skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My 2 cents: I was contacted by a recruiter, unsolicited through a referral, and asked if I was interested in interviewing. At the time, I already had an offer from one of the other big companies, which I was upfront about. The recruiter said it was ok, and would set me up for the first round of interviews. After about a week of emails, I just simply stopped hearing from the recruiter. Not a single interview, no reason for terminating contact, just plain dead silence. I tried emailing her a few times and left her a voicemail, noting very politely that they had contacted me and not vice versa, and asking if they were still interested in setting up an interview, but all I got was stony silence. If that's not broken, I don't know what is. For a company that hires the best engineering talent, they either hire substandard HR people, or perhaps most HR people just operate at a different level of efficacy.
Rob, which 3 are new? I felt I had read all of them before.
> Retorts to the nothing-to-hide argument about exposing people's naked bodies or their deepest secrets are relevant only if the government is likely to gather this kind of information.

Whatever happened to the TSA's body scanners? Are they still around?
Thanks.

I expect a response with a lot of emotion.

Josep.
Ah, that's promising, thank you.
I think you misunderstood the quote..as you can check if you want but there are no high selling games on iOS in $20 to $10 range..
Why Kubrick used "Daisy" for HAL's death (first computer to sing - Daisy Bell)
Two weeks on AngelList
One of the few reasons I've held out on excel - pivot tables seem to be such a great way to use SQL like queries on spreadsheet data. Excellent!
I totally remember checking out the Yonkly source code when I was first learning asp.net mvc. :) Has it really been years already?
I believe what people are protesting is that austerity measures, more often than not, are enforced upon services that benefit the middle to low income working class, rather than on the corporations that were complicit in creating the problem in the first place.

They are protesting for a more balanced approach.
I'll be happy when someone else writes an 'I'm leaving Google design because' rant other than Bowman's from 2009. That single post is probably pretty tired from all the constant traffic to it every time this meme comes up.
I had a similar experience. Same letter from the recruiter, back-and-forth with rate-your-skills, but then nothing. It's strange because the position they had in mind seemed directly aligned with my proven interests and abilities. Hell, my cover letter was pretty much describing the job they wanted before they even told me about it.

I really see it as strange that I never got a call back. (Maybe it's not over yet, it's only been a few weeks.)
So it's die then. You can't even buy WebOS devices in many (most?) countries so how they expect to gain any market share at all is beyond me.
This is fairly huge. Anyone who is sufficiently advanced or works long enough with Excel sees it as a lot of stuff around an amazing analytic engine. I wonder if they'll have large dataset support?
> it is making itself a target before it has any real social defenses

The system doesn't exactly have control over who notices it.

Some people are (rightly or not) excited about it and building services, sites, and the like around it. That aspect of its virality certainly isn't a bad thing if the community wants to live past that coming critical inflection point you suspect will happen.
Great comment and very true, you need to be able to take criticism to get better. I'm curious, which school is considered the top design school? Thanks.
Are you still working on Aterium.com? Or do you have a new startup that you're working on now?
"The touch-screen platform will be implemented in around 7,000 McDonald's restaurants in the United Kingdom, according to reports, in an effort to improve efficiency and speed up customer service times."

Here's an idea: create a Chipotle-style ordering app. You'll improve efficiency, speed up customer service times, cheaper capital investment than buying all those touchscreen kiosks, still get the benefit of looking technologically savvy, increase your brand recognition by getting your logo on millions of phones, and most of all, keep all those cashiers employed and contributing to the economic growth of Europe--a win-win for the long term health of McDonald's and their shareholders.
This is of interest to me. I have a computer science background and would like to know more about bioinformatics. I have been looking for specific, easy, midlevel and big projects so that I can start learning the trade.

I know that NCBI is a good organization for such a field.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
There isn’t a speed limit: Line up customers before you ship
Ask HN: Choices for Start Blogging
I'm going to start doing some startup blogging and there seems to be basically three main choices for blogging:

1. Hosted solution - I'm thinking posterous here.
2. Installed open source solution - eg Wordpress.
3. Static page generation.

