skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think adding a barrier of having to login would at least get rid of the automated searchers/scrapers that want to register all short domains in a profitable domain niche.

Limiting numbers of searches, depth of searches in free/no account vs having an account and/paying?

I'm not advocating for making it a paid service - squatters will probably pay too for a good service, my wishes for LDS are that it stays relevant in search quality and results for a long time and it can't be usurped by a few people with money -- most of who are squatters.
They feel they're entitled to ask for your salary history, which is a subtle, bur very real, distinction. (Much like some employers feel they're entitled to rummage through your Facebook account, apparently.)

By the same token, you should feel entitled to tell them your prior salary data is a personal matter, if you're uncomfortable sharing it during salary negotiations.
I'm adding this to my about me on facebook now. thanks for the copy!
The True Promise of Social Media Drowned Out by Self-Promotion
That the illustration is Nixon's resignation letter should be a clue.
How To Start Your Own Record Company
The problem with Zynga's growth
All questions are legal to ask. What's illegal is discriminating on the basis of certain answers. The reason not to ask is to avoid being the target of a witch hunt.

This is why competent background checks are conducted by a security officer who produces nothing but a list of disqualifications along with the factual evidence to back them up. ("The candidate appears to engage in the unlawful use of mind altering drugs. [Facebook photo of bong use attached.]")
Well, I don't think that point alone is all that compelling. People put all sorts of "off-limit question" info on their personal blogs too. Does that mean it would somehow be unethical or illegal to look at a prospective candidate's personal blog that turned up in a web search?

While I would certainly not put up with a company asking for access to my private online content, it's not clear that it's illegal for them to do so just because it may contain information that can't legally be used to make a hiring decision.
"It goes without saying that until we actually make it into YC, these hacks, ideas, and suggestions are totally worthless."

So they are only sharing what they did, not what was successful. I'd rather work on my business than spend obscene amounts of time hacking the YC application process. If I don't get in, I'll still have the product, those who try to hack the system will only have the knowledge of what doesn't work.
Evolutionary algorithms are very capable metaheurisitics with striking exploratory abilities. Exploratory in the sense that given a large search space, a well performing evolutionary algorithm can navigate this search space a lot faster than traditional metaheuristics. However, the problem of getting stuck into local optima is common still.

They definitely are a staple algorithm type in the field of optimization, especially combinatorial. Look it up.
ShowHN: QRSplice - Use animated QR Codes to transfer data between iOS devices
The problem with non integrated solutions (integrated as in in the application) is that people need different access restrictions depending on their specific use case.. This had led to what you see now in Linux with apparmor, grsec, selinux, smack, tomoyo, rsbac all with different incompatible outside solutions that don't really solve the problem or introduce a huge amount of technical overhead that only the developer of said application would have knowledge about. In short their useless due to time and effort needed.
What if you spammed out one to every reference the candidate has? If there were, say, four or more emails, you'd get a decent chance of a reply if the guy really was stellar.
I find it ironic that they speak of SEO, yet the page is just one big image and zero text. Practice what you preach.
Why not host yourself? There's little sense in leaving one silo just to go into another one. I have set up Postfix + Dovecot for my e-mail needs and DAViCal for my calendar. Works like a charm!
Something to gather the world's environmental data affordably.
8 years or so. I was inspired when I read the readme of a server monitor that someone wrote for Medal of Honor Allied Assault. He referenced c++ in there and that started the snowball.
As a web developer, this graph is simply beautiful: http://static.arstechnica.net/2012/04/02/chrome-adoption-201...
"In the past, it was common to have having multiple untrusted users in one system. Outside of universities that is now uncommon."

Is this a personal anecdote or do you have actual evidence?

More importantly your discussion of users/privileges does not take into account separate users for separate processes within the system. Do you think postfix/mysql/apache/whatever-daemon should all run as the same user? Different daemons are essentially different untrusted users and I am glad that unix treats them this way.

Without separate users how do you do backups safely and reliably?

I am not positive but I think that a modern windows system has different users for different processes..
Maybe around several months ago there were a few right in a row that were clearly written without thought to how they'd be perceived (sorry, I don't remember actual details and it doesn't look like they're archived). Nothing outright offensive, just immature sounding. Think 'brogrammer' but less deliberate.
My QR code hack just went live, check it out. Send text data between 2 iOS devices with an animated QR code. It works pretty well until the file size starts to get big. Let me know what you think.
but it has memes!

everyone reads reddit and everyone loves memes!
Even knowing this, would you be able to turn down an investment from a top VC firm while you were raising a seed round?

We're wired to expect things to always get better, we're wired to believe that we are the ones who will succeed and that the VC not doing a follow-on round would happen to other companies, but not us.

