skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like the license part, bear with me.

I grew up with the vynil lp, which definitely was a product. You went to the record store and bought an actual physical product, 30 cms of diameter with a play time of usually 20 minutes per side. I could play it, lend it to a friend, gift it to somebody. The product was independent of location or device; devices playing LP's where standardized.

The RIAA was actually founded to standardize the equalization curve (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization) for the playback of music and not as a money grubbing -, mob like -, thuggish organization suing teenagers and dead people.

Then came the CD. Still a product. With different specifications and playback devices then the LP, but still interchangeable, playable everywhere and in every country. Definitely a product, which you bought, owned, could lend, gift, use as a coaster, whatever. It was yours to own.

Then suddenly the product turned into a license. CD's where no more actual CD's, but some crippled data container, to prevent copyying, licensed to you for use. Possibly the licensed product contained some dreckware, which wrecked havoc on your computer and was stealthily installed without your knowledge or consent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit).

When you download a song (legally) nowadays you only license it. Ideally the copyright owners would like to charge you on a per country basis.

Going to Amsterdam for the weekend? That's an euro, sir, since your song is only licensed for Germany.

I'm aware that we're not there, that the licenses are in fact more open now as when Apple started to offer music downloads. But I'm pretty certain that this would not be the case if the music industry had their say (see 3 Euro ringtone downloads).

Where the hypocricy comes in that a license would imply that you only pay once.You pay for the right to use a song. Reality however, and I leave that as an excercise to the reader, looks very, very different.

I close my rant with the link to this interesting essay by Steve Albini (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_albini) :

http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
You mean the inability to digest anything that hasn't been heavily machine processed to an extreme glycemic index? Granted, we required cooking of food to support the energy requirements of our large brains, but that's pretty much just a fire and a slab of meat. Is it really a good evolutionary path to depend on a whole industrial complex of food procesing machinery that is a big natural disaster away from being completely broken down?
Or maybe Europeans consume milk and alcohol because they can easily digest it?
I thought about this when reports of Google music started to appear and the way Amazon sees it is completely my point of view. If it is my content that I upload to that service, then it really isn't Amazon's duty to care about licensing deals. The analogy to an external harddrive mentioned in the article explains this very well. You could even go one step further and replace the external harddrive with your own webspace to make that analogy even more similar to Amazon's service: Imagine you upload your music to your own webspace to be able to listen to it wherever you are. Not very practical, but there's no way one could argue that there have to be any additional fees involved. This shouldn't even be news.

So when Google has to negotiate with record labels this tells me that users apparently don't simply have upload their media collection. There have to be more features, similar to former lala.com maybe. Otherwise Google shouldn't even feel the need to contact any record labels. After their music is bought it's none of their business anymore. At least that's my opinion.
It is also worth highlighting that extensive object oriented systems can and have been built on top of C :

http://library.gnome.org/devel/gobject/stable/
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Rajasthan tour of India is all about rajasthan and different exiciting tour options that are unique across the world.
It's like they're almost trying to winnow the pool down to developers whose programming ability outperforms their career experience and business sense. They certainly exist: I had the business sense of wet paint as recently as two years ago (which might explain why I willingly worked as a salaryman despite having perfect knowledge of the hours and salary).
FACEBOOK FOR ANDROID
This is the time to update some more features developed by companionably.
Good news for android phone users. Till now you might be use the face book in many devices. But recently, an app has been launched in android market. If you have this on your android Smartphone, loteasier to access face book anywhere under the sky.
That "opportunity" is not worth having no company-provided health insurance, nor is it worth paying both halves of the FICA tax, except for the desperate.
I graduated out of school in 2010 May.

I have been trying doing a lot of freelance gigs that range around $500 - $2000 (5 such gigs)

Plus a lot of small stuff ranging from $50 - $100 (2 each every fortnight)

I pick up work from ODesk, and some other sites like ScriptLance and also know some clients via private contacts.

I'm looking to move into per hour billing from fixed price. Anybody made that exact transition yet? And how do you talk to your existing clients when you want to make the switch?
Wait, so use of partial downloads (say reading from a stream buffer) is legally different than the same use of a full download? (If my connection is fast enough for the second song to _fully_ buffer before the first one finishes playing, does this change anything, since the player is now reading from effectively a "full download"?)
Offers don't expire when you are out fishing next week and won't be reachable... cough.

No seriously, offers don't expire if you communicate with them.

