skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would you answer this job ad?
ROCKET FUEL INC HIRING ROCKET SCIENTISTS

Gang - I know you've already got jobs and you're exited about soon becoming some mountain view company's 16,502nd through 16,547th employees respectively.

I'm happy for you, I really am. But dudes. You used to be cool. What happened?

The last time I recruited heavily at Stanford was 1997/98, when I got 7 of the top 7 students to join me as employees #18 thru 24 at E.piphany.
See http://ai.stanford.edu/~gjohn/fountain98.gif. I'm not kidding about the ranking, one guy in that photo had A+'s in 12 CS classes.

Two of the people in that photo went on to get CS PhD's at Stanford and MIT, two became professors, one even became a prof at Stanford, three are CEO's of their own companies, the rest went on to high-impact management roles, and they all enjoyed working on hard CS problems with fun co-workers while watching their net worth hit 8 figures.

So it may be worth checking out what I'm up to now, which is disrupting online advertising with advanced AI and CS. We just hired our 7th employee today, so you can be #8.

We have some job descriptions posted for people who care about that stuff, but if you're smart and good at coding + databases, machine learning, or distributed systems please drop me a note with your resume including grades in Stanford CS classes + SAT/GRE.

------------

Some friends and I saw this ad recently and we laughed our asses off at how incredibly arrogant it seemed, but thinking back on the undeniable quality of the team that recruiter assembled, I'm wondering now if we were wrong. Thoughts? Is the ad unbearably arrogant or just funny>
I think there's a line between unscientific and scientific conjecture. No scientist worth their salt considers the multiverse interpretation more than a conjecture, which seems fair game. It's fine for scientists to go grasping at straws, since I believe that's fundamental to the creative processes that result in new theories, but it's important to note where that's happening and where theory is unfolding.
Yes, it does. Skribit is still alive and well from last year's Atlanta Startup Weekend.

In defense of the other projects from this year, I will say that 6/8 projects are alive past the weekend. 1/8 died, and 1/8 is on ebay. I'm not negating anything Blake says - he hits the money on the head with his lessons learned - you just get to learn them a lot faster in a failed project. I just wanted to point out that Startup Weekends can generate something else - if the team composition is right.
It's actually refer to this Guan Yin Goddess, not, Indian Goddess.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guan_Yin

From what I know, some Japanese worship her as well. Maybe it was much more popular in old days.
Installing And Using OpenVZ On Ubuntu 8.10
I would also recommend anything by Joel Salatin (http://www.polyfacefarms.com/library.aspx), who farms in Virginia (and was featured in Pollan's book). A quote from a Mother Jones interview:

This fundamental understanding drives our production models. Herbivores in nature do not eat dead cows, chicken manure, dead chickens, grain or silage: They eat fresh or dried forage. Of course, what’s neat is that empirical data is discovering the nutritional and ecological benefits of this paradigm. We’re reading about Omega 3 and Omega 6 balance, conjugated linoleic acid, polyunsaturated fats and riboflavin. Whenever a new laboratory confirmation of our philosophy hits the news, we make sure our patrons know about it. In a word, this is all about healing: healing our bodies, healing our economies, healing our communities, healing our families, healing the landscape, healing the earthworms. If it’s not healing, it’s not appropriate.
To be honest, sounds like a salesman trying to sell me something as being better than it actually is. And failing. But that's just me.

And BTW, is it just me or does that picture have some (bad) Photoshopping?
It seems to be making people as fat as possible as fast as possible...
Elance.com Customer Survey - What went wrong ?
Thanks for that tidbit, any news on the Australian startup scene is welcome. However, I am saddened by the ignorance and self-importance of local VCs. I wish there were ways to counter it, but I'm out of ideas and patience.
NASA Loses Contact With Mars Lander | TechJaws
5 Minutes with Angel Investor Dave McClure
What would that achieve? (The first part)
Wikipedia has become a fairly good reference for these sorts of basic principles.

