skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Speaking only for myself, any candidate who starts going down the road of "I won't fill out employment application until we are interested in each other", "I won't discuss previous salary", "I won't provide references until there is an offer letter", etc... - just screams "Prima Donna"

The first is fairly ridiculous, and I can understand not wanting to hire such a person. The second makes perfect sense; you should at least respect that he's honest enough not to flat-out lie to you, as most people would do. (In finance, every banker got the top bonus for his level of seniority.) The third is sketchy-- it sounds like he's trying to hide something-- but I can understand his not wanting to provide a current reference, lest he jeopardize his current job.
He clearly states his bias: "Our Government bureaucracy, which contributes nothing to the advancement of our society, now is a larger portion of GDP than manufacturing."

Somehow I don't think our past experience with trying to get roads, power, plumbing, and the Internet into rural areas agrees with statement.
Might also be good to track the value of the USD against other currencies in the world in relation to stock moves, too.
based on what I know about their experience, the listed (and back door references)

If by "back door references", you mean that you check references that the applicant doesn't give, then you, sir, are a scumbag, and that'll be $25 for this consultation.
you can do that today, use a 3.5" hdd (laptop hd) and ide2usb converter (aka enclosure)

don't buy metal casing tho, i got my 3.5" hdd short-circuited and now is dead -- now i never use enclosure casing
"They should be able to walk into the interview and tell me to within $5K precisely what they should be making."

I think this only works for average hires. People who are more competent than average often don't understand that they are; to them, it just seems like they've had the bad luck to work with incompetents so far. If you're actively looking for average people to fill up a roster, that's fine, then, but if you really want the most competent people you can find (as evidenced by your "if you can justify $200K/yr" comment), you're either going to have to pay what they're really worth independently of what they think they're worth, or risk losing them to the first hirer that is willing to do so.
Speed is great, but the sad thing is that Microsoft now gets to pull out what I suspect is their old hardware-versus-OS-upgrade-lockstep cash cow playbook:

Step 1: Push new industry standard hardware device protocol.

Step 2: Offer free help to hardware manufacturers (both for PCs and peripherals) to encourage them to add the new connector.

Step 3: Strong-arm PC manufacturers to remove old hardware connectors, using carrot-and-stick approach with the terms of their OEM Windows license deals.

Step 4: Sweet talk peripherals manufacturers, bribing them with offers of co-advertising, cross promotion, acceleration of driver development, delaying of driver development for intransigent competitors, and possibly wads of cash, to convince them to drop old hardware connector from their products, so anyone buying a mouse, keyboard, digital camera, scanner, printer, joystick, or anything else, will need an operating system that supports the new hardware.

Step 5: Roll out new operating system (Windows Menudo, or whatever crap name they give it) that supports both new and old connectors

Step 6: Deliberately refrain from publishing simple patch for old operating system that would provide compatibility with new hardware.

Step 7: If possible, put in place technical and legal mechanisms to prevent or impede third parties from adding compatibility with new hardware to old operating system.

Step 8: Sit back and watch the dollars come in, as everyone is forced to upgrade to Windows Menudo.
Why would googling a potential hire make him a scumbag? I've never hired anyone I didn't already know, but it seems to me that I wouldn't be willing to hire someone without actually doing a little research on them. Candidate-supplied eferences are supposed to be about character, but all they can really tell you is if the candidate was smart enough to only give references who would say good things about him, it would seem.
I think this relates to a recent discussion here about Customer Development as something that should be done from the very early stages, closely tied to the product development effort.
( http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-is-cu... )

As a tech guy, if I were starting a company I'd like to have a biz person with me from day one, talking to potential customers, bringing in feedback and helping make sure we build something people are actually willing to pay for.
Can everyone be an Einstein?
"dramatic reductions in global poverty", lmfao. Quote me wrong.
Right now it is part of the overall market exposure, but yes, some companies might be more sensitive to it than others.
To have any component of the decision-making process that the candidate is not aware of is unethical, because it denies him the opportunity to improve his application in the future and successfully seek employment elsewhere.
Acts_as_git plugin for Rails
It rewards saving, keeps interest rates low, and makes people want to accumulate productive assets rather than natural resources, property, or other hedges.

People won't accumulate productive assets, they'll horde money, which will contribute further to declining prices. This will put an economy into a deflationary spiral.
Biotechs claw for their lifeblood - financing
Digg's top users banned for ever and ever
Star Trek 11 Trailer
Understand it.
Oblong g-speak: the Minority Report OS brought to life
So instead of a model built on trust, this is a model based on distrust.

It doesn't feel right to me, for various reasons, starting with the above.

