skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No-Hiring somebody after they get one wrong answer is ridiculous. A wrong answer during an interview and how it's followed up on is one of the most telling parts of the whole process.

If you want to hire people that are good at taking tests then by all means require every answer to be correct. If you want people that understand themselves enough to recover and think critically about their own mistakes then treat a wrong answer as what it is: being a human being in a stressful situation.

edit: also any company that still asks "brain teaser" questions in 2011 should not be one that you consider working for.
That's a good point, why can't responses be automated to alerts? I wonder what critical parts he needs to fix.
You should let people save playlists to a custom url. roll.io/bestplaylistever
> what do you think, are there gonna be sufficient incentives in the future to decentralize certain services?

You bring a very good point, one that I hadn't considered at all.

Although I'm not sure, I think the "work from at least 50% of honest nodes" is an issue. The more demand you have to create work for decentralised services, the more you split and weaken said services.

For example, if x is a major player with 33% of workin one decentralised system, they are more likely to have > 50% in smaller systems. So they would have power in smaller systems being able to usurp them at will.

One way around this would be to have a lot of players in each system, such that it would only be realistic to have a few % at a time (each). However, this again would most likely be undermined by any state actors who would ultimately be able to produce much more than anyone could if they wanted.
Was a pleasure. Love your work =]
It may turn out to be too verbose, but in terms of my motivation, and conciseness vs. verbosity, the goal was to achieve:

1) conciseness of expression of intent ... I feel that this is the most important thing to get accross
2) conciseness of implementation logic: having chainable condition statements would hopefully lose a lot of if...else... conditionals within implementation logic
3) conciseness of conceptual mapping of the bound element to its name, eg. 'The "New Post" link" vs. "a#new-post" ...

Again, this is all just an argument from motivation rather than experience. It may turn out that this was a really, really bad idea.
USPTO inviting comments for software patent reform
I guess a follow on point is that unlike Hypertalk where the implementation is written in a DSL, whenever.js is just a way of _describing_ an implementation.

Everything else is plain javascript, and you can use whatever language features you want within the definition functions.
Posers posing. I see that a lot in the corporate world.
On the beltway, drunken sex driving car crash
I too had the exact same experience: scrolled up halfway through to see whether Arrington wrote this, and was surprised to see it was MG.
I would have to disagree with the comparison of PayPal and Square. I find that there are similarities, but there are much more profits to be found in enabling businesses to bypass the hardship of being able to process cards (which can be both time consuming and costly). I think the valuation of Square to be reasonable, considering that in that they are early-stage and are already processing three million dollars per day (which is increasing). Though the valuation of Spotify at one billion dollars is just plain ridiculous.
Blackberry adroid 2011
Blackberry Adroid 2011
Blackberry is now presenting the newest models of BlackBerry adroid 2011, which will be launch mid-2011, blackberry is very dynamic and in terms of features and content are very interesting, capable of highly advanced computing, and connectivity of the BlackBerry phone is very fast, for wearing adroid system.
I agree with you. Price will be the biggest advantage for every other ecosystem. Android's success has largely been possible because of the huge price-range in which you can buy Android devices. Today, you can get an Android phone (unlocked, no contract) for as low as $120. Low price smartphones make a sizable portion of Android sales, (atleast, here in India).
Sounds like I can't just have it respond to specific e-mail addresses though. I'm telling ya. There's a fun service in there.
More churn in Congress would decrease the value of any one congressperson to private industry, and would also reduce the tendency of members of Congress to amass large numbers of markers that they call in later.

It would also change the entire dynamic of Congress, to be less of a club and more of a transitional job, people coming from some other job -- some of them perhaps even hoping to do the right thing regardless of political fallout -- and then disappearing from the public stage and moving on to another stage their lives, rather than turning elected service into their lives.

A seminal paper on this subject from 1968, The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives, by Nelson Polsby:
http://crespin.myweb.uga.edu/polsby.pdf
Ask HN: Any web-devs interested in a small consulting project?
A friend is looking for a web developer for a simple apartment rental site.

