skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought it was interesting seeing the cruft of earlier versions in the automatic update cycle (more noticeable in FF than chrome, about 2% total of market share) that doesn't seem to be disappearing. It would be interesting to see how that changes over the next, say, 5 years. To see if it decreases and finds a level that it stays at, or to see if it increases and becomes an issue.
I think most employees (and perhaps many managers) fail to understand the purpose of a reference check. It is _not_ to find out whether the employee will be any good - that can only be determined by observing the employee in your new workplace for some probationary period.

The hiring decision is traditionally made on the strength of a hiring-manager's conviction and only the hiring manager - the interview pool can inform, but never make a decision. I've seen many situations in which the entire interview group said no to an individual who was hired, and became a star player. I've also seen scenarios where everyone said yes, and the employee was terminated for non performance within a year.

The interview is just a numbskull filter - you usually can't identify great people, but usually (particularly for technical positions) - you can eliminate the people who don't know anything.

So, what then, is the purpose of the "Reference Check" - it's to determine if this employee you are hiring burned down, assaulted, or otherwise was convicted of some horrible crime at a previous company. In general, with larger corporations, all you'll ever get out of them was "He was an employee from XXX to YYY in the position of ZZZ" - but, if he was terminated for killing a coworker, you might discover he was terminated for cause. (unclear whether they'll tell you _what_ cause, but do you really need to know?)

I've done over a 100 reference checks for employees - and, over time, I've realized that's all I'll ever get. And, when an employee does not give you _any_ prior bosses (particularly if they've had a lot of them) - that's a warning sign as well, that you are allowed to discriminate on in at least California.
We have societally chosen to make up for that a little bit by giving the mother a legally protected break from job demands.

In which case we should collectively pay for it rather than dumping the burden on her employer, especially since as you note that creates a disincentive to hire any woman of childbearing age.

When it's time for reviews and raises, the new mother has three or six months less of productivity and accomplishments, so it's natural and not discriminatory for her to receive less reward here.

Her attorney might see things differently.
Ah, if thats the case than I 100% agree with you. Initially the interactions seem like hyperbole that was probably made up, but yeah, if they're made up, I know what you mean. As I said in a different post above, I recently left a company where they had asked all of us to sign new employment contracts. I most certainly was not the only one.
Ah, but infected cells are hijacked to do the virus' job rather than the job they are intended for so any killed cells weren't aiding the body.
amazing. as a manager and someone who spends his time trying to make sure my actions and policies dont constrain our best people, this rings so true. Thank you for your thoughts on this issue and I wholly agree with you that these sorts of invasive practices will ultimately kill innovation and any real identity in a workplace.
Whoops, my (really) bad! I don't know why I remembered this incorrectly. Google web fonts has Open Sans--not bad by Google web fonts standards, but no ideal sans. http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Open+Sans
Yeah, it kinda does, because, you know, its my scheme.
Ah the good old stalking technique. I remember the first time a potential employer tracked down and telephoned my mother.

Sure that would have been OK if this was an FBI background check. But it wasn't. So the answer to the job offer was "Sorry friend, but go to hell."
OK, I've read their doc now. And what I can say is, they don't solve the problem I've mentioned at all. Their dot-notation is just syntactic sugar for an "ordinary" multimethod call. It does nothing for module selection.

This means you've got to either use qualified module names, make sure never to import two modules that export an identically-named method, or (if the methods have similar signatures) resort to a type-class.
Show HN: Hacker Polls, an aggregator for polls on Hacker News
This right here is another really annoying message board tic. Outrage trumps understanding, so much so that it's legitimate to rant at someone for not being outraged enough.
They once used the program to generate a top 10 list of factors predicting the probability of acceptance. ”I don’t want to share it, but it was fascinating,” Graham said.

This is understandable, but a pity nonetheless. I'm sure HNers would love to read about the factors. PG, can you tell how well these factors sync with the characteristic of a good founder you've written about in your essays?
Canada gets two new LTE networks thanks to Rogers
The current law can't prevent it, but in a civil case, I'd hate to try to prove that I didn't discriminate based on information on a Facebook page.

You are not innocent until proven guilty, it's "balance of probability". And given that the focus of Facebook is person information, it's hard to argue that you weren't interested in it.

You don't just have the information, you have shown that it's the kind of information you are interested in. Unless you are looking for very specific things (in which case, why didn't you hand it off to a third party?), their lawyer will say you were interested in the general "look and feel" of the candidate. Stuff like age, marital status, religion, what their friends and family are like. All the stuff you shouldn't ask.
Jelly gamat
Yes. Thank you. I'm glad I'm not the only one who wants to retch when I read posts like that. The underlying ego and assumptions are laughable, at best.