I'm somewhat interested in what the effect on SEO and traffic will be for the differing options. For example, will it be easier to drive traffic to something like posterous? Do many people use their email system to signup to blogs, can you get traffic cross-pollination from being listed on there?

How good are search engines at indexing content on Wordpress and dynamic blogging sites such as posterous? Is there any disadvantage over dumping out static pages from a script?

Thanks for any advice on the matter.
If you haven't looked at it yet, you may also like Nemerle - http://nemerle.org

You don't really need Windows to write C#, F#, etc. There are emacs modes for them if you like emacs. I'm pretty sure there's an F# module for Monodevelop available.

It doesn't help you with the OS situation at all, but Visual Studio express is free from Microsoft should you find yourself on Windows.

I know C# better than most of the other languages in my toolkit, and it's pretty great, but I don't think that Windows is very enjoyable to use when compared to an OS with unixy underpinnings. Should you decide to check out C# or F# in more depth, I'd recommend staying on the OS you prefer.

Mono is production quality today, you don't have to wait for it.
Saying what works as part of your criticism is also a pragmatic way to make the recipient receptive to your negative criticism. A friend of mine who is a professor uses what he calls the sandwich theory of essay criticism: Say something nice. Say the critical stuff. Say something nice. The tough and bitter meat is in the middle, and the bread makes it palatable. I’ve just taken over a peer-review essay site and added a feature (expert reviews) that has come to dominate what the site does. Although the reviews we have started offering are not scathing, they are detailed and very critical. My hope, of course, is that they are very useful, but some students who submit essays for review will find their writing dissected and examined to an extent they have never experienced before. And it’s in public. I expect that it may for some be an overwhelming or even harrowing experience, and reading this post and the comments makes me appreciative of the courage of those who submit their essays for such criticism.
> Consider when Amazon successfully sued Barnes and Noble for the One-Click patent. In what way did Barnes and Noble infringe? They do not share databases. They do not share implementations. They do not share architectures.

So? The patent is on a mechanism for one click shopping. Like all patents, the mechanism is described as abstractly as possible while avoiding prior art. (The doctrine of equivalents is settled law wrt every other kind of patent. Why do you think that it shouldn't apply to software?)

Implement one-click shopping with a different mechanism and the patent doesn't apply. The patent also doesn't cover using one click for anything else.

> In each case I guarantee the relevant code in both implementations is orders of magnitude larger than the patent itself, which by simple information theory means that the patent is only a small part of the whole.

You write that like it's important - it isn't, at least not wrt any other kind of patent. Why should software be different?

> They have a patent on the idea of One-Click shopping.

You seem to think that patenting an idea is somehow wrong. Since every patent covers an idea ....

> There apparently exists no alternate implementation of One-Click shopping that will not violate the patent, because by any remotely sensible standard that would permit such an alternate implementation, Barnes and Noble must be able to meet it.

I haven't read the claims (and I'll bet that you haven't either), so I can't say whether it covers every possible implementation, but even if it did, so what? That's the goal of every other patent as well. Why should software be different?

I suspect that you also think that "the abstract mechanism is obvious if you're trying to do one-click shopping" is meaningful - it isn't. In every other domain, novelty can come from asking a new question, such as "wouldn't one-click shopping be a good idea?" Again - why should software be different.

> Patents are supposed to encourage innovation by enticing people to create their own alternate solutions, but in software, and more or less only in software, you can patent ideas.

The above is wrong on almost every detail.

Patents have nothing to do with encouraging people to create alternative solutions. They're about disclosure and blocking free-riders. And, as I wrote above, every patent is an idea patent.
Sweet project, but just a heads up: you forgot to set some fallback fonts for the Pricing area. I, and probably most people you’re targeting, don’t have Helvetica 55.
And then you'll develop for them using what?
Care to provide some insight into those different reasons?
Ask HN: How to get pitched by startups
So I work for a pretty awesome consumer products company, and we like to try new things that aren't proven by the big guys yet. Any tips on a place to get pitched by startups?

