skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, In a world of Networks that need to be built, customers that need to be deployed, ticketing systems that need to be improved, Post Mortems that need to be completed, and Network Architectures that need to be visioed - I simply don't have time/energy or, even the _ability_ to deal with someone who isn't going to throw themselves 100% onto the team. And that starts at the interview. Perhaps it's a reflection on how I perceived the employer/employee relationship.

The interview is a (very poor) proxy for what the work relationship will be like with the candidate in the future. Firing people is such a major, major hassle (particularly as you get bigger) - that unless the person is grossly incompetent or breaches company policy in an unambiguous manner, you typically have to wait for the next round of layoffs to get rid of them, even if they are difficult to work with.

What this means, is that you are looking for all the danger signs you can during an interview - and hiring someone who is going to "Stand up for their rights" or "as a matter of principle, not share detailed employee history", is fraught with risk. Both of those actions are entirely reasonable in and of themselves, but, for better or worse, they portend, for the potential employer, risk.

And I guess that's what I was trying to get across (from the perspective of an employer) - that rightly or wrongly, your actions in holding back information or challenging the employer in an interview, will be sending clear signals.

If you are a strategic hire, or if the job market is tight, or if you have some very, very specific skills - then you can probably afford to negotiate hardball, and be as difficult as you want - they aren't hiring you for the person that you are, but the things that you can do - but, in the 95% of the time a hiring situation is taking place, that is not the case.

[added: And as far as spamming references - ask anyone who hires; actually getting around to calling references of people you are _hiring_ is hard enough - I don't know if I have _ever_ contacted a reference unless a salary, start time, and position where pretty much agreed upon. And I'm better than most at getting around to that task. ]
Login-free link: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10993931?source=most_viewed
But pretty much any browser can display PDFs just fine without having to open a separate reader, and that's the defacto format for documents on the web. Occasionally you will come across other formats like word or rtf, but there are browser-based viewers for those formats available too.

I suppose that is what bothers me most about scribd. PDFs are easy to read for me in Safari, but when someone links me a scribd document, I gotta scroll both the document and the page or maximize my browser window to read a scribd document comfortably, I can't just have select text working without clicking a button, I can't view documents the way I want to (two pages side-by-side continuous). Sometimes they'll link me a scribd document of a PDF available widely from the original source, or a PDF of a webpage, and often it'll be outdated. And of course, Scribd is inaccessible with voiceover (the screenreader), which is absolutely not fantastic when the original document was fully accessible. Of course that wouldn't be a huge problem if it were simple to login, except with all the flashy web2.0 that's not terribly simple either.

You can make the point that I can create a scribd login to download files, but creating a new account on a site I don't even want to visit just to download something is irritating. Definitely not my definition of "easily" viewed or a "good" experience.
"Come on techies- why so few responses? Is it because he's right? Is it because you all think you're so smart, precious, and valuable that no 'suit' could ever add any value?"

I'm just going out on a limb here, but maybe it's because this was posted less than three hours ago, on a Saturday afternoon?
I'd be as happy as all get out to see a solution to one of the problems of open source economics: connecting developers with money in order to create a positive feedback loop where developers make more money and can spend more time on their projects.

However... "It's rare to see non-coders visit an OSS bounty site and create a bounty." There's a good reason for that: normal people are going to look for something that does what they want, now, not go through all the hassle of bounties and other things only to possibly see some code who knows when.

Maybe the site can be 'salvaged' by doing some creative tweaking to make it into something else that is a little bit more likely to make money? Good luck in any case!
Web Sokoban in Clojure
Slate: a prototype-based OO language based on Self, CLOS, and Smalltalk
That's quite true. Most normal people want a solution now.

We're trying to mitigate that where we can; for instance a pledge is a 30-day commitment (rather than a perpetual one). If nothing satisfactory is released in that time, the money can be easily withdrawn.

Regardless of what we do, there's going to be less "normal people" contributing to projects than the number of normal people actually using the stuff after it's gone through the process. Our hope here is that our search and drilldown options (and some other stuff in the works) will help the normal people find what they're looking for after it's released. We think "finding-the-right-software-for-X" is a big open problem, and we'd like to take a crack at it.
I have read that those who might do well in computer science choose a different field for their success. Face it, it's not the most financially rewarding career and the hours are probably worse than anything but Ob/Gyn professionals. Toss some "gender biases" (for lack of a better word) into the mix and it's no wonder why there's an estrogen shortage in the field.
Nothing wrong. The problem is that there's no such thing as a book any more. It's all just text. Any search engine will do.
> "finding-the-right-software-for-X" is a big open problem,

That might make for a good site. Help connect people with open source software, and consultants who can assist them with it. For values of people where people == 'small businesses'.
Who are these "normal people?" Can you give an example of software they would be interested in funding?

