skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you have a valid point that Yahoo! is probably not laying off their top performers. However, the job cuts were large, and there is enough randomness in the HR process to assume that the startup could find 5 good employees there. Not to mention, an employee in the bottom half at Yahoo would probably be an excellent employee anywhere else. Also, there are factors other than competence that play in to decisions like these, like tenure.
The OP mentioned this up front; the interview process is only necessary if your network falls through.
FYI, there is a jobs section on YC:

http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
Another example would be Google's Lunar X prize, and, of course, the X-Prize.

I have to admit that I never fully understood how the economics work out for the teams competing for a prize. Money for the R&D efforts of each team still has to come from somewhere, and only one team wins the prize to cover the costs. If the technology is so valuable, it makes more sense to me to attempt to take it to market rather than compete for a prize: there can be more than one winner in the market, and the potential payoff can be higher than the prize money.

Obviously, this doesn't work if there is no accessible market for the tech, or if the team is motivated by recognition rather than money.
Here I thought it was a poorly titled article, perhaps for something like a super lower power microcontroller running linux powered by a potato. Instead I find totally senseless satire (which I do appreciate, just not on HN) mocking the linux community and slowly turning this site in another reddit/digg.
So you mean John Q. Public is as qualified to speak about science as people who spend several years of their life learning about all the necessary background in their field of study, and then spend the rest of their lives contributing original research in that field? Or are the latter merely charlatans and frauds?
Ask YC: Better to ask users to upload photos vs. have some canned images?
Which is better for our social search/recommendation site?
A) Have some standardized, category-based photos for users to select from when authoring recommendations (we have ~12 top-level domains/categories of recommendations). But, also have the ability to upload your own photo if you want. Pro: User can quickly add a photo that somewhat reflects the topic of the recommendation. Con: The photo selected might not fit the content exactly.

B) Have no standardized, pre-selected photos but emphasize the photo uploader. Pro: User-uploaded photos might be more accurate to the rest of the authored recommendation (e.g., Yelp photos). Con: People might not go to the trouble and there would be a lot of "empty" photos on the site.

Thanks! Please add specific examples/urls if possible!
So your "that" referent consisted of two hypothetical parts and a 3rd statement that you agree is trivially true.

I meant setup from a user standpoint. I suspect that once such sandbox software was stable, updates would be less frequent than updates to the Java plugin. You meant setup time in terms of getting code JITed and actual execution.
"Scientist" does not indicate a field of expertise. It's a magic word.
You can always form the connection by making sure your site is green certified:

http://www.co2stats.com/certpro.php?s=1138&ref=http://ne...

Nothing like the latest fad for making money.
your article was a good read as well.
I'm a "recovering" investment banker (I'm about to get my three-year chip!) and there's a lot in this article that's very interesting. Working on Wall St. and living in NYC can really warp your perspective on life and money. When making 10 times what the average family makes in a year is considered a bad year, something is very distorted. It must seem devastating for all of the bankers getting laid off or uncertain about their futures, but once the dust settles, they'll be okay if they've lived below their considerable means. It seems that the key to financial happiness is to live within your means. Perhaps if more people did that instead of cashing out the equity on their McMansions, there'd be a bunch more happiness to go around and this guy's firm wouldn't be in the headlines every week...

As for making your living by doing your calling, you either have to make some sacrifices or be very fortunate and have your calling happen to be something that's lucrative. Unless you work for a job that is minimally demanding, you most likely will only become very successful if you truly have some calling for it. Otherwise you'll probably tread water and have to find fulfillment in other parts of your life.

You start having real problems if you work at a demanding job that you don't have a calling for. I did that for years and it could be very difficult. I was always somewhat awed by the bankers I worked with who absolutely loved it and it clearly was their calling. Often, their third wives were very happy to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Making the switch from Wall St. was difficult and it really took a little bit of time to put the whole money thing into perspective. Now, I've found a calling creating software and am optimistic that I'm one of the lucky ones whose calling can be lucrative. Now if we can only start generating revenue...
best case i would have both. require the author to select a category when posting, and using this category either pull random image out of stock photos in the category or if you want to get cheeky, parse the text and run semantic to get a closer match (does it really matter though? :D ). if user decides to upload his own photo, just use that instead.

easy peesy
on the other, your instinct to abandon your chosen career the moment it ceases to offer an easy path to fame and fortune, suggests that what you’re really in the market for is a job.

I don't really follow the logic there. That makes sense only if the career he wants to abandon already happens to be his calling.
~20 new users daily, ~40 new packages daily, ~180 unique users with stuff being tracked, ~150 updates sent out daily
That is a hard lesson to learn. Good luck.

One technique is to have a set time set aside where you focus totally on, say, family. For me, it is Sundays at 3pm. I have a videoconference with my folks, and for that hour I am theirs, completely. The benefits to having a regular schedule increase the potency of the interaction, as it provides an anchor, rhythm and excuse.

