skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "baby meow" is just an anxiety meow. "Look, I'm a kitten, and I need something Right Now," it says. I don't think it's intentional in the sense that they'll try it and stop using it if it doesn't work (except in the sense that they might stop interacting with you at all if you pay no attention to them, give them no food, etc).
Is this a marketing or a recruitment exercise? Or both? :-)
You could make your own word dictionary, pick 12 random words (and append a few random characters to the end of the string) and come up with your own hash.

Now that you have the hash and the word dictionary, you "forget" that you know the real string, and you set your program to try to find it.

At least that would make sure there weren't any major bugs in it (logic bugs not included) before you tried to solve the real problem. Since you only have 24 hours to crack it, every extra second will count ;)
I usually wander in any time from 8:30 to 9:30 - the majority of the rest of the office (non coders) come in at about 10-11. In our other office (all coders) it is stricter - pretty much everyone is there by 9:15.

My boss usually comes in at 4am - it's kinda hard to come in really late (he wouldn't care if we turned up at 12 so long as work gets done) when you know he's been there 5 hours already :) It's the best motivational tool ever.
As a small Mac developer, I respect the GPL, but I don't always get it.

For example we created a GUI subversion client for the Mac that is pretty popular. I'm sure that it gave subversion usage on the Mac a boost as now more people can actually use it (half of our customers are not programmers). So our application actually stimulates the usage of subversion, which can't be bad for anyone involved.

We get a lot of questions wether we can also make a Git/Mercurial client, but the GPL makes that really hard as we would have to wrap the command line or make an open source communication library. Now, if the GPL GUI applications were as great as the commercial ones, there wouldn't be a problem. But for reasons I'm not sure about that doesn't seem to be the case.
Most places I worked as a developer required people to be in at 8.

When I had my start-up, I generally expected employees to be in by 8:30, but was always happy to offer shifted hours, if someone asked.
http://www.amazon.com/Mis-behavior-Markets-Benoit-Mandelbrot...
The article points out bad data in google, and it hasn't eroded their user base ;)

I don't trust Google at all for local information. I use social networks and ask my local friends rather than Google when I'm looking for a restaurant or other business in my town.
At least marketing, perhaps a bit of recruiting if you come up with a clever solution. If they aren't hiring, perhaps some else that is will see your name up on the leaderboard.
My office is normally 9am but over the summer we were given the option of going in at 8am to leave an hour earlier. Surprisingly the majority of our dev team took them up on this, only one held out. I'm usually in around 7:30 though.
I've been wondering lately if there shouldn't be two ways to do page layout. CSS + HTML is awesome for documents, which 99% of the web is. However, it seems like lots of people really want "brochure"-type pages, with crazy fonts, specific positioning of boxes of text and images, and lots of graphics. From looking around, it seems like every single one has to go through some horrible contortions of CSS and nested wrapper divs.

I'm not sure which is the best approach, you either end up with a page looking like 37signal's landing page, or you have 8MB of images and 30 absolute positioned divs, ala CSS Xen Garden.

I'm a programmer, not a designer, but every time I try to put together a front page that looks good, both to the user's eye and to the HTML maintainer's, I feel like I'm really fighting the natural way of doing it. I wish it was better, but I'm at a loss as to how.
Future of Newspapers: Profitless? Go Wireless
That's a lot of money for a domain name. Tell you what, for a 'cool million' you can have ww.com .
Thanks, trickjarret, for the useful feedback. I think a shorter intro would definitely be helpful.

We will definitely have searchable logs of all conversations in a future version. They will be searchable by everyone (based on room permissions). So, keep watching.
Awesome alternative to Python's pdb
FWIW: Although the site proclaims (dimly at top) that it appears only as intended on FF 3.5... I find that it looks essentially identical via Safari 4.
The point of the article is this:

There are many small tasks that you could do, but they are time-consuming and they are not your forte. Knowing when to delegate a task and when not to is something that comes from experience, and anyone working in a startup should do well to know that they are not alone in the world.

