skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds like you've gotten it completely wrong. He didn't mean people can't use ASCII art of write 'lol'. If you have an account and have a lot of subscribers you will notice many comments (obviously spam) which write lol, hello, hi etc and are not contributing anything to the conversation. These are people that just want to expose their account in as many places as possible (spammers).

Facebook aren't trying to stop people using phrases like 'lol'. In this case the filter made a mistake. Big deal. They need to continue to improve it. Anyone calling this censorship is idiotic.
It depends

I've hired great people without having them write code. (Or at least, not in a whiteboard)

Trust me, you can know a lot about a candidate without him or her writing a line of code (ok, maybe a line)

My favorite question: "Tell me about a bug you once solved". That will tell you loads about the candidate

Or ask him/her about the difference bewteen foldl and foldr

But, really, I won't use FizzBuzz again

"blah blah candidate has to write code" I won't use FizzBuzz

Be creative people, FizzBuzz is easy, but it's boring. And it's a bad filter (from experience).
I just started to feel this way too. Things that were not making sense are starting to make sense. It's a great time to be alive :)
The forum already has poor signal:noise ratio. Will you be doing anything to help that?
Just what my eyes told me when I looked at the page.

Looking now at the Typekit site (where the font comes from) I see that Adelle, indeed, is not recommended for body text by Typekit, only for headings.

The Typekit site offers some short explanations about what these recommendations mean:

Fonts recommended for paragraph text: “Recommended for continuous text at small sizes, these fonts possess a generous x-height and are manually hinted to perform well across operating systems.”

Fonts recommended for headings: “Recommended for short text at medium to large sizes, these fonts are generally more decorative and often served with PostScript outlines for improved rendering.”

A good place to start reading if you are interested in this is a post at the Typekit site again, part of a series on web fonts and font rendering:

http://blog.typekit.com/2010/12/17/type-rendering-review-and...

It includes this:

“All of the fonts tagged Paragraph have been manually hinted to look great on screen at text sizes in every major browser/OS mix. Use these recommendations to make informed decisions about how well a font will render, knowing that they are backed up by Typekit’s font diagnostic tools.”

More generally:

I have found that often—I’m tempted to say more often than not, but I have not the data to back this up—designs using web fonts are worse than they would be without web fonts. When you consider how complex the issue of good rendering across devices and operating system is, that’s not suprising. It is interesting though that even professionals—even people who teach web design and who write books on web design—make such mistakes.
JQuery API site is down
None taken... I've added some info about me on https://rayburst.com/company

Here's what it says:

"Long Nguyen has nearly 10 years experience as an enterprise build and software configuration management consultant and remembers having to install his first Linux server from floppy images that were downloaded using a 14.4K modem in his Harvard dorm.

Long has a PhD in Physics from The University of Chicago and got a crash course in the world of startups as part of the YC W08 session."
But..but..Everyone's told me that A players only hire A players, and hiring anyone else would sink my company. I'm an A player and only Linus himself will be good enough to write my CRUD app. I wonder when he'll be available..
You know what makes your point so hilarious is you could replace Facebook with "internet".

The internet is nothing more than a controlled place for spamming. The internet is for attractive girls to spam themselves to hundreds/thousands of males. The internet is trying to monetize all of this noise without scaring away its users.

Now let me ask you. Is that ALL the internet is for ? Is that ALL Facebook is for ?
Good list. Another big one: Don't preface your question with a thirty second ramble about you and your background/career/company...nobody cares.
That, too! :)
If you want to get rid of spam simply ban programmatic posting to walls from apps.

What users get up to is a lot less bad than what apps do.

And get rid of the 'like' un-feature. That will go a long way to restoring sanity.
It's crazy to think music in America was actually commoditized before being distributed and consumed in recorded form. Back before record labels there were sheet music publishers. Instead of a phonograph or a CD player, people owned pianos and vocal chords. When the latest smash hit came out, you went and bought the sheet music and performed it yourself for your friends and family. That was the American popular music industry.

So it's worth asking, is the thing of value here the actual sheet of paper with the music written on it, or the grooved metal cylinder, or the vinyl, or the mp3? Obviously yes, to some extent.

But imagine if you were around in the 1850s and one of your buddies stops by and bangs out "Old Folks at Home" on the piano, totally by heart. And maybe after a couple of times, you kinda figure it out yourself. And then you go to somebody else's house and do the same thing.

Is this the 1850s equivalent of peer-to-peer file sharing?

You start to realize, a song has been bound to a physical object for so long, we've begun to confuse the music -- the actual information -- with the physical object that holds the information. Maybe back in the 1850s there were renegades who ran around teaching people Stephen Foster songs and the publishing companies took a hit and sent the sheriff after them. It seems ridiculous but that's basically what's happening today with the RIAA and file sharing.
1) The text on your page is too small for me to read comfortably.