* budget is a few thousand

* needs to be accessible in English and Chinese (this probably means the developer will need to read/write Chinese)

* needs to showcase units in a 3000 apartment complex (you'll need to talk to him to get requirements)

If you know someone that might be able to help, please let me know and I'll put you in touch (email in profile).
I am a huge supporter of creatives and artists. That being said, I have only partial sympathy for this guy. Work is work and we all need it, particularly creatives, but when you take a job writing about things you don't know anything about, you can't complain that you're being asked to do so. If he hadn't seen the most popular shows on television, he took a job he wasn't qualified for. That's fine, but then, he couldn't be bothered to research the industry he was covering - when that research required sitting in front of a TV and watching The Simpsons. That's not exactly slave labor.

It's a shame that content production has become the ad mill that it has, and writing about that from an objective viewpoint with all of this guy's internal data would have been good journalism. But I have a hard time feeling sorry for someone who got paid $35k a year to write about cartoons and couldn't be bothered to watch some of them in his spare time.
Summary of the Amazon SimpleDB Service Disruption
I think term limits are probably ineffective, if only because so many staff stick around even as the names on the offices change, and they hold so much of the power.
Who else has a hunch they don't yet have access to Brink accounts, but instead have access to log files that would reveal password when users now change them?
You can set up an email account specifically for the responses, and have messages forwarded to it by a filter. That's extremely hacky, though, and yeah, there's certainly a service there.
He wants to make something that everyone can use. Freenet isn't there yet. (This doesn't meen that the FreedomBox software couldn't be built on top of Freenet or ship with Freenet, however.)
This is pretty ridiculous given that Square's market is a tiny fraction of retail, its distribution model is expensive, and it doesn't solve any of the problems with the payment industry. Granted, I'm a competitor, but $2 billion? Even $1 billion is absurd.

Sigh.
I'll take reliability over almost anything. I work out on the road 200+ days of 365. A drive failing on me while out in the wilds would be a ~~~~ing catastrophe. I can picture it now, Sunday night, after a long flight, code modified on the flight, not in a remote GIT update in a couple of days... failure in such a scenario would mean i'm out of job. No thanks, I'll take the slow HDD
And neither can perfectly straight lines.
I would definitely use it, if it can work with backbone.js, possibly with offline storage
It sounds like a bunch of people who havent experienced the difference first hand, trying to convince themselves that they dont care.
I don't always sit at work, but when I do, it's on the toilet.
Don't stop the POP
Hear Ye Hear Ye! After years of intense studies, our research team has finally discovered a NEW human emotion!

www.poptop.it is launching soon. Early invitations are available.

Can't say much else publicly but I'd be happy to answer any questions at shane@poptop.it
How does this mean it wasn't true that Apple was doing this to handicap web apps?
High failure rate, high price, low capability, but great speeds. So the ideal setup is SSD for your OS and programs and a spinning disk for your documents?
Why Economics falls down in the face of fatherhood
fwiw I have been reading sky is falling stories like this for ten years now, but the sky has in fact remained in its original position.
My Macbook Air screams. I bought a macbook pro about 1 year ago and my brand new MBA (top model) is noticeably faster. Not only boot and shutdown times but overall snappiness of the machine. The main reason for this is the SSD inside. I love it and will be installing one in my PC desktop soon enough. I can live with the high failure rate although I haven't run into any problems myself yet.
I was thinking of building something like this, too.

I was going to start in cafes, and monetize by charging the cafe for the service. The patrons get the jukebox-ey service for free, and the cafe pays a small monthly subscription.
Microsoft Kinect for PC
Anybody have some detailed technical insight into why the failure rate has been so high? (i.e., I can guess as well as the next guy, I'm asking for knowledge.) One of their initial promises was reliability due to not having moving parts, and, well, that sounds pretty reasonable as far as marketing copy goes. Why isn't it true?
Google Chrome Frame could also be helpful here. Macromedia somehow managed to get most people to install their terrible plugin.
Hardly Working: Start Up Guys At Internet Week -
At my last job, they got me an SSD. About a month later, I started coding a new feature for their product. It was a few hours' worth of work, and they were using CVS, and didn't really have a good branching model, so I didn't do any work-in-progress checkins.

