibility to recommend a video to be next. It could be better then the automatic youtube recomends (do I think right it uses that?)
I don't know about physics, but in robotics and computer vision and CS, there is no correlation between credible research and journal publication. I suppose physics attracts more quacks, though, and it's not quite as easy to verify because you need expensive equipment generally owned only by people who publish in journals all the time anyway.
People should also know for writes that there are a variety of ways to mitigate this. The first way is to write sequentially (no seeking). The second way is to install battery backed write cache which will do this for you. If you're ok with losing a little bit of data you can also just have the OS write to memory before flushing to disk. BBWC controllers seem to handle write reorder optimization much better than the OS. So I'd recommend the BBWC over writing to memory.

This is a large reason I dislike cloud hosting, most of the hardware is crap and you could get much better performance from it with a little more expense. Also it's mostly pointless to bother making your writes sequential as the performance degrades to random IO because of all the other instances on the machine.
Www.dodgeit.com was doing this long before mailinator. They eventually shut down for some reason, but still, mailinator wasn't original. Just well timed.
Grandparent said: ""Projects" are for fun. Projects may become elevated to "startups" only if they make money." Does Quora make money?
drop.in - "don't search for stuff. search for inspiration. do it. drop.in"

?
I have a better solution, which saves me from crashes, and allows me to use the browser of my choice: I don't have flash.

Problem solved!
whoops ... thought you were talking about my definition in the article!
Employment History:

http://randomurlwithnorevenue.com/
March 18 - 20, 2011 (2 days, 18 hours)

I absolutely would love to see stuff like this on someone's resume, but it should not be listed under the employment section.

To me, startup implies company. You can't be CEO of a landing page, website, nor project. But if there's a separate corporate entity then you can be CEO of that. Titles and entities aside, if someone can credibly list their venture as work history, I would consider that a bona fide startup even if the other factors weren't there.
A dozen years ago a few of us interviewed this guy, thought he was a good fit. When we went to check in with our boss to see if we could hire him, she turned him down. Why? "He seemed kind of geeky."
Nathan, you're clearly very clever at intentionally writing copy that will pique the interest of hacker news crowd, which presumably is your target audience.

I think where you fall down is that submitting all the articles yourself. It removes a lot of the authenticity from the notion that someone independent to your company thought your post had merit to be on HN. That is also why usually it's frowned upon to submit your own blog posts to HN.

Also the anecdote to pitch ratio of your phone screen post makes it feel to me that the only reason you crafted the content was to be able to make the pitch in the first place.

It all feels like this the discovery of your service is being being done by force not osmosis.
It's one thing to self-post.

It's another thing to do practically nothing but self-post, only about a single topic, with links to only a single site -- a site that is selling a product.
Interestingly, in the actual example he uses that isn't a fixed with element. Look at the Heroku.com site, its the div with id "accordion". That space to the left of it is created because of the padding of the surrounding div (which is fluid width), and the margin of the accordion div.

Its sister element with id "rightelement" is actually fixed width, but I don't see the issue there since the majority of its contents are image elements and not text.

---

That said, I agree with you set a max-width for text only enclosures, and a min-width for enclosures that have image elements.
Your website that you threw together in a couple of hours, that is NOT a project, and it certainly is not a startup.

Seriouly? So, a project is defined as an ongoing, methodical task, which extends minimally beyond some undefined amount of time?

If you're a tech person, you know that the "couple of hours" may well represent months of idea gestation, followed by two hours of very precise execution based upon, say, ten years of professional experience. Also, consider that any non-trivial website will require ongoing maintenance (try hosting any user-generated content, which instantly puts you in the anti-spam business), and you soon realize that a "two hour project/startup" is likely much, much more than that.

As for startup vs project, 'startup' means you consider yourself to be starting a business. That can mean a lot of things. I can just as easily say you need two million in funding and five signed "rock star" devs before I'd consider you a startup.
Again I did not say "All things tie into databases" I simply said I tie most things back into databases because thats how my mind works.

