skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Recruiters who request SSN over the phone
I was contacted by a recruiter firm yesterday about a 30-90 day W2 position. I sent my resume and later received a message from the same recruiter person who stated he had a "question." After another call this morning, I learned that the information they were seeking was my Social Security Number.

Of course I am always hesitant to give that out. But I really need work. After checking out the company's site, asking why this information was needed, and generally getting no straight answers, the person said that all kinds of companies are asking for that info these days: ATT, Microsoft, etc. Basically what I said was, half-jokingly, "Well, if I'm a vicitm of identity theft, I'll just sue your company."

I really need paid work, so I eventually gave it over, but this does not seem like this should be a necessary part of standard practice. ESPECIALLY for a w2 position.

Question: Does anyone have experience with this kind of procedure? I have not worked with recruiters for so long for reasons like this; but desperate for work, I feel like I am backed into a corner.
I assume the poker games I play for money are too. We're all criminals! It would be kind of interesting to see a list of laws we all break but that aren't enforced (and I don't mean the ridiculous ones against sodomy, etc).
"Excuse Me" APIs: Why most Facebook apps disappoint
It was excellent on-the-job training, but there probably is a more efficient way of training entrepreneurs than by letting them make all the mistakes.

If the strongest Moore can say is that there's "probably" a more efficient way, with all his experience, it makes me doubt there is one. I think it is possible to train people for spin-off companies, because they are in the same kind of business; but for founding a new type of industry, I don't think it's possible to train entrepreneurs, because there's no one who knows how to do it to train them. The only way to learn the unknown is by making "mistakes", a.k.a experiments.
If the Rubik's Cube were invented today, would anyone care?
Now that computers are commonplace, physical novelties such as this are perhaps not that interesting. Moreover, today's games involve complex and accurate depiction of the real world, not simple abstract games.

Would the Rubik's Cube succeed if it were invented today?
If you know something about the corporate culture of IBM, you know why IBM holds this patent.
have you seen mibbit.com?
I also got the feeling from the article that the methods of the school seem to be contrived to please the metrics used to evaluate them. The high amount of rigor seems very Prussian of them, a paradigm is particularly uninterested in teaching kids but instead in disciplining them and making them do well on tests, and more generally in making them comfortable with the future that has been predetermined for them.

However, I honestly don't see anything bad about transplanting people from a seemingly negative cultural surrounding to one which is more likely to make them have a more successful and fulfilling life, even if it seems hostile to parents and condescending to poor neighborhoods.
Yet another 37signals article that's actually about survivorship bias.
I have a somewhat opposite viewpoint. For years I considered Theora worthless because the developers appeared not to care about how it compares to H.264. IMO this is the first good press for Theora ever.
I enjoyed the point made at the bottom of the article about how the legislation itself is emotionally distressing to journalists and that the authors of the bill should be the first one's prosecuted under the new law, should it be adopted.
Creative Pros on Twitter
What is Scoopler built with?
And the very first web browser was written on a NeXT too.
The Trucker Hats of iPhone Apps
Bitcoin: peer-to-peer network based anonymous digital currency
> but it's a bit hard to explain that to a man in sorrow.

Wait until he's done mourning. Then write the article. It's a whole lot harder to write well when you're grieving.
I think you're selecting for the wrong people with a post like this. Find people who are excited about changing the industry, not just excited about working for someone funded by YC.
How should applicants contact you?
I love the one on Obj-C

"1986 - Brad Cox and Tom Love create Objective-C, announcing "this language has all the memory safety of C combined with all the blazing speed of Smalltalk." Modern historians suspect the two were dyslexic."
Or some sort of instantaneous messaging or how about a telephonic device that transmits voice over copper lines (or even wirelessly) or perhaps meeting someone for a malted beverage at a public house of some sort.
"That's huge and someone who is on a 500 calorie deficit per day will have a much different experience than you."

