skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.crypt/browse_thread/threa...

This person Globemaker seems to be on the right track.
Want to bet on cricket? 1.5 billion people are doing it
True, but the support will be better than using CSS for logo's.
I'm assuming it means outright firing someone.
Other interviewing techniques that I should probably add:

- group interviews

- ask someone to do a presentation

- role-play, especially around customer interaction/trade-offs

These are fairly heavyweight and not used frequently.
Ideas For Making Color More Vibrant
GeigerCrowd: Collaborative radiation measurement project [Japan]
...in particular people from industries that were once more profitable than they are currently. There is nothing like decreasing revenues and companies going to the wall to make people get greedy.
Sony vgp-bps13 battery
I need to be clear here. Not all entrepreneurs are Internet based. There is a ton of non-internet things people are trying to do.
That's kind of like asking why students choose to go to harder/more hostile universities.
Isn't it the same thing for any platform? Once you use a platform, you're at risk from the owners of the platform. Apple's App Store is another example, it seems like your app can be blocked on a whim.
Work/Life Balance at a Startup -- Just a Pipedream?
Canadian Home Find
I somehow feel that tolerating corruption is not an option. The "chalega" attitude is what got us in this mess today.
I noticed that too, he has a fast b and a slow b, and he was right handed ( if the smudge is his hand)...I think the page with NOTES on the top was two days and the second paper was the third day.
Every contractor I know in the Bay charges more than this - more like 80-120 and up.
Why does the iPad 2 cost $100 less than the first iPad?
An opinion article about the peculiar action by Apple to sell the iPad 2 for $100 less than the first one.
I always crack up when the extremely lucky few that were able to gain notoriety and turn it into success give out the advice that the secret to success is notoriety. "You should become a blogger and then gain 100s of thousands of followers then you can be successful just like me!".

Reminds me of the old get-rich quick schemes that were "start a get-rich quick scheme and sell this advice, just like me!"
Silver Bullet Marketing
The computer room is an interesting idea but I am not sure I want my kid running around in it at the same time as I am trying to use it. For that reason there will always be a home on my coffee table for the iPad ( or what ever tablet takes over the number 1 spot in the next few years )
30+ Google Chrome Extensions
Google chrome is very exciting browser and used by millions of the people in the world. It is no doubt very fast in speed, But the most useful thing in chrome is its extensions like firefox add-ons. Today i have featured 30+ from them which i think are more useful and make your browser Powerful.
Anyone remember MP3.com (specifically my.mp3.com) from about 10 years ago? The lawsuits eventually shut that useful and efficient service down.
So writing Forex trading algorithms, according to you, will innovate to "change the world"? How? A common critic to the financial sector is that their "innovation" helps only to get themselves rich.

A lot of real innovation still happens in semiconductors, medical, energy. I think that's a better contrast to the 'bullshit app' hype.
think of it like this miles is mlse to him...he writes as tho he is exhaling at the end of each word. MKSE = makes
I'm curious, where in Germany was that college campus event?
Sure -- http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/20246/. Specifically, they have "implemented filter primitives using PCMOS technology, used to realize the H.264 decoding algorithm." (from http://www.cs.rice.edu/~lc6/visen/2006vlsisoc.pdf). That paper does not go into much detail about the video implementation, but it seems they discussed it more in a conference presentation.

The relevant part of the technology review article:
"That changed in 2006. [Palem] and his students simulated a PCMOS circuit that would be part of a chip for processing video, such as streaming video in a cell phone, and compared it with the performance of existing chips. They presented the work at a technical conference, and in a show of hands, much of the audience couldn't discern any difference in picture quality."
Geeknrolla Live stream
It seems humility, at least in the press, is a quality he consistently exudes ... see Nytimes article from '09
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/jobs/08bosses.html

"My life has been a series of well-orchestrated accidents; I’ve always suffered from hallucinogenic optimism.
> my overall impression of their skills

If you do this, please take into account the time they wrote the code too - they might have improved their skills significantly since then.
Facebook redesigned their "like" button - much better
You don't get to say x is safe if x has had an accident that took many years off the lives of half a million people.