I sold a company which wrote sharepoint plugins ... there were no database functions needed there, rather it was giving a database more functionality.

I recognize many things do not rely on databases in a significant way and perhaps my experience is not sufficiently broad, however I certainly am capable of recognizing other possibilities
You misunderstand what the 2% is about. The 2% is about Kelly criterion optimal bets.

Yes, don't bet more than you can afford to lose -- but don't bet more than 2% on a single horse.
Great datail to add random names and not "guest012"!
Firefox is better for development. Chrome for fast browsing. Firefox loads slower, but has FireBug. But browsing pages, reading news is cool with chrome. Those crashes are true. I hate them. I think these two are the best browsers and I use both of them. They both have their strengths.
Thanks for the feedback Ben. I post the articles on HN when I publish them. Maybe next time, I won't publish them to HN and see if the readers do it on their own.

I was under the impression that self-posts were not frowned upon. I've found some of the best content here to be self-posts.
Take a good look at the number of plugins you are already running. If you are using Chrome type in about:plugins in the URL. I think you might be surprised.

I see many people have this hate towards Flash because it is a plug-in, but what about QuickTime, Silverlight, and Java? Plug-ins exist to extend the functionality of our browsers and let's face it, HTML does not do everything.
Keeping an Eye on Everything
This is good mostly for algorithms but for system software (drivers, a lot of different technologies involved) is impossible because issues are outside of your control, without debugging you'll lose 100x of time.
I was under the impression that self-posts were not frowned upon. I've found some of the best content here to be self-posts.

There's nothing wrong with the odd self-post, especially if it is a Show HN/Tell HN or whatever. But almost all of your recent activity of your account is promoting either your company, your event at SxSW or your personal blog.

How many self-promoting posts do you need to make before it becomes reasonable to ask whether you are fairly contributing to the HN community? Perhaps you could use your ability to identify successful content to curate and promote the work of others too by submitting more content created by others?
Needs updating for SSDs, I'm not sure it's really worth the development time and increased time to market to optimise for rotating disks.
Wait, this is software related to web development, and you don't believe there's a community online to create 'buzz' about the product?
I don't agree 100% but I think debuggers are for code that you didn't write yourself and has insufficient documentation.

When it comes to a dynamic language, knowing how and what lead to a particular function being called is important and all that information isn't exactly saved on the stack trace---you have to step through to find it.
Right. Thanks to flash compatibility on my phone, I can watch/listen to a lot of content that cannot be rendered on an iDevice. That's a meaningful differentiator.
"body {min-height:101%;}" will work much better than "overflow-y: scroll".

Unlike the latter it's CSS2 (vs CSS3) and also works without bugs.
Things are not so black and white. In my personal experience many times over, communication and ease of communicating correctly and how fast you move, especially in a startup environment, IS significantly better if not entirely necessary. I've had lots of personal issues making a long distance thing work even with last partners located in a different state much less a different country. I'm sure others can make it work but that's never been the case for me.

Second, in a startup culture early on, in my personal experience, we've had guys jam out all day and night, weekends, etc to push a product out when timing was critical. I can't honestly say I believe the same deadlines can be met with a remote team.

Finally, to be a great coder, beyond godlike programming abilities, you must have certain quality traits (too many to list here).

But per your request, here's a technical challenge we've done in the past. Find an insanely hard captcha, figure a machine learning algorithm for it to be able to read the captcha without relying on human eyes. As the mahine continues to view more and more captcha, it learns to decipher it. I will say you shouldn't do it for the purpose of breaking captchas and in some cases this is illegal but the technical problem to solve it is really good in terms of coding capabilities.
Easy ways to get around the coming New York Times paywall
Unfortunately, the cost of maintaining a gaming license in an appropriate jurisdiction is likely to outweigh the revenue stream from such an enterprise.