skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's an old joke that a new MD at Goldman is looking to hire 5 new analysts for his department.

The new MD goes to his old boss and asks, "What should I do? I have 10 resumes from 10 great candidates, who all went to Ivy League school, graduated with perfect GPAs and all interviewed very well. How do I decide who to hire?"

The old boss asks to see the pile of resumes, and gives them a quick glance. He then shuffles the pile of resumes, throws the top five in the garbage, and hands the new MD the remaining five and says, "Hire these five."

The new MD is shocked - he exclaims, "Is this how Goldman Sachs does is hiring?! It's so capricious!"

The old boss responds, "It isn't capricious. Goldman Sachs doesn't hire unlucky people - and all the resumes I threw out belong to unlucky people."
This is a welcome post, thanks. Perhaps you could also follow up with a more elaborate write up? One thing I would like to see covered is "5 examples of good videos and 5 examples of bad videos, with explanations of what makes them so".
If you tried to achieve a 19th-century standard of living on twenty hours of work per week, you would face three problems. First, many aspects of the 19th-century standard of living would be quite cheap nowadays, but are illegal. 19th-century-quality housing, sanitation, food, and medical care can't be legally provided today. Second, if you did manage to live a 19th-century lifestyle, you would probably be psychologically unable to cope with having a lifestyle so materially inferior to the people around you. Being denied comfort and medical care enjoyed by other people when you were in distress would offend your dignity. Third, even if you did manage to cope psychologically, you would be unable to participate meaningfully in society, because other people would draw conclusions about your strength of character or mental stability.

The only way to achieve Marx's dream would be to make a society-wide decision to apply productivity gains toward leisure instead of towards the material standard of living. But guess what: most people like to work, and everyone needs to feel productive to be psychologically healthy. I'm sure that was easy for someone like Marx to overlook when pondering the plight of people who were brutally overworked, but it changes the equation quite a bit. Plus, productivity translates into power, and everyone has a certain appetite for power.
It certainly could. Then again, it might not. Funny thing about the future.
Goldman's secret to "success" in this instance is the freshly changed accounting rules (see my comment elsewhere) and in the recent past has been the patronage of ex-Goldman Sachs CEO and now treasury secretary Paulson.
You're not "relying on Twitter" for a source of news, you're relying on unattributed hearsay which just happens to be transmitted through Twitter.

That's not smart.
Once you change it to the old-style theme, remove the nag screens, and delete the junk that comes pre-installed on most comps, Vista is actually quite decent.

If MS had just shipped without the nag screens and with a lightweight desktop theme, I think the reception would have been very different. That's not to say that it's the best OS, but it could have been a business success.

The tiny effect of the UAC being enabled by default has, in my opinion, snowballed to destroy Microsoft's reputation and profits. A one bit difference in the OS will hurt their bottom line for years to come.
Nice -- I really like Peldi. I've spoken with him a couple times, done a review for him. They really have a good vibe going for them. These are the startups I love reading about
> Uhm... Can't homosexuals have civil unions

No, that's exactly my point. In most states there is no concept of civil unions for homosexuals. And furthermore, they also don't recognize civil unions from other states. This is in stark contrast to recognition of heterosexual unions.

> Also - what is the use for the state?

It is not about the state; it is about individual liberty.

> It does not need to keep track of the offspring.

Not sure I understand what you mean?

> It takes 5 minutes. Most straight and sane people do it in any way - it is simply a good practice (just like writing a will).

So maybe the government (state and Federal) should simply not recognize Marriage AT ALL?

> If the person you married was a woman with AIDS

Homesexuality is not a disease, dude.

> Also - if you benefit gay couples you conversely discriminate against 2 single people.

Single people choose not to get married. But with gays, the state forces them to stay single.
this is a good. college tuition costs need to not just drop, but crash. they won't until people stop propagating the idea that they are required.
An ARIA for Google Moderator
Interestingly, they're sitting on over $100B cash and cash equiv.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=GS&annual
Sun's Open Source Boss Slams App Engine's Java Support
There are rare earth metal deposits in the USA, however due to environment regulations it is not even close to cost effective.
> checkin a file with a name that begins with a dash. Now check it out under Linux and try manipulating it with command-line utilities

$> echo 'hello world' > -h
$> cat ./-h
hello world

what's the problem?
With accounts payable of $257B, so the cash doesn't really mean that much and a net ~64B assets-liabilities and all those numbers are from Nov '08
Maybe the statement should be a little sideways: "If your answer is ads it is likely to be the wrong answer."

At least more so then other answers you might hear.

Doesn't mean there aren't good businesses to be built on ads. Just that there tend to be many not good ones.
Disney's anthropologists try to understand the young male demographic
It certainly is a strange response, isn't it - he essentially finds fault with the journalist for not being an activist and organising a campaign. It is not a journalists's role to oragnise campaigns; it is to inform the public. If the public is then roused to a campaign, so much the better.

