skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like it. My current method of reading a long body of text is to keep my current position at the top of the page and scroll down line by line. With this, my eyes follow down the page with the black bar refreshing to the next page scrolling right behind them, then at the end my eyes jump back to the top and the scroll bar loops.

It worked really well for me, was a really pleasant way to read, and helped me keep my place better. I'll be using this in Chrome.

------

Edit: After using it to read a few articles, here are some additional thoughts.

* I don't have to be as vigilant with scrolling to keep my position (at the top of the page, in my previous method). I can track where I am on the page based on its vertical position, because that's not changing anymore.

* I wish the bar were more visible. I want to be able to track it in my periphery.

* I can scroll up on the first page. I shouldn't be able to.

* The reversed scroll direction in Mac OS X 10.8 doesn't make sense anymore. I feel like I should be controlling the bar. Perhaps reverse the scroll direction?
Ok, but they called it Zavers (and referred to their company as Zavers)...it wasn't something Google rebranded.
Yes, fuck transaction costs! I understand why we have them, though.
Awesome!

...but the image is so small given that it packs a ton of information. ):

Mapped HREFs onto a PNG image that's only 872 x 640 pixels?

How about an SVG file?
With no downsides to using tabs over spaces, and wanting to preserve readable SCM diffs, saving 20% of the space for such diffs just happens to be a nice side benefit, not the primary one. (The primary one being flexibility in presentation.)

Saying you don't conform to a use case does not invalidate said use case.
Side note:

I watched a once-coworker give a 30 minute lecture to high school students on how to do these giant puzzle/estimation types. His trick was to take the geometric mean of reasonable min/max bounds at different stages of the estimation.

Example question: How many flights occur in America in a day?

You can start from the bottom, with an estimate of the number of people who fly, then the number that can fit in a plane, et cetera. Alternatively, you can start from the top at the number of airports and their flight capacity. With a bunch of sqrt(minbound*maxbound) and reasonable guessing, the students (via groupthink) ended up with two roughly matching estimates that were within an order of magnitude.
Good point, I hadn't considered that. But isn't the source code a part of the methodology used? As in, if someone doesn't review the source code, then he's skipping a certain part of the methodology?
I don't have a 'show HN' thread. But if your target market isn't HN, why the hack would a 'show HN' thread contribute anything to growth?
Is it just me or did I see this thread 15 minutes ago, and now the link is dead?
This person has clearly never worked in a stressful trauma unit. I have actually tried the google docs and drop box think in an outpatient clinic, and it is terrible. People accidentally delete things (sure you can get them back but the non-it person at the coal face wasn't able to). Records get written over and multiple people try to edit the document at the same time and conflict with each other. People forget their logins and then ask you for help working out their password (quote: shall we just ring them?). People accident sign the wrong email address up and distribute access to the wrong person. Privacy? Forget it. Data is stored offsite. Dunno where. Who is accessing the data. Unsure. Does it auto logout? Depends.
Piecemeal electronic record systems are bad, but consumer focused solutions are far worse.
The trauma unit isn't interested in population cholesterol or stuff like that. They want platelet levels now. X-rays now, CT Report, before now. Google and dropbox weren't made for this, and don't work on a day to day basis. I've tried.
Edit: typos. This subject makes me frothy mouthed as the commentator has valid concerns, terrible suggestions. Try it and see.
> "How many ping-pong balls can fit in a VW bus" is just about the worst question I've ever gotten.

The point of questions like this is "Does this guy have any common sense?" Some of my least favorite hires were people who were whip-sharp at the details of their chosen programming language, but then when hired, would go off and do crazy and impractical stuff with it.

Whether or not the question accomplishes a good evaluation of someone's common sense is up for debate, but unless you're hiring drones, you do have to ask some questions that get a broader picture of the way the person thinks.

(BTW, your "pair programming for the rest of the day" is a great way of getting that. But pair programming doesn't/wouldn't work at any place I've ever been, for a variety of reasons.)
Which would be more impressive: that I long ago memorized that the Earth's mass is about ~5.98E24 kg or that I could estimate it knowing Kepler's third law (T-squared = C * R-cubed) and orbital information about the Moon(28d@250,000miles), Earth (365d@1AU), and Mercury (88d@0.4AU), where 1AU=93million miles. Or that I could cross-check it by knowing the circumference of 25,000 miles to get the approximate volume, and knowing that the density is around 5tons/cubic meter? Or I could use the orbital numbers to estimate G then knowing that Earth's surface gravity is 9.81m/s/s then I can also get M_earth.

All of those involve memorized numbers, and most require physics knowledge. But I have a feeling that the more complicated ones would impress them more, and make them more likely to hire me. If that's the case, then my strategy is not to give the answer which I know, but to exaggerate the difficulty by hiding my actual knowledge.

