skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A coding problem is less illustrative than a decent--LOC is always suspect, but let's say 10,000 LOC--corpus of work. Something to show much more than a toy problem.

Better still, however, is collaboration with open source projects--you can see individual communication between people as well as the developer's ability to enter a foreign codebase and be productive, (hopefully) without introducing bugs due to ill-advised changes without understanding what's being changed.

(We don't look at side projects or open source at my current employer. I wish we did.)
Attaboy! Still rooting for you guys. You should add gigaballs of steel to the mascot.
Unions are happy to take anyone's money. In fact they'd rather represent happy workers rather than unhappy workers -- happy workers pay their dues and don't cause any trouble.

I know from experience that unions are very good at forcing reluctant populations of workers to unionize. All they have to do is make you sign a little card, and they're not keen on taking "no" for an answer.
For bowling, the underlying is basic physics, something that is never going to change, never go away.

For technology or tools, the underlying specifics are going to change insanely fast, so if you are learning it, you will need to unlearn soon (and learn something else).

So should you learn internals of libc? STL? JVM, bytecode? rt.jar? .NET CLR? V8 JIT?
It can run Visual Studio (more useful with a USB or bluetooth keyboard), not just a Flipboard clone, mobile Internet, Twitter or Photos.

You can even hook up a second monitor to it.
Hardly. I like it here.

And as for startups, I worked for one once. It's a big business now.

I build software which happens to reside on the web, not "web sites" or "web applications". Sometimes we have desktop applications deployed because they require real-time data. Sometimes we integrate with massive systems with millions of users. We don't use functional languages (they do not suit our workload and don't scale to our recruitment requirements), we use message queues (NServiceBus, zeromq), we use image libraries (GDI, reportlab), we use all the funky nosql stuff (Mongo), we use ORMs (NHibernate), we don't use computer vision or sound because we don't need it in our space.

Big, exciting things happen where I am.

It's the bubble you are in that I'd hate to be in. The superficial one which appears to be based on pushing social crap, novelty iPhone applications and glorified todo lists on the world.

My problem is that we did ALL OF THIS in 2001. The process hasn't changed, but the tools have and the time to market is the same.
i was not aware of monoprice, thanks!
Unfortunately, unions have a tendency to limit the number of skilled workers that a company can hire due to higher wages required for existing employees.
MySQLTuner - An Excellent MySQL Profiler.
What about a paid app that's classified as simply an Internet radio player that has a huge directory of stations (similar to iTunes)?

Would that be subject to similar legal issues?

I may or may not have just released one :-).

Edit for more insight:
Here's my app - http://endlesswhileloop.com/apps/dial

Some others...
Snowtape - http://vemedio.com/products/snowtape_phone
Radium - http://www.catpigstudios.com/

Both of these are great apps with their own built-in Internet radio directory that I assume they built on their own with or without stations' permissions.
Its' tough for a company to keep impressing customers with everything that comes out of it. That is what google has been doing for a long time now. It really is impressive.

As a developer, I just HOPE that one day google takes a service like this and makes a long blog post out of it describing and bisecting every aspect of the app and how it was built. I'm tired of clicking 'view source' and finding nothing but minimized JS
But the predictor isn't whether the testee gets these problems right. The predictor is whether the testee uses a consistent mental model for the problem--that is, someone who interprets "a=b" as "move contents of a to b" will end up programming as well as someone who does the converse, but not someone who picks and chooses without being sure.
Download Windows 8
That's kinda cool actually - a support group for people thinking of a start up - given that more and more folks see this as a viable option (and probably the way the US will launch into the next wave of innovation) - there will probably be a demand for places to go and just ask plain questions, get coaching, or just support when it's late and you think this is going nowhere and all you need is a pep talk. I'm game.
Your only option is to email PG - there is no way to delete old comments.
Thanks for that reference, turns out OP absolutely wrong:

Subsequently, regulation SOR-89-253 (published in the 4 February 1989 issue of the Canada Gazette, pages 498-502) eliminated licence requirements for all radio and TV receivers, eliminating the possibility that licensing could be reinstated at the regulators' whim.
That will be very cool.

