skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
-Instead of leveraging your network for recommendations, ask for advice and tips on your product (then go out and execute on them).

I think they are trying to optimize the wrong things. I'd much rather they spend a few days testing your business model and hacking on the business than the YC app itself. You'll probably learn more that way. Plus if your business model is successful and you have traction, it's really helps your app.

Chances are you won't find a spot into YC, but you'll probably still have your company in a few months. Which one do you really want to optimize? I'd go for optimizing the business with less of a focus on the YC app.
Reading about projects like this always helps me when I ask myself the question whether I'm working on "stuff that matters". Not that I think everything could (or should) be on the same scale as huge science projects that lay the groundwork for our species' future, but it provides a reference point for comparison.
Which is exactly the unfuriating thing.
Final sentence of the third-to-last paragraph: initiatng should be initiating
Didn't y'all know that Google Wallet was blocked before you bought the phone?
Not installing Silverlight. Sorry.
This reminds me a lot of those "How to get into Oxbridge" type books. Not everything can be reduced to a process.
Google Analytics Premium vs. Standard
SpiderOak is Dropbox for the security obsessive (Arstechnica review)
I read with showdead on, so I always see the comments from the hellbanned.

If I think the comment is worthwhile, I upvote it anyway. I don't know if it does any good, or if it maybe eventually leads to them being unbanned, but I try to help out if they're contributing.
This would be a symptom of developers also being the sysadmins.

On another note, Microsoft typically has good documentation but I feel that they need a very simple 5 page 'Owners Guide' for some products that goes over the most important topics in a simple manner. We can't assume that only experts will use said products so at least provide a dead simple 'This is how to not screw yourself' guide.

The custom errors issue the article talks about is an insanely basic configuration error that is NOT the default. Someone started tinkering with a setting without realizing it's full extent.
Duplicate of New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3736247)
So this is more of a "expect this type of stuff to happen if this becomes the norm" deal?

Either way, interesting read and gave me some stuff to think about, as usual. Thanks.
This post points more to the absurdly litigious nature of hiring/firing. It's an interesting exploration of the matter. Approaching the problem of employee privacy at an oblique angle. It won't scare any HR departments though. Most have systems in place to create reasons for not hiring or firing. All that you've guaranteed is that the HR person will be making all hiring decisions.

Fundamentally your best defense against discrimination is being too good to ignore.
If they focused on #2, #1 wouldn't be so much of an issue. Instead they hire on meaningless metrics and utter BS like what you have on your Facebook profile instead of your ability to do the job.

One of my friends who is an awesome salesman and was recommended by the person hiring for the job was not hired for the position by HR because he doesn't have his GED. The guy is super smart and doesn't have his GED because of some unfortunate circumstances regarding his classes being on the 2nd floor of the school and having broken both legs.

Now he's going and finishing up his GED in a couple weeks and will continue the search.
Awesome. Otherwise the site is excellent.
This seems like a good strategy but I would only try it if you had a few different good references to check. The danger that the email gets ignored because the person let it slip through the cracks is fairly substantial.

Maybe it could be improved to be super short and only ask for a simple "yes" answer so they can answer it right away instead of flagging and moving back to it.
the "certain things" might have had nothing to do with LGBT
Did a great interview with Naval of AngelList (video)
Viewing source of the internet around the time I was just starting elementary school. Educated me a bunch, especially since the internet back then was super-primitive. People were using VBScript back then. I had no mentors, so when I took a look at Javascript, I got confused as to what curly braces were ("Where's the endif? VBScript has endifs! And what are those silly {} things for?"). I finally got into PHP around middle school early high school when I wrote a really primitive webcomic system for a friend, modeled after megatokyo. Full of SQL injection holes, though I started to figure out and create my own OOP-ish system.

Later: Python (Pylons), PostgreSQL, Java Servlets, Jersey, Play Framework, Jackson (in roughly that order, omitting a lot of detail).

Only ever had a mentor who taught me new things once, when learning the servlets stuff. The rest of the time, I had no mentorship :(.
Is there a list of companies that admit to or have been accused of asking for Facebook passwords?
Thanks, I didn't realize that. Specifically, this link mentions it:

http://www.zeromq.org/area:faq#toc5

Appreciate the heads-up!
>But I'd be shocked beyond belief if Draw Something does a billion in revenue this year.

I think that was Jach's point: that omgpop was overvalued.
Though I understand the idea, I'm not too familiar with how A/B tests are performed in practice. I would've assumed you'd need a lot of data to get statistically significant results. Is the volume of data that you need to achieve that statistical significance well-understood and do you actually have the traffic to collect that amount of data? (I guess I imagined that it would require huge amounts of data.)
That's probably true in general, although if you don't get hired due to discrimination and then sue, usually you avoid the conflict by asking for a cash settlement instead of a job.
A toilet made out of gold.
Nice catch. Just turned it off. Thanks for the reminder :)

Hope your girlfriend enjoys the videos! If she has any issues, questions, comments, concerns, etc, we're around to answer any questions.
There are many employers who feel that they're entitled to your salary history. Some see this as a sensible request, but it always struck me as a spectacular invasion of privacy.
For a flat annual fee of $150,000.

