skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did quite a bit of it when I was younger. It was good work if you could get it.
Twitter's heavy focus in states with major cities probably looks very much like early graphs of cell phone use. I still have a hard time imagining it spreading, but I guess I haven't been bit by the twitterbug yet.
FCC Commissioner: Return of Fairness Doctrine Could Control Web Content
Sad but true that landing a job with a great company takes more than charisma alone.

Last 2 interviews I had I was turned down largely due to poor performance on coding challenges.

I feel it was the right choice for each company to make. They had really great teams and I admire them for holding out to hire an equally charismatic individual with truly excellent coding skills.

The hurt you feel getting turned down when you know you've put your best face forward is the blunt end of professionalism. A good indicator that you've got your sight set in the right direction.
Ah but that has a lot to do with not knowing what shoes to buy. I'm a distance runner, used to get injured a lot, now I wear the right shoes and do 10+ miles a day at 6:00-7:00 mile pace. The key is having a group/friends to run with and enough discipline to do it every day.

Swimming is awesome also, but running is easier to do because you don't need a pool or a club to do it.
Once you know what kind of shoes you need (from a specialist or something), go to runningwarehouse.com and use the coupon code CP20 (corporate perks 20% off coupon). That can make a $90 shoe like $65-70 because their shoes are already like 10-20% off to begin with. No discount for asics or mizuno though :(
I'm an avid cyclist and I can sunburn easily if I don't use sunblock. I would say that surfers are more likely to burn (and do so more quickly) simply because beaches don't have much shade. While riding a bicycle you can often duck into tree shadows during a ride.

Some cyclists do use long-sleeve summer jerseys, but they're in the minority. Short sleeve and sleeveless jerseys are more popular because they are cooler.
Hmm I'm a runner and tried biking...but hurt my knees

lol different strokes for different folks!
If you're ruining your ankles just from running on dirt, you aren't wearing the right shoes...
If you exercise you're more likely to be health-conscious about what you eat too, which can contribute to long life.

Just another one of those things.
One main reason that I would never ever interview for MS is that I will have to use Vista. I can live with XP, but god forbid not with Vista.

Is there any MS employee in this board, can they shed some light on what OS-es do people use to develop with.
Maybe it is allowed, but is it frown up to use a non-MS OS?
But an iPod or Porsche are used for very specific things (listening to music and going fast, respectively). His point was that the original Eee was useful in a way normal laptops or PCs are not. To apply the same name to more conventional devices dilutes the brand power of the original Eee, much like if Porsche made a pickup truck.
Same here...I work for a web design firm and this client wanted the site to be the next youtube.

If only he had more than 5gb of bandwidth on his shared hosting plan...then maybe we could get out of beta...
Automate as much as possible. Reduce the time you need per customer, so if you record how much time you need for current customers -- then multiply that out. If you had 2x the customers would you be able to support them properly? How about 10-50x?

Is there anything you can do to make the existing customers happy? If you keep concentrating on them, more will follow.

Just take it slowly... don't do massive advertising/marketing spends all at once. Control the rate of new customers you get.

Each time you grow you'll probably find issues, so best to do it slowly... otherwise everything could fuck up.

It's tempting to go 'oh things are working now, let's throw $20-80k at advertising tomorrow and see what happens!'

Nothing worse than having 20,000 angry customers.
VC Firm Confirms That It’s Clueless, Subpoenas TheFunded For Negative Review
Posterous.com (YC summer 08) launches Video support
"imagine yourself living next door to him"

In my imagination I'm not peering through his basement window going "Oh no, things I don't understand and which therefore they must be 'potentially dangerous'! This an emergency!"
Yes, this is an old parody, but it has traveled far beyond its original intended audience. As little as 12 months ago I was handed this, in printed form by the well meaning manager at a company I was consulting for when I suggested using linux on a server to serve their small web site.