So if you're great at Perl, that's fantastic. Go ahead, hack it in a minute or two. But for that guy who hasn't written Perl in a year, might need a google search or two to remind himself of the syntax, might even need to update his packages... well guess what? Maybe it's time to delegate and focus on other things you are even better at.
antenna design, but the spectrum is a little different
Is there a reason you used 'news.ycombinator.ORG' in the above link?
a) 'twas a joke, sir. :)

and b) the idea may not be silly but the name sure is. By this nomenclature, all current economists should more properly be called "Econostatisticians" or "Econopsychologists" (to quote Charlie Munger speaking about the silliness of the term "Behavioral Economics": "If economics isn't behavioral, then what the hell is it?!?")

No offense meant, of course. I just think it's a bit humorous. He's an economist who uses methods from physics, that's all - no need to make up a new name for it (let alone a name that sounds even dopier than the previous name).
C++ concepts were designed to put constraints on templates. If you pass your class to the sorting algorithm, it had better be comparable using the less than operator, etc.

Basically a tool to write better libraries that give better compilation warnings upon failure. Incomprehensible compilation errors were the big failure of the STL, and this was going to fix that.

All the big names were pushing Concepts, including Stroustrup. Apparently the issue was that the GNU implementation was just too slow and they didn't expect compiler writers to do better soon.
Just to be clear, there is probably no realistic way of winning this without having lots and lots and lots of computing resources available to you once the dictionary is released, is there?

Since you need to choose a twelve word permutation from a possible set of one thousand words, plus append a 0-5 character random string, calculate the SHA1 hash for all possible permutations, and calculate the Hamming distance of each to the hash of the challenge phrase... correct?

1000! / 982! permutations of dictionary words * 36^5 permutations of random chars
We also intend on offering downloadable archives, along the "your data belongs to you" lines. We're just a service.
I thought Dave Cutler was the principle architect on NT?
No. It spends more time on head-ache inducing bouncing stuff around than on actually displaying the message.

This feels like the late 90's/early 00's MP3-player-apps .. totally 'leet acid-green sci-fi-alien techno UIs and little more than the very bare minimum functionality.
I don't have a boss, but I've been a boss. I let it run completely free except for the office manager. This worked quite well in practice, even though we had the occasional person for whom it would not work and that required the 'choices in life' talk. After that it either worked or that person left.

I find that personal responsibility is a great way to run a company, I don't know how our employees experienced it though.
I never saw The Wire, but was their office completely void of computers? I can see where some offices would still have typewriters for certain forms (for some reason people here still use typewriters to put addresses on envolopes), but a police station without computers has to be insane!
Chicago (Win95) came after NT.
How We Know Chrome OS Will Be A Hit: Steve Ballmer Doesn’t Think So
The Ghetto Gourmet : Pirate Restaurant
I don't think we're talking about the same issue.

Of course you'd have to write the application before the 20th. My point is that for people with day jobs, Mondays are almost always the busiest day of the week so I'm sure that will preclude a number of people from participating.
This seems like a move by Google to push faster adoption of HTML 5.
Microsoft’s Ballmer On Google Chrome OS: ‘Who Knows What This Thing Is?'
Zed's not special. People who write code should be rewarded for their work: "the labourer is worthy of his hire," after all. This is why BSD-style licenses in a world where multimillion-dollar companies make a killing off of the code you write don't make sense for the individual developer -- especially when you're a star contributor.
Sorry I couldn't resist:

https://store.theonion.com/kitten-thinks-of-nothing-but-murd...
If you can guess 5 words in the dictionary, you can pre-compute over 7 billion guesses...
I think the idea has promise. I could definitely see larger companies using it to communicate within departments on a real-time collaborative basis (versus in-person meetings or blasting a one-way email to a group and then having to resend any valuable feedback).