Best of luck to you guys.
12 Things Happy People Do Differently
Google designing Android for Intel chips
Unix Systems Programming in Ruby
Good to hear.

You also have one killer competitive advantage: an adorable logo.
You're responsible for all content, if you blink at one DMCA takedown? I dunno, that seems a bit extreme.

Is this for real, or is this just a lawyerly, overly cautious opinion? Are there cases where this has happened? Does the DMCA itself have wording to this effect?
except that Hipmunk's interface is a clean clone of ITA's matrix search's gantt view (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/) - I'm sure it'll be a matter of time before that makes it into google's interface.
Oh, I get it. Those plugins are "compile-time" -- so they happen during the HTML generation process, before going up to github -- all github ever sees is static HTML and CSS files.
Ah, I see. Sorry, the ambiguous "it" made me think "it" was hipmunk. Somehow.
Developmentseed.org used to be a Drupal site, fwiw.
Winter Wedding Hairstyles
Thanks sebandr.

I didn't want to give a link to the site in my first comment, as it didn't seem appropriate. But if you're a fellow foodie, I'd love it if you could have a look and give me your thoughts.

mylifethroughfood.com
Ah, missed it. Thanks.
In defense of these guys:

1. The feature is highly tangential. The core product is a time tracking app. A time tracking entry (core) can be associated with a "project" (metadata), which in turn can have "notes" (metadata about metadata). These guys built a time tracking app and ended up maintaining, in a dark corner inside of it, blogging software (functionally speaking).

2. This is the sort of feature that just grows and grows. Already we've gone (guessing here) from what was a project note to "notes" plural. Someone presumably had to figure out how to sort the notes and how to delete a note, etc.

Next the users will be asking for text search. After all, if you have 100 notes on a project, with people using them as a repo of project knowledge, search is kind of a basic feature, don't you think?

And it would also be nice if there was a pretty archive view with a nicely formatted calendar so you could easily go back in time without clicking through endless pages of old notes.

Oh, can we have RSS feeds per project, too? I'd like to see when there's a new note.

Oh, also, we should be able to attach an image to a note. Pretty basic.

Hey, if we can attach images why not videos? Can we embed tweets, too? Audio? Will you support HTML5 for my iPad AND Flash so we don't have to transcode to ogg for Firefox?

Oh and this text entry form is looking a little, hmm, primitive, could we add WYSWIG controls?

Etc. etc. They are smart to nip this in the bud when their product is still young, IMHO.
If you leave the destination open and limit by price, you can answer questions like "Where can I go for $500"?
I'm in. Which of the Strangen? And what's a suitable forum for working out the details and proceeding? A Google group would probably be my go-to default but I'm open to alternatives.

Edit: Let's see if this works: http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=2993321.
Water district taps Google for good coverage
I think the parent comment is suggesting something like, in a new version of the software, doing this:

-- remove the button for the feature, replace it with a "Give me back my feature!" button

-- when the "give me back my feature!" button is clicked, send a GET request to mydomain.com/theywantedthefeatureback.php , and give them back the feature button

-- look at your server logs to determine whether anyone actually uses the feature

This is no big hassle for the developer or the user and it will tell you rather quickly whether anyone actually uses feature X.
Hipmunk's key differentiator is design. It's a pain in the ass to book flights and hotels. Hipmunk removed that pain by making it fun.

Google's flight search doesn't look fun.
Bill Gates gets mostly capital gains.
Wow, perfect case in point, then.
Yes, I read the paper.

Try coming up with a 'consistent mental model' that works with random execution sequences.

Then try again for one that works backwards. And so on.