I also suspect getting a big name VC in on your seed round goes a long way to getting more investors in that seed round.

Can somebody give an example of when they turned down an investment from a larger firm, and if they now look back on it as a positive?
We launched a "netflix for action sports" dvds back in 2004 and the first day we shipped all the dvds (about 30) by hand. We hand picked from inventory what each customer wanted and then made mailing labels on the laser printer, licked the envelopes and mailed them out. Once we found out that there was a rental market for action sports DVD's we built the back end to use bar coding of dvds, automated envelope printing, etc. We did build the credit card gateway upfront though, both because we were offering free 30 day trials that involved shipping customers our inventory and also because we wanted to capture the CC info for recurring billing upfront.
Remember CarFAQs...
build a killer robot for the tv show robot wars and make children cry as their robots get obliterated
Just an FYI, the whole site looks naff in Windows because of the use of "Lucida Grande" and no font-stack degradation. Even a "sans-serif" fallback would have sufficed.
I'm seeing a lot of comments that equate to nitpicking over how little RH is giving back to the community.

Despite how uninformed I might consider that opinion to be, given how many open source developers are on payroll, and how many projects get many of their patches from RH, the other little thing that RH has done was effectively legitimize Linux as a sellable resource.

Without the RedHat sales team getting RH in the doors of enterprises around the world, Linux would be significantly further back in terms of performance, compatibility, scalability, etc.
Holy shit. Except for a few details, I could have written that.

I recently had a job I was "promoted" into a pseudo-managerial role and immediately asked to disparage people I actually really liked, in order to put a "unified front" about our history and our people before new management. Told it would be "insubordination" not to sign this "official version of events", even though it was full of factual inaccuracies. I was shocked and disgusted. (The company's engineers are great; this is a managerial ethics problem.) Resigned on the spot. No two weeks' notice, just walked the fuck out.

Half my friends think I'm a hero for not selling my soul. Half think I'm an idiot for firing myself to avoid harming others who were in someone's crosshairs already. I don't think I'm either. Hero and idiot both imply a choice. I had none. I am not going to do the wrong thing. Ever. Not for more equity in a company whose executives are okay with this kind of shit, not to keep a job. Just not fucking happening.
Groupon Pile On: Shareholder Lawyers Salivating
I suspect it's partly due to businesses continuing to use XP. I know of one company that's set-up a major division locally, and all their new computers are XP with IE6 - which is something to think about if you have a start-up that caters for business users.
And build a flying car
The Spring Hackathon
People use all sorts of tangentially related images for their blog posts. I guess I'm just really gullible, but I thought the post was non-fictional.
Of particular interest is the paper on Plan 9's security model:

http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/auth
Blackberry fans cite reliability as they snub competitors
Genetic algorithms, heuristic hill-climbing, simulated annealing, etc, etc, etc. These are all basically equivalent ways of tackling an optimization function that can only be point-wise queried efficiently, and they are all subject to same problems (most notably local optima, curse of dimensionality, etc.).

I've seen these used rather sporadically in academia, where people generally prefer to reformulate a difficult optimization problem as a convex (or similar) relaxation that is provably solvable, and then throwing solvers at it.

However, I get the impression that when you just need to get some reasonable solution quick and dirty in practice (especially with discrete domains), one of these is the method of choice. I'm not aware of some particularly good arguments for GA's specifically though.
I'm not sure this is the solution. The problem is hiring (or accepting for YC, College, etc) in general is a complicated process where the generally accepted solution doesn't work as well as we want it to.

The only real solution would be to get to know the people better, which takes too much time. We resort to things like the reference check because it's the only option that doesn't require massive amounts of time. Unfortunately there is no substitute for the time it takes to get to know someone.
What constitutes one year of programming? Writing at least one line of code per day for a year? Writing at least one program/script in a year?
"You saved yourself from hiring a B-player, or worse."

As somebody that's probably not up to "A-player" status for this guy, I'd consider myself lucky if this method saved me from getting hired by anybody using it.
It really is and I love that Firefox is close to looking the same.
I think Winamp, which predated Napster by a couple of years, was really the turning point that made MP3 popular. Really MP3 made P2P networks popular, rather than the other way around.
I want to build a more interactive web browser.
The first few weeks of Papermill, an Instapaper client for Android
This is the language of "TopGrading", a hiring methodology.
Precisely. I hope that there are some hungry lawyers out there smelling blood in the water 'cause this is easy stuff.