He took me aside and in a fatherly way intoned "There's something you should know about this Linux". Where does one even begin?
In the bigger picture, ASUS need to fill in all the gaps between the low-end eee and a laptop proper, so they don't open an opportunity for a competitor.

Their brand "eee" is their best way to signal to consumers that they have a smaller-than-laptop available and why don't you have look, let's see I bet this one is just right for you, ok? a bit bigger? a bit smaller?

Incidentally, they already have dropped the "eee" brand from the high-end "eee" style machines.

Also, I hope I fail as well as them. :-)
Not necessarily.
You have to compare sales to something. He's comparing (I assume) to what he thinks they could have been.
"This is hardly a "chemical set". It sits firmly in "WTF" category, especially if you are charged with protecting public safety.

A couple of posts earlier you said this is _not_ an example of "war on the unexpected", now you argue that because people in charge say "wtf?" when they hear what he's doing, they should shut him down just in case - in the interests of public safety.

Which is exactly the point of the "war on the unexpected" discussion.

"Consider the context. An usually large amount of potentially dangerous chemicals in a residential area is an emergency situation."

No, it's not. A swimming pool is an unusually large amount of potentially dangerous chemical - someone could die of asphyxiation if they accidentally inhaled even a very small fraction of it! Ban DiHydrogen Monoxide! Fearmongering for everyone!
I should point out that not all contracting agencies are like that. Quite a few of them don't fabricate candidate's CV and some even have their own technical screening procedures.
Someone should also write a post about the stupid but real requirements that get put into job postings
Posterous keeps getting cooler and cooler. Nice work guys!
Terrible, sensationalist headline.

Was "doing science in a residential area" an actual quote? If not, why is it in quote marks?
Next episode: Posterous now delivers babies, too!

Jeezus H, Gary and Sachin, take a break or something. You're making us the rest of us look bad. And I even know some of the other stuff you're working on, too, so it's almost depressing.

Ha nice work.
Very cool update. Now I'm waiting for my phone to support video capture (GUESS WHICH PHONE!).

Once you guys roll out customizable themes and domains, I'll definitely be using Posterous to host my blog (vs. tumblr). That multiple posting feature is really winning me over.

Great job pumping out the features.
I don't know. Were there ever all that many?

(Although I know plenty of adults who might spend their holidays doing garage science, if it weren't for the fact that they already get paid to do it as a day job.)
Now imagine the pain you would have to go through before acquisition.
Thanks!

While I can't share specifics of our operations due to privacy concerns, I can share some general thoughts ...

I've had a series of 'startup setbacks', but this time, I guess the one main thing we did differently was: to build something that people are not only willing to use, but also willing to pay for. We saw plenty of examples where people loved to use stuff for free, but didn't find much 'value' when it came to paying for it. If someday Gmail went paid, a vast majority of users will not pay and move to other free email services. So our challenge was to mould our idea into a 'product', not just a fancy application.

I guess the other reason we saw some success was because, although our product has atleast 10 competing services, but we focus on simplicity of use, which I think attracts a lot of Web users these days.

And yes, we didn't give up, even when things weren't going well. I kept saying to myself: whatever happens I'll not pull the plug.

We still have a long way to go.
Thanks kyro! Paul says that the 10 weeks of YC are some of the most productive times you'll have in your entire life. We can confirm that first-hand. =)
Commentaries are even funnier.
True. Thanks for your viewpoint.

Althought our service is completely automated, still internal process automation has been our core initiative. While we haven't been able to achieve as much as we wanted, but we did streamline a lot of our processes.
Start sending emails, get on the phone.

We were thinking on similar lines, for an offline marketing strategy, which by the way, we haven't utilized at all.

Thanks.
I'll take a drop-dead easy solution over a theme any day.

