skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find this story hilarious because in its reach to setup Yahoo as a parable for Google, they actually describe exactly how Yahoo faltered -- Yahoo had their lunch eaten by Google as users found that hierarchically organized lists of links was usurped by text search: Why would I want to labour through hierarchies when I could just type my city and pita, for instance.

Yahoo later bought the collapsed remains of a failed AltaVista but it was too late. The web had pivoted away from what Yahoo was offering, and the company has been in decay mode since.

So if the lesson was that Google can't sit on their laurels, expecting the world to stay static, then I commend this article for its insight. But I suspect that wasn't the author's intention.
That's odd... the interviews I've had to travel for were all compensated. The companies actually bought me the tickets, set up the hotel reservation, and got me a rental car, so all I had to worry about were the meals.

Edit: Just talked to a friend of mine who does interviews for her company, and apparently there's been a paradigm shift of late. Since grads want jobs more than employers need them, there's been a power transfer between the two. Instead of the employers courting grads, it's the other way around now.
Great work! And I must thank you for introducing me to Intercom as well! :)
Congratulations on getting it off the ground.

I searched through a few pages of your blog archives looking for your customer acquisition strategy, specifically search and ads. Can you tell us anything about that?
> this is one of those cases where a Bayesian treatment is conceptually much clearer

Is there any other sort of case?
Where is Eastern European daily deals industry going?
True, mostly anyways, but nobody talks about the other side of the learn-how-to-program hill.

You can create anything. Anything. Want to write a database? Go ahead. Hack on a GPU, nothing is stopping you. Make a recommendation engine? Why not? A game? Trivial (to get started at least).

Once you know how to program (not just one language, some high level stuff and some systems stuff) and know the surrounding tools and communities around the languages sometimes you'll feel like all you want to work on is stuff that pushes your knowledge, even if you could easily make a Exec type of app that would make you more money than programming something that is new to you, like an operating system.

It is a strange situation.
You're welcome! It's a fantastic service, but they won't let me throw money at them yet :-(
Very impressive...I'm ashamed of being in the 30's and not achieved something that high...but I've been trying...if not 15 could be later one day...but your's is a great motivation. Congrats!
Congrats on your launch! Our first month, we had 9 paying customers, so very similar to you. But like the one commenter said, keep posting honest posts!
Or you could start your own news channel on YouTube, and advertise it locally (in the local paper / subway / with locally-targeted Internet ads).

It's not computer programming that's special. It's computers themselves -- they have greatly lowered the barrier to entry for many creative professions. (For which we must thank programmers, of course!)
And only 5 222 now. We need 95 THOUSAND more signatures.
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SEC may start Groupon investigation
Small start up looking for CFO with connections
I am the owner of a small start up company. I am looking for a young eager co-founder that can be a CFO and has some connections for funding. If you are interested email me at bryce@confusinghomework.com
100% agreed! Currently I'm trying to get access to a iTSM tool that uses HTTP as it's transport mechanism. It uses ActiveX controls to gather data into a grid-like mechanism.

As I particularly hate ActiveX, I have started reverse engineering what these controls do. So far so good, except that the format used for the data that the controls receive is an application/octet-stream binary format.

Now I've worked out how the format works, and by using JDataView I'm parsing the format. But you know what? Internet Explorer takes null characters in strings and will not go any further, even though ECMA-262 states that:

"The String type is the set of all finite ordered sequences of zero or more 16-bit unsigned integer values... All operations on Strings (except as otherwise stated) treat them as sequences of undifferentiated 16-bit unsigned integers; they do not ensure the resulting String is in normalised form, nor do they ensure language-sensitive results."

If they had passed the data back in something saner like JSON, or heck even XML!, then things would have be fine. As it is, I've decided to skip Internet Explorer as it's just not worth my time to get around this issue, and every other browser works fine with JDataView.
It would also reportedly allow intelligence officers to access emails, calls and texts as they happen, without a warrant, rather than retrospectively.

