skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think its obvious someone fresh out of college will have "excellent algorithmic thinking" since that's how they spent the last 3/4 years. So in that case you should be spending more time during interviews looking at the more likely areas of weakness, which I'd sum up as "real-world experience." If you're interviewing experienced candidates, then you can generally hazard a guess that their areas of weakness are elsewhere (lack of passion, knowledge and experience that hasn't kept up with the state of the art, etc).

Interviews are all about probing. They shouldn't be a set of rote questions that you apply to every candidate regardless of background. You should make a guess at what the candidate's weaknesses are, and then push on them, push on them some more. This will also help you learn how well they deal with adversity.

Of course, before this, testing is a good way to determine what a candidate's strengths and weaknesses are.

As a total aside, I've found that US Customs and Border Patrol (the ones who do "secondary inspections") are about the best interviewers out there. They probe so much you end up feeling a little violated.
Another implementation of the same idea - http://www.leavemealonebox.com

This one is supposedly 7 years old, so it predates the trunk version. It also looks less artistic and that's a good thing in this case if you ask me.
How much do you value your time?

My laptop is my primary tool. Day in day out.

Even at $75/h it pays off in 10 hours.
I like the exercise for the reader. It's rare that a blog post is actually trying to teach me to the extent that it would ask me to participate.
Using GNU's GDB Debugger
Back in early 80s I saw the same toy, but in a form of a toilet. It was a piggy bank.

A small plate was attached to the front of the seat, and the seat had its cover closed. Hand would appear from under the cover, steal the coin from the plate and follow with a flushing sound. It was really funny and it was, of course, made in Japan :)
HP's gone downmarket in a big way, pushing lots of $700 notebooks into Costco, Target, Office Max, etc. They're the only laptops you see in Costco anymore, I strenuously avoid them. I'll stick with thinkpads and Toshiba for XP/Ubuntu dual booters.

i commented on teh Mark Evans blog that macbooks have one feature no other laptop under about $1700 has, the DVI out. That, Time Machine, textmate, iphoto, firewire, a listenable sound card, and a few other features are easily worth $750 canadian.

I will say that i've had 4 mac laptops, 2 worked great (G4 powerbook and Macbook), 2 are problematic. Another powerbook had its logic board replaced 3 x (twice in last 5 months), and i've experienced spontaneous freezes on Leopard a few times when quitting Firefox or textmate. This i consider a serious issue.
Article makes reasonable (although not exactly new) arguments for running faster, leaner, less formal with fewer meetings and more emails.

What annoys me is the twitter part - who in their right mind would have any sort important technical discussions over twitter? Can you imagine discussing MySQL tweaks 140 characters at a time? Dynamic programming algorithms? I guess some people just like to hit every nail with a social media hammer.
What Netscape’s Founder Thinks About the New Google Browser
It is useful and important - just not to hackers.

If you look at the range of MBTI personality types (not that this is hard evidence), there's plenty of people who don't view the world in terms of focus, efficiency, and usefulness. In fact, one of the common differences in the J/P split is that P's like wandering about, being irresponsible, and having things constantly changing around them.

The social usefulness comes from the F/T split. To those who are thinkers, the people aspect is often belittled because to them, there is no pleasure gained from communicating with people (but, LISP... now that is a joy to work with!!!). However, to the F types, talking to people is very pleasant and comfortable - much more than writing code in a structured, logical programming language would ever be.

Wikipedia says that FP's count for 30% of the population, and FJ's, another 30%. Compare that to TP's or TJs (16%, 24%), and social browse captures a majority market space.

Programmers (INTPs and INTJs, mostly), although they are generally more active and enthusiastic customers, account for < 10% of the population. And they are right in that social apps aren't useful or important to them. However, they're a clear minority in terms of user base, and they're picky, disgruntled, hard to keep, and easy to offend.

SocialBrowse (and all social apps) may not have value to them, but it definitely has value to the majority of the world. Now, the key is getting off tech blogs and into real world marketing, guys.
Culturally, cars are status symbols. Computers aren't (except in small geek circles, sometimes). When you pay extra for a car, you're paying for prestige. When you pay extra for a computer... well... you're paying extra. Apple is trying to change this, and for some people it seems to be working.

(As for me, I wouldn't spend extra on a fancy car either, unless it had some significant technical advantages)
all advertising is bad advertising. I don't want to be distracted by an ad. I don't want to be tricked into hitting an ad link by mistake. And I don't want to see numerous ads(that usually have NOTHING to do with anything I'm looking for.

+ adblock doesn't seem to block search results ads, and imho thats where most people click ads anyways.
By having a unique product in terms of operating system and hardware design, Apple avoids their products becoming commodities. Thus they aren't subject to the same economic forces as Acer (jeez, how can you compare Apple to Acer, anyway...).

