skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for sharing your story! Now that I'm a freelancer, I see lots of different code bases, and I've seen a few that are really nice. It feels great to see and appreciate someone's else good work. I make a point of letting the people in charge know that the previous/other contributors have done a great job.

One of the great things about joining a well-written project is that usually I learn something new. If that guy was so struck by your code that he called you up, I bet he learned a few things, too.

As in the OP's story, sometimes the code I learn most from isn't immediately obvious, and I have to "go with it" for a bit before I see what's happening. But that takes some openness, perhaps something like what Zen folks call "beginner's mind."

There are times when, like you, I have to start tearing things out and rewriting chunks of functionality, but in general I think programmers are too quick to take that step. My PM anecdote taught me the importance of reading other folks' code charitably, really trying to understand why they made the choices they did, and doing my best to respect and follow their approach. Textual interpretation has the "principle of charity," and reading code probably should too.
mtgx is first and second on http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/superstars, too.
Wow, I never made the connection but you are right. If AAPL really wanted to, they could buy AMZN in cash right now, even with their absurd valuation. Nuts.
There's another side though. Do you want to see pseudoscience stem cell "therapies" sold on late night infomercials as a panacea? A balance has to be struck between the number of people that could potentially be helped and the number of people that could potentially be harmed. We can debate how this balance should be struck without assuming bad faith on the part of those that disagree with us.

On the internet, when startups overpromise, misrepresent, and take risks, the worst that usually happens is that a few million people lose their data or get their embarrassing photos shared with their coworkers. In health care the consequences of an overhyped technology are far more grave.
Good question. I am not actually familiar with the specifics of WinRT; I haven't touched Windows regularly since the early 2000s.
Information Flow, Evolved: How post-news will use recommendations
"... didn't seem to understand how quickly tablets are selling..." what part of my statement makes you think that? Shake your screen and try again.
I don't see that shutting down the FDA is a good alternative. There are countless therapies that are dangerous and/or ineffective and plenty of unscrupulous or incompetent people who want to flog them. Yes there's a human cost to regulation, but that's nothing compared to the cost of opening the floodgates to every half-baked idea out there, not to mention the damage to medical science when the medical trials are bypassed.
Do you mean the general idea of citation ranking, or the specific math used by Pagerank?
Very true.

http://freakonomics.com/freakonomics-radio-why-cities-rock/
WORLD WAR 3 AND D TALMUD
There are a number of aspects of publishing and perhaps reputation academics would like to reboot. We are frustrated with e.g. Elsevier, and there is a big boycott on. Presumably this boycott, and the reasons for it, will extend to Mendeley after it becomes part of Elsevier. Given that all these startups are probably heading for similar exists (if successful), this is just more of the same. When we reboot publishing, it will be in a way we control, not with Elsevier 2.0.
ADHD is a real disease with real (and severe) symptoms.

That said, I personally believe that responsible use of these stimulants by people without ADHD can be of net benefit to individuals and society. Prominent bioethicists have agreed [1,2]. Just because something can be addictive or is abusable by some (c.f., TV, food, video games) doesn't mean it should be banned.

The real crime here, in my opinion, is not that people are faking symptoms to get medication, but that they should have to. Also, as others have mentioned, the kid in the story very likely had other problems beyond his Adderall addiction.

[1] http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1039...

[2] http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080409/full/452674a.html
LastPass encrypts all of the passwords client side. Assuming you use a strong enough passphrase it shouldn't matter if LastPass gets hacked.
Unless the sound is available as an audio out pluggable into a hearing aid (or a hearing-aid replacement), it's useless to me beyond basic boop-beep.
You have a point but only if you replace "paying dividends" with "returning capital to investors."
The more people who purchase iPhones and iPads, the more demand for the apps, which actually exerts upward pressure on app prices.

Software is not a limited good so the classic supply curve does not really apply.
While I admit I have a problem with focus, I have been able to control it with self-discipline. Others may not be so lucky.

There's a marked difference between actual ADHD and just normal fidgetiness or lack of focus. For years, psychologists prescribed children who may not have had ADHD with medication. There have been so many misdiagnoses and ADHD has received so much press attention that physicians are now much more wary of diagnosing it in an attempt to please the family of the suspected patient. Since that has happened, people with true ADHD are now not getting the help they need.

There's a simple way to test for ADHD. Give a person a deadline, and give them an hour until that deadline to complete an essay. Tell them the essay will count on one of their formal records (even though it won't). If they buckle down and finish the essay, the person most likely has a lack of discipline. If the person continues to have a lack of focus up until the last minute, you can be safely sure that that person has ADHD.

