skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you have a life, I don't want you.

If you have a family, I don't want you.

If you have enough energy to do your work but not enough energy that after work you can work some more, I don't want you.

What is it that makes employers so enamored of people with 'pet projects'? Are they easier to take advantage of? Do they work long hours without expecting compensation? Does not having dependents mean that it's easier to pressure then in to working harder?

Really, having or not having pet projects (and I have plenty, don't worry) shouldn't matter even a little bit a the hiring time. You judge people on their ability as good as you can and what they do in their free time is simply none of your business.

So, if you ask me about my 'pet projects' I don't want you.
This foreshadows how Apple's model will devolve. I have been a Mac fanboy for a long time, and have always said that Apple wouldn't turn into Microsoft if they became popular. The good news is that it appears they won't; we don't see Apple promoting their inferior products with the goal of locking people in to their platform. What we see instead is Apple ardently defending Intellectual Property rights, even when there does not appear to be infringement. Only the clear establishment will be allowed in their channel, and only their channel will be allowed on their hardware.

This is more avoidable than file formats: one can easily switch to another operating system without repercussion. Unfortunately, there aren't many good alternatives.
I thought the OP would reference the fact that errors in solving a linear system don't combine and magnify to produce unusable results beyond say a 10x10 system.

At the outset of numerical linear algebra, say in the 1940s [until 1948], it was not known whether errors would blow up or not. [best bound was 4^n where n is matrix order]

Turned out they did not (if you do things remotely right) but even von Neumann [in a 1947 paper, with others] was surprised that large (say 20x20, at that time) linear systems could be solved accurately.

[edits in braces: This history, and more, is in www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~higham/talks/twge96.ps.gz ;
Higham wrote probably the best and most comprehensive up-to-date book on the accuracy of numerical linear algebra.]
I might be confusing this video with the one on This Is My Next. I watched them both today.
Looks nice and it has great potential, especially since it isn't cluttered with links to Expedia/Priceline like the others are.

That said, I can't really use it until it supports multiple destinations/open jaw in a single search.
NFL Watch: Kansas City vs Detroit Live Streaming TV 2011
International Rugby Events

WATCH HERE

All kind of International Rugby Events, like September Tours, 2011 Regular season.

Detroit VS.Kansas City

Match Details:

Date: 18 September 2011
Time: 01:00 PM ET on ESPN
Cup: National Football League (NFL) Cup 2011
Regular Season.
Venue: Ford Field Stadium
They have revised GDP figures since 2007 or so. So in the interim/short term, productivity is actually much closer to hours worked than previously thought.

The longer term trend is also questionable starting around 1973, ala Tyler Cowan. Ah, good old economic numerology.
Thanks for the link, I think this might save me some time developing this myself. (Still wish this was in the default install, so that I'd have an easier time navigating other people's Jekyll blogs, especially now that they seem to enjoy another jump in popularity)
The (well-hidden) "Limits" widget is a very cool bit of visual / visceral UI design. Click the "scatter graph" button next to the Duration field and you get a scatter plot of duration against price for all the flights - which is useful data in itself - then you can drag a boundary around to set the maximum duration or price.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

no edit button here on HN. or i am blind. though i suppose both are possible.
Very nice, my only complaint is they don't have Southwest pricing. No one else does either, so Southwest continues to bring me to their site :)
> so there would be a different story for Europe which there isn't.

Or the US just dragged the rest of the world with it. The stagnation in the US led to decreased investment and exports in Europe.
Vladimir Putin, Action Man
http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic14795.html
Or if you have a standard contract in Sweden
Yeah, I'm currently insured by United and was previously insured by Blue Cross.

I think your point is correct that the site is a (now cliched?) "leaky abstraction." But the good news is that it works for at least some segment of the market (those like myself).

I was 25 when I did the Blue Cross app and 27 when I did United.
"5 unknown price"

Looks like it needs another QA pass.
Just curious about the backend. Python too or Lisp?
Hook Analyser Malware Tool Release
Google launches Flight Search with booking links to airline sites only
Sites like musicvideogenome.com and tubalr.com (and netflix) make me want some sort of app or widget that can scrape/redirect video from a portion of my browser or screen and turn it into a source that VLC can multicast across my network.
Great implementation. Recently I've been playing with skyscanner and HipMunk. This will definitely replace them for me when international support arrives.
It probably is caching data from other people's searches, similar to what Kayak does. This is cool right up until you try to actually book a flight and it sells out or goes up in price dramatically.
Ask HN: What is your favourite obscure or surprising fact?
Steve Blank invested to 2 startups on his Helsinki visit
Just for some context, here's the previous HN discussion when Google announced their acquisition of ITA in July 2010.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1479107
cleverjake, many thanks for your exceptional help.
You totally rock.
It's quite scary that a company like Google can come along and shit in a startup's cereal practically overnight.

