skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the project is in fact "very exciting," maybe you should respond in kind. Humor them. Rent a rock star costume and wear it to the interview. Gently explain how you were moved by the job description but that there was this one part which seemed pretentious to you. Be honest. Tell them you cringed when you saw the words "rock star." Then, with all the drama you can muster, tear off your uniform facade and reveal the person you are underneath. Or at least the person you are in clothing suitable for a job interview.
If the questions were asked honestly, then you would have cited your sources. To be honest, I really don't care about neither the IQ issue nor about the answer. I just thought the questions themselves were very leading. The answers don't matter, the way the question is asked is the whole point.

As to the comment about me... Well, ok. If it makes you happy go for it, I'm glad to help make your day better. I'll give you a badge of honor, why not?
You can run a turbine engine on ethanol. It's just that the existing ones aren't certified for it.
Ooh, is it shiny?
A VC: Real Time Blogging
I feel that any list worded in the style:

- some item
- another item
- ...
- oh yeah, and REALLY IMPORTANT POINT

contains condescension inherently. It says "the last point is the core of my post and is so important that you must know it. See how I faked almost-forgetting-it to clearly show how trivial it is to me. Be thankful that I deigned to hand it down to you instead of just throwing it away."
Looks great actually. Shame we do all our testing on Dells... :(
When just about everyone is a rock star, the lone groupie will be in high demand.
I have yet to meet a 'rock star' that was particularly impressive. They're 'washed up, surreal-life cast member' quality at best.

Is there even such a thing as a 'rock star' anymore? There are indie-rock bands with small but loyal followings, sure, but 'rock star'? My daughter won't have any idea what the term means. It smells of old out-of-touchness. Like COBOL! ROCK STAR COBOL PROGRAMMER WANTED!
yes, my first computer was a timex sinclair 1000 with the 16k memory expansion pack plugged in the back, and then when that blew up (just stopped accepting keyboard inputs one day) I got my first "real" computer, a Commodore 64!! I'm also looking at other alternatives, but seems that the $299 price point for this thing is pretty hard to beat.
Scrabulous Now Officially Getting Sued
Ruby Samurais?

Ruby Commandos?

:)
I have both - the chemex is a much cleaner cup of coffee but more difficult to produce a 'perfect' cup. As a benefit, it doesn't require a burr mill grinder - the key to a solid french press cup is consistent grind.

But a french press cup brewed properly will express the flavor of the beans better than most other coffee brewing methods. But for the love of coffee, don't use a home drip machine. They suck.
10% is NOT average. the 90's distorted people's perceptions of good returns. 6-7% is more average, and that's with risk.
Facebook Became a Fan of Microsoft Live Search
I wouldn't be so sure. Even after 9/11, Southwest had minimal layoffs. Source: http://tinyurl.com/5mbq9y

While I certainly agree that fuel hedging has played a large role in their current short-term profitability, there's a lot more at work than well timed utilization of financial derivatives.
I don't think many people would debate what to do if you had the opportunity to sell at a huge markup (i.e. 40-80x your yearly take) that would leave you set for life. That's kind of a no-brainer.

The real question, to me, is whether you should build with the intention of trying to flip or if you should build with the intention of making it a stable business. That direction will make a huge difference in a lot of your decisions about whether to take on funding, whether to focus on early revenue or just on user numbers, etc. And there's no easy answer to that one; it really depends on what you want out of the experience, what your expected likelihood of being able to flip is, if you take satisfaction out of building over the long term or if you'll get bored in a few years anyway, etc.
To add to what other commenters have already stated: the largest proportional purchasers of one way tickets are business travelers. Not coincidentally, business travelers are also the least price sensitive.
Facebook Drops 250K on LuckyCal
Facebook invested 250K into Boston based LuckyCal
I used DB_Table with mysql and mdb2 a few weeks ago. Wasn't bad. Using it with the Table Generator class was useful. I'd also like to know what the best db framework is for php (I'm not a huge fan of the mvc frameworks--oftentimes I think they're overkill).
>What Linux needs, is PC manufacturer's support. I am not talking about drivers here, I'm talking about quality pre-installs done at the factory.