In terms of intellectual "worth thinking about"-ness, the anthropic principle may be more worthwhile than blind faith, but in terms of science, it is equally worthless.

You need to revise your understanding of how science works, or else you'll only continue to blunder around.
Kudos for the work!

Like DavidW, I'm interested in the meta-issues involved here: how many more fakers are out there? Are we attracting this kind of activity in some way? If we can block spam with code, can we block this activity with code?
Looks interesting. Thanks for sharing.
it is starting to make sense:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/28/sun_dziuba_tm/print....
Do you have an automated system to verify an account is being used for this sort of astroturfing? If so I'm sure many of the folks here would be interested in it. I think a service that helped forums identify astroturfers could even be the basis for a YC company.

I would imagine simply grouping accounts by their ip address, creation time and set of articles they comment on should easily catch the unsophisticated guys.
The 9 Business Models of the Web
Have you considered a career as a private detective?
That's pretty sweet.
The anthropic principle is just way too convenient, and I fear it de-motivates scientists from looking deeper into issues that really need explaining.

This I must take issue with. The anthropic principle is what drove the Renaissance. It's what motivated people like Sir Isaac Newton to better understand the universe, they believed that this was the way to get closer to God. The anthropic principle is responsible for the single biggest leap in science in the history of mankind. Saying "God created it" doesn't excuse anyone from anything; you still need to work on it, in fact the good Christian has no excuse not to.
Isn't this a major part of string theory?
I think even if you convinced the Government this filter was a bad idea, they'd string it out for as long as possible to keep Senators Xenophon and Fielding on side.

For non-Aussies: The Government, who holds power Australia's House of Representatives, lacks a majority in the Senate and needs the support of the two senators above to pass legislation.
The Consumerist has a lot of articles about this, grouped under the title "Grocery Shrink Ray" (http://consumerist.com/search/grocery%20shrink%20ray/).
And here I thought my scoring on it the three times I took it was an accomplishment (like you my first score was probably my best, as it was my freshman year, and my high school didn't offer calculus - I studied it on my own).
We are all freelancers now, but only some people realize it. That's a different post.

I am very interested in reading this post sometime.
Bangkok Sightseeing Tours, Bangkok Travel Agents, Thai Cuisine, Nightlife Guides
AtBKK.com is the directory of Bangkok providing links to Bangkok business, hotels, guest houses, nightclub, spas, resorts, airlines, transportation, shopping, jewelry, education, beauty, travel agents, tour operators and more.
The ad isn't spell-checked. And, it is quite elitist - sure the Stanford hackers are good, but are they the only good ones, and are they good in the right ways (i.e. creative)?
Probe ends historic Mars mission - RIP Phoenix
Java ME developers switching to other mobile development platforms
The Intern's Picks:  November 11th
Vacation Rental Site Raises $250 Million
Here on Cape Cod vacation rentals are big money, I wonder how many locals use this service as it's the first I've heard of it. CyberRentals tends to dominate the local market (besides local rental sites)
In fairness, there is never anything technically worse to do than make an impulse decision based on short-term gain at the expense of long-term destruction. There were always better things for me to be doing, it just so happened that I found none of them particularly engaging and enjoyable. The first and only conventional employment I ever had in no way engaged me nor did I gain any measure of joy from it.

Had I gotten a job at 15, I would likely be far worse off than I am now since my life would have been filled with more things I didn't like, leaving less time for me to learn what I did like and make mistakes trying, etc. I believe the fundamental problem here is that kids are basing their actions off of their peers, who are just as bored and unsatisfied and just as immature. Therefore, they end up making the same immature choices. If, instead, schools were improved, parents were more proactive and children were all extended the same opportunities someone like myself was, this wouldn't be an issue.

Of course that's never going to happen so the drug business is safe. Phew.
Actually Atlanta is only one of two cities to hold more then one Startup Weekend event. Last year about 70 people participated. This year over 100 showed up and there were 70 people still standing on Sunday night.