As for your health, well, my grampa used to say "your health is your wealth". That is still a lesson I am trying to learn.
Count me among those who who thinks the CS vs. Software engineering debate is silly.

I never understood how you could teach CS theory w/o a lot of programming and I have no idea how you'd teach programming w/o the theory. If you can't figure out the big-O complexity of an algorithm you're useless and if you can't implement it you're useless.

I also think that engineering degrees should not be crammed into 4 years. Just to get the basics requires way more credits than a normal BA. Perhaps a BS should be viewed as something between a BA and an MS and 5 years should be standard.
Number of Linux Distributions Surpasses Number of Users (!)
Social Media is Simple
They're taking over, slowly but surely.
> Crossing a picket line is not the right way to take a principled stand against unions.

He's under no obligation to take a "principled stand". In fact, he didn't ask about that. He asked what to do.

I do like how you insist that he can't disagree with your position without taking a huge personal hit. Why is your position so privileged?

> If you don't like unions, then don't take a job in a union shop.

In other words, he shouldn't have gone to grad school.

> If you cross the picket line you are a 'scab' and some of your colleagues, especially if they come from a working class background, will consider you to be a traitor.

Some folks will consider you a traitor for voting "wrong", for having the wrong color skin, for liking the wrong football team, for driving the wrong car, for drinking the wrong beer. Such things are commonly recognized as "their problem".

> The TA-like employees you work with probably do not resemble the stereotypical angry union truck driver or dock worker but some of them may come from countries where trade union organizers are routinely arrested, kidnapped, tortured, and murdered.

So? His response to his union has absolutely no relationship to what happens to union folk in other countries. More to the point, what happens in other countries doesn't justify union thuggery in the US.
In theory yes, but it just seems too easy to criticize in that way. But I admit I don't know enough about their work to give a fair judgement...
My answer would be to give a completely random number and then justify it by quoting Dilbert:

Dilbert: Studies have shown that accurate numbers are not that much more useful than the ones you make up.

PHB: How many studies showed that?

Dilbert: 87

I probably wouldn't give this answer in an interview, im more of the "I don't know" group of people.

p.s. Dilbert strip:
http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-05-08/
Awhile ago I added a thanks/pls donate direct message nag when a first-time user submits a package. The results have been pretty poor, and theres been one complaint on the Uservoice.
Don't be afraid to ask for what you're worth. On the other hand, you don't earn anything if you price yourself out of the job.

For reference, the going rate in Minneapolis for competent contract software engineers seems to be in the $100/hr neighborhood.

If you can't come to an agreement on an hourly rate, you might try negotiating a price for the job as a whole. If you're especially productive, you might even come out better this way than if you had done an hourly arrangement.
Why does cal max out at 5875706?
Pasting error messages in Google saved my ass a few times.
The alternative is not "believe the worst global warming case" or "pollute away". The alternative isn't even "mankind is adversely affecting the environment" or not, since it's pretty obvious some things are being hurt. It's "what shall we spend our money on?", and if Global Warming is being grossly oversold, let's put that money into things that will actually matter, like fixing the Pacific dead zone or researching the amelioration of other real problems.

If Global Warming hysteria is wrong, than panicking and destroying our economies over it is not noble. It is not even neutral. It is destructive, because of the resources that could have been spent solving real problems that got wasted instead. If Global Warming is hysteria and not fact, the hysteria itself is the single greatest threat facing the environment today.

Skeptics like myself are often painted as anti-environmental; frankly, I return the change with gusto back to those who won't even consider the question of how to best spend our resources, but assume (with varying and often low degrees of justification) that they already know the answer. First we find the truth, then we figure out the solutions. I think the order has been inverted and that's bad engineering no matter how you slice it. (Not to mention the solutions sold for global warming that won't even fix the problem even if they work perfectly....)
Forbes: Entrepreneurship (Or Lack Thereof) In Millennials
I don't disagree with you at all, but...

I have a problem with Apple taking 30% because the store is far too polluted now. I feel it should be scaled back to 20% due to the amount of marketing and press expenses people (read: indie developers) must now incur. I have no problem engaging in marketing activities, it's just expensive.

Also, I just had a huge argument with Apple in which they did not budge to correct a massive bug that has ultimately affected our sales:

- app was approved but would not go on sale till our bank contracts were approved. (+2 extra weeks)

- once contracts were approved, app was listed as being 2 weeks old, rather than showing a release date that was true to it's availability on the store. it's first day on the store, it was listed near the end of page 1.

- within a week, our app is now on the 2nd page. not normal for this section. should have had ~3 weeks of Page 1 exposure.

- customer's impression of the app is now distorted, they think it's 3 weeks old with only a few comments and possible not worth the download... as oppose to a brand new app that's accurately dated.