I track HN/TC/etc daily, but I have this feeling that theres probably a lot of startups that could help our business, and likewise we could help validate/grow. I might not be thinking about what they're offering, or frankly understand the proposition.

Any ideas?
To your last point, with the nuget package manager it's becoming easier to integrate the latest and greatest into your projects. For example, here's a nuget package that makes sass and coffescript a 'one click install' in your asp.net project: http://blog.paulbetts.org/index.php/2011/05/16/announcing-sa...

But like you mentioned, being easy to integrate isn't enough, you'd still have to justify it, which in a big company is more difficult than a start up.
OSX Software Update Server w/o OSX Server
Our netflix usage is 99.5% kids shows. Pretty much all the PBS cartoons are on there, NOVA Science now is on there, Thomas and Friends, Dora the Explorer etc. We use hundreds of GB every month streaming media and have no plans on going back to cable or satellite. My wife can get some of her shows via hulu at her desk, some of them on the TV and if she is patient she'll get a whole season at once on netflix.

That being said, we'd use even more bandwidth with Netflix if their on demand streaming selection didn't suck for more recent releases. I don't watch a ton of older movies and those I do want to watch over and over again I own on DVD or Bluray which I would prefer to use since the quality is better and there's never any buffering problems.
You've made a mistake writing all of this and placing it in public. It can now be used in court in any way his attorney sees fit. Don't talk to anyone or ask for anyone's advice. Get a lawyer now and turn it the case over to him or her ASAP.
Your second example includes 'M$' which is a rather childish and antagonistic way to abbreviate. The tone of the first comment seems to be a little immature as well.

I'm not trying to have a go at you personally, but I've found HN to be a community that generally values mature behaviour, and rewards/discourages with karma.
I often ask a similar question such as "Your top 5 languages". It does not negatively affect the interviewee, it just helps me target my questions better.

Though if you say that you are a 10 but perform at a 5, then who knows, it could affect you negatively as my expectations are set high at that point! :)
Except that the anecdotes that are being heard suggest that their HR practices are broken, through and through, rather than fitting the pattern you described.

For example, people just being dropped from contact with Google for no given reason (not as in, "We don't want you," but as in... they just never heard from them again).
Microsoft had the same problem in the late 90s, though I wouldn't want to attribute causation to that for how MS has wound up. However, I do think it provides an object lesson that the use of abstract interviewing might indicate a company that is very popular to work for but has possibly jumped the shark (or hit a plateau) businesswise.
I'd buy your argument if Ruby on Rails only worked on Amazon servers, or if by using Ruby you could only use nginx and not Apache.

The fact is when writing a .Net web app, if you don't like the way IIS or Windows Server or their providers are handling things, you're out of options. Oh and if you want those nice features that make the ecosystem usable, you get to upgrade everybody to the Pro version (not just the people who need the features.) Remember to buy the next version, too, so you don't fall behind on updates and enhancements. And the next version.
ZeroDibs : best of free & opensource software
I used MonoDevelop to write a WebForms-based ASP.NET 2.0 site last year. It was relatively pleasant, had most of the niceties one would have expected out of Visual Studio. I usually development on a Linux stack, so maybe I'm just not enough of a VS power user, but MonoDevelop was fine for me. :)
Bill Gates says he advocated Skype takeover
I had a deadline to give a yes/no to another company, and my recruiter at Google asked me to get my deadline extended so that Google would have time to interview me.

I asked the other company for an extension, which I got, and told my Google recruiter the new deadline.

Then Google never responded and I never did an interview with them.

I felt really put-off by that.
i appreciate the feedback, and that does makes some sense.
I see a lot of startups on a day to day basis (I run The Startup Foundry) and would be happy to pass along some info your way.