2) Zoom is broken on your front page, so I can't fix #1.
Code 511 sounds really useful. If captive portals actually implemented this, it would help efforts like Convergence[1] to handle captive portals gracefully, rather than having to play a heuristic guessing game.

It'll be interesting to see if browser vendors and captive portal vendors both implement this, and what level of adoption they both reach.

[1] - http://convergence.io/
Best bug I helped find was a flaw in some FPGA code for a special DAQ board for a muon detector I was building. When the board was in a temperature above about 74F, the FPGA would often (but not always) fail to initiate some ADCs correctly because some delays would cause part of the circuit to go out of sync, and when it was below, it always worked fine. So, testing in the office worked fine, but running the board outside wit a slightly different setup in the summer would mean a failure, but not always.

The horrible part was after all this, I had to wire up a bunch of NIM modules instead with all the special logic (coincidence/anti-coincidence triggers + a bunch of other stuff so I could have separate binned energy counters) and then calibration manually because the engineer for that board was busy with other things to fix the bug.

I would have loved to tell this story at an interview for a job, except I could almost never get past HR drones, probably because my degree said physics and not CS or EE.
in case someone else is as dense as I am, apparently.. :)

the ones of mention are those that say '(draft)' after them: 428, 429, 431, 511
I quickly redid the design of the landing page to make it easier to read and act upon. Obviously just some input for a proper a/b test.

I wanted to add a testimonial or link to an excerpt but it's getting late over here :)

http://imgur.com/fEV6Q
Bagels, Toasted
We've used moinmoin, which is nice.

Can't use vim.

Maybe Dropbox for teams?
Do people actually use FizzBuzz itself? I always thought it was just one example illustrative of the type of simple and quick-to-answer question that makes a good initial negative filter.
Cloud Computing for consumers: As easy as abc
"I wince every time someone says it's the FBI's job to catch criminals, and we should make it easier for them to do so. No, it's not their job to catch criminals, period. Their job is to catch criminals while protecting everybody's fundamental human rights. It's part of their job description, part of their raison d'etre, and yes, it's a tough job. If you can't accept a tough job, you don't deserve a badge."

Amen! It's not our duty to give up individual liberty in order to make it easier for the FBI or any other government organization to catch the fringe terrorists and criminal element.
Yes. Several people use it.
Those people aren't after an answer. They want the captive audience.
> Instead Apple realized cellphones would never be great MP3 players so even if they cannibalized some sales early on trying to maintain an artificial distinction would not be useful in the long run.

I believe they came at it from another way: if someone is going to eat at your sales (iPod), it might as well be you (iPhone). That's been Apple's mantra for a while.

And although anecdotal, most people I know with an iPhone (or Android smartphone) don't buy new iPods. And if they do, it's a lesser model (i.e. for excercise); not to the same value as before.
just linking it to a github page where no other info is on there about it isn't helpful .
Developers should not believe the HTML5 hype
shouldn't they have a backup site where it will automatically redirect if its down... but I guess a 301 redirect wouldn't work because "if its down its down".
True, but I am forced to say, correlation != causation ;)

It would provide evidence, however.
On the other hand, for many people this is their only opportunity to speak publicly and be heard, and question moderation has to remain sensitive to this.
Thanks for making this point.

I'm no fan of AT&T, but the childish, whiny sense of entitlement that's increasingly prevalent online is really disgusting.
"That's not how the best coders code, we offload most things to google searches"

If that's really what you think, you may want to reconsider who the "we" you're talking about are.
That is super helpful. You have gone above and beyond! I owe you one.
Hard to say. As other people have reported, total profit seems to be loosely correlated with price. I sell more at lower price points but total revenue is similar.

Some music apps make do really well but they're generally much less complex and technical than mine.
Metagasm: r/dataisbeautiful data stats
Related: asking questions that whilst widely applicable require a lot of detail for a worthwhile answer. Nobody can read your mind.
Really agree with "Ask a question, don't make a comment."

I was part of the audience for a Peter Molyneux talk recently, and half the questions just seemed to be statements. Was just thinking, what's a good answer to that?
We're definitely looking into the right way to turn this into a commercial product...
of course, a blog post like that is basically just worth sharing if the icons are free (which seems to be the case as I skimmed it). If I remember correctly these free icon pages were more colorful ones than described on css-tricks.com
I think ebooks will change the landscape less in the short term than Charles is supposing. The idea of 'genre' is a powerful one with a lot of momentum, and not a little utility independent of physical organization of books. Genre will continue to be a useful way for retailers to partition the power law to maximize sales.

I'm also hopeful that the growth of ebooks will make the promise of GoodReads or even the good old days of rec.arts.sf.written come true: that 'what you read' will become an ever more viable way to find birds of a feather for both book recommendations and social connections.

