skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is frustrating. It is indeed very hard to get a startup funded in 2012. But for first-time investors, getting funded has never had less to do with connections and dress code than it does now. That's what 'gruseom is saying.

You're also missing his larger point. You seem to think that not getting funded is the worst thing that can happen to a small business. No. Getting funded by the wrong people can be way worse. I think first-time entrepreneurs on HN need to get this fact through their head more than perhaps any other: it is worse to waste 1-2 years of your life on a DOA startup than it is to fail fast and get on to your next endeavor.

You will not get those years back.

It can be even worse than that: you can be 9-12 months into your DOA startup with your pathological dress-code-attentive investors, have a much better idea and a team capable of executing on it and not be able to pursue it because of your legal obligations to the investors.

Taking investors is in some ways worse than taking a full-time job. The law recognizes the real power dynamics in employer/employee relationships and, for instance, refuses to enforce noncompete contracts. The law sometimes views the relationship between founders and investors in exactly the opposite way.

Take on investors, by all means, if that's what's best for your business. But watch the heck out for psychos.
You could try following up with this guy: http://falkvinge.net/2011/05/29/why-im-putting-all-my-saving...

(for reference, HN discussion was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2596475)
How Do You Use Technology to Actually Be Social and Connect Offline?
Is Ron Paul Electable?
Protecting User Privacy: Path 2.1.1
The title is pure linkbait. The article doesn't make any kind of deal about that it it's such a small amount alot of sampling errors could account for that. The article tries to justify it's > 10 point difference from other surveys re: chrome vs IE so I don't think a sub 1 point gain is worht spending too much time talking about and the article doesn't.

Can someone change the title?
Path Improves Security in Mobile App
I prefer ZMQ when I have the choice. ZMQ is better from an ideological perspective and better for infrastructure.

In cases where you can only use HTTP, this will be great, but if I have a choice I'd use ZMQ instead.

I don't mean to sound dismissive, but I am opinionated. I think Kenneth and Armin do great work. I'm sure this project will be excellent.
As I said before: Ease in using HTTP itself is welcome, but I don't want to use it in my infrastructure. It's a band-aid for WSGI instead of a solution.
Looks good, but I have to ask (and this is in no way trying to bring what you did down): is there a significant difference between this and templates like 960gs's? I've been using 960gs's template since Bootstrap was announced and adjusted the columns when they switched to 12cols...
Dwarf galaxies provide new insights on dark matter
How to Send Secret Encrypted Text Messages on Your iPhone [IPhone Apps]
SEEKING WORK - Remote and North Texas

If you need an experienced writer who has a background with computers, consider me. Turning technical jargon into layperson language is easier said than done, and so is getting grammar right for website content creation, to take two examples. My work has been published by Salon.com, literary journals, and other venues. As a writer, I'm really no hacker or coder, but to give you an idea, I'm running Ubuntu, idling on IRC, and of course, RSS-ing Hacker News regularly. I can take on all sorts of writing-related projects. Let me know if I can help with yours!

Email: dal@douglaslucas.com
Site: http://www.douglaslucas.com
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/douglaslucas
Example piece: http://www.salon.com/2012/02/23/julian_assange_prepares_his_...
The AWS Report - Episode 1 - Rob Frederick of Gripwire
Google.com rendered on 14 different Android browsers
I think 'Software Engineer' is thrown around too often.

That title should be reserved for those who pass (a currently nonexistent) certification like other professional engineers, and indicates that they are capable of working on life-critical systems like car software, medical systems, space shuttles, etc.

Unfortunately startups and web/mobile app companies may abuse this and require engineering certification for job openings when it's just unnecessary.
I'm not really fond of references for a couple of primary reasons:

1) IMO, they are relatively unreliable indicators for technical candidates

2) They leak the candidates active job seeking status to potentially untrusted colleagues

1 occurs primarily because references are self-selected to be people that the candidate has friendships with rather than people who will give the the most honest assessment. In large companies, this can often be especially easy for a candidate to game. The technique in the linked article will do nothing to resolve this, IMO.

And 2 is made worse by this person's desire to interview people who aren't even listed as a reference by the candidate. I've worked for companies before where I would have had to turn down a restriction like this.
The problem is that you don't know what other functions the libc function you want to call itself calls under the hood.

For example, take the classic case of printf() - sure, you might be able to guarantee that your signal handler can never interrupt an ongoing printf() call elsewhere, but what if printf() calls malloc() internally, and your signal handler has interrupted a malloc()?

That's why there's a (short) list of async-signal-safe functions in POSIX (see http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/V2...)
Companies complain and complain about the hiring process, with people like the OP even resorting to subversion in an attempt to "de-risk" the process.

