skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: I will work for your start-up as a designer for two weeks (SF Bay Area)
My name is Shahed Khan, I am a 16-year-old entrepreneur as well as the CEO/Co-founder of Viatask. I love designing new products and brands all the time, it's a hobby of mine. I'm looking to take on challenges and will help redesign or recreate your start-up or your website for free (sort of).

I will not charge you a single dime for my work. What's the catch?

I'm from Chicago, but will be travelling to San Francisco next Friday (Dec. 23 - Jan. 7) and will be there for meetings with investors and other like-minded entrepreneurs. I'm looking for a place to stay while I'm there, and was hoping to stay with fellow entrepreneurs or start-ups.

In return for lending me a couch or a floor to crash on, I will not only consult you on the design side of your company, but also help you build it. I can provide as much time as possible while I'm in SF, but please do realize I might be busy during the day, due to all the meetings and work I'm going to be doing, but I will love to help you guys whenever possible!

Please leave your comments/questions below, or email me at shahed@viatask.com

My (growing) portfolio: http://dribbble.com/shahed
Flame bait, content void post. If you are interested, "solaris11.tar.bz2", ~104MB. Not more information on the linked source or the linked source's sources either.
That's not a simple fix. If you don't use "reverse a linked list" anymore, then you start asking increasingly harder and harder questions, and the bar gets ridiculously high, to the point where everyone needs to know how to solve NP-class problems within 45 mins. And even then the system still can be gamed by simply memorizing more and more questions. It's a lose-lose situation.
Less known data structures come to mind:

- Topological sort. Great for dependency traversal.

- KD-Tree. Great for geo-spatial search.

- Consistent Hashing. Great for scaling and clustering.

- Fuzzy Hashing. Great for document digest and mining. Sadly there might be a patent conflict somewhere.

- Extendible Hashtable. Amazing space-efficient and extendible lookup table.

- Bloom Filter. Space-efficient check.
I got schooled angrily by the creator of JavaScript and founder of Mozilla on the difficulties of NaCl and Dart here http://shaver.off.net/diary/2011/10/28/approaches-to-perform...

He says it would be impractical for other browser vendors to keep up with the sprawling mess of APIs required by NaCl known as Pepper. Also Google's behavior around it's open source but not open standard tech like NaCl and Dart leaves a bad taste.
Link:
Dribbble Portfolio: http://dribbble.com/shahed
>"How can you convince someone that the TV show that is broadcast for free over the air is legal, but downloading exactly the same show at a later time is illegal?"

People know that copyright infringement is not lawful though, don't they. They just don't care.

Same way people know the speed limit but don't care to abide by it
Something like that. rbx takes about 0.5 secs to start up, but after that it generally runs in the neighborhood of 10x faster, assuming you're spending enough time in actual ruby code to make that possible.
I thought most of the source code was open via OpenSolaris?
Current 3D technology results in a dramatic loss of picture quality. In theory they're supposed to compensate for the brightness reduction by cranking up the projector, but I've yet to see a 3D film that wasn't dramatically murkier than the 2D version. You also get terrible judder. And, for people like myself that wear glasses, the fact that no movie theatre distributes polarized glasses designed to fit around a pair of glasses means that I usually have difficulty focusing and get awful eyestrain.

I don't have a problem with the idea of 3D, per se, but its implementation has made watching films in a theatre very frustrating and uncomfortable.
I don't actually schedule anything, but I've got a number of things to juggle. Thankfully, I've got a wife who runs her own business and understands the rigors of being a bootstrapped startup-er.

That said, I'm more goal-oriented than calendar-oriented. I try to set weekly goals, and chunk them down into daily goals. Each day, I'll set one must-do goal per "thing" that I'm involved in (startup, consulting, family, life). If I manage to get other stuff squeezed in, that's a bonus.

This way I don't restrict myself to only spending time with family between 6-8pm...I do it whenever I want and get the rest done when appropriate. Obviously some items (consulting) may require more strict calendaring, but you can flex around that.

