skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Need help with Design/Data Visualizaton - Opportunity to earn some cash
Hello Fellow HNers, I am working on startup idea in the past few weeks. My expertise is in the backend pieces and can code rudimentary JS and HTML. I dont have visual design skills. I am seeking help in that domain. Are there any HNers with design, UI, UX an d Data Visualization skills who wanna help me and earn some extra cash [ not a lot but meaningful ]. I am in SF Bay area and would prefer someone from around here. Profile page has my contact info
> Noon should always be noon

In other words, given a point on Earth (or any planet) and it's angle relative to the sun it orbits, when that point aligns exactly with and faces the center of the sun, it is noon.

Consider this: The way everyone refers to time is "X Units before noon", much like the 24-hour clock (no am/pm), except 0 is noon. The key is that X must be flexible, it should have no maximum, and no minimum.

edit: clarification
I shall look into that! Thanks Simantel...
I have done something very similar. Walked out of an interview (politely) due to how it was being conducted.

Employers forget that interviews are two-way, and that a talented potential employee is scoping you out to make a decision as well.

They are too often used to having all of the power in the negotiation, they completely don't get it when the time comes to interview someone who isn't desperate.

The ego blow is hard for them to take when you turn them down.
USF Professors Try ‘University of Reddit’ to Put Courses Online
I'm sympathetic to the guy who walked out of the inteview, though I'm not sure it was a good idea.

A lot of this probably has to do with your experience. I once had an interview for a position that was right up my alley. I have an MS in Industrial Engineering and I've worked at large manufacturing companies as a developer, as well as smaller startups that create optimization software for manufacturing, shipping, and production systems.

I went to an interview for a company almost precisely in this business area. They asked me to code a singleton, traverse a binary tree, then do it without recursion, add a leaf to a binary tree, prove that the dual of the primal is the primal of the dual, prove various long term outcomes from markov chains, swap two integers without creating a third integer, write various outer joins, convert a sql table to a binary set of indicators (is this a common thing?), and print all possible permutation of string using recursion.

At no point did anyone ask about, or even show the vaguest interest, in my background or experience. It wasn't super well coordinated, they pretty much just kept moving me from one developer to the other - so of course I was much more exhausted and drained than perhaps my interviewer of the hour realized.

My interviewers were younger, and generally looked fresh out of their CS degrees, so I'd guess that they were quite a bit sharper where it came to markov chains, hessian matrices, and b-trees. I didn't look like I was clueless, but I came off as rusty, and I did stumble with things that I would have done much more easily with an hour hitting my old text books.

It was eye-opening, and frustrating. I was polite and stuck with it, and I kept trying, because I actually wanted the job, and I thought that they could use someone like me, because while they were very talented, my few questions to them suggested that there were areas where I could bring some experience that they didn't have in house.

I didn't get an offer, but I am glad I stuck through it. The one thing I wish I'd done is politely explain to the hiring manager what I just wrote here - that I think their hiring process might be filtering out an area of talent that could be valuable to the company.

Actually, that's probably the advice I'd give the dude who terminated the interview. Rather than ending it abruptly, ask the hiring manager if he'd be willing to confer for 15 minutes or so. Explain why you think it's going badly, and what your concerns are. If you disagree, that's fine - then you can end it on better terms without appearing to leave in a huff.

And while this is off topic, I would like to point out one more thing - this is the sort of experience that often comes to my mind when I hear about companies complaining about a lack of available talent, and it's one of the reasons I'm skeptical (though this interview was years ago, when hiring wasn't on fire the way it is now).
Good answer. One thing overlooked in this discussion is that, if things went this far bad (scene in conference room and embarrassing elevator conversation) then something went wrong. This implies there's room for improvement in the way the interviewee handled the situation.
After the Higgs: The new particle landscape
You do realize that there are analogies that could be used without slighting sex workers and bringing up trans-panic?

I don't know what sort of yuks you were expecting, but both of those are wholly unnecessary, bordering on hostile.
given that his next step down in difficulty was

>Given the area of a circle is given by Pi times the radius squared, write a function to calculate the area of a circle.

I think we can assume he was just looking for something trivial.
Sure, I get that it is useful to realize that spending 3 hours researching a better deal to save $20 is a poor use of time. But your examples were not at all like that, and you focused on things like factoring in tax consequences, which presumes what I consider a fallacy, that one can calculate opportunity cost to that degree of accuracy for something like life.

When the iPhone App Store had just launched years ago, I saw that all of the tip calculators focused on exact calculations, even making a point of excluding the state tax from the tip. At least one went so far as to incorporate a state tax rate database! My idea was to write a tip calculator app that put things in perspective, that rounded and swagged, with the intention of making tipping and payment easy while influencing people's perspective and generosity (e.g. Just put down a $20 bill rather than $19.42 or if you're paying CC, tip $4 in cash rather than $3.91 on your card). Then I realized that by having people use a tip calculator I was undermining my own message! Anyone who is uncomfortable with "Just take the bill, divide by 10, then double, and round. If you aren't poor, be generous" just doesn't get it.

