skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That would actually be a good question to ask, but probably for an entirely different reason than facebook meant. This is how I would ask this of a Javascript person:

I'd immediately tell you to use Newton's method, what Newton's method is and (if you didn't have a college degree) what derivative is.

Then we'd go through the exercise of doing it for square root and then I'd see if you could the fact that Javascript has support for first-order functions to implement it similarly to how it's done in SICP:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-10.html...

(I really do wonder if this is what the Facebook interviewer wanted to hear, but I am doubting it.)
Hopefully we are moving back into an era of increased competition in the OS market; that would be a good thing to see. personally I'm rooting for Plan9 :)

Having you product commoditized isn't so bad, provided that you've got high volumes. Getting people to upgrade existing XP and Office installs is going to be Microsofts biggest challenge, in a saturated market where sagging hardware sales are no longer pushing new Windows licenses. Hence ever more aggressive Windows Genuine Advantage stuff, I guess.

I don't know about you, but when people talk to me about upgrading their 'slow' old pc's now, I usually talk them into putting Linux on it. They are generally astounded at the speed improvement over their mushy old, virus addled, Windows install. No complaints from anyone yet.
I think it's a very cool experiment. I could see it working very well. However, no pay and only 10% of the profits doesn't seem like such a great deal.

To me, getting a full time job and doing affiliate marketing at night--keeping 100% of the profits, seems like it would be a better deal.

There are many very profitable affiliate companies in San Francisco that both pay well and offer revenue sharing deals to their workers. These companies really know what they are doing in the lead gen/affiliate space and offering a decent base salary is small peanuts to them.
Masoud Kalali On Sun/Oracle And The Future Of Glassfish
All politicians have to control their image. Mudslinging and character assassination has become so widespread that a tight control of all images are necessary. Negative campaigning continues to be used because it is far more effective than positive campaigns. Hillary has never really recovered since her Tammy Wynette remark back in 1992: it was the beginning of the right wing campaign to attack her [1].

Image control is critical because it shapes how people remember you (as a candidate). Not your issues. Not your positions. Not your history. Your image. All that left-brain/right-brain stuff can, and does, get used against you. It is identical to how words get manipulated - words like freedom and terrorism get used to control how you think and ultimately, prevent you from thinking at all [2].

I ran for election myself in 2008. I had never done so before, not even in college. I learned a lot, and managed to make just about every mistake possible [3]. In the end, I came in dead last.

After last year's experience, I now have a brand new answer for the null-question: "what is your greatest weakness?" My answer is that I discovered "I interview poorly."

An example of defining images, some very staged, some spontaneous:
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/mirror-mirror-on-...

Notes:

1 - It is my opinion that if she got the presidential, or even vice presidential nomination in 2008, then McCain would have won because the vast majority of the GOP have been trained to loathe her, and there would have been zero GOP voters staying home that day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_Clinton#cite_not...

2 - I'm reminded of one of PG's essays where he says: Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.

The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

3 - Without getting arrested, or in some sex scandal. I'm rather boring IRL.
Picking Letters, 10 a Day, That Reach Obama
The programming is the hard part. 10% is ridiculous.
"Statistics show most people will look once and then leave."

What stats?
It's not just the numerical analysis aspect: what if the interviewer was looking for knowledge of functional programming (given Javascript's support for first order functions)? Given that square root via Newton's Method is one of the first "wow this is really neat" things that struck out to me when I read SICP:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-10.html...
Managing a country is just like parenting --

A child should not be given absolute freedom before he/she is grown up enough to act responsibly.

However, using the above as an excuse to control the child forever will certainly result in catastrophic failure (for both the child and the parents).
I used to write with lots of caveats and such. I had to stop.

Was it because it was hard to read? No. It was because it didn't matter.

It doesn't matter how much you water your prose down with caveats and exceptions and criteria and clauses, it turns out that there's still a percentage of people who won't read them and still flame you. It doesn't matter how humble a tone you strike, some people think you're being arrogant simply because you have an opinion.

It's really not worth gumming up prose with exceptions, because English doesn't have the requisite level of precision anyhow.

Of course, I don't follow this principle 100% either, but I've stopped stroking out about it. Better to say something clearly and be misunderstood than say something muddled and still be misunderstood.
You could be right, but I suspect the groups of people that enjoy building software and doing affiliate marketing have a relatively small area of overlap.
I'm the original submitter and also wrote about the distraction issue in the context of students and laptops in this post: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-di... . I've just bookmarked May's post for future reference.
High school students and hackers: both are prone to distraction
(b) I've heard of many Internet companies like this.

