skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dan, I am really surprised that anyone would treat you as code monkey.

I think you should get in touch with Patrick (patio11) and Thomas (tptacek) and get some tips on you how can pitch yourself better.

And yes, as a piano beginner, I love your app. :)
If you are not hurting for money(which I doubt), I would suggest taking a nice break, travel, pursue some other skills like new language(Spanish, Portuguese), photography, cooking, volunteering, adventure sports. It will recharge you and maybe along the path you will find some interesting problems you could solve, for an instance a software solution for a problem that exists in some foreign country but you dont see the same problem in US.
I can answer some of your questions. The longevity and age of onset of patients with familial ALS is partially dependent on the mutation they harbor. That being said, genetic background is an important contributor. Fortunately or unfortunately, familial ALS isn't common enough to have significant statistics on the matter. To my knowledge there is no solid proof that environmental factors play a role in ALS. I'm fairly certain some will be discovered, but to date specific factors that enhance or prevent ALS are not known. On the issue of veterans, it is thought that the enhanced physical activity may be the cause for the increased risk of ALS, though the increase is merely 2 fold and once again the statistics are poor. If I remember correctly, this increased risk was present for both combat veterans and those that didn't see any combat. Once again outcomes are identical with the civilian population.

I don't believe that his longevity decreases the urgency for research into the matter. However, compared with disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, cancer, and heart disease, which combined will affect some large percentage of the population, the 1:1000 lifetime risk for ALS makes it somewhat insignificant.
I boosted the volume of the sound files from 50% to 75%, that should hopefully solve your problem (others have it too). Check in an hour or two for v0.5 to be up with the new audio files.

Thanks again for testing.
The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives | fnBlog
Kanye West Wants to be the Next Steve Jobs
We use LaTeX to take care of this in our PDFs. It does a pretty good job. Yes, it won't be 100% as good as if you paid a typesetter to do it, but there is nothing obviously objectionable.

For example, one of our books (leanpub.com/battingat10) was written by Chick Dubber, a retired typesetter. He noticed some bad hyphenation and we tweaked a few settings to make it look good. Other than that, he had no complaints.

There are lots of book samples that you can get for free from Leanpub. Many are linked to here: http://leanpub.com/bestsellers. Take a look and see what you think.
Forgive me for playing psychologist, but I'm detecting a bit of insecurity. You should internalize that you really are awesome & rare, as evidenced by the fact that you single-handedly created a high-quality product and sold it.

Examples:

> I'm (so far) a single founder.

Doesn't matter, you have a great track record. Yes, it's better to have a good team, so you should keep an eye out for teammates.

> nobody seems to think that I'm anything more than a code monkey

Sounds like maybe you haven't presented yourself as more than that to them.

> If there were some openings for "startup douche", I'd probably apply to those.

What's douchey about winning?
Most code is not written by government employees, but contractors. The contractors usually sell the government on reusing internally-developed code to lower the cost, but they then maintain rights to that code. My guess is that the license is an attempt to cover such things.

Also, government appropriations can be weird- money for 'changes' might not be able to be used for 'new' software, etc. Some of the language in there seems to be related to that as well.
FizzBuzz:

Write a program that prints the numbers 1 to 100. However, for multiples of 3 print "Fizz" and for multiples of 5 print "Buzz". For multiples of both 3 and 5, print "FizzBuzz".
The networking stuff is the memcached engine branch. It's pure C and loads ep-engine as a module for doing all the backend junk.
Louis CK Q&A
Personally, after my experience with Android, I am completely uninterested in investing in an Android tablet. A Windows 8 tablet on the other hand with Microsoft actually in control of the software (which is what I understand they are doing) -- even if it only has a web brower, office and dropbox, I'm so there. Plus from what I understand Microsoft is making their App store free-software friendly, so maybe even emacs (smearmacs!) and latex.
>Eh, I'm sure some hefty salaries being paid with the revenues makes employees happy at least.

We grew from 37 employees as of June 30, 2009 to 10,418 employees as of September 30, 2011.

If not hefty, than numerous...

Why Groupon employs over 10k people is beyond me, even if most of their employees are in accounts/sales it seems those numbers are a bit excessive. I have personally worked as a salesman for over 4 years, personally handling hundreds of clients on 5 different continents. I'm now very curious to know what its like to work at Groupon.
Convincing management that cooperation and collaboration was worth it
'Monopoly' is a good one too. I don't think the terms are mutually exclusive:

"They want the Government to create a Prohibition so they can have a Monopoly on content"

That said, I do think 'Prohibition' is an accurate description. SOPA may well be the first step in a 'War on Piracy' that does have strong parallels with '20s prohibition and the drug war. SOPA is a futile attempt to stop normal human behavior - sharing of content. It won't work. The fact that it won't work could lead to even more draconian blocking measures, creating a self-reinforcing loop of ever-escalating restrictions and punishments. 'Prohibition' conveys that futility and extremeness pretty well for a single term.
How is this better than using github pages?
Mac OS X Lion has a feature called "Automatic Termination" that kills background processes (that support Automatic Termination) when the system feels like it.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.a...