"The only real solution would be to get to know the people better..."

I totally agree. Read the resume/CV, run the technical test (if required), conduct the interview. If they seem good enough, hire them.

All the jobs I've ever had (perm and contract), had a probationary period during which I could be fired at will.

If a company cannot handle the financial strain of hiring and subsequently firing someone within the probationary period then perhaps they shouldn't be hiring someone in the first place?!
A good write-up. I played around with Pyevolve[1], which is also written in Python. GAs are non-optimal for most problems, but it's a fun starting point.

[1]: http://pyevolve.sourceforge.net/
Just from the interwebs looks like you've had problems at two employers now including Google:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3783114

Maybe the problem is you, not the employer?
That's not a gain in marketshare, that's some random statistical noise.

Take a look at the graph[1]. IE6's segment is generally trending downwards, but the "wiggle" from month to month is a bit bigger than the trend. This month it happens to be wiggling up. Next month it will probably wiggle down, and ars will get to write a breathless article on the impending demise of IE6.

The correct take-away is that IE6 is declining, but slowly. So slowly, that on a monthly timescale, the change is smaller than random variations. So stop measuring it on a monthly basis.

[1] http://static.arstechnica.net/2012/04/02/internet-explorer-a...
Hire base on employee referrals have always worked the best.
Yeah, all this nonsense about "we don't hire B-players" is ridiculous. Narcissists always think their loyalists are the best people in the world and everyone else is an idiot. Classic sign.

If we're going to ignore the douchebag baggage ("douchebaggage"? 'tis a new word) associated with "A-player" and "B-player", I'd say I really want the person who turns B-players into A-players.
The best thing to do in a signal handler is often to write() a single byte to a pipe.

Your main loop can then notice that the other end of the pipe is readable (the main loop is normally watching file descriptors for activity anyway).
I wouldn't lie about it, in fact I can't see ever consenting to such a thing (giving out a password to any service to someone it doesn't belong to). But there are actually people out there that don't have a FB account. I was wondering how an employer would deal with that. Other people would probably ghost their FB, give up the password or friend an overseer, but never use the account again.
This is great as a work of fiction that vividly gets across the issues. In practice, I would expect companies that are legally on the ball to work around it somehow. I'm not a lawyer or an HR person, but the obvious answer is to outsource background checks to an outside firm that only includes legally permissible information in a written report to the hiring committee. (Don't they do that already for background checks?)
Symbols, everlasting
1DollarScan Improves Its Book Digitization Service With Fine Tune and Dropbox
Is it "public" knowledge that HN user eternalban is actually Mr. X in real life?

Btw, if that is not age discrimination -- "your facebook coordinates, please" -- I don't know what is .. /tongue/cheek
That's good food for thought; whaling is perhaps another good example. But previous generations had less capability to exhaust nonrenewable resources than more modern ones, and the side effects of killing all the Syrian Elephants might be less harmful than the side effects of blowing the tops off of mountains.

Similarly: most species extinctions seem either to have occurred BCE or after the industrial era. The older extinctions caused by people who knew less about the impact of their (for instance) hunting, which makes them less morally culpable.
Hopefully they aren't trying to sell them in Japan, the certification process there is waaaaay painful.
There are many, many bogus things about this post.

First of all, I'm ready to stab myself in the eye every time I have to see someone they only hire "A" players. This is getting tiresome and unbelievable - I don't know of any startup that has nothing but "A-player type work" to do. Almost every plausible startup has some work that will be comfortably addressed by a range of abilities and the idea that you're going to stuff your startup full of absolute super-stars (and do well as a result) is just posturing.

I am also not entirely sure that someone whose references are, I dunno, busy doing actual work or "on holiday" deserves to be penalized with respect to someone whose references are all hanging around in their office with nothing to do but promote the living shit out of each other in some kind of mutual admiration society.

Speaking from experience, I have seen many such cliques of utterly mediocre, self-serving people who would unhesitatingly tell happy stories of how wonderful everyone in their clique was to anyone who asked - even if a more conventional response from further up the management chain would have given a very tepid review of the actual performance of said people.

Finally, if you're going to contact a bunch of people out of the blue, adding self-promoting line about your blog is not appropriate. Under the signature line, maybe, but putting it the body text is a dick move.
"Good teachers actively demonstrate why what they’re teaching is interesting/useful/insightful."

A lot of what you learn has benefits beyond being obviously useful and insightful. It teaches you how to think.

I hated maths and couldn't understand the practical purposes of it. However it helped me develop a way to think about problem solving much later in life. I hated ancient history, What possible benefit does understanding the battle of Troy have to do with me getting a job? It helped teach me critical thinking, which is incredibly important.