For me, a hard time-based schedule is not going to make me more productive...it has the opposite effect on me. So, I'm lucky enough that I can work things in a way that work for me best.

Cheers,
AL
I'm pretty sure iOS used to have a single search/URL input, but they separated them out in later releases.
The linked presentation looks like a great, opinionated piece of OS and Sun history. It's too bad Google Video went away, since being able to easily download presentations like this for offline viewing was a useful feature.
The majority of short-term market participants have deemed Zynga's two-day prospects to be poor, and correctly so. The factors that influence them, for the most part, are very different than the factors that long-term investors look at/care about.

In fact, it's entirely possible that the IPO participants are making money in the meantime lending their stock to short-sellers. Yes, the funds that participated in the IPO have a loss on paper, but so does the person who buys a house and sees that interest rates dropped 0.00001% the next day.
Instagram on Track to Oust Foursquare as Biggest Mobile Social Network
Is 69 becoming the new ‘27’ for dictators? Probably no
I'm not saying it's the case, here, but beware of the trojan horse, full of heavily funded IP lawyers itching to sue (and/or correspondingly spend) your project and perhaps you into oblivion.

Such releases can actually pose a risk to open source if and when OS developers have to "prove" their lack of exposure vis à vis the "clean" nature of their own work.

That all aside, I'm not exactly in Oracle's camp. RIP Sun -- warts and all.
Who Was Steve Jobs? by Sue Halpern
Joyent Makes Long-term Go-to-market Bet
Proof that supercomputers can see and build the future
I thought the preferred pejorative for Leland Stanford was "robber baron".
Simple method to backup your computer.
THE ZOOMQUILT | a collaborative art project
The only way for farmers to survive on a world market utterly dominated by subsidized farmers in Europe and USA is to subsidize them, yes.
Does using Facebook make you legally famous?
No. That's an online backup of your system. A version control should clearly mark versions you'd ever like to go back to or merge; "save" is not enough for that (many IDEs save every time you compile, and most of the time that's definitely not a version I would like to refer to in the future)

Too much noise/versions is ALSO bad. I'm quite happy with having to tell git every hour or so "this is a version I'd like to go back to"; and continuous zfs snapshots when I want to undo an unplanned delete of the last 20 minutes of work and immediate IDE crash (otherwise, ctrl-z is just as good).

Right tool for the right job.
Programmer interviews are famously terrible. Take a second to think about FizzBuzz, why anyone ever thought we'd need something like it, and how it actually continues to serve a purpose.

Everyone thinks they're better at interviewing than they are. They often have a survivorship bias. In clueful companies, it's not that dead weight doesn't get hired. It just gets washed out. Interviewers tend to remember the people they end up working alongside.

There are dev questions that are harder to study for. They tend to be open ended. A few of my favorites:

* Describe some code that tends to follow you from project to project (I mostly interview C devs, so I tend to ask this as, "what's in libyou.a?"). What's in your bag of utility functions?

* What's the worst library you've ever worked with and why did you hate it?

* Estimate the amount of time it will take you to complete system X. Drill down, both by forcing the candidate to specify components (do an informal design exercise) and then cost each of those components. Estimation is an extremely important skill regardless.

* What's a piece of functionality that tends to crop up on lots of projects that you'd never implement yourself if you had the option of using a library? (Usually, I'm trying to get C programmers to tell me that they would not in fact hand-hack doubly linked lists out of structs with nested struct pointers).

* Describe the last system you contributed significantly to; how did those contributions break down structurally (did you write libraries for X, Y, Z; did you write plugins for X, Y, Z; did you extend the engine in X, Y, Z ways). Now describe the trickiest bug you ran into on that project.

For C devs, I always used to ask, "You're testing a component you just wrote and finding that it crashes in malloc. Diagnose the problem." This is less relevant now, but there are probably surgical questions you can ask e.g. a Python dev that verify that they actually have the experience of working professionally in the language.
Great analysis, missed a huge point though.