At best this test determines which people are going to be 'easy' to teach programming. But just like sales start at 'no' teaching starts when the subject is having problems, not when it's easy.
Yup. The iPhone and iPad are intimately personal devices. For the iPhone this works 100%. For the iPad it's both a blessing and a curse.
That's the kind of logic that would prevent Google Maps from displaying house addresses, which it does do.
I have one question. How to handle private methods in prototype/module pattern? If I declare private function in obj function declaration I can not access it in public functions attached to the prototype of obj. This is also true for module pattern. This problem arises when I need to add extra method later. How to overcome this situation?
Meta-comment: I know I saw something about this before, but why is it that any PDF gets a [scribd] tag, even when it has nothing to do with scribd.com? It doesn't make any sense.
> The 'perfect tool for open-source hardware' would benefit from being open-source itself.

Agreed. Open Hardware needs fewer closed tools, not more.
> One of the secondary ideas I applied to YC this round
> is a marketplace for new types of computers based on Arduino.

I'd be interested in learning more about this if you wanted to share.
These guys have looked very hard at the okcupid postings. Interesting stuff, but it doesn't really show how prostitution and alcohol ended up making uber better in some tangible way. Only that there were some interesting correlations.
Free seo
This is so nice site for the seo.
If you have multiple Macs, MobileMe will even sync your keychain, dock, dashboard widgets and preference settings.
What a Greek default would look like
Europe's banks are staring into the abyss
Improving Rails Performance with Twitter's Kiji
Because HN promotes scribd (A YC company).
Windows 8 apps will be easily portable to Windows Phone 7
Nearly 1 in 6 Americans in poverty
Just saw the update - awesome! Thank you.
They must be accessing prior flight search history in some way or they made a really lucky guess with their default selections.

I've recently searched for flights on Expedia and Southwest (I don't think I've visited anywhere else). Google already had those same dates and cities selected by default.
I'm in the same boat as you, I got assigned to work on a project that keeps me really interested and my side projects right now are basically research and experimentation that might be useful for my main work project.

Looking at projects like Ruby on Rails, Node.js and others like it where the creator created for work reason.

Or look at Linus, his side project was Git. It was something he needed for work.
Analysts: China Unlikely to Rescue Italy
Kurt Vonnegut maps out the 3 story plot algorithms
Microsoft Unveils Some New Windows 8 Tablets and More
Federal deficit totaled $1.23T through August
Wild fantasy for library & component search - once I find a part - not only can I pull in the symbol and footprint, but also select a canned snippet for one of the common use cases of that part (ie: what everyone copies from the app. note and/or reference designs). Eg: switchers+inductors+caps, max232+caps, ... This could be a value-add for certain parts and suppliers.

Bonus points for parameterising the component selection and adapting to current design rules!
The parts library is already integrated with the Octopart API.
Facebook has made some weird UI design choices lately to say the least.
give out unique stream urls to customers, then make sure each only works for one client at a time.
A tip I found the other day is that in Chrome you can actually de-obfuscate minimized Javascript and throw break points in there if you'd like.

In Chrome 12 you just right click the scripts pane in the developer tools and click "De-obfuscate Source".

In Chrome 13 you navigate to the scripts pane and click the "{}" icon. I honestly have no idea why they got rid of the right click functionality, but it's incredibly useful for me.
Honestly, I can't understand in which way your charts is more readable than pie charts.

I frequently use combination of graphic, histogram and bar chart with one pie chart.

Graphics - for chronological data, pie chart - for absolute values.
走出阴影
Debian (and Ubuntu) users have been doing it for many, many years without severe problems.
Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage: US 2010
Fun read; thanks for posting!
So who are you rooting for? In the hypothetical world where there is a winner and a loser (which travel search pretty much is, given its maturity), are you rooting for the home team or for the guys you worked with for so long?
If its the Pandora for Music Videos wheres the Like button on the video? i want to start customizing the channel i just created!

Well done!
Proposal: Linear Algebra Study Group
Inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2992963, let's start a group to (re-)learn linear algebra.