Maybe they will, maybe they won't. I haven't seen any studies that support that common contention. And I have seen at least one that shows weight loss speed has no real effect on keeping the weight off later. But so few people do keep it off that it's hard to know.

Either way, good luck to you and your diet. I sincerely hope that it works out for you.
Hooray: The Second Derivative of the Unemployment Rate Improved
You might also use the posts here as an opportunity to create a follow up blog post that contains the suggestions from here. Provided you get enough suggestions :)
Rails returns the body 1 line at a time? That can't seriously be true, can it?
California open source digital textbook plan faces barriers
Nice start. I was expecting more from the twitter feed. It's an rss feed from a query. Maybe a better way is to group similar real-time results ? v2
Sometimes I think you don't have to be very bright to be one of the most powerful people in the world.
I'll look into it. Thanks.

I'm generally averse to wasting people's time, I'm also somewhat detached to the worldly success of the site as I'm happy using it myself. Also, I think as a twitter client, there might only be 2 others that use it regularly for that purpose.

Side note: for a while I started collecting information about what people were doing on the site using ajax posts to the server as it's all client-side, and I found a regular Chinese user who'd possibly setup a bogus twitter account of a fictional gay character linking to products for all his followers.

It's going to need about 3 times more traffic to start getting feedback and PR momentum. I think the site will only stick with a small portion of people that visit it. So it'd need to be hyped a lot, which is not my thing if it ends up wasting people's time in the process.
This has minimized spin-offs, because we design our development specifically to transfer into the factory; so we don't have the problem of developing technology and ideas that we have no place for. Technology transfer is always difficult. We have tried to minimize the need to transfer it.

Xerox PARC didn't solve that one.

The Intel guys fully experienced terribly frustrating problems, and then came up with ways of solving them. I think both aspects contribute to their incredible success.
> restaurants serve such gigantic proportions

This is only true at cheap restaurants. High quality food does not come in large portions. Stop going to garbage restaurants.
True. Seriously. At least in 2.3. Pre-Rack, I don't imagine that code would have been present.
Next IBM patent: System and Method for Automatically Generating US Patent and Trademark Office Submissions
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers and then you cash in on guilt.
Coding Horror: Pseudocode or Code?
3500 calories is not all that much for a large active person. I have known people on 8k/day "diet" that where losing weight; not that most people are 6'6" and exercizing 10 hours a day, but it happens.

Using your body fat%, activity level, weight ect you can create a fairly accurate estimate on you're caloric needs and it's often higher than you might think.

PS: I can burn 1k calories exercizing for one hour.
This is one of the reasons I'm concerned about automatic enforcement of laws such as speeding (either by numberplate recognition and calculating average speed, or by devices fitted to cars).

There's a disconnect between the image everyone presents and reality. Nobody breaks the speed limit of course, that would be illegal. Yet everyday I head down the motorway and there are dozens or hundreds of cars and virtually none of them are at or within the speed limit (er, except me, natch').

There will be a big nationwide shift in driving styles and patterns and public feeling if such systems come into force, and for all the talk of fines and revenue and road safety, there's no public discussion about the real implications because nobody is going to be the one to accuse most of the country of speeding.

It would be interesting to see what life would be like if nobody broke any of the laws that "everyone" breaks. Officially it would be the same since lawbreakers are few and far between, but ... would it really?
Is this truly crawling the sites, or querying each site's search service?

e.g. for Twitter, are you crawling all the Twitter users' URLs (seems difficult to do - how do you find new accounts' URLs?), or are you fetching results from search.twitter.com ?
Right, so, let's conduct a thought experiment.

To be considered I must have experience with multiple technologies, the ability to build web applications, and a whole portfolio of work.

Why am I looking for an unpaid internship with a mysterious startup, again?
Have you read that book? Because his definition of "whole language" reading is different than the one used by most critics.
Rather then just downvote we can provide constructive criticism.