That would be wonderful. Ubuntu is making my laptop search very stressful. It is so much fun to use that I don't want to go back to Windows. However, if I buy a laptop that isn't compatible with Ubuntu then it will be hard or impossible to switch out the components for compatible ones like I did on my desktop. The only hassle-free solution is to buy Ubuntu laptops from Dell, but they currently charge about $150 more for the same hardware with Ubuntu installed compared to Windows (what happened to the "Windows tax"?).
yeah thats why added the Orange Savings account into the mix, 4.7%, no risk, 100% access to money
I think that only happens once the squirrels start bringing you food while you're under the tree.
Unfortunately 'the cell phone' does not exist. Even though they all probably support some form of MIDP, they are all slightly different. It's a true nightmare.

I would certainly pick a niche market like S60 or iPhone/Touch and not try to be cross-cellphone compatible.
I don't think technology wise, but they seem to spend a lot of time thinking about and experimenting with user interface and user experience. That is an interesting field no matter what, and satisfying when you get it right.
Stunt Programmer
Those rates are variable, EmigrantDirect had 5.15% going at the beginning of 2008 and now they're down to 2.75%. He's right, 7% is about as average as it can get.
It can not happen.

Until you can bring in a visionary dictator like Jobs that everyone channels their energy through, it is impossible to bring Linux to the level of Apple.

"The challenge for us is to figure out how to deliver something which is crisp and clean."

Crisp and clean? That's all it takes to match Apple?

A great movie requires a visionary director. Shuttleworth has does some amazing stuff with Ubuntu, but I think attacking directly at the bow of Apple is a misguided battle.
I've been using Ubuntu for over a year now first on a T60p laptop, now on a custom built desktop. The only compatibility issue I've had is the lack of ati support for Linux, other than that smooth sailing. I use linux simply because of how powerful it is, it doesn't stand in your way at all. As far as usability goes I'm a poor judge, everything seems logically placed to me, although it lacks the unity of MacOs and even to some extent of Windows. The open source community seems to finally be concentrating on elegant design, so this might change soon.
To be fair, all of the "world domination" quotes from Linus (oddly, the original didn't make the list) are made with tongue firmly in cheek. It's really not possible or practical for an open souce project to "compete" directly against another in the sense that Microsoft does. At worst, they snipe at each other counterproductively; at best, they share code and reimplement features trying to out-do the other.

The bit about OpenBSD is real enough though. Theo has a long history of being ... difficult, and over the past few years Linus seems to have lost patience.
If Richard Stallman sees this, he's gonna be pissed :)
That's the best illustration of a gorilla in a lab coat I've seen all day.
Arc Angel ?
Gonna be there. What's it like last time?
In almost every case, animals bred for specific traits end up with severe physical, mental, and emotional problems. The idea that humans are the one species that won't encounter these problems is a purely religious belief.
Just used it, very easy to use!

One question thought, will it work with Parallels(dont have parellels installed right now)?
Have you guys ever funded a startup based on producing custom hardware and software equipments?
It's too bad this doesn't work in Safari with GreaseKit plugin.
Do they still get groupies?
I think my wife would kill me if I came home with a $200 coffee roaster and tried to claim it would "save us money". It would, if I would use it all the time, but I bet most often I wouldn't have the patients and time and would end up not using it.

I've never really had good success with a blade grinder. I invariably end up with powder and large chunks.... maybe I should work on my technique.

At my last job we did the french press thing, and we found that if we didn't clean off all the residue everywhere (including taking apart the entire press and scrubbing everything) we got a pretty heavy bitter flavor after a few days.
Lua Lunatics
I think both dhh and pg want the best for "us" (and that's why they deserve to have fans). Maybe dhh is worried that pg's talking about risk is too discouraging for many people who would be happier as entrepreneurs but remain scared in their cubicle life. On the other hand pg might be worried that people end up not pushing themselves hard enough and ultimately failing and staying mediocre.