Also it vaguely says that code must be "open source" but this is not a well-defined term. The GPL (just one example of many possible licenses for open source software) requires that GPL-licensed projects have the source code available in the preferred format, an important distinction that is not necessarily present in all open source licenses. A developer could provide an assembler dump of their code, and claim that was open source, and walk away with the payment.

Worse, of course, they could just do a slideware demo, or they could do a demo using Microsoft Word, but claiming that it was software they had written.

Also you claim to be more centered on normal users, but normal users don't know or care about open source. To them, they just want the program. Yes, open source gives them benefits too, but they don't know that, nor do they really want to know.

As a developer, I would feel hesitant about committing much time to a project - it would be huge gamble. On a normal open source project, I could get things started, get the code base maybe 80% done, and then when that last 20% needs to be done (which in reality is actually 80% of the work ;-)) others typically would be pitching in, to the point where I could even walk away and development would continue without me, ensuring my initial work was not wasted, and ensuring the project got done. But with your site, the developer risks that the "normal users" will see any rough edges and deliver a total rejection - binary thumbs down - and I won't get paid. So it forces me to do way more work, and even then, the users can still say no based on some arbitrary whim - "I like the OK button on the left, not the right, this sucks!" - that's just an example; please don't bother trying to debunk it unless you can address the more general point.

All that being said, I could be wrong! It's happened before! I'll be curious to see how it turns out.
I suffer from RSI in my wrists and have yet to find a long lasting remedy.

A bit off-topic, obviously, but I've found that rock climbing is really great for the wrists. Starting senior year, I developed unbearable wrist pain from too much typing. After being unable to type for more than an hour or so at a time for almost a year, I started climbing at a local climbing gym, and for the past couple of years I've been able to program all day without any pain. It's worth trying, if you haven't tried that already.
I'm amused that the author seems to think that precious metals are in some way more real than paper money. They are limited in physical presence, perhaps, yes. But their worth is no less determined by human whim than a series of binary jokes laughing their way through the Wall Street infrastructure. Money is one of the ultimate human abstracts.
They've been around since Reagan. And most of their principles and the key people appeared during Nixon's administration.
I don't use it as desktop OS anymore, but I used to during the 4.x branch. Most of those days annoyances are now gone like having to recompile java from source or using linux binaries of Mozilla/Firefox for flash (this may still apply).

I don't think it's very different from using a non ultrapolished Linux distro(like Debian). Choose your WM, install bash or (pd)ksh(tcsh sucks) and your prefered tools(Eclipse, LaTeX, Emacs, OOffice... whatever) and you're ready to work. I don't like GNU userland so for me that was a plus, but some people can't live without colored ls and a several megs vi, so your mileage may vary.
I think it's fairly well documented that in amongst the hippies doing drugs were some key people involved in the creation of the computer, software, networking and internet industries.
1. Have you (the founders) ever contributed to open source projects? It seems to me you are taking the time resources of open source developers for granted.
2. Is your project (bitloot) open source?
3. Repository URL?
isn't there a copyright/trademark infringement on the name? i.e. for that "The Oblong's" show?
Does your mom know how to write a software specification document?
Next time I need to change cubes with chinese characters from clear to red or rearrange alphabet letters with a friend, this will be a viable option.

I always find it unsettling when I see demos of "new user interface technology" that involves people performing tasks that seem primarily designed to look visually impressive and only secondarily (if at all) are related to a task someone would actually want to accomplish.

Show me how this can help me work faster. I'm currently unconvinced that this system is superior to a mouse + keyboard. I'm not even convinced that the demo tasks couldn't have been completed just as easily using keyboard shortcuts and a mouse.
Yeah, but I'm really not certain they do. Lolcats don't exist as measures of tragedy.

There might be some amount of recognition there: we laugh because we imagine the cats as humans, saying the things they do. But that isn't the same thing as all as reflecting tragedy.

I think a better article would be one analyzing just how willing people are to laugh at things that aren't funny, given any reason at all. The first bunch of lolcats were funny. Now, most of them are pretty stupid. All of the spinoffs - lolpresident comes to mind - are incredibly stupid. And yet, people enjoy them, and laugh hard at them, because they've been conditioned to think that big words over a picture are funny.
The bicycle is a terrible example of an industry that has seriously had to reinvent itself. "no earthly reason why bicycles should still exist" my left foot. Bicycles are one of the most energy efficient means of human transportation ever created, and are immensely practical for many kinds of reasonable dense population centers.
Ask YC: API in an Ajax Adobe AIR app?
I'm pretty new to developing AIR apps, so maybe this is a dumb question, but I can't seem to find any answers from google. Any help you can give me is greatly appreciated.

I'm building an AIR app with Ajax using an api that is identical to flickr's Api, with a shared secret key. The problem is that the air installation package contains all the source and I don't want to give away my shared secret. Is there any way to do this? Can I hide some source, or somehow include this shared secret within the app without giving it away?

