skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trovix.com needs a search hacker
As some of you may know, I'm a product manager for Trovix (now Monster.com since they acquired us).

If you're not familiar with Trovix, we developed a conceptual/contextual search engine that we used to help match jobs and resumes to each other. Employer trying to find the perfect fit for a job? Just give us the job description and we'll find that person. Job-seeker looking for the perfect job? Upload your resume and we'll figure out which ones suit you automagically.

Even with this great technology, we're still looking for another perfect engineer for the team, and given the amazing people at Hacker News I wanted to see if anyone out there was interested in a position here.

Experience isn't an issue. We need someone who can pick things up quickly and is driven to figure stuff out. Ideally you'll have a computer science degree or similar. We're located in the Bay Area (across the road from Google, in Mountain View -- Mozilla is just downstairs from our games room).

The job will be all about putting our search engine through the wringer. This includes figuring out how to improve and maintain the quality of results, how to get the most performance out of it, and how to test its stability and scalability. What can we do to improve it? How do we track this in the future? This is a fairly open-ended role and the scope of your contribution will be what you make it.

The most exciting part is working on the core technology being integrated into Monster's job and resume matching. The challenges in scaling and adapting this are huge. You'll be working in a startup environment (we are still in our old offices with the same team as at acquisition) but with the benefits of working for a big company. It's a great team here, with nice benefits (21 days PTO per year for example) and competitive salary.

If you're interested, drop me a line at tcederman (@) trovix . com
Private file-sharing site Drop.io dumps datacenter, switches to 100% cloud architecture
Apparently, when you cry while reading a book, you are being hypnotised.
Rule 34 seems to apply to non-porn too.
Crackpots.

[I'm sorry for insulting your intelligence by wasting time addressing this paper, which among other things suggests Obama is transferring positive feelings about JFK to himself using "secret hand gestures", but NLP annoys the hell out of me]

This is all using jargon from "neurolinguistic programming", a discredited research area most often associated with "pickup artistry", a school of thought that says guys can hypnotize girls in bars by touching them on the hand and echoing back whatever they say. Yeah, good luck with that.

This paper presupposes:

* that much of what Obama has to say is overtly dishonest (always a great sign in an academic publication)

* that basic techniques of rhetoric written about since the Greeks like alliteration and call-and-response are, in Obama's hands, devastating psychological weapons (want to learn "rhetoric hacking"? start: http://www.uky.edu/AS/Classics/rhetoric.html)

* that cadence and word selection can be used hypnotically to "bypass" the decision centers of the brain and implant thoughts

* that capabilities not ascribed to any form of hypnosis in any therapeutic setting can be accomplished on a mass scale with a microphone and a podium

Homework assignments:

* Find citations in the actual scientific peer-reviewed literature for terms like "non-dominant hemisphere programming" or "pre-programmed response adaptation".

* Read a well-regarded Obama speech and see if it suddenly becomes less compelling when not read by Obama (last night's speech, for instance, reads even better than it sounds).

This paper is right about one thing: speakers who have mastered rhetoric and oration are capable of making disproportionately compelling arguments. Yep, they're right: that is in fact one of the major reasons we elected Obama. Most of us --- the sane ones, at least --- consider this a fucking feature, not a defect.

[Adding: here's the (uniformly excellent) Language Log on the same topic; I guess if it's worth his blog, it's worth a comment here: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=778]
"The accident was very serious, with the passenger being ejected upon impact."

...

"So far, the Tesla has proven to be a fairly safe vehicle with none of the 3 crashes resulting in serious injuries."

Huh? Is ejecting the occupants upon a crash the accepted safety mechanism these days?

Seems like these guys were mostly lucky.

Three crashes out of the couple hundred vehicles that exist doesn't seem like a very good record...
The Road to HTML 5: the section element
One of the important lessons in Tech is not to moon the Giant. Lot of things are personal in Business, just ask Netscape.
It isn't until I write that I know it needs a rewrite.

Perhaps I'm not smart enough to model accurately enough in my head, or perhaps not disciplined enough. I'd love to feel what it's like to think as someone else for a short while.

What "thinking" means to other people.
What when you release version 1.0 and then someone invents USB and your kernel needs to support it? Then someone invents a device that doesn't conform to the standards and you need to support it?

What about the world where there is no spec for a finished version, merely different balances between effort, cost, value, marketability, usability, and so on...
the reason people have trouble with concepts like geniuses and great artists is that it is very hard to distinguish anything more than two levels above your own.
Consensus based arguments worry me, especially if the consensing experts use them.
Dreams die.
"with very qualified scientists on both sides"

The only scientists whose opinions matter here are climate scientists.
"Crichton talks about the over-reliance on 'models' to understand the climate. What else are we supposed to do? Science relies on models, without which we can't predict anything. "

You are correct, we can't predict anything (this complex). There's plenty of falsifiable science that doesn't require computer models. Just because models are all we can pull out of our scientific backsides doesn't mean that they are sufficient. I think his point that our models can't predict 12 hours of weather is pretty apt.