All human beings make mistakes. Nuclear reactors do not tolerate mistakes.
Very true. It's getting worse as well. Back in the 90s, if someone wrote a Windows app that Microsoft didn't much like then Microsoft couldn't just shut it down. They had to go to the trouble of writing a competitor to that app and bundling it with Windows. Today, if someone writes an app for Facebook or the iPhone/iPad then the platform owner can shut it down on a whim. That's incredibly frightening.
A documentary about geeks coding all night on MTV. Man, how the world has changed.
Right. A good reason not to make your company dependent on a single platform and make sure you bring your stuff to multiple platforms.
Yeah, but on many platforms, you have a negotiated contract that is not one-sided. With facebook, you basically have a generic agreement that hundreds of millions of people click YES to that says they can shut down your account for pretty much any reason.

If your merchant account did that or the yellow pages removed your listing for a non-specific reason, you could take them to court. It isn't so much that you would take them to court, but it is the fear that you could which keeps these companies from being more careful.

Notice I say "careful"...I don't think facebook and all are necessarily intentionally trying to screw anyone. I doubt they have time or interest really to try and screw people. But that also means they may make business decisions that may have side effects that can impact a bunch of people without warning or notice.
As of second year, I've now written dozens of mostly trivial school assignments from scratch, and I can't see it being different anywhere else. There is, however, a difference between being able to pump out a command line calendar for processing .ics files or program an alarm clock in assembly, and being able to make something that people would actually want to use from scratch. Having never done the latter, I'm sure I would struggle initially.

I think part of the problem is that CS programs simply aren't structured for large projects. It would be far more realistic to say on day one, "get in groups of three and hand in a functioning program by the end of the term", but that structure just doesn't work for school. Or, if it would, then nobody has the brass to try it.
Here are the submissions from seven months ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1619515

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1616800

I provide this purely for reference, because as so often happens, it sank without trace then, but it's getting noticed and some commentary now.
Well, there's the obvious advantage that macrophages don't eat viruses, they eat bacteria.
I see the difference between Dropbox and Amazon terms, but I cant avoid asking myself If legally they are just the same.
BBC website crashes for an hour
What technologies?
I downloaded the browser and installed 3 small extensions. It asked to "Restart", which I assumed meant the application. Instead it reboot the phone.

After that, it just hung on the Loading screen sucking up 100% CPU. I searched to see if I could manually delete the extensions, but they aren't saved on the SD card from what I could find, so I uninstalled and reinstalled the application and now it actually loads.

They really need to put some safeguards in place to make sure extensions don't crash the browser like that. Having to uninstall and reinstall just to remove a bad extension is really problematic.
I guess lawsuits have become the record industry's core business, rather than selling music.
Only then did Amazon allegedly begin to address licensing issues before going ahead with the launches—licenses or not. "I've never seen a company of their size make an announcement, launch a service and simultaneously say they're trying to get licenses," the anonymous exec said.

If I recall correctly, Apple announced the new name change to iOS, launched iOS4, and then made the deal to license the name with Cisco after the cat was out of the bag

http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco_and_apple_agreement_on_ios...
I always thought that, at scale, SO and (Facebook or Twitter) were an apple to oranges comparison. Not because of load, but because of types of load.

For whatever reason, I have it in my head that the difficulty Facebook and Twitter (and even Digg) face in scaling are the social aspects of their sites. These are the things that require custom software (FlockDB and Cassandra) and a lot of machines.

Perhaps I need to use SO again, but in the day, this social aspect of SO didn't exist. This means their scaling challenges are far more traditional, say like slashdot. 99% cacheable reads type thing.

