skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I heard they almost have their spam filter down ... They have discovered every third mail sent is some form of cola advertising, and every fifth mail sent is empty words used to drum up hype.. Can no-one think of a way to mark those mails?
git is such a beautifully elegant concept and execution... it's so simple that i still often find myself grappling with exactly what the heck a particular command does and when it should be used.

i personally always get a small giddy thrill when i see such a wide spectrum of applications from a simple underlying concept... just like these. and each application alone is cool! DB, wiki, dropbox-clone... very, very cool stuff when considering the implications of integration on /that/ level.

but apparently this isn't a universal sentiment, given some of the comments on this thread (that i am genuinely surprised at, given what i would think is the typical "curious/hacker" mentality of the crowd here).
I get what you were saying, but this is (one of?) the first commercially available full-electric car manufacturers and it would be really depressing if it turned into a Ferrari-like club where only millionaires can afford to own it. It's a specific type of market where either you're all in, or you're out. Bugatti doesn't make a point-A to point-B winter-beater and never will. The FIRST EVER electric-car company becoming one of those luxury brands would push the democratization of electric-car ownership that much further into the future.

The Tesla S is great because it seems that upper-middle class folk will be able to own it, and I hope they continue down that path bringing electric cars to everyone.

EDIT: Also the other large manufacturers weren't interested in investing in electric because their analysis showed them they wouldn't see enough return. Tesla is there to prove them wrong. (Some large car-companies are only now building electric cars but it feels rather like a green-washing campaign - it's usually only one model, cars are dinky and impractical...etc)
"Remove money from the picture entirely and ask yourself what you'd like to recieve in exchange for your work."

Yeah no. We want money so that we have the fluidity of choosing a candy bar one day and a vacation another. Besides, you can't have someone offer you fractions of a vacation for your work. Is it truly that difficult to see where barter systems fail?

Besides, you are putting too much faith in the "fair value" idea. First off, when you want something and you barter with someone, a common technique is to disparage the quality of the item you desire. Why? To convince someone else that it isn't worth as much, that a "fair value" is less than that. Then, take the example of a mom-and-pop shop making jams and jellies. They probably have a lot of pride in their work and the price reflects their feelings of craftsmanship. They say, "Look at how good it is! How fresh, how pure!" -- they are trying to convince you that it is worth more than you initially appraised it at.

It's a conflict of interest -- it is in the best interest of the consumer to pay as low as he can, and it is in the best interest of the producer to get as much as he can. One seeks to minimize losses, the other, maximize profits.

Ever heard of donation-based bagel shops? You pay "what you think it is worth". Some people drop $5, others drop $0.01 because they want food and don't really want to pay for it. Even being glared at (social pressure) isn't enough to stop them.

The moral of the story is that people suck and asking them to "be fair" is a hilariously misguided way of getting revenue.

"When you put something on the free market, you are opening it to opinion and other people deciding the value. Think carefully first."

Yes, they can decide on a value, and so can the producer. If the values match or can be negotiated, you have an exchange. If they don't, then there is no exchange. Eco 101?
There was a theory floating around that the device had to be physically larger because of the 4g chip size and battery size, and the screen was just there to compensate.
I would think he would consider his adopted sister as his second sister.
Yes. I like it.

Whiteboard coding is good because interview questions are not about specific 100% solutions to complex real-world problems like programming usually is. Interview questions are about general problems whose solutions will fit nicely onto a whiteboard. You lose the ability to get realtime syntax highlighting, but you gain the ability to have multiple trains of thought, the ability to draw diagrams and arbitrary symbols, and the ability to point at things as you explain your thoughts to the interviewer. Do you really enjoy it when someone comes over to your laptop to ask you a question about code? Now imagine that for four hours in a row. That's what a laptop interview would be like.

When I was interviewing at Google, someone asked me a question that required me to remember some math. I did not remember it, but I knew how to derive the answer I needed. So I went to another whiteboard, talked my way through the sub-problem while drawing some math symbols, and then transferred the answer back to the original problem, halfway completed on a different whiteboard. Try doing that while hunched over your laptop.

I agree that this process is nothing like the job you're interviewing for. That's because it's an interview, not the job. We try to get a picture of who you are and what you know in a few hours, and that's just not enough time to let you loose with a laptop to see how you approach real-world problems. Not to mention, real world problems don't often involve much "computer science" knowledge. But you still need to know that so you can confidently attack problems that venture into that area.