Contact sales for more information.
This deserves a downvote.

Horrible idea. Most companies have their policies of not giving references either way. Lawsuits over good references (for people who turned out not to be good) have occurred, and even though the probability of a plaintiff victory is low, who wants to deal with that pain in the ass? Most people are fine saying that someone was essentially decent and worked hard, but aren't going to go out on a limb to say that someone who no longer works for them is "EXCEPTIONAL".

Also, what if the person doesn't remember his boss's email or gets it wrong? What if his boss is three companies away by now? Lots of false negatives here.

I think reference checks are not essential for junior hires-- not having references is a warning sign, but I'd take a chance and decide fast on someone if necessary if he wasn't going to be in a managerial role-- but I'd require references from past subordinates (2 per company) from anyone being hired into a managerial role. I actually think subordinate and peer references are far more useful than managerial ones: if you want to see someone's true character, ask people he had power over.
What is infuriating is that there is no political will to put a legal stop to this practice. I suspect that this means that as businesses learn how to alleviate the OP's concerns that they will do it more and more as time goes on, until it becomes the new normal.

Libertarianism being the dominant political philosophy of the moment such encroachments seem inevitable.
IT's Hottest 'Necessary Evil'
Cloud has a lot of different meanings these days so it's nearly impossible to really define it, but it is possible to think of them in various different contexts:

- Consumer cloud or SaaS for consumers (gmail, rdio, facebook, etc)
- SaaS for business (salesforce, box, etc)
- Cloud Infrastructure Services (amazon, rackspace, etc)
- Cloud Application Services - higher level services on top of cloud infrastructure (heroku, iron.io, mongolab, papertrail)
- Private clouds (which can include several of the above)
- etc...

In this article I'm referring to cloud application services because those are the high level services that just take a couple lines of code and a couple of minutes to configure and use.
It took some adjusting but now I prefer the feel of a MBA keyboard.
Sorry to be dense, but is this fiction or an actual open resignation letter? I don't know anything about raganwald.
Its as simple as "There are certain questions you can't ask during job interviews". Its been illegal to ask these questions for 20 years, and nearly no one disputes this. A peak at the prospect's Facebook page answers all of them. This should be the biggest no-brainer in HR history.
Novocaine: painless high-performance audio on iOS and OS X
Fictional. raganwald is too much of a slacker to be hired as a Director of Software Development
My first real project was a CMS written in Perl for a hardware review website in 1996 or 97. No database backend. The CMS created html files (maybe shtml) and allowed them to be edited. Primitive but it worked.
Do you know why small startups/companies don't have an HR person right off the bat? It is because the damn concept is demeaning at the very least.

Who wants to be thought of as a "resource"? Above all else I feel like culture fit is the #1 priority in hiring someone. And if a company's culture encourages peeking into peoples' private lives that is disgraceful.

The modern corporation is a vestige of the 1900s where factory workers all had to show up to a central location and toil for hours on end.

Is it possible to create a future where a "company" has thousands of employees but still retain all the benefits of a small group? Already we see it happening. Perhaps the 21st century will bring about this dynamic shift.
heh :) thanks
Thanks to all who contributed responses, it has been quite interesting to see what people have written. While this is only a small sample of responses I've gone through and identified mentions of companies where people have expressed an interest in working:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ApWuKfEFYQ6YdEd...

Interestingly, Google appear to be one of the places that people would still most like to work, although one respondent did indicate that as of six months ago Google would no longer be considered.

From a personal perspective, I found the following also interesting:

- While a few people were interested in working at GitHub, it's less than I would have expected.

- Khan Academy (and other accessible learning solutions) have people's attention

- I was the only person that indicated that working for Mozilla would be something they would like to do. Not sure why this is.

Anyway, it's if you still want to submit a response, that would be awesome, and the survey form is available at the following url:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEdlOGd...
Launch a startup
That may be the best defense against discrimination, but many people are discriminated against who simply aren't that good, yet are still good enough to deserve to make some kind of living at some kind of job.
Posix 'capabilities' are a neutered version of actual capability security such as capsicum in FreeBSD. Linux is trying somewhat to go this way with seccomp2 and perf but Linux is Linux and things usually evolve by bolting on additions instead of fixing the core problem. I honestly don't see why Linux doesn't adopt capsicum instead of reinventing the same thing.. poorly.
strange, i can't upvote this one :-(
Non-optional field?

Did they ask for a blog url as well? Was it optional?