And while I'm no design expert, I agree with everyone else about the design. If your target customer is companies & it's going to be a service that they'll ultimately have to pay for, then the design should look professional. The current design doesn't seem like it represents an "Enterprise" offering. And I personally don't like the black background and the logo font/color/image.

Good luck!
This isn't an issue where I've worked; show up whenever, leave whenever, lunch whenever.

All a manager needs to ensure is that you're doing your job, and that you aren't a burden on other people. Especially when half of your team may be around the world, it would seem that companies have already written off the importance of what time of day people are available.
I opened an office for a company in India (in protest). Eight people on staff (plus a little servant boy to serve them tea twice a day). One year later we scuttled the whole office and started everything from scratch. Everything they produced was garbage. Can you find talented people in India? YES. But it will cost you so much there is no point.

There is no sense of company loyalty. There is no sense of how to work independently without being told what to do. Status is defined as 1) how many people work under you, and 2) how many servants you have. If another company offers to give them 5 junior programmers ("freshers") to work under them instead of 4 you can kiss them goodbye. Oh, and never take their word about anything. You need to review the code on a daily basis to make sure something is actually getting done. Not to mention, while they will tell you otherwise, java and .net is the only thing they give a rip about, maybe a little php.

A startup is an inherently creative process. It would be like Bono outsourcing a new album-- then finding out they only play sitar. He would spend TONS of time documenting everything about how he wants it to sound and telling them in detail exactly how it should work. If he is lucky they will get 75% there. Creative processes just don't work like that.

Large bureaucratic organizations can squeeze the cost savings out of outsourcing, but for a startup it's just asinine. The only exception is VERY rote tasks. Basically just data mining. Send them a link to a website that you want mined and they will do it pretty cheap. Now, you could probably write a script to do it in about the same time, but in some cases it's easier just to give it to them.

Now that I think about it, the reason I left to do a startup was because I wanted to get away from people who get a big chubby over Thomas Friedman but don't have a damn clue about software development.

I've had much more luck and a hell of a lot more fun traipsing around Guangdong and dabbling in manufacturing.
Amazon wanting Netflix: crazy?
no one cares at my office and not at the previous job I had either. I usually get in at 8:30 out of habit, but there some that wander in anywhere from 9 to 10 and some that get in a 7 or 7:30.
Benoit Mandlebrot said that in the sixties.

But the scale-free quality does not imply predictability. In fact, I suspect it implies the opposite.
37Signals seems to me like the edgy anti-conformist artsy kid who tries to be creative by doing the opposite of what is usually done. That or they try to be uselessly introspective, like the plaques in front of the majority of the meaningless metal "sculptures" you find in cities.

Another example: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1555-learning-from-failur...
It's a shame that's such a great discussion of experts only has 3 points in 2 hours.
You spend time up front to find them. With a few hours of up-front work it's not very difficult.

Well, but upfront I don't even know the tasks that may crop up in the future. And once I encounter them I can often not be sure whether they're one-off or recurring. I just don't see how this is any quicker (or different, tbh) to just finding people when you need them - and hiring them or contracting to them.

The author apparently wants me to avoid hiring people and contract out everything instead. I have never seen that work on such a fine-grained level.
I'd need a PA just to spend the time of finding and managing all those micro-contractors.

But that doesn't mean outsourcing is bogus, or that it doesn't work.

Well, I didn't say it wouldn't. I'm just saying it was quite overhyped for a while ("just outsource everything to India") and this article seems to beat that dead horse again, from a slightly different angle.

We've outsourced post-launch bugs to a very talented developer who works for us 2-8 hours per week depending on the bugs we find.

Sorry, but that sounds absurd to me, unless your app is of the truly trivial kind. Bugfixing normally requires a deep understanding of the codebase and is exactly the kind of work that makes not much sense to outsource.

And how is a "post-launch bug" different from a "pre-launch bug", btw?