Thanks for your help.
Whoa, I just had flashbacks of 1999.
I have decided to embrace my variations on the idea

Yes. It's not the "same" precise idea - maybe, the same concept. And you'll see more as you go along:

I find my creativity is very local. I have to be at a new vantage point, to see new things. That is, to have a prototype, to play with it, to hear what problems people have - just to know more.

My experience: I began with one concept that seemed really cool to me, I did a little research and saw things vaguely similar, but they didn't get "my" idea (fortunately for me, I didn't find the several attempts that did get my idea). But as I began executing, I hit a roadblock - something that really spoiled my idea, made it impossible to realize the cool vision properly. I asked around, dejectedly, and someone suggested I look at how an unrelated project solved that particular problem - I did that and found the solution! But then bizarre twist 1: through doing this, I came to realize that the "unrelated project" was really doing exactly the same thing as me - just in a different sense.
I would not have seen this connection (and did not) until I was intimidate with the details (i.e. was at a new vantage point). Bizarre twist 2: the title of my project perfectly described both my old conception and my new conception, although I could not see this ambiguity til after the journey.

Take the journey. You are surrounded by opportunities you cannot see.

Also: "What do you understand about your business that other companies in
it just don't get?" http://ycombinator.com/app.txt (is there access to a more recent application form?)
First off, it's not walled. Scribd lets you take your stuff off their site in a variety of ways. A walled garden implies information going in and not coming out. With Scribd, if I add a text file anybody can download it. Scribd even reformats it into a bunch of different filetypes, for easy access.

The world wide web is an open repository for information. "Documents" implies things formatted for paper. That means, among other things, retaining the formatting, fonts, and layouts of the original documents. It IS possible to do this all online, but it's annoying as hell and you have to do it specially for each document you put up this way.

The value added is that Scribd indexes all these things in one easy-to-find place, that it lets you access them with Flash instead of Adobe Acrobat, and that it allows you to embed your documents on other web sites. I used to do that for a creative writing blog I had.

I understand not wanting to use it - I stopped using it after I got a Mac and had preview.app available for PDFs - but it still has its uses, and that's the important thing to remember. I still use it, for sharing web site mockups to friends, many of whom are on Windows and some of whom don't have a PDF reader whatsoever. There is no format that their computer will like, but they have Flash players, so I can send it to them on Scribd.
The purpose of a format is also to make that content accessible. If somebody has no PDF reader, how do you send them well-formatted documents? The only thing that comes close to working is something like .ppt, but that's an ugly solution (and what if they don't have PowerPoint?). Scribd gives a nice medium where you don't need anything beyond Flash to view content. For a lot of people, that's very useful.
You mean 2.5". And those enclosures violate the spec in more than one way: first of all, pretty much all drives require a spin-up current of around 1000 mA, which is twice what current USB can provide. Secondly, the enclosures don't appear to even try to "ask for" that much power, especially not the (extremely non-standard) "Y-cable" solutions. I don't know anyone who's fried their USB ports with one of those things, but I certainly stay away from them.

To answer the original question: if they bring out a drive + bridge logic that consumes less than 900mA on spin-up (or a bridge board with a sufficiently big capacitor to cross the spin-up period) then yes.
The right way to do concurrency for most applications is the CSP style. Look at Bell Labs' Limbo or Alef which have channels. And Stackless has picked up on this in some ways.
But you forget the context of the times we live in. We have a world that scientists have mostly explained. We have hope that the rest of the world will be explained through science. We have reason to believe that. We've had dogmatic belief struck down by courts time and time again, and we're continuing to make progress.

The ancient Greeks were often brilliant. But they lived in an irrational world in which nothing made logical sense. Look at their literature. Every story is religious in nature. It's always about the gods interacting with people, punishing people, getting drunk and screwing people. It's fascinating stuff and I love it. But to compare to modern society, that's like if every single story had God coming down from the heavens to help one side or the other. The Greeks NEEDED God in their lives. We don't.
Featured Firefox extensions for all
Hey guys i have seen various post regarding the addons for Mozilla and many of them are quite useful but some of them are not as handy as user thinks..!!

Every addons has their own advantage and disadvantage.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_be...

Check out the movement in the graph starting around 7:40. A huge portion of East Asia and South Asia (where a large part of the world's population lives) experienced a large gain. (We might not consider a move from $1/day to $10/day significant, but it is)

As another commenter pointed out, this isn't something we can attribute to some "U.S. generation", but there it is.
Online ad growth grinds to a halt
Amazing collection of Digg tools
Digg the name says it all.

Digg and stumble upon are the most important weapon of a Blogger.

