skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reason many recruiters want .doc is so they can "reformat" it into the "house style". The CV you see may not much resemble what they wrote!

Ultimately the only solution to the HR problem is for the technical staff to do the entire screening process, but that won't happen (in large companies anyway) as why should the technical people be recruited differently to the marketing folks? What are they SPECIAL or something? Well, exactly.
"Beware of turning hobbies into jobs"

Don't most hackers turn their hobbies into jobs? How does that work for you?
Nah, you get lots of dead wood at any big company. Nature of the beast. The hiring practices are more like an initiation rite than a real quality indicator.

Plus, 15% would be a pretty small amount of deadwood at a company that size. It may just be specialists hired for departments that don't exist anymore or people that stopped caring 5 years ago, but have been around so long that they can't be fired.
The game-show version of the Monty Hall problem isn't ambiguous... people even had the chance to see the show before knowing the mathematical problem. I agree there are different ways to state the problem, but the wording doesn't explain why it confuses people.
It's really a great small book, and I fear that I am undercutting their ideas by elaborating (too much). However, I am typing in their valuable content (apologies to the authors if they come across this) in the hope that you will be inspired. And be able to rate honestly, which level you are at now.

Incorrect model: Success <--- Me ---> Failure

Correct model: Me ---> Failure ---> Success

"Most people get to the sign marked 'failure' and they figure they're heading in the wrong direction, turn around and head back home. They think that success must be back the other way, but it's not! It's straight ahead!"

"The best way to desensitize to a word is to use it, and the best way to desensitize yourself to an action is to do it."

Level 2 explained verbatim:
"Develop the willingness to fail, which means they come to accept failure as a natural by product of the process of seeking success."

Level 3 explained verbatim:

"Having the wantingness to fail goes beyond mere tolerance and acceptance of failure as a part of life..Wantingness means developing the desire to fail with the inner faith that personal and financial growth will follow"

Level 4 explained verbatim:
"The people who ascend to Level Four are those who have come to the conclusion that if failing is good, then failing faster is better!

And not just failing faster, but if one is going to increase their failure rate, do it going after BIG goals that are worthy of the effort"

"Instead of avoiding rejection, what if we made the decision to seek rejection? Instead of avoiding no or perhaps simply tolerating it, what if we went out of our way to actually go for no!"

If these failure-tome nuggets strike the tuning fork in your head, please buy the book!
Consensus is clearly 66% or 50% depending on whether you think the GB and BG combinations are the same thing in the context of the question.

But isn't it true that more boys than girls are born (because boys die younger so evolution tries to balance it out a bit)?

Does anyone know if certain fathers can only produce one sex of child? If so then having one girl would increase the chances of having another girl slightly.
I still remember when there wasn't a restriction on the size of flash cookies and you could put in as many MB as you wanted.
This is easier to understand if you start by listing all of the possibilities.

Two boys: BB
Two girls: GG
Boy, then girl: BG
Girl, then boy: GB

So there are four possibilities: (BB, GG, BG, GB).

If you know that one of the children is a girl, then BB is impossible and you can remove it from the list. This leaves only 3 possibilities (GG, BG, GB).

This is the set you use to calculate the probability and there are two ways out of three that the person could have both a boy and a girl: BG and GB

That gives you 2/3 or 67%
I always tell people the best part about Hacker News is you can witness people changing their mind within a thread. How many places are like that?
Rising prices are a subset of wild fluctuations. The other part is falling prices. Rent control isn't really necessary for the latter, is it now?
Yup, I've read lots of their stuff (particularly Ries).

Our firm has named a number of companies. In my experience, these are tough projects, as it's difficult to determine which is objective/subjective feedback.

Some of our most successful names were ones that clients hated initially, but later found very usable. Although some are put-off by names that feel different at the outset, once they are spoken a few times these ones often become more memorable.