What is the cost of living an anal, money-focused life? See my other comments.
They taught me to have it signed, by myself and someone else every day.
Android users finally buying paid apps, download numbers catching iPhone
Ah, I was thinking the straw/sand was more to dampen the shock-wave somehow. Interesting, I would have though that the shrapnel from a bomb that big would have been far more devastating even with sandbags; I guess they probably used more than I was picturing in my head. Fascinating stuff.
More than half of the interviews that I have had involve having to impress someone with the ritual.

Unfortunately the interviews that require something of a skill test or the chance to have a chat about something that isn't complete BS are extremely rare. A lot of interviews are nothing more than listening to someone talk about how good they are and agreeing with them.

Quite a few times I have interviewed people I have cut it short and told them why, then thanked them for there time. Most people are appreciative of straight talk.

I have spents hours stuck in an interviews listening to three different people telling me about their degrees, experience, how great their skillset is, how great they are, how working there is the greatest thing ever and failing to talk about the job.... I have spent far too many hours in meetings like this. It is a great indicator company culture. Life is short enough as it is, I don't care how much you want to pay me.
Blit even had some capabilities for terminal side software so that it wasn't entirely "dumb terminal" [1]. After logging in the host was able to upload some code that would run on the terminal during the session, but would be gone after power cycle. In a sense one could compare it to a web browser of today.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal)
Spreedly Core now supports Dwolla
Read the following classic books (I'm sure there are others) to get a better perspective on why "working hard" itself may be a luxury. They helped me understand better. Good luck!

Everybody Loves a Good Drought: P. Sainath. There's a haunting picture there of an emaciated man who climbs trees to gather toddy. The most poignant thing about it was that he needs protein since he does hard physical labor. The solution is for him alone to eat a couple of tablespoons of fish everyday (no other member of his family gets to do so).

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich.

This book explains why some poor people have no savings. E.g., they have to live in relatively expensive pay-by-the-day motels instead of apartments since they literally don't have the $500 to put up a month's rent as deposit.
nice thout!
I have never used facebook, twitter, etc., but I have increasingly found relevant content and discussion on g+ pages.

So much so that last week I attempted, unsuccessfully, to create a g+ account for rsync.net. You'd think that wouldn't be rocket science.

Then all of that "real name" bullshit that I tried to ignore last year came back to me. Google refuses to recognize the account, blah blah blah.

No, I am not giving them my personal information for these discussions, and furthermore, multiple different people will be using this account (it's a business account) so it's not appropriate to tie an identity to it anyway.

Does the "g+ for business" solve this problem ?
Lawyers and financial analysts don't play with side-projects, but many of them do pro-bono work for friends and charities, and I think that's their equivalent of this idea. Engineers and craftsmen often do side-projects for fun... engineers create fighting robots, and craftsmen create furniture and art for their own use. That's pretty much exactly the same as programmers doing side projects and participating in hackathons.
Long for this world — trailer
I think you mean the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon[1], which I always find funny, since I learned about it the day after I watched the movie.

[1]: Listed on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
I think there's plenty of evidence that free food does more harm than good in the long run, outside of emergency situations that couldn't reasonably be planned for. In the long run millions of beggars wouldn't have been born in the first place if free food hadn't been available. (That's not to say that beggars are always caused by free food.) Humans aren't much different than ducks in this regard.
reminds me of "relative time" Jews and Muslims (and Japanese, until 1872) use.
This is a French wikipedia article I stumbled upon: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaot_zmaniot
Practice Makes Perfect, But Do Take Breaks
Could you point what was his expectation culture wise and the company's situation? What exactly he didn't like except the wrong questions?

I wish I left some interviews early :)

In the end it's important to leave on a good impression for future connections but probably those people (in your friends company) were arrogant immature kids in the first place and they don't care about good future connections anyways. In this case don't waste your time.
Same for the interviewers - please let the people know early on and save their time instead of being "polite" and dragging them into meetings multiple people (usually with the same dumb questions) or even stretching interview process into multiple days!
While knowing one will certainly ease learning the others it's rather misleading to say that Java, Haskell, Prolog, and Brainfuck all have the same structure. Their differences are significantly beyond syntax.
I was hoping this was a more radical proposal like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time was.

Our current way of measuring time is absurd. It starts as base 1000 with milliseconds, then base 60 with seconds and minutes, then 24 for hours, 7 for days, 4.3whatever for months or 28-31 however you want to track it.

