skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I 100% agree with the problem Alex brings up here. The interviewing process at most companies is broken. The problem is that I don't think his solution works and I am not sure what the solution should be. When you think of the "Google" way of doing interviews (i.e. doing a series of extremely hard whiteboard problems with almost any mistake dooming the interviewer), they no doubt miss out on a lot of qualified candidates. However, how many people that they actually hire are dumb? Not many. I doubt that Google likes the thought of missing out on a candidate that is great, but they are playing the numbers game. It is more important to them that the people they do hire are all great and they have accepted the fact that they will reject a lot of good candidates.

It is true that having a 3 month trial period would alleviate this issue in theory, however, there are two issues. One is that, as Alex points out, you will still end up missing out on a lot of great candidates that don't want to take on the risk of getting canned in 3 months (though you could argue that if someone is really good they wouldn't worry about that). The other issue is that if your requirements are too lax for the 3 month trial, you may end up wasting a lot of time and resources burning through candidates that don't work out. So, you may save yourself time on the front side, but it will cost you on the back side.

Now that I think about it, I do have one potential solution to this problem. Instead of the 3 month trial, how about paying the candidate a 1 week project. The candidate could continue to look for other jobs and doesn't have to worry about explaining a weird 3 month blip on their resume. They are getting paid to do something in between jobs which is always good. And the employer gets to see a more real-world example of what the candidate can do. Sure, this would cost money for the employer, but you would only do it for people that pass a couple rounds of interviews and that cost likely pales in comparison to the time and resources wasted if you bring on dead weight.
Meta-comment: why do tech blogs punch-up headlines with words like "just" and questionmarks?
Big question is do they use LED or CCFL, and are they the cheaper e-IPS? What is their refresh rate, >10ms ?
Bootstrapped with 1000 paying users OR viral app with 1M non-paying users? 
What would you prefer: bootstrapped with 1000 paying customers but the company may not scale to million paying customers OR a possible funded social/viral etc. app that could scale to millions of users but non-paying?<p>I ask and wonder because I have 2 ideas that I am struggling to lock down and one of them falls in the former category while the second one falls in the latter.
Fokus, a simple project management app that follows how you think
Is there a weather app that shows me the weather right now relative to the weather at the same time yesterday?

I don't know about you guys but I always evaluate weather in relative terms("it's cooler than yesterday morning") and yet most apps just throw the temperature at you...which could be wildly deceiving depending on wind etc.
Andrew Lipson's Mathematical LEGO Sculptures
C++ Systems Hacker as Employee #1 in YC Startup (W12)
We're solving this annoying problem: http://xkcd.com/949/. We're building a desktop peer-to-peer file sending app for securely transferring large files over the internet. We had a very successful beta and we're hiring a good hacker to play a lead role.

________________________________________________

You Will

* Own a critical section of the codebase that deals with secure networking, file systems, and client deployment.

* Be paid well and receive a significant equity stake. Design your own benefit plan.

* Have freedom in your coding methods, tools, and implementation choices.

* Work closely with two talented technical co-founders:

* A former financial quant, who runs our server-side.

* From the world of data visualization and UX, who’s writing our UI.

* Have an opportunity to open-source parts of your work.

* Your code will be used by millions and disrupt a billion-dollar industry.

________________________________________________

Responsibilities

* Client-side file-transfer code (P2P, secure).

* Cross-platform build & deployment (mac, windows, linux).

________________________________________________

Requirements (3 out of 4)

* Strong C++ systems experience.

* Deliver robust code quickly - you ship!

* Have a knack for solving complex problems with simple solutions.

* You can code more (quality) lines per minute than Chuck Norris.

________________________________________________

Nice-to-Have Experience

* Desktop software

* SSL networking

* Moving the mouse with your mind

* wxWidgets

* win32

* Obj-C / Cocoa

________________________________________________

Hours: Full-time

Location: We prefer that you work with us in our Kendall Square (Cambridge, MA) office - partial tele-commuting okay. If you rock and you’re remote, we’re open to that.

