skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, actually, the livejournal account is literally "cyxymu". The word is best written as Sukhumi (the Georgian city), but the cnet article refers to the "account name" and so is completely accurate.
Credit Card Debt Correlates with Small Business Failure
How about the ethics of not using that data and having to do the experiment again?
These experiments were far beyond perverse and I can imagine why we would not want to use that data, but it is far too late.
Most of our lives and science after WWII are already based on most of that data.
isn't that usually the case in any system?
Relentlessly Profitable- how great ideas kill companies
I don't think there's any reason to believe that someone who is willing to spend $5 would inherently have a more worthwhile opinion than anyone else.
Amazing and frustrating how much better 3d is on the iPhone than the web.
I would fail if this was a 'live' screening. It's rare that I write SQL by hand, and remembering the syntax for a JOIN is something I pretty much always look up. I just don't do it by hand very anymore.

I'm a very good developer (my track record would suggest as such), but I would fail at least one part of this test due to the simple inability to remember elementary SQL syntax.

The interesting thing about this statement is that it shows one way out of potentially being asked to code on a whiteboard/over the phone. If you have a PhD' from MIT and/or have a strong track record of writing Open Source software, creating and selling a startup, build robots (and electric unicylces ) for fun etc, in other words, if you can show , well before the interview, that you are as good or better than the job demands, you are very unlikely to face the "find the longest subsequence in a string" or "write a join" type questions. But then if you could do all that why would you look for a job?

That's just not true, particularly at the larger companies out there. Amazon, for instance, has a rigorous process that you can't (more or less) circumvent. It involves a lot of saying algorithms over the phone. It was one of the most challenging interviews I've done in my life. Not because of the content, but because of the method.
Except no one knows how to rip and replace in this case. There are governments out there that are less complicated but offer more to their constituents than the US government does. And no one in the US government wants to give up power or funding.
Oh, the other Washington.
Cloudera!
Their tutorials kick-ass :)
Note that, once again, this is about small businesses generally, not startups. These reports from the Kauffman Foundation ought to come with a warning label attached.
A light-emitting diode (LED) (pronounced /ˌɛliːˈdiː/[1], or just /lɛd/), is an electronic light source. The LED was first invented in Russia in the 1920s, and introduced in America as a practical electronic component in 1962. Oleg Vladimirovich Losev was a radio technician who noticed that diodes used in radio receivers emitted light when current was passed through them. In 1927, he published details in a Russian journal of the first ever LED.[citation needed]

According to wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode
This is not a question about whether an interviewer needs to customize the questions for each interviewee. This is about a possible mismatch between the environments of the interview versus the workplace and the relevance of the questions to the actual job.

You make a case for developers needing to be able to handle "high stress" or "high pressure" conditions. Those are pretty broad terms, as they could mean anything from "very competitive and high standards" to "quick firefighting emergency work 24/7" to "your boss will micromanage the living hell out of you". So, in effect, you're saying, "Look, you complainer, working for YouTube is like being in a phone interview all day." All I can say is that if that is true, I am certainly not a match.
No way. You may raise the low bar a wee bit, but you'd drive away the outside makers, who are only here very tentatively in the first place.
Should you wonder what baryon acoustic oscillation is and how an earth-bound telescope could beat out a satellite this is your article. It's about an investigation into the influence of dark matter on the expansion of the universe.
Yes, if it will keep the quality and sanity same
"That's just not true, particularly at the larger companies out there. Amazon, for instance, has a rigorous process that you can't (more or less) circumvent. "

"more or less" is key. If someone at the level of PG or RTM (or Linus or Hejlsberg, say) were to apply to Amazon (or Google or Yahoo), I am sure they aren't going to be asked to code "subsequence of a string" on the phone! They'd no doubt get a good interview but i highly doubt thatthis kind of "ask trivial questions" interview would occur. The purpose of such phone interviews is to eliminate clueless people who have the knack of writing good resumes , the "all hat and no cattle" types.

I was specifically responding to this sentence "PG, RTM, and TLB would probably fail your test". I doubt that somehow!
This is @ pj:

There are many different kinds of pressure. The pressure in an interview is very different from the kind of pressure experienced when the database is down.