GDP? It's about the size of the debt, which is something like 7 trillion, so I would have estimated $10 trillion. (Actually, the debt is $12, and the GDP is $15.) I might have double-checked my answer because I think the budget is about $4 trillion, and 20% of GDP giving $20 trillion. (Actually 3.54 trillion and 22.6% GDP).

How is this memorized knowledge useful? Especially since I don't know how the GDP is actually calculated? Nor the difference between GNP and GDP. So this mostly tests to see if I've paid attention to the economic news. It's almost like asking me if I know the hottest temperature ever recorded in Death Valley.

And as for the London Underground - too many variables for me to even estimate. Turns out to be 4134, and that what I thought was part of the Underground was actually rail services. If forced, I think would have said: 20 rail lines? (Actually, 11.) At rush hour, 10 cars separated by 5 minutes distance, for a total of about 90 minutes per line? Which gives 3600 cars. I probably would have rounded up to 4,000 for spares, and then been amazed at how close I was. (Ahh, I forgot the factor of two because trains are going in both directions. And I think the inter-train spacing is less than 5 minutes on some of the lines.)

But this only works because I've been to London and made those observations. Without that experience, I would be off by an order of magnitude.

So there you go - this proves that I have a degree in physics, that I follow the news, and that I've visited London. It helps with the job you applied to because ... ?

(And if you say it's because I can reason about these sorts of problems, then, see "have a degree in physics" and add "and also math.")
Thanks for this. I've recently been focused on machine learning myself and this is a gold mine. The titles alone made me open a Google doc to list potential project ideas of my own.
>You don't know what you are talking about. You just don't

Totally. I don't. I just don't.

>Gangnam Style is available on Youtube for free.

Oh shit. I didn't know that [OK, I did. And it's not free, but you seem not to have read the last billion "you're the product" posts.].

Oh wait, 10 seconds of research on TPB says:

Gangnam Style [one song] - 8k Seeds
Beatles [lots of stuff] - 3-4k seeds

And that's just one modern hit versus the entire catalog of one of the greatest bands ever. Sort "audio" by seeds or leeches and it's pretty much new stuff all the way down.

>having missed all this internet stuff.

I assume the ironic bit where I used this internet stuff to disprove your point is lost on you...
There's not enough room in a 12-page paper to give details. As someone else mentioned, every detail is also an invitation for some nitpicker to try to sabotage your work.
Honestly, the results are terrible.
The Internet is Already Altering Human Evolution
Just to add to that, I'd estimate that patient records are accessed far less by doctors than by allies health staff, booking clerks, receptionists and such like. Te actual time in front of a doctor is small compared to the amount of time everyone else accesses records. The system for booking in one CT where I work would have probably 5 people see the record, one being a doctor.
Apple is so secretive with its development process for the same reason bank robbers are paranoid about other people stealing their money; it's how they got where they are and they can't imagine that there's any other way to do it.

Pretty much every major "new" Apple feature of the past decade was a standard feature in Android, Blackberry, WinMo (yes, WinMo), or Symbian, or was a feature in one or more such phones. Apple took an existing feature an iterated it to improve existing implementations.

You can identify the features that are truly unique to Apple (not based on iterating someone else's creation) because they suck. See e.g., Apple Maps, the Newton, iMac, the all-metal phone, Siri, Do-Not-Disturb, iCloud, iTV, iTunes...
Many people prefer a sprawling car-dependent lifestyle. Others are compelled to live near their jobs, and there's lots of jobs in the suburban office parks of SV.
As well, some gamma rays which weren't exactly directed towards the earth would be nudged towards us, given it a slightly longer path.
I see a little value in "Fermi problems" like ping pongs in a VW bus. I use one like it on a candidate's second call (first call with an engineer; takes place after our on-site recruiter has screened tehem). The point is to see how they handle a relatively intractable problem. The only real wrong answer is either a refusal to come up with an answer or an off-the-cuff guess with no explanation. If they at least try to extrapolate an answer from reasonable assumptions, that's fine.

To your process, my thoughts:

- Open-book challenges like you describe (in which you can use stack overflow and whatnot) are awesome. However, why do you have them do stuff they're not expected to know? From what I've read, the only thing hiring studies seem to agree on is that the questions which best predict a candidate's long-term success are those that simulate what the candidate will actually be working on. Getting them to learn outside their comfort zone is good, but maybe you'd be better off doing that by finding problems you've actually had in the course of your work that are outside of their comfort zone.