I see lots of startups. Two of those that emerged from this weekend have the potential to be YC type quality startups.
Wouldn't it be a good idea to silently hide the posts from everyone except the troll. Now he (or she) has been public outed he'll probably try again with a new set of accounts.
I was struck a few years ago by an interview with an olympic athlete. She was asked how she found the discipline to keep a grueling practice schedule. She answered that what many see as discipline is actually passion.

If you're having trouble finding discipline, the answer may lie in finding a way to love what you're doing more.
My wife and I really started paying attention to where our food comes from a few years ago. We've never really eaten fast food on a regular basis, but even so-called normal food is often prepared from ingredients of dubious origin. In particular, high fructose corn syrup is in _everything_.

Here are some discoveries we made:

1. Most of the major chain restaurants use one or two suppliers that specialize in things like laser-cut chicken mash with painted on grill marks and similarly horrendous things. Once your tastebuds recognize food from those providers, it's almost impossible to eat at any of those places again.

2. Much of what is labeled "organic" fits some legal definition but not the real definition of what organic is supposed to provide. We ended up contracting with a local CSA (community supported agriculture) group for about $60 / month to get a more than ample supply of fresh fruits and vegetables, grown in season and no more than 30 miles from our neighborhood. You could go to the farm at any time and verify that your food was being grown as advertised.

3. We also found meat suppliers that will ship grass-fed beef, goat meat, etc. to our house for about $9 pound. It's a little more expensive than what you would get at the store, but it's a lot less scary.

After making these changes, we found ourselves with better tasting food, more energy and more interest in cooking for ourselves.
Yes, it does. I'm a bit confused though - I wasn't in question about that.

Let me clarify: I was wondering if pg's bayesian filter works so well that publishing his email address won't cause a bump in spam for him - since he seems to hide it (as I do mine). I was using Gmail as one example of bayesian filtering.

Mainly, I was gently suggesting it's better to not publish anyone's address here where it will get harvested.

BTW: When I think about it though, Gmail didn't work as well for me in the past.. but I don't know the cause of the improvement: it could be because I've been a lot more careful since then; or because Gmail has improved in general; or it's learnt for me specifically. I think a big factor is my old uni accounts stopped being diverted to it, and they used to catch a heap of spam. That's probably it.
How You Are Getting Here
Risks of Offshore Outsourcing
Many of us go for offshore advertising to save time and money. If we have someone else doing the work for us, then we will have more time to focus on other aspects of our business. It also saves us money because we can get the job done at a cheaper rate than what we would have, if we had to do it in-house or within our country.
That reminds me of Peter Norvig:
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.

Let me add:
Don't waste your time reading books about trivial topics.
FREELANCE WRITER Technical writers for copywriting freelance writing
Second post - looks like SPAM after all.
Jquery.timepickr now released
I have flagged it.
Another spam account.
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sanjeevbhiru1
Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD) – Vista in the Cloud
I think the case you mention is more about having reasonable expectations than staying upwind.

If you're studying as a musician and targeting symphonic performance as a career goal, you need to realize that you're going into a field which maybe has a couple dozen job positions open up per year world wide. Being the 200th best clarinet player in the world, despite being statistically very impressive, means that you still won't be able to work as professional symphonic performer.

On the other hand, if you set that as a nice-to-have goal, but are fine working as a studio musician or teacher, it becomes a much more attainable goal.

Fortunately, as a software developer, even if you're only one of the top several thousand you have a pretty big chance of doing impressive stuff.

My sister is about to finish a degree in music from a decent conservatory, but I'm glad she decided to double major half-way through. She's very good, but she doesn't have what it takes to be competitive in a race for maybe a dozen open positions every year for her instrument.
They should send the bill to the west.
I would never respond to an ad like that. It's more about what's wrong with me than what's right about the company. It's like one of those personal ads that ask: where have all the decent men/women gone?????
We scraped Yahoo Mail for about 6 months quite heavily. We had to keep it at a >5 minute timer otherwise we got captchas during the auth process, or we got locked out for 24 hours with error 999.