For example, I have no problem at all with on-site interviews but I choke pretty easily during phone interviews. I also have no problem with public speaking, but I have trouble engaging people I don't know in one-on-one conversations.
google for 1and1, you'll see a lot of complaints there. I had a few bad experience with them. If your renew payment has some issue (mostly CC expiration date etc.) they'll immediately send the account to collection and suddenly your $6.99 or whatever domain becomes a lot more expensive. I refuse to deal with shady business like that.
I taught myself acoustic guitar. First, I learned from books and websites. Then when YouTube came out, I found a lot of very good "How to Play Song X" videos on it. I really enjoyed learning to play. Spending 5-10 hours a week away from my computer, and not looking at a screen for most of that time, significantly boosted my productivity and improved my morale. I was pretty burned out and looking for something to do besides computer work, and reading about computers, when I started picking it up. I haven't played in a few years, though. As I got older, I kinda lost interest in music (both listening to and playing).
Good developers get hired and removed from the pool. Bad developers go to the next interview.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/gy/you_are_not_hiring_the_top_1/
Nokia Surge 6790 (AT&T)
The Nokia 6790 Surge for AT&T is a bit of a departure for the Finnish handset manufacturer. You wouldn't know it just by looking at it, but the little guy is actually a smartphone like the Nokia N and E series devices.
You don't need another editor for this. In vim, you can use gk and gj to move up and down on screen lines, instead of internal lines. Also, you can use g0 and g$ to go to the begin or end of the screen line.
I agree. I used to make the mistake of screening on language trivia and simple functional ability (like they're doing here). HUGE mistake.

Now I screen on much bigger topics that tend to be more philosophical in nature. The role of design patterns, benefits of one language over the other (particularly functional languages), value of unit tests...

They submit their answers via e-mail, and within a minute or two I already know if there is any value in at least talking to them in a more formal interview setting. I've found that folks who understand development at this much higher level always handle the basics well.
Aardvark for potentially kicking off a new way to search (and even if not, for having awesome diction)

Kickstarter for being beautiful and the first crowdfunding site that looks like it has a chance to explode.
I don't think the violinist comparison is fair.

Any violinist worth their salt has practiced sight reading to death. Absolute death. It's difficult to do, yes, but if you're playing in any sort of group situation (orchestra, etc), sight reading is extremely important.

Unless you're saying "I drew some lines on this piece of paper that represent the strings on the violin; I want you to play the piece of paper like you would the instrument." In which case it's a worthless interview. Whiteboards are fairly common for code snippits and pseudocode at most of the jobs I've worked. Pieces of paper with representational lines for the strings are used as individual studies (e.g., sheet music) - not for collaboration. That's usually done in jam-format..
I don't think a membership fee is a good way to solve the problem, because I don't think the problem has anything to do with fees. I think the problem is that our community is too popular, and the curious outsiders are starting to outnumber the insiders. Since the outsiders are more likely to have day jobs than the insiders, having a fee would probably increase the ratio of outsiders to insiders.

I think proggit is doing more to keep the HN community focused than charging a fee would, as it scoops up some of the people who are bored at their day jobs and curious enough to read about hacking but not to actually hack. :)
Why would I pay for a user generated link aggregator?! The content and people here are great, but it is all original content or content linked from other sites. Makes no sense to pay for. Are they having trouble paying for hosting the site? ;)
One possible explanation: Companies which are under pressure to diversify their boards select people who are less competant/experienced.
I've commented before on the false number of developers that Facebook recites: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=687796

Considering he's using their numbers for his calculations, the entire premise might fall apart.

"Another intellectually dishonest number I hear Facebook recite is the number of developers. They get this number from the number of people who have installed the developer application. In the first year of the platform, that was 400,000. I know numerous friends who know nothing about programming that installed the developer application in that first week because they didn't know what they were doing. They recite this figure as if hundreds of thousands of people have devoted their lives to making Facebook applications. Sorry to burst someone's bubble, but it just ain't so."
The one thing I have been unhappy with about gandi is the support - it's been slow (responses that take days to weeks), and the english of the support reps has been poor enough to make it hard to read/communicate.
SEO Moz seems to be the most interesting of all them, focusing really on SEO. Others have too many entries on news about Google search, Yahoo deal, etc.
GitHub really impresses me.
>>1.5B apps/year? All of them are paid?

No, but the blog never said that.

The blog explictly says "Furthermore, assume that half of applications are given away for free,.... "
Metafilter is a general community, not for a particular topic, like HN. Still, I think the model would work here too.