Who's in, and how shall we go about it? Something like a chapter every week or two, plus do the exercises?

Time to trade in a few hours of internet downtime and actually learn something.

Edit: here's what seems to be emerging. We'll read Strang's "Linear Algebra and its Applications" (ISBN 0030105676), one chapter every two weeks plus exercises. We'll stay here where the community is, unless proven otherwise. And... that's about it! I like systems with few rules.

The one sticking point is waiting for people to get the book. Anyone who, like me, just ordered a cheap copy on Abebooks (probably a re-import from India) is going to be blocked for a bit. I will post again when my copy arrives, and will email everyone who (a) has said on this page that they're in and (b) has an email address in their HN profile. Will that be suitable?

I'll check back this evening.
"IRC" is a bit of a misnomer; it looks like it's web sockets connecting to a custom server, unless I missed something.
Normally, you would have to take responsibility for the data on your servers. Legally, there is an exception if you disclaim responsibility for all user-generated content, then you just take the content down and whoever has a problem has to work it out with the user directly. This exception is known as "safe harbor", and there are very specific rules about who gets to claim it. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Online_Copyri...

Basically, as soon as you take responsibility for any of the user-generated content, you can be held liable for all of it. Either you're responsible for the content on your servers or you're not, you can't really pick and choose.
>I used to ask this question, but now I've generalized it to asking if someone has any hobbies.

I think this is far better than "pet projects". Some people would rather socialize, read literature, play music, play or watch sports, work on cars/home improvement, paint, travel, camp, write, get involved in politics, read the news, or any number of things! Rest and relaxation are particularly helpful to mental health. Even playing video games, watching movies (with a certain amount of moderation), or doing things that are more classically endorphin-releasing "fun" than programming contribute to a well-balanced individual.

I'd rather hire someone with a sense of balance in their life.
I think that would create a sort of turtles all the way down situation. Google has so much internal proprietary technology infrastructure that it would be pretty difficult to provide a compelling explanation that doesn't have you wondering about how 10 other google services work (that you just learned about).

Disclaimer: I work for Google and this is how I feel every day :) it's a good feeling though!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1886310
Criticizing Microsoft also gives a lot of downvotes with it.
Unions don't waste their time trying to organize happy, satisfied employees

Well, sometimes they do, but it generally doesn't work very well. I remember reading a story about how a labor organizer just totally failed to get anyone interested in signing up because their jobs were just fine, thank you.
In my experience, candidates with major pet projects, especially ones that aren't related to their current job, fall into one or more of the following categories:

* They don't have life, and are usually not the most pleasant people to work with, let alone communicate with non-programmers.

* For some reason cannot find a job that involves the passion/knowledge/skill they put into their pet project. The job market for programmers being what it is, that's a major red flag.

* They have a passion for programming, but aren't good enough to hack it in a professional environment. Often not so much a skills but discipline or team player issue, but yes, you can have a passion for something you are not particularly good at! Millions of amateur-[enter activity here] do it every day!

Having or not having a pet project is an good angle for an interview, but not a meaningful qualification in itself.
One thing I believe is lacking in news today is follow-up. It seems that so many things are all the buzz today, even an outrage, but by next week it's all but forgotten. I'd like to be able to track the life of an issue.

So a nasty crime is committed, and somebody is arrested; is he later convicted? Responding to complaints, a corporation pledges to make changes; do they ever materialize? An earthquake puts thousands out of their homes; have they been restored a year later?
You should try writing some unit tests then :P
Raspberry Pi Q&A with the hardware team
the first motivation of any for profit corporation, especially one as large and successful as Google, is profit. That is their entire reason for existence, don't fool yourself into believing otherwise.
the naievety is amusing. what site isn't using some sort of tracker to better serve you ads or market to you better using your information to sell you something.
Show HN: Unobtrusive Realtime Mouse-Tracking Analytics for Node.js
I'll be happy to- I'll do it today - and I assume you have contact info on the site.
Unless I'm missing something fairly obvious, they might have missed something pretty big - is there any way to book a one way flight?
I played with Jekyll on GitHub several months ago, but as I recall, you commit your source files to the repo, and the GitHub would run Jekyll to compile them to HTML. (And send you an annoying message every time that it was successful...)
Formspring Launches Official iOS App
Economic situation getting more severe: Japan economy minister
Don't blame technology
Paxfire: our search query intercepts are not wiretapping
Many of the tools Google uses to build their products are open source. Flights source for example mentions GWT.