Unpaid PHP LAMP HTML Javascript / AJAX CAKE MVC Frameworks experience in the valley Seriously?
"If you type 192.168.1.1 into your Web browser’s address bar - a trick well known to network gurus - the MiFi’s settings pages magically appear."

Yes... it's entirely magical and meant to be a secret. Surely this thing defines a hostname like 'mifi' that you can type in instead of the IP.

Cool device, but four hour battery life is kinda slim. Wonder if you could dial down the power on the Wifi transmitter so it only worked within about 8 feet and extend the battery life a little.

You could also slap this on the back of an iphone with skype and poof, iPhone on the Verizon network, if you really dislike AT&T.
Why the... ???
awesome job dude! It would be awesome to have some sort of real-time alert feature, too!
Sphinx - text search The Pirate Bay way
Math and Art: Differences and Similarities
The Artist as a Young Girl
May I suggest http://ocw.mit.edu? I didn't go to MIT, but my computer science program was based on MIT's, and the reading list was excellent (starting with SICP of course!)
If you've never come across it before, you should really read Joel Salatin's "Everything I Want to Do is Illegal," a farmer's perspective on how regulations crowd out local and organic farmers, destroy farming communities, favor industrialized monoculture-based agriculture, and generally make life less pleasant:

http://www.acresusa.com/toolbox/reprints/Salatin_Sept03.pdf

He also has a book:

http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Want-Do-Illegal-Stories/dp/...
Is there a lot of per-line processing in Rails? Or is this something caused by Rack?

I know next to nothing about Rails, so I'm sorry if these are questions with obvious answers. I just think the decision to process body responses on a per-line basis seems odd.
Hey, recruiters lie.

An SSN is required when you hire for a W2 position... that's that a W2 is: a report of income indexed by SSN. But unless they are saying "you're hired, start Monday, and bring proof of citizenship for the I9", this sounds very shady. I've never been asked for this pre-hire and I can't imagine any good uses for this info.

It sounds like they are taking advantage of desperate people and you should tell them to shove it up their ass.
Probably it would still be popular, tho maybe not as much of a hit. Physical toys and puzzles are still pretty popular among non-gamers. And some pretty technical people still enjoy playing with this kind of puzzle: during undergrad I noticed that Rubik's cube was always popular with the mechanical engineers, physicists, etc. This kind of tactile problem-solving can also be a lot more instinctively satisfying than achieving the goal of a video game.
The Wazabee 3DeeShell: "The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed"
Then I read opinion pieces that say things like:

"UV rays convert cholesterol into vitamin D" and "you need blood cholesterol, it's shipped to damage sites and used in repair" and "higher blood cholesterol doesn't always mean increased risk of heart attacks" and "statins reduce cholesterol but don't reduce the risk of heart attack" and "sure, your blood cholesterol is lower. You know why? Because your body is using it and no longer able to replace it"

I wonder how much medicine/biology/biochemistry background I'd need to be able to make my own reasoned decisions. Roll on (friendly) AI.
Is it similar to swoopo?
Abstract: A method and computer program product include defining, by a user, a time template including a plurality of predefined time intervals for scheduling meetings. The time template is applied across a collaborative system.

Translation: recurring meetings feature
It's definitely odd. I'm inclined to attribute it to carelessness, and just not really thinking about the implications of precisely how they chose to implement the Rack specification.

What's frustrating is that apparently there wasn't any performance testing of the 2.3 release that ought to have found this problem. It's been in the code base for about a year at this point.
Google launches Chrome ad campaign
Google has launched a campaign to promote Chrome on the front page of nytimes.com (and probably other sites as well). It features the short video clips found on the Google Chrome YouTube channel, which were created by, among others, Christoph Niemann, whose work appears regularly in the Times.
Sproutbox invests people instead of money
Ask HN:  Should FaceBook Delete Groups That Deny The Holocaust?
It sounds fishy. Is a background or credit check part of your pre-hire approval? If not, there is no reason for them to ask for this information without you being there to fill out a W2, as aristus mentioned.