I'm having a hard time imagining exactly who you're targeting.

How is this different than microPledge?
Is this guy a spambot?
Browsers used to display PDFs just fine, but Acrobat reader keeps getting crappier and crappier! It's so big and so slow!
I'll have to take your word on it as far as what HR people will do.

The people I was thinking of were the team leads and managers.

These are the people I've dealt with and I am. We do, at least in every company I've worked for, have the ability to say I want this person, lets make it work wrt salary.

Now obviously this has limits; a developer can't come in and expect to be the highest paid person in an established company:). But if the person's demands fit anywhere on the salary grid, and their abilities match, then they are almost assured of getting hired at their desired salary.

We don't create a salary range when we create a position.
I like the idea, even though I'm a bit pessimistic about it kicking off...

A few glitches I noticed:

* The video takes awhile to load, while loading there's a black rectangle. May be use an image while the flash is loading, or bootstrap your flash with a preloader a la youTube.

* The "Help" form is behind the flash video.

* Consider dimming the background when the help form is open. Also, close it when the user clicks anywhere not on the form or presses Esc. ThickBox, GreyBox, LightBox, Uservoice, etc all do that, it's something the users expect.

* As clay suggested add some real content, no one is going to contribute to a test site.
On what browser/platform is "Help" rendering behind the flash video?
In our actual, factual physical universe, the Continuum Hypothesis isn't so much "true" or "false" as "irrelevant". It's possible the universe is fundamentally discrete, in which case it just doesn't apply to anything physical, and even if it turns out to be continuous in some sense, it's likely to be some hybrid continuous/discrete combo where the hypothesis still doesn't apply to anything physical.

(One of the points made in Reflections on Relativity ( http://www.mathpages.com/rr/rrtoc.htm ) is that both a continuous universe and a discrete universe, taking the traditional senses of the term, are logically contradictory things to build a universe out of, and Einsteinian relativity calls for an odd mixture of both. No clean link to a single page as, IIRC, the point is made over a series of sections, culminating in a unique (AFAIK) discussion of Zeno's Paradoxes, which I can link to: http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s3-07/3-07.htm although you really need to read the sections before that for full impact.)

So, sleep easy. It is nothing more and nothing less than a choice of axiom. The axiom of choice is similarly irrelevant in the real universe; since use of the axiom calls for the selection of an infinite set from another infinite set, possibly uncountable, it has no particular connection to the real, finite universe.
I thought the reason it was so complicated is that he used symbolic logic to do it - maybe that's not the right way to go about these proofs?

It seemed more like a work in showing the use of symbolic logic, rather than a proof of math.
“Most of what you learn from a textbook is in the exercises”

That explains a lot ....

Too bad no one told me that back when it mattered.
What is the subject of your book?

How did you get O'Reilly to accept it?

I've been thinking about some cool books I would like to write for O'Reilly. I live 10 miles away from their headquarters, which might help me.

Are there any other north bay hackers out there?
Seconded. And it's completely BS-free. He uses very few adjectives and writes almost entirely in declarative sentences. The book's astonishingly unembellished and plain, relying on the facts as he remembers them. Totally readable in four hours or so.
Cool.

UI crits:
1) Try browsing without javascript enabled (cough).
2) Try using the back button in any project-specific page. You have to hit it multiple times, quickly, to go back.
"There is no permanent place for ugly mathematics"

-G.H.Hardy

I loathe these automatic proof systems (at least the state of the art today) - I think they may be useful for verifying that a complex CPU correctly implements integer arithmetic - but these proofs have little to offer a human mathematician. Let's follow Paul Erdos who said "one need not believe in god, but a mathematician should believe in The Book" The Book is where god (the supreme fascist) has collected the shortest and most elegant proofs in mathematics. Here's a great book written in this spirit (dedicated to Erdos) -

http://books.google.com/books?id=KvQr9l0wgf8C

when a theorem prover can produce a proof as elegant as as the one given in this book of say sperner's lemma then I'll give them another look. (No disrespect to Russell or the creators of these programs is intended, of course)
My school, Case Western Reserve University, had a student shooting at the business school a few years back.

A business major went on a rampage because he thought some sysadmin had deleted his personal webpage. He went on a shooting spree at the Peter B. Lewis building and shot a few people, killing a fellow student. His target, the sysadmin, was unharmed, though.
FF3 and Chrome running under Vista x64. Works fine with IE7 though.
Great idea, what is your marketing plan?

I would suggest finding a few businesses that spend a substantial amount of money every month on proprietary software. Then ask them to support the development of a free and better version by pledging a small amount each.