I like undrln because it’s short, and there’s a bit of a tongue-in-cheek nod to the tools we use every day in it. Seems to be working: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=undrln
Your comment has exactly the same information, that owners are not prevented but are disincentivized from maintaining their properties in a rent control environment, as the snippet of text you quoted from me. How did you manage to be a sarcastic prick about restating exactly what I said?

Anyways, from the POV of the tenant who is faced with eviction or a gradually deteriorating building, which do you think is the preferable option?
"As of October 31, 2008, the Jython development team is proud to announce a new beta release: Jython 2.5b0!"
http://www.jython.org/Project/

Jython is alive and well.
It basically isn't, which I suspect is a huge collective waste of effort. I have several times had what I thought was a reasonably obvious idea that was "sure to work" which I was baffled that I couldn't find in the literature. Then, after spending a lot of time pursing it, I find it didn't work (for non-obvious reasons). I suspect I am one in a line of many people that have gone through that process.
S&P ending '08 around 900, thus... Summer of '97 Thread
With the S&P set to close at mid-June 1997 levels, I thought it might be appropriate to reminisce about the summer that was, the summer of '97.

I was between 8th and 9th grade, at CTY (Carlisle first session, Lancaster second). CTY memories include: Don McLean's "American Pie"... Scum: the Masquerade (a card game)... Bleem, the integer between 3 and 4... trying to hook up with a 15-point-7 year-old "no more" (no success; I was only 14.1). Great times.

I was super-bummed about missing out on ARML, having not heard of the contest till national Mathcounts in May, and therefore having learned about the contest too late to register.

Outside of CTY sessions, I spent the summer hacking QBasic text adventures that no one but me wanted to play. :(

I won't post too many songs of the era, because I figure other posters will pick up the slack. Only three stick out as memorable:

Savage Garden - To the Moon and Back.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I9hVzqTbn0

This one I remember only because it was absolutely eerie at 4:00 on a summer morning. (I had to listen to the radio at night, else I couldn't fall asleep.)

Our Lady Peace - Superman's Dead
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOZLSHuDBxY

Great song from around that time from one of the most underrated '90s bands.

White Town - Your Woman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVL-zZnD3VU

Quirky, odd song from an unusually talented, but unpopularizable, one-hit wonder. Vintage '97.

What are your Summer of '97 memories, songs, and (of course) hacking projects?
Pownce owes it to the user community to make their data available to them. I would suggest only those users connected to the social graph it contains should have access to it -- they built it.

Any other use/sale/provision of the data should be held to a vote of Pownce users

... or whatever users were using the service that shut down.
Doesn't look particularly Comet like to me, it's polling the server every 2 seconds for new messages. (Fair bit of bandwidth also).

Interesting though.
'Bjorgflur Gudmundsson

March net worth: $1.1 billion
Current net worth: zero'

WOOW! I don't believe this.
My feeling is that, at the moment, there are a huge number of academic bioinformatics jobs available. (More than machine learning.) Be aware, however, that these academic jobs are probably not attainable with an MS, and the market tends to change quickly. In industry, my feeling is that machine learning is more employable. I think that a CS MS who is a great programmer and knows machine learning cold would have very good employment prospects.
It's odd that it's only affecting the 30GB version though. I would expect the software to be the same unless one version was just manufactured with different software.
It is called publication bias. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias
There are also certain public libraries (I believe the NY public library is one) that have access to these databases, and allow residents from anywhere in the country of world to get a library card. (You may have to get the library card in person, however.)
In mid-1997 I was about to enter grade 12, and getting my first experience with C -- writing code to compute the 5 trillionth bit of Pi (yes, I believe in jumping in at the deep end).
"government seizure of Iceland's second largest bank wiped out the $1.1 billion fortune of Gudmundsson, the bank's chairman and biggest shareholder"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414491
No, support@. The only one I could find on the beta web page, although I could have missed others.

And yes, PTM is a windows app, but it is .net so conceivably mono could help/work with other platforms. I'm not a .net coder by trade, so I don't know of the difficulty of cross development issues with mono.