Beyond that, however, the poster needs to learn about ROC curves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characterist...) – for just a moment, let's assume we're genuinely only hiring "A" players – then the challenge is a signal detection problem, pure and simple – sorting the signal from the noise and avoiding both false positives and false negatives.

While I have huge issues with the post's method, it's clearly only focused on avoiding false-positives – avoiding hiring someone who's bad but is sold as good/great. Unfortunately, there are real issues with false negatives as well – you may miss out on a fantastic candidate, first and foremost...

But, of course, decisions aren't that simple. Anyone who understands decision making knows that decisions depend highly on context – including the context provided by the other options... and if you systematically fail to account for eliminating some number of options, you may well be (foolishly) limiting the range of options and the context of your decision. In short, "A players" are relative...

And that idea goes even further. Many stellar employees, innovators, coders, etc. don't start out that way. Sure, some do, but those aren't the people applying and giving you references.

Your job, when hiring from a resume pool, is precisely to find those diamonds in the rough – those false negatives.
You would have to qualify the call with the module where the generic function is defined. Otherwise, you could import two modules that both define a generic function named foo() -- but whose foo() functions do completely different things.
Yes, that was during the last day.
Curious: Were real-time updates something that your customers had high demand for?

I'm asking because we thought about doing real-time updates for our product but decided against it because it made topic modelling (clustering based on topics) much harder for us.

Also, what is your experience with publishers being consistent about pinging the hub with updates? Do you still need to poll feeds periodically to make sure you didn't miss something?
Thank you. This makes infinite more sense than the original post.
Agree. Hiring all A-players is something people say who do very little hiring (or have ridiculous amounts of money, though I've never had the luxury myself). Hiring all A-players means your paying way too much for your staff. A great manager with a great process will be able to get results from a team of all skill levels.
Newly released 1940 census crashed National Archives' website
After quite a lot of research my suggestion as best for the money is the TomTom XXL 540TM. It includes lifetime map updates (the M) and an included FM traffic receiver (the T).

Don't get the 550 instead, the 540 is much better.

If it's too large for you, the XL 340TM is identical in everything except screen size.

The other models have lots of other features (voice input, bluetooth, mp3 player), but they didn't seem worth the money to me.

The only drawback I've had with it is that it takes longer than I would like to recalculate a route if you miss a turn - especially if the destination is distant.
The fact that Google+ can strongly appeal to a particular niche is a good sign. I don't know of any massively-viral social applications with staying power that didn't begin in a similar fashion.

That said, I don't think programmers are a particularly great niche for eventual viral growth. We're sort of the default niche for every new product in the valley. Whether we can sustain a product until it becomes mainstream is a complete toss-up. It happened with Twitter, but even then, the main catalysts were celebrities like Ashton Kutcher creating profiles.

Compare that to Pinterest, which strongly appeals to women of all ages and locations. Or to early Facebook, which targeted college students. These groups are almost defined by their social behavior and their "mainstream-ness". College students get older, leave college, and become hair stylists/grocery baggers/whatever kids are going to school for these days, where they make even more social connections.

So I'm curious how G+ can exploit the particular niche(s) they've had success with. I doubt they'll be able to do it well by simply parroting Facebook's features.
It's at the level of spam filtering: individual words in application fields. So the insights were the sort I noticed when I first tried statistical spam filtering-- e.g. that ff0000 was highly correlated with spamminess (because it's html red).

Incidentally, the past tense in the article is misleading. We're using that software now. It's the product of a company in the w2012 batch. I don't think I can mention the name because they're not launched yet, but we're very impressed by its performance. SV Angel is using it too.
Well, I was looking more for a site dedicated to developers that might also host games. But Raptr seems interesting enough. Thanks for the suggestion!
Nobody is calling him a liar.

Whalliburton directly called him a liar.

Those without inside information may not know what is true and what is not true.

Then email him.

There's really no way anyone can say "everything michaelochurch says is wrong".

It's incredibly creepy that HN is fact-checking a personal anecdote about a nameless company; an anecdote which he clearly wanted to share with us in order to simply chill with us and be happy with us. He wasn't even hurting anyone or saying anything about anyone. You all chose to dig for no reason at all.

Let me put it another way. His original story did not whistleblow anything. It was just a story without a particular purpose. It doesn't matter why he wrote it, nor does it matter whether it was true. He wrote it in order to feel happy. HN went out of its way to check whether it could ruin that happiness, for no reason whatsoever.
35 Great Resources for Compass and Sass
Ray Larabie (among others) was doing the 'free fonts, but donate if you want' thing (16!) years ago, so this is hardly unprecedented.

