skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mountain Dew may dissolve a rat, but it also prevents suicide.
"you have leverage over them (you're the only potential buyer)."

An excellent point which many people in the domain business fail to understand. The name becomes a bastard name and can't even pass to another buyer without potentially giving the "only potential buyer" a basis to file a UDRP once the ownership change takes place.
Resolution: I will not increase my productivity
What "viable" means is heavily context driven.

TLDR: In established markets, viable != minimal.
a) Glad you like it. Simplicity was a goal.
b) Yes, totally agreed & in the works.
c) This will be in the next release.
d) We actually have a ticket in with Apple to get this fixed. There's nothing we can do on our end. Terrible.

Thanks for the honest feedback!
You're focusing too much on the wrong thing. The point is being able to take a (simple) problem and convert it to code. The problem doesn't matter, the method does.
I wouldn't suggest anyone learn Ruby as a 1st language. I say this from a readability standpoint. I'd recommend python as a 1st language. My second recommendation is .NET / C#. You get the most bang for you buck. (WinForms / Silverlight / ASP.NET)

I know everyone is over hyped on open source xy or z but in reality these require a good knowledge of a lot of various pieces of technology.
Bootstrap your company's devices quicker without MDM
his longevity is mostly due to him having money

You are mostly wrong. It is due to his will to live. Even if I could afford it, I know I do not have the mental strength to go through a life in such situation.
>> I have to disagree with your attitude toward optimisations
> How can you, you don't know it?

This bit

> Computers go unimaginably fast now. Really. Humans can't intuitively comprehend how fast it is.

seems to imply that you think computers are so fast that performance shouldn't be more than an afterthought.

I'll repeat myself: I don't think anyone should explicitly try to exploit this implementation detail. It's just that you seemed to dismiss all performance considerations.

> When optimizing, you should be hand optimizing only the hotspots, not the rest. This article is talking about something that has almost no chance of being the hot spot, and acts like it's essential to never do it.

No, it doesn't. The first paragraph starts with "Obviously this is an utterly preposterous statement: it’s hard to think of a more ridiculous and esoteric coding requirement."
A trivial piece of code that a candidate should be able to write as quickly as they can type on a computer or write on the board designed to test that (1) they can write basic code and (2) they've written enough code that trivial problems are trivial. Jeff Atwood coined the phrase [1] and gave the classic example:

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples
of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five
print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print
"FizzBuzz".

[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...
The state of textbooks is so fucking sad. I still don't get how Bill Gates or another richy-rich hasn't realized how fucking great it would be to pay 100k to an awesome professor for writing a textbook and publishing it under a CC license. If you did that with all subjects, and paid for translations, and made it all digital, it would cost next to nothing in the large scheme and be more beneficial to humanity than the cure to polio or malaria or heck even cancer. It would have an exponentially awesome effect.

Accelerating the rate at which humanity is educated is fundamentally more important than anything going on today, and it's always pushed back because the generation that's currently being educated doesn't have a fucking say in the matter.

Someone should take some of their money out of their hedge fund and drop it on this shit pronto.
Read the article. I'm simply saying that EC2 is at least 10 times more expensive than the competition but people don't seem to realize it. The performance on EC2 is basically equivalent to a 10 year old crappy computer.
Nokia owns Navteq.
Google uses different algorithms for walking & biking. For example, you can walk in either direction on a one-way street, but you can only bike in one direction.

The bike directions prioritize streets with bike lanes and low traffic bike boulevards. With walking, really any street with a side walk will do.
I think EC2 is definitely a scam

You're saying scam when you really mean just "expensive".
Yeah, there's whiteboard apps. I want a shared whiteboard. Ideally at least 4 feet by 4 feet. The key feature is both parties can draw and erase and the marks appear on both boards. I'm pretty sure I could talk employers into buying one for the office and one for each remote worker, especially with the arbitrage opportunities around different housing costs. Also, in my experience video cameras trained on whiteboards seem not to work that well because of glare.
Civil answers are overrated. I'm really sick of corporate leaders (e.g. You) telling me I should change my life to suit them. Their job is to accommodate the customer regardless of how weird my hobbies may be.
Interesting to note that computer/math degree holders don't fare far better than recent humanities and liberal arts graduates. Journalism majors perform even better.

For all the jokes about us English majors, we don't seem to be doing that badly
Just to clarify: I used "take-home" by analogy to taking a test in class (= whiteboard) vs. having a week to work on it in as you wished in your dorm room (= puzzle on our website).

We did not actually give people tests to take home. :)

Interviewing is a numbers game. Your goal is to come up with a process that balances time spent by the interviewer with finding a suitable candidate.

