skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just a nitpick: The O'Reilly book title is actually _Learning GNU Emacs_. (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596006488/)
The product(s) it's designed for are selling today.

If you have an entire process setup already for planning your software development path, and you already have a well working analytics system, then your products are already being managed, and you don't need this.

This product is designed to bring an efficient structure into the life of the ISV. Processes are there for a reason - they make it so you don't have to guess what comes next or what you have to do next. This product is designed on that principle - it takes the random life of the developer and makes it efficient.

There are two ways one can approach the software business - you can either just do things randomly as they coming, and hope things work out, or you can plan ahead, observe trends, iterate and optimize to grow and make more money. This product is designed for people who want to take the second path.
Thanks for the tip, I'll see what they offer.
$100B "Internet Idiot" Industry Set To Explode
me too.. it challenged many of my assumptions and gave me new information.. possibly useful info for any entrepreneur planning a financial strategy in an uncertain economy.. and it frames the crisis as a real opportunity..
What turns you off about the name?
Debated whether to re-post or not, but given the unprecedented fallout from the previous week, I thought it was timely. I always point folks to this when they start asking about the subprime mess--it's much more engaging than some of the long, dry articles around.

Apologies to those seeing it again. Hopefully it reached some new eyes.
That doesn't have much to do with the age of the captain...
Not where but when.
Half of Google's products are in 'beta' and will stay that way. The future web is and will be never finished. Conditioning the consumer to accept unfinished, unrefined, ever evolving, sometimes down, mostly up and operational, that's the future state Google will always communicate.
If I were interviewing there I'd just ask straight-up, are there any major universities, elite or otherwise, whose graduates you wouldn't consider?
You can probably still get hired, I'm sure, but it reflects poorly on the culture there.
It's a little complicated, but worth the read!
Full Windsor, Half Windsor, Four-in-hand, and Shelby. Do I get the job?
Paying $0.02 instead of $0.01 for a hit gets you faster response and better quality usually
Chrysler Unveils 3 Electric Car Prototypes: sports car like Tesla, Jeep and Minivan
An algorithm you could use: try three times, prefer the most similar two ("map"), look in those for puzzle-piece matches with the nearest neighbors ("reduce").
Yeeeeess.. Let's have companies focus solely on shareholder value. That's working out so well lately.
I dont think I would have easily found the site in a goog query. licensekey.net....makes me think of license keys :P

I don't mean to be negative, I think it's a great idea and I'll be keeping a close eye on it when it comes out. Personally, I think that names can be some of the hardest things for hackers to think of...they always turn out crap (Django ?!)
Uh... which comic is this again? It's not showing up in FireFox, and IE is reporting an error with the Flash Plugin. Any got a mirror to a non-locked down version? (Or the HN or Reddit article that discussed it in the past?)
What is hiberfil.sys?
Perhaps I was exaggerating the sentiment, as one generally applies to a company and not HR. :) I find it amusing rather than vexing, seeing as it's socially quite gauche to make any reference at all to "the Ivy League" among educated people (regardless of whether or not they attended Ivies).

What college did you go to?
I hear the Starbucks program is a little more advanced though.
Amherst College.

Also, I use the degree requirement as a filtering mechanism on the jobs themselves. I figure I don't want to work for anyone who cares more about titles and appearances than ability, so if that's a disqualification, I don't want to work there anyway.

There are plenty of startups around - more than there are skilled developers, actually. And if you are a skilled developer, you can always start your own.
I'm the complete opposite. If I think a job looks interesting and see that the company has elected to limit their candidate pool by putting a lame qualifier like, "a degree from a top-tier university," I don't waste my time. It shows that the company is more concerned with how their employees are perceived than what they can accomplish. Pass.

I sometimes have similar reservations about companies that list arbitrary experience requirements too, especially when they're clearly just going off some industry norm. That's just me tho. YMMV.
Hrm. Still seems weird to me. I post here because it's pretty explicit that I do it for my own reasons. If I were to make 2 cents per post, that would make it somehow demeaning for me, I think.

It does appear to work though, so maybe that's not a valid concern for many people. I wonder how exhaustible a resource people like that are, though. If MT were to become more widely used, would it fall off a cliff as the supply of people doing it "just for the heck of it" dried up and they are forced to ask for market rates?
This is only the front. You check the backs of your US bills, don't you?
Four ways to optimize paginated displays
A bug that causes $218 trilion phone bill
10 Lessons Startups Can Learn From Superheroes
This is the story: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12247590/
Here's I think a much better way of saying it:

"Awesome at what you do and have some way of showing it."