PTM also tracks use of applications by CPU time (or some such), along the lines of RescueTime, so you can see what apps you've actually used during whatever task. I don't use nor need that feature, and that might also be something that can't be reliably ported to other platforms.
Definitely in English, and also in bio-chemistry. Math and physics only as much as chemistry is applied physics and physics applied math.
This is a great article, and it reminds of all the other recent advances in our understanding of the brain, like this one: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080305/full/news.2008.650.ht...

I sincerely hope our understanding of the brain is at the start of geometric growth.
Having a buggy mp3 player that crashes at the same time for everyone brings you all closer together. That's the social element. Then presumably you discuss music, make friends etc while ms releases a patch.
That reminds me of a Greg Egan short story where a doctor (in the near future) laments that if he wanted to have the most impact helping cure disease he should have gone into software design.
Tell HN: Happy New Year
We're almost an hour into 2009, and I've just got home from an evening on the beach eating fish and chips and watching the fireworks with the kids.

Just a quick Happy 2009 to you all, and I hope everything goes well.
One heavy handed way around stuff like this is to use a VM (with shared storage to your laptop) for browsing and rolling back at the start of a session. Something polished and stable like VMware on Linux has never been overly annoying for me.
Or hundreds of thousands of browser instances. The whole point of most load test tools is they can generate far more load per hardware unit (CPU, RAM, etc...) than browsers could due to being lighter-weight specialized programs.

I'm not sure why this is such an issue. Most commercial testing tools use proxy recorders which will happily record all the AJAX requests along with the normal requests, and will spit out test scripts that include the AJAX calls. If you don't want them all using "banana" then just record 10 different scripts (which you should be doing anyhow to cover the most common usage models/flows for your site).
Hey, do you see iPod owners all flocking to iPod forums at the same time? Zune's like an mp3 player with a flash mob built right in!
The genius of Tesco is that it's classless, which is exactly what the UK wants to be.
I work at a big software/hardware company. We have pretty much the same perks, same height adjustable long desks, aeron chairs (or you pick one based on the one you like) etc. Only thing I don't like is that there is no windows :-((.

so no big deal, but windows are nice
can you just send the data on dvd's with regular mail (ups etc)? of course I don't know where the server stays, if it's human accessible..
In the case of Pownce, it /was/ made available to them. The community was given 2 weeks and a set of tools to export all of their data.
Did you get to keep the data as well? Is there a standard practice to this?
"...computers are the way of future and lab work is for suckers. But alas, in the realm of biology, the micropipetters and mice-killers win again."

Doing biology is the only way to develop biological intuition. Sometimes this means pipetting and killing mice.

Ernst Mayr speaks to this:

"About two years ago, three years ago, for maybe the 20th time I went over the whole business of the species concept. What is a species? I looked at the major figures in the evolutionary synthesis, and I looked at Robzhansky and myself, and Huxley and Stebbins, all of us had reasonable species concepts, and the only person that had a species concept that I thought was quite absurd was the paleontologist G.G. Simpson. And then I said to myself, "Well, he can't have been a naturalist in his youth if he had such a peculiar, unworkable species concept." So I went to Simpson's biography and what did I find? I found that in college he was an English major. He had never been a naturalist as a youngster. He never collected anything, and he discovered geology in his senior year in college, and from there he went to stratigraphy and finally to paleontology. Not surprisingly, not having been a naturalist, he has no idea what a species is and he never had. I argued with him about the species concept year after year, but lacking that background, he was unable to see it, and that is the thing. Being a naturalist -- having had that background of being a naturalist -- gives you a view of nature that cannot be acquired just learning from books."

(Go to bottom of http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/may1int-5 for a video of him saying it while sitting next to E. O. Wilson.)
why is a guy who lost .6 billion, in a higher spot than a guy who lost 1.1 billion?
Manhattan could have 3x the number of apartments by increasing average building size, granted transportation would become an even larger problem. However, when you increase the cost to live somewhere you decrease the number of people who want to live there so it's probably not a problem.