I know we were all rooting for The 'Munk, but it seems that Google's use of Price x Duration matrix effectively steals the thunder from Hipmunk's agony filter.

I mean, it's not as if Google needs the affiliate revenue, and I bet the Hipmunk guys would have preferred it had Google decided to "organise the world's information" through an acquisition. I think I'd need a good cry if this happened to me :(
I'm glad to hear you're not ignoring performance, but please keep in mind that you're putting a big stumbling block in the way for people who would want to use a similar service. github would've gone absolutely nowhere if they forced programmers to re-type everything into HTML forms, or even into extremely well-written web apps.
The rule of thumb that I've heard was that anything about a month out represented the 'normal' price.

If you're buying a ticket for a flight less than a month away, the prices start to rise dramatically as the flight date draws nearer. But if you're buying a ticket for a flight more than a month away, it's more-or-less the same price as a flight that's a month away. [1]

So absent any other information, the 'normal' price can help people ballpark costs more quickly, something I'd expect to be statistically more common than actually searching to book a specific flight on specific dates.

[1] With exceptions for destinations with very defined/popular seasons, holidays and things like that.
BruCON – Belgium’s First Security Conference
Washington is actually pretty good relative to any other state I've seen. If you avoid SHQ through previous coverage, especially post-Obama changes (getting rid of lifetime limits), buying health insurance IS fairly straightforward.

Even with the SHQ, it seems deterministic.
It’s rather powerful: as long as the origin airport is one of those shown on the map, and the destination airport is reachable via a domestic flight on one of the major airlines (AA, AS, B6, CO, DL, F9, UA, US), the search results come back instantaneously. Multiple origins and destinations (up to five of each) are supported as well:

http://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=LAX,SFO,SEA,LAS,DEN;...

And the results still come back immediately! Including the three-month chart of prices. This leads me to believe that Google/ITA has precomputed all of these results, and is simply serving these results out of a cache of some sort. That would explain why they are only offering a limited set of origin airports at this time: it probably takes an incredible amount of computing power and storage space to pre-calculate all of the possible results.

Colour me impressed.
How  to Prepare for Your MBA Education | MBAPrograms.org
Release early. Release often. Minimum viable product. Any of these ring a bell?
Not so much, no. Lump of Labor fallacy, m'lord. Wages have fallen because of something fuzzy and abstract ( and indefinable ) called "liquidity preference". If you take to the "fear vs. greed" cycle theory of economics, that means fear is winning.

A ... textile job in Indonesia still pays the same as it did, roughly ( modulo Baumol Cost Disease stuff - increased admin cost ) in 1950, it's just that that $2.00 or $0.50 per hour isn't worth driving to in the high-cost US.
Only flights within the US? That is a bit too alpha.
Rails-app called Elenco (Italian for ‘list’)
Unless you ask.
Why "Python too"?
I always wondered why they didn't just apply a clustering algorithm on your friends to auto-generate friend lists.

If you ever ran one of those "friend wheel" apps, it was easy to see that data about interconnections provides an almost-perfect way to group connections from different facets or stages of your life.
Don't you still have to look out for ill-conditioned matrices?
The Security Onion LiveDVD - Download
Well, you know what they say: "To make something from scratch, you first have to create the universe".
But I get your point, and I agree.
Housing is furiously repricing. SFAIK, there's no bottom to it, and it depends on where you are. If you live in a high land rent region like San Fran or NYC, it's stable. In Florida or Las Vegas, there is no bottom.

In Texas, it's stuck at 1990 or 1998 prices, dependent on area.
94% of sexual activity in male Giraffes is homosexual.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals
by "integrate into their search results" i mean.. if you search google for "sfo lax" and it brins up this new Google Flight page with their organic results.
http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/09/13/317965/the-evol...

EDIT: Remember that the CPI tries to compare apples to apples, which means N-square foot houses to ones of similar size. And IIRC the size of the average American's house has at least doubled since then.
It wasn't overnight. ITA has been doing flight search since forever. In fact, they even had the matrix UI before Hipmunk (though it wasn't featured as prominently):

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-company-that-HipMunk-copied...
Rejecting a tenant due to credit report and background check
This is just beautiful. Data matrix is innovative, UI is out of the way, slick and to the point interface, and it even takes you to the correct 3rd party booking pages.

I can't wait till this is implemented in Canada.

Kayak beware!
The bad news for hipmunk is it wasn't that much of an improvement over actual travel sites. I never had that much trouble using Expedia and I already know how to purchase my ticket right on the site. So there wasn't much reason to use Hipmunk in the first place.

This Google search interface is pretty nice, and makes a lot more sense than Hipmunk did.
It's different than a physical radio because a physical radio can get more than just one station. Think about how far you'd get making a radio that got just one station and marketing it as the "Z107" radio or the "ABC" radio.