I think previously they could only start monitoring after a court order had been granted (same as listening in on your phone calls) whereas now they record everything and (presume) would have historical access once the court order had been granted...
Really, Reginald, are you a fellow Ontarian?

That you might be living in Ontario was one of my surprises on first reading http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-hereby-resign ... i would not normally read you however i follow Martin Fowler and he wrote this today: https://twitter.com/#!/martinfowler/status/18715905169883545...

Did you really resign as Director of Software Development over this issue? Or, is that just you being a creative essayist? aside: when bloggers arrived, it seems essayists became extinct.

One thing is certain ... i now see at least one use for an iPad.

Also, apparently i made an error in judgement on removing the fact that i've been programming for 45+ years ... more if you let me count overtime. FWIW, i'm still learning to program ... it's nice to glean from your article that i might be better off to simply sue every prospect who fails to give me an interview. unfortunately, i, up to seconds ago, assumed that i could file a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights commission ... but as of a minute ago at http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/issues/age, i learned:

"On June 30, 2008, the role of the Ontario Human Rights Commission changed. The Commission will no longer accept complaints of discrimination."

The same page in the link above does tell me that i'm protected from age discrimination. Hmmmm. Perhaps i could complain to Bashir al-Assad? Hmmmm, again, i just noticed there's an Ass in al-Assad.

In November 2009, i began working for a company where i had four managers ... but then let's not talk about "corporate transition" ... i'm tempted to name that company here but then this comment could be in the internet-verse for decades to centuries baring some galactic or man made calamity destroying planet earth.

I probably should not mention my April 28th birthday because Jay Leno and the late Saddam Hussein share my birth date ... imagine some HR Letterman fan seeing my name coming up with Leno's in a Google-ish search!

Dear Reginald ... if you really did resign your position over such a machiavellian HR policy, then you've dewservedly earned my utmost respect.

Regards,
Gerry Lowry
https://www.gerrylowryprogrammer.com/
Please note that Rust is very alpha alpha alpha at the moment. Syntax evolves constantly. Several concepts don't even exist yet, and many are present only in half-formed nascent states.

The bottom line is that if you're interested in writing applications using Rust, you should really hold off until 0.4 or so (I'd say give it three months), both to give them time to implement all the missing pieces and then to refactor the Rust compiler to use those pieces, thereby shaking out the bugs and annoyances.

But if you're interested in helping out on writing the compiler itself, or proof-of-concept libraries, definitely consider pitching in. The devs greatly appreciate volunteer contributions.
Former Microsoft-focused dev here. It's funny you mention fads, because I feel like most of the successful development decisions in Microsoft frameworks arose from copying previous 'fads'. Once you deep dive into OSS, you start to see where Redmond got most of its influences.

Here's my current OSS stack.

Framework: Ruby on Rails

Language: Ruby

Web Server: unicorn/nginx

Data Layer: ActiveRecord

Database: Postgres 9.1

OS: Linux (Ubuntu Server)/OSX

Editor: Vim/TextMate/SublimeText

Training: PeepCode, RailsCasts, CodeSchool, Pragmatic Publishing books, local meetups, you name it.

Technical References: Ruby and Rails API docs. GitHub.
Ask HN: What's the current uptime of your workstation?
I am curious to know whether people suspend or shutdown their primary machine while taking a break. I have been rater busy past few days and here is my uptime:

nilesh@cd-oneiric-laptop:~$ uptime
20:00:02 up 7 days, 7:41, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.06, 0.08

which is not extraordinary by any means, but it would be interesting to know the extremes. Share your uptime.
I'm not sure that's a "critical issue". 99% of Google users don't care that PageRank is complicated; they just marvel at how good the results are. Just like most redditors simply talk about how great the comments are, and not the math that makes them so.
Android fragmentation rears its ugly head once again
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I'm a bit confused by lumping Yahoo in that group (unless your goal was to show a sampling of companies including one big win, in which case I apologize for misunderstanding).