We now have a formal agreement with Yahoo, but during the process Yahoo indicated they had an informal open policy on scraping. Note that they have an initiative to open up all services within the next year or so (google Yahoo Open Strategy to read more about timelines).
With Instapaper you can read stuff in text-only. Plus you can read disconnected (prob more useful for Touch than Phone)
botnet = free cloud computing :)
True, neither multiverse theory nor a singleverse theory can be proven. But both are scientific in the sense that they (sort of) predict the structure of our universe. The question then becomes how to select one of the theories. Occams razor provides little help, since both theories are similarly complex, so one possible way to select a theory is to use Bayes rule. I'll sketch this reasoning:

The laws of physics are governed by equations which output only a probability distribution P(x) for various quantities (positions of particles, the values of certain fundamental constants).

(Note: I really don't understand any of this stuff well, so if someone (Dani?) with better knowledge can correct me or clarify, I'd love to see it.)

In a single-universe theory (SUT), one postulates that a particular x is selected, at random, relative to P(x) dx. In this theory, it is highly unlikely that the universe can support life (or at least life like us). In a multiverse theory (MUT), one postulates that all x are selected in parallel. In this case, our particular x will be chosen; the fact that we live in a good universe is not luck, merely natural selection. So the probability we exist is close to 1.

Both these theories are more or less equally "simple" (think Kolmogorov complexity), so let us assume they each "occur" with the same or similar "probability" (i.e., p(SUT)=p(MUT)=1/2). Then we use Bayes rule:

p(SUT | we exist) = p(we exist | SUT) p(SUT) / p(we exist) = (really freakin low) (1/2) / (1/2+really freakin low) = (unlikely)

p(MUT | we exist) = p(we exist | MUT) p(MUT) / p(we exist) = (almost 1) (1/2) / (1/2 + really freakin low) = (highly likely)

So multiverse theory is more "probable" than single universe theory. This remains true even if you wildly alter the complexity of competing theories, e.g. p(SUT)/p(MUT) = 1e6.

It's true, we can never falsify SUT or MUT relative to each other. But we can make educated guesses as to which one is more "probable". And yes, this is pretty sketchy, hence my use of scare quotes everywhere. But it's the best we can do right now.

Note: I computed p(we exist) = p(MUT)p(we exist | MUT) + p(SUT)p(we exist) = (1/2) 1 + (1/2)(really freakin low).

[edit: just curious why I'm being downmodded. Not begging for upmods, I'm honestly curious. Did I make a mistake here?]
how would someone do "deliberate practice" with programming anyway? Music, basketball etc involve "body memory" where repetitions of identical movements help. This seems to be fundamentally different from programming.

I am guessing programming "practice" would involve writing more ambitious programs? where would the feedback come from?
I've toyed with something similar though not this implementation. I like the concept but it still feels odd to me. I haven't had an application that needed a time picker yet, but when I do this is a very good candidate.

That being said, it doesn't feel natural to me. Sure it's intuitive, but I still feel a little awkward when using it. Does anyone else feel this way?
Where's the benefit in this? Is mobile platform hardware evolving so fast that the only way to keep existing code working on new devices is to simulate the old?
5 Ways to Stop Trolls From Killing the Internet
..or you are the founder. :P
I believe it's "perfect practice makes perfect."
I suspect that you do not quite mean what you said.

JavaScript is not compiled (ignoring Google Chrome) although it is transformed to byte code at runtime when it executes within a browser.

Perhaps if you were to explain what it is you want to do in a bit more detail then you might get some help with your problem. Alternately - give http://stackoverflow.com/ a try.
More known for their wise-ass lists, Cracked tries to offer some solutions to the Internet's Troll problem.
Sounds interesting, this could replace a scheme I use to store files in AWS. However if you're using AWS under the covers I'd rather use my own AWS account via dev pay instead of paypal and I'd rather grant your service permission to store stuff in my own bucket.
The show that war sucks and every country powerful enough to show it has an ugly side.
Where's The UI In The Semantic Web
Yes, but that don't necessarily make their action technically legal.