The supporters can see it as a form of advertising for one. Every company would love to have its name behind a piece of software that has the ability to change the game. They also get to fix a problem and reduce future expenses.

Not only that, this new software will be constantly updated by talented people who are passionated about the problem they are solving and they will not have to pay a penny more for new versions.
I would be careful using PayPal. Another bounty site - microPledge - recently shut down because using PayPal to hold money in Escrow is against their TOS.

I wrote about it here: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/10/09/open-source-fundin...

I'm sure there are a lot of project owners from microPledge looking for a new home, but using PayPal might just lead your down the same path.
It's extremely annoying, since it makes it hard to scroll documents with the two-button trackpad gesture on a Macbook.
I had the opposite result - tortilla's link worked, jgranby's didn't.
Get Foxit Reader; nobody on a Mac has this problem, though.
How/why has this been submitted if it's been dead since 2006? It sounds really cool but I have stumbled on it before whilst googling for history on smalltalk etc.
Wait --- I have to actually pay money and then hope I get software?

I don't think anybody is going to do this, Drew.
I wonder if there's a corollary: happy hackers hack; unhappy hackers read Hacker News.

(Goodbye, comment. I expect to see you disappear into the background under a barrage of downmods within a matter of minutes.)
Sigh, this stupid meme again.

Fiat money is backed by something - the majority of the time it's backed by real estate, or other real property.

Fiat money allow the value of property to be represented as cash.

If I build a house there is more value in the world, so there should be more paper money too - without affecting inflation. This is what happens with fiat money.

On the other hand if we use gold, then if I create value - a house - you can't also create more gold to match it, so instead I just deflated the value of the gold (i.e. the ratio of value of real propery vs the value of all the gold just changed) - that's bad.

Gold money does not, and can not work unless you are in a static economy. Fiat money works in both cases.

Please spread the news: the anti fiat money/anti federal reserve/anti fractional reserve banking meme's are dead.
by far, one of the best

So there's a huge gap between, say the third and fourth best articles you've read in a long time, but only a tiny gap between numbers one, two, and three?
mmm...brains...
If a project isn't being completed to your satisfaction, you have the option to withdraw your money 30 days after you contributed it. Among other things, this gives developers incentive to complete projects and to complete them before you stop caring.
Say Goodbye to BlackBerry? If Obama Has To, Yes He Can. Maybe.
There is a huge difference between paying money and getting it back, and promising money.

I still don't see how this site is any better than any of the 100 freelance job sites out there now.
I agree, and I suppose by "theory" I mean anything that isn't code (even pseudocode). I've met many "type 2s" who can give you a great database and object model for whatever you feed them, but would be utterly lost if ever asked to translate into code.

And God help them if you describe a bug to them and ask them where they'd begin looking.

In the end it boils down to not doing. To be good at anything you need practice and experience, not just rote knowledge. Type 2s do not have this, since nobody holds a gun up to their head and makes them code till the early morn.
Mathematical Platonism is dangerous for mental health. Cantor is a great example of someone who literally went crazy contemplating the meaning of uncountable infinites.

Set theorists, by the way, seem to be the most likely to go insane.
First Weekly YouTube Address from the President-Elect
The major difference between bitloot and sites like Rent A Coder is that we promote open-source software. With the OSS model, everyone benefits, not just the people who pay. We don't want to be Rent A Coder, that's a different market.
Passenger and Shopify: "I cannot see any reason to choose a different deployment strategy"
Nice. Very similar to http://schneier.com/paper-street-performer.html

Nice to see some implementation of it.
* College kids who want a good, free game to play at a LAN party

* My mom, who wants a free alternative to MS Word that works well on Windows and is less intimidating than OO (and more powerful than Google Docs)

* People who saw an OSS tool running on their friend's Linux and want a port to their platform

* People who run existing closed-source software that they want to add a feature to, but can't

* People like me who code, but are too busy to learn to hack Platform X just to get Feature Y

I was a long-time mp user. Unfortunately they are no longer operating. As I understand it, their model was more focused on funding (mostly closed) software in an open way. Of course, it's difficult to convince closed-source people that community funding is a good idea, and I think that was one of several challenges they faced before shutting down.

Our focus is completely different. We want to connect people with OSS. A large part of that is money (because money is a strong attractive force). We talk about it a lot, because people start listening when you tell them they're going to get paid. But there are other problems too--search (how do people find OSS projects?), developer time (I have a week--what do I work on?). These problems are far out of bounds of micropledge or other bounty or funding systems.
I don't think the historical or current experience of being oppressed automatically makes a person more sympathetic to other oppressed groups. It can just as easily harden a person--"I and my ancestors suffered through X, why should I care about your Y?" So while I agree that the gay community could do a much better job selling gay rights to African-Americans, I wouldn't describe the support level as "frighteningly low".