A fraction of an industrial machine makes zero napkins.

Your analysis is spot on, the problem can be solved more efficiently with a large scale production. The capital expenditure cost however is similar (43M vs 50M). You point out they huge disparity in labor costs $25M vs .09M but labor is 'free' in India (which is to say there is so much of it available that the price is a lot less than elsewhere).

The incremental solution here wins because a small increment in cash instantly starts feeding the supply of napkins. The 'big machine' solution loses because it takes a huge investment to get to the point where you can make the napkins and nobody is willing to fund that.

There is another problem which are transportation costs. The infrastructure in India is, by all reports, spotty in the rural areas. By creating the manufacturing in the towns themselves you mitigate the transportation problems. That would not be possible with a centralized industrial machine. Further the folks who 'make' the napkins can also sell them so you have a personal relationship with someone in the town.

The incremental nature, the fact that India is labor rich and infrastructure poor, and the comparable capital costs make this an extraordinarily good solution to the problem.
Well, it depends if the CDDL has been stripped off the files or not. If the CDDL has been stripped off and replaced with anything that denotes that the source is now a trade secret, then yes -- it's stolen IP. But if the CDDL is still there, the situation will be murky, and I would hope that Oracle would clarify it one way or the other. Remember, this is not simply a proprietary system, it's a system (1) that was open source not very long ago (2) that was closed without a public announcement of any kind and (3) for which an internal commitment was made to make the source code available after Solaris 11 shipped. [1] Point is: this isn't SCO by a long shot.

[1] http://smartos.org/2011/12/15/fork-yeah-the-rise-and-develop...
Where in the western world?
You just have to make the problems so diverse (not necessarily hard), that genuinely understanding the solutions is the easier strategy than rote learning.
Real estate commissions are negotiable as hell.
List of Supporters:H.R.3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act
For people who's been asking for this information. This is the official document.
You're forgetting bootstrapping costs. Sure, an industrial machine may be cheaper in the long term, but he'd have to raise $500k to buy one. In addition, buying an industrial machine lacks the immaterial benefit of bringing manufacturing and engineering jobs and expertise to India.

In addition, it's important to note that this is merely a first revision. It's safe to assume, I think, that future revisions would improve upon the design and, due to the agility of manufacturing (how many industrial machines are manufactured per year?), it should be easier to prototype models that improve efficiency, cost and quality. I'd even go as far as to say that if this catches on it will eventually come close to matching the efficiency of an industrial machine for a fraction of the current cost.
Will China Break?
This is a pretty awesome break down of NES 2D platformer physics. It's a shame that the title focuses on such a minor part of the entire article.
I think this is more typical of positions being filled in Silicon Valley, where it appears that more programmers tend to have CS degrees. Or there are enough people with CS degrees that the rest of the community feels compelled to know and understand at least second year level CS theory (Big O and Data Structures).

I work in Texas, where this is not the case, and I've never been asked to implement a Linked List in any language. I have a CS degree from 10 years ago, and I can count on one hand the number of CS graduates that I've worked with in the past 6 years.
Maybe it's more that I could have gained the skill if I'd worked harder. I fully realize that discipline is harder than raw development skills to learn, and that it's the critical ingredient in any major venture. I understand that, but when I have to really work to finish something I tend to fall down. Which is why it makes me feel horrible.
Maybe a logical "2nd step" for you would be to disclose that you've found a substantial bug that could "financially harm users" if exploited...but don't actually share the exploit. Post that you've contacted the developers as of <date> and will give them X-days to resolve the issue.

Now, as for that final step...that's up to you. Not sure the legal ramifications for sharing the exploit, or frankly, what the benefit to the community would be. I think your goal should be to put pressure on the developers, but not to actually expose the threat. If they never get around to fixing it, you've just potentially screwed the community (not to mention those that might never see the update).
I call complete and utter bullshit.