- Short-term contracts are tricky. On one hand, I think they're the best way to test how well a candidate will work out. On the other hand, switching jobs is a lot of work and stress. If I had a choice between two pretty good companies, one of which was a 1-month contract and one of which was a normal job, I'd definitely take the latter. If I had to move to get your job, it'd make rejecting such a proposal even more of a no-brainer. If it works out for you, that's great, but I'd be really worried about losing excellent candidates.

- It seems like your remote screening is lighter than what I'm used to. At my current gig, we send candidates a challenge to be completed in their own time (3-9 hours of work)- we've found it's a great prelude to the phone screen with an engineer. It's pretty much a code sample for which we have an excellent reference (all the previous submissions). We've found it improves the quality of candidates that get to our on-site.
Thank you good sir, and apologies for being derp
Cool story, answered my question perfectly. I wasn't sure if I explained myself or not.

Do you still own the domain?
This isn't really true. The baby bullet takes 59 minutes to get to a single SF location. One would then have to get through the city to one's real destination. I can reliably drive to northern neighborhoods in SF in about 50 minutes in light traffic.

In addition, there are only a total of eleven of those baby bullet trains, per day. At many hours of the day, you can't get one at all.

On average, given the average wait time til the next train and other factors, I can drive to SF about 2.5 times faster, round-trip, than I can reach various common destinations using CalTrain plus whatever else is available.

It's true that if you are commuting in rush hour only, versus heavy traffic, and your destination happens to be very close to a CalTrain station, and you live close to the CalTrain station to begin with, the train will win. But not under most other conditions.
SV Angel raises new $30 million round
Just an aside, but man, that's a refreshingly readable and pleasant article...
Reviews are scathing. I'll probably give it a pass, am fairly happy with Transmission.
I'm still waiting for a computer I can roll or fold up and stick in my pocket.

Speaking of computers in your pocket, maybe these tablets should be slaved to my phone. I would be okay with a small hard section for a bluetooth connection to my phone, over which I can send data to view, possibly including some code for parallel processing. I guess we need pretty high-capacity flexible batteries.
Chinese people can pay their taxes in yuan. When there was a gold standard you could pay your taxes in gold, but now there isn't, which is why gold is just a commodity, not a currency.
Quality's definitely an issue, even with previous model of the Lenovo X series, which I have. Things that were common and easy to replace, like fans, are now buried and more difficult. And it overheats like crazy. An IBM/Lenovo engineer told me that the number of screws used has also gone up significantly.

They're still better than the competition, but the new ThinkPad models are not very interesting. I'm hoping Lenovo will respond to current pressure and release new X and T models that are worth buying.
I'd love to know more about these tweaks. I recently typeset a book for my in-laws and am having it a handful of copies printed through an on-demand publisher. I think it looks great (produced by ConTeXt) but you've got me curious about what sorts of things might be done to improve it.
WTF are you smoking?

My Lenovo T61 has two batteries (9 cell+ultrabay). I get 8 hours. It's also 5 years old and just doesn't break - it's been dropped, had drinks in it, thrown a couple of times, used in the rain. Plus you could beat an elephant to death with it. The whole thing is build like Wolverine out of the X-Men. Look at the picture - the grey bits are titanium:

http://www.lenovo.com/shop/americas/content/img_lib/products...

Compared to my 2010 Macbook Pro which caught fire after 5 months, lasted about 3 hours on battery and had a new logic board after 4 weeks...
indeed, but most of them are from medical field or allied fields, people who have gone through tons of records, and don't really care to snoop anymore even if they unprofessionally did in the past. But putting it on the internet, even if its in the corner, strict no-no. But I wouldn't mind to say this that the person who wrote that article didn't actually do that bad, because its of course natural to perfectly identify a mistake yet not being able to perfectly suggest a alternative. So yeah, he got a point somewhere.
New Zealand has many troops in the "war against terror".
...I have yet to encounter, or hear of any news event in which Uber put people in a dangerous or even inconvenient situation.

Not surprising, considering that Uber currently carries a tiny fraction of the traffic that the cab companies do. As the company scales, it's not hard to imagine that they will need to bear more responsibility for background checks on their drivers, and assume liability for damages those drivers may cause. Full-time drivers will begin battling one another for preferred territory, and Uber will have to mediate the conflicts. In short, Uber will start looking more and more like a traditional cab business, and less and less like a peer-to-peer matchmaking service.
Other collegiate sports offer scholarships, but not like football. NCAA Division I schools have 88 scholarships apiece. Division I hockey, 18. There are more Division I football scholarships in Texas than total Division I scholarships for hockey. Division II with its 65 football scholarships per school dwarfs a handful of DII hockey schools with 13.5 scholarships each.

The resources for developing football players probably exceed those of any other sport in the world, e.g. Nick Saban earns a salary comparable to managers at top footballing clubs. And the NFL pays for none of it.
B.
Movies at the Star Wars level (i.e., blockbusters) cost about 200x as much as a single one-hour episode yet are only about twice as long.