While I was coding the feature, the SSD failed. This manifested itself via all sorts of strange compiler errors, and so I rebooted. After that, Windows didn't show the SSD anymore, and my code was never seen again.

So, while the SSD did save me some time, I effectively lost it all when it failed, due in part to my stupidity, but also due to the fact that you need to understand that if you buy an SSD, you MUST plan for failure. This is not an option, this is "yes-I-will-wear-a-helmet-while-riding-a-motorcycle-at-70-mph".

Contrast that with my Dell laptop. I bought it in ~2007, and I've never had a problem with it (except I've had to replace the dim screen a couple times).
Given recent events I take it we're no longer emphasizing stability and security as features of bitcoin. I jest, clearly decentralization is the new killer feature. Money quote:

"Bitcoin makes it feasible to pay for internet relays that anonymize or reroute traffic - that is, it makes it easier to remove central control and fight censorship"

And who doesn't want to fight censorship amirite? Surely there are no negative repercussions to letting people reroute traffic anonymously.
Will have to check this out this weekend. Any idea if the other MicroConf talks will be posted? I'd like to see the talks from Justin Vincent (from Techzing) and Noah Kagan.
I've had a 256GB Crucial SSD running for a year without issue. I wrote about it at http://littlebitofcode.com/2011/03/02/a-year-with-a-ssd. I'm not concerned by failure rates because I have an excellent backup strategy. I've had dozens of spinning disks fail unexpectedly, they can and will fail as spectacularely and unexpectedly as an SSD could.
How to Hire Your First Sales/Marketing Person
I do care and I have no doubt that SSDs are faster and better. I too am holding off until their reliability improves. But I just tested starting my iMac with a 7200 RPM drive in it and it took 31 seconds from the startup chime until I was able to fully use it. So I can also understand people's hesitation.

And besides, if I booted over to Windows 7, it'd take about 4 minutes until this machine was usable, so it's all a matter of perspective.

EDIT: to be fair I just measured Windows 7 and it took 1:30 before the machine was usable.
I have a laptop with SSD at work and an almost identical laptop at home, except it has a hard drive. There are unquestionably a lot of operations that the SSD makes much faster. But in normal day to day use, I can barely tell the difference. Booting is fast as hell, but how often do I reboot? I don't compile much on either machine, but neither do most normal users. I don't think the average laptop user is i/o bound most of the time (unless they're swapping, and then the solution is more RAM not an SSD).

To me, the biggest benefit SSD gives is battery life. I like that it's quieter too. But neither of those is worth the price premium. Which is why I haven't stepped up for my home machine even though I get to compare it on a daily basis.
Yes. Every policymaker knows that the US jails more people than any other country, both in percentage and total. "Unintended" is a sad attempt at a fig leaf.

Any action we do can have unintended consequences (not to mention known tradeoffs), and we deal with them by using experience and fixing problems as they come up. But this case is far beyond that.
Social Media Combines the Mundane with the Profound
Are you sure writes are your bottleneck there?
jerf, the oddest part is that if you read through the de-duplication and redundancy designs of modern SSD controllers (like the SandForce SF-2k series) not only do the drives do automatic de-duplication and compression on the fly, the scatter the bits evenly across the memory arrays (in parallel) to control even wear-and-tear of R/W cycles on the memory.

Then they typically write the bits to multiple locations or an entire section of the drive is maintained for parity information, sort of like an on-disk RAID5 setup where the individual blocks of NAND can be though of as "disks". For example, a 120GB drive typically has something like 150-160GB of storage space on the disk. This is not unlike what spindle disks do with a large section of disk not allocated to the format operation and kept behind for failed sectors that are re-allocated by the controller.

