skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Travel Like The Rich and Famous
Discover How A Pauper
Travels Like A King!
Let me ask you a few questions.
Did you know that you should QUIZ the check in clerk at the hotel you’re staying at?
Did you know that you almost always OVER TIP for room service
Do you realize check-in clerks are trained to ‘tempt’ you into an upgrade--- by making you an offer you can’t refuse?

What a smorgasbord of travel information awaits you!

All in one place, right in front of your eyes, instantly available, --- all the travel hot spots, ---the unknown secrets, ---the special deals and comprehensive travel savvy, --- knowledge that would take you years to learn on your own…in one location, on your hard drive, in this PDF e-book document!
Call to Action! Call to Action! Call to Action!

Echoing what has already been said, your goal is to get them to give you their info so you can make the sale, or to get them to order online.

Also while I totally love Vimeo, you need your videos to autostart. If Vimeo can't do that, get them hosted elsewhere so that you can. The motion is what will draw people in.

And kill the splash screen. It's very 1998 and annoying.

I suspect you did it for SEO, but you need to work on your content. The better SEO help is adding more content to site with multiple pages. Give me a page about the Jellyfish. About your aquariums. About the history of jellyfish as art. About jellyfish mating. Etc etc. Don't spam the site up, have logical navigation, but the more content on a site, the heavier it is weighted and you're going to be going against scientific sites for terms like jellyfish. So you're fighting an up hill battle when it comes to SEO.
It's a great service at a great price.

I do think they should have picked a different brand name than Amazon for it.

We're moving to EC2 at the moment and when explaining it to commercial people it's an unnecessary hurdle to also have to explain that Amazon do more than sell books and they really can be trusted to host infrastructure.
I agree that it can be massively frustrating as a female in this industry.

True story: last year, I had an interview with Nasa Ames Research. A recruiter had called me up and said he had some Linux-oriented position for which they were hiring.

So I made it out to the interview, was interviewed by a couple of people, and alas, given a Microsoft machine during the last part of the interview. I was then ridiculed because I couldn't remember off the top of my head how to get to the default C:\\command-prompt on Microsoft Windows because I have been working almost exclusively on Unix variant machines for the past 4 or 5 years. I eventually got it, but almost felt like the interviewer put me in a position where I was made to look and feel stupid, despite the fact that the recruiter had told me that I was interviewing for a Unix-type position.

I was not hired. The recruiter told me it was because I don't have a car. (This info was NOT in the job description or requirements, and I'm pretty sure it is illegal to deny somebody employment for not owning a car -- should I sue?). I suspect the real reason I wasn't hired was because I am a female. I suspect if I were to attempt to "fight it," I'd also lose because I'm female (well, maybe only during the last Administration's reign). :)

All in all, I was out almost a full day of my time, public transportation costs, and down a whole lot of hope for females in this industry.

P.S. This is the real deal http://oss.zentu.net/?q=node/27
Yeah, it etches sketchy when you don't put your prices up.
Put your own tanks on the front page. Make your own videos with jellyfish in them, and use those. The videos you offer don't tell me anything about your product.

You also need more content. I want more from your Website than it offers. I'm genuinely interested in your product but can't find enough information about it on your site.

Consider adding a FAQ to cover basic questions.
Except the entire point of allowing users to downvote comments is to promote civility. If someone is not being civil, then they should be downvoted. This is a clearer and less distracting means of telling someone what's not appreciated.

At least, this is my understanding of how pg intends the system to be used.
Your product is great, and I'm sure you'll have no trouble making sales.

However, the two pictures on the "Tanks" page looked a bit tacky, and I thought the splash page was unnecessary. Also, three videos on the home page seems excessive. Might I recommend a more modest approach (perhaps one video on each page)?

Otherwise, the site speaks for itself. And I like it.
I already put an invitation to read this

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

under every comment box for the first day of a new user's account.