While MF's quality of discussion is much better than most other site (yahoo answers cough cough), you can still find snarky answers.
The quote is, "Truth is the first casualty of war." Actually, various members of the standing army are the first to be killed. And people dislike crows for their particularly stupid qualities, ie, cawing endlessly for no reason, or their destructiveness. The finest quality of the bird isn't its intelligence but its habit of eating dead animals on roadsides.

Crows, while intelligent birds, are complete idiots compared to humans. Songbirds, by contrast, are better composers and better looking than 99 percent of humans. It comes down to that, I think.
Several posters have taken it as a given that software ought to live for a long, long time. That's a philosophy worth considering, but many people just want to make money.

If you lived in Atlanta during the '96 Olympics, you might have rented out your house for $10K for the month. That's a great "business" even though you know it will fail a month from now. However, you would not be rational to note that rents are now $10K/month and buy up a bunch of houses using that rent as a long-term factor in your business plan.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with building iFart, etc. But, it's absurd to pretend that revenues for fads like these will continue. I am reminded of an article I read about the business of opening up trendy nightclubs. The experienced owners think that it's impossible for a club to remain trendy for more than two or three years. So, they open them but build a business plan that doesn't anticipate long-term revenue with the expectation that they'll build their next one while the current one is still doing well.

Note that I believe Facebook/iPhone apps can be a great extension or component of a long-term business model, but that model can't be predicated on the continued popularity of those platforms alone.
Probably a good one, if they taught C rather than C++.
(flame-retardant-underwear-mode t)
I bet there will be more than one app... ;-)
"Winning" iPhone/Facebook: 1 in 100. $10M per year.

Winning Mega Millions Jackpot: 1 in 175,711,536. $12M paid over 26 years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_Millions)
I'd be interested to hear where you get the Akamai Technologies-SharePoint link, I've only heard that SharePoint is wholly written by Microsoft.
I think costs in New York can be crazy if you live a certain kind of lifestyle. But I think we're just used to living with less of certain things (mostly due to our space restrictions) that don't necessarily translate well across other cities (We rented a whole house in Cambridge when we were there for YC last summer for about what you'd spend on an apartment 1/3 the size in New York).

There are certain things that augment the high cost of living though:
* We don't drive cars and most of us take mass transit most of the time.
* We buy fewer possessions (no place to put them). A side benefit is that when you do buy something, you tend to buy better quality.
* When we do buy something, it usually involves recycling or selling what we had before.
* We don't see our living space as our own private paradise. We don't tend to duplicate resources the public already has. We have parks instead of lawns. We'll use taxis and zipcar when we need them instead of owning cars.
* We tend to live very close to where we work and could walk there if necessary.
* Restaurants face a large amount of competition. You can get excellent food with excellent ambiance for less money than I was used to paying for a comparable experience elsewhere.
* Lots of free or nearly free experiences. Art, museums, concerts, performances, groups, and lectures.

The way I feel about (or rationalize) New York City is that I get to live in a place that offers so much more for only a slight premium on what I'd pay to live in San Francisco.

The big down side is that you miss out on the tech community in SF, although others argue that this can be a net positive.
The point is that the listen to scientists because they are wearing white coats, despite the (play-acted) agonized yowls from the unfortunate victim, from which the experimental subject can clearly infer that they are causing suffering. If you think that tuning such information out is normal or sensible, I suggest some self-examination.

Note that in the Milgram experiment the scientist figure never tells the subject it's safe or makes excuses for the degree of shock administered, they just insist that an external authority 'the experiment' requires the subject to continue.
Tesla Says It Is Now Profitable, Ships 109 Roadsters In July
thesixtyone, probably. It's replaced Pandora for me. It's a little too social networky (I just want to listen to music!) but it works.
Assuming that's true, why is there a shortage of skilled women directors?

This result would be unsurprising in, say, the 1970's, but in 2009, it is somewhat mystifying, though perhaps the median age of corporate directors is still high enough that an older generation is the norm, before many women enrolled in MBA programs or had lengthy corporate careers.
Excellent! I really like this idea. I'm going to work on how to implement this in my hiring strategy.
Very weird support call. I finally said listen I think it's a problem with Sharepoint, and they forwarded me to Akamai, however they answered the phone as MS, but the CallerID showed Akamai Technologies.