In an interview you can't ask how old someone is, where they were born, what religion they are, and a zillion other things, all of which are blatantly plastered all over the average person's facebook profile.
"That tracks each user's actions (if they don't sudo -s)"

Or any of a million other ways:

$ sudo /bin/bash
$ sudo su
$ cp /bin/bash ./; sudo chmod u+S ./bash; ./bash
$ sudo less # invoke /bin/bash from inside less

That list can keep going for a long time. Hardly a trusted way to track a user...
This is what I was thinking. This is (hopefully!) not due to people choosing to use IE6, but likely due to people installing a likely pirated copy of XP who were not previously Internet users.
> but I thought the post was non-fictional

That confusion is almost certainly deliberate. (Yuck.)
Your fix is self perpetuating in a bad way. If only the top 100 users can get on the front page, only the top 100 users are going to get upvotes. It's impossible for real people to make it into this group.
Could you name one? I've never heard of anyone selling a put option on BTC.
I've looked and I could not find anyone like that.
There's a bug in the program. In the mate() function, when it recalculates the string, it uses `esize-spos` when it meant to use `tsize-spos`.
Captain of Undirected Development
When I read the title, a part of me was hoping that somewhere in the world it was still April 1st and this was a very distasteful April fools joke!

Interestingly enough, if you look at the "Internet explorer version adoption" graph, IE6 and IE7 appear to have identical adoption trends. Maybe this is some kind of sniffing error?
Here's a fairly direct translation of the original program into Go: http://play.golang.org/p/Xg9f0lM40n
I hacked up a Faraday (my ruby HTTP client) plugin that uses ZeroMQ: https://github.com/technoweenie/faraday-zeromq. I honestly don't know if it's worth it though. It's easy enough to write your own ZeroMQ stuff.

Example: https://github.com/dotcloud/zerorpc-python
First I was like "OMG... that is some funny ish"

Then I was like "What.. what the? They might be serious"

And finally I was like "If they ARE serious... that just makes it even funnier. LOL"

Please tell me this is a joke. It is a joke, right?
I just finished making my own version of this! What unfortunate timing, but kudos to you.
Oh dear. Is this a thing now? Thanks for the heads up...looks like I have another set of snake-oil buzzwords to watch out for.
I read this an immediately thought 'this is an April 1st joke.'

Looks like it's science fiction :-)
http://twitter.com/#!/raganwald/status/186940946015993856
I totally understand... It's temporary (working on an HTML 5 version now).
This reminds me of a quote I enjoyed enough to write down:

"The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence." - Milan Kundera (The Unbearable lightness of being)
I can't find a reference right now, but in 2003-2006 there was a huge jump in license costs for Microsoft customers.
The thing about GAs is they're probably one of the easier to understand tools in Machine Learning, even someone with almost no math background can successfully implement a GA. However knowing when to use them optimally does require understanding of the rest of ML. Essentially if your optimization problem is convex, or "convex enough" (as is the case when minimizing the cost function for linear/logistic regression, SVMs, neural networks and more), GAs aren't the best solution. However when you have a really ugly optimization problem on your hands, they are a really good last resort.

There are plenty of applications, however you'll never see them everywhere because they'll never beat optimization techniques like gradient descent, hill climbers, back propagation etc. in cases where those techniques work.

So while GAs are very easy to understand, finding an ideal use case for them takes a bit of knowledge. Looking to solve problems with GAs is harder than having a hard problem and realizing GAs may be helpful.
A long time ago, I was a VC/growth equity investor. Reference checks were incredibly important, as a startup's chances of success, are, on average, very much correlated with the strength of the team in a variety of areas.

First, obviously, we were looking for red flags. We had ways of phrasing questions designed to get people talking (esp about negatives). Also, more importantly, we were looking for names/contact info of other people who worked with the person we were checking that weren't on the reference list they provided to us. We'd do the same thing with customer references.

Second, we didn't know most of the people provided as references. A random stranger's opinion is interesting, but not that useful, especially when phrased in terms of "good/bad" or "exceptional/not exceptional." What was more valuable was to find out what kind of person we were dealing with, which is something that you really can learn from a few random strangers. For example, in past lives, has the CEO been an effective salesperson? Does s/he need a strong COO because s/he tends to let details drop here and there? The line of questioning went something like: "If you were going to build a team around this person, who else would you want on it? What qualities would the other team members have?"