I like that China only has one time zone for the entire country. We should all go by UTC times regardless of our geographical position. But we should also change our means of measuring time to work around whole base 10 numbers.
Only most of the first and second doctors' runs were lost. Alot of the missing episodes that were recovered came from overseas broadcasters. The BBC always had the complete runs of the other five doctors - over 22 years of television.
Yes, I had a single index:

db.events.ensureIndex({ ts: 1 });

I'll try to clean up my benchmark code a little, throw it in a gist, and then I'll send it your way.
This seems like a fairly common thing right now - I've got an update for my app that has been waiting to be reviewed for several weeks now, and lots of others have been reporting waiting times close to a month. Prior to this summer, wait times were usually around a week.

Hopefully it is just a temporary slowdown due to Mountain Lion causing a bunch of new app submissions, and not indicative of long-term staffing reductions.
I'm surprised AT&T didn't sue the hell out of apple because BLIT is clearly older than the Macintosh.
BLIT is actually from 1982 as is shown in the video at 3:50 and in the copyright notice some seconds later.
The wikipedia article also claims it's 1882.
You're right about one thing - you see what you want to see. I'd swear if asked that he's using his thumb and finger to draw a rectangle shape on the desk representing the keyboard he describes at the same time, but there's no denying the circle on the screen, even if just a shape bounding his touch points, rather than an object he selected and zoomed.

The later clip with the two fingered multitouch zoom of the person that recoiledsnake links to is more compelling, even if the gesture doesn't quite match that we know as pinch to zoom.
Launch 3rd Party Apps with LifeTopix's "My Apps"
Here ya go: http://blog.evernote.com/2012/08/24/the-new-evernote-smart-n...
>> I can't even fathom why somebody would needlessly burn bridges like this.

Your ability to "burn bridges", so to speak depends on how small the hiring community is and where you are in your career.

Myself, I've gotten all of my jobs in the past decade by referral/reputation. I don't have a mortgage to worry about, etc., and I live in a big city so the notion of "burning bridges" isn't as big a deal as it might be for someone starting out. If you burn a bridge for doing something that is justified, and you do it politely and professionally, so be it.

It is quite possible to terminate an interview politely and professionally, and most of my peers (including myself) who have gone through the hiring cycle actually appreciate it when someone cuts it short, because most of us want to spend time recruiting people who actually want to work with us. I'd actually respect that candidate even more, to be honest.

>> What really surprised me was that the OP's candidate was a referral.

This is one area where you generally need to go through all of the motions, even if it's painful - I'm willing to allow my own bridges to burn, but I would never burn someone else's bridge. I've had an interview like that before, and had I not gone in under someone else's word, I would have cut short the interview as politely and professionally as possible.

Having said that, it is worth noting that the OP recommended the person because they were a "no-nonsense" kind of person. They can't regret referring that person for demonstrating the exact behavior that got the referral in the first place.
The pinch to zoom patent is for single vs multitouch gestures on a touch screen. What Krueger is demonstrating is not a touch screen.
I created it as a community tool, to provide a common base for command line users across people and machines. I hope you like it.
Except that these "houses" happen to be banks, which customers have entrusted with their assets (E-mails addresses, passwords, credit card details) to keep safe. Their doors should not be unlocked.

While I believe Lulzsec went too far in their actions, I'd say that they were trying to prove that these companies did not go far enough in their responsibility to keep their systems safe.

To continue the analogy above: The PSN-hack wasn't a bank robbery. It was a person walking into the vault, unarmed, loading everything into their vehicle of choice and leaving the scene. In other words, the bank did too little to keep the assets safe.
Delivery Lockers: Delivering the Goods
Twelve-Year-Old Programmers Help Fuel IPhone Game Frenzy: Tech
LOL. Anyone who can afford to set up a trust for their kid is not using a website doing it.
Another one at Amsterdam Airport, must be the season, like the mushrooms:

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/29/world/europe/netherlands-a...
It is creepy how much that looks like 8 1/2 and rio. Pike clearly thought he had a good thing.
Tiny sweet madness. Notes on a CS curriculum
I recommend Calculus Made Easy by Thompson. This book is short but complete. I read it at 22.

I gave up on mathematics after my first college course but found that for everything I wanted to get into, Machine Learning & Bayesian stats, it was essential . A year later I know math better than ever before even though I haven't stepped inside a classroom in years.

You're probably getting bored because most math books are hundreds of pages long and in addition to the material they include mathematicians bio's, several solution methods, and the explanations of edge cases.
While I agree with a lot of your synopsis — a general de-personalizing — it's hard to deny that the new homepage is stylish and sexy. Which, in my opinion, is what WP needs to portray most these days.
[Are you pretending that you are not the author?]

But that's not what your article was about! You weren't pushing a rough awareness of opportunity cost, you were saying that it's a "fallacy" because in most cases you can't calculate it down to the penny. See my other comments.