"The physics is easy to understand: carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, letting visible light in, and reflecting infrared back. This warms the earth."

If it's that simple, why is it that a mess of climatologists don't agree with you (including one commenting here)? Either they are stupid (I'm doubting that), they are evil, or the issue isn't quite as simple as you think. I honestly don't know-- so I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you... But I think history (even RECENT history) shows how utterly wrong scientific consensus can be, especially in the arena of climatology.
NLP is just a way of making basic social skills sound more scientific.
it was never going to go through anyway, smart of them to cut their losses
anyone can become rational. it takes only the willingness to throw out any notion that is proven false, no matter how much you held that notion dear.
with this one parameter you will arrive at successively more accurate approximations of reality.
Retooling Early Stage Development: Steve Blank (audio + video)
I have a number of questions that you don't have to answer in public but you might want to give some thought to:

How did you price the product? If margins are huge is it priced to high? Do you take "Cost of Sales" into your margin calculation? Perhaps it's priced too low?

What alternatives do you compete against? Do they have a direct sales force or rely on one or more indirect channels? How do they recruit sales people and what compensation plan do they offer? How long is their sales cycle?

If you have a long sales cycle it may be difficult to hire a commission only sales rep.

What sales tools and materials did you provide your sales folks? How did you train them to sell your product?

It's not clear from your post if you are able to sell the product if you spend time on it: are you? If not, I would spend more time on that before trying to hire someone else.
corollary: all hackers steal other people's ideas in order to improve upon them.
Scientifically, we should do exactly what we are doing. Run models, speculate wildly, compare to experiments where feasible.

But "the best we can do" may not be very good; from what little I've seen, it is not very good in this case. Climate models ignore a lot of physics, make many assumptions (e.g., scale separation to reduce degrees of freedom, and even the existence of a deterministic "thermodynamic" limit), and have large numbers of unknown parameters. These parameters are usually chosen simply to make the model fit the climate record, but fitting a highly complex model to a small data set proves very little. The word "overfit" immediately springs to mind.

I'll grant you that some climate skeptics are liars, and many exaggerate their claims. Some environmentalists are liars and exaggerate their claims too, that's an inevitable result of politics.

But reasonable skeptics such as Crichton (and Dyson) make one very modest claim: we don't understand climate very well at all.
Shell-jitsu?

Joking (when appropriate)? Would that be in the sweet break room or somewhere else?

You're a startup, so hiring me is quite risky. Given the location, working for you entails some risk on my behalf. Your ad is casual in all the wrong places - you're trying too hard.

Instead, try and improve the tone so that you sound both casual and effortlessly professional. Sell me your product; tell me what sort of startup you are (VC, angel, bootstrapped); give me ballpark dollar figure; tell me about equity; tell me why I should be excited about your technology.

Sell the role.
If a brief description on HN or a perusal of his website allows someone to steal his idea and take business away from him then he has more than a sales problem.
Oprah Talks Sex with Dr. Laura Berman | Passion Promises
where is the math that shows that raising taxes on the wealthy will actually result in increased tax revenue?
I read it as, "now that MS has backed off from Yahoo, we can can this deal and blame it on the lawyers."
At my university we had a no laptops policy on case study discussion. At first you kinda get annoyed about it, but you later realize how important it is. It is nice to pay attention and not have to worry about the guy next to you playing call of duty on his laptop. I also must say that I missed several things surfing the web. I think there should be a no text messaging policy as well in classes.
BBC shunned me for denying climate change
We Did It - What some hackers did on election night.
"More people need to realize and accept this."

More yes, but definitely not all:)

It really depends on your skill-set and experience with running redundant, HA, systems and services. And if you have the time to deal with it yourself.

There's no reason you can't provide better uptime than Amazon has thus far, if you have the right folks and the right budget (multiple boxes at each tier). If you don't have the experience in-house, and don't want to manage your own servers, that's 100% legitimate, but don't assume beating Amazon's uptime would be hard.
Eh, I live in mid-Florida, and rumor has it there's another dude somewhere in the panhandle...
Maybe you need a co-founder.
What's a logical person?
And on the other side, their technology works like nothing else.

