skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's pretty cool looking. One question, one concern: 1) Are events added manually? They certainly seem well-enough targeted that I could see them being so. But the flip side of that is that there's a lot of other events of a similar nature, but with less of a geeky focus, that I'm afraid I wouldn't see. If they're not manually added, how are you ensuring that all events that could be potentially targeted are included?

2) It might be nice to include a throttle for the refresh speed. 5 seconds, for a high-volume item like the BEA, was total information overload.

EDIT: I should be more precise about #2. I'm seeing that even though it's been constantly refreshing every 5 sec for a couple minutes, it's still up to May 29. So maybe it's not actually that high-volume, but there's still something going on where I'm seeing a hard-to-follow stream of text.
Reminds me of Richard Feynman.
"mathematicians designate any theorem as "trivial" once a proof has been obtained--no matter how difficult the theorem was to prove in the first place. There are therefore exactly two types of true mathematical propositions: trivial ones, and those which have not yet been proven. "

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Trivial.html
That's true. On the other hand, having a flag score would mean that it effectively became a downvote, and presumably those aren't in HN for a reason. I'm not sure of the actual effect of all this.
I'm confused. What's ridiculous about exhorting people to write kick-ass cover letters?
I am not sure what it does, but it looks fucking gorgeous.
Blue jeans, a polo shirt and converse or vans are the only thing I've worn to work or an interview since 1999.

I've also interviewed a ton of people and the only time I've noticed what people are wearing are if they were wearing "dress clothes" or they had one of those weird burning man goth cyber warrior outfits on.
Highlights a larger issue - the way we hire people is broken. Resumes and cover letters only give you enough info to know the person may or may not be qualified for the job. Are they a fit with culture at your company? Are they going to leave in a year to pursue their REAL passion?
Ask HN: any recommended web based interactive graphing tools?
I'm trying to graph a social network plus meta data. This is essentially graphing a subset of a social graph with transaction information. The goal is to build a graph based admin tool, accessible over the web.

I'd like to quickly identify subgroups by dynamically adding and removing users and selectively adding depth and breadth to the data displayed. I'd like to connect to a live server and display the results in a browser.

I think Processing is the best tool for the job, but I wanted to ask the community here for input. By the way, http://processing.org is horrible name for googling.

I'd also love to see any examples of graphs, tool tips, and user input that loads more data from a server done in processing. For a live site, I wouldn't be surprised if processing.js is a better choice.
If you're talking to a "hiring manager" who "doesn't read cover letters", you've already conceded the game. Also, speak for yourself --- I read cover letters in advance, and often don't even bother with the resume until the candidate is in front of me.

I have no idea why you think most good candidates won't be "writing specific cover letters for your company". Top talent doesn't shotgun resumes across 100 companies; they pick places they think they'll like, have a reason for doing it, and do everything they can to get the best possible offer.
Business casual. A tie says "BigCo refugee". A t-shirt and jeans probably won't neg you, but it can in some places.
I disagree that luxury meals are enhanced by their high price. I eat for the food, and superlative, exquisitely prepared food tends to cost more. Overall experience, most notably accomodating and non-intrusive service, is important as well.

I think a handsome receipt gives a "nice touch" feeling about a restaurant experience; in a similar way, a flimsy receipt may stick out as the only dumpy aspect about a meal.
All of this is "obvious" to you?

Do you think, just maybe, that you're reading a bit too much into my question??
Ho, and indeed, Hum.
That's what interviews and references are for.
sounds to me like Rubinius is dead. these guys were very anti-jruby not that long ago.
I was indeed trying to make a distinction between a library and a full application or web site. From an entrepreneurial perspective I think it's important to focus on products rather than libraries. It's far easier to monetize a twitter client than it is a twitter library.