Each "technical interview" I've been to is about 3-6 hrs. I've yet to see a Silicon Valley technical interview where it's not at least 3 hrs, meeting with 3 people. So right there, fitting 25 "next stage" interviews in 1.5 weeks is bullshit.

Where is he going to find the time for 40 initial phone interviews? That requires talking with the recruiter, and then the recruiter scheduling time with a developer. Anyone who has realistically interviewed in Silicon Valley knows that recruiters are very slow, and things tend to get muddled up very easily.

In 1.5 weeks, assuming they don't interview on weekends, that's 6 1-hr phone screens, plus 3 on-site interviews per day. The logistics simply don't work. It's a complete lie. If he had said 1 month, then it still would have been impossible with 1.5 phone screens and 1 on-sites per day, but it would have been slightly more believable than 1.5 weeks.
Oracle stopped publishing their changes a while ago.
You do what you have to do to take charge of a scene like that. I've also had the misfortune of dealing with serious and even life-threatening injuries. I guess I'm lucky because my brain does not shut down, but rather goes into overdrive. So I naturally end up taking charge whether I want to or not.

You're absolutely right about crowd mentality, too. You have to expect that most of the bystanders will be almost useless and order them about. I never told them to do jumping-jacks, but I do give specific instructions to specific people and that works a lot better.

But I know what you mean about seeing horrible things. I try not to think about Grandma lying in a pool of blood, even though I saved her. I hope I never see another compound fracture again.
Security researcher Moxie Marlinspike interviewed on Slashdot
Lessons from Launch - sprint.ly
It's not really gaming the system. He solved the problems, himself. He asked questions, learned and then came up with more and more effective solutions. Aren't these exactly the traits an employer should be looking for? Didn't he put a lot of effort and time?

Here's my own example. I've been recording some of the problems I have to deal with at work, and some of the things I come across in my spare time in the form of a blog, for the last 3 years (with some gaps here and there). I recently started looking for a better place to work. I included the link to my blog in my resume. I got an offer recently, it will be a substantial increase in salary. I only interviewed with ~5 companies to get an offer, that's my easiest offer and shortest job search ever.

Now, would you say that I 'gamed the system' because I had a blog, and most don't? I guess you can say so, because when I started my blog, I had that in mind - it may be useful next time I look for a job. But I did not mindlessly type stuff in - I made sure I understood it as much as I can, and quite often writing the solution down helped my understanding. Same with this guy - he did not just memorize how to do it.

I had one YC company ask me to create a linked-list structure in ruby, and then reverse it. I did it recursively, mentioned that it would blow the call stack, and then re-implemented it iteratively. I also remember there was some problem where I used symbols rather than strings and that would cause some bad memory leaks over time in a long-running process. - From this passage, he might not be the "top 1 percent" everyone tries to hire, but at least top 5%, that I'm sure of. Or maybe he gamed my impression too.
Powerful uncle could overshadow Kim Jong Il's son
Some Tips on Online Degree and a Guide to Online Degree Programs
Free The Network
(It'd probably be less than $1 via media mail anyway.)
It's tough but not impossible to overcome this sort of thing. In my experience I think that in a twisted way that kind of messed up situation can actually be beneficial given you've got the right personality traits. For me the same traits that predispose me to being an addict are the very same ones that predispose me to entrepreneurship and date I say success even.

I think it's a combination of obsession and compulsively chasing something that gives you a rush that can actually make addicts amazingly successful. Those traits can be equally beneficial or detrimental depending on how you focus them. Do you see any of that in your friend? I sometimes go back to the program that allowed me to get the charges dropped and speak to addicts and I always tell them that despite what the world tells them they're in a unique position to take their problem and turn it into the opposite.