It's not under user control and it can be a bit wonky, but it's a sign of where Mac OS X and iOS are becoming more alike.
Indie studios can innovate, but they can't lobby as effectively.
99%+?!

This guy must spending every waking hour interviewing.
1) Start advising small time entrepreneurs full time. Full time. You can join an incubator and do this, or you can simply do it alone.

2) When you are ready to do another startup you will just know it.

Edit: We spend our lifetime surviving, catching up, trying to make it. Once we make it, we realize that we never learned how to just live.
Here is my take on the whole Groupon thing. Every small business should give customers, especially first time customers, a discount. We used to print in the local news paper "buy 1 get 1 free ciagar" specials and pay the paper $250 for that ad. It wasn't really worth it but we did it every month because our competitor was doing it.

This is what I see is happening with a lot of small businesses. I don't think the issue is really Groupon so much as it is the businesses not understanding what to do with these new customers. If they're just in there for the deal, they won't come back after they get the deal. This is from first hand experience.

We got customers coming back because the deal was just to bring them in. That was all. It wasn't even to find new customers. We just wanted traffic. Once we got the customers, each of us who worked there had a responsibility to get the customers excited about coming back. We were masters at it. These small business lack that skill and it has nothing to do with Groupon or any other deal advertising platform (including newspapers).
Indonesian classified ads
Premium classified ads feature with youtube embed
Well nobody said they aren't being given those things, you certainly might be...however even then it's not true.

None of those things are necessary to solve the problem. There's no need to search for information...all the information you need is contained in the problem. It's an exceedingly simple algorithm, and if you can't take the verbal explanation and translate it into code, you are simply not a programmer.

What would you search for, how to make a for-loop? If you don't know such basics as flow control and basic logic, you probably need to go back to school. If you can't remember the usage of printf then you either picked the wrong language, or ask for help, or simple explain you'll fudge it a little and a good interviewer wouldn't penalize you. I'd note if you are interviewing for a language-specific position and said you are fluent in it, not knowing such a basic API might count against you though...

I think the important thing you are missing is that generally in "whiteboard" type situations, you are not expected to produce a completely correct/compilable program. Generally pseudo-code or whatever language you please is accepted and if you make some small syntax or logic error it's not a big deal. In light of that, a compiler/IDE/computer is not necessary unless you have some other reason to require them...such as a disability.

The important part is to see how one reasons through the process of taking a described algorithm and translating it into code...that is the essence of programming. If you can't do it, you are ipso facto not a programmer.

Your analogy is false...in your example the person is not being tested on the actual job they are expected to perform. Obviously that's not a good test.

In this case the programmer is being tested on precisely what their day to day job is: taking a verbal description of a process and translating it into code....so an accurate analogy would be to ask an architect to sketch a simple truss structure and discuss it, which is not unreasonable.

The entire point here is to give a drop dead simple problem to weed out the people who are fundamentally unfit for the position.
Not sure I agree.

I wouldn't have been able to tell you what an insertion sort is, by name. But by looking at that image, I can describe it pretty well:

Have an outer loop that counts from the first position in the list to the last position (call it n...). At each step in the loop, make sure that the first n items are sorted. This probably implies an inner loop that finds where, within the first n-1 items to insert the nth item. And given that with only one item, it's already sorted, we can probably start with n on the second item.

Yeah, I think I could code that, given the image.
"The 1%" and What It Takes to Get There
What does 6 months do vs say a month?

Genuinely curious, thanks
I've been in a couple of these interviews before and I've also had to try to interview programmers I wanted to work on projects for me ... an interesting approach that I haven't had the opportunity to test exhaustively is to start out like the computer SAT exams.

Let me explain.

On the SATs, they ask you a simple question, and if you get that right, they step up the difficulty and on an on until they discover you're a genius. If you get the answer wrong, they ask you another question of similar difficulty to the last question you got right and on and on.

Now with regards to interviewing, I like to start from the basics ... I'll start out with simple questions about languages they've used, so that they're comfortable. Syntax isn't majorly important to me, you can google it ... however I take note of how comfortable the interviewee is with the syntax of the languages they're using (especially if its one we use). So while it won't count against them, it can count in their favor.