Maybe I should add an additional confirmation step for short comments.
we wouldn't be suffering from unemployment... labor would be redeployed to new ventures

Yes, but redeployment takes time -- especially when everyone looks around and sees all their assumptions about what profits different activities will return are wrong, and need to be recalibrated. That research -- which happens tentatively, experimentally at first -- means some capital/labor sits on the sidelines while the necessary information is collected or created.

Redeploying labor immediately at the first things you can think of might keep people busy but can worsen the wealth destruction, if those activities wind up being of net zero or negative benefit. (By tying up workers on make-work, they could also slow the rediscovery and restaffing of valuable projects.)
It would heavily depend on what % of the product was hardware dev time vs software dev time. It might be worth having someone else build the hardware?

Or if you can cannibalize some other hardware/dev boards it saves a great deal.
MySpace Founders Interviewed by Charlie Rose
What is the deal with the second half of the article?
It's illegal in the United States to discriminate on a basis that has nothing to do with the job. So if your job doesn't require people with sharp analytical skills (trucking, for example), it would be illegal to use an IQ test. In programming, I doubt it would be illegal.

The reason for this is that people who wanted to exclude black people or women from their workforce would pick some irrelevant trait that the disadvantaged group would score lower on, and use that as the reason not to hire.
Wait a second, isn't inflation = expansion of the money supply, i.e. monetary inflation? Price inflation comes later as a direct consequence of monetary inflation, as effects propagate through the economy.

Also, how could money "be withdrawn quickly enough"? Who would withdraw it and how?
Being that I used a shovel just this morning, I can think of a couple things:

1.) Snow falls of the end of the shovel.
2.) Can't use the shovel to clean up the car. Need to get a snow brush and if the snow is deep it doesn't work well.
3.) When it snows a lot you need to throw it farther.
4.) Doesn't always get down to the pavement.
5.) The shovel that does the driveway isn't that good for the front steps.
6.) Snow shovels break when you use them to remove ice.
These puzzles aren't necessarily used in interviews, and I'm sure that employers who are looking for intelligent employees have several ways of attaining them.
Everything you wanted to know about writing Mac OSX drivers but were afraid to ask
And, the bandwidth prices have gone down a little.
Sass doesn't make you bloat your css, but it does make it easier if you rely heavily on mixins. That said, if you've got a website of any complexity then you're using gzip compression for your static assets, and the compressed file sizes are pretty much identical. In terms of rendering performance, I've not seen any comparisons but anecdotally, I've not noticed any slowdown.
There are clearly cases where the government can spend money better than the self-interested individual, namely on public goods. If the stimulus package were restricted to say, building useful infrastructure, energy research, and basic medical research, would all the followers of the Austrian school really say that it's a criminal waste?

I keep seeing criticisms of the silly part of Keynes like burying money in mineshafts, without any criticism of the more rational point that expenditures have to start somewhere.

I work with a company that among other things makes printers. They've had a lot of layoffs recently, mostly because of the forecasted downturn in demand. There's a downturn because other businesses aren't going to be buying printers, because they have their own economic problems. If the "malinvestment" in various industries was corrected with better investments elsewhere, there's a good chance that the new industries would also need printing, but right now, the company is laying people off. Their suppliers in turn will have to lay people off. I suppose that they will need fewer people cleaning the building, who in turn will need less child care, who in turn... and none of this is really malinvestment. (Very technically, for the moment it is, since it's bad to invest in most industries in a downturn, but printing in general is still useful.) It's just lots of people losing their jobs.

How do all the Austrians want to get things going again?
Now, where are the Mac OSX driver development jobs?

Need a driver written? Please let me know!
If you want to tell people how to use a self-moderating site, you are likely setting yourself up for failure. Either hire moderators, go to Slashdot's system of rewarding certain behaviors with moderator points, or live with the digg/reddit consequences.