If it's Google -- They took a lot longer than 5 days to decide they want you, you can tell them it will take you longer than 5 days to evaluate their offer.
Thanks, that's an angle I haven't seen since I've mostly used EC2 as a hosting service. What little batch work I've done on it hasn't involved instance counts where I ran into limits. (Now, EBS i/o limits and other things... :/ )
Yahoo Messenger 2.0 for iPhone
In one way, Yahoo is root for all the social networking sites.We have many divisions in this antiquated icon like mailID, yahoo messenger. Yahoo messenger for iphone’s initial purposeis “instant messaging”.
Tim Ferriss is a hack & a fraud.
Sounds like Diaspora with a new name to me.
I would not appreciate a candidate spilling the beans on what we ask in our interviews, even if he didn't sign an NDA. Sometimes you do ask similar questions, and it's a waste of everyone's time when the candidate in front of you went through some programming interview books and a bunch of blogs like those.

Similarly, I wouldn't even bother to bring in a candidate who transcribed his interviews elsewhere.
This comment is way too cynical for confort and to be honest I think it's pretty baseless.

1. There is a potential risk of SQL injection here - as far as I see, it's more likely that there is in-fact none.

2. You imply you're living in the UK, if there was an issue who do you think would suffer? Do you think the PM, etc. etc. pays for services like this their own money...

3. This idea that you might get arrested for informing them about something like this is just plain silly - it's ridiculous. What exactly can you possibly be charged with here?
Did you manage to find a tech co-founder? If you did, that should be another interesting post.
Some speculate that drug companies don't bother working on cures because it's far more profitable to sell perpetual treatments.
I'm a linux noob, that thought he knew something, got destroyed in an interview.
I didn't realize you started a post too. Here's my link:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2380810
Yup. "No false positives" is my goal. I've experienced what happens when a company gets bloated and teams get diluted with bozos. Even one person can poison a team. Firing people is bad for a team too. I'm determined to avoid that to a great extent. I know of no other way than actually working with a person to determine whether I want to keep working with them.

I don't think most people even question how ridiculous it is that companies interview a person for a couple hours and then agree to work with them for many months or years before they will even consider firing them (usually only after additional months of trying to "work it out").

In my opinion the best recruitment tool is having a team that a potential candidate would be really happy (and lucky) to work with. You can only do that if you keep standards up and hire slowly and methodically. A bit of a pain in the beginning, but worth it for everyone involved in the end.
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this article and this comment thread are both infuriatingly conspiratorial.

Facebook may become a defacto standard for an internet ID but its power lies in having people willingly share information about their lives. This would cease immediately if the US government mandated it as a form of ID etc. Which kind of contradicts the company's goals... no?
They only care about trends that threaten to go mainstream. Why do the leave usenet alone for instance?
It's already helped album sales a little. I bought 5 albums browsing through Amazon MP3 this morning after seeing the announcement.
Nice. How have you gotten the word out?
is it a consulting firm who is offering to buy it?

Why not give them a license for the current iteration for the price they want - inclusive of "N" updates - but they have the right to white label the service to their own needs.

In negotiations, assuming they offered you 100K cash - Tell them you would OEM for 75K cash and an annual support of 25K which would include some level of support. The support fee you could use to hire an intern to manage their support questions.

Iterate the site out -- have a vertical for .txt, .html, .JS etc...

Allow file tags, search, families, etc.. etc...

Put together a quick roadmap of these ALREADY planned features to get them to agree to the OEM deal, knowing that they will get the verticals as they come -- but that each vertical will have the 25K annual support license.

So, for the 1st iteration of 12 months of .txt - they pay 100K - next year they get .js, .py and a renewal for .txt and have to pay another 75K

Allow for them to submit update requests which you will value and include for $N... This will allow them a feedback loop and you an income.

If they say no -- hold out and IMMEDIATELY add one of these features, as they will be watching and say "shit - he is doing all that roadmap without us -- fuck it lets bite"
Tablets might be a flash in the pan: Microsoft global chief strategy officer
This article is well written, by someone with experience in both systems, and posits a solution for overcoming what he sees as a deficiency in the 'losing' system. From now on, whenever flamewars break out between zealots (of any technology, not just DVCS), I'm pointing them to this article as an example of informed, civil discussion.
Step 1: Threaten Amazon to try to extort license fees.

Step 2: Spread FUD in the press to scare users away from Amazon.

Step 3: Get a judge to compel Amazon to disclose user identities and their MP3 watermarks.
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I think that it's highly likely that a person who can't work out a binary search algorithm probably cannot solve interesting problems in pet projects, unless by interesting, you mean simple web applications or something of that nature.
My own personal experience always causes me to shrug, in reaction to the carbo-phobia that seems so rampant, of late. I put in several hundred kilometres per week on my bicycle during the warmer months. I eat a massive amount of carbs, including some with the dreaded "high glycemic index" that's so chic to discuss. I've never been healthier (great numbers for my weight, blood pressure, etc). But again, my personal anecdote does not constitute a scientific study.
In my experience you never get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.