If they can't tell you specifically why they need this information in very concrete details, do not give it out. (I see that you've already given them this information, but be sure to be more careful in the future.)
Scoopler is written in Python. We use Cloudant (YC s08) for storing our data. I'm planning to write a blog post about this on soon on our Posterous.
The ssn is I think eventually required for background checks, but for me, that happened after I accepted the job offer.

Did you call the company's board line to reach the recruiter ?

I normally don't give out my ssn in any situation.
Using the term second derivative obscures the meaning here somewhat. 'Deceleration' would be a more accessible concept to use to describe what's happening. It doesn't mean we're going backwards yet (i.e. net employment gains), but the rate of loss is slowing. At least that's what they told me in Physics class.
The Feltronification of Tumblr.
Jewish or not... This is 2009... FaceBook, set a standard, don't feed the fire here and give ammo to this BS arsenal.
Maybe it's because I'm in the wrong field. I'm not a technology junky. I don't run my own email server, DNS server, and token ring network at home. I'm frankly not interested in how something works unless it's not obvious how it could work. The most valuable people in my company are the ones who know the (to me) excruciating details of every technology we use, the excruciating details of how every part of our system works, the excruciating details of all of our customer relationships, and the excruciating details of exactly which person out of thousands to talk to about every issue.

Frankly, all of that bores me. I like solving logical and algorithmic puzzles. My work provides me with a regular but meager diet of such things. My ability at such stuff makes my code correct, performant, and reliable, and I'm valued for that, but I'd probably be a more productive employee (a better Software Engineer, in other words) if I couldn't write recursive code but could remember the names of all the people I've been in meetings with in the last six months.
"There is a sucker born every minute".
It's in the pipeline! Thanks.
More likely, at least here in North America, ISPs will just start throttling video streams.
The handbook referenced by the article does NOT say that yard sales are illegal. It just says that yard sales are regulated by laws. There are certain things you can't sell at yard sales, specifically "potentially hazardous products".

Now I haven't read the handbook, but if you're going to say that the law prevents you from selling used books / old toys, you should probably cite the law that says that.
Especially when you bear in mind that natural history presentation is only one of the strings to his bow. He was Controller or BBC2 and was tipped to be Director General of the BBC except that he decided that he couldn't stand working behind a desk for much longer.
there are special classes for kids with IQ's of 70 and AP classes for kids that show a bare minimum of ability. not much of a spectrum.
PHP5 had a very unfortunate and slow pickup from the developer community, mainly stemming from a wave of backwards-incompatibilities in PHP5, some of which was in the new object model for PHP5, the rest of which was changes to way some core functions took their parameters. There are still some applications that are not yet compatible with PHP5, even five years later and after PHP4 has already been end-of-lifed.

It's much like the Python 2.x -> 3.0 migration, in that it needs a lot of attention from developers to make sure applications are ready. The difference is that with PHP, you have scores of uneducated shared hosting clients who don't know anything about their application other than it works in PHP4, but not in PHP5. Hence the reason that it took years before PHP5 outnumbered PHP4 on the webserver...
Original w3 proposal (ahem): http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/17/verity_stob_glb/
Microsoft's Kelsa+ project finds "broad gains" in digital literacy among low-paid staff
No, you never-ever-never-ever give your SSN to a recruiter(nor anyone else). There is absolutely no reason form them to need it.
Yet everyday I head down the motorway and there are dozens or hundreds of cars and
virtually none of them are at or within the speed limit (er, except me, natch').

Depending on what state or jurisdiction you're in, you could have said this and made an even stronger point...