Yahoo was surely a resounding success for the VCs who backed them, and has been a major contributor to life on the internet for over 15 years (so it's not just a financial win). They've also outperformed NASDAQ since 1998 despite being a poster-child for overvaluation, so they've been a (comparative) win for retail investors as well.
GMail is open about the fact that it mines your emails for your advertising profile. Encrypting the data for you would result in reduced value proposition for them. Not going to happen.
Thank you so much for writing it.

What is your interpretation of why this protagonist allowed unethical activity to continue for so long? Just to keep his job? Or is there something more to it?

I think people have accepted a certain fatalism about corporate scumbaggery: corporate entities are complex and bound to have some unethical people within them, so why fight it? Sure; it's true that unethical people will exist in any sufficiently large set. I wouldn't quit a job at a 10,000-person company because I found out that one employee was unethical. Let's fire him and get on with our lives. But when scumbags are getting promoted in spite of, or even because of, their ethical depravity, it's a really bad thing.

I think most Americans believe that "work" and "life" are separate and that it's perfectly acceptable to be a scumbag at work because "everyone is like that". People who wouldn't even think of shoplifting have no problem damaging careers, teams, and entire companies for ridiculously short-sighted reasons.

I'd like to open a Work Court in which people can "sue" employers over the low- and mid-grade scumbaggery of the sort that isn't worth a real lawsuit. Instead of a suit taking years and burning up half the award in legal fees, it can be settled in an afternoon. This Court has no authority to collect judgments (if there are awards, they come from ad revenue) but it can censure, and the effect of the censure is to bring public exposure to unethical activity.
> It just requires better educators to explain it, with analogies and metaphor.

So... anyone want to take a stab at explaining that equation to those of us who don't really get it?
As far as I know, the google art project isn't selling anything. It's just art out of several museum collections.
Currently I flag obvious SEO pages (most of the foreign language posts are SEO) and mathema-tricks. Perhaps 10 a day?
I always assume that initially there are q voters who gave the average rating. This yields the following formula:

(pn) / (n+q)

This is simpler and gives similar results:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+%28p+%2B+z^2%2F2n+...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+%280.8+*+n%29+%2F+...
There are a lot of comments complaining about how complicated the math is. This shouldn't be all that hard to understand.

The assumption is that there's some constant p underlying probability that a random person will rate a given thing positively. If we observe, for instance, 4 positive and 5 negative reviews or votes, there's a probability distribution (known as a Beta distribution) which tells us what the possible values of p are given the votes we observe: p^4 (1-p)^5. graph: https://www.google.com/search?q=x%5E4+(1-x)%5E5%20from%200%2...

Now if we observe 40 and 50, respectively, the curve looks like this:
https://www.google.com/search?q=exp(20+%2B+40+log(x)+%2B+50+...

(I had to do it in the log domain because Google's grapher underflows otherwise -- the 20 is just to make the numbers big enough to graph. The more correct thing involves gamma functions and that just gets in the way right now)

The more you observe, the more sharply peaked the likelihood function is. The funky equation in the article is an approximation to the confidence interval of that graph -- 95% of the probability mass is said to be within those bounds.

It's not a great approximation, for one because the graph is skewed (try it with 10/50) and it assumes that the mean is exactly in the middle of the confidence interval. The correct computation involves the inversion of a messy integral called the incomplete beta function. Scipy has a package which includes betaincinv which solves this more exactly:

>>> import scipy.special

>>> scipy.special.betaincinv(5,6, [0.025, 0.975])

array([ 0.18708603, 0.73762192])

would be the 95% confidence interval for 4 positive and 5 negative votes;

>>> scipy.special.betaincinv(41,51, [0.025, 0.975])

array([ 0.34599562, 0.54754792])

for 40 and 50, respectively.