Pick a number to which you will be 100% happy to do the work for and use it as your "must have" number, from there consider perks, bonuses, stock etc as nice extras but not part of the must have.

Start as high as you can because that sets your baseline. From there consider that it is a lot easier to get more $ by changing jobs than by merit raises..

My personal pet-peeve, for some reason companies have a problem increasing the pay of top engineers at a rate equivalent to their productivity. (Something that sales people always get)

And finally... always, always always remember: if it is not on paper, it does not count!
Documentary about the issues faced by international Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs
I am familiar with Diaspora in name only... I need to go check out what they are doing.

That is what I love about the Zeitgeist! thoughts really do enter the sphere of the human psyche for us to grab if we are open...
There are quite a few people out there who would enjoy working out on interesting questions. If you already know the question or have solved it previously you just give the solution and admit it that you had seen it earlier. But more importantly its about the thought process and how you got to the answer.

"Similarly, I wouldn't even bother to bring in a candidate who transcribed his interviews elsewhere." - Well there are gazillion blogs and books written on technical interview questions including by ex google, msoft and apple employees. So is it really that bad that a sophomore student decided to blog about it for the benefit of fellow students.
Ask HN: Can someone make an RSS feed for user comments?
I would for subscribe to Patio's and PG's... and thanks!
I sent a email when i saw it too.
I'd take the one that makes full-time offers immediately in a heartbeat, because I wouldn't trust the company that does the 3-month, no-benefits contracting "test".

Going to work for a company with employees of varying skill is no big deal; every company above a certain size has people who probably shouldn't have been hired. Going to work for a company with shady management, however, is a deal-breaker.
Geo-tagging your photos is kinda cool, and it's a feature that I would find interesting if I had a device that supported it, but I would make _sure_ to strip those tags before publishing the photos anywhere.
Google Talk Guru : Google bot that lets you ask simple questions
I can see it as potentially useful in mobile devices, since it sounds like it's a trade-off of engineering time (analog circuits are much harder to get right) vs. power consumption, and mobile has such large volume that engineering costs can become a rounding-error.

I'm slightly concerned about per-unit cost since I'm assuming testing yields is going to be much harder. Digital behaves in well-understood ways across temperature and voltage ranges; analog is not as well understood.

[edit]
I see they are claiming 30x smaller footprint, which will help, since they can be very aggressive about rejecting chips, but still I wonder if fabs that mainly do digital are setup to test something like this.
You've been a cloud admin for over five years and working with Linux for over 20, but you don't know the difference between symmetric and asymmetric encryption?

I'm as arrogant as the worst of them, but this sounds borderline ridiculous.

That said, I'm looking forward to see how you're looking to change this.
slightly OT, but anyone know why lossless formats aren't available yet?

I'd assume it would be a good deferentiator from the ITune Store, Also, given that they are now charging for storage space, it would seem to align itself with this model too.
+1 for "if it is not on paper, it does not count!"

I was naive (or inexperienced) enough to take the word of my boss when he said that the firm will match an offer I had with another firm. One year later, I am working with the same firm for 80% less than what I could have been earning.

I was given all sorts of reasons under the sun for not increasing my pay. Looking back, I should have got it in writing.
I get a really good insight in the candidate's programming skills by pair-programming a simple problem with them.
For TDD, I write a test and ask him / her to write the code to make it pass (then repeat, refactor).
That way, I can see how fluent they are in the programming language, at the same time evaluate their problem solving skills and see how they work in a team.
Walmart oral argument in the Supreme Court or how to try 1.5M cases in one trial
I guarantee with that hiring process, that you will not want to work with me. Given your interview process, the feeling is likely to be mutual.

(I don't watch TV or most movies, haven't seen The Social Network, and have no interest in doing so. If that is what you value, then I'm going to be a poor fit from both sides.)
There is also a very popular article in Time this week on this subject, "Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin":

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914857-4,00....
Ummm, vinegar + oil is pretty much the composition of every dressing out there, sometimes with a small amount of emulsifier, such as mustard (vinaigrette) or egg yolk (mayonnaise). Is it the fact that you use olive oil that OS important? Or the fact that without an emulsifier the dressing is much thinner, and hence ends up on the plate, not the salad, so you eat less?
I wonder if you could give them access to a custom subdomain of a test site and tell them to build a web app, anything they want, and upload it. Give a suitable time limit, a day to a week, depending on how much you want to see and whether they already are a full-time employee or student. Then screen based on what people came up with.

That's a bit more involved than the lighter-weight solution in the same vein - remote coding tests facilitated by a collaborative website. But it's something I haven't heard of yet.
My answer to that one would be "I've found it's more efficient to not keep up with the latest fads."
Yeah...pretty sad. But at the same time, if the site isn't down by now, there is probably server side checking in place as well.
At first I thought - that's too bad...people really are taking their anger out on the wrong people.