Also, Larabie's free fonts are way better than this one (no offense to OP, but I'm not a huge fan of this font).

http://www.larabiefonts.com/
You seem blind to the popularity of Zynga and other makers of 'shitty' games. Steam has plenty of what you would call real games. G+ is wise to court the popular games first.
http://www.domainsbot.com checks way more than 10,000 for every search, doing semantic matching. They have been doing it for years.
I'm sorry but I'm failing to see how this is cooler other than the fancy colors.
Surplus Outlet
Allegheny Surplus Outlet is a Military Surplus Store,army surplus store
offering more selection and lower costs than many other Army surplus outlets.
Congratulations. Not only do you code and ship, but you also write extremely well. That was one of the most coherent, no nonsense blog posts I've read in a while.
It goes through the toilet tank for heat exchange. I don't think it actually draws water from it.
Am I the only one that thinks that thinks that github community is too focused on the looks?

Sure, a proper site design is something of value. why would anyone want this instead of simply using github's wiki features o simply uploading .md files is purely a matter of aesthetics, which should be secondary.
Asking for a URL is exactly like being too lazy to find it on your own. You want to know? Find it yourself. I'm under no obligation to assist you.
Love the "R" in regular weight! I have no idea what the style is called, but drawing the right hand side of the letter so that it avoids intersection with the left-hand vertical stroke is my favorite way to do it. :)
I believe this is referred to as the 'self pipe' trick.
Dan Bernstein says he came up with it in 1990.

http://cr.yp.to/docs/selfpipe.html
I really don't have a facebook account (we children of the cold war are sometimes a bit wary of any system that looks too much like a KGB wet dream).

Or twitter.

And on reddit I remove all my messages and delete my accounts whenever I pass 3000 karma.
There are already problems along these lines. Here in CT there was a minor kerfuffle over the storage of license plate information (gathered by automatic number plate recognition systems on cruisers) long past the stated purpose of identifying stolen vehicles and expired registrations wanted individuals. This fact was actually concealed from the public until there was a full-court press to discover the truth. These kinds of legal questions are no longer theoretical; the feared actions are now happening as predicted.

How comfortable do you feel about the government compiling a dossier of your movements? Do you believe that there isn't some chance that this data will tempt someone to use it improperly?
Congrats -- when I was 15, all I thought about was the opposite gender.
I'm generally supportive of RedHat, and think they do pretty well by the open-source community. But I don't agree with the latter part of your comment on principle: not everything that is legal is a good idea or something we should cheer. I think there is a general ethical requirement to give something back to people who got you where you are, even if you aren't legally obligated to do so. (And RedHat does in fact do so.)

Things actually work better in the case where there's an ethical but not legally codified understanding, imo, enforced informally through community pressure rather than lawsuits. If you try to add it into legal obligations, complex licenses start piling up; the old BSD advertising clause, for example, was an attempt to turn the ethical principle of "you should prominently acknowledge the work you built on" into a legally enforceable license, which in retrospect most people agree was misguided. But you should still prominently acknowledge the work you built on, anyway, and it's fair to call people out on it if they aren't giving sufficient credit. You can't sue people who don't give sufficient credit (past the bare minimum copyright statement), but you can criticize them and apply community pressure.
I assume you meant to highlight that Red Hat pays a lot of developers to work on open source projects. I don't think that came across clearly, which is probably why you're being downvoted.
22 mil hits on census sites crushes Inflection servers
I think the random Capitalizations are Awkward.
In the future you might want to consider Jekyll-Bootstrap (http://jekyllbootstrap.com/). It simplifies a lot of the early configuration and adds theming, commenting, tags on top of Jekyll.
I went to Woodland Hills, graduated a few years ago. Spontaneously decided to click on the comments and was surprised to see this.
>If the market wants a crap app that does something incredibly silly for no real benefit to society then there will be someone to make it for them.

Who says the market wants that? Right now, VCs want that. VCs != customers.
So a wise yc-spammer will take the published YC applications of accepted teams (Dropbox, etc.) as a starting point.
>The 'everything done ahead of time' nature of high-technology civilization just exacerbates things.

Could you elaborate?
Thanks for clearing that up. I just didn’t know and couldn’t readily find it.
Them: "I'll need to see your Facebook page."

Me: "OK, search Facebook for my name."

Them: "I'll need you to log in for me..."

Me: L.O.D. pause, walk out
Hey everybody, Novocaine is my baby, and it's completely awesome to see folks already using it.

For the record, it's open-source, I just forgot to stick the MIT license at the top. Or would folks prefer BSD? Let me know, I'm flexible. The only thing I care about is that people use it to make awesome software.

If anybody's a Boston local, I'll be talking about iOS audio (both novocaine and some fancier frequency analysis, I hope) at the Berklee College of Music CS club tomorrow, 6-8pm, at 150 Mass Ave, room 118.

