skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps I can try to convince you of our long term vision: developers increasingly take their work online, which results in a mountain of professional data. A lot of it is meaningless, but some of it can be woven into interesting stories.

We're still trying to find the best approach to this, but in essence, our mission is making sense of this data. Some of this will have nothing to do with popularity - say, we might give you a concise overview of someone's code or professional thoughts. Other metrics will use social activity only as a rough validation. For example, if someone has 20 watchers on GitHub, they're definitely not a celebrity, but they have crossed a very meaningful threshold of "someone cares about this person's work".

Does that sound like a good direction to you?
Haha, nope, lots of PhD students and junior profs that have their act together.
Just this morning, I was thinking about metrics. It should be possible to develop a set of metrics for code quality that would apply to apps using particular languages and libraries. These metrics would be general and very imperfect, but they would still have some utility. For example, it would be fairly easy to develop an automated metrics program to run on a given Ruby on Rails app. Things like depth of nesting in code, reported errors per statement, average lines of code per function.

What if there was a website where you could download a metrics app, which would take the measurements, then upload the data to a web app, where someone could login and see how well their shop stacks up in comparison to the general population of shops using the same language and library?

This would give hiring shops some way to quantify the maturity of the shops a prospective hire has worked.
Figure is the fun music-making app for instant inspiration
The problem is, what do you do about dual/multi licensed projects, or projects which contain code that's under a mixture of licenses?

All questions that were answered over a decade ago by sites like SourceForge. Though not perfect, their solution was using tags for each license, and letting developers tag their project with multiple licenses (among other attributes, like language used, development state, etc.). This tagging system was called the Trove system, but since a software company has named itself "Trove Software", my last few Google queries didn't lead me to the origins of the system, only Freshmeat and SourceForge's references to the name.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sourceforge/wiki/Software%2...

http://freecode.com/articles/fm3s-fresh-features-tagging
The sheer mass Google has and their control of search represents a huge barrier to entry in this field. Like it or not, they are a monopoly.

The majority of advertisers are familiar with Google's advertising platform as search users. Given a choice between an unknown startup and Google to advertise their own business they'll choose Google, hands-down.

You and other investors would have to throw tens of millions of dollars (ore more) at a startup in order to mount a serious challenge to Google's supremacy.

If you can beat them at search you can probably mount an attack on their advertising business. Without that it'll probably be very difficult to convince publishers and advertisers to switch sides.
Adobe releases open source malware classification tool
"It may sound nuts, but I’ve found that it’s easier to make progress on mega-ambitious goals than on less risky projects. Few people are crazy enough to try, and the best people always want to work on the biggest challenges. We've also found that “failed” ambitious projects often yield other dividends."

Loved this comment! Out of curiosity, are there any other failures at Google (apart from the ones he mentioned) that are used for different purpose than the one intended?
Hotel Wifi JavaScript Injection
its hillarious you present valid evidence, and people vote you down. Google is evil.. rabble rabble. Yes this was just one case.. without hearing the full story .. this example just proves that theres more to the story.
The writing style reminded me a lot of the book "Leadership and self-deception" (http://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Self-Deception-Getting-out-...) in which a guy shows up at a new job and gets a day-long welcoming from the CEO, during which they slowly go through the idea of putting people in boxes and what to do about it.

The ending of raganwald's post especially was similar in tone with "You belong here. We'll do great things together".

edit: "they slowly go through the idea of putting people in boxes and what to do about it" Hmm, this sounds kind of odd when you don't know the book I guess :) To clarify: in the book, you put people "in a box" basically when you have prejudices about them and look at things through that angle only. Or something like that.
Also try ValueClickMedia, in the past they paid a lot better for me than the alternatives you mentioned. Get someone on the phone though, don't try their automated application process.
Why why why are they having a two dimentional represntation of a 1 dimentional data point? If they wanted something like this to work you should use squares instead of circles regardless.
It is a plot by the Cybermen to take over and you WILL be upgraded.
Avon katalo
> Advertising is the only thing recording labels
> bring to the equation now days

Also:

* Payola... errr.. I mean radio air time

* Connections to top-notch producers / audio engineers / directors (music videos) / etc.
Great stuff, love node2dm, and didn't know about statsd + graphite.
I have a gripe with the opener.

> At Clearspring we like to count things. Counting the number of distinct elements (the cardinality) of a set is challenge when the cardinality of the set is large.

On a turing machine, you're always operating on sets with the same cardinality as the integers.
Heh. My wife was turned down for a product management position because she did not send a thank you note. She forgot because she was (we were) so excited about the position.

The hiring manager went back to the recruiter asking for somebody else "just like" my wife.