Please tell us about some cool projects you’ve worked on and something colorful about yourself, at wevehadtheinternetfordecades@gmail.com

P.S. Sorry about the pseudo-secrecy; we’re in stealth mode.
Could you elaborate on your issue? I've not run into this and am interested.
Want to Add a Navigation Drawer to Your Android App?
Just a heads up, if the creator is reading here, your page loads 0 content with javascript blocked. A minimal plea for javascript unblocking might gain you extra traffic - I know I didn't care enough to add you to my whitelist, since I had NOTHING to go on.
The Internet considered as a fifth dimension, that of memory
I really like Outlook. I switched to Gmail this year because I wanted free e-mail and Gmail is easier to configure. But, as a client, I enjoyed Outlook much more than I do Gmail.
Yes. Single founders can build successful companies. It is what keeps me going. I am not successful yet, but I have been at it for 4 years, and I haven't had the fight kicked out of me yet.

What makes it harder for me is that I am not a technical founder. I am a product founder with vision. I can rent programmers, but I can't rent vision. I can't rent hunger. I can't rent ambition. I can't rent tenacity. These are the things that a founder brings to the table. There's nothing that guarantees that a crowd of 4 founders has this in greater force than a single motivated founder. If I had listened to advice like this, I would not have invested my life's savings to build a consumer proposition currently in private beta, and already making a couple of bucks a month per user.

You sound like a motivated and hard working person who is totally into what you're doing. Why care what other people think?

Whether you're lone or part of a team, entrepreneurship is a lonely road. Only your own faith and strength will give you the staying power. And as long as you're not doggedly chasing a poor idea or paying the price of being a lone wolf with poor execution...
How much is Y Combinator's share (if any)?
Guys, this is really impressive! If you don't like PHP or JS, try to build a VM running Python on Go, or something you find sexy.
But when you open a message with lots of replies, there's no structure, and you can't reply to one person's comment (like I'm replying to your comment here). This would be messy in gmail.
When people call copyright/patent infringement "stealing" or "theft" they usually don't mean to invoke the legal definitions of those words. The fact that this conversation occurs so often should make it clear that there are a number of people whose personal idiomatic definitions of those words include "illegal getting-of-things".

I think you're looking at it backwards. The fact that this conversation occurs so often makes it clear that there is quite a lot of people who are aware "theft" is an incorrect term for it.

The way I see it happen usually is that these people point out that infringement, unlike theft, doesn't take away some physical property and isn't a simple zero-sum act (as in, if I steal 10 dollars from you, you have 10 dollars less). The next thing that usually happens is that the answer is something along the lines of "but it's still wrong" and/or "you're just splitting hairs".

That's why I brought JackC's explanation into play: he explains the real difference between theft and infringement, without sliding into legalese, and he also explains why it's so important.

People are entitled to their personal definitions, and the fact that the legal definition is different is immaterial. When a reckless driver crashes their car into a kid, the kid's mum calls the driver a "murderer", and we don't consider them "wrong" (because the guy's crime is actually called "vehicular manslaughter".)

I strongly disagree with this. The reason why people protest that infringement is not the same as theft is precisely because they feel that the legal definition matters.

The people who point out difference between theft and infringement don't do so because their argument is "Infringement is not theft, so it's okay." (Or at least I don't know anyone dumb enough to try that.) They do it because they know that infringement is at the very least legally wrong and they want to get the emotional coloring of the word "theft" out of the picture, so that people can finally settle down to discuss whether the laws governing infringement need to be changed or not.

Incidentally, I believe that a lot of people would consider "the kid's mum" from your example wrong, but that doesn't mean they claim that the reckless driver is not guilty or that he should be dealt with leniently.

Now, it's fair to argue that using these defintions of "theft" is prejudicial, and that it's also fair to argue that people should refrain from that usage to minimise ambiguity, but it's not fair to argue that they should stop using a word because it doesn't agree with some "authoritative" definition (except in legal contexts, of course.)