If you want to get a programming job it's a good idea to publish a lot of stuff to github. Personally I find it more satisfying to build applications vs. libraries. Others find the opposite to be true.
Breakthrough In Quantum Control Of Light: Implications For Banking, Drug Design
"Come, as you are, as you were, .. as a friend".
Qajack - missing link in social media
Qajack uses video to play with what you know and what you want to know. It's monkey simple, no profiles to fill out, just login, play and gamble with your reputation.

If Twitter is about brevity and inanity, Qajack is about authenticity and rich relevance.
The "forget the resume" part, or perhaps the "we don't believe in years of irrelevance" -- they believe 6 months and 5 years of experience are roughly the same when it comes to productivity.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/833-years-of-irrelevance

By all means, write a good cover letter -- but be aware that apparently unlike 37signals, some hiring managers do actually skim resumes when making the first cut. I'd feel irresponsible not doing so.

"Write a good cover letter", however, is not particularly novel or link-bait worthy advice.
PS: Some of the differences are just funny. Retric in Google = Hacker News profile, Retric in Bing = Slashdot Profile.

Slashdot has been around for over a decade. It has a PageRank of 9 versus 6 for HN. I would imagine Bing has a similar metric for measuring the popularity of a site. It seems to make sense that the Slashdot profile would rank higher.

What I think is really interesting is why Google ranked the HN profile higher. I'm thinking freshness is weighted much higher on Google than it is on Bing. I've done similar searches on both and while both yield relevant results I'm more likely to see older content on Bing.
For those of you who have clearly not used live.com in the past year and a half they've been doing this, there is no "nebula obsession" -- the photo changes daily along with the facts.
Yep, when I worked out in Reston (also in Northern Virginia area, for those on the other coast) there was a building like that right next to ours. If you pulled into their driveway by accident, you could expect to have machine guns pointed at you until they determined you were not a threat.

Occasionally, we would have an interviewee show up 20 minutes late for an interview in a cold sweat, shaking, and looking like they had seen a ghost--all because of a wrong turn.
Doomed.
Edit:
Because it's ugly. I went and looked at more designs, most belong to the "Art Instruction Schools" aesthetic.

Because it's vaporware. Have they made 'one' yet? How do they intend to make the body? Fiberglass? That's the only thing they could possibly afford. If and only if they have access to a 5 axis CNC router and a CAM package to carve the plugs.

You won't be able to get it financed in the foreseeable future.

You will have to jump through unimaginable license hoops to register it yourself as a kit car.
Doesn't decimate literally mean to reduce by ten percent? Literally decimating the pool would mean eliminating 7 applicants :)
Project Natal:  E3 XBOX 360 - First Video Demo Release
I played around with it for a bit and thought it was quite cool. Then just as I was about to click close I saw the wierd slider thing at the bottom and though - ah that would be so awesome if I could slide it and.... OH COOL!

Kudos.
You made some interesting points here.. I think you are a man of science and being such a theory you hold based on seemingly limited facts is never published.

The statement made the US African Amerians are to Moraccans to France. The premise I can never agree upon. France has never had a Moraccan president. Until then I can't agree to your premise. An there being at Least 100 more reasons why the parrellal can never be drawn.. I would say that it was a reach.. My encouragement to you is to continue to live and seek and an understanding. Talk to people and, that is where books come from.. The experience of someone else. Enjoy some for yourself.. Believe me it enriches life..
And remember, you can always ask the HR rep setting up the interview what the typical dress at the company is.
Since when was free speech a recognized right? There's restrictions on it in every country on the planet. We in the west are lucky that we're allowed to say a lot without restriction, but we hardly have free speech.

Other peoples rights are always more important than my own, that's recognized in every country regardless of political affiliation. I can't libel or defame someone even though I have a right to freedom of speech, and I can't threaten the stability of my country as it may endanger peoples lives, which is why there's national security laws that can put strangle holds on newspapers and essentially anyone.

People respond to the Chinese banning things like its inhumane. I'm sorry, but China has a notorious history of political instability, only two times in history has it not been in Civil War. That is right now, and when it was invaded and conquered by the Mongols.