I also find the account of the waiting lists for whatever fashionable bar rather distasteful given the context.

Look, I haven't been to Dubai. I don't know whether the Independent piece was a valid description of the society or not. But the kind of rebuttals I have seen are unconvincing. What kind of rebuttal would I find convincing? Some of the Westerners that live there saying "I have a maid. She holds her own passport. She is paid a living wage. Her working conditions are hard but not inhumane". Or: "I am a contractor working in Dubai. All my workers hold their own passports. We have these and these arrangements to ensure they are not asked to work in 50 degree heat".

There is no reason to make this into a religious issue; the article was far more critical (in my eyes) of the Westerners that flock to Dubai than of the local population. Having read that piece I assure you I would much rather be stuck in an elevator with a UAE native rather than any of those shallow, vapid Brits that were described.
This is most likely not fantastic news. This is most likely terribly misleading news. As noted, suspending aspects of mark-to-market undoubtedly helped their bottom line. And who knows how much of these "profits" were the result of one-time payments from the government via AIG. There is so much opacity with all banks' financial statements that trusting them seems unwise. Wells Fargo claimed they had record profits in Q1, and just today an analyst estimated that Wells actually needs at least another $50 billion. Who do you trust - people effectively talking up their own books, or independent observers who still see huge problems ahead?
I would also check out the math books here.
http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/listing.php?category=3
I'm running Win7 on the low-spec'd 'home' computer that the rest of the family uses - 1.8ghz Sempron, 1GB ram - and it works surprisingly well.

I think it's got the best of Vista and XP and less of the garbage we hate. I think it will be successful if Microsoft can pull off a good marketing campaign. The difference between IT departments upgrading to Vista or upgrading to Windows 7 is that Win7 will actually run fairly well on their old hardware.
Logo: I think you should keep the text. The name is non-obvious so it's helpful to remind the user. The mascot is kind of strange. It looks like a McDonald's character. I'm guessing you wanted something relating to "critter". Something less literal would probably be a better match with the concept of the site. Overall the branding is a little more casual than I would go for, but that part's up to you. (What's up with the weird quotes at the bottom?)

UI, I'm referring to the webpage around the flash. It's a little hard for me to tell because I'm on FF2/Linux now and the site is kind of janky, these are some things I'd change:

- On the homepage, the buttons don't look like buttons.

- On the homepage, the way that the black line follows the borders of the buttons is ugly. Maybe it's the aliasing. If you're going to have that line at all, the horizontal should align with the vertical center of the buttons, instead of some arbitrary point.

- On the learning interface, the horizontal lines extending to the left of the flash are totally arbitrary looking.

- Too many thick black lines. Use contrast to control where the user's attention is drawn. Right now the front page goes logo -> description -> buttons/nav-menu (ignoring the video). Should be description -> buttons -> nav-menu -> logo. Part of this should include making the buttons and nav menu look more clickable.
If You’re Not Blocking The DiggBar, You’re Part Of The Problem
This is probably what students should learning in high school rather than mundane, boring and repetitive topics.
1.5 Million Homeschooled Students in the United States in 2007
First thing I would say is that you don't have to code to get a job. The reason I classify what these individuals are doing as "whining" is because there's not a lack of opportunities, just a lack of the opportunities they expected to have.

Let's take, for example, the English Literature Ph.D. working at a Starbucks in NYC (I know a few...). Why are they there? Because they want to be in NYC. They want to be near the "action", by which I mean the publishing houses and big universities. Great! That's one choice.

Another choice would be to travel out to the heartland of America which is in dire need of educated individuals. Get a teaching position and set-up writing workshops, for the locals to improve their resumes even. Take up an interest in back-woods folk lore. --or-- What about other countries? I hear that the Czech republic is in need of professors. Poland, too!

You see, the problem is that college coddles people (or at least, it did me), and graduate school coddles people. It's not that these individuals can't go out, be creative, try something daring, and maybe fall flat on their faces a couple of times. No, instead, working an 8 hour shift to go home, change, hang out at the bars the "writers" hang out at, and desperately try to sell that novel to yet another publishing house is, let's face it, comfortable. Sure, there's a chance at success, and some people willingly make this choice.