(Note that this is personal anecdote and should not be used as a substitute for proper medical attention. If you suspect you have trouble with focus, seek psychiatric help. The above is ONLY a topic for discussion.)
A completely unsubstantiated statement.
Animation Disruption: Yet another promo, then at 2:24 - Whoa
Simple, classic games, with a multiplayer version. Checkout Solitaire Arena on Facebook to get an idea :)

It is, basically, a gaming company, but we do not build more complicated games, like Zynga or other big companies do.
Does anyone have advice about improving my karma? I'm roughly 42nd percentile. I suppose lurking doesn't help.
The primary duty of the company's executives is to deploy capital effectively. Paying out dividends in many cases is a sign of good management since it makes it clear they understand the limitations of what they can do with deploying capital internally. The assumption is that unless they can earn more on the capital than shareholders could by investing it elsewhere, they should return it to shareholders.
It is tough to compete in the public relation and marketing arena. It is a soft-skill that many competitors have not master.
If you prefer to go home and do other things than code, you may want to reconsider joining a company where everyone probably feels the opposite way. By making a github account a required field, they are pre-weeding out individuals they feel do not fit into their culture. Make sure you are willing to be that outsider if you try and work around that.

But, if you feel these companies are still a fit for you, I would try and get references from the startups you've helped; have them vouch for you in lieu of sample work.
Why do they need the copyright to keep this information? Wouldn't a license or something like fair-use be better than ownership?
Since HN doesn't publish a userlist, this site gets its data by crawling the "latest posts" HNSearch API every ten minutes. That 11,000 users includes all users who have made a post on HN since January 25th. Thats right, 11,000 unique users have means post on Hacker News in the past 2 weeks.
We're debating the semantics of ADHD diagnosis and ignoring the real story:

It was where, after becoming violently delusional and spending a week in a psychiatric hospital in 2011, Richard met with his doctor and received prescriptions for 90 more days of Adderall.

No legitimate doctor would prescribe amphetamines to a patient with a history of psychosis, ever, under any circumstances. It is an egregious failure of care, resulting from either indifference of incompetence.

America is beset with an epidemic of physician-facilitated drug abuse. The back pages of local newspapers all over America are full of advertisements for "pain clinics" prescribing opiates to all comers. 20,000 Americans are dying each year from overdoses of prescribed painkillers. 80% of all the world's opiates and stimulants are prescribed in the US.

It's a situation akin to patent medicines and prohibition - booze was officially banned, but you could buy "medicinal" tonics that just happen to be 80 proof.
Thats because someone typed in that username with a trailing space character ("mtgx ") and it made a new entry for that username int eh database. Nothing a little .strip won't fix...
So I suppose they're also considering paying the students for their work? Otherwise this will probably last about 5 seconds on a 13th Amendment challenge.
from what I read they actually ARE scanning the manuscripts. But the problem is those books are really old and you can't just use any average book scanner.
"Little Johnny was in a book! Look, see! He was so good they published it! Isn't that amazing? I'll order you a copy."

Slightly sleazy, but clever business plan.
It's transmitting power directly instead of taking it through a generator then back again using a motor, so it's quite possible. A quick search suggests that motors and generators can both be over 90% efficient in the electrical/mechanical conversion, but I would guess that you could do better in a purely mechanical system.

Over short distances we already use mechanical energy transfer all the time (drive shaft in cars, chains in bikes, etc.), this takes the same idea and extends it to a longer distance.

My hunch is that while it would still work in theory, electrical systems would win out because of construction costs and maintenance. Motors and generators are widely available, wire gets laid once and works for decades, and contractors know how to deal with all of it. A jerker line needs more frequent lubrication, has custom parts that wear out, and when they do you can't just say "I need a new NEMA 6 motor" and have it in a day.

EDIT: Also worth noting that the high efficiency numbers for the electrical system are going to be at peak load, if you run it at partial they'll drop. The frictional losses on a jerker line are probably a bigger percent of the total at part load as well, but I don't know whether they'd be more or less significant than a generators'.
App prices are low because Apple sets low reference prices, eg. $10 for Office, combined with developers with little marketing skill who can't communicate a value prop and instead think basic econ, that is to say, lower prices = more sales.

The average indie developer (and the entire android ecosystem) is more interested in having users than having profit. iOS types talk profit share, android types talk marketshare. It's a difference fundamentally in what the product is, iOS is an Operating System, Android is an Advertising System, hence you see lower prices on Android because the product is its users.

It's a classic overly competitive economic case where the benefits of reduced production cost accrue to consumers rather than producers, such is the case in textiles and the well known case of Berkshire Hathaway.