But by the end of the review, I had totally bought in to the fact that maybe we've found the thing we love to hate so much that it will blow up in our faces.
I don't think that's a fair assessment of this article. This self-help article is different from all the other junk out there because it's based on psychology research, not personal hunch.

If you're going to claim that there is one ultimate solution that works for everyone in the nebulous field of achievement, it would be useful for you to back that up with actual research.
The advantage of the contract with a specific project is two fold:

1) It makes it very easy for either party to end the relationship in a natural and simple way. Minimal hurt feelings/embarrassment/harm to morale, etc.

2) The project is at least semi-isolated so it's very clear how skilled the person is. They don't get lost in some "training" mode as a new hire spending 6 months "ramping up" on the primary codebase. They (hopefully) get an early win and earn respect and confidence from the beginning.
s/'Me and my cofounder'/'My cofounder and I'

But it was a really good article besides that! Sorry for being a grammar german.
Great project! Bookmarked.
Because it's impossible to pay someone at a higher hourly rate than they would be paid as a full-time employee?
I don't know, I feel like I might be reticent about admitting exactly how much time I've wasted on HN and /r/programming.
Strangely, I've had a different experience. I've heard promptly from Google, but nothing from Facebook. Perhaps they just aren't interested in me, however.
Do you actually find people that expect candidates to implement quicksort?

I've certainly implemented it, but there's no way I have it memorized, it's not an obvious algorithm at all. I'd be flabbergasted to be asked to implement it from memory with no warning. It seems clear to me that one would be testing for if the person happened to have looked at the algorithm recently, not if they were competent.
Looks like LISP to me. Or just the rantings of someone out of touch with reality.
Google I/O 2009 - Site Review by the Experts [video]
Um, so if Amazon doesn't think they need a license to stream my music to me, how come I can upload music, but not listen to it if I'm outside the US?
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When I was in Switzerland, I lived mostly on home made Greek salads (Tomatos, Cucumbers, Onions, Olive Oil and Feta Cheese -- eaten 4x a week for about a year). They were delicious.

I made one when I got back to Canada, but the flavor was gone. I haven't made another one in over 4 years.
I don't understand how Hurd has taken so long. The GNU project managed to get gcc out, and compilers are harder than kernels. At least, that's how it seems to me as a former Unix kernel hacker. I've had occasion to replace the stock process and memory handling with new implementations of my own from scratch, so I've been pretty deep into the system, and so don't think I've missed some hidden vein of difficulty.
Because with a large codebase, you're not going to be particularly productive on the first day? I mean, it's better for web projects with a framework and set of conventions, but for, say, sizeable C++ applications it can be a serious hurdle.
It's not the easiest thing in the world to explain, no, which is why I bet most people who do the temp-to-perm thing don't bother, and just pay the contractor according to their yearly salary. After all, if they don't know enough not to take the term-to-perm offer, why complicate things? ;)
Well, I asked the interviewer if by asymmetric he meant something like PKI, and all I got was a frown. And I was like symmetric encryption is just normal. I think I was more caught off guard, as well as just not thinking much about it. I got all the PAM questions right if that helps. Probably doesn't. I feel genuinely humiliated by the whole situation.

Seriously in the back of my head I heard my Father's voice: "You done fucked up good, boy"

EDIT FOR FATHER QUOTE
Would anybody be interested in one-time multibillion dollars profit-making opportunities?

What prevent such formation of profit-making opportunities?
That's awesome! I'll have to play with this, and suggest it whenever I hear the topic of coding interviews come up.

As a side note, if there's any chance of you being in the bay area this summer (Mtn. View specifically), I'd love to grab lunch with a fellow HNer. I'll be interning at Google starting early May and know a sum total of 0 people out in the area. If you're interested and possibly going to be around, my e-mail is on my profile page.
> I have been an interviewer in the place where I work currently, and I always asked candidates to write code.

Agreed. It doesn't have to be perfect. They should be able to talk and explain it. Whiteboard design sessions are my favorite A good marker and a whiteboard are indispensable for me, and I use it in interviews as well. I present the situation as here is a typical problem we are solving, let's solve this together.

I also give plenty of chances to let the candidate tell me or teach me something they are excited about.
Or winnowing it to people who have experienced the results of conventional hiring practices and want a place that is more rigorous about it.

I spent many years hiring and working for companies that did it the way most people do it. The results speak for themselves: most companies suck to work for and most of them suck because of a few (or not so few) bozos and the environment they create.
Apple should follow suit.
Given the Xbox I'd say that Microsoft should own a large chunk of the tablet market — it would be sad if they just gave that up to Apple and Google.
I hope they made sure to get you to sign a copyright transfer for the work.