PS: There's a black church on the south side of Chicago which is unusual, for black churches, because it stands firmly in favor of gay rights. Its pastor, until recently, was a guy named Jeremiah Wright. You may have heard of him.
Sounds like in this case though he may have been a foreign worker on an H-1B, who wouldn't qualify for nationalized health care anyways.

This is entirely speculation, but knowing Chinese foreign visa holders... it's likely that he was very close to his green card, and thus bringing his family over to the US, and then he got laid off - 5 years down the drain, and even if he gets another job it's another 5 years before he can see his family again. That kind of stress can make a man do strange things.
there is a reason, the username is non-hacker, go easy :-)
I couldn't find the info on the site but how do you decide when to release the funds to the developer?

I've developed a similar site in the past but never publicly released it as there was a few flaws in the system that I couldn't work around. I've since moved on but I'm wondering how you managed to get around them.

For my system you got votes based on the amount you contributed. This opened the site up to people pledging just enough to get 51% of the vote then accepting any solution even bad ones.

The other way where the creator of the bounty gets the final say also opens up to people creating popular bounties then claiming them for themselves with no acceptable solution posed.

Outside of automated solutions I suppose you could have staff review each claim manually but I decided against this idea as it just couldn't scale.

Anyhow, curious to read your solutions to these problems.
But you can list open-source projects on RentACoder if you want.
Seconding these criticisms - they make it very difficult to browse the site. A related problem is that you can't right click links to open them in their own tab from the browse page. All in all a cool idea though (not sure I see the business potential though).
Your principle is sound, and you are right, until you run into a code sweatshop type of job/company. Companies that are seeking bright talent will always form their compensation around such, but there are even more companies out there who just "need an engineer" - i.e. they desire no more than the minimum, and know that they're not hiring top talent. In which case they are certainly hiring to a strict budget.

A company that treats its employees like interchangeable parts will invariably begin compensating them as such.
XMind - Social Brainstorming and Mind Mapping
I don't like the behavior of the tabs. When I wanted to back to browsing all projects, I clicked on "Browse." That didn't work, so I tried my back button. That didn't work either. Then, several minutes later, I noticed the "Back" link. This was definitely not intuitive.

Also, once I click "Next" when browsing for projects, I see absolutely no way to go back!
Tell YC: Congrats to YC applicants who made it!
And to those who didn't, congrats for developing a team, idea, and prototype--now go for it anyway!
This could be ridiculously awesome... if it actually works.
Voting algorithms are hard. If people game Digg and Reddit, you just know they're going to be all over you when there's money involved.

We've got some pretty good metrics that we're looking at. The obvious ones, like number of contributors, voting times, and so on. We also look at activity, and construct minimum spanning trees for various subsets of users as an automated "Someone should look at this" flag. Contribution times and rates are also something we look at.

Probably the biggest single stopgap measure is decidedly low-tech: there's a short delay (a day or so) between project release and release of funds. If any real people at all are downloading the stuff they paid for and it doesn't work, hopefully they'll shoot an e-mail off to us and we'll take a look.
Same - but I try and avoid it now (water is a bit of a restricted/precious resource here).
The 10 Coolest James Bond Cars Ever
Do you always tell the people you're interviewing what the maximum budgeted salary is for the position?

If the answer is no, then withholding their previous salary isn't hardball negotiation, it's simply negotiating on the same terms you are.
The last solution you mentioned was one I ended up implementing but I just wasn't happy enough with the rest of the solution to work out better fraud detection.

One other suggestion for going forward might be to implement none software bounties as well. A large portion of my development was based on the idea of community bounties. Say Bountyville wants their park cleaned up so their kids can play they all chip into a bounty on your site. Receive proposals from companies then choose the best one to do the job. This would help you get more "normal" people involved in the site which might translate into these people discovering the software side of the site as well.

The only difference you need for those are a two stage voting process where by users vote on proposals before the action and also on the result after.

Anyhow, best of luck.
Secret Directed-Energy Tech Protecting the President?
OS controlled using hand gestures
Tone down the reverb on your demo video!
A currency back by land makes a lot more sense than a currency backed by... nothing, which is the definition of fiat money: 'Fiat money is money that is intrinsically useless; is used only as a medium of exchange' http://economics.about.com/cs/economicsglossary/g/fiat_money...
I really never use Scribd and it took me approximate 5 seconds to figure out how to copy-paste and print in Scribd.
It doesn't even look like its setup correctly... the repl buffer name should read slime-repl clojure not inferior-lisp. inferior-lisp is what you get when you haven't properly connected to swank.