I personally prefer links to past projects and code samples. Whether or not somebody knows their way around theory you can sort out in an interview (and having a degree from a top university is unfortunately a frustratingly bad indicator of such). Figuring out if they can code is a lot harder.
If you had graduated top of class from /etc that would be a different story...
Please don't patronize me. I never said, "no one in their right mind would do this." I asked, "why would someone do this if the primary motivation was money?" If the primary motivation isn't money, and people are looking to alleviate boredom, all you needed to do was say that. understand that the reason I asked was because I tried it once and couldn't stand it.

That said, your study does answer my question. People see it as easy money that they can pursuit while doing other things or when there is nothing else to do, which makes sense.
that doesn't mean that what worked for Sweden wont work for the US. besides just in terms of common sense you don't just give someone money without being able to measure/keep track of anything along with a sizable return on investment

without any oversight whatsoever, a certain someone can technically go off to Mexico with 700 billion multiple times without anyone else knowing why or when

free markets self correct; if you're going to interfere with it since everyone has pain why not just bail out everyone then and not just Wall St? - hell even the auto makers need bailing out now
> Who's time is worth so little that they'd actually see a single cent worth doing one of these drawings? Kids? Third world laborers?

Unemployed Java programmers?:)
"... more often than not this means people who went to an elite school."

I'm not convinced of that. Sure, you can create an argument for the point that sounds good, but that doesn't mean it's actually true.

What I think that really does is get the person doing the hiring off the hook. If you hire a dud from MIT you'll get less flak for it than if you hired a dud from an unknown school. (Or someone without a degree.) It's the same idea as "No one gets fired for buying from IBM."
Amazing Skyfire browser for Windows Mobile finally in public beta
That's how I feel if, given an obviously qualified candidate, they then reject him.

But I try to give them the benefit of the doubt on the initial job application. They have to put something down, and as spez pointed out on the Reddit thread, it's an easy way of disqualifying people who like to complain instead of do something about it. It's an unfortunate filter that probably turns off a few well-qualified candidates, but nobody's perfect.
Learn jQuery From Someone Younger Than JavaScript
Sept 24: World Day Against Software Patents
Didn't know this until just now, but apparently today is the day for protesting software patents. Since there are lots of startup founders on here, who may have a different take than the average hacker, what are your thoughts on the software patent issue?
Didn't know this until just now, but apparently today is the day for protesting software patents. Since there are lots of startup founders on here, who may have a different take than the average hacker, what are your thoughts on the software patent issue?
Well, businesses definitely need structure, but I don't see how this particular product would help me observe trends (aside from web site page views and total dollar sales), iterate and optimize.

Perhaps if there were a case study of some sort up on your page? Right now, it just looks like a to do list stitched into Facebook, and that's not what we're needing.
It takes a while to update.

To speed the process, go to your page (i.e. friendfeed.com/yourusername), click Add/edit services, click the self-referential feed in the My Services list, then click Refresh Blog.

BTW I'm not encouraging anyone to actually do this. It was fun just to try out.
This is a generational phenomenon. The housing-market racket of the late '90s and early 2000s was a case of a large, dominant generation (Baby Boomers; b. 1943-58ish) enriching itself at the expense of a small, recessive generation (Gen X; 1958-80). It occurred during a period when the Baby Boomers were selling houses (that they inherited from parents, or that they were selling in order to downscale to smaller, more maintainable dwellings), when young families (Xers) were buying them, and when Millennials were (thankfully, from my perspective) still renting. All of these bailouts, in my opinion, are the same thing. Bush-style "conservatism" is clearly not future-oriented, and not very conservative either. Cutting taxes while starting a war? Come on. It's a bunch of obnoxious Baby Boomers with no foresight plundering the future.
I agree. So why bother with the label in the first place?
The article title calls them add-ons, but have are modified/patched versions.
Free up 750 hours a year with one simple change.
"The digits of pi are conjectured to be "random" in the sense of being both uniformly distributed over {0, ..., 9} and possessing no n-ary serial correlations for any n, but as far as I know, this has not been proven."

This is why I find the concept interesting. I want to see the conjectures and theories /in person./ I love mathematical theory, in general, but my knowledge is very shallow. I more-or-less understand the properties of pi that you described, but I want to test them. I also want to test the properties of Benford's law to see how they work and how they can or can't be applied. This looks like the perfect opportunity to do exactly that.
We're working on it, believe me.
I love the thought of improving the workplace for productive and quality individuals. There is nothing worse than stifling creativity and imagination.

That said, I wonder how this model works if you are running a business that employs people that may not be as smart or motivated as say the 37Signals crew or Google, which probably means most businesses.
I don't know how many products you sell, but let's say you sell about 4 products. You sell roughly 6-7 copies a day, and you site views are about 1500 uniques a day. Now, you nee to keep a constant eye on these numbers, and you need to do things to make these numbers go up, and not down.

If you work without structure, it's difficult. My tool is designed such that you can take a look at the frontpage and you instantly see how everything is performing.