[edit: apologies, I had to run and get ready for work -- I didn't really have time to make this very comprehensible; but i just now fixed a bug in my confidence interval stuff above]
My takeaway from this post is that raganwald drastically underestimates the complexity of Enterprise Java FizzBuzz.
PGP on its own will only protect the contents of communications, not the fact that the communication occurred, nor the parties of that communication.

The proposed legislation will apparently still require a warrant for the contents (and in the UK you will be required to decrypt the contents on demand).

So while I agree that PGP is a good thing, it will not work around this proposed legislation at all.

If I had to choose, I would prefer to see effort going into political action to prevent this law being passed instead. This is an unwarranted privacy intrusion by definition. If it were warranted, then the police would be able to get a warrant.
Lol yeah. My point about having to change browser for a site stands though. It's a self-imposed "denial-of-customer" attack :-) I raised it because I see it more often than I would expect, and expect it least of all from an ad company like Google.

HTML 5 is great and all, but if a web site is trying to gain pageviews/users/whatever, then effectively blocking out one of the most widely-used browsers makes no sense to me.
"If your software matters, you will write it in C++ "

If you don't know any better. Then please let me know what you are working on so that I can eat in your plate.
The second algorithm, in my experience, is too simple, though. When browsing Amazon I'm pretty regularly annoyed by an item with one 5* review appearing ahead of an item with hundreds of 4* and 5* reviews.

One simple fix would be to avoid calculating an average until a minimum number of ratings have been given. But I do think the statistical way is lovely. If I were Amazon I'd give it some kind of snappy trademarked name and push it as a feature.
I got a laugh from the FizzBuzz team part. Actually from what I know of Corporate IT I think it might actually take a team "several months" to implement. I was once told by corporate IT guys that it would take "Three Months" to move one of our machines into the DMZ, I got another Internet Connection and set it up myself in 30 minutes. As you can guess they were VERY unhappy about that as it made them look like ... well.
I agree. If I were faced with a high-profile architecture problem of my own at work I'd definitely solicit opinions from my friends before making my formal proposal.

That said I'd probably put together a rough sketch of my own design and then send it to my friends for a sanity check rather than asking them to build it for me from scratch.
I had figured out about half way through that the story was fictional. It wasn't explicit, but it was subtle. Who's going to write a resignation letter like that? No one.
Team Fizz Buzz is not an unreasonable team name! Or is the norm out there for teams to name themselves to whatever they are working on?

Our current teams are named: "Team America 2", "Kill Kenny" and "Etablissemanget" ("The Establishment" in swedish)
CEO answers: How can PrivateSky not see your data?
Konacha tutorial: JavaScript testing on Rails
It's a bit short sighted to claim that trigonometry and calculus are 'only necessary for scientists'.

For example, if you write code for some user interface, you'll have a very hard time to get smooth animations if you don't understand derivatives.
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I've had MacBook Pro's for about 3 years and I've been running a MacBook Air for about 9 months.

I love my Air, it's easily a very solid machine. But the small screen size can be a little constraining, and the machine does noticeably lack power. Not having a dedicated graphics card also limits you from trying out things like WebGL. And anytime you hit a Flash-based website, your MBA will sound like a jet engine.

I think if you're very mobile (i.e. travel a lot) go with the Air. If you're at home most of the time, get an iMac and an 11" air for the few times that you are mobile. If you need the best of both worlds, go with a MacBook Pro.

My next machine will be a 15" next gen MacBook Pro. Those should incorporate design elements from the Air in a more powerful package.
See also "The Power of Plain Text" in "The Pragmatic Programmer." Why people think binary formats are the be-all-end-all (or even the correct solution for the majority of problems) continues to confound me. But then again, I don't get NIH syndrome either, and many who insist that binary is better usually want to invent their own binary format.
And before that, you get into encodings like EBCDIC, RAD50, SIXBIT, FIELDATA, and even more failed schemes now largely forgotten.