What are you looking for specifically?
Why has someone not mashed up oAuth with online payments? I think it'd be a fun idea.
Think Twice Before You Use Your Smart Phone at Starbucks - Gawker
HP should take on android head-on by uploading WebOS to GitHub and promoting it to handset manufacturers. HP has a sizable chunk of the PC space without an OS of their own
WebSockets?
I don't see any demand for WebOS devices. At this point it would be a niche play and compete with WindowsPhone/BlackBerry/Symbian. Symbian is all but dead, WindowsPhone just has too much steam and with iOS and Android there simply aren't developers caring to spend the time on WebOS.
At $8/mo I have no problem with paying for Netflix for what I can get out of it right now. We get all of our sons content from Netflix and my wife can get some of the TV shows she liks from Netflix. I would probably pay up to $10/mo for what is currently available. However I would be really aware of every price increase due to the fact that 99.9% of what I want to watch is DVD only. It sounds crazy since $10/mo isn't really that much money, but anything over that and I'd probably cancel the service due to the poor selection of recent titles and the only "ok" quality of the video stream.

edit: I should add that we are on the verge of cancelling Hulu due to the large number of device restrictions. We don't care much for the back catalog of shows or movies so there's no value in that. When we also can't stream a show to the TV and have to watch it on the PC that's a disincentive to use the product.
You know, before reading your post I never even questioned that I had a strongly scientific leaning in my mentality.
Now I realize I'm much more of an exploratory engineer than a scientist.
Actually, now that I think about it, haven't there been a great number of scientific discoveries that were, according to your distinction, actually exploratory engineering? I would think that following all the side-effects and byproducts of rigorous scientific study would qualify as exploratory engineering, wouldn't they?

Anyway, interesting perspective. Particularly on point, as I just finished reading Cory Doctorow's "Makers".
Facebook Drops Age, Residency and Industry Prohibitions on Promotions
Neither of these are good comments. They aren't interesting or insightful. They are also written in a childish manner that is not normally accepted on this site or in the professional hacker community (except perhaps on IRC).

In my opinion, down voting works just fine and complaining about it usually makes the author look even worse than the original comments may have.
There's a pretty big difference between sharing photos and going to an event with someone. I'm willing to share all my concert photos but I have a shortlist of people I'd be willing to spend hours at a concert with.
Actually, the full source of the ASP.NET stack is now available from Microsoft and you can easily get decompiled source from .NET framework classes. I would agree that fixing a bug (if found) would be difficult but at least you could understand the behavior and code a work around or substitute.
Cinderella's Ball, with pendulums.
The last time I checked I remember all the Ubuntu images were too big to be completely free. They required more storage than the free tier allowed. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.
despite the very high tech and unique looking appearance of their hiring process, it's actually very typical. It's different rather by its scalability and the extend to which it is industrialised than by its cleverness to find people's creativity and potential. It's a very well oiled machine to weed out people with a bad grasp of the fundamentals en mass rather than a tuned process to find a few shock trooper geniuses it needs.
I suspect that that's rather the point. If an US server is hacked, a power plant gets bombed in Canada, Australia, or Sweden. Do you not want the power plants in your country to be bombed? Then you'd better fix the US cyber infrastructure, because the US doesn't care who broke it. They just want it fixed.

It's unfair, bullying, and bad diplomacy, but it's not stupid.
>Plus the code is compiled and tends to run more efficiently than Ruby for instance. :-)

Those words don't mean what you think it means. You're right that most CLR code will be faster than equivalently idiomatic Ruby code that accomplishes the same task, but the reasons for it have nothing to do with compilation.
"I mean, is every Ruby programmer a genius?"

Yes, they are geniuses, because of this: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
This is very interesting. I never imagined he would say Basic is a lousy language.
It is. Things like this are, ahem, the future. Maybe not this iteration, but something like this.