If you're working on a credit card processing system you are correct due to the complexity. But most apps are not this complex, and you'd be surprised how quickly a solid developer can start fixing bugs on a system they've never seen before if they are talented and the architecture is sound.

If it's honestly cheaper to have an external contractor learn your codebase and fix your bugs, than to have your in-house staff take care of that, then I think you have much bigger problems in first place.
This is smart. After the contest, anytime you search for one of the terms in their dictionary on search.twitter.com, then @engineyard will show up (assuming there are a lot of entries).

All they have to do is make the dictionary include terms that potential engineyard customers might search for on Twitter.
I finally dumped my hotmail account when it told me it doesn't support Chrome.

So you chose to switch e-mail providers rather than browsers. The parent is saying the same holds true for search engines, which have a lot smaller barriers to switching services.
Zed has gotten nothing from me. I've gotten the ability to use a good web server, instead of spending time setting up or dealing with an inferior one.

A license structured as "acknowledge your use or you will be sued," with penalties specified, as opposed to "please acknowledge your use" might have a different effect. I really have no idea.

Kent Beck's post from last month came to mind.

http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/blog/?p=231
Ok.. I guess I misunderstood the question.
Oddly enough, a lot of econophysics went into justifying the recent bubble and the creators of heat-equation-inspired Black-Scholes equations were directly responsible for the LTCM collapse in 1998.

Econophysics doesn't have a "not snake oil" feel to it...
Where did you read that the issue was the GNU implementation lagging behind?
What about..

"You may permute capitalization for the dictionary words (i.e. you may use Ruby, rUby, RUBY, and RUBy)"
Interesting. I'd like to see a video of that in action. I'm skeptical still, but I'm also a person who has no problem with the current status quo. I was reading books on my 160x160 Palm Pilot with little objection. This appears to make me an outlier. (I think it may because I started on the Commodore 64 on a regular television; against that reading experience, a clean 160x160 is still an improvement!)

Properly done that could work.

Do you use it? When you scroll over one or more columns, the system jumps column-wise, right? Not like a scrollbar would on a normal web page, which wouldn't jump to columns at all, and would have problems with half-displayed columns (which are useless).
I don't think it's a chicken-and-egg at all. Users don't need other users for the site to be useful to them, they just need the site to be good. Sure, you'll be more likely to attract new users if you have more - through word of mouth. It's not like a dating site where the users are the service.
For some reason, I find "4 quarters" to be "cheaper" than than "$0.99". Maybe it's because I associate quarters as disposable and any dollar amount in $x.yz format to be more significant. I wonder what the effect would be if in the App Store a developer has the option of pricing the game as "4 quarters".

It could be the same illusion that $99 seems so much cheaper than $100.
Meditation timers for Linux and Android
I'd love to hear from the professional domain squatters what they think this will do for their business model. I can't remember names but I know some of the larger players can afford to pay for those TLDs.
This is great - I just wrote about exactly that topic - choosing 2 (but you can't have all three) on my own blog.
Self-fulfilling prophecies, they're called.
You can permute the capitalization of the words in the dictionary, and the random characters as well ..
Examples of Design-Enhanced Data
http://twitter.com/a_williams/statuses/2619971319
The typical path for software looks like this:

Developer -> Distributor [-> Distributor ...] -> User

The BSD license grants rights from the developer to the first distributor in the chain. Other distributors, and the end user, are completely dependent on that first distributor to pass on the rights he received.

The GPL requires that certain fundamental software rights are passed down the chain. This ensures that a single ill-behaved distributor will not restrict the rights of the end user.

As someone who builds and uses tools for developers, BSD is thus more useful to me, because it grants the maximum freedom to the people I target -- myself, and other developers to whom I distribute BSD-licensed tools.

There is no need to pick a license to maximize your own rights -- by the nature of international copyright law, you already have all possible rights to your work. The difference is whether rights should be transmitted. Apparently you believe that some users do not deserve the same rights to their copies of your software as others. While this is a common belief, I feel it is unfortunate and ill-considered.
I'd recommend keeping "kick-ass" on the homepage if it reflects your, and thus your company's, attitude.
Not really up to 37 Signals' standard. It seems they've confused a detailed, rigid bible of a plan with being the only way to direct yourself. I think they're doing this on purpose though.