I for example see no learning/entrainment value out of cleaning my apartment

What about the value of a less stratified society? Ever see Metropolis or read Brave New World? Ever live in a country like Brazil or India where the moneyed have servants to do everything from cooking, driving (few in India drive their own car!), and even raising their children? Yes, I want those people to have jobs, but no, I don't want to live in a world like that, or anything like Metropolis. And I don't want to be so elite and spoiled that cleaning my fucking toilet is beneath me.

I make well into 6 figures, though I just quit that job and will likely make much much less to contribute something better to this world than I have been, something better than what pure and cold capitalism has been telling me is valuable.
I tried that at an interview and it still took another 30 minutes to get out of the door.

In my younger days, I had an interview at a casino. One of the job requirements they sprung on me was "unless you take vacation, you need to be within 15 miles of the casino". The casino was located in rural ND.
If in your last line you mean "Everyone works in terminal emulators all the time", that's not what he was going for. The intent of the statement you quote was that previous terminal hardware, such as the VT-100, gives you access to exactly one program at a time. GNU Screen was not to be invented until 1987, and I have not heard of any earlier terminal multiplexer.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Hired A New CMO While The Current CMO Was On Vacation
The Muck
Does anybody else see why such patents are curbing innovation? I mean, the whole difference is a moot point.
People already create guns and bullets on their own with commonly available equipment.
I once interviewed at a company that I thought was pretty cool. During the interview the guy who would be my manager started insulting me, in retrospect to get me to just leave. At one point he asked me "are you just here wasting our time?"

I watched with glee as their stock symbol got de-listed. I still have that manager's name on a do-not-hire-whatsoever list.
Podio Cuts Down On Unnecessary Emails With New Email Integration
A day long interview is a good signal the company is full of bull already.

What's wrong with meeting the guy, talking to him and then inviting to work one day at the company? Just give him some tasks, see how he manages it. If it doesn't work out, you got 8 man-hours for free.

They wanna judge people based on how they dress, what they do on their free time, etc. Not everyone is on their 20's, or wanna be a geek all day. Some software companies act like model agencies thinking they are the coolest the place in the world. It's embarrassing.
"Someday the tech economy will be very different, ask anyone who lived through 2000 - 2003, when a lot of people had to get out of the industry because there were NO JOBS."

This is such a great point. You never know when you might need some help from someone or a favor from a buddy. I can say I double clutched a few times on burning a bridge or two and I always find out later I'm glad I didn't.
I'm sure it would be fine as a first pass but there's no way anyone would end it there. Two obvious immediate objections being that the point where it first rounds to the correct value does not imply the point where it stabilises there and the second being that you're using the value you're trying to calculate in calculating said value. At that point, a good interviewer leads them toward fixing these issues rather than just saying "wrong", of course, but I'm sure the end result is not to use pi in the algorithm.

Also, his next step down isn't really one jump down in difficulty; it's presented as "if you don't even know how to begin to approach that problem I need to make sure that you can code something trivial." That is to say, it's an arbitrary number of steps down that implies little about the initial question's intended difficulty.
Debuggers are great and superior to print statements when they're usable. Use a debugger when you can. Sadly, it is increasingly the case that you cannot use a debugger when you want to use one.

Print statement binary search is primitive, but it's survived as a tool because it's almost universally applicable.
Survey Says: Mobile Developers More Interested in Creating iOS Apps than Android
Honest reasons may also expose the company to lawsuits. I think we'd be better off if companies could just say why, but we've settled on a poor local maximum.
Our New Shrines
The article is deeply flawed. Patent protection is important, but differentiation is critical in the eyes of oems. WinMo does not offer differentiation, so that's a non-starter. In addition, 1b is a small price to pay for a free os and market leadership.
I was first very exited about those possibilities but if I get it right I have to basically give up / merge my personal G+ Account unless I want to have 2 account with the same name on G+.

If I do so the Apps-admin will have full control over my account including reading my private messages, deleting my account... right? Besides trust issues I wonder what would happen if I leave the company? How do you handle this at Google?
This is why I like being a consultant. Have work and money to pay for it? Then we're on. I don't want a marriage.

God, now that I think of it, I'm a prostitute.
MSFT's sneak attack on Apple: SkyDrive, not Surface
"If it doesn't work out, you had 8 man-hours for free."

Setting aside the legal, ethical, and tax implications of such a proposal, why should a talented developer be expected to donate a day of unpaid labor?
As long as we're on this subject, I'd like to strongly encourage programmers to adopt a "pen-and-paper" approach to problem solving. Just like mentionned in the article, there are great benefits coming from actually writing down the problem.

Agreed. Also relevant to this topic is Rich Hickey's talk on "Hammock Driven Development": http://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586