And largely, the process works. There are very few programmers at Google that can't program. If I have an idea, I can explain it to pretty much anyone, and get good feedback. At other jobs I've had, I've had to explain thing like arrays to coworkers. That means I'm not going to get any feedback on my complex idea, and that sucks. Google is not like that, because we filter those people out at the interview.
It looks exactly like eval is causing the reference to be maintained.

If you change the inner function call parameter 'foo' to ('alert("hi")') you'll see the reference to foo='bar' is still maintained in the inner function. So there is no -direct- reference to foo in the inner function, but there isn't even an -indirect- reference being made in the call to eval. The reference to foo is being maintained purely because eval "might" require it. Or so it appears.

If the return eval(_var) statement is replaced with alert('blah') we're back to foo being undefined in the inner function. So I've definitely got my finger pointed at eval on this one.
I'd not use GoDaddy hosting if I were you :^)
When I was applying for permanent residency in 2003, this question also came up as part of my interview. I had briefly been a member of a small radical left organization in Canada, back when I was 18 or so - and since I didn't know how in-depth the background check would be, I decided it'd be best to disclose it.

Paraphrasing from memory:

Interviewer: "So, tell me about this thing."

Me: "Stupid kid stuff. I was in college."

Interviewer: "So you don't believe this stuff any more?"

Me: "No, I've made my peace with capitalism."

And that was that.

I came away with the impression that (at least for people from countries lacking a near-term history of guerrilla warfare) this was largely a formality.
"the most important message in the book is that business and entrepreneurship is the path to success, NOT being an employee and staying in the rat race."

The best book that I have read that emphasizes this point is "The Millionaire Fastlane" — awesome, awesome read ... a must for anyone starting, running, or thinking about creating a business.

http://amzn.to/millionairefastlane
I don't think he's rejecting anything, just making a general point about investing in something with cashflow (a business, farmland) vs speculating in something that is only worth what others will pay for it (gold, commodities)
If by "all dictionaries" you mean no dictionary I've ever read, nor the one quoted for you right here. You're wrong.
Well, the Communist party is part of the governing coalition here in Uruguay (the president is a former guerrilla fighter), which has caused a lot of problems (top government officials are not cleared to visit the U.S. because of their past).

And the Communist party has a lot of members here.
Firefox 11 - PageInspector 3D - The minecraft way
Two Giant Steps Forward For Entrepreneurs
I worked at google for four months. That wasn't my experience at all. I ended up on a team that despite working in the same office, barely spoke with each other, rarely ate lunch together, lost 1 member for each month I was there, and I didn't even have a 1 on 1 with my manager until 3 months in when I asked him why he was having 1 on 1s with everyone else, but not me. It was the singularly most soul-killing work environment I've ever encountered. What is this strange concept of whiteboard coding and collaboration of which you speak?

The relevant job skill here would have been the willingness to do anything for the great pay and food. I wasn't and I had other employment options I chose after it became clear I would not be allowed to jump to another project anytime soon.
> Beyond that, someone who's able to code on a whiteboard will a fortiori be able to code with a keyboard and editor, and will typically code better with a keyboard and editor than someone who relies on the keyboard and editor to be able to code.

That is very subjective and I'd love to see some evidence of this.
Business strategy lessons from religion
You can upload the PDF to Google Docs, which will OCR it and make the document searchable. This particular PDF, however, is rejected because it's more than 2MB :(
The Drumlet, an EPIC drum machine made in JavaScript
I like the Intel (SSD 320/520). Unfortunately I haven't figured out how to get the crypto to work on Mac OSX.

I haven't fully analyzed it because I couldn't get it to work with a Mac, but for PC, it looks ok.
The company already has the right to sue you for any reason they can conjure up. This is America.
What point did you prove with bubble-sort? Was the list already nearly-sorted?
BTW, the article mentions Dropbox raising $250 million. If I'm not mistaken, youtube had only raised about a tenth of that by the time it was acquired, and they had to stream videos, and I guess storage (and bandwidth) was more expensive back then. Does anyone know what Dropbox does with so much money?
This story made me sad, I wish you guys would continue because it sound like you are onto something and you have done a lot of the hard work already.
You seem to implicitly reject the human ability to adapt. We'll find a way to adapt to the changing environment. Hell, we might even adapt our habits (ha!) and allow the environment to correct itself.

Regardless of the plausibility of global warming, 400 million acres of farmland will still produce more value in crops than you could shake your investment stick at.
Yes, I think the ladder analogy is true for all startups. This is largely written for my family and friends who aren't involved in startups.