As has been said, a plan is a statement of intent. It attempts to anticipate what it can in an attempt to make choices easier when you are "in action". You are doing it wrong both if you have no intent at all and if you attempt to account for every conceivable scenario; if you do that, you never achieve your intent ~ duh!.

Here is my plan to rent a movie this weekend:

1. My objective is to secure a movie on DVD and watch it Friday night with my wife, generally enjoying the night. (See - a goal, a method and a deadline.)

2. I intend to do this by getting into my car and driving to the video store. (This is a general statement of action. I don't bother anticipating whether there is a roadblock on my street, or whether my car will start or not. That would be over-planning, and as 37S suggests, stupid.) There will most likely be things that will need to be adjusted, some big, some small.

3. Assuming the original objective remains viable, I'll rent the dvd and return home. (Note here that I am not aimlessly evaluating video stores, romping off to best buy to upgrade to blueray, or stopping at starbucks for a latte on my way to get the movie. The plan allows me to frame the actions within the realm of achieving the objectives! It helps me to make decisions. I have assumed that the objective is valid for whatever reason. Your plan helps you test that assumption, nothing more, nothing less.

Edit: Adding number 4: If, while carrying out my plan I find out that the video store is on fire, or that my wife would rather go to the theatre instead of renting, I adapt to the changing reality. I do not stubbornly insist that I follow my predefined plan. I incorporate the new variables into it. In certain cases, this does in fact mean changing the objective. However, I reassess the situation and re-plan from there.

Not having any plan is about as dumb as planning to the nth degree, IMO. Even worse, I think 37S understands this perfectly.
I'm amazed you think the word "correlate" counts as "dressing up". I use it regularly, without any intention of claiming scientific credentials.

I'm amazed you think that someone making true observations they think are interesting is being borderline irresponsible. Quite specifically he says the sample is too small, quite specifically he says that "not having these attributes was no guarantee of success." Quite specifically he says that they saw no positive predictors.

What should he have done? Observed these things, noted that he was surprised by some, then not told anyone? That seems to me to be borderline irresponsible.

I see this post as an invitation to make a larger experiment, one with controls, and where the sample is large and chosen appropriately.
I'm definitely not great at this kind of stuff, but I'll give it a try ...

Check out the Amatch ruby gem ... it can compute the hamming distance ... might be easy to automate with ruby ...

http://amatch.rubyforge.org/doc/index.html
It's like Swoopo for compute cycles!
Any tips for walking to nearby hashes from HN's crypto-gurus?
Now that I've read your reply and took another look at the article, I wonder what I was thinking when I suggested it could be guessed!

Putting an actual quote in there makes it very secure.
Forgot to consider that; along with the fact that the 5 random characters can be any printable ASCII characters, not just alphanumeric.

So this is somewhere upwards of 10^50 phrases to hash (in a naive implementation), right?
When MG Siegler left Venturebeat they wrote a post titled "we’ll miss you...especially your headlines" and this is the perfect example of why. The man's got a talent.

The post itself comes across as filler. Ballmer disparages all his competition and given Microsoft's track record I'd guess he's been right more than he's been wrong (only in the last 5 to 10 years has Microsoft become the gang who can't shoot straight). But again he insults everyone so it's not really an indication of anything.
I would submit though that a 5 year plan that is anything more than a couple of paragraphs of intent is in fact a waste of time.
Lots and lots of waste is contaminated stuff, not spent fuel. For example the regulations may (and probably do) require that used protection suits be treated as radioactive waste.

This way you end up with huge quantities of waste that may indeed be slightly harmful, but are in no way radioactive enough to be reused as fuel. This is mostly where the "tons" of waste come from.