Also, controlling how people downvote things is going to be really tough. Many people think comments that they disagree with do detract from conversation. I think one obvious rule should be you can't downvote comments on stories you comment on yourself.
We have been building bridges for centuries. Software is a new thing.

Testing a bridge: put a 1000kg on it and you can infer that 500kg will also work.

If testing a bridge were like software: you would put the 1000kg on it. Repaint the 1000kg barrel red instead of green. And the bridge would fall down.

Most mechanical systems now heavily rely on software to handle control. Engineering of any kind is tough: software, mechanical, chemical or (insert favorite discipline here). I am not really a fan when one discipline beats up on another discipline for being "easy." Anybody who says building software is just coding can walk in my shoes for a few days.
I saw one of "my friends" up on the mountain summits around Innsbruck.
So how do we raise the costs of being an Asshole?

Increase the rate at which reputation spreads between people.

This is actually one of the goals of YC. Historically investors have often behaved like assholes to founders. But if someone maltreats a YC startup, 300 people know about it. Most investors sense this and try to at least act upstanding.

I was talking to a YC founder recently who's working on a fairly fragile idea, in the sense that it's both good and easily copyable at this stage. He was worried that if he talked to VCs about it, they might encourage someone to copy it. I could honestly tell him "they wouldn't dare."
Live Nation and Ticketmaster to Merge (so much for competition)
For your tanks, how do you do water changes? Where's the protein skimmer? the carbon filters? How will people make sg 1.025 water in their office?

Saltwater tanks are a LOT of work. I'm just curious if jellies are somehow easier (like having a Betta in a bowl)
Heyzap (YC W09) launches: The forming of Heyzap and some lessons learnt
how about a heated shovel?
<cynic>Alternative title: "Concepts, that if accepted by many people, would make funding much easier"</cynic>

<devil's advocate>Death by old age is there by (non-intelligent) design. It's no accident (leaving aside the process of natural selection).</devil's advocate>

I've said it before on Hacker News, I'm indifferent towards life extension. The pros and cons are very evident but one doesn't seem to trump the other. I'm very much undecided on the issue and would like to be otherwise.
I think you need more photos. Some possible inspiration:

http://www.amanotakashi.net/portfolio/nature_aquarium/index....
I noticed the same thing in an LA Times article: http://www.latimes.com/sports/custom/morningbriefing/la-sp-r...

Maybe it's search engine crawler food?
Processing your offline Gmail in Python
Sons of migrant farmworkers co-found promising Silicon Valley tech startup
Note the link at the bottom of the page to share the story ... on Facebook.
We use Mail2FF (http://friendfeed.com/share/mail) to post links and photos to a private FriendFeed Room (http://friendfeed.com/rooms/). It works great and you can even get a daily or weekly digest by email (https://friendfeed.com/account/ > Email Settings) reducing the "interface" to plain email.

EDIT:

Instead of emailing to the room you can also add a delicious tag's RSS feed to it (e.g. ff:myroom => http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/yourname/ff%3Amyroom) to cross-post from delicious using your favorite browser bookmarklet.

EDIT:

And as mileszs said (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465772): you can add the room's RSS to a reader (even if it's a private room).
And best friends are not usually something that happens instantly. It takes some history.
I would - if you can find me a blonde pretty cofounder ;)
But how to change something to make it better is a classic hacker question. In fact that would work well as a definition of hacking: trying to change things to make them better.
Doesn't look like they intended to do that, ignore it.
I feel that this is a function of the size of the community plus the type of people in that community. As it gets larger, it gets filled with more of the type you don't want.

Compare the Joel on Software discussion forum with the Business of Software discussion forum. Same site. Same format. Completely different quality of discussion.

We've done experiments to help raise the quality of discussion by limiting the number of posts, having active moderators, deleting rude and obnoxious posts...

But I expect asking your community to shape up doesn't work too well.