You have to admit that this is biased towards a company, like Google, that must hire many more people per unit time than most companies do. (And the Google process seems to work remarkably well for Google.)
Ruby script to get Facebook Like stats for your blog
How startups are like finding love
I could see this working well. I think these new types of textbooks would gain a foothold not by some epic battle between the entrenched publishers and open content revolutionaries, but simply by being affordable and valuable enough that students start using them in ADDITION to the textbooks they are currently forced to buy. Similar to Khan Academy's current position.

Then, if the ecosystem hits critical mass, it won't be too long before some professors and teachers start saying "wait... why are we making students use this crappy book again?"

I'm aware that the last part is a bit naive, but I think it's REALLY naive to think that we will see a massive legislature-driven transition to "the right thing" anytime before the sun goes dark.
Get ready for internet prices to go up for every several percent that quit.

My internet cost has doubled in five years (duopoly city).
I'm the same boat as you, paying for a VPN so that I can consume the content of my choice on the internet. I even pay for a few services abroad that normally wouldn't take my money, due to IP restrictions.

I'm also in Canada, and unfortunately you really can't get everything you want on cable here, given the CRTC's restrictions on foreign competition.
I heard of at least one engineering grad student who made heavy use of it to get work done. (Which is not a great counter-point, I know.)
Thanks! Good idea. Which library are you using?
I have managed and coded a lot of sites on both dedicated, co-located servers I had full control over as well as on Amazon. From my POV it's definitely worth 10-20 times more. Unless you are a HUGE outfit, Joe's servers are very annoying to manage.

It all depends on what you are doing do; you want Amazon (or any cloud service) to scale automatically and auto failover for sites which grow (and shrink) massively over time.

I have no clue (at all) why people would run sites on Amazon which just use 1-2 servers and cannot scale automatically (and do not need to). In that case Softlayer or Iweb or something would be much better. Especially as they, these days, also have some 'hybrid' cloud experience where you can, not exactly at the speed/ease of Amazon, add dedicated or virtualized instances.
Your blog is the engine of community
"hampers startup's flexibility with names"

A certain well known funded startup wants a certain name. But the name is owned by google (and not in use). If a domainer owned the name it wouldn't be cheap but it would be possible.

Likewise the perfect name that a startup wants that is owned by a local distribution company with 50 employees isn't going to be had for a trivial amount of money either.

Startups who can't get the name they want always assume that nobody would have the name until they wanted it. And it would just be sitting there.

If you know the domain business you would realize that the people who own names (lots of names) know when to fold their hand and not wait possibly forever for another deal to come along.

dudu.com by the way has pretty consistent content (it's in chinese) that goes back to the 90's. So most likely it was an operating site and a company that had to be compensated. If this domain was owned by a domainer it would have sold for a 10th of the price or less.
I find the shoplifting analogy decent, but the main flaw I see is that it keeps the discussion framed around crimes being committed and what is the punishment. Even if the punishment is seen as really extreme, centuries of legislation have shown that being "tough on crime" is extremely popular.

My hope with the term 'Prohibition' is to turn it around and put the focus on the evil being done by the media companies. They want the government take away your rights, because they don't want to compete fair and square with web technologies.
And presumably Apple came up with the iOS5 notification design without so much as looking at Android?

A quote from John Carmack comes to mind:

"Patents are usually discussed in the context of someone "stealing" an idea from the long suffering lone inventor that devoted his life to creating this one brilliant idea, blah blah blah. But in the majority of cases in software, patents effect independent invention," Carmack wrote on Slashdot, "Get a dozen sharp programmers together, give them all a hard problem to work on, and a bunch of them will come up with solutions that would probably be patentable, and be similar enough that the first programmer to file the patent could sue the others for patent infringement."

There is often one, single "best" solution to a problem. Someone else might have already done it, but what are you going to do- deliberately make your experience worse? Every phone manufacturer has borrowed at least something from another, it's the nature of the beast.
Preach! ...I would add that there's a great deal of emotional complexity involved in great product design, and its easier said than done to determine correctly what is "viable" from what isn't for an initial launch product - even if its well tested (while I understand @alexturnbull isn't saying testing is bad, nor is he saying MVPs are inherently inappropriate or obsolete). That said, many of these "viable" touch-points are often intangibles - not discrete interactions, features or functional benefits, and this is something that can be really costly to get right. Hard to beef with the argument he's making specific to competitive markets. Its absolutely costly to enter competitive markets... Many product authors continue to miss the mark for what is MVP because these same "mission critical products" are getting more and more sophisticated, and consumer expectations are being raised all the time.
Dept. of Energy developing project to reinforce grid cybersecurity
A) Detroit Lions vs New Orleans Saints live stream
Detroit Lions vs New Orleans Saints
Match schedule:
NFL Postseason
Date: SAT, JAN 7 2012
TIME : 8:00 PM (ET)
Playoffs - Wild-Card Weekend
TV: NBC
watch and enjoy Detroit Lions vs New Orleans Saints live streaming
and also watch NFL full season live streaming online here.
> Can anyone find a source for the unemployment rate of high school graduates? 22.9% is astoundingly high, if true.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is always a great place to look.