Don't get me wrong, themes will be awesome, but simplicity and ease of use are the game changers with Posterous. Keep up the good work guys!
I don't know if Apple feels pressed. It's hard to say if, long term, you'll need hardware to jailbreak an iPod. I'm just pointing out that there is a bit of hubris in the jailbreaker mentality --- it is not, from a CS perspective, an unsolveable problem to make jailbreaking more effort than it's worth. Apple's got a lot of smart people.
Also, iPod stands for the same thing across its product range -- an MP3 like any other company might make, but more stylish, more trendy, and easier to use. In fact that's what the Apple brand stands for as a whole.

What does Eee stand for across its entire product line. Is it stylishness? compactness? low power consumption? You can't send mixed messages about a brand name -- if you look at iPod ads, they all focus on creating the "image" of iPod and they let product-specific ads tackle the feature sets.
It's a good idea, seeding job reqs with nonsense requirements (I'd do something more believable, though). A much better idea: never using recruiters. You will get luckier on Craigslist.
Mercedes Benz SLK revived the concept of the hardtop convertible, and now almost every convertible make is shifting to a hardtop. The difference between a hardtop convertible and a soft top is basically the difference between a iPhone and a Nokia N95 (comparison to a regular phone is a strawman).
weird. you can do that for free on IRS website, in 20 minutes or so.
I start to use Disqus on my new blog on Blogger. It's wonderful.
Looks interesting, considering that it can target both the JVM and .Net CLR.
There are some unofficial video recording apps for the iPhone, and they have email support built right in. Hopefully one of these will make it to the app store, and we'll have a direct video to blog flow. Brings a whole new meaning to live blogging.
9.5 hours is actually just thorough. Hiring is the #1 thing any engineering org has to do right. Remember, a false positive will cost you far more in dollars, time, and effort than a false negative.

Microsoft is a huge company. The best thing it can do to improve its odds in the marketplace is to put enough process around hiring such that they can significantly reduce the false positive rate.

I'd argue more people should do full day interviews than less. You wouldn't marry someone after knowing them for only 4 hours, so why should a company hire someone after getting to know them for less than a day? ;-)
FTA: The problem apparently exists within the software licensing code, rather than the functional part of ESX software.The license code falsely identifies many implementations as being out of license, prevents new virtual machines from launching, or existing VMs from migrating to new hosts.

Another case of anti-piracy junk causing real damage to real, legitimate users. Its gotta be tough when your purchased software accuses you of being a thief and hoses your entire infrastructure to the point of locking your instances away form you so you can't even move them. I'd bet that doing away with licensing algorithms altogether and just accepting the piracy that might happen would have been much better outcome than this for all invloved.
Ask YC: Help on authorization for iframe embedding
Hi All,

Does anybody have tips on how to allow only authorized websites to embed a web page I control into their website. My first thought was to use the HTTP_REFERRER, but thats not reliable.

My second thought was to create an algorithm that only the authentic website and my website knows. The authentic website would send through a hash of the result of the algorithm, which my page checks. This could be something like a mixture of the day, month, year and hour of the request, multiplied and summed in different ways, concatenated with a password/pin number.

I'm not great at Math, so don't have much of an idea if this would be secure or not. But to my untrained eye, it seems it would be more than enough to stop script-kiddies from just copying the source of a page .. but how much would it slow down someone more experienced and persistent?

Any thoughts?
I wonder if that's common of consulting agencies. That would explain the triumvirate of crappy consultants that we had at work. I guess a way to combat it would be to publicize consulting agencies that are guilty of that sort of thing.
What we have here is the textbook example of why we don't see many science articles getting voted up on news.yc.

- Linkbait-flavored, exaggerated, inaccurate headline stolen from Harry Potter.

- Results presented out of context. How significant an advance is this? What exactly can I do with it? Who else is working on it?

- Lame, vague description of technology at a level that wouldn't satisfy a curious fourth grader.

- Reference (but no link) to papers in subscription-only journals that nobody can afford.

What a waste of five minutes.
One Man's Quest to Digitize and Publicize Rare Vinyl
If anyone outside of the tech world came to your site they would have no idea what it is.