While I agree there are problems with modern western education, you've just taken a few of personal anecdotes and written off thousands of useful programs.
Ethics aside, an employer asking for login access to your Facebook profile is a violation of Facebook's TOS.

That being said, I don't care how difficult the job market is--if a potential employer demonstrates that they have no regard for your personal privacy during the interview process, you should thank them for their time, smile and never look back.
Two Months Removed From AddressGate, Path Starts Hashing, Anonymizing Data
OMFGDOGS
the only constant is change.
Solipsist here. Sorry, had to answer "believes" for everything.
Unless you're going to present some solid evidence, it's out of place to make that suggestion based on only two data points.
Related to points 2 and 3, Microsoft didn't just make it easier to get the Windows tools, they made a tool that made it easy to write Windows programs: Visual Basic. Everyone loves to hate VB, but it was a huge factor in enabling line of business developers -- people who just need to bash out CRUD apps as quickly as possible, people who don't need the fine control of C/C++, people who want to knock together a bunch of forms rather than mastering the vast Windows or Presentation Manager APIs -- to create applications on Windows. And of course VB was also adopted by hobbyists and people creating simple utility programs, again ensuring that those programs would be available on Windows but not OS/2.
NOTE: I don't think employers should be allowed to ask for special access to a candidate's Facebook page. I'm not arguing for Facebook access below, but rather I'm arguing that I don't necessary think current law can be construed to prevent it.

I'm not convinced that theory is correct. There's a difference between asking a prohibited question, and acquiring the answer to a prohibited question incidental to something else.

To give an obvious example, you can't ask about race and sex, but the employer is going to find out that information at the face to face interviewer by simply observing the candidate.

Or consider criminal background checks, which are allowed in some states. A criminal background check might turn up information that makes a candidate's sexual orientation, national origin, or religion apparent.

I don't think that an employer would find themselves in legal trouble for doing a criminal background check that turned up that information, because they weren't doing the background check to acquire the prohibited information.

As a practical matter, though, even if it is legal to look at Facebook, it is a bad idea. Suppose you do not hire a candidate, and the candidate sues claiming that you didn't hire them because of their marital status. During discover, the plaintiff finds some emails between employees containing disparaging remarks about people of his status.

If you have not looked at Facebook or otherwise snooped into their private life, you will offer as part of your defense that you did not know their marital status, and so could not possibly have discriminated on that basis. Even if you do have some managers who dislike people of the plaintiff's status, they could not have acted on that dislike in this case.

If you have snooped, then you no longer have that defense. You are in the much less desirable position of having to argue that your people (who have been caught disparaging people of plaintiff's status) did not use that information, even though they did have access to it.

I can easily see this being the difference between a plaintiff win and a defendant win.
Don’t Eat Too Much Three Bean Salad. The Server Will Crash.
Welcome to the club:)

My general thoughts on this, plus the "called it" comment are here: https://plus.google.com/107226275692313566931/posts/L69x1jz8...

I was focusing more on how to deal with it in a world where employers will do this, though, and less on the "here's how to hack it". After all, for many of us both saying "no" and "hacking" the process is not necessarily a valid option. Mortgages and kids need to be figured in occasionally. (I hope I'd still have the conviction to say "no", but I understand it's a sticky situation for many)
I know I'll probably get down-voted but.. isn't it unfair to take a new job and get away for 6 months for parenting purpose? And what about being lesbian.. why would a company not hire a women because of that?

I don't know, I somewhat believe that once you put something on the web, be it facebook or not, it's now public. Yeah, on my facebook I have pictures that I'd rather not show to any employers but if they choose not to hire me for that, I'd rather not work at a place like this.

But, while writing this, I kind of realised that not everyone is in my position.. and not everyone is as open minded to accept homosexuals.. so I guess I understand what it's unethical.
maybe its me, but i find it hard to scan across three columns to find a name that pops. perhaps just have the results in a single column? i already found a name i like though, so thanks!
Microsoft's OS/2 Crush Plan makes a good read today.

http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/OS/2_Crush_Plan
K-Lite Codec Pack Update 8.6.4 Build 20120402 on Downloads App
In Canada, at least, parliamentary discussions are in both English and French, with real-time translation.
Love the idea! Sent you an email I was having about payment issues a couple hours ago, any word? Looking forward to checking out the videos.
Seems the link to tarball is not correctly parsed if you don't have master branch (this is rare ...).
Open Sourcing our Operational Scale Tools–Meet Trigger 
Network device & ACL management python tools from AOL open sourced.
玫琳凯之窗订货
References that people give you are a starting point, not an end point. Nobody is going to pick a reference they know is going to say bad things about them. The main thing you should try and extract from stated references is who else you should be talking to.
BB霜
A private facebook profile is much different from a public blog. If you put something out there, you run the risk of someone stumbling over it.
Scientists have solved the ‘Chicken Or The Egg’ mystery
As usual, the news article is maddeningly short on details, but I assume they're going to be using this for interferometry between all those radio telescopes -- combining the signals with some really heavy DSP to get a relatively high-resolution raster image of a portion of the sky.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_interferometer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array
I'm sure you're wanting to make a point... But all I see is different browser chrome, and some browsers not requesting the mobile page?