For 4 months I've bootstrapped this company and our first (premium) app has now had it's sales potential chopped at the knees. Here's where I get real mad:

I talked with multiple representatives about this glaring problem with no luck. Nobody will fix the date. I'm sick of their lack of transparency and unclear requirements around their publishing system. I've sent in screenshots and plenty of proof where their system has failed, and they are in complete denial. Supposedly they'll pass my complaint...

I'm tempted to write a long blog about it because I'm that furious about their stubbornness over this issue. Give me my 10% back, and the 7 weeks you stalled processing my bank contracts...

Sorry, had to vent.
There are in fact a couple good ways to do some "white hat" SEO:

1. Title your pages appropriately - if you want to get searches for "Yosemite Park Map" - then make sure that's the title of the page.

2. Make sure your pages are linked - Google will not crawl your pages if they are not linked. I linked all my park maps as follows (http://www.trailbehind.com/park_index/0/), strictly so Google would crawl them.

3. Try and get some external links, through sites such as Y-Combinator and Reddit - external links help your pagerank.

4. As a corrolary to #3, you should try and get links where the linked text is the search result you want. So if you want to get referrals for "Download Park Maps", you'd like the link to use those exact words.

5. Consider your copy carefully, and use key-words for which you want search referrals. If you have a page that is titled "Yosemite Park Map" and the words "Yosemite Park Map" in the body of the page, that will help.

6. Links from credible sites help your page-rank a great deal, so if you know someone with a popular website, ask them to throw you a bone if a link to you is topical to their site.

7. Aim at "long tail" searches. For my start-up, it's unlikely that we can get links for something like "Yosemite National Park," because there are a lot of great sites that provide information on Yosemite. But there are also a lot of smaller parks, places, and trails which don't have much, and we are looking for Google searches on those.
I think prize economics is really interesting... though practically speaking, there's probably a limited class of problems that could be better solved by using prizes. (I think "the auto industry" will do just fine without any kind of prize.)

Check out these articles:

"The Bogus $1 Million Meat Prize"
http://www.slate.com/id/2189693/

"Should the government start handing out prizes for science breakthroughs?"

http://www.slate.com/id/2182663/pagenum/2
really? I will assume so as I am too lazy to google this time of the morning. In that case I take it all back !
The Hardest-Hit Industries
Neat demo of 3D video-projection-mapping technology [video]
Your stats are unfortunately pretty small when it comes to advertising dollars.

The fact is that Twitter doesn't lend itself to monetizing on the messages itself, and as that is how your bot operates that makes it quite difficult.

Twitter spam is pretty unwelcome in general, the "friending" (when users follow each other) is treated as a pact not to create noise. I think given time it will become more acceptable as Twitter ages and more services spring up that people want to use and need funding to survive.

I don't think Freemium will work for you, this isn't a necessary service and that's what is required for user conversion from Free to Premium.

The webpage login may work, but now you're just giving the user a specific action which means any ads you show them have a very low chance of catching their eye.

I think my suggestion is check out Magpie or something similar, and make one "broadcast" tweet rather than a DM to each user. They have to be following you to get your DMs so they have to get your tweets. That's my suggestion.
Pictures of the Dutch Cafe Energy-Generating Revolving Door
> Go here, and have your fill:

Ok, I'll go download one of these here technical papers. "Implications of Proposed CO2 Limitations." Let's jump down to pg23, picked at random. Here we have a multi page discussion of models that are NOT published anywhere for free. You have to go buy them as far as I can tell.

This was my whole point. These IPCC papers are huge collections of commentary with footnotes, not actual research.

> that the reports are hard to understand

The reports are not hard to understand at face value. They are hard to meaningfully understand. A statement of cash flows for most corporations can be basically explained in ten minutes. It doesn't mean anything without analysis, however. You need industry context and commentary along with it. If you just read a company's annual report and look at the page with the statement of cash flows on it you're not going to know shit. These IPCC papers are VERY MUCH like glossy annual public company reports, even aesthetically. They are nothing like the writing that leads to real understanding of economics or the finances of individual companies.

BTW: Why would anyone take an organization with "intergovernmental" in its name seriously? Treating government releases as your first source in any other field is a pretty surefire way to fail.
Whatever you decide to do, I think direct message ads are a bad choice.
The "Yahoo Family". Sorry, when it comes to family - real family, not pretend family - you're stuck with them, and you don't just discard them because of "tough financial conditions". Heck, family run companies are full of examples of people who were actively harmful, and were kept on because they were actually family, not "family". Now, that may not be the best idea, but it's part of what family means to people where the word has some actual value attached to it. Sometimes the fake gets layered on too thick in the US. There are plenty of nice things you can say about a company without resorting to cheeseball shit about being a "family".
Facebook login?
Originally discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385806

However, this link includes photos of the revolving door and a link to the actual cafe.

http://www.natuurcafelaporte.nl/

Also, the 4600kWh / year figure originally quoted is the total energy savings versus a normal sliding door; not just the energy generated.

http://www.boonedam.us/inc/press/pressdetail.asp?PressId=182
Maybe there is an opportunity for someone to create a mobile job fair inside a tractor trailer that goes around to companies laying off employees...
Ask them about their budgets? That's like saying "oh, ok, how much do you have?". Even if they tell you, they're not going to like it, which may lead to probelms in the future.
I would focus on finding a job you can do well for the next three to five years, building on gaius' point that you won't be the same person in 10 years.