From there I'll ask them more difficult questions. How would you implement this one thing? We have this one problem we're dealing with, how would you solve it? If they can't do it, I'll try another and another, giving them multiple chances to show that they can hang. All the while I'm poking and prodding to find out how they think about stuff ... and what makes them tick.

And then I'll go to the really hard computer sciencey stuff (which bores me to tears to be totally honest. sorry.) ... just to see how proficient they are with it. Obviously a person who eats algorithms and datastructures for dinner in addition to acing all the other stuff is someone I'd love to have if they work well with us on a small project we'll have them do.

I do the same thing with programs they've written, side projects they've done etc.
To summarize, I'm just trying to find out where they are on a continuous scale from "total newb" to "could write os x from scratch if they needed to"

Basically, I think brain teasers CAN be useful, but I think we should use them carefully. Value the way someone thinks over just them just getting answers correct.

my 2c
Franken is one of the co-sponsors of PIPA.
3 hours of prep work X 5 applications (1 application a day for a week) = 15 hours of unpaid work per week, or 60 hours of unpaid work per month. Given that a typical job search lasts multiple months, this is not an insignificant workload to saddle potential employees with. However, if your company is special in some way and people feel it's worth the rigamarole to apply there, then the market will bear it.
You're missing a huge chunk of information here. They are not a Religion. Their official paperwork says they are a Belief Community or something like that. As such their beliefs and membership to this "religion" does not protect them from being prosecuted for infringement.

In fact, the whole idea seems like a joke. If they actually are trying to get immunity for copyright infringement they aren't doing a good job. If this is some kind of social commentary or satire it still isn't very interesting.
This seems so obvious that it's painful to think that it hasn't already been done.

It would be awesome to see a non-profit started which provided a repository for textbook content, a platform for mixing and matching content to meet the curriculum of a particular district, and a toolchain to produce digital copies of the books in the format used by the district - all open source and released under broadly permissive licenses.

If even a handful of school districts funded a project like this instead of purchasing moore textbooks, I would imagine this could be sustainable.
HBS’s Noam Wasserman on Cofounders, Equity Splits, and Reality Distortion
Pretty much exactly right. 1 difference for me, though. I already know what I want to be when I grow up:

A programmer!

Yes, I've reached the end of my career. I'm where I want to be, and I don't want to change. I don't want to be a manager, team leader, or otherwise do anything other than programming. If there were any change I wanted, it would be 'do fewer non-programming things'.
He comes out of / is a product of the entertainment industry. What did you expect?

Also, "Hollywood" had long been a... "bastion" of Democratic support. And, of course, the juice flows both ways.
The fact that there is no "mutually assured destruction" if they follow-up with this makes this so called "nuclear option" much less scary.

An earlier discussion proposed a more thorough "nuclear option." Instead of trying to inform the electorate, threaten to cut the supporters off from a lot of prominent Internet-based services. It's also a bit easier to claim moral high ground with a second strike strategy.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3406148
Arrays.sort() creates a full copy of the input data before sorting.
At Freestyle Capital, investing is a family-friendly alternative to startup life
Funnily enough, the only time I've been asked a genuine logic puzzle in an interview was at ITA (don't remember the details, but it was something about ants walking on a 1d line and bouncing off each other). It even had some kind of a "either you see it or you don't" aspect as well.

But the programming puzzles on the website were just awesome, even though I just solved them because they were fun, not for applying for a job. I've been surprised that nobody else has done the same thing, but your explanation of how much work went into the puzzles kind of explains that :-)
Consider setting the Click-to-play option in about:flags. It's a built-in Flashblock equivalent for Chrome.
Are you sure they didn't? Perhaps, like me, they have already finished their career plan and they are working their dream job.

That's the thing these interviews fail to take into account. They assume that everyone wants more, when that's not always the case. Happiness means knowing when you have what you want, and enjoying it.
For the record: this was made before GitHub pull requests worked with the same repo, and before the event API. It hasn't really been touched since.

I do agree that it's not ideal for the review request to be enshrined in commit history. We've not used this for some for that reason.
From my perspective, the biggest limitation in using GPUs for more general purpose computations is the communication latency. I published a paper that came to that conclusion: http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/papers/debs2010.pdf

In short, parallelism is not enough to get benefit from using GPUs. You need parallelism and data reuse.
Reaction to Andy Grove's Clinical Trial Proposal
Some of the points are valid, but you shouldn't generalize the situation. Very few people in the 90's woke up with the idea that they needed to be connected with someone on the other side of the world. But they eventually realized they did when they were shown the internet.