Employment status of the civilian population 25 years and over by educational attainment: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm

According to this (last updated Dec 02, 2011) the not-seasonally adjusted aggregate unemployment for anyone who holds a HS diploma (regardless of higher level education) is 20%.

Edit: I didn't mean to cause any confusion by aggregating the "non-hs-dropout" stats, so let me make it clearer:

Level of Education : Unemployment Rate
High School Dropout: 12.7%
High School Diploma: 8.4%
Some College/AA Deg: 7.4%
Bachelors or Higher: 4.2%
This is interesting, but it doesn't prove college is "worth it". We know that at least 40% of the wage premium of attending college (and possibly considerably more) are due to ability bias - smarter people get paid more and smarter people go to college.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/correcting_for.h...

(I do suspect there is some individual benefit to college, from some mix of beneficial skill increases and socially harmful signalling. But the data in this article doesn't begin to address this question.)
The point of the article, as I read it, is exactly that many people are misunderstanding the MVP to mean just tossing up a bunch of half-assed "products" to see if they stick. I don't think you're really in such fundamental disagreement. The idea is that, for a lot of people, the emphasis needs to shift back to the "viable" part of MVP.
There are a lot of humanities/liberal arts developers in the world - more than you might think.
I used to work at a "Groupon for X" startup and I can say that only closing 1 deal per month would be catastrophic results for a salesperson. I can't speak for Groupon, but I would put their targets at around 10-12 closed deals per month.
Wait... you're migrating from EC2 to someone selling computing time on really old CPUs? Sure, EC2 isn't fast, but it is somewhat reliable, which is worth something.

A sledgehammer is a 9 year old CPU (from 2003), and even if it was 10x faster than the Amazon instance, the chance that it will survive for 4-5 years more is quite low. Paying for really old hardware is a bad idea, generally.
In case anyone else is curious: I have decided that I am ok with being called "comic book writer genius". This does not bother me.

I have also decided that ecaroth is probably a super smart person that deserves at least two fancy trophies. With either bowling guys or tennis guys on top. We're talking FANCY here.
New Jersey resident proposes California State Senator stay out of education and focus on reducing his state's budget deficit.

Open-Source Textbooks ARE a good idea. However, just like Wikipedia didn't need the government to get started ... this gem doesn't require the government either. It'll happen once eBooks become more prevalent and there is nothing the government should do to help or stop it from happening.
Hm, I’m not sure whether it’s in Microsoft’s best interest to adopt Webkit. I think they will stay with their own rendering engine.

But – as is already obvious – dominance is indeed no longer something they have, will realistically achieve ever again or are able to leverage. If they want to have any say at all when it comes to the web’s future they have to play the standards game. They have to cooperate.

Microsoft is keenly aware of that (though maybe not entirely comfortable), as is evident from the direction they took with IE.
North Koreans think their country is the best too.

The US health system sucks. The US spends more public money on health, let alone private money, and still has a crappy system.

The reality is, medicine is something that any idiot can manage. Get a doctor and some nurses, put them in a clean building, and give them a few million to buy machines and stocks. Even the government can do it, and the government does it at a lower price, because they aren't looking to rip off desperate people. There's huge barriers to entry (regulatory issues, deals with insurers, no way to boot strap unless you are a doctor), but it's not all rocket science. No-one competes on value (i.e. quality of life over price) - not many people shop to find the cheapest hospital (it's too hard and confusing), they just go on vague stuff like how nice the lobby looks. You won't lose much if the government replaces pretty private lobbys with Stalinist admissions rooms, and tells doctors to look after the patients rather than con them into expensive, unnecessary, and sometimes risky procedures.

Unless you believe that competition lowers price to the marginal cost of supply (which is pure fantasy cooked up by economists, and is completely at odds with how business actually run), or you think that the management of hospitals needs innovative techniques, then there's no reason not to have public health.
Bill Gates and his team is already working very hard on Education Reform. You're going to want to look up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for more information regarding what they do. I'm sure they've considered text books and are working through the best options.
Yes...the low hanging fruit has mostly been collected. The fact of the matter, from what I can tell, is that on any given issue, most representatives won't say what their position is because they don't have to...there are very few legislators like Ron Paul who are just going to just say whatever they think when put on the spot.

So, other than the official co-sponsors, to determine someone's position, I just extrapolated from any historical information. For example, anyone who was on the judiciary committee who approved of PROTECT-IP's precursor (COICA in 2010) is likely, as far as we can know, a supporter of PROTECT-IP too.