IMO rent control is best when it limits how much above inflation you can increase rent per year. At 3.5% over inflation you can basically double the real cost over 20 years, but people can plain ahead and know they will not be forced out next year. The major problems seem to occur when rent suddenly goes up 20 percent with little notice or fall significantly below market.

PS: London and Paris are less developed than Manhattan, but they seem to want to maintain their historic look which limits growth. DC has started building down because they can't increase building height which is extremely expensive.
> Yes, BBBBB is rare. But BBBBG is just as rare

Actually, it isn't. More boys are born than girls. (However, boys are somewhat more likely to die young.) Also, the odds for a given mating pair are not the same as the odds for the population as a whole.

And then there's post-conception sex-selection....
Good for you: doing another startup right after Kiko. That's very awesome.

Did you take any time off in between startups? How'd it play out?
Remember the guy who built a game while working, and then got sued? He won
Given that there are 113 cities in the world with greater population density than NYC, I'd say it would be possible to build more housing.
http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities-density-...

But rent control is probably not the whole story. I'm not familiar with NYC laws but I'm sure there's a lot of regulatory red tape besides rent control that keeps housing scarce and expensive.
cause it's in alphabetical order
Why can't an objectivist marry a non-objectivist? If Carmack were a socialist, it would be unlikely: to an objectivist, socialist views would suggest moral decay. That could hurt a marriage. But if Carmack's views are not too far off, she could simply view him as mistaken. Why not marry him under those circumstances?

(Note: I really don't know the social details of objectivism, e.g. how cultish it really is in practice. Just the basic philosophy.)
it must have been some clear ass water if he could see the treasure from space
Is it because the supply of gold is, in theory, somewhat stable?
> This guy is the ultimate hacker. He epitomizes everything that this site is supposed to be about. And you guys are quibbling about the environment?

I don't read the comments that way. I read them as "We thought that Carmack was an ideal but now we find that he's a heretic - what do we do?"
Clearly living in a deteroriating building is better than being evicted.

However, eviction is not the alternative to rent control. Being evicted is different from having your rent raised to market rates, and is different from having your lease not renewed. It may be a legal consequence of tenants deciding not to leave and/or not to pay a higher rent, but it's not like the choice we're debating is eviction vs rent control.

As to my restatement, you claimed that argument X is "pure bullshit" in a short paragraph that shows you clearly understand that argument X is much more accurate than inaccurate. If quoting that paragraph and asking you to observe that contradiction makes me a prick, so be it. (I'll admit to being sarcastic; if you want to call me a prick on the internet over it, I'll still sleep OK.)
And everyone has a brick to throw...
Close to 5 million bots using up your server's resources....wonder how much $$$ that translates into
oh yeah. Thanks
Ask HN: Notice a jump in Page Rank today?
Looks like Google updated their Page Rank today for the first time since September 08. I know our site jumped to a 6. Anyone else notice a bump?
Who says Java programmers have no humor
Google: Firefox and Chrome run twice as fast as IE
Do you remember what it was?

If I recall correctly, computing hex digits of pi is fairly trivial, but decimal digits are not. Is that right?
This isn't great news for Microsoft. All of their "flagship" products have a terrible reputation right now:

Vista - not worth the upgrade (I use Vista on one machine and don't really see a big issue with it either way).

Xbox 360 - Red ring of death problems

Zune - Apparently hit by a date bug
What would be more interesting is if Goog can monetize those bots via adwords or as a bot-mitigating service.
Crystal Point condos
Crystal Point a new 42-story signature condominium building rising high above the dazzling Hudson River on Jersey City, NJ’s waterfront.
The BG vs GB thing is difficult to understand. But easier to understand is that 50% of two child familes are mixed gender, while 50% are same gender. With 40 families having two children, 20 will have a boy and a girl, and 20 will have either two boys or two girls. Of the same gender familes, 50% (10) will be boy/boy and 50% (10) will be girl/girl. If you learn that a particular family has a daughter, then you know that family isn't one of the 10 families with two boys. This leaves 30 families, 20 of which (or 2/3) have one boy.