Why should a brief overview go back even to the pre-ISO-8859 days except to mention ASCII? None of them are directly relevant: The world we're dealing with now on the Web begins with ASCII, moves through a Pre-Unicode Period, and finishes up in the Land of Unicode, where it's at least possible to do things Right. All history tells a narrative; when it comes to character encodings, that's a good default unless you really think your audience cares about why FORTRAN was spelled that way back in the Before Time.

Tom Jennings has an interesting history:

http://www.wps.com/projects/codes/
Absolutely. So I'm not really running any ads (I did throw away $100 on an ad on clientsfromhell.net and got virtually zero results).

My search strategy follows a lot of what patio11 covers here: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/

Write relevant content for your audience (educational content: how they can better their lives or work) and promote where possible. I'll sometimes to go message boards for freelancers, see what questions they're asking, spend some time on a post, and then cycle back to them.

Long term strategy is having a healthy amount of crawlable content that my audience might search for.
Original author here. For the academically inclined, there is a critique of this approach in this paper:

http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~dell/publications/dellzhang_ictir2...

Of course, I think the authors miss the point of the algorithm, since I basically wanted a system that is one-sided (i.e. false negatives are OK but false positives are bad).

Also, if you deal with more than two outcomes you might be interested in multinomial confidence intervals, described here:

http://www.math.wsu.edu/faculty/genz/papers/mvnsing/node8.ht...

The application to 5-star systems is not straightforward, since it's not clear to me how stars relate to each other. Is it a linear scale? Are they discrete buckets? Or maybe we want to use Tukey's froots and flogs? I'm not sure.

By the way, I'm coming out with a stats app for Mac soon that implements this algorithm and much more. Drop me your email address if interested:

http://wizard.evanmiller.org/
They're saying that the contents will be only accessible with a warrant, but metadata will be accessible without a warrant.
Video chat has much better adoption for close relationships with people that don't live near by. Family moving away, long distance dating etc. Overall communication is a lot more nuanced than most people think. Just consider text messages.

What science fiction in 1920 thought people would hold phones that let them call other people and instead chose to write the message down and then send it. Yet, often people find text messages far more useful than a phone call.
No matter how much statistical data you reveal, you still need to present the results in some particular order. And this formula is the best ordering function I know of for things that are rated.
TIL Stephen Fry is a true techno geek, who knew? I prefer his rants on religion frankly, I can get this stuff elsewhere.
What's not to like about building fighter airplanes? :P
Well, I try not to be dogmatic :)
Why are tax payers money being used for this? I think the citizens should have a vote on whether megaupload gets shutdown or not.
Who helps make Linux? Microsoft.
CloudStack has it's own well-documented API.

Today, CloudStack uses a separate translation layer, and has for some time, to translate AWS API to CloudStack API. That will remain the same going forward, except the translation layer will become a bit more integrated.
Talk about setting an example to your employees...
Don't forget that part of the solution to education is role-models. You can teach all you want, but if kids ain't interested - they ain't interested.

High tech startups (and when they are seen by the public to be successful) are good role models covering entrepreneurship, engineering, design etc.

So I'd argue that putting money into science, tech, entrepreneurship _is_ doing good for the education of our children. (I'd rather my daughter looked up to the likes of notch than some x-factor winner).

Listen to Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson on NASA whose budget could equally be spent on education, welfare etc full episode at 34m 30s http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/28/2909148/on-the-verge-episo...
Linux all the way
As a Mozilla employee that strongly supports the right of all persons to marry, let me be the first to say: who the hell cares? At the end of the day, what he believes doesn't matter to me or anyone else.
First Eucalyptus moves for AWS API offical blessing from Amazon and now cloudstack becomes an Apache Project. Looks like the private Cloud space is just heating up with lots of moves by companies to become the de-facto Open source alternative to AWS.

Lots of parallels to the Desktop space (MS Vs Linux flavors)