I don't think such judgments of position can be made on campaign donations alone though. So it's an interesting challenge to think of ways to discern how engaged a Congressmember is on an issue based on the less publicized interactions he/she may have. Hopefully there's an easy way to collect such information that doesn't involve being a full-time researcher...but I plan to collect what I can and update for the time being.
All this post says is that it's easy to do something predictable and hard to do something novel.
Let me take the devil's advocate position:

This new Internet thing is threatening the business models of some of my biggest supporters, as well as aiding illegal activity. A legal remedy would seem to be in order.

Is this a free speech issue? No. People will still have the right to make new websites or post on websites what do not infringe, or go on talk radio or publish newspapers, so they will still have free speech.

A bunch of scofflaws just want free downloads, and websites naturally don't want to be saddled with enforcing things. A legal remedy would seem to be in order.

The question we need to ask ourselves, is how do we reach people who think like this? Once we've done that, then the legislators will have to listen.
> You can have them help you with some problem in your actual codebase you're already working on.

This is a terrible idea. If they come up with a brilliant solution can you actually use this in production? Who owns the code they write during an interview?
100% agree that viable is context driven, but I kind of disagree with your example. If you want to compete with an established player, focus on the differentiating factor that you think is game-changing rather than competing on features, otherwise you'll never win. The early adopters that you want to court will be excited by what's different, not by a clone of something that already exists. By the time the product is ready for the prime time it will need those features, but by then the bleeding edge early adopters will have moved on to the next new thing.

However, in cases like healthcare or finance, or certain B2B applications, viable may entail a much more mature product.
it's all of the above
That's what I find to be the most interesting part of this project: instead of just relying on the instinct of the crowd, the idea is to put state money into funding the writing of these books, and using the Creative Commons licensing to make it free to copy and distribute and to allow instructors to make corrections or create customized versions for their classes.
Ask HN: Interns 2012?
The Jobs in 2012 posting seemed to get a lot of responses. Now, is anyone looking for interns? Any recommendations? Thanks.
> My guess is the vast majority of the talent Google has gotten through acquisitions would have failed miserably going through Google's traditional hiring process.

I don't believe that's the case. What I've seen with talent acquisitions (at Google and elsewhere) is that interviewing the team is actually prerequisite to making the acquisition.
Of course, the interview doesn't have to be as rigorous: during the due-diligence process you can actually view the codebase and see the individuals' contributions.

What I've also seen, specifically in the case of Google, is that individuals from acquisitions would be asked to stay a year, at the end of which they'd need to interview for other positions at Google: if they couldn't pass the interview, they'd be let go with a very generous severance package.

That said, I am sure there are exceptions.
I think it depends on what you're hiring for.

For 90% of engineering tasks, you're just plugging together different technologies other people put together. Oh hey yeah, Unix + HTTP + Rails + Javascript + Some Dude's API.

The amount of SHEER INTELLIGENCE necessary to untangle the above is, I think, not very high. It's a low threshold of competence. So, for that range of problems, fumbling around for fifteen minutes in front of a whiteboard will display the necessary grasp of logic.

The hard part in interviewing (and what people usually screw up), in my opinion, is almost entirely finding someone with a can do attitude who you can get along with for 40hrs every week.

Almost anyone can string stuff together; finding people that you can trust is way harder.
For a good programmer, a 3 hour take home test is like a $300+ application fee. Even if the puzzles are reasonable, filters work both ways. For a recent graduate or a mediocre programmer, it's probably worth the time for a shot at the job, but talented people will have plenty of options at good companies that don't make them jump through extra hoops. Perhaps it's fine if you pay a lot higher than average or offer significant perks, but I could see a strategy like this unwittingly driving away the top tier of candidates if you aren't careful.
Coding takes time. It's more cost-effective to ask the interviewee code a non-trivial task at home and review his results before inviting him in. Then you already know if he can code and you can walk through his thinking on a whiteboard, with a more specialized case.
HTML5 versus Native Apps: Which Platform To Choose For Your Next Mobile App
I'm not migrating from EC2, this is for a personal pet project where price matters.

However, you just proved my point. If a 9 year old CPU performs 10 times better than a m1.small for the same price, something's not right.

That said, it's not true to say that an EC2 instance is more reliable than an old dedicated box. We've had countless "degraded node" notifications over the years for our EC2 instances. For example, if a network adapter fails in the physical machine, even if it does not affect your instance, Amazon will shut it down. So in a way, many more things can go wrong.
I think the problem people have with this approach is that they don't want to be defined by their performance on one very specific problem. Most people, myself included, want to be seen as the sum of many accomplishments, not just one superficial one in an interview.
I'm just surprised nobody has mentioned calculating the solution directly using factorials or some builtin n choose k function.