(Loved the conversational format. "Bertie Wooster" is an inspired choice for that style of hiring...)
How a geek dad and his 3D printer aim to liberate Legos
Thanks! This was my first node.js project, would love any feedback on it.
Congrats Ariel, Aaron, and Brian! Textbook industry needs disruption.
Great comment. May I suggest for discussion the following proposition:

There is a difference between narrowing the pool of applicants by being specific about things directly relevant for the job and narrowing the pool of applicants by being specific about things only indirectly related to the job.

“We’re looking for Haskell Programmers” is not the same thing as, “We like to hire MIT Graduates."
Linux Kernel Developers Detail Top Gripes
Appeals court gives Viacom another shot in billion-dollar YouTube lawsuit
Ow, My Trademark (Need Legal Help w\ Infringement)
TL;DR Version:
Someone started using my company name in commerce about three weeks after I started using it. I have first use in commerce and (as of this week) the trademark. What I don't have is much money for legal representation or the legal know-how to fight this pro se.

The web hasn't been very helpful, does anyone know of an IP lawyer or start up legal help desk for situations like these?

--

About a year ago I started building a company: Domain purchased, design commissioned, business cards printed, code started. But it's not a weekend hack-a-thon type project, it's more of a slow burn long-term project.

About three months into building it full-time (I saved up and quit my job to pursue it) I went to register the twitter handle before heading off to a convention... Only it was taken... I started poking around to find that accounts on almost all of the various social networks were registered, and a shop at an online marketplace under the name was open for business.

The name itself is unique but familiar... Even more, the name uses an odd spelling for one of the terms.

I did some research and found that my first use in commerce bested her by at least 3 weeks, so I applied for the trademark, and contacted her to make sure that she knew that I was using the name (But, I was nice! I did it in a: "It sucks that we both started using the name around the same time, but I was there first." sort of way.)

This was in June, 2011.

I received the trademark a few days ago, but, since applying for it she has started a website under the name ("www.[trademarked-name]ontheweb.com" As if our site wasn't "on the web"?) and formed an LLC ([Trademarked Name LLC.]) What's worse is that she has started using my tagline in various interviews and articles written about her.

It's kind of surreal, she has a degree in business and is pursuing an MBA as well, so I'm not sure why she would register the name everywhere except at the USPTO? It feels like she's simply acting in bad faith.

I'm completely self-financed so I don't have a lot of money to burn in legal fees.

Does anyone know of an IP lawyer or start up legal help desk for situations like these
After a lot of experimenting on a wiki hosting service I run (editthis.info), I found that putting ads way at the bottom of content, and just putting one ad tended to work better than any other location. You have read all that you will read, and you don't mind being distracted to go off and see what an ad will lead you to (my guess).
I wrote something very similar today in a response to another comment on another article..., also about the british/american divide (and it might also be about Oxbridge)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3802440

The quoted parts are actual quotes from the individual application processes, for what it's worth.
One takeaway I got from the oil uptick a few years back (~$150/barrel, if I recall), is that people will change their behavior. In 50 years, driving habits continued trending up and up, but in that time people actually drove less.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out what that means. They actually changed their lifestyles to accommodate the pinch they felt. Carpooled. Took fewer road trips. Consolidated trips. And it wasn't even an issue of shortage; it was purely speculative increases.
TL;DR: Golan Levin designed printable pieces which can be used to connect previously incompatible toy types together (LEGO, Playmobil, DUPLO, etc).
As a consequence, this raised a myriad of copyright infringement questions for the future of 3D printable content.
Am I the only one that really has NO idea what Boundless does?

"Boundless is putting students back in control of their education." is extremely vague.

Could they possibly just summarize what their product is? I'm guessing this is some kind of e-textbook? What is a textbook replacement? Are you replacing the physical format of a textbook into an eBook? Are you proposing an alternative (like interactive learning?)

But if the textbook publishing industry is suing you, you must be doing something right.
Google Maps is in a rough spot right now. They're not better than their competitors, so most of their users are just there out of momentum. If Google does anything to annoy their users, masses of them will leave for Bing Maps or OSM. If they want to make some money, they will have to improve their product first.
To play devil's advocate for a second. They do offer a bit more than just advertising. And that in itself is pretty important as well, even if you are actually good.

Record labels have a lot in common to VCs, sure you can bootstrap your company and do all the needed marketing and development yourself, go viral and scale without getting money from anyone. But for some companies taking money from VCs make sense, they wouldn't know what to do nor have enough resources to without help.