It's not about minimizing ambiguity. It's about stopping people from misrepresenting one thing as another, so that the correct thing can be discussed. What I think is not "fair" is telling those people "Well, my definition of 'theft' encompasses 'infringement' and I don't care, because I shouldn't be held to some 'authoritative' definition."
A friend of mine bought one recently, and it arrived yesterday... his comments were along the lines of 'Build quality is not as good as Dell, but passable, and it's a third of the price'. He found a calibration file and seems very happy with the purchase.

The common brands to search for are the Yamakasi Catleap and (to a lesser extent) the Shimian QH270.
If the web app uses extra memory or CPU, SSH response time may be affected. So delaying in the web app doesn't do a good job of concealing CPU and memory use by the web app, because it's a shared-resource system.
We make small investments (rarely more than $20,000) in return for small stakes in the companies we fund (usually 2-10%).

Taken from http://ycombinator.com/about.html
Repeated swapping to an SSD wears it out faster.

Mountain Lion does in fact swap less than Lion due to some VM improvements.
Regrets And An Apology
Says LED on the panel, and they said refresh rate was just fine. Not sure what type of IPS it is, but given the explosion of IPS panels and demand these days I wouldn't be surprised if it was the real thing. $337 isn't cheap, after all.
Yep... everything you hear about the horrors of children are true:

The poop on themselves, they cry, and then even vomit seemingly at random.

They are also worth every moment.
"Do you really care about the brinksmanship that is conducted by two giants?"

Yes I do. Samsung is disabling useful features on my phone because of it. This might also affect my ability to purchase the phone I want.
Hmm, I currently have 3 x 24" Samsung monitors and I've been considering the Samsung MD230X6 (6 x 23", 1920 x 1080) but the cost (around $4,000) vs. the $1000 cost of getting 3 x 27" (2560 x 1440) means I'm tempted to try out these "korean" monitors.

My main concern is why are they so cheap. The article mentions that they're displays that companies didn't deem fit to sell, does that mean these are displays that were due to be destroyed and someone is just selling them on, or are they purchased in bulk at a big discount and then being resold? I figure all that matters is if they work and is only $1,000 but I would be much more comfortable purchasing if I knew exactly what their story was.
You have to have enough background to know what to look up in the literature.
Thanks Carter. I'm actually not local yet - finishing up in Ithaca for a few more weeks. It would be great to find a time for coffee.
It's not an app (or at least, it isn't a standalone feature of an app), but if you search on wolfram alpha, it usually provides a handy graph for the past. I'm always wondering the same thing as well.

eg
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=weather+san+francisco

and hit "more" when the "Weather history & forecast" section shows up. I don't know how permanent this URL is, but here's the result I get from that:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/pod.jsp?id=MSP32441a2b0ia1...

I would love to see a better interface on that data as a standalone app.
You don't think the world needs more ways to reinforce the egos of narcissists everywhere?
I agree with this comment. I am using IE7 (at work :) and i don't know the input boxes since placeholders do not show up.
Yeah, I'm hoping to pick up a generic version of whatever high-res monitor they introduce, if they don't clamp down supply too hard. Windows isn't quite ready for that kind of scaling, though...
This seemingly minor preference is what makes Mail.app useable.
I've been researching these lately as well and I've found the Crossover 27Q LED to be the best build quality and the nicest casing.

Quite tempted to snap one of these up before they get popular and drive the price up..
> There's definitely a gap in the market in real time customer conversations on mobile

Agreed. We realized this when we users would chat with us live via our site(s), and solving their problem right away would bring them real pleasure. There's currently no way to do this on mobile (outside of a phone call), and we're working on a click-to-call solution like you've mentioned.