The comment about PG forking the discussion probably seems like the only solution. Start over every couple of months or years.
Wouldn't the change of algorithm be a variation on the LOC metric that's universally despised? People would simply write longer comments with possibly as little worth.
Rate My Startup: JoeMaps.us
Hello friends,

JoeMaps is a new site by me and my cofounder, Joe Harrow. Here's the "elevator pitch": JoeMaps makes it easy to get a map that gives you directions between two places. Unlike traditional maps, where it's often hard to figure out where you are and where you are headed, JoeMaps are customized for your specific route. Just enter your origin or destination, and we'll send you a map to your email inbox in 7 - 10 days. Our tagline is, "For every route, there is a JoeMap." Check it out: http://www.joemaps.us

Anyway, thanks for your feedback in advance. I am thinking about adding some ads, what do you think, is it too early?

- Andrew
I was so prepared for this question that I already told you why. Because phrasing an algorithm design question in the form of a guy and his quirky light-bulbs is a much simpler, and clearer, platform for focusing the discussion on the aspects of algorithm design. Trying to figure out at which floor a lightbulb breaks (a common question), given only 2 of them, is a very clear description of an -actual- class of computing problems (here hits and misses are not of equal cost) that are far more difficult to explain and far more likely to confuse.

When you start trying to pin these types of questions on "actual" problems you get tons of non-answers. You get distracted, easily. They start worrying about things like libraries, and language issues, and implementation details, etc, etc. And when you try to focus them on the algorithm portion of the question, they get flustered and feel like they are screwing it up.

There is a time and place for stripping away the computer and asking about simple algorithm development to see how people think. People who get offended by abstract problem solving are sending out red flags.
Loopt needs to look to be acquired or abandon the idea of a mobile only social network and focus on leveraging services like Facebook connect. Although there level of funding might make it difficult, I also think they're a great target for Facebook.

In any case, this will be a large space and there is room for multiple players.
For me the biggest problem with the classic snow shovel is (was!) that it's not good with ice. It assumes powder. It also assumes a flat surface. So it's good for shoveling newly fallen snow off a concrete suburban driveway, but lousy for clearing a Cambridge sidewalk.

Maybe you could design an urban snowshovel. It could be narrower and heavier, like a regular shovel.
it can be massively frustrating as a female in this industry. [...] I was not hired. The recruiter told me it was because I don't have a car.

It is normal for employers to expect employees to have cars. http://www.helium.com/items/503172-tips-for-overcoming-objec...

In your preparations, list your weaknesses and any possible objections that you can think of. For example, one objection may be, "You don't have your own car. How are you going to get to work at 7am every day?"

-

I'm pretty sure it is illegal to deny somebody employment for not owning a car

Should car-ownership status be added to the following list?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_discrimination#Prote...

Protected categories

* Race or color
* Ethnicity/National origin
* Sex or gender
* Pregnancy
* Religion or creed
* Political affiliation
* Language abilities
* Citizenship
* Disability (physical, mental, or emotional)
* Medical conditions (AIDS or other diseases)
* Age
* Sexual Orientation
* Gender Identity
* Marital status
* Military Veteran status
* Military discharge status or anticipated
military deployment
Ruby 1.9 Internals: Ordered Hash
Why India's $10 Laptop is a Load of Hype
Ask HN: P2P Wireless
Reading this post ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462525 ) the other day about wiring “the sticks” got me thinking. Actually rethinking about something I’ve thought about for a long time.

Some background: I live in Alaska, so reliable, high-speed Internet is something most people in the US take for granted and Alaskans consider themselves lucky when they have it. I live in Fairbanks, a borough (county) of about 100,000 people. So I hardly consider it “the sticks.” The problem is, in Alaska, due to its size, zoning laws, terrain, etc. houses are very spread out up here. This makes it prohibitively expensive for cable companies to wire a neighborhood and DSL is mostly out because of the distances between places and lack of repeaters etc. In many neighborhoods, the only option, believe it or not, is dialup.