Facebook can be used as promotional tool for a business, hence why a Facebook url could be relevant.
When I was working in finance I probably used most of the stuff I learnt from undergrad CS (concurrency theory, network protocols, information theory, complexity theory). It's not often I had to do stuff that pushed at the edge of CS (except maybe with lock-free algo design where industry is ahead of academia) but I'd often need to use my CS training to figure out clever ways to apply standard techniques.

In the startup world I've not used my CS knowledge as much, but am starting to do some data-mining stuff which is more theory heavy.
It certainly got me interested. After reading your post, I find myself wondering why any employer would tolerate the potential liability.
Hiding Windows
I wouldn't respond. I would just find it douchey.

You should already be convinced that the person is exceptional (in talent) or at least good enough to hire before you start messing around with references. The purpose of a reference check is to make sure the person isn't either (a) lying about his background, or (b) seriously harmful. For (b), I don't think references are the solution but I can't think of anything better. Unfortunately, there's no character test that can be done in a few hours of interaction.
c'mon hacker. That is what Austin Powers would want.
Best of April Fools' Day 2012
But thank you for spreading the love! We plan on more action in the near future.
It's important to draw a line in the sand where you will launch, say, "when I get X done, we will launch". Then make sure you stick to it. If you plan well, and you know your customers, this should work.

It seems like the real problem here is just not knowing your customers. By all means you should be beta testing with your friends and anyone else you can guilt into helping you. Don't launch blind.
Something seems a bit fishy about the latest data points in those graphs. Firefox 3.5, Chrome versions < 10 and IE6 all had superb months.
Definitely the best suggestion. He may not need to graduate to get a spot at a new company, but you learn a lot more than just books at college.
Yes. To save people a few clicks:

https://github.com/tpope/
FreeBSD 9 has another neat option - Capsicum (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/). If you're interested in a good way forward, have a look.

Authorization will always be hard because working out what each person should be able to access and then giving a meaningful way of describing that is hard.
I am a gay fundie transgender black jewish pregnant woman with narcolepsy who has beat cancer, here is my FB passwd.
Honestly, this was my same response. I may enjoy what I'm doing, but to be a part of something like this. Wow. I can't even imagine what it would be to be a part of something this amazing and huge.
Oh I wasn't worried about them being antigay or anything at all, much more so that HR forces them to be that careful and tip-toey about HR practices during recruiting.

edit: to be clear, they were specifically about being LGBT. And I don't necessarily think that sort of PC-ness should be absolutely required, but I'm unhappy to tell you that there are still plenty of discriminatory people out there.
I was just thinking the same thing about Rails
So, is the resignation due to fear of litigation or because of the moral quandary ? Clearly, the author was okay with looking at the FB profiles of the candidates and would have probably continued to do so, had he not been threatened twice on the same day. I wonder why he could not refuse to indulge the HR, especially since he held a pretty important position in the company.
But most ATMs move to Windows XP, strangely enough.

To watch them boot, you only need a power failure. Strangely enough, ATM is often not even plugged in UPS.
Alexis Ohanian's Thoughts on Facebook Vs. Google
They don't pay for ads directly. They pay for Google products to be placed on the iPhone. The last estimate I saw was about 50% of total revenue. They pay 0% to place their products on an Android device.
Well, at least I'm not the only one who took your post literally.
The argument is interesting. I feel like the reason it's overlooked might be a realization that once you have to make such an argument, all is lost, evil has won, everything decent will come to an end, &c.
I'm interested in pretty much the exact opposite of this product.

I've worked on a few apps where I need to pre-render some high-quality images and include them in the app bundle. In some cases they are relatively difficult to hand-draw in an image editor (at least the sort of image editors I can afford) and I've had to write a Mac app to draw the image. Basically the sort of thing that a CAD program would be good at.

So I'd love to have something that I can script in a relatively high-level language that renders really sharp antialiased graphics at 2x resolution with control over things like end caps.
Ah, the involuntary irony of saying "beautiful" is overused while calling these designs "awesome". The word you're looking for is "good". You're not awestruck by these designs, you just think they're good.
This law is offense, and on the internet.

Your move, Arizona.
If you're unhappy with it you needn't stick with it for 2 full years. Many iphone users like to stay on the latest model and have found that the Early Termination Fee if often not that much more (if any) then the Ebay value of phone.

For example here is completed listings for Verizon 4G Galaxy Nexus:

http://www.ebay.com/csc/i.html?LH_Auction=1&LH_ItemCondi...