Consider the addict that hits bottom has no food, shelter or money but somehow manages to keep getting his fix. I know that I was beyond broke but nothing could stop me from getting what I craved. Now I swapped out craving a harmful thing for craving a beneficial thing and I channel my energy into achieving success now instead of a syringe full of dope. As an addict you're often forced to hustle just like in business. You also have to take a lot of shit and negativity from every which way. Apply that to business and you're almost impervious to being beaten down by inevitable failure. And lastly, the ability for someone to overcome a substance addiction at all shows that they have some serious will power and persistence. Dropping the habit isn't a one time deal. Almost all addicts must make multiple attempts and deal with relapse before finally succeeding. In business you'll also likely fail multiple times and having that prior experience and knowing someone has done something similar before is a pretty good indicator of how well they'll do if they apply themselves correctly.

That said, it can't apply to everyome with that background. You've still got to have some degree of intelligence and we can never discount luck but all things considered I think people with that type of background come out the other side stronger, hungrier, and have the inborn traits needed to succeed if focused well.
A small counterargument: that industrial machine produces 21,000 napkins per hour = 500,000 per day = 15,000,000 per month. So, it would serve say 500,000 women. In highly rural areas of India, the distribution of the product would require quite a complex distribution mechanism.
Windows 8 to feature image sign-on system
Jolt in WikiLeaks Case: Feds Found Manning and Assange Chat Logs on Laptop
9 Security Controls You Should Add To Your Network
Is heroku's free instance loaded on demand? If not that would be cool as startup times on the ep.io dynamic instances are v slow.
Zynga Plants Platform Seed for Facebook
Teaching with Mobile
> It might or might not work.

It doesn't. I have heard of this firefox feature before, but never been able to get it to work successfully. On the other hand, if you just type "webkit" in the address bar of firefox or chrome, the google search results contain a link to the relevant wikipedia page on the first page of results. Given what I have to assume is a vanishingly small proportion of firefox users who are even aware of this feature, I don't think the feature is important enough to justify a design decision this big.
Have you ever tested for a None value?

if foo is None:
return

if bar is not None:
bar()
I don't know you and haven't seen anything like combat so sorry if this is presumptuous, but have you considered psychotherapy? A good therapist could teach you strategies to control your level of anxiety/stress/alertness whatever you want to call it. Doesn't mean you're crazy and there's no shame in it. thanks for our service.
> a really important feature of fascism is this hate component which keeps being omitted.

Yeah -- it's like an elephant in the room and no one among those who are the first to bring up comparisons between the U.S. and fascist states talks about it. I wonder why.

> SOPA is nothing more than a big present to certain industries

That is the best way to think about it -- it's akin to government pork in a way.
Stop worrying about shit that doesn’t matter, a short guide
Nit: I think pattern matching would be local the way you are using the term; pattern matching is(/would be) implemented right at the site you use it with some form of if/else clauses that would be verbose, but obviously related to the original code. Your other three examples definitely involve large-scale "non-local" source transformation all over the place to implement them.

I say this because it took me a moment to figure out how those four things went together.
This is so true.

I could consume a million of these a month at that price point. Let that sink in. One million a month, 12 million a year. Its not even difficult, there are probably a half dozen ideas that can consume them in this quantity.

Why? Because I can put software on them and resell the package for $99. Going through distribution and giving them 40 points of margin and I'm still making better than 65% gross margins.

They are so not ready :-)
That behavior is egregious. FWIW, you can probably fix it from your end by using a different public DNS server.
Quora Expands Beyond Q&A, Launches ‘Boards’
Can you show me your list implementation? I just installed rbx and tried this; the Array implementation ran in single-digit seconds, but I gave up and CTR-C'd the list one (which works fine for smaller lists).
"Language tools for handling application-level concurrency" this sounds interesting. Can you recommend a good read about this topic?

PS: I presume the graph drawing library is written in-house, what did you use as the building blocks for it (both for design and implementation) ?
Blizzard sues Pocket Gnome World of Warcraft bot creators