If I'm right, SO is really just a case study that, depending on what they are doing, some startups will be able to scale with .NET.
Same story, many comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2318159
Valpak Rolls Out Augmented Reality Coupons
Ask HN: compatibility layer to parse XML and HTML documents?
Hi guys,

I'm making an aggregator for restaurants menus in Java. I'm looking for the best way to extract the content of documents formatted in various ways: some restaurants provide an RSS feed, others provide an HTML table, for others you have to compile the result displayed on multiple pages...

What I'm looking for, is a way to describe the transformation necessary to go from the source document to an easily-parsable format. Of course this transformation will have to be different and custom-made for every data source, but that's not a problem.

I know I could write a Java adapter for each restaurant, but I'm looking for a simpler, more standard solution. Basically something like XSLT but more flexible.

Any idea? Thanks for your help.
> Anyways, I don't see why this is a cop-out any more than any other hiring procedure. No company has anywhere near a 100% success rate - this procedure acknowledges the shortcomings of a traditional interview process (namely that succeeding on an interview and succeeding as a developer are two very different animals) and tries to address them.

Agreed. But tptacek's point seem to be that this new process addresses the perceived weaknesses of traditional processes by moving all the downsides/risks to the potential employee. I think the hiring firm can signal their honorable intentions more clearly if they would pay a significantly higher salary during "probation" - something that compensates for lost benefits etc.

Edit: staunch mentions elsewhere on this thread that he is offering higher rates during probation.
I've just started a new job, and I am on a 6 months probationary period, which apparently is standard for this company. It doesn't really phase me, I would be surprised if I was let go.

I haven't worked anywhere that didn't at least have a 3 month probation period.
AudioMesh [Requires WebGL & Flash 10.2]
This was super interesting to try. Even more interesting are the thoughts everyone has had. My version, parsed so I could take a look at patterns.

(PI)

(mndmvneaRSE-n-sta-unare) (alsm)

tf r nen pt NSE N PSER cb NSE N PRSE inc

PRSE N MRSE opreh ld-en-ld NCBE (tfxl ftexl NCBE)

al-pr ppit xly ppiy NCBE mek SE inc d RCBR NSE PRSE

WLD RCBR NSE ntog nen tx SE - crsle - cit r-SE WLD NCBE

alwlp NCBE tsme LRSE RLSE urglsneas N WLD NCBE

(mopfsen LSRE NCBE) ntegddm NSE n curer cbrnt

(te-n-et-frne NCBR tse NCBE ing)

(flr SE PRSE ON DE 71 NCBE)
(cdn SE PRSE ON s DE 74 NCBE)
(prt SE PRSE ON re DE 75 NCBE)

(tf nbcmspsolemrdeluse tote WLD N in ld NCBE)
(194 WLD's NCBE) (trfxl)

some combinations:

tf, tfr, tfn, tfxl, ftexl, trfxl

"rcbr nse prse wld rcbr nse" (this seems poetic in structure)

ncbr, rbcr, ncbe

(se could = it, at, on, we, he, in)
se, nse, nen, mrse, prse, pser,	rlse, lrse, rse

I find WLD the most intriguing since there seems to be a contracted version of it also. WLD'S.
Could be- can't, you'd, she'd, who'd, why'd, how's, who's, won't- as each of these form a new word when removing the contraction.

I also wished there was a much larger version available, if they truly wanted help that is. Its hard enough to read, especially when reduced in size.

The top right very hard to read. I've seen several versions of it now. I translated to "alsm" put that into google, and came up with an old google coder page for Username: alsm...@gmail.com.
You could say that. Wow.

Geeks on MTV. Either this is a bubble, or things are really different this time.
Thanks all for the comments. I've tried all those approaches, but failed so far. I'll keep trying.
The solo version is closer to juggling:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/08/quadrocopters-enter-the-f...
Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers?

It is a give and take. If developers are in high demand, it is the companies turn to show their value to the employee in advance.
Bit offtopic but that CSS made reading the article a complete pleasure. With the mixture of nice readability and interesting content this post turns out as a really good essay.
I would suggest human beings are unsafe. It's human beings that put all Fukushima's 20 backup diesel generators in the basement, but put no backup diesel generators a few stories above or on stilts raised above a flood. Two backup diesel generator installed a few stories up, and none of this happens.