Social news network is meaningless to a surprising amount of people, which will probably make it very hard to market.

Also, the constant user registration pop-ups kills your sites usability, and I consider myself an early adopter.
The real value of virtual dung and other online items
Some of the Microsoft Interview Process Filmed
I did pink box testing and, boy, it's exhausting.

http://www.pinkboxjapan.com/ [NSFW] (sorry)
I think that because part of his team being in India, he can keep expenses low.
Highly Demographic Language
Chlorine is by far the most common pool cleaner, but not the only option. Some pools use other methods like ozonation and UV sterilization. Neither of these would bother your skin. Pools like this are admittedly much harder to find, but if you really want to swim it might be worth the effort to track one down. I have a friend that bought an 'endless pool' that uses ozonation technology because of a chlorine allergy.

If you use soap and shampoo that are specially formulated to remove chlorine after you swim, it will also help you immensely. Most of the bad effects of chlorine for your skin are from longer-term exposure. Of course, you still have the carcinogen issue...but you can minimize that somewhat by swimming in a cooler temp pool with cool ambient air.
The explanation is much simpler: You burn much faster on or in the water because of the reflections from the water...you're basically sitting on a giant mirror.

I fried myself once when I was sailing, and I had the worst burns on the bottom parts of my body (bottom of chin, bottom of knees, basically anywhere the rays hit me after bouncing off the water.)
nothing against adodb but if mantis is any clue it doesn't solve this problem. I've tried installing postgres in mantis and it was a no go due to known bugs, related to the area of schema definitions.
Breaking a Vigenère Cipher
NSFW - four little letters that make life a lot easier for everyone else.
I think we need high quality science posts, not any ones. I think we used to have some of those.
Adequacy was fun when they were trolling k5. Welcome to the internet of 2002.
My mom sent me a forward about how Harry Potter was turning people to satanism. Supposedly from some conservative christian group, it read like The Onion, and sure enough: http://www.elektron.pl/ks-jacek/Harry%20Potter%20Books%20Spa... had been passed around as a "real" story.
who needs it?
Coldwater Creek Coupons
Commentary on how to find the best Coldwater Creek Coupons.
Ask YC: How to web scrape 100s of sites/forms?
hi...

a potential research app requires the scraping of a few hundred websites/forms and diving into the child links to obtain the linked/parent structure ie. company->dept->title->name.

in this case, this would involve going 4 levels deep, and getting the required information.

so, does anyone know of a method/app/company that can be used to accomplish this. orm am i going to have to figure out how to get a number of cheap guys to write a bunch of python scripts!!

thanks
Excellent job, guys. I'm still not a fan of the email-to-posting system, but the rate at which you've added features is stunning.
Thank You Yahoo for YUI!
It is truly amazing what power you can add to your web app with very little coding thanks to YUI. Thank You Yahoo!! You guys rock.
'Slow' iPhone 3G glitch blamed on secrecy
...cheap guys to write a bunch of python scripts

You know what will be 'cheap'. Writing it yourself.
Luke, you guys at Startuply has been working insanely fast too!

They recently rolled out an awesome resume tracking system for employers, which we definitely hope to be using in the future.
That's like the idea behind the dregs of postmodern literature: that by deliberately being bad, you're denying people the right to call you bad. That is not the case: if you're bad, then you're bad, the end. And Nielson does things poorly in his site design.
Scientists develop skin for robots
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=272266
Can you not? Please?

I'd prefer YC's comments not go the way of Digg or Reddit.
Spectra Visual Newsreader - web-based news visualization from MSNBC
This was certainly useful as I'm scheduled to interview with them in a couple weeks. I know some people who have been interviewed there on both the accepted/rejected sides of the coin.