Since dhh was a speaker at Startup School I also assume they get along fine and we simply benefit from a kind of benign competiton.

Probably they are both right, what I would like to know now is which course of action has the bigger chance of success ;-)

Nevertheless I also feel pointing to the CEOs who stayed with their company might be inaccurate. Jeff Bezos might still be with Amazon, but he might not be much into selling books. He might be exploring things like the Kindle and Amazon Web Services, or something entirely different. The point: those longterm-CEOs might simply be doing startups within the safety of the mother company.
Wufoo are my heros because to be honest, I would never have thought there would be money in providing web forms. They might be an excellent example for "just don't die"?
I support eugenics because it has been successfully used to reduce incidence of a really horrible disease in humans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay-Sachs_disease#Prevention
But the events of Beowulf happened in Scandinavia. The poem itself was written in England, though. Probably.

Not that I think it matters much: I suppose only those cultures that have existed entirely in isolation really have truly unique myths, and that isn't very many cultures. And maybe not all of those unique cultures, either, given how many themes are found in the mythology of very different peoples.
Facebook and MS ink Search Deal
Virginia Tech building supercomputer out of 324 Mac Pros
Kaminsky (finally) provides DNS flaw details
And then you can work native in order to give your app much more access and power than a java app would have.
Google creates a new market and wreaks havoc on another
what if your product is the company to sell?
The point that most Linux users and developers seem to miss is not that a good user interface needs to be pretty -- it needs to be consistent. Sure, the stylish looks of OS X do a lot to woo people to the platform, but the experience is why people stay.

Consistency is the area where Linux fails miserably. Perhaps this is due to the lack of a single visionary who leads the way in Linux desktop development, but I'd say the problem lies more in the 'not built here' mentality of the developers. Which is kind of ironic, because the entire point of free software was that anybody could contribute to improving it.

Consider this: Think of your top ten Linux applications, and the GUI toolkits they use to handle their interaction with X11. I'll wager that, out of those ten applications, you can probably list four or five different GUI toolkits, each of which works slightly differently. Why isn't there just one really good GUI toolkit?

I think the answer lies in pride -- everybody wants to have 'their' project, so they start their own, rather than contributing to an existing codebase. For the same reason, open-source project maintainers often do an awful job of listening to their users and co-developers, because their pride of being at the head of the train is threatened by other people making key decisions.

This pride also extends out into assuming that the user of said application wants to be an expert in its use, which leads to overly complicated preference panes, nonsense confirmation dialogues, and so on.

This is why Linux applications often have the most appallingly inconsistent interfaces, and sadly, I can't think of a good solution to the problem. Frankly, I wish I could, because I would love to run Debian Linux on a Lenovo tablet, and have a GUI that is as useful for me as OS X.
Also requesting an invite. Thanks!
I think the logo needs a redesign. You can spend $200 and get a better design at http://99designs.com. Allow people automatically submit their video updates to their Twitter accounts. Talk to FriendFeed and add your service. Add width and height to the embed code. Can't say anything more because it is still in private. These are just my suggestions.

Overall, good job.
Human beings can be selectively bred for various traits, but I don't think this is the issue for any intelligent, educated person since science is pretty clear on the matter. I take issue with the idea that human being can be improved, specifically with the word "improved" or any other such term used instead. Improved is subjective at best and totally repulsive when one considers what "improved" might actually mean to those defining an improvement (Nazi eugenics program). Human nature is such that any human designed program to selectively breed human beings will ultimately become a gross perversion, since the program would require institutionalization, planned breeding, castration and outright murder. We humans tend to be somewhat ethical and decent on an individual level but on a social or national level we're repulsive, greedy, disgusting monsters. Frankly, we can't trust ourselves.
The Windows tax is offset by the crapware subsidy.
Cydia 2.0 vs Installer 4.0
I find ProggySquare to be slightly more readable, partly because of the additional empty space taken up by letters like A
25 Visionaries Who Created Empires From Virtually Nothing
One way to start to fix this problem is with marketing. Linux is just the kernel; GNOME is the OS. Ubuntu and Fedora are GNOME distros. You shouldn't expect to run KDE or Motif programs on GNOME; after all, they were written for a different operating system. Of course, this divides the former "Linux" market into even smaller pieces...
Holy crap, that's awesome.
Humans often test for those traits. Couples from populations that have a high incidence of the same recessive disorders will frequently abort kids who test positive for those disorders.