I don't think its true that all startups are for all founders. We realized that the "right" track for this startup was "build software, get a large sales team to distribute it". That particular profile of a business didn't suit us.

In some regards your criticism is right: Founders get into a startup without necessarily knowing what paths lead to success. The most probable path to success was one we didn't feel we were good for. You might say that a really tenacious founder ought chase any thread that leads to success -- and that our unwillingness to do so is a founder deficiency.

I happen to be interested in lower variance, possibly lower EV opportunities. I don't want to roll the dice for 2 years for a chance at a big exit.

"Startup" means a lot of different things, so I think its pretty hard to identify someone as ill-suited for "startups in general". There are a thousand ways to skin a cat; pick the one that works for you and keep doing it.
Double Fine Adventure
Auto show season is starting.
Hopefully by then people will have realized that a social security number isn't a great way of identifying a person, so it won't be that relevant anyway.
> Why would you sign an NDA for a job interview?

Because they're Google. I know that's tautological, but I remember a blog post from some time ago about a guy complaining that all his friends that had been hired by Google had suddenly stopped chit-chatting about technical issues that they encountered at their workplace. They stopped doing that during the usual "at-a-drink-complaining-about-our-daily-job-ordeals" sessions, or on their blog, or anywhere else that might be publicly shared (and, why not? , maybe help other people learn from their (Google's) mistakes). The guy even compared Google with a "vortex", if I remember correctly.
I'm glad that you had a pretty good experience overall. I know that lots of folks at Google have worked to try to make interviewing less painful (like limiting the max number of interviews you'll have to do). It's nice to get an independent datapoint where the experience was pretty good, even if it didn't work out this time.
He omits the only valid reason any non-speculator would own gold - it holds it's value through times of political turmoil - holds it's value over millenia rather than decades or centuries.

A coup d'etat may result in seizure of private companies, rendering your stock worthless, but not touching the value of gold.

It would be speculating to put all your assets into gold, but a small amount is like an insurance policy.

relevant: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2011/1105/Hugo-Chave...

Government expropriation of private industry has been a
key policy of Chávez's regime.

More than 450 companies have been expropriated this year
alone. ExxonMobil, which had its assets seized in 2007, is
still fighting the Venezuelan government for $7 billion in
compensation it believes it is owed.
Honestly I put in css which _does the very same thing_ for each of the major browsers and then once more with no prefix.

So standardize it already. It is a defactor standard, so why haven't the standard organizations made it yet?
This is a huge. It's so easy to make mistakes doing those computations by hand, but Wolfram Alpha handles it with ease. I use it all the time.
> It seems like building a database confirming which kinds of direct mail people don't like would be valuable. If nothing else, it would provide a way to update the names on direct marketing mailing lists (for direct mail that hasn't yet been stopped).

That seems like the slimiest of all possible options.
Organic Marketing Services
I hate this kind of titles, unclear about what you're going to read, it looks like Reddit but without the fun.
Seems like the best approach would involve making this a paid service, possibly with a free version allowing up to N pieces of junk mail. I'd pay for this service for as long as I continue receiving junk mail.
This is a great idea, but I have some constructive criticism about your marketing site:

1) Basically, I think the slideshow is pretty ineffective.

a) Why is the first slide a picture of tree branches? It doesn't help me understand what the app does.
b) It's not obvious at all that you can switch among slides by clicking the phone, and the slow timer compounds that fact.
c) The copy is too far removed from the images, and also isn't highlighted in any meaningful way, hindering its effectiveness.

My solution to this would be to record a short, snappy video to place inside the phone "frame" (which I find to be effective). If you want to use photos, do so in a section below the video in more of a step-by-step format.

2) Your marketing message needs some distilling.

a) Don't mention saving the earth. I think it distracts from what the app actually does and why someone should download it. You have a great idea! Push that idea and push it hard.
b) Overall, there are too many words. For instance, "PaperKarma helps you get rid of paper junk mail and save the Earth at the same time" could be shortened to "Get rid of junk mail" and would be more effective. The initial pitch needs to be boiled down to its essence.

3) I think the overall look of the site isn't very polished and belies the quality of the app.
Convenience is key when it comes to single-serve. No matter what, you can't make great coffee that fast.