In less than 2 years China's raised the average household income by approximately 20% or $1,000, which is phenomenal. They have low unemployment for a third world country, inline with standards aimed for by western countries, usually below 11% is seen as good and China has an average of 9%.

China is managing to keep a greater percentage of its citizens above the poverty line than the US, despite it being a slightly smaller country with four times the citizens. So please, perhaps question the restrictions placed on speech in your own country, before you condemn the restrictions placed in another country, with a different culture, different circumstances and a very different history.

You question who deserves this right, however perhaps you should be questioning if we as westerners deserve this right, when people without this 'right' are treating their poor better than us.
Danger-Will-Robbins. If you're applying at a VC-funded company, there's a decent chance the HR person has no idea what the engineering culture is actually like. Don't wear the tie.
Thanks for the link, soundsop. Iconfu is a pixel-oriented icon editor written almost entirely in javascript - ie no flash or flex. It uses <canvas> heavily so no Internet Explorer either, sorry microsoft (and google's ex-canvas doesn't do the trick, it doesn't have all the features iconfu needs).

In a previous life I developed web applications at a bank and occasionally we needed icons. Finding the right icon was next to impossible, and MSPaint was our only option for drawing. Most frustratingly of all, in many cases all we needed to do was take a little "adjective" icon (a miniscule '+' or '!' for example) and overlay it on an icon we already had ... not possible.

I figured there had to be a better way, so I quit my cosy job to make iconfu. Technically, it does almost everything I'd want an icon editor to do - especially drawing a given icon on top of another icon. And drawing icons, pixel-by-pixel if necessary. There are some neat features I'd like to add - layers, more HSV controls, multiple parallel edits for example - but not yet. Financially ... um, I'm not sure how to put this ... my family has been very helpful.

I admit I'm biased, but it looks like iconfu is the best online icon editor out there. I haven't figured out how to turn it into cash, yet. HN ideas would be greatly appreciated.

There was some discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=636388 earlier today about the concept of an online icon editor.
I always tailor my cover letters to each company. On the other hand, I'm not shotgunning out 100s of resumes.

But, my experience on the other side of the table is that I've never actually gotten a cover letter passed on from HR. Or, if HR gave them to the hiring managers, they didn't pass them on to the engineers reviewing resumes & doing interviews.
"In my day Johnny...gaming consisted of two buttons and a thumb tab driven joystick."
Ask HN: What would you do with a touchscreen monitor?
I recently bought a 12-inch touchscreen display off of eBay. I figured it would be cool to put some kind of status monitor, weather, etc. on it and mount it on the wall. A regular LCD would work to display that information too, though.

Any ideas on what would be interesting/useful/cool to display on there (particularly anything that would take advantage of its touch capability)?
Neat idea, but this is unusably slow on my PC (Firefox 3, Core 2 Duo 2ghz).
Thinking further: lock-in doesn't give you much competitive advantage in comp tech - but it does grant you a buffer against competitors. It buys you time, to match their improvement, or even improve on them. Therefore, in tech, I think competitive advantage should be measured in time * : our good image gives us 1 week; user inertia is 1 year; adapting to another interface is 3 weeks; our server farm speed is 6 months; PageRank is 2 months.

These times only come into play when a competitor offers something better in some way (if there's nothing better, then these timers aren't engaged). It's like a better product is a pressure or voltage differential, and the competitive advantage is the resistance.

Of course, when you're ahead is the time to grow your competitive advantage, even though it's not needed, so that you have it when it is needed. It's an investment. The parts of the model are: the users you have; the relative attractiveness of a competing product; and what stops your users from switching.

Actually, I think this is just one kind of competitive advantage, and it only covers existing users (not new ones). For a start up, it's not enough to just retain users, you need to get them in the first place. You're better off focusing on getting them (by increasing the relative attractiveness of your product) rather than stopping them from switching... but Warren Buffett is always going on about competitive advantage - what exactly does he mean?