So all that work and the failure rates are still too high for comfort. It's really surprising to me and suggests that all of this needs more baking time.

I have no idea what the failure rates are in lower-end drives like the Kingstons and other drives that are likely rebranded garbage. I imagine it's not any better :)
What struck me as odd was being down-voted without anyone telling me what it was that rubbed them the wrong way.

The reason that I hang around HN is because I learn a lot by doing so. When someone down-votes something and then runs off, no one actually benefits in any way from that (unless the post that was down-voted was complete trash).

My extensive edit was an attempt to lure out the down-voters so that I could find out exactly where the wheels came off in the original post.

Looking back, I probably should have angled for a less confrontational tone in my edit, but I have a hard time getting tone across in these things.

You know, you spend less time typing each post than you would spend on a research paper or an email but more time than a text message. It is a challenging thing to get the tone just right. I much prefer face to face conversation any day of the week, but I like this place a lot.

The thing is that this is my first time actually not lurking on a site in nearly 10 years, and HN has its own unique culture.

Look, you've been on this site for more than an order of magnitude longer than me. Do you (or anyone else) feel like helping a newbie out:

When anonymous down-votes strike, is it better to reply to yourself, keep your edits small, or just walk away?
Some of this list is pretty much expected (McKinsey, Bain, Jane St, Palantir, Bridgewater), but some of it seems pretty ridiculous. BP? Really? My sister interned there (and was in charge of on-campus recruiting for oil companies at her grad school), and thought they were a bunch of idiots, something apparently confirmed by Deepwater Horizon. Amazon and eBay ahead of Google and Apple? I think anyone in Silicon Valley would think that a bit off. And the only hedge funds were Jane St and Bridgewater - where's D.E. Shaw, or Renntech, or Citadel?
I wouldn't say that about the ATI driver folks. Back when I was running a small team at MSFT, we were the first serious users of the then-new WPF text rendering APIs that were built on top of the new driver models. So, we hit bugs. The ATI on-site folks were awesome. Usually, they had already found the bugs and had a patch that was going through stability testing. When they didn't know about it, one of them would come by, usually within a couple of hours, and connect up a kernel debugger or whatever else was needed to track down the bug and turn us around a fix. I still prefer AMD video cards to this day based on that experience.
What will they say when we finally understand them?

"So long, and thanks for all the fish!"
http://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds-collide.pd...
After 1 year Crystal Reports is giving you a 67% health rating? That seems... not great. I don't know how full the drive is, but I imagine you'll be look at a failed drive by 1.5year mark. For $630 I'm having a hard time getting excited about it.

Totally agree that SSDs will fail as big and randomly as spindle disks, but for 10x the price (or whatever factor it is) is it wrong to expect better reliability?

If you need the speed and have the money, more power to you, especially if you have a good backup strategy and losing a disk is no biggie... I just don't think many people realize HOW unstable these things are. That is all I'm pointing at.
I did appreciate that Microsoft gave reasons along with their snub, but their analysis felt pretty NIH-and-not-going-to-help-with-the-inventing to me.

Shaver says:

>I also suspect that whatever hardening they applied to the
>low-level D3D API wrapped by Silverlight 3D can be applied
>to a Microsoft WebGL implementation as well.

Nice point. Whether Microsoft engages with and helps improve WebGL could be seen as a proxy for whether they will in fact engage with Web Standards in IE 1X. Or is WebGL so broken that it's impossible to contribute?

I'm also surprised since the next battleground for browsers seems to be in mobile and pushing forward a unified and seriously advanced browser strategy could be a serious advantage for MSMobile (whatever the hell it's called now). Instead, they seem to be re-fighting battles in a war that's already been semi-lost (the PC browser).
I haven't heard of any publicly available implementations of Pregel, per se.

The Pregel paper does describe some other related and publicly available frameworks for graph algorithms, but I haven't played with any of those frameworks. Details are in the second last section of the paper: http://www-bd.lip6.fr/ens/grbd2011/extra/SIGMOD10_pregel.pdf
they were missing a few terms, like "collapsed user models" and "elastic network".