https://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
I charge $60/hour when working at home and twice that when on site. I turn down almost all (over 80%) consulting offers, so I could probably raise my rates if I was not so fussy about what work I accept.

I am semi-retired now, and enjoying work is a higher priority than maximizing income.
Revenue is for keeping score and paying commissions
Uber is able to decrease the average wait time by strategically placing cars wherever alcohol and prostitution are prevalent, thus making the service better.
MindFlash Makes It Easy to Create a Training Program -- and to Charge for It
Powers the Shopify website as well by the way. Jekyll was a good fit since we made Liquid and are therefore really familiar with it.
But github does that part for you. You push up the raw files AND Github runs Jekyll and generates the HTML files.
Is there anyway to do one-way flights? I really like it so far but cannot for the life of me figure out if one-way is possible.
I've been steeped in this space for a bit - there's catchafire, 5000hands and a bunch of others.

I guess it all depends on geographic scope and focus of the startup. Unreasonable Institute and Global Social Business Incubator are good places to begin looking.

Hope it helps -
It's a plain HTML5 <video> tag with nothing saying to autostart. It'll work however your browser is configured to handle video tags. It doesn't autostart in any of mine.
I agree that a lot of frameworks are overkill, but if you put yourself in the frame of mind of a non-programming designer or a layperson who just needs to manage content on their site, using a static HTML generation tool is out of the question. I've been using octopress/jekyll recently and think it's amazing and really love it, but there's no way in a million years I could give that to a client to manage their own website.

Also, it's not really wasting time or money -- cheap shared hosting costs the same regardless of whether you're serving a php/mysql app or static html files. And setting up a wordpress site is probably easier for non-programmers than getting a jekyll setup going.

It's definitely a colossal waste of CPU power though, but that train left the station 10 years ago.
This is such a great look into data-- I've long felt that consumer companies like Uber (and Google and Apple and so on...) have the strongest ability to explore the fabric of today's culture through their data, and it's sweet to see that Uber has opened up some of that understanding to the public.
> I do a lot of research and learn about programming in my spare time, but have hardly any personal programming projects to show.

I think this point is not stressed enough whenever this subject comes up. A person who spends all his free time reading CS research papers and experimenting with different solutions to problems he encounters in his field is not passionate by this standard if he doesn't have a pet _project_ to show at the interview.
What I bring to UX from working with criminal delinquents & young offenders
HP used to have that clause in '06 or so. I read through their agreement around that time.
Online copyright protection for Freelancers
The name "sieve" gave it away for me before I'd even looked at the code, but I decided to make sure I was right. Then i looked at it and my mind was kind of blown but how neat and concise it was. This definitely makes me want to take a look at functional programming (just ordered "The Little Schemer")
Good point. Having some kind of bookmark feature where users can keep track of the progess would be a great feature. I will be taking note of everything suggested.
It's hard to tell if there's a real legitimate complaint here, because the overall thrust of the article seems to be "I thought this game was going to be like Left 4 Dead but instead it was like Borderlands." The other main theme, that games use numbers and bars to manipulate you, is almost universally true, and has been since Pong.
Next to what other people have pointed out, you can also hide the map if you want to by clicking on the marker.
BTW: Pages are currently down...all blank
They imply that looking at crime data reduces average wait time, but they don't actually present any data to show that this is the case, or to quantify how much better their demand prediction model can do when given access to the crime data.