The Dutch have put their water pump generators up a few stories for a long time. New Orleans had power for their water pumps raised a few stories pre-Katrina.
"Invisible" servers let gov intercept and modify their citizens' communications
Just now, looking around the office here in Tokyo - most of the engineers here sit at their screens day in day out from 9.30am through to past 10pm. Most of them don't exercise more than walking to the elevator and maybe standing on the train for the half hour daily commute. They are all, with a couple of exceptions, "skinny" by western standards. Why are these sedentary office workers not gaining the pounds? It's got to be the diet.
Interestingly, in the poll at the bottom of the article, 40% of 3800 people said they don't think tablets are here to stay. A lot higher than you would expect.

Personally I think they are here to stay, although I think their value is a bit exagerated. I used an iPad for a few weeks and I really liked it, but I didn't do anything I don't usually do on my smartphone. Doesn't mean I wouldn't buy one though...
Related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2380668
> Regarding obesity, exercise is far more important than diet. You can eat all kinds of, well, crap, and if you exercise, you'll still be physically fit and probably even look healthy.

No. A hundred times no. I say this from experience: you are what you eat. No amount of exercise will do you good if you don't eat clean, fresh, natural food. The only reason I'm not the fat fuck I was an year ago is that not only did I stop eating out, I started avoiding any kind of food that comes ready-to-eat out of a plastic bag[1].

Then again, people in my country still cook and Coke is viewed by some as the embodiment of absolute evil (which it is, by the way).

--

[1] In some scenarios, eating out is unavoidable. I don't worry about eating out once a week or so.
Something else I've read (Michael Pollan's In Defence of Food) is that diets are connected to the culture they are in as well. So taking an Inuit diet and moving it to Spain would indeed not work, but then taking a diet that works in Spain and moving it to the Arctic won't work either. The food you eat is balanced out by what your daily activities are and vice versa. To that end the modern Western diet does not work well with a modern Western lifestyle, which leads to problems.
Good points. I'm reminded of the palm pilot form factor. I used one for a while. Thought it was great. Then after about a year I stopped using it. I think a lot of people did that and therefore for a good two or three years it looked like the future of computing.

I read Daring Fireball a lot and one thing I think he gets wrong consistently (although he's not the only one) is pointing to the popularity of the iPad as proof that it's not just a fad. The problem is that some fads are quite popular. I think in the case of the iPad it probably isn't a fad but only time can determine that conclusively.

And you're right... even if it's not "The Official Future" you can make a ton of money selling them and Microsoft should be there. There's hype and then there are fads. You can sell a lot of Handspring Visors and Palm Pilot cases based on a fad.
Balance is a pipedream. Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration - glib, but true.

We started 5 years ago - I've been on call 24/7 ever since. We've now got other people on call too, sure, but as the technical lead, I'm where the buck stops. An average week is in the region of 70-80 hours work.

I have precious little in the way of "life" - I allow myself a few hours off once a week on Thursdays, but apart from that, spend my time glued to my laptop, growing the business.

That said, I see several ways out.

1) This sucker actually works, and we retire.
2) This sucker actually works, and we grow it into a behemoth.
3) Ditto and we sell, and I re-invest the proceeds into my next mad idea.

1 is pretty unlikely. 2&3 are far more likely, which rather reflects the fact that my work is my life, and if you're doing a startup without that attitude, it's going to suffer. A startup is effectively all about selling a "regular" 20/30's for a decade (or two) of brutally hard work, high stress, and attaining financial and inventive freedom.

Sorry, I'm rambling. No coffee yet this morning.
> "instead of seeing a screen it can beam individual rays of light into your eyes right on your retina ... [so] you can look at your phone and see HDTV"

I'd would love to see that in action, assuming safety is not a problem, of course. Making a "large screen" on something so small has a lot of applications, and is just plain cool.
I run a namecard printing business on the side, primarily dropship. I partnered a printing house in another country, I get orders/partners locally. And email my orders overseas for fulfillment.