The CBC is right. They're embarrasing themselves but they're right. Just because they have the right to take their ball and go home doesn't mean they'll make many friends in the neighborhood doing so.
#Opiran new press release for 23 September by Anonymous Hackers
Bars are horrid for working out "what portion of a whole" is represented. I don't care what iTunes does - it looks like shit.
I guess Google will be able to fill this automatically by checking your Google calendar for recently added events in other cities. :)
I wonder if it'll run in a VM. I'd like to try Windows 8 on my laptop without messing with partitions/dual booting.
"With ... OS X Lion, Apple gave us a glimpse at what a post-PC operating system might look like"

Cheat Sheet for People Who Type Stuff for Engadget And Want To Be Good at Other Things Too:

iOS = post PC

Lion = first step in bridging PC and post-PC

Windows 8 = [strikethrough] your grandpa trying to rap [/strikethrough] second step to bridging PC and post-PC
No, it's better than on Ubuntu. On Debian, installing 2.5, 2.6 and 3.0 at the same time is a matter of doing "aptitude install python2.5 python2.6 python3.0"
well, when I sort on deductible, I have to mentally categorize all of the prices based on the other features even though I know I am not going to accept, say, 30% coinsurance. If I could max the deductible at x and the coinsurance at y then I could sort by price.
>> Most people don't even understand what "coinsurance" is.

That's exactly why you should add a calculator, so people can see how the variables interact.
If you're hiring a software engineer and that person programs in their spare time, it is a pretty clear indication that they not only want to be a software engineer but also enjoys programming.

I used to ask this question, but now I've generalized it to asking if someone has any hobbies. I find passion in any area to a good indicator of the type of people I want to hire.
August 2011 Mobile Income Report
Ah, right. For the kNN/GiST support in Postgres, distance has to be defined in such a way that it is computable given only two data values; furthermore, I'm pretty sure it has to be both symmetric and satisfy the triangle inequality in order for the index to produce correct results.
The Past, Present and Future of Software Security
I wonder how much the amount that is spent on the compensation of the median employee has increased from 43 years ago? My understanding is that healthcare rather than wages has been taking up an increasingly large proportion of that figure with the US's exploding healthcare costs.
Light has no mass so it does not experience time. Everything happens instantly for it.

While it takes us 10 years to wait for light to travel 10 light-years, the light takes no time at all.

This explains it perfectly:

http://www.askamathematician.com/2011/07/q-does-light-experi...
When I want to do a flight search, I don't usually think of a map.
It looks like it was built quickly.

Why is there a giant search bar at the top of the screen? I came here to look for flights, not to search the web.

Why is there a giant map at the top of the screen? I already know where I want to go. I don't need to look at a map to decide which destination I want. This part seems like more of a tech demo than anything.

The whole UI looks like it was designed by an engineer. For example when I want to book the flight, I get a tiny left/right arrow box-thing to increase the passenger count. Very poor choice of UI.
A lump of lead will float in a pool of mercury.
He might be referring to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence
In addition, http://getawayfinder.southwest.com/ has been around for some time already.
They specify what they mean by "evil": http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/googevil
I think when you're young with free time AND passionate about something, you should dive into it and learn as much as possible.

When you're older and if you have children, PLEASE PLEASE spend the appropriate time being a GOOD parent. It seems like the world is more work focused than ever and parents are not spending as much time with their kids as they should. We want good programmers, but we NEED good parents even more. Our future will eventually rely on the next generation of adults and not just good software..
This is similar to how the NFL limits reproduction of its broadcasts. Yes, it's legal to receive the broadcast using any TV but it's still illegal to take that stream and rebroadcast it over the net or some other platform.
Apple has also been shipping iPads for the past 17 months.
I dislike Octopress for several reasons:

- No proper attribution to code that they clearly didn't write themselves. It's not that hard people.

- Time could be better spent making the Jekyll docs clearer. The time they spent creating this could have gone into official documentation efforts and creating a better default in the core

- Would be nice if they could add chuck those plugins into their own repository. That way it would be possible to add them to the plugin list I created on the official Jekyll Wiki

I also wish it had a better base template, but I'm no designer, so what the hell do I know.
Ethan gave a wonderful talk including several points about this design at Converge SE (http://convergese.com/) this June.
Ok, Daniel. Linear algebra study group. Let's make something happen.