Yeah sometimes you don't need to be "disruptive", but sometimes you do. And it's especially hard to realize which is appropriate when you are building for a profit, a bit easier when you are building for change.
I think this is exactly it. The fact that the only manufacturer able to turn Android into a success on the tablet is a competitor doing an unlicensed/unbranded clone must be deeply embarrassing.

The Fire really is a nice device at a fantastic price.
I'll add my voice to the "take a break" chorus. On the marketing problem -- people seeing you as a code monkey -- you could look for product development or project management jobs, and say "oh yes btw also I can code," but you're better off filing that away for future reference and travelling for a while. It's good to have a life!
Very interesting thanks for sharing that. I'm not an OS X user so I didn't know about that one. As a Windows user this makes me jealous.

I've dabbled in Linux (Arch) but I'm not aware of a similar feature. Does one exist?
Isn't that just "blogging for bloggers"?

I thought the whole hacker nomenclature revolved around tinkering, crafting, and creating. The type of person that is compelled by an idea they had for their blog and then they enjoyed implementing it.

So unless you propose a blogging system that facilitates the hacker urge, how does it have anything to do with hackers?

(I'm just guessing the definition)
I wish I had some advice for you, Dan, but I don't. I'm just leaving this comment to say congrats to my old roommate. You're the man now, dog!
I haven't had to really be interviewed in 15yrs, but the last one I had was probably the best. I walked into the office of the guy who would be my manager, he introduced himself then immediately turned to the whiteboard and started writing and drawing while saying "This is what I'm about to start working on, we need to figure out how to do it.". We spent the next 3 hours working out a solution together.

I ended up not accepting their offer, mainly because of the things I learned in the interview. But I still feel like that was a good way for both sides to evaluate each other.
30 search quality highlights (with codenames): December
The only problem I've had is embedding github gists in tumblr (or any other javascript-based embed). Putting code snippets in is trivial using Markdown.
Capybara, Cucumber and How the Cookie Crumbles
Mixed-race marrow donors needed (now), really hard to find
Show HN: TuneIn announces Car Mode for Android
TuneIn announces Car Mode for Android, becomes first audio streaming service to offer voice command:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0WDDvOAzzc
Do you know how Dudu.com was used prior to the sale? Maybe the owner had big plans for it or already built something. I have no idea, but I did hear it was not for sale at the time of the purchase. It's not like the social network started out on godudu.com and the seller then bought dudu.com with the hopes of selling it to the startup.
Actually, ZeroMQ is brokerless by design[1] which prevents a hop in all communications. The design is slightly more complex, but the speed increase is very real.

[1] http://www.zeromq.org/whitepapers:brokerless
Generally pseudo-code is accepted and if you make some small error it's not a big deal.

Do you think this accurately reflects the working conditions of a developer? Do you think that they jump into problems and that small errors are OK to them? do you think that they will be comfortable making those small errors in front of people, given that they A) generally would not accept them for themselves, and B) how critical some people can be of code that is not their own? Do you think they will be able to put there best foot forward in such an unnatural situation? They may blank, they may freeze and they may just be the type of person that reflects on an issue for a while before the set out to code.

What would you search for

I personally would search for the mathematical formula and a text description that I could put on my second monitor as reference. But first I would search for a standard library and avoid the effort all together.

taking a verbal description of a process and translating it into code

I personally never work from verbal descriptions, I document the issue, and place it into a ticket system in which I work the tickets based on priority.
Yes, in retrospect, I think I was misunderstanding. OP clarified his comment, and in that case, I think it makes sense. I agree - that is the essence of programming, and if you truly cannot do that, you have no business being a programmer. However, there is more to software engineering than being able to translate algorithms into code, and I'm not so sure that a single litmus test should make the difference between hiring/not hiring a candidate.
Mineways - Send Minecraft models to Shapeways for printing
When someone would tell me I had worked hard on something, I would get embarassed and shut down. I'm not sure exactly why...

But I did react exactly like the NutureShock book mentions.

I'm feeling pangs in my chest just thinking of all the times I froze with a fear of failure when presented with even the slightest challenge. Or even worse, when I would brush something off as beneath me, since I was so smart. I didn't need to try.
Rootkits in your web application
I have two main problems with this blog post:

1.) The example used - The increasing consumption of bottled water is observable and the options available to those entrepreneurs are reasonable. However the real question is this: who was the first successful entrepreneur to capitalise on the idea of bottling water? That person definitely changed the world.

2.) The repeated confusion between cause and effect - When Apple brought out their affordable personal computer it helped to kickstart the trend of personal computing. If that is not changing the world then what is?