I'm working on a photo scanning business now, similar to the first, customers mail the photos to my address in US, UK. It get dispatch to my team in another country. They scan it to DVD and mail it back to my customer.
Except you don't have ownership of digital content, you have a license. You have an open-ended rental on tough and seemingly conditions, and that's all you "have".
No nuclear energy is cheap. It's a big lie.

The primary cost of nuclear power generation is decommissioning the reactor after the power generation is over. The Federal Government has 1 trillion dollars in nuclear reactor coming down the road. The nuclear power "industry" is long gone at that point. The decommissioned reactors get spun off into their own little corporation , and the parent corp has it declare bankruptcy, sticking us with the cost of clean up.
Web security is hard, but I don't think its unreasonable to expect that someone you hire understands the basics of how to make a form submission secure, if they don't perhaps they should be flipping burgers instead. There is just no excuse for something so sloppy.

As for SQL being a "bad API" that might be one of the more ridiculous comments I have heard.
Wanted: C++ Hacker to Design Petabyte System to Map the Human Connectome @ MIT
Incorporate california
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To make a coral cache link you just append .nyud.net:8090 to the hostname, as above. Less useful nowadays than it once was, back when a good Slashdotting was guaranteed to cause a server meltdown..
seriously? we're sending each other programs now?
Wow, that's a really profound statement for me. Mind blown, thanks to you, dear sir.
That's a cool gig! It's mapping the brain's connectome -- similar to mapping the human genome (see Sebastian Seung's talk "I Am My Connectome" - http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sebastian_seung.html).
Online Newspapers and Fun Zone: Online Newspapers
As long as you don't want to do it in-place, it's actually very easy to code.
I think most people look for it, but that the poster is talking about due diligence. It is easy to read that someone contributed to open source and give them brownie points. It takes a bit of effort to find the work they did, figure out what its doing, and determine whether they actually did a good job. People try to conserve their mental resources, so they don't always put in that effort.
I've been shocked by the pricing of the iPad competitors that have been released. The only good ones are more expensive than the iPad unless you buy a subsidized model that ends up costing a thousand dollars more over a two-year contract.

While I have an issue with the walled-garden that is the iOS ecosystem, I don't see any compelling reasons to spend more to get less polish and functionality. I don't plan on buying a tablet, but if I was, I'd get the iPad 2.

Unless the competition can provide a similar quality product a lower price than the iPad, I just don't see it being worth my money.
I have been involving in a startup since one year ago. Result: I broke one relationship, and missed another. When my mom came visiting me from another state I didn't have the time to bring her around, and not even the time to talk to her. When everyone is enjoying the weekends I have to lock myself in my room and code, code CODE. When everyone is enjoying TVs after coming back from work, I read emails, filter resumes and do other work related stuffs. I don't have personal life; all of my time is consumed by this one little startup which may or may not work in the future.

Now you know why relationship won't work for me at this stage of time?

So whenever someone told me that they could have a nice work/life balance at a startup, I smiled. And when girls told me that they would support their husbands in pursuing their dreams at all cost, I could only conclude that they didn't know what they wish for.

They haven't seen the true cost of startup, yet.
Are you German? I don't know who would say "an euro" unless you pronounce it oi-ro.
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Analog computers used to come in various forms - including hydraulic. I once worked for an engineering Prof who had spent a lot of time using hydraulic analog computers to "solve" systems of equations modeling various kinds of real world systems.

One thing that I thought was particularly neat is that he had spent time using a hydraulic analog computer to model the flow of fluid through building walls....
Wait, what? The iPad 2 costs the same as the original iPad. It differs a bit in different countries, but that's mostly due to exchange rate differences, and Apple has always 'corrected' those when releasing product updates.
http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/

Read the section "Non-profits are NOT the Answer".
...or genetics.

(I'm not arguing the specific cause, just pointing out that it's not as simple as diet alone.)