Yet everyday I head down the motorway and there are dozens or hundreds of cars and
virtually none of them are at or within the speed limit (*including me*, because if I
drove the posted limit, I'd get pulled over for *obstructing traffic*!).
Use Archivd. :)

It depends on the situation, how early the company is, how tight the sub-community, etc. But there are 5 major things to check.

a) Funding? See if they are listed on the angel/VC website. Check news reports, press releases, etc. See what other companies the investors have funded and their outcomes.

b) Personnel? See if there are any names in early reports that no longer appear. Make a note of the business / manager / technical mix. Also check to see if the people have worked together before.

c) Competitors? Do your own deepdive for plausible competitors and make a note of their funding, team, and possible business models. Take care to find dead competitors, ie foo.com is cool but Bar Corp already failed at a similar model. Why? How are you different?

d) Relays? You might know someone who knows someone who knows someone at the company. Get their opinions of the people and the business.

e) Demo? Ask for access to their prototype. If Arrington has an invite, then potential hires should too. They might get cagey, might not, either way it's a good data point.
Does a small startup have a chance on hard problems? AtD vs. The Spell Checker Poem
You are right, it doesn't seem to be doable. And that's the point, which is why the author is complaining/writing about it.

Why is a requirement for games not to crash silly? Or do you think apps cannot crash but games can?
I had no idea S3Stat was made by someone on HN! I've been a customer of your nifty service for about six months now.

Good to hear I'm doing my part to put a roof over the head of a fellow hacker ;]
>> "how about a telephonic device that transmits voice over copper lines"

In real time? You're crazy.
It's in 2.3 stable, but it appears to no longer be present in edge (in fact, ActionPack has already gone through a lot of changes):

http://is.gd/xP8Y (github link)
The US narration reminds me of Iron Chef. But I learned something interesting from both: some spiders have mobile retinae; and some have ultraviolet-visible markings.
Not to mention http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/majority-of-hospita...
I agree with your points, except that last one: It's very hard to burn 1000 calories in 1 hour. No matter what the elliptical machine says when you're on it for 30 minutes, you generally burn 100 calories a mile. 1000 calories would be 10 miles at a 6 minute clip for an hour, which would be ridiculously impressive.
I love the smell of irony in the morning
I don't think there's any obscurity; this is high school calculus. If the rate of change (first derivative, negative in this case) is slowing, that means the second derivative is positive here. I'm not yet convinced this is a sign of things to come, however; there are five inflection points in his table where the rate of loss improves.
Work: Python, PHP, Javascript, CSS, HTML, SQL; Django, Drupal, jQuery, CleverCSS

Play: LISP, SuperCollider, Max/MSP, Processing
I think 'deceleration' is more ambiguous.

I tend to think of derivatives taken with respect to time in terms of high school physics.

Let x = postion

x' = velocity

x'' = acceleration

x''' = jerk

(and, incidentally, the 4th through 6th derivatives of position are known, respectively, as 'snap', 'crackle', and 'pop' ;-))
I agree with you.
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/category/carbs/
"One element that’s really nice, is the Peek feature, which allows you to take a look at pages being linked to in an overlay on top of the results, so you don’t have to visit the actual page."

Real-Time news for the writer: you actually visit the page. It's an iframe...

In the old days, there was something called target attribute. Neat when the target is not iframe friendly.
I'm tired of these overwrwought comparisons. The legislation certainly needs work (which is the point of committee and congressional votes), but there is a qualitative difference between writing '(public figure) is a doofus!' and '(private individual) is an evil person who strangles kittens' and conducting a campaign of character assassination.

At present, one can leverage the internet for unfounded personal attacks to a far greater extent than the law provides remedies to defend against them. Our libel and slander laws are written for a simpler age where publication carried an implication of editorial control. You're probably not going to find civil remedies adequate if someone has already falsely identified you as a child molestor for the lulz, say.
I'm not saying the terminology is wrong or anything like that. I'm just saying 'deceleration' is a more concise and comprehensible way of talking about changes in the second derivative. You might be surprised how little high school calculus most people have retained.