In fact, most of the stories I've heard of companies doing the 20-hour day thing end in failure. I think more people try it that way.

Actually, I should rephrase that---companies that START OUT with 20 hour days more often than not end in failure.

The reason why is simple: there's no reason why you need to work that hard until you've found a "magic model" and are scaling it.

In other words, here is my blueprint for maximizing your odds of starting a successful Internet company:

a) have stable income.

b) start side projects part time, don't work on them for more than a few hours a day.

c) once one of the side projects is generating significant revenue more than income source A, or is growing like a Twitter, then slowly ramp up to where you're working the 10+ hour day thing

d) sell for bazillions

If you skip A and B, you will likely fail.
> Customers buying many of the least-expensive laptops with the software are likely to be limited to running three applications at a time and miss out on other key features, or pay for an upgrade.

This strikes me as scarily bad strategy. I buy a new computer and ... I can't do much with it. Am I happy about my purchase?

I wonder whether the real losers here are going to be the hardware sellers. Microsoft, after all, does make useable versions of its operating system. If a computer is received with an unusable OS on it, then the customers might blame the people who put together the computer.

Disclaimer: I didn't read the who article, seeing as the rest of it is subscription-only. (Eerily similar to the Microsoft strategy the article is discussing, eh?)
[In what way is this worse than offering an unpaid summer internship, which seem to proliferate everywhere (especially in an economy like this)?]

There are a number of white label job board solutions out there. I think ours delivers a far superior user experience, but that's open for debate. I can say for sure that there's more to building successful sites than sticking an implementation of someone else's software on a page somewhere.

We think we're working on some pretty fun stuff, and would love to have some smart help for the summer. Because we don't have the cash on hand to pay interns $20-$30/hour, we're trying a deferred compensation arrangement - which we want to pay more, in the end.

I do have some extra sham wows I could sell you, though.
One smart thing Oracle could do is make their database talk the MySQL protocol and SQL dialect. They already support pretty much all of MySQL's features, so offering an instant upgrade path might get them a lot of business. A cheaper Web edition of their database will help, too.
I should have said at least 10%. We'll talk with whoever's interested, take a look at projected cash flows, and find the right number for everyone. Everything is always up for discussion.

As tptacek points out below, many internships are unpaid or offer minimum wage. How do people afford them? Parents and student loans, I imagine. We think this is a pretty decent option.
Please read what I wrote: "People who are obssessed with guns to the extent they create twitter accounts and websites called Save The Guns". Not just anyone who happens to support gun rights, which I also do, as it happens.

I agree it is not really appropriate, let's leave it there.
Poor people are dumb, let's keep them slaves.
We discussed this in an Algebra class during highschool--she actually sat us by birthdate. Turns out two people shared my birthday and she made us take out our IDs because she thought it was some sort of ruse. 10% of the class with the same birthday is a bit odd, but we all had fun calculating the actual odds.
Glad to see some of the meetups are extending to SF as well as down in the Valley. iamelgringos hacker and founder meetups are pretty damn legit though.

Good luck bros.
The hard part and the fun part. Fortunately, we've been building online recruiting software for almost a year and half, so we've got just a little bit of a foundation to work from.

What number do you think is fair?
John Paulson is not an economist, he got an mba but you don't go to business school to learn something, you go there to get a passport and connections. Be that as it may, he is definitely not an economist but a hedge fund investor.

Taleb is something of an anomaly. He is your prototypical anti-economist. GIven how he rages about economists, I'm surprised to find him on this list. If someone wants to provoke him, send him this page... ;)

Roubini is an economist but very definitely not mainstream.

The others I don't know.
What you describe is the no-risk route. However, by going full time on a project you increase its chances of success significantly. I'd argue that it is very hard to determine that an idea (including successive iterations) will not lead to a successful internet company till you go full time on it.
A lot of middle class Indians would agree with the sentiment that democracy causes chaos.

In the brief period of time India was undemocratic (the Emergency), anecdotal evidence suggests that the middle class was happy with the way things were. The poor, meanwhile, were miserable, and they responded by voting out the incumbent govt by a record margin.

So it won't be very surprising if middle class China actually supports the lack of freedom.
I don't know how much research this requires, as someone who had a front seat for the conversion of Eastern Europe to democracy it all seems obvious to me.

OBVIOUSLY you need law and order to get democracy. Democracy is the pinnacle of a working society not the root cause of it.

Now,people will often mistake the results of lawlessness and corruption as the reason peoples X just ain't made for democracy and freedom.