The bigger barrier is that a lot of mobile developers are afraid of opening the floodgates - time spent talking to users, is not time spent writing code. We believe that ultimately though, as more folks sell stuff through apps, and start thinking of users as "customers" providing live support this way (similar to how a lot of ecommerce sites on the web have live & phone support) will become more mainstream.
I assume that by 'core business' you mean the DVD rent-by-mail business? Keeping that would have been a terrible strategy. You only need to look at its competitors to see that (if there are any left).

They shed a lot of customers in order to pivot but it was pivot or die.
Launch your own startup instead.
Meteor has brand-new experimental support for serving HTML to crawlers. Check out the Google cache for meteor.com :) The links work and everything. This just went live this morning.
How very Silicon Valley of the author to treat these numbers almost like they're profits, or any reasonable sort of "income" at all. The real question is: how much of that money has already been multiplied tenfold, through exits, IPOs or exorbitant profits?
Wow... that's the exact opposite of what I like to see. I want to see a thought process -- not someone throwing together code to get something there. When I've seen people like that get hired dealing with their code long term is painful. You tend to get "mostly working" code with a bunch of band-aids.

For an entry level position, getting an answer is important, but for more experience developers knowing how to figure out what actually is important (in my experience) is a better indicator (and yes, they actually need to be able to code).

Experiences vary though :)
Awesome service! Congrats Liyan.

In the past i hated develop the "upload-code", now with your service it's really easy: just one html line.
The room-cleaning metaphor isn't as apt as you think. The metaphor I have found most helpful, heard from several other voices, is the garden-tending one.

There's a reductio ad absurdum open in the room-cleaning premise. I could write a million lines of code that don't do any measurable harm -- calling a no-op -- and by your standard they ought not be removed. Not doing any harm isn't the same as actively contributing value, which is what most people want their codebase to do.
Gender Games: Olympic Sex Test
Getting homebrew and mountain lion work together
After careful analysis, it looks more like they've cloned your product rather than your site. Do you know the site owner?
... Hacker's News? Slashdot? Ravelry? Ars Technica? Penny Arcade? ESPN? RedState? And that's just off the top of my head.

You seem threatened by someone succeeding at something that has absolutely nothing to do with you. It's really kinda weird.
"Apple has admitted in internal documents that its strength is not in developing new technologies first, but in successfully commercializing them" - and that is why they WIN! Who cares whose technology came first. Samsung couldn't execute and Apple could. If we had it the Samsung way, Nokia 7200 flip phone would still be the standard of mobile technology. shivers
Unrelated: I just remembered about a hacker called Tiger-M@te who defaced 700k websites in one day and took over a datacenter. Mad stuff.
> you can't reply to one person's comment

You can, but it doesn't maintain proper threading. It just groups them all together and sorts by date.
Full dev computer with internet access I approve of, whiteboard coding I don't.
We bought a bunch of them at DISQUS, our current failure rate is about 20-30% failed within the first three months of use. Would not buy again.
Your question about the importance of developing Safari for Windows given that Chrome was in the works is interesting for this discussion, but your comments afterward seem out of place since they are about Safari as a whole.

I don't see how the existence of Chrome has any relevance to the creation of Safari as a whole. First, the timing might be off (I'll leave this for others to research.) More importantly, although I don't know exactly what the point of Safari was (presumably Apple wanted to have their own browser to include with the OS just like Microsoft did), I would have to think that if Chrome would satisfy that need then the latest Mozilla browser would have as well.
They already are. Part of the IPv6 address is derived from your MAC.

Despite not owning the network for which they are being allocated, IPv4 is a "paying job" to some people. And sometimes an ego boost too, i.e., people who get their kicks from creating "IP address policy". Needless to say this easy "work." Hello ARIN.

It's a lot like ICANN.

On CircleID someone recently pointed out that IPv6 will make this sort of "job" meaningless. There is so much IPv6 address space that playing favorites and charging hefty fees is unjustifiable.

Back to your point about MAC's: This is also why the "we're out of IP addresses" meme seems silly. Because we don't see the IEEE complaining they are "running out of MAC's". And IPv6 addresses use MAC's.