But I do agree with what you're trying to say. While record labels do more than just advertising. Everything they do is getting easier and easier to do without them. They're becoming irrelevant in many different fronts. I just don't believe they're 100% irrelevant... yet, but that only means there's room for startups to innovate.
Please don't miscategorize asking for honest business practices as "a more lenient stance on fraud". What's Google's alleged to have done here -- deprived payment for services rendered -- is morally equivalent to fraud.
makes absolutely no sense, play by the rules. And theres no needs to solve problems in other ways.
Consumers are not much hurt by false negatives in fraud detection. Consumers are significantly harmed by false positives because they lose access to ad-supported content. I would still be regularly updating my old blog and entertaining my readers if it were profitable like it was before Google accused me of being a scam artist and shut down my account.
Show HN: Incredibox is a great way to make some amateur music
Palo Alto for 3 days, how to maximize time? (Angels/Networking Based)
Hey,

It's my first rodeo to Palo Alto and i'm trying to get the most out of my trip. It's my first go with a funded startup, and I'd love to get familiar with the area and try to network/setup connections for the next visit.

Guessing this has been well covered on here, but the search function isn't treating me very well. Feel free to post links.
"In addition, we gave many of our products, such as Google Search, a visual refresh, and they now have a cleaner, more consistent, and beautiful look. "

This is just bizarre.

As pg said in his essay "Ambitious Startups"

"Google used to give me a page of the right answers, fast, with no clutter. Now the results seem inspired by the Scientologist principle that what's true is what's true for you. And the pages don't have the clean, sparse feel they used to. Google search results used to look like the output of a Unix utility. Now if I accidentally put the cursor in the wrong place, anything might happen."
The lawsuit is mentioned in the title, but glossed over in the blog post. The blog post claims that the publishers are trying to "copyright facts."

But the actual complaint ( http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor... ) suggests that the publishers allege much more. You don't have to agree with the publisher's claims (you obviously don't), but be fair and give the full picture.

The publishers claim that Boundless is copying the chapter titles, subtitles, subheadings, and pagination of each book, using pictures of the book as marketing materials, and then paraphrasing 100% of the text of each book.

It's true that you can't copyright facts, but paraphrasing on such a fine level is often considered copyright infringement. Even Wikipedia forbids close paraphrasing unless the original material is in the public domain or there is absolutely no other way to express it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Close_paraphrasing

Universities also consider close paraphrasing to be plagiarism:
http://library.csusm.edu/plagiarism/howtoavoid/how_avoid_par...

And a court 100-ish years ago found that a close copy of an economics textbook was a form of copyright infringement, in a very similar pre-digital case (it's not like the digital era is the first time that people have noticed that books are expensive):http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macmillan_Co._v._King

Should that doctrine apply here? Is it a good doctrine in the digital era? There's room for debate. But you'd never know that from the blog post.
The University of Waterloo in Canada.
Great school if you really love math. But like I said, too many of my professors didn't make the slightest effort to relate the theoretical concepts to the real world.
How To Shoot Yourself In The Foot (Programming)
But what could go wrong, its only peoples hard earned money
That sounds like a great idea, (the "opportunity" you mention) but how does one avoid becoming "just another ad network"? There are so many fringe players out there who provide low value and poor customer service that many website owners (myself included) prefer to avoid them.

I'd love to see ideas in this space. I'd even collaborate with other hackers to build something along these lines if there was a clear vision of what success looks like.
Cool story.

In other news I think this is neat idea. Basically your goal is abstract me from the underlying workings of all these different APIs so I can use a single API with a single style, uniform responses etc...
My suggestion since this involves essentially a domain name is to file a UDRP to get control of her domain. Of course nothing will prevent the person from registering a different name but you aren't going to be able to handle the cost of the trademark case.

Cost of a UDRP should be $5000 including attorney fees.
Include Wordpress Template Files In Your Theme
Why The JOBS Act Is Good for Startups - and for America
Startup Visa: American by Choice, Bootstrapper by Passion
I would like to add that one of the points in the discussion was a simple application of a much broader point. Chen says, "It's bad enough that your own marketing efforts drive down channel performance, but usually once your marketing efforts are working, your competitors quickly follow."

The broader point is to think about the world in terms of feedback loops -- what we might call feedback theories. Our modern understanding of nuclear chain reactions works this way; once you get above a certain density, a neutron will be likely enough to hit a fissionable isotope, that the average number of neutrons produced per neutron is more than 1.0 -- then the neutron makes itself more likely, the chain reaction grows exponentially with positive feedback, and boom. Otherwise it will just peter out to 0 from negative feedback. Evolution by natural selection is also a feedback theory, if you focus on the genes themselves.