I'm not an economist but I wonder how much profit they get from positioning as a luxury good and how much from having a unique, single-vendor non-commodity product "ecosystem" that includes things like the iPhone, iPod, etc.
Setup a dozen seemingly random questions that will help you know what personality the person has.
I don't buy Cringely's logic. He rarely makes sense to me, and this column is no different.

Microsoft is working very hard to get into the Internet advertising business. They need a big, technology-centered growth business like advertising to power future growth because they're certainly not going to get it from Vista or Office.

If you assume that Microsoft won't block ads from its own ad network, the idea that Microsoft would block Google ads is unthinkable. Such obviously anti-competitive behavior would bring down the Wrath of Kahn from every government agency in Washington and Brussels.

It simply isn't going to happen.

IMHO, Google launched Chrome because Google has unlimited resources, a desire to play on the desktop, fuzzy notions about a web OS, and because Googlers just don't know what to do with themselves these days. Advertising is so profitable but, alas, so boring.

There's no reason why Chrome won't be successful, but there's also no clear business case for the product at present. Then again, there's no business case for Lively or YouTube either...
This reminds me of an old joke:

There are exactly two ways to do the dishes -
either after the meal or just before it.
The free -> monetize angle I was referring to was their reference to craigslist. I agree with you on the sustainable revenues part, that's basically what I was trying to get at.
Parallel data stuff makes sense. As for the hardware aspects of scaling: I don't think that people are thinking about hardware much beyond "more boxes". My understanding of the hype surrounding ec2 was that it mostly concerned the rich API/management options for configuring your scaling (in software).

If you mean that people are ga-ga over how many of Amazon's machines they could scale to but not how they can add layers of caching and database partitioning -- that's probably accurate. IMHO the key point is that Amazon has a generic framework. The architecture you choose to scale with probably ends up being a lot more ad-hoc, "driven" by your problem domain.

I'm fairly confident that if someone comes up with a rocket-ship approach to architecture that generalizes well for web startups, time and energy will be given over to thinking about it.
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After leaving Urahara’s place, Yoshino heads over to the remains of Bount mansion to confront Jin. While there Jin’s explains that Yoshino doesn’t know of her own importance to the Bount. Yoshino doesn’t want anything to do with Jin’s plan and decides to attack Jin, not caring whether she survives or not.
Acer actually do make some nice laptops, no, really, I'm not kidding. There are a few sexy/slim/light ones.

But they are not the laptops they sell for $399. Those are pretty much not laptops but rather movable computers - they serve _a_ purpose, but not the same purpose as a portable laptop.
All the problems you bring up are real. Perhaps the hack-together approach could be rephrased as a screening stage, not a hiring stage. No point in blindly hiring people after testing them with some random, one-day stressful sessions.

(It's like scoring students with exams; makes no sense at all, when an informal oral exam would really tell you how much the student knows. Scoring students while having a beer with them may not be conventional, yet my former PhD advisor used that as a pre-screen for hiring new grads.)
I've seen people do great, well-commented code at interview, and then after I recommend them, they turn into mediocre 9-5 coders.

People always misrepresent at interviews; I can't think of a way around this.
I totally question why someone would purchase a high performance sport car. 10 to 100 times the price of an already very expensive thing for performance you can't legally use and a nicer looking design. They're nice, but they're not $200'000 nice for a marginal increase in power, ability, & a nice body panel design.

Plus you can get motorbikes that would beat any ferrari for the same price as a prius.
With regards to craigslist -- I don't think that they ran with a high burn rate or took much (if any) VC money. Today, they are certainly profitable, although probably not making as much money as they could be. I think the key is to make sure you know how you will be making your long-term money before ofering stuff for free.
As a bonus, how many faces can you spot in the image at the top? I'm at 6 or maybe 7.

But seriously, these technologies are really interesting. The "shadow" of stealth bombers through standard cell waves is interesting. Eventually they may create a plane that emits white noise to cover up it's shadow.
You must have no expenses, amazing. Do tell.
Thoughts on Startup Ideas and Team
Shoeboxes are horrible. They're not fire-safe, not waterproof, difficult to secure, difficult to distinguish, easy to spill and easy to crush. Get a safe and dump things in there.
Laptops: Mac vs WinXP/Ubuntu?
Is there something I'm missing? I have tried to find good arguments for getting a Mac over Ubuntu/Windows, but haven't really found any that hold water. I mostly do documents, presentations, spreadsheets, research, internet browsing, light programming.