Additional background: I’m not a hardware guy and know very little about electrical engineering, so if this sounds dumb, it’s because I am.

My question is this. Would it be possible to create a wireless “router” that transmits and receives data, and then “partition” it so that you use half the “throughput” and the other half is reserved to feed the “grid.” The “grid” being anyone else how has one of these grid routers. In other words, if total “throughput” is 1.5Mbps, you get to use 750Kbps, and the remaining 750 is used by whoever else is using your “grid piece”. Likewise, their router is partitioned and on and on. Essentially it’s peer-to-peer hardware. You create a mesh. Therefore someone who doesn’t have a hardwire would essentially get “to the internet” by hop-scotching from one “grid router” to the next to the next until it hits the “access point” which is hardwired. Obviously there may be some latency issues, but those could potentially be resolved over time. The added benefit is the more people on the mesh, the faster your speed, just like p2p downloads.

Obviously at some point, you would have to be tied into to a real fiber line, so somewhere there would have to be a “wireless access point.” Seems to me it would make sense for the ISPs to do this because it saves them the huge expense of wiring and gets them customers where it’s too expensive to wire period. Or, you could be the “neighborhood access point.”

An added consideration is the security angle, or giving someone access to have your router. Which is why the partition would have to be pretty secure.

I know Alaska isn’t the only place that could benefit from something like this. Any thoughts on this? Is it possible? Is it done already?

Didn't mean to ramble on there, but I figured there are enough smart people on here, I could get a better answer here than anywhere else.
Do you know anyone who is good at programming in general but not in solving these puzzles?

Software engineering is not the same thing as (clever) algorithm design.
"large space and there is room for multiple players"

apart from that being true, I believe Google's approach to location leaves open other opportunities.
Come on guys, you can enjoy these puzzles for their own sake without freaking out about interviews. That's how this site sees them, too. Start with these: http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/riddles/easy.shtml
I am not really a fan of Joel's advice, but if I look at the relative successes, I would have to favour Joel (also, listening to him speak now, on that podcast, indicates that in his "old age" he really has less advice, he has mellowed out and realised that there is a lot more variables at play).

I think any methodology really boils down to: have good people any they will make something work. That is the only common thread in successful projects/teams/products that I have seen (and others). Its 80% people, perhaps more. Therefore any other tweaking of things are really like premature optimisation.

And I like brain candy. Its sweet in a bitter world ;)

I think Paul Bucheit said : "Limited life experience + overgeneralisation == advice".
No sectors exist in a vacuum. Take this very simplistic example:

The original source of our financial crisis is the collapse of subprime mortgages. People are getting kicked out of their homes, which has several effects:

- There are now a lot of houses on the market, driving prices down and reducing demand for more construction. Construction companies suffer, as do all of their labour and material suppliers (lumber companies, contract labour companies, etc)

- Banks have reacted to the defaults by attempting to protect themselves from further risk, meaning that it's harder than ever to get a mortgage. The effect is a similar drop in housing demand, with similar results as above.

- As the true scope of the problem unfolded, people began bailing on bank investments, driving prices down, and eliminating wealth that normal people have stored up in the form of mutual funds and such. This loss of wealth amongst "average people" has driven down consumer demand, and thus basically every other industry out there.

- As investors realized that consumer spending will be down, they withdraw their investments in these companies, resulting in further depression of the stock. This in turn causes more loss of wealth for people holding these investments, and causes a vicious cycle.

Nothing exists in a vacuum.
Inflation is defined as a persistent rise in general prices. It used to mean an increase in the money supply, but that usage is archaic in most economic circles.

The money would be withdrawn in the way that central banks usually withdraw money in their day-to-day operations: by selling bonds or allowing them to mature.
php doesn't have a seperate list vs. hash type. that's what i'm getting at. maybe if you knew something about the language you wouldn't have just thought this was a random insult.