You may actually be surprised about the front-end costs. Dear Coffe I Love You put together nice graphic comparing the front-end and per-cup costs of entry-level single-serve brewers and entry-level manual brewers (specifically the Aeropress.) Check it out: http://www.dearcoffeeiloveyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03...
Did you follow the link? Buffet's recommendation comes with a long time horizon, and the asserion that he can predict stability:

"Whether the currency a century from now is based on gold, seashells, shark teeth, or a piece of paper (as today), people will be willing to exchange a couple of minutes of their daily labor for a Coca-Cola or some See's peanut brittle."

I think he's right about people, but in the statement he is also implicitly asserting that peanuts will be a cheap commodity in 100 years. That rejects our best projections regarding climate change. The much more important implicit assertion I quoted in the downvoted post (thanks guys) is that you can buy productive farmland now that will be productive in a century. That will only be generally true if climate change does not happen.
SPDYshark - WireShark extension to analyze SPDY protocol
Well, you gain a bunch of features for free, like distributed storage, signed edits, etc. Also, I already know how to use Git, which saves me time over having to learn a whole new set of commands to use some other wiki software.

And frankly, is it really different from using someone else's library or module?
PPC Resolutions for 2012 to Keep You Focused
Honestly (and regardless of the actual value of global warming) the projections have changed so much and are so impossible to nail down exactly that they might as well be read in tea leafs.

And if we get draught, what do you think the farmers will do? irregate their fields.
I love this. I was an early adopter and have been using it since release. Keep at it!
For me, I actually think 4.65" is still a little small -- 5" would be best for me. Much to my very slight irritation, the only 5" phone currently is the Galaxy Note, which doesn't use T-Mobile US's 3G or 4G bands.

I do know a few people who prefer smaller screens, but it does seem that 4" is around the sweet spot for most people.
Wouldn't that mean that the manufacturer still has the secret key? That would make you vulnerable to government agencies,... and it is not the case if you use truecrypt or dm-crypt/luks.
Running Python and R inside Emacs
What I worry about with WDE are unclean shutdowns. Does anyone know if WDE increases the risk of ending up with an unbootable computer?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KvgtEnABY

We must protect our precious bodily fluids!
I second that. Capistrano does have a very comprehensive run down of how that all works but for the beginner I can see them getting lost with those. Most Rails tutorials I've seen either tell you to deploy to Heroku or if they don't they don't cover deployment to your own server so much, it usually feels like a quick skim.
According to Mozilla's own research[1]:

how many sites in your mobile Webkit browser crawl use at least one of 'transition', 'transition-timing-function', 'transition-duration', 'transition-property', 'transition-delay' (ignoring prefixes)?
1245 / 30087 = 4.13%

how many use them only with -webkit prefixes (no -moz or unprefixed versions of the properties)?
336 / 30087 = 1.12%

how many use them only with -webkit prefixes and unprefixed (no -moz versions of the properties)?
365 / 30087 = 1.21%

Is it really that serious an issue if it only crops up in 1.12% of mobile sites (where webkit has the overwhelming marketshare).

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Layout/CSS_Compatibility#D...
> When the feature is standardized the prefixes are dropped.

More accurately, when the feature is standardized most browsers recognize both the the prefixed and unprefixed versions. This is still a significant competitive advantage for Webkit since there will be a lot of legacy content out there that uses only the -webkit prefixed name. This situation is an incentive for Webkit contributors Apple and Google to delay disclosure and standardization of these features as long as possible, and the W3C discussion above indicates they are doing just that.

> What you are proposing is to strip developers of the ability to test out non-standard features.

If it's only the developers we're inconveniencing, then sure let's have the W3C dictate that prefixed features are available in preview/beta/canary builds but disabled in builds intended for non-developer release. That would create some healthy pressure to get things standardized quickly, eh?

> If you want to only support standardized features then only support standardized features.

Once something is available to the public, developers will use it and often with good reason. That's where prefixes are most destructive. If Chrome comes out with a -webkit-sparkle property tomorrow, advocates of prefixes would have you add -moz-sparkle, -o-sparkle, -ms-sparkle, and plain old sparkle immediately just in case it becomes a standard. Nuts! It would be better for non-Webkit browsers if we just started with plain old sparkle so that legacy content would not be forever broken to them.
> 1. It's a good indicator of how much you know for simple problems.

Google doesn't solve simple problems.

> 2. You can practice.

Maybe if the interviewee was still in college they could "practice" coding on a whiteboard, but considering they may have other obligations like family and work they probably won't have time to practice such a pointless skill.

Personally, I wouldn't need to practice in the first place as I interview extremely well and could easily code on a whiteboard, I just find it antiquated and pointless to do so which was the reason for my comment - not because I am bad at it.