I wonder if it's not writing but finishing something and having it judged that's the problem (a roundabout way of saying perfectionism). If it is writing--which I doubt given the fluency of the prose in your question--perhaps you would make a good counselor or coach or salesperson: someone whose job involves listening, influencing, and verbal improvisation.

It could be that you draw your energy from interacting with people (and learning) and you should look for jobs that have a significant component of that.

I think most jobs will reward learning (at least learning that leads to excellence in execution not just an accumulation of facts) so I would focus less on learning as you can normally work that into most jobs you take on.
If I'm not mistaken, the way these Google Zeitgeists work is that Google looks at their real data, then cherry picks something that might be kind of interesting?
I just started using the service a couple of days ago, and I'm very impressed. Awesome work.

I can understand your problem, though. Honestly, I'm not sure that I would pay anything for it, but I'm not a business user or anything - I'm just using it as a slight convenience.

So, for me at least, there's not much value. Maybe I'd pay a one-time fee for some kind of convenience, or to stop ads. I payed $10 for the Instapaper iPhone app, but mostly as a "thanks for the awesome service" kind of thing. I could see doing something similar for this.

Having some kind of ads doesn't seem like a bad idea, and maybe they could be coupons or something? I dunno - maybe something where you got an affiliate deal? I'm not sure how much I would tolerate, but if it was good stuff, maybe a couple a week.

I'm just a joe-average-user guy, though, so I'm not sure how valuable I would be as a way to profit. If there's a way to get after business or heavy users, that might be the trick.

If it's not very expensive to run, perhaps you could open-source it or simply use it as a portfolio piece. I've done some open-source work that ended up benefiting me when I was looking for work. At the very least, that should be somewhat valuable.

Sorry I can't be much more help than that. I think it's a great little utility, but maybe this is a "feature not a product" situation. Perhaps you could try to sell it to Twitter directly...? License it to UPS for exclusive use...?
Assuming you found a way to get ads out there and then got $1 eCPM for them that's still just $50/yr or so. Probably better to use this project to promote one that has a better chance of making money. IMHO.
I'm beginning to think that the movie "Dumb and Dumber" began its life as a documentary about the Hollywood marketing and distribution business.
Bjarne has obviously never heard of the "School of Hard Knocks".
I do consulting every now and then, and my hourly rate is around $100, which I'm told by clients is very fair.

I primarily do business/IT strategy, business models, etc. but also some programming and a bit of usability.

I'm placed in Copenhagen.
26 Ways To Know Your Software Development Project Is Doomed
Lists are for Digg and Delicious not Hacker News.
It is not necessarily the wrong thing to do, but it can't be all you got.
Ask YC: Hiring contractors to convert PSDs to HTML/CSS
I've got some Photoshop mockups of web pages that I need turned into HTML/CSS. I've seen psd2html.com and sites like elance.com seem to be full of people ready to take my money. Does anyone have any experience/advice after getting a contractor to do this sort of thing? Can you recommend someone in particular?

On a related note, I've been looking at how to separate the presentation of the site from the scripts that power it. My goal is to make sure that it is easy for contractors to update the HTML in the future after it is integrated with our scripts, even if they are using something like Dreamweaver. Something like tinybutstrong seems to be a great solution to this problem (basically, you create standard HTML with things like [var.message] when you want to insert the variable $message). Any thoughts on that?

Thanks,
Had I been given such books as a 1st year student, I would have changed fields. Those books were trying to spoon feed the students. Good students need to be challenged! The contemporary Math, Physics, and Biology books I have seen are far, far more conceptually challenging than what we present to CS and engineering students in the area of programming.

Let me testify from personal experience that Bjarne is on to something here.
Here's another Danish alternative to Detroit http://www.ruf.dk/ since the author brings it up.

Wouldn't worry too much about them though, they've been going for 20 years and only have a test-setup to show for it.
I think someone (Milton maybe?) proposed a solution to do this for pharmaceutical drugs. The companies are then computing for the drug discovery and as soon it's discovered it becomes open to anyone to manufacture.

This avoids pharmaceutical companies preventing the poorer people/countries from getting needed drugs.