Windows hosts AD which talks to IIS and Exchange attributes are in AD and your file permissions are linked to AD user accounts and you can query it with LDAP which means your RADIUS devices can talk to it and your Certificate Server links with your domain, and your workstations access shared folders on the network which mirror files over WAN links using DFS which is AD integrated also, as is DNS which links with DHCP, machines are locked down by group policies which apply even on laptops, Exchange supports ActiveSync to Windows Mobile which has SQL Server Compact which can sync to SQL Server Express for your desktop and SQL Server for your main server which is monitored by MOM and running on HyperV and Virtual Server, and SQL Server Enterprise for your cluster, which has AD integrated permissions and is running on Windows Datacenter edition hosting a site on ASP.Net which serves to desktops using ClickOnce which builds into IE which is rolled out by WSUS which sits on Windows Internal Database which reports using SQL Server Reporting Services which is published in your Sharepoint site which handles your Excel spreadsheets with Excel Calculation Services along with your documentation which is all searchable through Search Server Express which is SQL Server backed and understands Windows file and website permissions, as do documents in Office when you use Office DRM to say who can change them and track versions and you can see if people are online when typing their names as they turn into smart tags which link with Office Live Communicator so you can IM people and SIP call them and email them which will be tracked in CRM using the plugin to Outlook which you're accessing as a published app from a terminal server connected by a windows integrated VPN through an AD integrated ISA server ... and the whole glorious lot is variously scriptable with COM, WMI, vbscript, VB for Applications, and plugins developed with Microsoft Visual Studio.Net and person-decades of documentation.

One Microsoft Way is right enough. No other software ecosystem is anything like the same scale or as usefully well integrated, from a business POV.

Linux on the desktop is almost laughable in how far from the Microsoft business reality it is. Every little annoyance, horrible error message or instability is worth putting up with because of the integration of ... everything.

And it's so cheap, too. All it costs is your company's soul in proprietary data format hell. Forever. But look on the bright side - few people even realise their company has a data soul, and it's not like there's any choice.
quick, someone make a laptop that is just a keyboard and trackpad plus one of these!
Flokka: A Blogging Network for Woman in Business
Yeah, I loved AS too. His later work has gone downhill but he was very innovative in his early career.
Odds that domain once belonged to the first literary erotica + social networking site?
South Florida has a few companies with really good hackers, but they're pretty much not working on any web applications outside of major IT groups down there.

It's an absolutely amazing place to live, so if you offered relocation, you might have more takers.
Clojure beta book now available
Basic OO Design Patterns and Principles - very informative article.
ah, i was right about to post this.

yes, you're a startup in a down market where startups are slicing employees left and right. a double whammy when you consider the stuff i mentioned earlier.

you're going to have to convince people to [leave stable jobs and] apply. step it up, give more info on the company, hard facts, benefits (401k? health? etc.), salary range, etc..

for what its worth, i'm considering dropping my resume in just to see what you guys have to offer.
Web 2.0 Startups Beating The Odds in Down Economy
Here's nine Web 2.0 companies, some of whom started with Y Combinator funding, who are making their products work in the worst of times.
What'd we do exactly?
Reminds me of an article in Byte magazine back in the 80s or early 90s. A student at Georgia Tech wrote his dissertation on a program he developed for a personal digital assistant program, hosted on a wearable computer. Partway through his dissertation defence, the examiners realized that he was using his dissertation to defend itself. Would you have voted his thesis up or down?
I went to a top-tier cs university, and a third of any given class was useless to any given student. It wasn't that the teacher was bad, it was just that the third was different for every student. Classrooms aren't perfect.
In other words, the paper should be titled: "How To Be A Great Public Speaker"
The article answers this question.

Basically, students think they can multi-task (IM and listen to the lecture), but professors know that the students can't.
Ask YC: Give Beta users a free release copy? 
We're getting close to launching our product which is a consumer desktop app. We're currently in private beta.

Should we give our beta testers a free or discounted copy of the final Pro version? Some sound like they are expecting a free copy or they'd be offended.

I want to be as generous as possible and establish strong long-term relationships with our customers, especially those who've given us extensive feedback. But we've got a big beta list that took time to generate and thats a lot of potential revenue we're kissing goodbye. I'm conflicted.
CNN's holograms not really holograms
Are any (non-race) cars designed to be safe at 100MPH?

But anyway, the car can't be blamed for any of the three accidents. They were all due to the driver not paying attention -- a problem in any car.
I'd say it depends on the number of beta testers; you say you had a big beta list, so it might make more sense to offer a discount rather than just free versions, if you intend on doing anything at all.

Is the Pro version more featureful than a "non-Pro" version, or is the app itself the only version?
Ashamed to admit it (especially here) but I still use Hotmail. Why? You can use a local client and send/recieve via WebDav.