The todo list is a standard todo list (like basecamp has), but the fact that you can keep your product based todo separate from the rest of the usual todo is helpful. When a product is cruising along fine based on trends you observe, you can ignore the product from a business point of view. When things start getting bad, you have a todo list you can refer back to.
We're currently running ads from a couple ad networks, but we're just getting started on monetization projects.

We've raised both angel and VC rounds (google for it if you want the amounts and people)
Startups and The Power Of Polarization
Haha, I found that part of the job posting to be a joke for multiple reasons.

For example, given that their enumeration of the top CS schools doesn't include the best computer science program in the world, I wouldn't worry too much about being in the "etc." :P

* http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/grad/eng/c...

* http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/college/spec-d...
http://code.google.com/p/canopy-clustering/

"This repository contains a set of example map-reduces using Hadoop.

Specifically, there are examples for:

* Pagerank
* Canopy-clustering "

more examples like k-means here: http://delicious.com/pskomoroch/hadoop+code
Hehe ... NO, over-qualified.
I think this was fairly vacuous. It's easy to say "too much bureaucracy", but harder to implement in the majority of companies. I'll believe it when 37signals starts doing consulting to make your ordinary, average small/mid size business "get real".
There's not a lot of substance here, although I agree. It seems that the reasoning behind the way the workplace functions is: "because I said so."

I work at a job where nearly everyone could work remotely and be just as (or more) productive. This won't happen because it would be too upsetting to the way things are for the conservative people in power.
Alexa's numbers are crap. Total crap. They only reflect your traffic in the loosest way. There was a period of time where our traffic doubled and the alexa actually declined. It eventually catches up though....think of a random distribution around the true value.

Just so you don't get the idea I'm picking on Alexa, estimating this stuff is hard (or the people doing it are incompetent, but that seems unlikely with so many entrants). Quantcast and Compete.com are even worse, and ComScore is expensive but no better than Alexa.
Where is their shareholder value now?

And, are we not left clinging like shipwrecked sailors to those companies who successfully guarded their shareholder value?
is the product ready?

if not, great way to get iterative feedback before building product/feature set that nobody wants.
Since ustream is "quantified" on Quantcast, I know the actual traffic numbers for both sites. And believe me when I say, Compete doesn't even resemble reality.
Indeed. Our growth doesn't have a big spike at the end, it's just gradually doubling up every month or so.
The key to the PC's success and Apple's downfall was that the open-standards-based IBM-compatible PC created a platform for third-party hardware and software makers to ply their stuff.

This is just false. The Apple II didn't fail in the business market because it was a closed platform. It was one of the most open platforms in the history of personal computing -- it shipped with a ROM listing and a schematic. It was possible to clone the Apple II hardware -- check out this huge list of Apple cloners:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apple_II_clones

The Apple II's rise in the business market was halted because IBM had unbelievable corporate marketing clout and, at the time, better operational management. During the Apple II boom Apple was not the best managed company in the world. It famously ran without a budget for a long period. Apple's problem was that the Mac didn't arrive until well after IBM had established their hold on the market, and in the meantime all the company had was the Apple III and the Lisa.

The IBM PC "smashed" the Apple II first. [1] Then the cloners appeared. We remember the PC cloners and not the Apple cloners because the PC cloners were just more successful. Indeed, they were successful enough to essentially drive IBM out of its own business -- partly because IBM quickly caught up to Apple in the "corporate sluggishness" metric, but mostly because IBM didn't realize until too late that their core asset was the operating system, which they didn't own.

[1] I find it hard to say with a straight face that the IBM PC "smashed" the Apple II, a platform which lived on for another decade and which was ultimately "smashed" by another Apple product, the Mac. All the PC did was drive Apple out of the sweet spot of the business market, which was admittedly a big loss but obviously didn't destroy the company. Indeed, while IBM's PC platform has been a big success, Apple is the company that's still in the PC industry.
"Yeah, I went to Stanford and got the $200k education so I can work as a JavaScript+HTML+CSS coder at Posterous.com. I'm a real genius."
How about Easymacs? I dislike the standard shortcuts not because they are difficult to remember, but because they cause me pain in my hands and I've never had anything of this sort before. I've tried remapping the caps lock key, but it didn't help much. Now I find that using Emacs is much more enjoyable. I don't think torturing yourself is justified. I can spot only one drawback: you have to take your fingers of the home row (learn touch typing, my rodent-using friends) a bit more.
Doing the math on Ning's CPMs
Seems to me that the issue here is input method. If someone comes up with an input method better than a keyboard, then the form-factor large enough for a keyboard looks far less attractive.
The story itelf appears to have exploded.
Download Las Vegas Episodes
I love the thing that I can download The Las Vegas episodes along with thousands of other TV series without actually paying for every single episode I download.
I love the Posterous guys (and their product), but I think they are wrong to require this. It would disqualify everyone on my team (which hurts my feelings) and also disqualifies some of the most brilliant/hardworking geeks I know.