You can be technically savy and still not be a good fit for the team and vice versa. Communication is equally important if not the most important facet. If a team isn't on the right wavelength you'll have more problems than you can count.
Cities, Ambition, Distortion
That's funny. EDF chipped in at the last company I worked for (Arbor Networks).
Students Develop 'Mind-Control' Interface to Play Video Games Without a Controller
I actually know one of the people on that team(Arnav) and worked with him during the 2007 ARML(http://arml.com) competition.
new logo? how does this relate to hacker news?
You wouldn't marry someone after 9.5 hours, either.

The problem is, if you insisted that every first date lasted ten hours, you'd rarely get a second. The ones who did make it though your screen would probably be neurotic and weird.
fair enough, I was jokingly referencing this comment from @jowyang "Friends, before you go ape shiggles for Google Insight, please note the data is NOT USAGE, it's just querying the frequency of search terms"
http://twitter.com/jowyang/statuses/885631287

jokes and odd references often get lost in textual translation.
Something called SearchQuest already does it. It's kinda unstable, though...
Ya, this is pretty old hey.
What is the cost of failure in your scenario?

Are people going to be able to make serious money off of cheating you, or are you going to get a few misimpressions from buggy browsers?

If the cost and risk are low, then HTTP_REFERER is good enough.

If not, then you are going to get very friendly w/ javascript and authentication of untrusted requests.
This is hardly news to anyone that has been a landlord in the last twenty years in any state. Residential Real Estate law is so screwed up and has encouraged this type of behavior for years.

And where is the Hacker News connection?
If every first date lasted TEN HOURS. Well, if you're cooking breakfast in the morning, maybe a second date might be expected. ;-)
Everyone I know there uses Vista (unless they're using something EVEN NEWER WAHAHA)

But really, Vista-hate? Does Vista really get in the way of you opening MS Visual Studio (which seems to be the IDE of the day there)?
Or get one expensive guy to write you a script that

writes the scripts to scrape the sites
by scraping the sites
to read the structure
to write the scripts to scrape the sites.
well mark has to realize that to other family members, his issues may
not matter. maybe i am using motor oil produced by evil people...i
don't know because motor oil is just something i use.

for him, he should stick to his guns. mac products are typically not exceptional and the
users are consumer sheep...exactly the same hipsters who mock rampant
consumerism elsewhere in society are the ones camping out to buy a
phone.

i do so wish anarchists would start tagging apple stores
Where do you live? You can swim safely in almost any random pond.
Is ShiftSpace Useful?
Awesome info, thanks for the recap. Though, its a shame that the event had to be on a weekday :-\, but, otherwise, it could get too crowded :D.
Great idea, but the quality is awful--not at all surprising, given that you're using a video format dating from the late 90s (Flash Video 1, a slightly modified version of the decade-old H.263 format). "Looking like Youtube" is not a compliment in 2008.

High quality at reasonable bitrates in Flash isn't difficult; you just need to use x264. ( 280kbps example: http://norp.ath.cx/h264.html ) Quality has improved quite a bit since that sample was made, too: http://i35.tinypic.com/rk33wx.png (screenshot from 400kbps encode). There's a reason a huge number of sites, both small startups to companies as large as Facebook, are switching to x264.

Drop by #x264 if you need more information; we're there to help. And if you need something more in-depth, I do contracts, too...
Did you read it first? It was an awesome article. It isn't paranoid conspiracy-theory linkbait at all, despite what the title may imply. It's a retelling of the crimes and the ensuing trial of four African Americans who decide to use an obsolete legal defense that, once upon a time, legitimated chattel slavery to try to escape the death penalty. It's surreal. It may have themes in common with some very bad articles on reddit, but it is not one of them. It's a false positive. This belongs on Hacker News.
In France they give the thing away with mobile phone subscriptions. What they do is build dazzling displays for it in mobile phone stores, positioning it as the lastest in cool gadgetry. And I must admit it really looks slick, in a "I didn't know there was a new iPod that's kind of like a notebook computer" kind of way, which I guess is exactly what they're aiming for.
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