And anyway, eugenics doesn't have to go that far -- what about policies that just reverse the dysgenic effects of low-education, low-accomlishment, high-crime types breeding more:

http://www.projectprevention.org/
I'm Vice-President in Charge of Crayons.
Lost tapes from the '60s of Dr Who composer Delia Derbyshire
I think the issue is not whether IQ is a good predictor of success, within the system of it's application (for example the military screening new employees). The issue is whether this equates intelligence.

Rephrased: there would probably be less of an issue if it IQ was really "SP" (Success Predictor), not "Intelligence Quotient".

It might seem like the same, but I don't think it is: throw a Harvard graduate into the middle of the jungle, and he might fare rather badly. On the other hand, throw a perfectly successful jungle inhabitant into the middle of Harvard and he might also fare rather badly.
He mentions he is taking some substantial time off, likely he sold his equity to others in the company and will live off of that for awhile.

It is a hard transition from a "scrappy start-up" to a more mature start-up. I could imagine at one point he is super important, in every meeting, helping direct the focus of every little thing, then as the company expands you get pushed out to the side a little and treated more like an employee. The fact is he was/is an employee, but it is hard to not think of yourself as a little more then that when you have had so much involvement for so long.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 48 - Un-Nested Conditionals
Being opposed to sex is common on the American left. If you want names, Hillary and Joe Lieberman are two prominent ones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_mod
How do you plan on providing an exit to your investors by following the 37sig model?
DC Post of the Week - Finding Latency in Multi-hop Connections
Invite please :)
In many countries, such as India, there is actually a rise in women in Computer Science, probably more to do with the fact that in most cases they start off on an equal footing to boys in terms of exposure to computers pre-college and secondly due to the lucrative (in relative terms) job prospects and non-manual nature of the work.

The trends there seem to be following the early trends of the graph here (but in a more condensed timeframe), and it will be interesting to see how it continues.
Steve Forbes?

From Wikipedia:

"Malcolm Stevenson "Steve" Forbes Jr. (born July 18, 1947), is the son of Malcolm Forbes..."

"Malcolm Stevenson Forbes (August 19, 1919 – February 24, 1990) was publisher of Forbes magazine, founded by his father B.C. Forbes..."

"Bertie Charles Forbes (May 14, 1880 – May 6, 1954) was a Scottish financial journalist and author who founded Forbes Magazine."

So virtually nothing means being the third generation in your family to run the magazine?
The Beginner's Computer Handbook - Understanding & Programming The Micro
I think that some of the "interesting" factor comes in when people rely on your projects. It is the most satisfying thing when you begin a new project with goals, milestones, ambition, and fervor. However, it is very satisfying when people benefit and appreciate what you put effort into.
I love my Dell Latitude X1, and apparently it does not cost much more than the eeepc on ebay (new - it just isn't available from Dell anymore). And it's a real computer with a similar form factor to eepc (still holding up very well and I have had it for two years now). In my opinion eeepc is just garbage - sorry. I think it is one of those things that let's people go "oooooh, cute, want", and two days after being bought it ends up unused in the corner.

Try to find a Latitude X1 on ebay (I am running Ubuntu Linux on it - also, I just learned it can be upgraded to 2GB RAM, despite officially only supporting 1GB).

I use it as my main computer for everything except playing 3d shooters. The keyboard is fine, the 12' screen is OK for traveling and at home I have attached it to an external 24' screen.
"Michael Milken was perhaps the first “corporate raider” in history. "

Milken was not a corporate raider. He financed raiders, but never raided companies himself. This article is riddled with errors.