And, if you dig novocaine, check out the apps I made with it: http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/alex-wiltschko/id344345862
Looks nice.
Looking by timeline, last week it's almost 1 poll/day rate. HackerNews is going to become Daily Poll News if it's going to be like that.
>The latest US generation has led a life of leisure. Arab protesters carry swords and machetes, ours carry iPhone 4S’s in pink, personalized cases.

Look dude, if it wasn't quite explicitly against Massachusetts weapons laws, I would go protesting carrying a sword. Also, if someone would teach my swordsmanship. And if swords were actually viable weapons in modern times, rather than nice symbols of Arabs' chauvinistic, honor-based culture.

>From computers to desks to chairs used by cute digital startups like Oink or Bizzle or FoSchnizzle, – it’s all made possible by better, more substantive innovators. This superior breed of entrepreneurs and inventors toils away in relative obscurity, often in Asia, solving real, complex problems. They squeeze 32GB onto something the size of mint strip. Or, they make un-killable batteries that let us Tweet deep into the night. They make solar cells worthwhile or water out of thin air.

Did you know? There's actually a whole economic sector to this stuff. It's called research, it's practitioners are called scientists and, often enough, grad students, and the United States of America treats them/us like crap. Science is chronically and endemically underfunded in the United States relative to most other developed countries, and several less developed countries such as India, China, and Israel.

Come on, people. I agree VCs are too quick to jump for the cheap, easy trivial "innovation" rather than the fundamental invention, but if you want fundamental invention, stop kvetching and figure out how to fund a university lab for the next 6 years to work on your truly important, fundamental scientific problem.
If you have to resign in order to have this HR policy changed the company you were working for was not worth working for anyway. I don't think it is right to work for companies that disrespect their employees on such a fundamental level. You did the right thing in resigning.

I am also somewhat surprised that you complied with the policy. Why would you comply when you knew it was wrong?
You can use TLS/SSL with ZeroMQ. The docs suggest doing so here: http://www.zeromq.org/topics:encryption
We launched with billing code, but did not have code to actually do something with accounts that did not pay until they were into their 35th day of a 30 day trial (a slight estimation error, you know how software development works).

"Hey, you lucky guys, we're extending your trial period by five days! Ain't that cool?"
That's what separates us from the animals. Except for the weasel.
> 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.

Even on those cases, it is not obvious. A person that looks like a man might consider himself a woman, for example. I'm currently working on the Chilean Census, and, even though we are supposed to ask for the person's sex, we can't make any judgment about it. If we enquire further than what the person says, we are in for a lot of trouble.
The Pylons Project is looking for GSoC 2012 Students
So most hacker news readers are significantly brain dead. OSX, really? wow guys, wow
I used RH and liked it in the 90s, but since then I don't see why a RHEL-based distribution for server isn't a good enough option. I understand that is just being parasitic, but it is free after all- why pay for it? So, I think Linux is strong and will be strong with or without RH. Sure it's great that they provide a major paid option for customers that feel like they have to pay something, but I don't respect any tech company that pays for Linux because they feel they need to just to have the support. If they like the distribution and want to support them, fine. But, don't do it because you feel that you have to have support.

Also, I interviewed for RH several years ago and was not impressed. Their employees seemed fairly unmotivated, and despite the number of people I interviewed with, it didn't seem very well thought out. I didn't like their distro at that point, so it was a bad idea in hindsight to interview with them. I just didn't believe in RH anymore, and going there only solidified that.
I’d be interested to see a graph of submissions/day from announcement till deadline. Is there such a thing?
Depends on the NDA I'm sure. Would many people really object to "I won't disclose the questions you ask me, or the written test you'll give me, or anything proprietary I might overhear while I'm there"?
Mochilas Nike
> why an HR manager would would choose to enact a policy that requires perspective employees

Fear. Ignorance. Stupidity. Anachronism.
I'm wondering if it says more about the companies or the people judging them :)

Kidding aside, I'de be surprised if specific words correlated with the probability of success. So there's a good chance this is measuring only if there are key-words that please the reviewers.

I'm sure you've looked at prediction models for individual partners and compared them (or at least considered it, what with days only having 24 hours :)

It'd be fantastic to see you write about the results of that - maybe once the company has launched.

The reason this has me so curious? If the predictive models are not partner-specific, this could indicate that there are very specific things that successful companies/founders say and/or do. Sharing that might or might not mess with the models, but it has a good chance to increase the likelihood of success.
If/when I have kids (hopefully a long ways off) I'm going to find a way to get some sort of BASIC machine in my house. That's where I started (at about the same age as you) and I still remember a long drive from Cheyenne to San Francisco, sitting in the back seat of our van with a toy VTech computer and a book on BASIC I found in our school library.

That feeling was awesome.
牙齿矫正要多少钱
I can tell I'm going to get tired of "Merlot" very quickly.

Looks nice 'till 1000 sites use the same heavy theme.