The thing to keep in mind is that just because something, e.g. a better addressing scheme, or true network-level peer-to-peer networking, is not "widely adopted" does not mean it isn't available, _right now_. It may have been available for years. There were people at universities still teaching the use of punch cards even after a well-known computer professional in Canada was already programming using a terminal display. And there were other Canadians sending emails before DARPA.

Do not assume that the crowd is always wise. And be wary of the "hype".

80/20 rules - another great internet meme - mean than we can have 80% of the people being stupid. And the 20% have to suffer.

When the "new" naming, "new" addressing and "new" peer-to-peer solutions are offered up the next time, keep an open mind. Try not to be so quick to dismiss any sort of change to the "status quo". Evaluate the approach carefully. It might have merit, and maybe it's not immediately obvious.

Many times (in fact almost all the time), the solutions are not new. We're just waiting for people to finally catch on and realize there is "a better way". We're waiting for people to "try something 'new'".
I have succeeded as a single founder, but I am determined to work with other people on my next thing. Not sure how though.
"Hitting it big" with a multi-billion dollar exit is not an absolute requirement for being a successful company.

Also, 40% of all women hardly sounds niche to me.
Wow, a Review-Reviewer-Review ^_^

Now, who reviews the reviewers reviewers reviewer?
I'd more likely place blame on competition ramping up like Amazon and Redbox and them being severely squeezed by content providers who've been jacking up their rates at renegotiation time.
Raising money isn't any indication for any success but is a nice accomplishment - money coupled with the mentoring and connection from ycombinator could significantly improve the companies odds to succeed.

These numbers are vanity metrics but are still indicating a trend - companies going through ycombinator are more likely to raise money than others.

I know I would go thru ycombinator - not because of the money I could raise easily but mostly because of the alumni network, connections and access to world class mentors.

You could have a look at what companies raised money and what were the successful exits to date: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/y-combinator
If they're less than half the price of a comparable Dell, a 30% failure rate seems acceptable. Just buy some spares, right?
Show HN: I made a Klout killer in 2 weeks
Quibird is a better way to measure relevance on Twitter: http://quibird.com
Do you use reddit?

As cookingrobot says, gmails threading is one dimensional and super clunky when you have lots of replies. It auto collapses to far so you can't easily reply to a particular message in the thread.

Reddit has the best comment threading system of any site online. Quora is near the worst. HN is just slightly frustrating.
That isn't me. :)
Didn't Paul breakout the outcomes of Y Combinator companies a while back (e.g. acquired, sold, in business, etc)? It would be interesting to see if anything has dramatically changed.
Lots of reasons.

From a security perspective - IPv6 SLAAC (sort of like DHCP) does this - it uses the MAC as the last 48 bits of the 128 bit address. However, this is largely seen as a security problem things like RFC 4941 [1] have argued against this idea. If you think having your iPhone keep a track of which cell phone towers you've been to is bad, think about the consequences of being globally reachable by the same IP address at all times, which means you can be tracked to where that devices is and has been based on the routing rules.

As well, ethernet is not IP. They are different layers of the OSI model. Just because you're on ethernet (wired/wireless) doesn't mean you're using IP, and vice versa. Some devices don't have MAC addresses. Frame relay uses DLCI's for instance. Historically there were lots of other technologies using IP that weren't ethernet - FDDI, token ring, ATM, etc. Ethernet has replaced nearly all of those, but not all.

Routing scalability - another huge problem. But this will rear it's head in IPv6 with the exponentially large amount of possible routes. Right now the routing tables are around 350k-400k routes. Compare that to the billions of devices that connect to the internet simultaneously.

MAC addresses are locally assigned addresses. There would be no way to prevent duplicates. In most networks, your IP address will specify the way you are routed through the network and your security level. If that isn't centrally managed you have no security or IP addressing schemes.

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4941
Mountain Lion's new file system