The bottom line is: if the years upon years of education you've received can't somehow be turned into good fortune in the absence of an obvious path forward, then what good were they in the first place?!?
Well, content rots and disappears, as after a certain period of time it is not accessible from the first five pages of google.
I have to agree... a friend of mine has been using the public beta and, after tinkering with it for a while, I found it to be a very functional, rather natural step for Windows.
How many GBs does the install of Windows 7 take up?
Buying the best Samurai Sword
Samurai swords are popular collector’s items. It is one of the interesting hobbies and at times, it can prove to be an expensive hobby too. But for those who collect samurai words, price is never a problem. They will be ready to spend any amount of money as long as they find their exotic samurai swords. Though we do not use these samurai swords for self-defense, we should ensure that we get good quality samurai swords for the money we pay. Many of us buy samurai swords to decorate our walls and as such.
I think it's very interesting that Google is brave enough to put this app out there from a security point of view. They are letting any random stranger without registration etc., run code inside their sandbox. For example, switch to groovy mode and enter:

println new URL('http://www.google.com').openConnection().inputStream.text

You'll see it fetches the web page and prints it out. So this app is now an anonymous proxy, of sorts, using Google's bandwidth to hit other sites. Of course, that is just the first thing that came into my head, but it seems to me there might be many ways someone evil could use this either directly to do bad things or to try and hack the app engine sandbox itself.
Actually, Paulson is no longer the Treasury Secretary. Timothy Geitner holds that post.
Run PHP on the Google App Engine
Perpetual Novice - Years of Experience vs Skill
When bugs metamorphosize
From James Taranto's Best of the Web column in WSJ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123963336683813615.html#mod=rss_opinion_main; edited slightly):

<blockquote>

"Meijer: Bugs in Pet Toys Are Caterpillars"--headline, Associated Press, April 11

Until metamorphosis, when they become features.
</blockquote>
Indian Curry - cure for Alzheimer’s?
It has been scientifically proven by research backed by the University of California that turmeric = an unavoidable ingredient of the Indian Curry Sauce - counters the Alzheimer’s disease.
Try "cat *" and see what happens. This has more details than you ever wanted to know about filenames: http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.h...
>If their revolutionary spirit and humane conscious suddenly spring to life, it's only because Dubai represents the oriental Other

This is not exactly correct. There's nothing sudden about Dubai criticism (foreign worker exploitation, etc.). The criticism existed for a decade, at the very least. It is true however, that many people are ignorant and weren't aware of "Dubai issue" until now that it's gone mainstream in journalism.
Sure. The company I current work for, who consider themselves a leader in online optimization, have all of our HR details on a 3rd party IE6 only site (https://www6.intersourcing.com/www/templates/utilities/TreeV...). So anytime I want to view my paycheck I have to fire up VMWare on the Mac.
Yeah, there are probably lost of nasty things one could do.

The first that comes to mind it to have the have the website open itself, re-insert the command, open itself, ad overflow.

On the other hand, there are security holes in everything, and its a fun toy, so one might as well enjoy it while it lasts.
I had trouble with left and right for a long time. Then, one day on an elementary school ski trip, another kid indicated he wanted to go right at the top of a hill. I somewhat embarrassedly admitted I wasn't sure which way that was.

Response: "Look, this way (point) is right, this way (point) is left." Never had trouble with left/right again.
Wow, very impressive stuff. A job well executed and done. Keep it up!
I think there's a bit more to it than that. For example they hurt themselves enormously by breaking the driver model. I have a bunch of useless devices sitting all around me right now for which there are no Vista drivers and never will be. For that reason alone I don't recommend Vista to any of my friends because I know they probably have printers, scanners, cameras, who-knows-what that is never going to work again if they install it.
To this day I'll hold up my hands and make an L shape with my pointer finger and thumb. The one that looks like a proper L (and not a mirrored L) is left.

East and West gives me a hard time too, so I have to think about where California is or where Florida is.
The Internet never forgets. Where we once had oral retellings of epic sagas, we now have synthesis of radical new ideas. Humans are extraordinarily adaptable machines. We've now built a ubiquitous information retrieval system and it will only get better.

If you could trade memory for creativity, would you?
The way I learned: my left hand makes an "L" when the thumb and forefinger are perpendicular.
Looks absolutely awesome. I gave up on chinese a month ago (my chinese girlfriend just broke up with me and I've decided to learn spanish instead), but the tool looks immensely useful, and I was looking for a tool like this previously (and didn't find all that much). Learning to write the characters is integral to learning to read them (stroke order is very important).

The video is excellent... I just sat there and stared at it. Only criticism is, being able to draw the characters on-screen does not automatically translate to being able to write them by hand. Do you have a way to translate the on-screen writing skill to manual writing skill? If not, I would suggest this simple method: provide a way for the user to select characters that he/she has already learned on-screen and print out a practice sheet (A4 or Letter sized, probably as a PDF), filled with measured squares (with the guidelines), with the first square containing the character, the next 10 containing a pale grey version of the character, and all the other squares blank.

In my experience I needed to fill most of an A4 page before being able to write the character freehand without guidelines - perhaps even more than that. If you have this feature, then next time I'm learning chinese (!) I'll gladly pay an "affordable monthly subscription" (like, about $5-10) to use your tool, probably for about a year (I'd probably buy a year in advance).