(Goes back to working feverishly on his own flavor of futurecasting...)
I suppose thats the problem, I'm not quite sure.

Our company is Vita Coco (http://vitacoco.com), and we're always looking for ways to increase our social media fans, analyze where and what our fans are doing, optimize our web/fb pages, etc.

I guess what I'm looking for is a way to opt-in as a person willing (and looking) to be pitched ideas by fresh companies.
Microsoft has tried time and time again (with their various .Net initiatives explicitly!) to lock the web into their platforms, because they saw back then (and are blinded by the fact now) that the web is the new platform and pretty soon nobody is going to need Windows anymore.

Just look at Silverlight. Who wants to install that on their Apple or Google device? Flash is bad enough. And yet it's what Microsoft wants you to use to make your ASP.Net app have fancy graphs. L-L-L-lock-in.

Even iOS and Android wouldn't be as powerful as they are had fully-interoperable webservices not come first (killer apps like Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, and Dropbox are webservices first, apps second. You can't compete with them by making an app first, they're platform agnostic.)

So yeah, given the chance Microsoft will try and make Windows 7 running IE accessing a Windows 2008 Server running a .Net app on IIS with a MS-SQL Enterprise backend the only option. It's a testament to the fierceness of the FOSS and LAMP communities that Microsoft is losing this battle (and the world is better off because of it.)
> Mono is production quality today, you don't have to wait for it.

Having looked at it myself, it just doesn't seem to the case: the only recently got support for generational garbage collection and only plan to support tail call optimization (for F#) in an upcoming release. It's still a technical risk to "bet" on Mono, much more so than on JVM or Erlang/OTP.
"The Welcome Back Programme" for PSN users
I remember reading that Kevin Mitnick wasn't even allowed payphone access for fears he could start World War III.

I always thought this was rather silly overreacting. Now US policy makes it possible for a hacker to start a war.
Twitter's Humble Origins: Jack Dorsey, His Pager and a Hack
A Mac Mini is really not that expensive. (Do I have to list the $100/year cost, too?)
I have both a .Net start-up which is a Bizspark member and a non-.Net start-up.

It's not the software costs for me it's the development costs of using .Net that make it tough.

.Net developers get paid a lot which means it's expensive to quit your .Net job and form a start-up and it's expensive to hire people to work on your project.
How Can you Model Twitter Traffic? | Wired Science | Wired.com
As far as I understand it, the only value in any non-commodity-backed currency is a mutual agreement to use it as a medium of exchange for what are effectively IOUs. US dollars have no intrinsic worth, but I know that if you give me some, I can give them to someone else in exchange for something I want, and therefore I am willing to accept them in exchange for my labor. The only value in the dollar you give me is the fact that I can give it back to you later in exchange for something I actually want - but what makes it actual currency, and not just an IOU, is the fact that I can give it to anyone else in a dollar market in exchange for something I want.

Part of what makes this work is our mutual knowledge that it would be very hard for either of us to game the system. I can't just print up new dollars and neither can you; this means that the dollars you give me are very likely to have been given to you by someone else, which makes it very likely that I will be able to pass them on to someone else, which makes them useful and therefore valuable. If I could just print up my own dollars out of thin air, I wouldn't actually need to do any work to acquire them, which would make me less likely to accept them in trade for whatever it is you want from me; if everyone else is in the same position, then none of us have any reason to accept dollars from each other, and the currency is no longer useful as a means for exchanging debts. So the usefulness of any currency depends on the degree to which it is difficult to create new currency units.

This is what I mean by confidence that bitcoins are going to remain valuable: people can't just pull them out of thin air. It takes a lot of work to get a bitcoin. Right now the bitcoin system is new so lots of people are mining bitcoins, but once there are enough of them it will be easier to get a bitcoin by doing some other kind of work than by mining. This is all we need for bitcoins to become a useful medium of exchange for IOUs, should we decide to use it that way.