As a consultant I'm regularly working on site at companies where they have everything except port 80 blocked. So IMAP, POP and (especially) SMTP are out. If you want a local copy of your mail in this situation WebDav's really the best solution.
Learning new things always costs time and money, it's called an investment and in the case of getting off the MS stack, it's well worth it.
As someone who works (sort of) for Tripadvisor, I found this interesting. I'm a little suspect that "Since I changed tactics, I have been having great hotel experiences." is confirmation bias, though.
also: social skills are just a euphemism for convincing other people that their interests are congruent with yours. manipulation.
I realize this is picking on your example, and not the concept in general, but why doesn't "I never beat my wife." suffice? I agree that a yes/no answer won't cut it.
I'm not a fan of the consensus based argument either, but the reality is that it is used quite often to bully "skeptics".

Related from today's news: http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/69623
Benioff gets SugarCRM booted from the Marriott
Sometimes being ejected from the car is a good thing, depends largely on where you land. But anyone really concerned about safety shouldn't be driving 100mph. IIRC suddenly stopping at that speed has a chance of ripping your heart from its arteries and instantly killing you.
I customize my resume for each job. If the company is small, I submit a tight, super-honest resume, and omit the buzzword-bingo.

If submitting to Inittech Corporation, I submit a keyword-optimized resume guaranteed to please the screening software (then swear never to do that again...)
If you're selling the future, make sure it looks like the future.
And ban them in many meetings too ...
We're an e-commerce solution and we charge a transaction fee.
How deep of a discount would make sense? We're looking at a $25-30 price point.

We plan on having a Free and Pro version. The Free version will have a generous helping of the features. It'll be fully functional and not crippled. The Pro will have a few more icing features, but stuff that can be lived without.
Maybe. I had a string of pretty crappy hotels, so started paying more attention to the reviews and noticed that although the hotels I had been staying at had higher averages, they had a lot less 5 star ratings. Next few hotels were much better, and when the option to get a hotel with a better curve wasn't available, I was appropriately disappointed. While I would like to think that I don't suffer from confirmation bias, this certainly isn't a double blind trial.

I have also seen a similar phenomenon with restaurants on Yelp though, which has been slightly easier to test in that I can try two similar restaurants with the different shaped curves.
Wrong again. Hasn't affected Freshview (Australia). CampaignMonitor and MailBuild are the best email campaign tools out there and they've got a US customer list to die for.
I have been called a retro-grouch for my firm stance against keeping my data in "the cloud", but this is a perfect example of how the cloud can go wrong.

How do you protect yourself from a similar fate? The way I do it is by managing all of my data locally on my laptop (and of course making religious, at-least-once-daily backups of said data). I download all my email using POP3, from a VPS that I am paying for into fetchmail / procmail / mutt on my laptop. My address book is managed locally in a YAML database, and my calendar is managed using flat text files and Remind. Note that none of this precludes remote access to my data, either; I carry a copy of PuTTY on my USB drive, and with the appropriate SSH key and/or S/Key password I can access my data, securely, from anywhere in the world.

That's just one way of going about it, of course; you don't have to go all Unix-retro to achieve the same peace of mind. The theory is simple: just find a way to consolidate the master copies of your important data on machines that are physically under your control, and then make frequent backups of these machines. If possible, also make sure that you have some sort of service agreement with the servers you rely upon for email, Web service, XMPP, and so on. Yes, it is more expensive, and yes it's more difficult than just signing up for a free GMail account, but your data is worth it.
Sen. Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama
I'm not an expert on pricing strategies, so this is just my opinion tossed out there: That's a reasonable, relatively low price point, so I think a small discount would be all right. But it depends on how many users you have, and what their current opinion of the value of your pro version (vs. the free one) would be.
Election data - vote breakdown by income and age
Wil Shipley (Omni Group, Delicious Monster, etc) has a great talk called "Monster Marketing" full thing here: http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/4/).

~25mins in he talks about being a software slut. Do that.
Scientists decode set of cancer genes
Obama's Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators
Travels is one of my favorite books. I had a beat up copy which I kept with me for years, but it's since disappeared. I am going to go buy another one and I suggest you do the same.
This is all using jargon from "neurolinguistic programming", a discredited research area most often associated with "pickup artistry"

To be fair, I think NLP would be better described as extrascientific rather than discredited. A couple ideas have been tested without finding any support, but most of the ideas are either untested or untestable. Also, the ideas from NLP that are discredited aren't the same as the ideas that the pickup artists promote.

That said, people who pay for NLP books and seminars are probably wasting their money.
As explained in Kestrels, the practice of nicknaming combinators after birds was established in Raymond Smullyan's amazing book To Mock a Mockingbird. In this book, Smullyan explains combinatory logic and derives a number of important results by presenting the various combinators as songbirds in a forest. Since the publication of the book more than twenty years ago, the names he gave the birds have become standard nicknames for the various combinators.

Holy crap. I own two of Smullyan's books, which I read as a kid, but I never knew this. News.yc pays off again!