I find their methodology interesting, but anyway, wasn't similar numbers reported/predicted before?
If a Creator were to exist (I believe He does), could science prove it?
My friend's father would always say (and meant it):

"I've never had a problem finding work. Getting paid for that work, now that's a different matter."
You cab obfuscate JavaScript to some extent but you can't hide it completely. Usually the sandbox within which the code executes sets limits that provide sufficient security and there are also restraints on cross domain calls.

I suggest a little more research on the web - you might find your apparent problems are groundless.
What do ycombinator startups incorporate as?
This could be an interesting language learning tool (with the drawback, it's machine not a real native speaker).

As someone who is learning Spanish, I'm interested in testing English to Spanish..
No platform fails until it stops being supported. Mono may not have succeeded though.

That's like saying that Basque is a failed language, it was never intended as an international language, it's still used by those in the small province where it originated.
Uh... people can get those in many ways - for instance by simply sniffing traffic.
Todo: get in a position where people are looking for excuses to buy my products.
Not until he was in fifth grade.
As a friend of the author, I know that people at Apple and Microsoft used Ted Nelson's Computer Lib as a bible on personal computing. Sadly, you can't buy it cheap (I have a signed reprint), but it's an astounding book.

It's likely that Jobs saw this early on.
We frequently will do a free smaller project for someone we term a "center of influence." So, if we deem that doing work for this person could lead to many more referrals and jobs in the future, we'll do a free project. Common example is putting an Ad Agency's website onto our CMS for free, so they can see our service and software, and then they will recommend us to clients in the future.

We've had great success and got into bed with some of our biggest clients this way. Also, there's probably a little guilt on their end that after we completed something for them for free that they "owe" us business in the future.
This is a fascinating action for both parties. Musicians decry the heavy hand and unending greed of most Record labels. Now the label has a vested interest but the band will act independently.

I don't think it's earth shattering in any way, and it's surely not the direction most bands should go as they aren't always the best at making their own decisions, and usually they just care about the music and not the business side of things. Sure a Manager can act as CEO but I still can't see it being a universal platform for bands in the future. What do you guys think?

It will be interesting to see how this band does!
Twitterrati, Anyone?
I don't find it intuitive at all. And the 24-hour-mode almost scares me; how can someone doing innovative work on time fail to grasp 24-hour time so thoroughly?
The Genius Behind Steve Jobs
New Watchmen Art Reveals Ozymandias and the Gang
Emtastic CSS Library
Corn is the most abundant and popular food in the world, beating out rice. I'm not sure how this is surprising.

"We're seeing that corn is the number-one reason that fast food is so cheap and available," said Meredith Niles, a food policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety who was not involved in the study. "U.S. programs are subsidizing obesity in this country."

U.S. programs are making sure that people have food to eat. Boo!
This ad is full of red flags.

- It denigrates other companies instead of talking up their own.

- It talks up past projects of the recruiter, not his current work.

- It talks about the caliber of individual employees, not their team or culture.

- It says SEVEN WORDS about the actual company/position.

I'm betting it all leads up to an epic lowball wage.
Just to give you a quick example of what I mean - imagine if police knew every single time you didn't come to a complete stop, or sped up to make a yellow light.

Or if people around you knew every single thing you thought about them. Or if your parents knew every time you misbehaved.

Civilization would not survive such a thing. You need the lies. A world where people could not (or would not) ever lie would not function.
http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/WRITINGS/TCOMPARADIGM/tedCom...

http://www.arch.kth.se/unrealstockholm/unreal_web/seminar03_...
To put some perspective on the notion that US evil >> JP evil for using the nuclear bomb.

In school (in Europe) I remember being taught how horrible the two bombs were and that it was somewhat good that the war was put to en end, but with much more stress on the former. I was never taught about the atrocities committed by the Japanese.
Reminds me of Mark Evanier's great 'unfinanced entrepeneurs' post: http://www.povonline.com/cols/COL209.htm
I think I would prefer if it was vertical and the initial selections were made with horizontal movements.