[ * ] for half their users to switch
I usually just ask on one of the phone interviews before coming in "Do you guys dress casually or prefer business casual?" and they tell me exactly how they dress. It is that easy.
New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets
In every company I've worked for (pre-money startups, post-money startups, small public companies, 10000+ behemoths), the HR tech recruiters actually interacted with the team frequently and had a good idea how they dressed and behaved.
Also, Java was originally targeted at very low end machines - think WebTV. IMO, the top things wrong with Java are:

Too many concepts that overlap - containers, arrays, generics, iterators, classes, interfaces, etc. An important factor in whether you want to use a language is "how many concepts am I going to have to understand to read other peoples code ?"

A lot of the library is very poorly designed, probably because they rushed it out the door. Take a look at the GUI inheritance hierarchy for instance. Also, a lot of the code looks like C code IIRC.
Nice interface, but jerky animation, which isn't surprising for jQuery, but a bit unfortunate.
Why would you not read their resume before the interview?

I spend a good 30-45 minutes building a list of questions based entirely on the contents of their resume. I couldn't imagine just looking at a resume and then interviewing a person off the cuff. Seems a little rude.
The fact that profits, not revenue or market share, are most important seemed to go over the heads of Apple's PC competitors for a while, too. Apple's growth prospects, profit margins, and expansion into the iPod business famously led to their market cap eclipsing Dell's several years back, after Michael Dell had recommended selling all of Apple's assets and returning the proceeds to investors as Apple's best business strategy. On Wolfram Alpha, I see Apple's market cap is now about 6 times that of Dell.

http://www28.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=apple+dell

Is a similar fate in store for the volume cell phone makers?
Look at what they research. It will more or less define any research you do. If you don't do research it will color what your professors know, and how well it is covered in your classes.
Another is how well is the school ranked, generally better ranked schools attract better candidates and better professors, cooler research etc. For instance consider DARPA grand challenge entries. How many were done by top universities and how many were done by community colleges or even universities ranked middle of the pack?

And last but not least soft issues, cost, location, etc.
It is rude, but this happens a lot, especially at smaller startups. The chain of communication is usually a bit chaotic and most people are very busy. Sometimes people get pulled into the interview at the last minute, and so on and so forth...
Okay, how about I go to a newspaper and print an article saying that you're a 'homosexual, terrorist pedophile' with a nice big picture of you next to it. Do you want this to be allowed? Or do you agree with the libel laws that censor free speech in the US?

Everyone has the freedom of speech, anywhere in the world. However, it doesn't mean you're not going to be punished for what you say. If I called you a homosexual, terrorist pedophile to your face, I'd probably be expecting you to punch me in the face to shut me up. If I posted it in a newspaper, I'd expect you to sue me and the newspaper to silence my outright lies.

Now I question everyone; if there was a button somewhere in the continental US that would destroy New York, do I have the right to publish its location or should the US government have the right to silence me? Because the justification that they're saving lives is why people can be silenced for national security.

Freedom of Speech would be amazing if 90% of the things coming out of peoples mouths weren't complete crap or lies.
Eyetracking Study for Web Forms
I had the same thought. It's a very impressive interface, but I couldn't find an "About" link that really says what it is, and it wasn't terribly obvious (at least to me). I see what looks like twitter stuff, I see comments, and I see links to news stuff.

But perhaps an "About" clicky would be helpful.

But overall nice job with the interface. Very slick.
Is there any way to see answers without signing in? Because otherwise, you've already put a significant hurdle to getting people to keep visiting you. People don't want to make an account without seeing anything. It'd be like HN requiring a user to make an account just to click the links.
The safest bet is always chinos and a button-up long-sleeved shirt. Not too casual, not too dressy.
Dude, the press hated Reagan, disliked Bush, and loathed George W. Bush...
All I see is a timer and then just a black screen. I'm using Opera 9.64 on x86_64 Linux. I'm sad because the other comments make it sound awesome.
Did not know that. I've been using this thing for close to 15 years and hadn't a clue! :-)
Congratulations. This is remarkable.