Coming back to the economic examples, it is now considered a relatively good economic model to assume that the stock market already knows everything that there is to potentially know about a company. If you just imagine that there was some person who magically started moving money to the day's top performers, you can reasonably envision that others might try to jump on this magical predictor, then attempted to bail out just before they did -- but so many would potentially sign up for this that it would damp that predictor's own profits to have a massive sell-off just before they were supposed to sell themselves, negative feedback. It's thought that on a smaller scale this would tend to happen with insider knowledge. Or, for another econ 301 example, there is a powerful argument that competitive markets are efficient, because they must be among the least profitable markets around. Why must they be the least profitable? Because if competing is easy, then anyone in a less profitable market cuts their losses and jumps into the competitive market instead, which concentrates profits in the market they're leaving and dilutes profits in the market they're joining. And if there's no profit, there's no room for inefficiency. (There's also a sort of odd pseudo-Marxist corollary: that agents within a market always want the market to be less competitive, so that their profits can be higher.)

Anyway, the law of shitty clickthroughs amounts, I think, to a particular feedback theory of marketing. If you market well, that generates negative feedback, both in the form of people following your example, and in the form of people getting desensitized to your ads.
PHP is not such a bad language. Of course it has its quirks. However bad code is written by a bad developer, not by a bad language. You can write beautiful code in PHP too.

And the huge code base from Facebook is impossible to rewrite it in even a few years. Throwing away knowledge, tools, and tested code.
You know what? I totally mentally replaced the word "white hacker" with "white hat", and only realized it after you pointed it out.
Pinterest's Invited To The Billion Dollar Startup Club, But Will It Accept?
While I enjoyed the article and its message, I found the spelling error on the resume example underwhelming. A professional's resume is the veneer they present to strangers. It's like the login page for your app. Do you want a spelling error there when it is so easy to avoid? It screams sloppy and lazy in the same sentence. Maybe the general quality of professional devs is so bad that sloppiness and laziness are better than the alternative... ?
Rich Kids Shatter Silicon Valley's Golden Meritocracy Image
I was more annoyed that the karma system wasn't attributed to other sites who used it first. Which is to say not terribly.
> With the # of ads I've seen with that tag, I'd imagine the "local mom" to be some sort of genius, making $5000/week, getting dermatologists to hate her b/c of some wrinkle miracle while losing 800 lbs in 2 weeks.

800 pounds indeed. It's because of this incredible weight-loss that "local moms" have an extremely short half-life and are in fact rarely observed outside laboratory conditions.
"You aren't allowed to play" because you use a good strategy is a terrible system.

Blame the ruleset, not the smart players who learn the basic way the game works.

Bughouse does stand up to scrutiny of strong chess players, it's just the way to win is different than what they think the game is about.

You're still completely misunderstanding. This has nothing to do with being Kasparov. The point is that simple strategy changes, using the chess skill they already have no more, would make then far more effective at bughouse, because the bughouse rules do not work they way they are imagining.

None of this is "win at all costs" or anything. It's just a simple fact: a 15 second time advantage in bughouse is as good as a substantial amount of pieces. A one minute advantage is almost always game over. Their play is disregarding how the game works -- it's strategically poor in simple ways that they could learn to do better in a 15 minute lesson -- and you are wrong to blame people who use a part of the game (the clock) for applying basic strategy that any of them could learn in 15 minutes.

Games that rely on following special unwritten rules, such as objectively bad time management (vaguely defined for how badly you're required to play), are broken.
Do you keep a work journal/diary? How?
I've observed over the years that people who I respected as "good at what they do" disproportionately often use a journal to keep track of their work.

I'm starting a job soon and want to try doing this for myself as I'd like to be able to reflect on what it is that I do. One obvious solution to this is a bound paper notebook and pen, which have nice properties of taking both text and images easily with pen or pencil, but suffer from not being searchable and are yet another thing to carry. Also, as a software engineer I find I can type much faster than I can write.

Another option I'm investigating is using emacs and org-mode, but I haven't found a way to nicely embed images into emacs besides ASCII art with artist-mode, which I find to be relatively crude for the sort of sketching I typically do.

How do you guys go about journaling for work? If you include images along with your text, how do you do it? Bonus points for lightweight or portable solutions.
My question: is there an easy way to create simple, beautiful landing pages?

(1) Go to http://www.woothemes.com/ or http://themeforest.net/ or http://99designs.com/.
(2) Pay money (you can get some for €20, the price of a few beers!)
(3) Have theme!
No No NO. There really Really REALLY has never been a satisfactory set of metrics for code quality. Not for COBOL and not for rails.
Something that wasn't clear to me - as an employer - what do I get when I sign up? Do you have candidates' profiles like the sample one in the system, or I will have to provide my own candidates to filter through your system to get a profile like that?
GrubHub.com my friend
Wow, thanks so much for the words. I want to keep improving it, but some other ventures I'm working on have been eating up a lot of time. I'd be happy to get further input.
Dallas Entrepreneur Launches STREETFUNDER to Promote/Enable Crowdfunding