The similarities between textiles and software are interesting because they are dominated by high capital costs (software is fundamentally a capital good with huge labour inputs), and low costs of reproduction.
>Amazon, on the other hand, is in retail. Very little magic or innovation happens in this old business

This isn't really true. Check out Emek Basker's famous paper "The Causes and Consequences of Wal-Mart's Growth" (econ.missouri.edu/working-papers/2006/wp0611_​basker.pdf (and its citations)) and the work of other economists who estimate that WalMart, on its own may be responsible for an appreciable portion of U.S. productivity growth in the 90s and 2000s.

One major problem India suffers from right now is entrenched incumbents who prevent modern retail practices from reaching most of the country. A lot of people there would love for American-style retail practices to spread.
I'm not a physician, but I will note that it involves lack of sleep. Sleep is important, and most of these type events involve chronic lack of sleep, and/or doubling up on prescriptions.

Note: The medical judgement of multiple providers in this case seems troubling and lacking.
> The primary metric is citations.

What field are you in? This is absolutely wrong for tenure decisions in economics. It is pretty wrong for promotion from associate to full professor.
I think you're missing an important metric: karma per submission. People with high KPS tend to be those who keep their mouths shut most of the time but when they do have something to say it's generally worth paying attention. I think this is the kind of behavior that really ought to be encouraged more than contributions per unit time.

Also, the see-your-data feature fails on Safari.
Looking at the news.arc code, user profiles are stored as files in the directory arc/news/profile/, so the names there are case sensitive because of the underlying file system. The users are loaded into a map using the name as a key, and map lookups are case sensitive in Arc. Thus, both the on-disk and in-memory storage of users is case sensitive. Of course names could be converted to a case-insensitive form, but the "natural" implementation results in case-sensitivity.

The code can be downloaded from http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar
Note the code is from 2009 and didn't exactly match the running HN code at the time, so any conclusions from the published code aren't guaranteed. I did an analysis of the HN ranking formula back in 2009 - http://www.righto.com/2009/06/how-does-newsyc-ranking-work.h... - but the live formula is surely very different from the published code by now. And ironically, that article got about 0 upvotes so it didn't rank well :-)
sudo apt-get update doesn't actually update raspbian. It just downloads new package lists. A sudo apt-get upgrade is needed to update the packages. Additionally, you can use rpi-update https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update to download the latest firmware and kernel.
My Developer friends are upset about Apple vs Amazon
The truth is I've struggled with focus my entire life. It just so happened that university is the first time school surmounted my lack of focus or, more precisely, my willpower.

What a wonderful way of putting it. Going by educational success, I'm by many measures in the upper percentile of my age group. But I still catch myself thinking how easy it would be to just flood your brain with dopamine. It's a very attractive option to the engineer-science-me.
Looks very helpful. Batch mode in particular is a great feature. Thank you.
Thanks, Marius, I'm happy you liked it :)
They may well be able to hold on to a niche segment in the market with high margins, but the chances of them holding on to a dominant position and high margins are slim to none. This is the reason for their seemingly low P/E.
>My highest rated comments aren't what I would consider my best. Instead, they are ones that appeal to a wide audience with some kind of emotional (rather than technical) insight.

I definitely feel you here. This is a trend I see absolutely everywhere; hell, I was surprised to find out it even extends into video games that implement this kind of voting system.

This problem feels like it could be solvable by changing the "meaning" of the upvote. Right now, the upvote is a tool that allows you to make a comment more visible and to throw a bone to the author in the form of karma. People probably feel inclined to "tip" someone who makes a clever or witty comment with the karma from the upvote. On top of that, people making witty comments who get upvoted are now encouraged to make more witty and unproductive comments because they know that they will get karma for it.

The issue is that the upvote represents general approval of a comment, rather than a nod of the head that a comment is productive or insightful.

Just throwing around ideas - maybe the elimination of the user-karma-tracking system altogether is a reasonable solution?
A great way around this would be for the system to ignore exceptions unless it was caught... wait nevermind
> The reason scientists don't blog a lot, or comment on blogs, is that...

So, now that I've read the comments on a few of these open-access type articles, it seems like there is so much variation among academic disciplines that broad statements about "scientists" are untrue in many cases and probably isn't a helpful way to phase things. This statement is not true in every field: in Economics (my field, you can decide whether or not we are "scientists," but we certainly try to publish in peer-reviewed journals) there are many blogs by extremely accomplished and prominent Economists. They get a lot of informal but meaningful credit for it, in some cases much more than another top publication would bring (when you go from zero to one or one to two top-tier articles, it affects your career. When you go from 31 to 32, not so much).