One interesting thing is that an e-ink e-book is particularly bad interface with which to find new titles. It's fine for buying something you know you want. But a real, internet connected PC is currently needed. I imagine this situation will get better.
I don't remember specific bugs in general. I think I try to block out the memories...
Hey, nice question. I'm writing it down in my worflowy, thanks.
Lots of power users have switched to Macs in recent years as well.
Hats and suits declined at the same time. Really, just a general reduction in formality.
Unless you spend a lot of time in the bright sunlight or out in the cold, today there is little reason to wear one so now they just look silly.

I kind of agree; some people look good in some hats, mostly though people look best in hats when the hat is serving some specific function.

OTOH, I know a few people, and see quite a few more, who wear hats all the time. Know a guy who was married in a hat. Know a guy who wears a wool cap no matter how hot it is.

I assume this is just some cultural difference, though I'd be interested in hearing from any all-the-time hat wearers how they came to decide this was a good thing.
Beautiful. People who think the world runs on money forget the people behind it sometimes. The world runs on those few, and that is a problem when only the few have it. Its not our job through violent revolution to bring about that change in distribution, but to find ways to help people achieve for themselves that level of equality. Bright future indeed!
Jobs Few, College Graduates Flock to Unpaid Internships
Show HN: my friday project: MOTP support for busybox login
Great article. Really like the Google Moderator idea as a deterministic way to eliminate blowhards and improve the value of conference sessions.

Has anyone seen it used for this purpose? Any other tools like this? It's an interesting mobile app challenge.
3rd party software needs to recompile with updated flags to make use of hardware acceleration.
If you truly want to practice your public speaking skills, one of the best ways to practice is to go to a non-technical public forum with an audience (a public lecture with Q&A - NOT a local government meeting) and try to say something (it helps if you have passion/conviction on what you are saying) in a concise yet convincing matter.

Toastmasters also rocks. I got my CTM years ago - advice is to find a club that is not affiliated with your workplace or anyone you really know (more freedom to fail without feeling self conscious)
...but at the cost of everyone else in the room's time combined?

Maybe if the person asking the question has no other opportunity to speak publicly and be heard, they should try to solve that instead as that is surely a more fundamental issue. Plus many of us in the room HAVE spent the time making sure we have well-read blogs, twitter accounts, etc
Google uses it to filter the questions asked to Larry and Sergey at TGIF and a lot of teams use it to source questions during team meetings (mine did while I was there).
Good to see that we're making good efforts at meeting our "articles about hiring" quota on HN.

I have this theory that hiring people is nowhere near as hard as this particular echo-chamber likes to think it is. Everyone thinks they need "rockstars" or "A Players" and is looking for the magical recipe for finding them, but I think for most positions, someone who is smart and technically competent and fits with your company's culture is entirely sufficient.

Most of the startups we talk about depend on good execution of a simple idea, not advanced technical skills[1]. I believe that a good leader with the right vision and the ability to articulate that to his or her employees can take smart people who fit well with the company and form them into people who will execute consistently well. Not only that, but this creates a belief system around engineering and product that is compounding and self-reinforcing.

Identifying technically competent people is not that difficult. If you were to read a few of the last 200 articles where we've talked about this, there are some common threads.

First this, always this:
a) Have them write at least a little bit of code to see that they actually know how.

Then pick a few of these. If at all possible spread the interviews out amongst a group of people so you can get different viewpoints.
a) Ask them some relevant programming questions and observe their answers. Focus on things related to the kinds of work they'll be doing in their job. Maybe work on a whiteboard, or even in a text editor. Maybe even a little bit of both.
b) Ask them a broader set of questions relevant to things like algorithms and data structures. Even for simple web apps, it helps to be at least conversant in the basics of these topics.
c) Ask them to see open source work, or if they have a profile, or maybe some code they wrote that they're comfortable sharing with you.

I really think that if you put someone in a room with a competent engineer for an hour, that engineer will be able to tell if the person they've been speaking to is a good engineer or not.
This question still haunts me.
Yes, I've used it before. I've also been asked to solve it in interviews.
It is often downright embarrassing to witness how the speaker has to stay interested and answer irrelevant or extremely niche questions in front of an audience.

The speaker has no such obligation.

The speaker should consider the audience at large and politely defer niche or obtuse or self-serving questions.
Agreed. Memory tends to be trigger-based for most of us mortals.

Even short-term, here's what I've noticed: I could verbally list seven terms and their definitions. If I then proceeded to ask you the definition of any one of those terms, you could probably tell me. But if I asked you to recite back to me all seven terms, you'd probably forget at least one or two.
Why the downvotes? It's an interesting question.
The small details the make you great
Are you focussing on the post in question, and what it says, or are you just focussing on the notion of a spam filter and silly comments? No one is arguing against spam filters. FB sends a lot of email that serves no purpose other than to try to get a user to log in. Is that "spam"? Would FB be opposed if an email provider filtered all that mail out of the user's mailbox?