Or - likely alternative - am I completely missing the point?
I submitted this purely because I think there's decent conversation to be had around both the page itself, and the motivations of the company behind it.
Well played Raganwald, well played.

The Nixon resignation letter was a nice touch. Perhaps the most interesting of times arises when firmly entrenched control structures are threatened. The Facebook login fiasco, and it is a fiasco, is one such example.
2tor brings prestigious university degrees online, raises $26M
This has to be one of the worst suggestions I have ever seen. Also, I cannot believe you would even consider asking a technical audience to just give up anonymity so lightly ("growing weary"?!) when they most understand its true value.

There are some high profile commenters or from high profile firms on here who may never have commented or will never comment if they felt their identity would be forced out of them.

I know for one that I would never have signed up to HN if there was such a requirement (and more importantly its enforcement).

HN is not Google Plus or Facebook - thankfully.
I left Google voluntarily but, since you asked, I did blow the whistle on unethical management practices, and I was chagrined when absolutely nothing changed. That wasn't why I left. I left because I wanted to do functional programming and that wasn't going to happen where I was. I don't mind using C++ but I'd rather it not be my full-time job.

For my part, I don't like the creeping laxity of ethics that I've seen in technology startups (including Google) for the past few years. I really think that some of the slimiest actors are coming into our industry because they think engineers are easier to take advantage of (since we just want to code and a lot of us put our heads in the sand about office nastiness).

I'm glad that programmer salaries are finally starting to converge to what we're worth, but a lot of the worst elements are coming into VC-istan because of the money that's in it.
a couple years.

i've been saying this for the last 10 years.
These early launches are not expected to "stick" - either that, or I've just been terribly unlucky. The only value you need to extract is real-time feedback about what you got right and what you got wrong. Then you tweak it and launch again, and again, and again. And eventually, you reach "product-market fit." And then it sticks. If you're lucky.

But the early product is not expected to be scalable. It just helps you avoid the problem of launching a late product with all the same major flaws.
This scheme speaks for itself.

It doesn't matter what you or I think it's "about".
The reason you'd want an HR person would be to keep the company from accidentally doing illegal stuff like what happens in this story. Startups can get away with it because they're small with few assets and their legal risks around hiring are smallish compared to their many other risks. As companies get larger, statistically rare events become more likely and at the same time they have more to lose.

So I'd say no, it's not possible in a large company to get by without HR, but there's still a lot of ways to improve the process.
This looks great. Most audio and image processing libraries are a pain and I always end up wrapping them in something like this. It is nice to see someone open source a well written wrapper.
Someone should create (or link to) a turnkey AWS EC2 hosted solution that mimics the gmail/calendar suite. I'd spin up a micro instance in a heart beat. Funded by selling managed registration and dns.
Even the actual title is reaching. They have a very interesting definition of the word "surge".
I don't think it's really possible to have a constructive yet critical discussion about Google culture on HN. There are too many members here with personal ties to the company. I imagine Facebook would be similarly hard to publicly deconstruct.
I can't believe East Asians (1/5 of the world population) are being shoved into the "Other" category.
Am I the only person here that is offended by "Don't let the candidate return the call" or was that meant metaphorically?

I might not be "A-level" yet but as a potential candidate I would be furious if my employer kept my options away from me, especially if he's likely to toss me away if everything isn't going perfect for him, as the language of this post seems to dictate as a very real possibility.
Can Dropbox live up to the hype?
"Really knows" is just a form (perhaps indicating higher confidence) of "only believes", as any good bayesian understands.

Like a lot of philosophic thought, this is just playing with the meaning of words. Yet is that so bad? Did such discussions help set to thinking the people who finally got us to understand the probabilistic nature of all knowledge?
Blogs are published, and meant to be read by people. "Off limit" questions answered in a blog would be comparable to determing an applicant's race and gender in a face to face interview, unless I'm mistaken.

Facebook, as seen from a logged in user's POV, is meant to be private. I think there is definitely a line being crossed when asking to snoop through their private lives.

This is just my opinion.
Keen On… Clay Christensen: How To Escape The Innovator’s Dilemma
Not everything you see when you log into your social media account is public information, and not everything you see was posted by you.
The Personal MBA Blog...