I hope I don't have to explain how stupid that is. It is just as stupid at the theory that democracy would flourish in Afghanistan and Iraq with little to no effort, like magic!
It's an internship position. Plenty of CS people take internships that pay minimum wage, or nothing at all. So far as I can tell, even Spolsky's interns get a flat stipend. Royalties are uncommon even for fulltimers and contractors.

I wouldn't do it, but it's not a BS offer.
You may get 3 interns just from this post (we provide no information at all about what we pay our interns, only that it's a paid position, and we have no trouble filling slots). But you might get better interns if you address the risk of not being able to pay living expenses in SV.
How to dream big. And the analogy to ice-nine (Vonnegut's Cat Cradle's ending) is not out of place.

While a great idea for a great purpose, biotech lacks the means to add a plug that could be pulled reliably when events turn wrong.
'appreciate that. We think it'll be a sweet experience for the right folks.
This is the worst YC clone yet. $0 in funding, for a 90% equity stake.
Cold fusion: it's the helium, stupid
http://yarchive.net/med/lifestyle_drugs.html
In university I had a teacher specialist on industry production factories.

He said something I grabbed: "When I go to a company, in five minutes I can see if the owners work hard or work well. When you go to a well managed company is very boring, all things are made routine and made without effort"

If you work 20 hrs day STOP!! Your work quality/hr is very low, you make your life hell, and your products reflect that. Start learning how to make effective use of your time. There are specialist on that, read books, see videos(eg Even Pagan) learn to avoid distractions, focus like a laser on what brings value to your company(marketing:learn about people necessities ).
Caltech is still a good bet. A few years ago I sat next to Hawking at Kip Thorne's 60th birthday party. Even more fun was being seated at the dinner table with Hawking's nurses, who told more than one story I'm not at liberty to repeat on Hacker News. ;-)
Solaris 2.5 and 2.5.1 were ported to IBM PReP systems in the 90s. You could order certain models of PPC workstation with AIX, Solaris, Windows NT, or OS/2 preloaded.
I didn't mean to post Rob's blog to discredit your submission of the link in any way. Sorry if I came across like that. Thanks for posting the link, I enjoyed reading it! And great article on your blog too! :)
The people are uneducated. In order to protect them from themselves, a strong government must control them. Since a strong government controls the people, there is no need to educate them. The people are uneducated...
I don't think Oracle really believes there's value in "social capital". To the contrary, they seem to thrive on the fact that almost everybody despises them a little bit. If people were happy to do business with Oracle then Oracle would feel like they weren't charging enough.
In Facebook's defense (I have no affiliation with FB, and in general am not a big fan of them), they probably weren't looking for somebody to whip out Newton's method, but rather just binary search.

Everyone who says "this question is completely irrelevant" isn't completely right. This question would be completely irrelevant if they were exclusively looking for a "fancy" square root finding technique. However, binary search is a pretty basic algorithm - the trick here is to recognize that such a basic algorithm can be applied to a seemingly unrelated problem. If Facebook is testing to see if people can connect different parts of their knowledge (square root function is strictly increasing, something that everyone knows to be true at least intuitively, combined with the fact that binary search can then be used in such a situation), then it's a reasonable question to ask. Maybe not for a front-end developer though.
I've seen a lot of my "normal/non tech industry" friends get on recently. They have a completely different usage pattern:

Under 100 followers is more than enough (followers and following)

A whole lot less updates.

Probably half protect their updates.

I think a lot of people will stick around, especially if they can follow celebrities and the like. The suggested followers that get added to your account are great for retention.

Good luck bros.
I have an idea for a novel that is truly earth-shattering. It might be described as "fucking brilliant". I'm very busy and therefore don't have time to write it myself, and I obviously can't discuss the concept here; I have to safeguard this earth-shattering idea so it isn't stolen. But if you've scored at least 700 on your verbal SAT-- formal score reports, please-- and can pass a 4-hour writing test I will administer on-site in New York, you can ghost-write my novel. You'll be expected to fill out at least 900 pages, because my idea is just too epic to implemented in fewer. You'll have 2 months to complete the task, revisions and editing included, and you'll be expected to live in New York during that period, with full responsibility for accommodations being yours. If you're successful and on time, I'll offer you a full 12.5 percent of the proceeds between publication and April 20, 2011.

Your name will not appear on the novel, though mine will. However, I'll forward your name to a couple of literary agents and, without getting specific, tell them that I know you to "generally do very good work".