The question is: Does the post in question appear to contribute anything to a conversation? Or not? Perhaps it appears to promote other websites and seems a bit short on "content"? What makes it "spam"?

Look at the words the post contains.

If FB is really having trouble with spam, then that speaks to the design of FB. Does every FB user need to use a website on the open internet, that any spammer can access, to contact their friends and family?

The FB employee says they shut off the filter. I think that speaks for itself.
Excellent book. The telco's clearly have the incentive and power to suppress competition. In fact, they are actively doing it through their legislative influence (e.g. state bans on public broadband networks) and vertical integration with content providers (e.g. Comcast/NBCU).

The moment both Apple and Google embrace an interoperable messaging standard and include a native OS app, SMS will suffer a quick death. In the meantime, consumers will continue to be gouged. It's truly a shame that Stephenson's nightmares have not yet come true.
I'm curious, is it really that hard to identify competent programmers? Surely asking a few technical questions that include some element of programming should be enough. I feel like there's about 5-10 articles on this subject every week, all of which say or or less the same thing. In very nearly every case that I've interviewed someone, I've been able to easily decide if they were a hire or a no hire about 20 minutes into the interview process. I'm sure for certain positions or certain companies who are solving difficult problems, things could be more complicated, but the vast majority of us just aren't in that situation.

It seems like the rather more difficult problem is getting competent programmers to want to work at your company and apply.
Arizona is just beautiful look at this view at this resort h... on Twitpic
Like iAd? ;)
It really helps to have someone willing and able to play the heavy. Someone who doesn't care if the questioner gets pissed at him or her.

Many speakers at tech conferences are not really good at the nuances of audience interaction so a moderator who can step in to keep things moving is big plus.
Show HN: FB hackathon HTML5 photo app, demoing in 2 hours
Is that a Sapphire and Steel reference?
One of the weirdest things I noticed about the military was the hat fetish -- all the rules about when a hat could or could not be worn (basically, all the times outdoor it was mandatory, except in certain uniforms; indoors, only if you were "under arms", which is distinct from just being armed), the fight over whether an elite (Ranger) black beret would get used by everyone, "no hat" zones outdoors (no hat/no salute areas where officers were in high density, and also in places where hats could be blown off and into critical equipment, like near aircraft), fights over whether an authorized hat (the boonie hat) would be authorized on specific bases, etc.

Outside of occupational hats (hard hats, etc.), the military is probably the last real holdout of hat use in the US.
Part of the issue with Windows is that the out-of-the-box scripting capability just wasn't there. Compare writing a batch script with a shell or perl script.

Add to that inconsistencies in how commands handled spaces in names and issues with having to escape the '\'s in generated command lines. I know I would have avoided all of it if I wasn't being paid (well) to do it.
The person you're replying to specifically pointed out that new ways of curating music are great too, and that s/he hopes they will co-exist.

Why do you think record labels can't provide value by curating content?

> And the fact that you're posting here on Hacker News makes me assume that you think it's working

I don't think merely reading this website means that anyone agrees every aspect of the startup ecosystem.
Hats are starting to come back into fashion in Australia, though nothing like in the article's photos. Hats were seen as old-fashioned, but over the past couple of decades, they've become much more common with schoolkids to protect from the sun. It's pretty common to pass a primary school at lunchtime and see every kid wearing the school cap. My guess is that with more kids growing up used to hats, there's less of a block to wearing them as an adult.

edit: on further thought, hats also used to be seen as something to wear with suits, and as people wore less in the way of suit-like clothing, hats went too. In more recent times, hats are used more and more with other kinds of clothing - if you see someone wearing a fedora in Australia, it's much more likely they're young and wearing casual clothing than someone in business wearing a suit.
This is slightly off-topic, but I remember reading about a European initiative for a standard mobile charger a while back. Did that actually happen?
http://httpstatus.es

I'm bias as this is my site, but I prefer it because you can link to each code and it doesn't rely on javascript affects to display the data, also a memorable URL :-)
Is this going to end up similar to a pirates vs. global warming graph?

As hat wearing went down car sales went up?
Though I personally feel this would be perfectly acceptable, the speaker might come off sounding like a jerk to some people.

I suggest the moderator "take the bullet" and make a statement similar to this blog and cut out questions that don't follow the rules.
Jury retires for weekend in deadlock in Oracle-v-Google verdict
For some reason I don't think this punishment isn't enough or will significantly impact them. Wouldn't the tracking information be much more valuable than 10 million dollars?
I'm sure people regret AT&T too for the same unlimited data and not delivering a network