In other words, references are just another data point, and I believe their value is not a binary determination of that person's ninja-rockstar-astronaut-whatever-ness, but a more nuanced read on that person's abilities as they contribute to the team overall.
As someone about to graduate college and interviewing at a number of firms I'm sort of hoping one of them asks for my Facebook password so I can laugh in their face while I accept one of the other several offers I've received.
It's probably the opposite of good lead gen. It's attracting a disproportionate share of pathological customers, for one thing, but also: for many, perhaps even most, of the potential follow-on customers, their first experience with the business is going to be of disappointment over what $99 actually got them.
Eh, you might want to clarify that somewhere... I thought it was real, and my reaction was "Wow this guy's kind of a dick, I wouldn't even have the balls to ask someone to open their facebook account in the first place".
IE6 (and XP) still dominate in China and there are approximately 420 million Internet users. Over 90% of software is pirated, most Chinese users never connect to Windows Update or even upgrading their web browser. Also a lot of Chinese websites have been built to work with IE6 only (e.g. banks).

http://www.ie6countdown.com/
Repl.it - Online REPL for over fifteen languages
"Pay them (the people to do the dirty work) $15/hour in order to free up your time worth $100+/hour."

Obviously that appeals to somebody with a "great idea" and an over-inflated sense of self-worth, who doesn't understand the amount of work and cost to implement an idea. It probably is not going to attract many of those people who have the skills to do the work.
I wonder what the employer's response would be to "I don't have a Facebook page?" Would I be required to get one in order to give them the password?

Also, it seems they would be selecting for people who were willing to trade passwords for money in the interview. The decision to trade sensitive data has already been made, it's now just a matter of negotiating price.
Ask HN: Where are all the Seattle startups?
There are absolutely a TON of startups/jobs listed here, but relatively few in the Seattle/Pac NW...

I'd love to hear more about the NW startup community!
I think that's actually a shortcoming of that type of line graph. The lines move in parallel, but only IE6's adoption is changing. It's even worse for Firefox's graph -- it's really hard to determine the absolute adoption change for any given delta.
I also started with QBasic, Nibbles and Gorillas. I then moved on to writing my own implementation of Hangman. Oh the memories!
Primary is hard to define.

I'm currently working on chef/sensu ssh'd into a few linux servers from osX desktop.
Since when did it become not OK to side with the FSF? This, (i.e. the "Hacker" News crowd) has really set a new low bar.
This is a strange definition of "profit", as it counts customer revenue before they've signed off on the deliverable --- or even before work has commenced. It seems to imply that the author's time has no value.
This method falls victim to self-selection bias. Consider this scenario: Tom is an mediocre developer but he has a great personality. People who don't like him or his work won't answer. But his friends will.
Or perhaps it can be a horrible idea, but deserve an upvote, because it leads to interesting and useful discussion.
Is it doing the developer community a favour by teaching people that for $99 you're going to get an absolute minimum product?

I'd be fascinated to see what kind of programming you'd get from places like Mechanical Turk. Has anyone done a $2 FizzBuzz request, and then compared all the resulting code?
Can someone explain in reasonable terms, why an HR manager would would choose to enact a policy that requires perspective employees to surrender their Facebook activity as a condition of employment?

I am really trying to understand what logical motivation is directing this latest craze. Was it a recent HR conference session that sold HR managers on the idea? An article written in an HR trade journal that cited definitive stats that sealed the argument?
Is this just a one-way thing? Or is there confirmation that the file was sent?
Not only would I not respond, I'd let my (former) colleague know what kind of potential employer (s)he was considering.

I don't know that I've encountered such an ill-conceived idea in quite awhile. Forget all the false negatives this method would be sure to "detect", I wouldn't feel comfortable spamming the candidates contact list.
The article says that he looks for people in the candidate's linkedin profile, so that he can spam them as well (regardless of whether they are in the reference list).
Ask HN: Who bought VRNG stock after reading the "Google going to 0" TC article?
After reading that article late sat night, I was planning on purhcasing 1-2k worth of VRNG stock at monday opening bell. He made some pretty interesting points and I go to vegas alot anyway so I figured what the heck lol

Due to hacking all night, I totally ended up sleeping most of monday and wasn't able to get in on time.

Did anyone invest in the VRNG stock? It's currently up 95%
Words of wisdoms from someone wayyy beyond his age. thanks!
I'd love to have a Macbook Pro for iOS development, but I'm sitting pretty with the Arch Linux install on my current laptop. Nothing matches the customization of Linux in my opinion and I could never leave XMonad.
raganwald did specifically mention Ontario, where even asking the question is illegal. It's against the Ontario Human Rights code to ask any question on a written or oral application that classifies someone on a discriminatory ground.

(IANAL, and this is not legal advice.)
It's one way, but there is enough metadata so the receiver knows when it has the complete file.
They're response would probably depend on whether they already know you have a Facebook account. But assuming you got away with it - if it's the type of company that is asking for Facebook passwords, then it's type the company that's likely to fire you later when they find out that you lied during the interview.

I haven't had to experience this yet, but I would like to think I'd just decline and say they are free to look at whatever public information is available on my Facebook page.