Likewise, for some reason the Monty Hall problem is hard to understand in three door form. But if you change the problem to 100 doors, and explain that Monty's assistant closes 98 bad doors, it's easier (at least for me) to see that the original guess had a 1/100 chance of being right, while the other door is 99/100 likely to be the right one.
Except that real data seems to disagree with you - the chance is about 50%.

http://www.in-gender.com/xyu/Odds/Gender_Odds.aspx
No. I'm saying, the trusted anchor keys aren't trusted. You think they're trusted, but they aren't. The trust necessary for SSL to be truly secure can't exist in the real world. If you're not checking the site's key directly with no reference to the trusted keys, you don't have "security".
I didn't know about this either.

Here's a way to manage plugin settings on Mac:

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay...
Britain to use Windows XP in its nuclear submarines
Quote: "The Mob Wars game goes to Maestri, but SGN will have rights to create similar style games itself. SGN also received an undisclosed financial settlement."

So not a win as such then.

Plus I rather suspect that creating a new game while employed by a game development concern is sailing pretty close to the wind.
I've been lurking until today. I too am concerned about not upsetting an apple cart. The rules today are pretty much the same as any other social situation.

Netiquette isn't so much different than etiquette. Treat people with respect, which you do. Add something of value, which you do. Listen to and learn from what others provide, which you are doing.

Remember, above all, this is a community (I just created an account today) like all others and I too am wondering what to say and not say.

I think the very fact that you asked the question shows that you are interested in this community remaining strong. That's what any community needs.
Aubrey de Grey: "I'm just a normal guy, I just want to save lives." (video)
Ugh, seriously. Academia isn't the place for people with 'Big Ideas' anymore (or was it ever?)

You find most of the innovation and creativity out in the startups and small businesses.
It's possible, but Objectivism's different from your average ideology in that who you take as your significant other must itself be determined by Objectivist ideals. (That's how Rand wrote it, at least.) In practice, there are probably Objectivists who don't take it that far, but I'm betting Anna Kang isn't one of them.

By the way, noticed you're at Courant. Do you know Adi, by any chance?
Pretty cool. Just wanted to mention that this is modeled after the Nimitz class, which are awesome nuke-powered beasts that are more like floating cities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz_class_aircraft_carrier
Wish the same to everyone!!!

Let 2009 be a lot more better for Hackers.

My wishes:

1.) No more terrorist attacks

2.) My next 'real' startup to be fun and successful.

3.) Everyone's good wishes come true :)

P.S: Any different HN colors for New Year like Christmas?
Aubrey de Grey: "What will happen if we cure aging?" (video)
Can someone see if the Friendly Atheist (that phrase just written out as two words) now returns Hemant Mehta's blog site as the first result? For a while he was way back on the second page of results, even though he should plainly be in first place. (I used the wiki tools to modify results for that search on Google, so I can't tell if there has been an improvement.)

I see a mixture of better and worse results with my usual torture-test searches. It still looks like brief entries on blogs get page rank that is too high compared to more substantive articles, presumably because they get lots of inbound links.
Online holiday shopping down 3 percent from last year
The question is whether Microsoft management can figure out who is dead wood. Based on their recent product fiascoes, I am not sure they can. It can also be that management itself is dead wood.
I intended 'prevent' to mean, you know, prevent, which is pure bullshit, given that all rent control laws explicitly allow maintenance increases. I'm obviously aware that it still creates the disincentive, seeing as how I pointed it out the very next sentence.

Eviction is the alternative to rent control in the cases where rent control matters - if the tenant can't afford market rates, then they get evicted.