How does this deal sound to you?
Your running shoes are a lie
this is the same mentality i had while working on my first startup and it's a fallacy. the most productive startup founders i know have activities/interest outside of work and aren't anywhere close to this extreme.

neglecting your health is not a badge of how hard you work. one of my startup investors, chris sacca, recently told me he's weary of founders who don't exercise regularly. exercise is a net gain.

i really urge more people to read this blog post from naval ravikant before launching into endless 14 hour "work" days - http://www.startupboy.com/journal/2005/11/29/the-80-hour-myt...
that's a reason why abusive contracts are bad, not a reason why allowing foreign workers into the united states is bad.

we should allow more foreign workers into the united states for the same reason we should let automobiles overtake horse and buggy - it's more efficient.
The HN "noprocrast" feature is there for a reason. Use it.
FSCK or ARGH would be funny symbols.

Honestly, I wouldn't care much about what it was called at that point. My eyes would be big glazed-over dollar-signs.
It sounds like a labored metaphor that's way off base.

We're not secretive; our software is already built, live and proven; we'll absolutely tell everyone who will listen about the folks who work with us; it's an internship, man.
Your Users Don’t Care
Not sure of the legalities, but hire a private investigator? It's kinda their thing...
Ask HN:  Thoughts on 40Billion.com
I helped a friend out with an issue like this recently. If you know his name, get a background check done on him. That should give you plenty to go off of. If you don't know his name, try figuring out which service provider his phone number is from. I assume the email has stripped out the IP address in the headers? If not, just plug that into one of the many databases available online.

If all of that fails, try this. Set up a webserver for which you have complete logging. Then, send the guy an email from a different account with a link. If somehow you can get him to visit your webserver, you can log his IP address. This is completely legal and there's not even anything that underhanded about it. You just need to get him to visit a webpage on your server. The IP address will give you an ISP and a general location. Armed with this data, you should have no trouble.

EDIT: For those that are suggesting he post the info, I strongly advise against it. Also, why would you track down someone when you don't even know the truthfulness of the original poster's story? I don't believe he's lying, but that doesn't mean I would get personally involved. There is a big difference between giving general advice and actually carrying out the action yourself. Further, HN doesn't need to follow the type of witchhunt behaviour that often happens on other sites like Reddit.
I think you've set yourself up so that anyone who would be willing to take your offer shouldn't be trusted.
What you would need to do is see who provided phone service to him and then get the information on address and billing through the provider (requires warrant). Also, did he use a public email (yahoo, gmail) or was it through a private site? You could try the whois to see who the host is and contact them too. I agree with pierrefar that the best course seems to be hiring a PI.

Or...

You could post what you know up here and round up an HN posse.

Edit: That last line is sarcasm. Don't really do that.
You're arguing with a straw man. Nobody is arguing that foreign workers shouldn't be allowed into the country.

It's a market inefficiency for companies to be allowed to "capture" employees and artificially suppress their wages by keeping them off the open employment market under threat of deportation.
As you've hinted there's a reason that economics is treated that way. At this point, economics simply relies on too many other fields; many of which are also at their infancy. When you think about it, we're having a hard enough time predicting stuff like weather; let alone something that is the sum of all of that and more...
Search for research papers filtered by popular websites using google power..
The clip art all over the site makes me feel like my email will get sold the second I register.
I just made it to try the custom search ....
how do you think we can get better at this ?
A little bit of an upgrade from Microfiche. Well done.
> You could post what you know up here and round up an HN posse.

No, there are so many things wrong with that idea. Leave that stuff to Reddit and 4Chan. There's nothing wrong with giving general advice, but there's no reason to drag the HN name into an issue like this.
I'm willing to wager there's a few pulling out right now...
Now forget that both oracle and sun are names of companies, and instead read them as english words. :)
Economic Blogger Who Angered Seoul Is Acquitted
I'll switch. I use mysql only by convenience. Postgres seems better anyways.
Looks like Idee from Toronto has some competition for http://tineye.com

Its never good to have Google enter your space.
Plenty of CS people take internships that pay minimum wage, or nothing at all.

Perhaps, but "amazing hackers" with "great references" who are taking CS "likely at a very good school" aren't going to be considering internships that pay minimum wage, or anything close. Even in this economy, I'd expect that good students should be looking at something in the ballpark of $5k/month.
I've been involved in criminal cases that had less to go on than a phone number (try IRC /whois and finger) and seen that lead to an indictment within weeks. Why aren't the cops working with the phone number you gave them? Which "authorities" did you contact?