One sold this morning for $390 incl a couple extras like car charger etc. If you bought in December your cancellation fee later this month will be $350 - (5 * $10) = $300. Now obviously that's not a free phone you're going to be out some money you laid down but you also can wait a bit more.
I tend to agree with China on this one, While I don't agree with a lot of what China does in America we have created this Disney World picture of America where everyone is a winner. At some point America translated equal opportunity to pursue ones dreams as equal abilities and almost everyone ignores the elephant in the room. Now I am not talking about racial or sexual identity issues I am talking about people in general. If a person does not get into college we all rally around them and demonize the big bad college to the extent that out of fear they lower their standard and inflate everyone's grades less someone be offended. This is just one example but this thinking has infected every area of public life. Now I am not a absolute meritocracy libertarian but at some level we have to judge people and their abilities on the merits, in start-ups this is self evident but as you move out to the big corporations millage varies widely.

I think given China's recent past with red communism the population is hungry and this creates a merit based system. They are outpacing us because they are simply rewarding individuals based on the merits, I understand that there is corruption and nepotism in China, but the reality is the way up in the working class is merit based, we need to return to the same thing in the US as well as figure out how to create a safety net of incentives to remove those that cannot, because they end up causing more problem than they solve when they are forced to do labor that they have no passion for. If we are going to compete we have to create a system where the competent excel and the incompetent are incentivised to get out of the way.
For my needs OSX is the perfect mix of a user friendly / powerful desktop OS. It's just a very elegant operating system. I feel like just about anything I need to do is very close to the surface. Anytime I am forced to use Windows or Linux, even though I am quite familiar with both, it seems incredibly convoluted to me. Not really difficult just unnecessarily complex and chaotic. OSX knows how to get out of the way and let me work. Since Lion came out I've been using full-screen apps + multi-tasking gestures extensively. I can go days without seeing anything besides my applications. The OS just disappears and leaves me alone when I don't need it.
"This is wrong" is completely valid and reasoned. Unfortunately "puts the business at risk, so much so I cannot hire in good faith and must resign" is FAR better understood by businesses - especially businesses do stuff that is wrong ALL the time.
Yes, sometimes we do need to address behavior from outside of school that bleeds over into school activities. For example, a few years ago students started fighting each other, filming the fights, and posting the videos to youtube. When it became something that unwilling students were being bullied into, and 50-100 students were leaving school to cheer on, the school appropriately got involved. "Off school grounds" does not always mean it's not school business.

I certainly don't mean that schools should look for stuff to investigate. I also don't see enough particulars from this article to make a clear judgement about this case. But when it is appropriate for the school to get involved, these situations can be handled without anyone handing over their password.
Benbria - Ottawa, Canada. We are looking for:

1. node.js developer

2. Product manager

3. Front-end designer and developer (Dual wielding)

4. Software coop or interns

Benbria powers notification platforms for some of the largest enterprises in the world. You'll be working with us on our new customer engagement product.

More info at http://www.benbria.com/company/careers
You do know that anyone can already look up your Facebook page anyway right?

Y-Combinator isn't asking for you to give them access to log in as you on Facebook, they're asking for a link to your public page.
The obsession with finding super-employees is the flip side of the obsession with finding the perfect process.

Does pretending you hire only exceptional employees help you believe that you're exceptional? Or does running an exceptional workplace help you hire exceptional employees? Would an exceptional employee REALLY be able to make a difference where you work? Or would they just ground down by an ordinary organization?
排毒养颜胶囊怎么样
Of course not, and nobody here thinks that.
I would buy worldwide copyright limit: 5 years and everything is public domain. The same for software patents.
Or you could pay up front/at regular intervals (health insurance? homeowners insurance? renters insurance? Car insurance? extended warranties, etc), and reduce the surprise factor, thereby permitting you to spend money on other things, knowing you won't need to spend more money on {car, house, health} because it's already taken care of ahead of time.

To some people, the value of peace of mind is huge.
Yes, he confirms further down in the comments that this is a fictional story.
Useless as software engineers. We've had 'programmers' that could not FizzBuzz, ones that didn't know the difference between 0 and NULL, ones that could not read an E-R diagram, and so on. So these days when we hire a software engineer you don't get to round 2 if there's no degree on your resume.
Sorry, we don't hire people who wear blue belts.

Best of luck to you.
Separate users for separate daemons provides an informal "privilege separation." If apache starts misbehaving it will not be able to write to any of the files that belong to postfix.

What is it that you do not understand in regards to modern web applications?
I'd expect the converse. The harder it is to fire someone; the more paranoid you get about the hiring process.
Wow, congratulations. I can't believe you started this at 15. I'd like to hear some details about the architecture and how you got it to work so quickly.
Move over Tebowing, Draping is On Next.
Is it just me, or does the person who wrote this sound like a snob?

* "In a startup, you can’t afford to hire B-players."

* "...a technique I’ve come to call it the “average-need-not-apply” method."

* "You saved yourself from hiring a B-player, or worse."

* "...employers can make better hiring decisions and make the hiring process better for everyone involved – except maybe the B-players."