If you don't get this video watch this:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/24/lumier-adds-a-new-coat-of-p...
LOL that's what I was expecting too.
(3 unread) - raider68att.net - att.net Mail
They fail (or rather you hear about them failing) because they are new. I have graveyards filled with spinny disks that failed, but it's hardly newsworthy because everybody knows drives fail. Has anybody put half HDs and half SSDs in a data center of any size? Anecdotes and data and all that.
First HTML5, now JS? Looks like everyone's trying to make Adobe obsolete.
"And most of us sane, rational people would opt not to give those discriminatory companies money."

I still remember all those "whites only" stores going out of business in the 50s...
SSDs are meant for boot and application drives where lots of random I/O happens. You wouldn't normally use them in RAID except to RAID0 them for better performance and more space.

Instead of anecdotes about failure rates, it's best to look at data. I don't know of any large-scale studies of SSD reliability, but http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/29329-ssd-fa... looks at return rates, which correlates with failure rates. Intel's return rate is 0.6%. The other SSDs are 2-3%. Hard drives vary from 1-6% for 1TB and 3-10% for 2TB drives. SSDs are more expensive than hard drives, so their return rates should be higher for the same failure rate (people are more likely to return a broken $300 SSD than a $50 hard drive).

The reason many people like SSDs is because they widen the worst bottleneck in modern computers (random disk I/O) by a factor of 10-100. The difference is very noticeable. I highly recommend you try out an SSD as your boot/application drive.
"There's the thing! There's the thing! Right there, it's the thing! The thing!"

"Moonmoonmoonmooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooon!"
IMO this could have been easily done with an update, since this is based on a whitelist of processes I think.
Is Software Improving Exponentially?
American Airlines to Provide Samsung Tablets to customers
You do realize "retail" is a multi-trillion dollar segment, right?
can't help wondering how much of gold's value is derived from the fact that, circularly, people think it has value.

or for that matter, any human activity's.
Given recent events I take it we're no longer emphasizing stability and security as features of bitcoin.

I understand where such a snarky statement comes from, but let's take a step back. Bitcoin has generate such enormous debate because it is not clear to anyone---security researchers, economists, or otherwise---what Bitcoin entails. It has some desirable properties, some undesirable properties, and has, imho, made people think a lot about the concept of fiat currency and how to go about extending the advantages paper currency has to the "digital domain" (and I use that phrase loosely).

I think it is great that lot of people are looking at Bitcoin in many different angles and since this is the first of its kind, I am sure people and society (including governments) will learn from pitfalls (security, economics or otherwise) to build a better system tomorrow. So let's not attack people who are trying to explore what Bitcoin gives us and what it doesn't.
The warranty is five years. I won't lose any data, and in two years I'll get a new drive from the manufacturer. I don't expect any reliability, hard drives aren't reliable, this is nothing new.

The Crystal Disk Reports is based on the flash wear patterns, so if it's at 67% it is likely to last 2 more years not six more months. The way I calculated, the drive saved me enough time in the first year to pay for itself.
I recently bought from OWC to be shipped internationally. It took 32 days and arrived a DOA drive and had consistent kernel panics (even when doing an initial clone). YMMV but if you're wanting to do an SSD upgrade, get ready to take into account failures.
As I as reading this I thought how eerily familiar to Huffington Post this sounded. Then I remembered who Huffington Post was sold to.
> I'll take reliability over almost anything.

Then measure reliability by IO operation instead of wall clock time.

I had a catastrophic failure in my MBP HDD after a couple years of use so heavy that if it were an HDD, I simply wouldn't've been able to have done all that work.
The software craftsmanship / hacker dojo people would argue your point that about needing to repeat over and over again.

Example: I probably need to sit down and actually practice, over and over again, certain Regex concepts, because I need them at hand immediately.... which is what habit does.