(I just bought the Strang book mentioned downthread).
For some goods, it is much greater. For government, education, health care and land rent ( may go to housing cost in expensive areas ) it is not. And actually, fixed baskets of health care, housing, etc ( based on applicable standards at the time the older measurement was taken ) it hasn't changed as much.
No one else does either, so I don't fly Southwest.
I wasn't able to find Skype/IRC like chat-room for my company (gmail) account. So I built this. Hipchat seems to be an option but it doesn't integrate with GMail.
To see how the map is useful, put in an origin and then play with the price limit.
Ask HN: Travel APIs?
I know this question has been asked before, but none of the previous responses seem to work/are relevant. Can anyone recommend (preferably free, or cost-effective) travel APIs, to grab flight, hotel, etc info? Thanks!
Interesting. That makes me wonder: would that really be the optimal approach? Google is able to return search results for previously unsearched queries nearly instantaneously too, so I'm wondering whether it's really a cache that's serving those queries. Would some sort of graph-based index be possible in this situation?
Come on, that would be like releasing an MP3 player in 2001 that had no wireless and less space than a Nomad.
Facebook friend list update targets Google+
IMHO, cluster algorithm is not perfect, and the penalty for false positive is simply too high. In that sense, a manually devised algorithm would more likely give you a controllable result. I believe that is the same logic why Google was resistant to machine learning algorithms on ranking for the first few years.
I strongly disagree. Google wants us to use its services because at its core is a bunch of engineers that simply want to make the world better.
I agree, the "powerful tablet" seems like a genre without a market. iPad style tables are attractive because they are extremely small, light, and have excellent battery life. Why would I buy a larger, heavier tablet with poor battery life when I can buy a similar laptop instead?

The iPad is popular largely because it's something completely different from what's already there. A big tablet with an i5 and three hours of battery life is pretty much the same as what already exists in the PC space.
Really pleased to see a YC startup in this area. One of the secondary ideas I applied to YC this round is a marketplace for new types of computers based on Arduino.
Learn Hadoop and go to Las Vegas
I'd like to note that while I did spend quite a while on these plugins, I used it solely as an exercise to learn Ruby. So this is definitely not the best Ruby code.
Or, you know, they could just be taking a cut for connecting users with flights better and faster than their competitors. But please, keep thinking that google is hoping to populate some evil database with precious, precious data to make their advertising 0.000001% better. There's no way they are considering the obvious and profitable notion of getting serious about travel search.
I have found that I usually start working on pet projects when I am dissatisfied with my job.

At my last job, I found myself working on several different extracurricular projects at once. I kind of realized that this meant it was time to leave (and do my own startup).

If I found someone who was supremely happy with his job, I would expect that any extra time would be spent at work, either making the product better or developing something else related to that company's business.

With that said, there is nothing wrong with working on a pet project, just that it can indicate something bad rather than something good.
I really like the focus on getting the open source hardware people using the product first, before taking it to the enterprise. Kind of like GitHub - free for open source, pay if you want to keep your code private.
This is the organization which thinks hyperlinks from other websites can be a copyright and/or terms of use violation, too. Right?
Learn Web Design from your High School Science Textbook
The problem is that programming in your spare time is not a necessary condition for enjoying or having passion for programming.

Further, its also discriminatory against people with families, or other hobbies, or against people who don't want to do the same thing that they did 40-50 hours during the week on the weekends too.
This is exactly the problem. Despite spending what is in my many cases billions of dollars a year on IT and related underwriting systems, most of the major health insurers in the US still have some manual touch involved in their pricing, which means that they can't price in anything near real-time. Even the best can do perhaps half in a fully automatic way, yet generally choose not to do it in realtime (for reasons I'll never fully grasp).

One major insurer that I'm familiar with receives applications from the biggest of these sites by fax, on paper. They're then shipped to a low cost country, where they're scanned, and then passed along to another low cost country to have the OCR corrected. Then the work comes back on-shore to be manually adjudicated. Figure 3 days minimum, a week on average to get all of this done.

A crowd-sourced solution would be astronomically useful. For it to be accurate, you need to capture a decent amount of medical information (most insurers ask a pretty standard set of ~20 questions), but even knowing that the average person pays 1.4x the quoted rate for someone of their age/gender/zip would be a great tool.
Apple Tries to Acquire Dropbox
>>>What line? Why else would they do it?

How does the App Store banning a magazine for Android users fit into your view of how the App Store operates?
I am myself a passionate developer, that doesn't mean I have the time to make massive open-source projects just to get a better resume, because I'm neck deep in writing code for the company I have been running for the last 7 years. Not all people have the luxury to figure out something worthwhile do do and put on github.

I hate hiring people and putting a price tag on them, it's a cruel world but not every job interview has to be like American Idol if you know what I mean. Of course he should try to find people that care but that doesn't mean that the people that care has to write excellent code, or that they have to write tons of open source code. They just need to deliver at work.
I do not think it is a coincidence the first two are producing food. Hygiene laws make it practically impossible to let visitors walk the floor.

Fibrous cement sheets, on the other hand? That one isn't open because of the risk that a visitor gets hurt.