"Milken’s insight led him to buy junk bonds when they were cheap, knowing full well that the government would bail out these large corporations and allow him to reap huge profits when they did."

Actually, he used studies dating decades to demonstrate that high-yield bonds outperformed other investments. Bailouts were a pretty minor part of this.
Right, which presumably means that the tale originated before the Saxons invaded Great Britain. But nonetheless the version we know is told in Old English and not any of its continental predecessors, and its earliest manuscripts are all found in Britain. It isn't disqualified from being uniquely English by the fact that it derives from earlier times in Scandinavia any more than Mormonism is disqualified from being uniquely American by the fact that it derives from earlier times in Jerusalem.
which is the name of your company :) ?
Hasbro Finally Sues Makers Of Scrabulous; Invokes DMCA To Get It Removed
Thin Locks in D
Common Lisp: First Contact [pdf]
from the post:

"When designing UX think about what your mom would use, not what Louis Gray would use"

That's probably a good rule. That's not saying build something a geek wouldn't use.
I'm not convinced that a four-dollar cup of coffee is really a feel-good luxury item though. A luxury item stops feeling like a luxury when you buy it twice a day -- it just feels like an overpriced daily necessity.
Fail: it's many times harder to build a business and sell it for $10m than it is to build a profitable small business. 1 in 1000 of the ppl who go for your option will make it - 1 in 10 of the ones who go for mine will make it. And some of my 1 in 10 will probably get the $10m option too.
Personally I think the Pike's Place Roast is a big improvement over their old brewed coffee, although I find it varies from day to day.
NZ judge orders girl's name changed
Sun technologist: SOAP stack a 'failure'
I just looked at the article again (blog article, not maths), and I must admit the gcd in the equation does not make it seem so exciting. gcd seems algorithmically very close to other algorithms for computing primes.

On the other hand, playing around with it would probably be fun :-/
invite please, windycitizen@gmail.com
Erlang: Scalaris Released
I'm not even trying to be funny...I do hate my job, and I am pretty good at it
Olin Shivers' Paper on Continuations and Transducer Composition [pdf]
That's Luxi Mono.
It's funny that he mentions the TSA. It's true that the negative experience with them makes you think less of the airlines, even though logically you know it isn't their fault, in the same way that you blame Windows when an app bugs out.

But it doesn't make you think any less of any particular airline relative to their competition, because they all suffer from the same thing. Unless there's some legal way for an airline to circumvent the security lines (and I have to think there isn't or we'd already have that) there's no competitive disadvantage there.
we might not have to have any (other than YC). And I'm not saying we would never sell...it's just not the primary goal. We'll see though...I'm getting ahead of myself.
Aurora Feint iPhone App Delisted For Lousy Security Practices
I think this is quite interesting. On one hand we have an investor saying things you would expect an investor would say (grow as much as you can). On the other hand we have an owner saying things you would expect an owner would say (my business is great). Yet when these two say it, it seems fresh for some reason.

Perhaps because when they say these things we know that they believe it in some absolute sense not just because it benefits them. So maybe I should say refreshing, not fresh.

I love HN.
I second this recommendation. Panic Sans is about as good as it gets.
This essay reminds me of the HOPL papers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOPL).

As a younger hacker it provides insight to what was going on in the LISP and Scheme communities in the 80s. (Thanks PG!)
My understanding is that heavier luggage requires special handling (and is thus more expensive) due to concern for safety of the people who handle them.
OK, everybody: stop calling views you disagree with "a purely religious belief". None of the ideas mentioned above is a "purely religious belief", even though several of them are half-wrong and the others are half-right.

Animals bred for specific traits don't almost-always wind up with severe problems, unless said breeding is done over-zealously (trying to do too much in too few generations) or deliberately for traits which aren't necessarily beneficial to the animal. All modern-day farm animals are the product of a lot of selective breeding over the past few thousand years, and they don't have "severe" problems.
I wrote a blog post on the very topic of so-called "rock star" job postings: http://coderific.com/blog/post/564