If it's a buyers market for employers and you're buried in candidates, it's a great line to throw in to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. In a market like this (where every good coder I know is buried in job offers), you're not going to be too buried in candidates.
this is my point...great when you have several highly motivated creative people (like 37signals), but what about "most" companies? I have several friends who would absolutely take advantage of this type of atmosphere by not doing sh*t. They would be fired in smaller companies, but lost in the shuffle of larger ones. Now you are focusing on house cleaning.
This was a total oversight by us -- we didn't really mean "REQUIREMENT" in the sense. Of course that's insane. This is something that we actually discussed with our friends (some of them from Hacker News too). The top CS school discussion DID come up.

Here was our thinking: the true hacker badasses out there will see that and not really give a crap. They know they're good, and will just glide over that line.

What we really mean is: we want people who are smart and amazing.

I can show chat transcripts with dcurtis if you care to follow up with me directly (we really did discuss whether that line should stay or go). garry@posterous.com

But the point is: Mea culpa, we posted it at 2 AM and it was a mistake to put this down as a "requirement". It's absolutely a 'plus'.
How will your product "do things to make these numbers go up, not down"? If all your tool is letting me do is count web site page-views and total dollar sales, that's not going to help.
Geez, these lines of inquiry are murder on my karma. But I'll continue because I'm hardheaded, and because I'm not nickb with a bazillion points to lose.

Micah, that's fine and congratulations. But, uh, do you really think that your request for a job deserved >30 points and a hit on the first page? Meanwhile the very interesting Project 10^100 link has 19 points and is falling off rapidly?

And this isn't the first time Posterous-related contentless posts have shown up on the first page: http://kirindave.tumblr.com/post/50264813/the-problem-tm-wit...

I don't have anything against you, but if everyone did what you just did, Hacker News would be worse than useless. And crazily enough we can't seem to flag your post down. I'm baffled why so many vote for this story, but your job hunt is not "news" nor is it something that a vast majority of hackers should care about.
Hey man, not at our restaurant. ;-)

JK, I kid.
The Daily Show's 8 Best Hacker Moments
I found this comment particularly interesting from the Reddit thread:

I think it's interesting that I see a lot of people saying that computer programmers don't need degrees, but I rarely see anyone saying the same thing about physicists, biologists, mathematicians, or zoologists. I wonder why that is.

Maybe there really are people decrying degrees in those other fields and I just don't hear about it because I'm a computer programmer. But I suspect that degrees are actually required and respected in those fields. What is it about Computer Science that makes people think you can read a few books on your own and you are qualified? What is it about the other fields in math, science, and engineering that make that not the case?
Mistake! Sorry! =/
That part I did not add to the screenshots :-) If you click on the last tab "Strategy", there are 3 icons beside the 'trends' icon. Those pages contain the steps that one takes to increase the page view, download count and so on. The info that is taught in business school is broken down into a form that makes sense for the internet, and that will surely make you more money if you do things steadily and step by step.

I decided against putting up the screenshots of that part because there are too many pages, and I've not completely fleshed out the concept yet.
It works in the same way as the Google Minimum GPA. The probability that you are wasting your time reading/interviewing a candidate from Etc. U. is simply higher. Is it a better criteria than other bits of info on the CV? I don't know, but I wouldn't dismiss it offhand. If you get a very large number of candidates and time is short, why not?

Everything you have on your CV is ground for similar discrimination. Judging from the response, this is a politically incorrect statement around here (cf.: What You Can't Say). Maybe they should have silently trashed all documents, if !doc.contains(topUni)

Before anyone points it out, yes, this line of reasoning supports gender and racial discrimination. Indeed, anti-discrimination laws make hiring a less efficient process. We have them because discrimination against gender leads to other social evils. Can anyone make such a case for university-based discrimination?
Can A Better Ad Database Boost MySpace Revenue?
For some reason, the link had a trailing backslash. It works better without it:

http://www.tekpopuli.com/2008/09/24/100b-internet-idiot-indu...
I dunno; I don't feel comfortable working for a company that assaults tall people.
Link should be http://www.tekpopuli.com/2008/09/24/100b-internet-idiot-indu...
If you need to ask, then you don't need to know.
It did. I thought it did a good job explaining things, even though it was a little (ok, a lot) childish.
Hufflepuff is the best, are you kidding? They are kind of just a vocational magic school though.
Tumblr also had that severe security hole back a few months ago that allowed anyone to go to /admin and see everything.
Help My Startup Products are Too Healthy
Yeah, that was definitely because the founder didn't go to college!
A Critique of Global Warming Science and Policy (Thursday Night)
Thanks. Is there any way to change this once I've submitted it?