The differences between them appear to come down to personal preference than an overwhelming difference:
-Security. Mac and Linux have better security handling and less malware than Windows. I use DeepFreeze, which can fight off even laughing kitty.
-Survives accidents. Maybe there's a slight difference here, due to the sturdier frame/case of Macbooks?
-Performance. I'm looking at response time, level of annoyance during daily use. Vista is a bitch, but WinXP and Ubuntu seem great. With similarly equipped laptops, Macbook seems on par or slower than WinXP, and much slower than Ubuntu.
Thinkpads sell at about the same price as macs, if you choose the proper "options" to really make the choice comparable -- the base macs are a mid/upper thinkpad. I own both, I know first-hand. And both are very reliable, as far as I can tell. The macs lasted 4 years each; the thinkpad is 2 years old and kicking very well. We'll see what happens.
This is cool. For anyone who has cascading experience: what tuning can you do for the Hadoop jobs/does it autotune? How does performance compare to running multiple MapReduce jobs in sequence?

It would be awesome to see this compared to Microsoft's Dryad (http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/Dryad/) which also supports DAG-like large scale computing. I don't think Dryad is publicly available though...
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Emacs completion: tab-key indent or complete, hippie-expand
Prayers at an Exhibition - Bhutan’s Sacred Art and the Monks Who Protect It
OS X DNS, localhost: pass NULL for servname.
5 Reasons to Go All Angel à la Lookery
Are you sure that Python is faster than JavaScript? I'm not saying it isn't, but in a light of recent optimized JavaScript engines who knows?
I really like the solutions that you guys come up with. Instead of complex enterprisey solutions, you came up with simple, smart hacks like adding executable logic as SQL comment.
Of particular interest to some of the hackers here will be the "Impact Graph." This was my first Canvas + JavaScript graph implementation and I must say that it's a pretty nice system to work with. While Canvas is strictly a painting tool, I'm considering writing a library on top of it that will give me some of the interactivity and animation tools that I miss from Flash. Canvas is positioned to seriously compete with Flash, I'd love to see more people using it.
Ask HN: Going to TechCrunch 50?
Anyone going?

I'd love to meet-up with some fellow YC'ers!
In other words, unscrupulous investment bankers might see an opportunity in helping weaker banks launching covered bonds; given their circumstances, these banks will have to provide top notch collateral, ie their best remaining assets, and will probably not get a great price for them (ie the bonds will be both overcollateralised and expensive).

Either the offered price is less than what these assets could otherwise be sold for (i.e. the transaction won't happen) or it's more (in which case the price criticism doesn't make sense).

Other than that, decent but fear-mongering article. Pretty much any scheme by which you exchange cash for a set of promised future cash payments is bound to be abused at some point. There is very little new here, except that this is another quasi-guaranteed asset.
If the owner of the website uses advertisements to keep his site afloat, that's a noble cause. It's not as noble as making a profit more actively, but for personal and casual sites advertisement is a good thing. And Google Ads tries to give readers ads that they actually will care about.
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Bones Season four premiere on fox yanks in the uk
Long Synopsis: Agent Booth was invited to speak at Scotland Yard and Dr. Brennan was invited to speak at Oxford. While in London, the daughter of a prominent American living there is killed. Booth and Bones are asked to help out with the case.
speaking as a former windows user, macs are worth the money given the frustation it saves you and the tech support you no longer have to do for your family. (I tried using linux as a desktop but it was just too unfamiliar from windows comparatively)

I think the guy is missing the big picture
Israeli Hacker Known as "The Analyzer" Suspected of Hacking Again
Top 3 Secrets to Career Success at Fresh Start After Divorce Blog
Doesn't the USRP website list a passive radar as one of the uses for it?
If the supercar experience is what you want in a computer you'll be running unix or something more obscure on souped up hardware. Maybe the Mac Pro rates here (it would be a lot more certain if you could practically separate Darwin from the candy), but there's no way the macbook equates to a supercar. Careful with those car anologies - I have heard people make remarks like that about Volvos.
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Y Combinator Dataset Of Posts Version 1.7
A 133MB archive of Y Combinator posts is available by accessing http://www.rushy.com/ycombinator-news20080906.tar.gz
You forget that exotic cars arouse female interests in owners of the cars. That's what the owner pays for the price difference.

At the other hand, an exotic laptop doesn't arouse female interest in their owner. Probably they know it is just $700 difference.
Ten Ways to Stay Young at Fresh Start After Divorce Blog
Unlocked Sony Ericsson W550i
The W550i Walkman is a mobile phone for music lovers. FM radio, an advanced digital music player inside and everything you need to enjoy your music on the move. CD ripping software is included in the kit for getting your favourite songs into your phone.
Generic functions vs mixins: a case study
the people who block advertisements won't be clicking them anyways, so the person loses nothing.

As far as Google contextual ads? They are useless in 99% of the time...just because I'm looking at a blog post describing a new TV, doesn't mean I want to buy it, from the first person who tells me they have it for sale.