Digg is a social bookmarking site which give us the power to reach to people who share the same interest.

So here is the list of most comprehensive tools for all diggers.
I consider it a kind of validation of an idea to see that other people are working on the same thing, but I know how you feel. It depends on your product and market, but I think there's pretty much always room for more than one success story.
What you say may have been true once, but by now they all have applications in industry.
Patent Trolls Attack OpenMoko Project
This isn't really proof that Scheme will be faster than C, and in fact doesn't really mention Scheme at all, except to show that it is a language that supports call-with-current-continuation as a primitive operation.

What I got from the paper is that using continuations with intensional equality (that is to say their contents are the same) can be used to dramatically speed up a program. And so, a primitive way to create intensional equal continuations would be a potentially worthwhile primitive for a language.
From 12.73% growth in Q4-07 to .61% growth in Q3-08
Ask HN : Which should I learn : C# or Java
I have been lurking on HN for some time now, and I have noticed that the languages of choice are python, lisp and ruby. However, I would prefer to learn either C# (and thus asp.net) or java. which one would be better? For the record, I have used php a lot, and code in c, c++ on the day job.
you could have your application do some sort of authenticated request for it on a server maybe? Or better yet, proxy all of your api requests through your server?

I don't know, seems like a lot of runaround to me.
While I agree that a good business person is invaluable, I just read moneyball and I think the following quote captures what I see as a difference between the biz people and the tech people (but in terms of baseball staff and baseball players):

"Anyone who wanders into Major League Baseball can’t help but notice the stark contrast between the field of play and the uneasy space just off it, where the executives and scouts make their livings. The game itself is a ruthless competition. Unless you’re very good, you don’t survive in it. But in the space just off the field of play there is no level of incompetence that won’t be tolerated. There are many reasons for this, but the big one is that baseball has structured itself as a social club."
I am also a woman software engineer, but my workplace is significantly different from yours. I'm the principal software engineer at a university with a commitment to diversity, and my team consists of 7 men and 6 women (3 developers, 1 dba, 2 QE). We're an agile workplace, so every day we have several meetings, including the stand-up, code reviews, and meetings with our partners. I don't think anyone is into gaming, but you might find the baby talk tedious (2 of us are pregnant, myself with twins, and virtually everyone has a family). The elusive "human touch," feels intrinsic to this job. However, it took me a long time to find the ideal workplace, so I fully understand your frustration.

For years, I was the one&only technical woman in the different companies I worked for. That can be very difficult, especially in a start-up environment where (depending on the culture), the atmosphere can be as sexually charged as a college dorm. I've had supervisors hit on me & grope me at parties. Another boss told me he was going to replace me with a nice, docile set of Geisha programmers, or sell me into white slavery if the start-up folded. The new sales guy at one place asked me to get him coffee, and when I explained that wasn't my job, he said I was "too hot to be a programmer." I was not flattered.

And then there are the message boards where hoards of young men post their opinions about women being intrinsically incapable of hacking. You have to have a really, really thick skin to be a woman in this line of work.
This sucks for sites that rely on ads, but at least it's not the quarter to quarter decline the publishing industry is and has been witnessing.
Oh well, time to brush off the old "sell dog food online" business plan.
Online ad growth is tied to economic growth. News at 11.
I just bought some ads on Facebook ... just trying to do my part for the economy.

For companies that still have the budget to purchase online ads, do you think this could be a good thing? I'm thinking less competition and lower CPCs ... I'm fairly new to buying online ads, so I'm not sure.
Wealth is relative. Since the Baby Boomers' DoB, many people have got wealthier, many more have got poorer. This is not coincidental.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160218
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=340482

I'm going to do this every time one of these absurd stories is posted.
Open Source Hardware: A Quick, Visual Intro
Uh, maybe, but as a female software engineer, I can tell you I'm doing ok on the cusp of my thirties with one kid & two more currently baking. I have my labor-of-love python project on the side, which may or may not ever get backing, and another startup I'm working on with my partner. If I don't get around to launching a company until I'm 40, that's cool, too.

However, as far as the attitudes of men, particularly men without families, or with families they have completely foisted off onto their wives, you are correct about the nasty, dumb, vulgar stuff.
Hopefully now we'll see more startups building products that sell, instead of free stuff with ad spam.
I actually really like this list. A lot of it is (or should be) common sense, but it's still a good reminder.

I also appreciate that he thinks some effort should be put into SEO. I tend to agree with that even though I know some here don't.
Ask YC: Do you think Obama's transition team read Hacker News?
Ask YC: Do you think Obama's transition team read Hacker News?
While I agree with you in spirit, in practice pretty much everyone has a PDF reader in addition to Flash.
I'm speaking of reductions in extreme global poverty:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty#Measuring_poverty