A TV show would also double as extended brand advertising. Every episode would renew interest in, and/or focus on, the Star Wars brand, so each episode would double both as an income-earning vehicle and as paid promotion.

C.
You greatly overestimate the mass appeal of movie stars and movies. The income generated by movies is easier to track, but TV shows have far higher viewership and mass appeal. Consider: every episode of Fringe, a low-rated niche TV show, is watched by "only" 5-6 million viewers. In movie terms, that would equate to $50-60 million in box office at matinee prices (i.e., would place in the top 30 all-time weekend earnings). Over the course of a season, the viewership of Fringe would exceed the total box office viewership of Titantic and Gone With the Wind, the two most popular movies of all time (based on the number of moviegoers, not earnings).

Famously, the Stargate TV show and its various spinoffs averaged fewer than 3 million viewers an episode per broadcast per channel, but the franchise is one of the most profitable in entertainment history, having generated more than $1 billion in licensing-related revenues.
We should be focused on wins for technology. This site is after all called Hacker News, not startup of the week entrepreneur news
>Basically, if the bank plays fast and loose with customers' money the customers shoulder the risks whilst the bank owners get the rewards - and there's no way customers can tell whether this is happening

Tip: This is happening. This is how banks have and will always make money.

It is the role of governments to regulate to what extent the bank can use your money and for what purposes in order to minimize customer risk.
With this, Google gets a lot of data about the last stage of the funnel, conversions/purchases.
You didn't read everything I said about software patents. I oppose software patents because I don't think our society needs them. But then again, you can try to pidgeonhole my opinion if you want to.

I'm talking about patents. You're answering that LZW is trivial today. Yes, it is, but the time difference is huge when you're talking about a patent that is 30 years old and now public domain, especially when you're talking about a "person having ordinary skill in the art" regarding a patent application.

The great thing about threads like this is that we probably agree on the key points, but it becomes a disagreement the moment you escalate your language.
Any site that works like this is not one I will be visiting more than once without hitting the Readability or Instapaper bookmarklets.
It is free (as in beer) so pirating it is a kind of pointless activity. Combatting this type of piracy is pointless too: try to prove that pirates stole 0$ from Psy by not watching Gangnam Style for free.

The trick is: you have to integrate the numbers over time.
Once you multiply the Beatles number by ten [years of active file sharing versus one for Gangnam Style] you'll unsurprisingly find out that Beatles are the king.

You're not the only one person confused by "pretty much new stuff" at the top. This stuff falls as readily as it climbed. That's why I quoted Last.Fm. Beatles seem to be the most popular band ever up to this day, integrally. Do you have something to say about this? Because you claimed otherwise.
I'm getting warnings on Chrome regarding your SSL cert expiring.
Bad enough to flag.
> Well first I would argue that modern copyright law is Unconstitutional and eventually it will go to the Supreme Court and will be struck down. Then we'll be back to the original copyright laws.

It has gone to the supreme court and was upheld: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft
Use Optimistic Locking:

http://railscasts.com/episodes/59-optimistic-locking-revised...
They're already paying fees for this in the form of lobbying. The money from your fees would go to the same people the lobby money is going to now. How does that fix anything?
It's not Chrome specific - it works fine in Firefox for me.
>“Estimate how many windows are in New York.”

>Are we refering to regular windows or computing devices running the operating system Windows? Plus, define Window. Is it an opening in a wall? Does it need to have a glass plane?

>“How would you direct someone else on how to cook an omelet?”

>Are they disabled in any way?

>“If we came to your house for dinner, what would you prepare for us?”

>Are you allergic to any type of food?

>“My wife and I are going on vacation, where would you recommend?”

>Are you going together?

I actually quite liked these answers, and I would think positively of a candidate who asked them (assuming I would ask the questions in the first place, which is unlikely).

While "Define this that and the other ad nauseum" is probably overly pedantic, the above do illustrate an ability and propensity both for analysis as well as even perhaps empathy - both, IMO, meaningful skills when developing a product.
The title is one-sided link bait.
Both the LZW patents and the Judy array patents are software patents...

I am not saying that LZW patents were bad patents because LZW is or was trivial. I am saying that defending Judy array patents because of Judy arrays are hard to implement is foolish because no such defense can be mounted for LZW.

The reason both should be unpatentable is that they are both algorithms.
This isn't generally approved of? I think it is, if you make money.
While there's definitely a difference, most likely because of dynamic contrast which might be negligible once you lower the brightness, the reason I switch to a dark theme is because low brightness white looks awful. Especially in a dark room. The monitor I'm using draws around 120 watts so lowering the brightness is a must.