If the site owner wants to make it a noble cause, then he should just throw some affiliate links to the item he discusses.
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I love the thing that I can download The Law Order episodes along with thousands of other TV series without actually paying for every single episode I download. I also like that it is completely legal, as easy as iTunes is and it helps me save hundreds of dollars every month. There are no limitations to what and how much you can download it's a perfect way to download all your favorite TV shows
There's some good answers and examples to the questions about database sharding here:

http://www.codefutures.com/database-sharding/
Let’s cry for the poor fragmented, underreported startups
If you can and would pay 10 to 100 times the price, then you wouldn't describe the original thing as "very expensive".

(A prius doesn't cost an arm and a leg. boom boom.)
Cool. We should just post references to this comment in lieu of the "debates."
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Alex Payne's Why Scala at C4[2]
Are social networks continuous partial friendship?
My prediction is, that Chrome will take away market share from FF, for the mere fact that they are able to inovate more rapidly than FF folks. It's very well possible that two strong players will left in the end - IE and Chrome.
Summary: "several products exist with different specifications and prices"

...
If you have the money, of course you're going to spend 100x the price to get the best.

Getting a performance car isn't about the top speed, or performance in itself, it's a status symbol, a big toy, something to marvel over, something to show people, etc etc etc (I don't have one BTW.... yet).
Would love a link to that if you can find it (assuming it exists somewhere on the interwebs).
I think you can't go wrong with WinXP, and even Vista is OK. My friend uses it on Laptop with one-core Intel processor and 1GB ram, and he was able to configure it so it is booting and running as fast as XP.
I sometimes feel that I'm too critical of Scoble, and try to like him, but what the hell was the point of that?
I'm confused. My laptop is my source of earnings. Every hour I spend fiddling with it is an hour I don't get paid for.

What am I missing?
The reason the arguing never ends is because the Mac faithful deny that a Mac is actually more expensive. No one would say "but the Solstice is the same price as the Boxster, if you just drop a more powerful engine in the Solstice..."
It's about time they work out a plan to move forward and add some stability to these two companies and the market. I don't like the idea of having the taxpayers foot the bill for all of this mess, but the alternative is even worse (doing nothing and letting the market continue to its downward trend). I would imagine that in this day and age the majority of people have some, if not all, of their retirement money in the stock market either through 401ks or through private brokerage firms. Either way the the common American gets to pay for this mess - through depressed stock prices or through taxes used to bail out Freddy, Fannie, and others like them.

It's got to suck for anyone how owned shares of either of these two firms. Down something like 80% this year. Ouch!
If you could possibly provide more info as to how your friend did it. I'd definitely be interested, my laptop needs a boost.
> Down something like 80% this year.

Well, now that they have been nationalized, it's more like 100%. From my understanding (as gleaned from the Economist), this will wipe out shareholders, both common and preferred.

But either way, I think the Feds are doing a good thing, as these guys were pulling Enron-style shenanigans, (guaranteeing their own mortgages, etc) and dominating the conforming mortgage market due to their access to cheap debt. Let regular banks step in and serve that market, instead of being confined to riskier mortgages that the two giants weren't allowed to buy.
As a building architect, the system looks fascinating. However, the biggest problem I see is reinforcing - concrete performs very poorly in tension without steel (usually rebar) reinforcing, and in general is not allowed by most building codes. One solution would be to have the robot build a double wall that effectively acts as formwork for the real structural wall in the resultant cavity. The structural concrete would have to be poured after reinforcing is placed in the cavity, and structural continuity would need to be achieved by the rebar connecting to rebar in the foundation as well. The other approach that would work better for the robot would be a radical improvement in concrete technology that would boost the tensile strength without the need for rebar - that would be ideal.
My personnal experience:
-Windows Vista is not bad, my next Laptop is with Windows Vista. Windows Vista only works bad on old hardware/software.
-I have worked on Mac OS X for 4 months, I will not buy a mac soon, here is why:
Mac is cool for new users, it is easy to use. But if you are a good Linux/Windows user, you'll find that Mac OS X is a loss of time. I can do things faster in Linux and Windows.
For documents presentations, spreadsheets its pretty much the same for Mac or Windows because they both use Microsoft Office. I personnaly prefer Microsoft Office than OpenOffice. For internet browsing they all have firefox, so pretty much the same.
I don't know what you call exactly light programming. For Web Developpement I think it is pretty much the same, for Programs I love Visual Studio and I hate Mac OS X SDK Developer (or something like that) so that gives you my opinion.
And I think dual boots are stupid, I prefer one perfect OS, so I'm not buying a Mac to put Windows on it.
I think you're right, it all comes down to personal preference. I like macs for their sturdy laptop, and osx unix like os.

I got fed up of loosing precious time configuring linux and researching for 100% compatible hardware. I don't like windows, it slows me down. Oh, one more thing, I can get commercial grade apps like photoshop or microsoft words on osx. We always need to be compatible with the rest of the world.

I do pay a premium for Apple laptop, but hey, they're good quality and I'm a sucker for design.