What's the backend like?
Whacked, what library is best for animations, in your opinions> I heard mootools was pretty good.
You might want to consider separating your front and back ends with an API that could be accessed by Flash or AJAX.

You can then introduce a simple client and progressively enhance it according to your client's sensitivities. If you use AJAX I recommend jQuery.
Well done there on the site, alex; UI, usability, content, mission, usefulness .. nailed.
I'd try and run android with it.
hate to add a "works for me" post, but try it in the firefox 3.5 beta - it has the new javascript engine, which makes this run very nicely.

It was speedy in google chrome too.
I think you are on the right track here. Getting a job isn't about doing all the right things, but doing the least amount of wrong things.
Did you try putting a + before the word? I think it tells Google "don't fuck with this word, I want an exact match"
Except I don't have time to interview 50 candidates.
if MU is going to be added to the core, that is going to make a stock WordPress install carry a lot of extra baggage.

It said in the article that Wordpress MU is 95 to 99% comprised of the core Wordpress code. Its doesn't seem like all that much extra baggage to me...
I would put my current hobby project on the back-burner, and I'd start playing with ways to interface with the computer using natural gestures. That's a topic that's always fascinated with me - and is becoming more and more relevant.
Web Designs from DeviantArt
How many web designers can say that there are too many places to draw inspiration from? Exactly. None. Inspiration is welcomed from high and low, far and wide. Sure, there are css galleries you can check out, or even other designers portfolios you may be friends with on twitter or other social media websites, but what about Deviant Art?
Author doesn't appear to understand what "tail recursion" means:

http://net-beta.net/ubench/index.php?t=recurse1

Interesting results anyway, though.
Or go get the glims safari extension so that you can add whatever search provider you want for the search box and also pick up a bunch of other neat safari tweaks (how I survived without the ability to undo a close tab I will never know... :)
Thanks! I always forget to use that, because its original use was only to force Google to keep common words in the search query.
Of course it doesn't work in my Konqueror :)
Beware of this Antivirus Scareware | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
In the UK my understanding is that this would be illegal.

The short version is you cannot publicly offer (or advertise) to buy or sell shares - unless the company is listed on a stock exchange.
I'd use it to write myself notes, or calendar, or to-do list. Basically, an electronic whiteboard.
The index.html and Cappuccino javascript are served from an EC2 server and the new content is continuously loaded from sequential files on Amazon S3 via JSONP (0.json, 1.json, 2.json, etc.).

Views, suggesting events, and adding followees are sent to php pages on EC2 with MySQL.
That's not what the Rubinius team is saying.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=631646

I'm not qualified to judge how much progress is being made, but casting an eye briefly over the commit log, there certainly seems to be plenty of activity.

http://github.com/evanphx/rubinius/commits
In a somewhat related note, if you haven't seen Francisco Tolmasky's speech at JSCONF 2009 on Cappuccino and Objective J I definitely recommend checking it out.

Video: http://jsconf2009.com/francisco_video.html
HN Post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630290
Hm. I guess I have some bugs to work out. I had that happen to me once, but haven't been able to reproduce it since. I'll try, though.

Yes, it's just a WebView... I hope people don't think I'm trying to push it as a "real" OS X app, because it's just javascript, so I'm trying to call it a "Standalone Browser."
http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2009/02/28/announcing-atlas/
'blint' is pronounceable but doesn't actually mean anything. The same is true of my username, for that matter.

'Performant' doesn't have any etymological basis, nor does it fill any real need; such words only serve to highlight their employers' lack of vocabulary. Children make up such portmanteau words on a regular basis, but this is generally the result of ignorance rather than originality and is generally curable with the help of a dictionary and thesaurus.

English has such a massive vocabulary that if you need a new word and you're not writing a fantasy/sci-fi novel, then it probably means that you weren't paying attention.