Oh, as someone pointed out, you'll lose all the students with that subscription... perhaps worth offering a student subscription for a little less (or even contacting universities to subsidise their student memberships?).

Good luck!
The "archaic" way feels better, though. Brain (mine at least) must parse it in a way other than the obvious way.
You were actually part of the inspiration for me getting into this market; I even have "bingo card creator" in my notebook.

There are definitely many interesting aspects of this market. I don't think it is impossible to differentiate or I wouldn't be in it. But, I really do think that prices for formal educational books, materials, and software are all heading towards $0 fast.

Rosetta Stone really has executed brilliantly in its segment of the market. It sales and marketing effort has been top-notch. It is also interesting to see how they are attempting to cross over from do-it-yourself language learners to traditional language learners. I would love to know what they are charging schools for their software.
This is the second time in the past few days I've been told to use two spaces instead of tabs. Can anyone provide any insight as to what difference this makes?
I heard the same joke about McKinsey. Makes sense, after all McKinsey is the Goldman Sachs of consulting.
Why have our “needs” risen as our productive powers have, with the result that the hours we devote to employment haven’t fallen as much as Marx or Keynes forecast? Why is it that so many of us - I count myself fortunate to be a partial exception - haven’t used wealth to free ourselves from alienating labour?

Because we're accelerating.
StumbleUpon brings serendipity back to the web
You've probably already thought about this, but the corporate market is pretty large for language learning. I work for a big company with offices in many countries so they strongly encourage learning other languages. And the corporate expense department won't blink an eye at spending a few hundred dollars for language learning software. If you get a reputation for being the best product in your space, it is worth quite a lot more than $5 per customer.
I'm not quite sure why this style guide is more noteworthy than all the other ruby style guides out there.. e.g.:

http://www.caliban.org/ruby/rubyguide.shtml

and

http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/10/elements-of-ruby-style/
If Windows 7 fixes the file explorer, I'll be happy. Vista has a bad habit of turning all my folders into "Music" folders, and making it impossible to sort things by date.
Visualization of Steel-Bank Common Lisp development history
This was kinda obvious. Why would Google just cut off its clients randomly? They aren't that evil.
Seems to me that there is plenty of online cooperation going on, between sites like Wikipedia, communities like HN, Reddit, forums, etc, open source projects, and all that jazz.

Perhaps I didn't understand the problem very well..
Bill Gates Applies for Patent on Electromagnetic Engine
Ian Macdonald puts it well:

Unlike in some other communities, there is no contention in the Ruby community over whether to use two, four or eight spaces. Everyone is happy to use just two. Furthermore, never use tabs, which includes the practice of mixing tabs with spaces.

That's not to say spaces are better than tabs, or two spaces are better than four spaces. Just that idiomatic Ruby code uses two spaces.
The untapped, unexplored universe that are our brains and our genes astound me every time I read a story like this! Nothing is more fascinating to me. Except for the process of human/animal evolution.
I was like this for east and west when given north for the longest time. I would always ask my little brother which way east or west was.
Christian is a very well known Ruby developer.

I'd say having a noteworthy developer write a style guide is noteworthy.
What Kids Are Saying 
What Kids Are Saying offers kids educational games including the funny things kids say, their thoughts and help in improving their computer knowledge.
Well, what tom says. Relying on twitter for news is like listening to chatter on the street - until you click on one of those tinyurls, which may or may not lead to a tangible source. You'd be better off just subscribing to a few RSS feeds of popular news sites. Even if you only read the headlines that would still provide better information density and at least a bit of hope that these headlines have gotten some scrunity before broadcast. Also there will be a full article waiting behind each link - which helps if you truly want to form an opinion on something beyond catching up keywords for re-tweet.
CRUISES OFFERING BEST HONEYMOON PACKAGES
Tabs are not fixed-width. Tabs are interpreted by the viewing application according to that application's settings.

Two spaces are always two spaces.
But guess what: most people like to work, and everyone needs to feel productive to be psychologically healthy. I'm sure that was easy for someone like Marx to overlook...

Actually that is Marx's point. That when people are free of labour they will fill their lives with productive work that they enjoy. The conservative anti-Marx viewpoint is that no, people are by nature bad and lazy and need to be forced to be good and productive.

work != labour

labour: doing something you don't want to do

leisure: doing something you want to do

work: being productive (orthogonal to labour/leisure)
Can anyone actually read this thing? Did he just replace the mechanical flywheel with an electrical one?
Finding Utility in the Jumble of Tweeted Thoughts
Did this work for anybody? In simulator I see the keyboard on top of the semitransparent view...

EDIT: Oh, I see it now. You have to type in some text and press blue button to see the effect of keyboard being covered. Interestingly, keyboard is in its own window which is one of the few cases where an iPhone app would have more than one window at all (one other being alerts popups).