Just for specifics: Jim Hamilton at UCSD (my alma mater) started and contributes to the blog http://www.econbrowser.com. His graduate students started landing order-of-magnitude better jobs and interviews once the blog was established (and, just to make clear that it's not sour grapes on my part since most of them are my friends: these are jobs that the students are quite well qualified for; I think previous students if anything got too little exposure). It's a great blog that's really well regarded among Economists, and everyone I've asked thinks that the blog is bringing him a lot of (IMO deserved) attention.

> This de-prioritization of peer review slows down the whole scientific communication system.

In any field that I'm familiar with, scientific communication does not happen through journal articles. It happens through conference presentations, seminar presentations, informal discussion at conferences and when visiting other research institutions, working paper dissemination, and (somewhat, but growing) online.

A lot of that activity becomes formalized by comprehensive letters of recommendation that are solicited for every major promotion (in academia, obviously), so it gets heavily rewarded and is taken seriously.

Peer review exists as a check on those steps to make sure the impressions are right. Polish up the arguments, have an editor and referees sign off on it, and then put down a copy for the record for the people who need it to look over carefully.

If there are specific fields where that is not true, please spell them out.
Citations in scientific papers are by their very nature uni-directional (you can't cite a future paper), the web does not have that restriction.
Today is the 100th Anniversary of U.S. Federal Income Tax
Everyone has a different weakness when it comes to coding. You'll need to review your own work and figure out what took longer than expected before you can figure out how to improve on it.

Some people spend too much time overthinking the design, others jump in too fast and spend their time reworking prior design flaws. Some take forever doing the UI, others get stuck in the DB. If you can figure out what caused the biggest delay with your last project, you'll see the largest improvement if you fix it. I'm sure questions on a specific problem will get more help from others as well.
This company posted on their own blog that they fired 20 people in an 8 person team?

Mouth: insert foot.
Choosing a web host (EC2 vs. Rackspace)
List of organizations with official stances on the SOPA and PIPA
You are right about the ecosystem but that is not how Apple makes so much money. iPod and app/music sales are minor portions of Apple valuation. The main profit center is driven by high iPhone margins, which are carrier subsidized so that people upgrade without second thought. When there are good enough lower cost alternatives carriers have all the incentive to reduce the subsidy, which either show up as lower gross margin for Apple or higher prices for consumers (which leads to less upgrades and less unit volume). Pick your poison.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is what really matters
Local banks should hire a "startup advocate"
In case people are wondering, the unit is '000 USD.

So that's 98 million vs. 41 billion USD.
> I'm curious your target have access to Google.com during your "interview"?

I think it would have been a good idea for Google to publish online an official "Google interview cheat sheet" and hand a copy to the interviewee at the start of the interview.

However, if the candidates know beforehand that the web will be available, they're going to study less; it's just human nature. If they have 20 minutes for a question, and they have to use the web to recall the basis for the question, they're probably going to waste 5 minutes compared to someone who has taken the time to study.

> If your canned intelligence test questions gave been recorded and indexed aren't you going to feel a little silly?

They weren't intelligence questions. Many of brilliant people would have failed miserably and many of people with IQs lower than the Google median would do very well. Many of the questions I asked were simplified versions of problems I saw and fixed in Google's codebase. I wanted to make sure that people who got hired were capable of diagnosing and fixing the real kinds of problems I had seen.

Edit: spelling mistake, added "it's just human nature".
Ahh silly mistake. Will fix it asap. Thanks.
Karma is nothing but an algorithmic parameter. I wouldn't think anything else of it.
> Sadly, policy is made around these incidents.

You're offering equally fallacious reasoning: that Erdos managed to handle his amphetamine consumption tells us nothing at all. Policy should be made around solid data, not carefully chosen data points that confirm our respective biases in the matter.
This "encode problems into names" approach is something I first ran into at Facebook.

When a particular function or class is found to be a problem (or when it is known to be a problem in advance), it is (re)named something like "foo_POTENTIAL_XSS_HOLE" or "FooMapNonStlCompliant" throughout the code base (using pfff or similar tool), and then the potentially long process of removing the problem can go forward with some confidence nobody will add to the problem while you're working on it.

pfff: https://github.com/facebook/pfff
Confessions of a Corporate Spy
This was my first thought as well.

"... shortcut information for finding a particular object, such as a file system inode."

How do you guarantee that the client isn't handing you something malicious?
He ended up in the psychiatric hospital after the abuse had already gone on for a while. Why do you say that he most likely had "psychological issues to begin with"?
You don't get to reference the Erdős story and not tell it, it's too good:

> His colleague Alfréd Rényi said, "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems",[31] and Erdős drank copious quantities. (This quotation is often attributed incorrectly to Erdős,[32] but Erdős himself ascribed it to Rényi.[33]) After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month.[34] Erdős won the bet, but complained that during his abstinence mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine use.

(From wikipedia)