If you've ever dealed with MS Business Support they have sections for every single product and some products are segmented by parts.
We have always been at war with Oceania?
Facebook and LinkedIn display a list of contacts from your email and allow you to select which ones to send invites (spam) to. And it is usually an optional step that can be skipped.

In my eyes, this is OK because it the page is clear about what they want and that it will email your contacts that you select.

Of course this is what I recall from when I signed up a while ago, so I could be wrong.
Agreed this is a completely absurd move by the Treasury Department. What brought the financial industry to its knees was too much leverage. Venture capital firms don't use leverage, so they can't be a systemic risk.
That doesn't imply the top 1% isn't there; just that they are more likely to be under-represented. Also, programmers are prone to move to new areas that are more interesting, especially the top/best, so that can skew it back in favor of the upper echelons. It always seems that the mid range to bottom developers are more likely to find somewhere and stay, as they have so much trouble finding a new place to go to. They are the ones that have 'stickyness'.

What is the biggest factor, from what I can tell, is that the best don't send out their resumes but get poached by other companies or use their networking to land a job.
I do the same thing -- I give new developers some repository credentials and give them a small task.

One thing to watch out for though, is competent developers who are unreliable over time. They have the skills, but they spend their time surfing.
I think this is personal preference. One way is not "saner" than the other, it's just a design philosophy that must be consistent within an app.

I can't speak to Emacs, but Vim assumes that if you put something on the same line, you want it treated as a single line, regardless of where your window is causing text to wrap. For example, dd deletes your whole line, not just the window's line. I think this makes perfect sense in the Vim context, particularly since Vim is geared a bit more towards coding than word processing. How weird would it be to dd

// Here_ is a really long comment that has wrapped in my
window

and end up with

window

left in your editor, no doubt breaking your code?
Unix abandoned (or never had) any conception of WYSIWYG, and probably never will. I hate it, too.
Angstro
As an analogy, corporations are to countries as stock is to currency. So, if that is the case, perhaps we can help understand what is going to happen in the US by examining what has happened to companies in similar situations.

What are some examples of the governments that are simpler and better?

If no one wants to give up their power, what is going to happen? Revolution? Civil war? Domination by another power somewhere else?
Anyone tried Cassandra? I thought that was what Facebook was using for this type of thing?
What would help you improve customer service?
Customer service is a proven way to increase customer retention and referrals. What would help you do this better?
Drizzle?
I'm intrigued how they are going to pull this off. Develop for Zune HD & it will run on Windows Phones too.
Same here. Integrated mouse gestures, integrated arrow-key-based keyboard-only navigation, integrated content blocking, bookmark sync across computers. Firefox would do everything I want, with the right plugins. Opera does everything I want, out of the box.
This is great - I'm looking forward to the series.
I recently needed 256MB more memory, having only 512MB. I could put a new memory stick in my laptop (this is a problem because either it's 2 256MB cards, or it might short out, as it did when I tried to upgrade the RAM months ago).

My solution?

Well, Firefox was using 350MB to display 10 tabs. I upgraded Opera to 9.64, put those links in 10 tabs, and it uses only 150MB.

So I've saved 200MB without upgrading my RAM!
Google's Last Dodgeball Employee Leaving To Join Foursquare
Yes, I too find that irritating. They do it on radio commercials too, by either using software or actors who can speak fast to rattle off the T&C. Restrictions on this tend to be regarded as an intrusion on free speech, but I'm not sure that commercial solicitations should enjoy the same protection as other kinds.
Austria for example, and Germany. They have social services that are built in and aren't nearly as bloated as the US government.

However I don't agree with that analogy in this day and age where countries offer services countries should be seen as corporate entities.
http://www.launchly.com/
Twitter blackout left users feeling 'jittery,' 'naked'
Awesome. Now they just need to get cheaper so that it can be more accessible. Or release the sedan and make that the cheaper and more accessible car in their lineup.
Approaching a Minimum Viable Product for  a Startup
Agreed. Ask MetaFilter has been worth every penny of the $5 dollars I spent on it.
Spideroak impressed me. It's a service similar to Dropbox, but with more emphasis on privacy. I found their devs really accessible and interesting to talk to.
The Raytheon Sarcos exoskeleton looks promising:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhj3Z9o6t0g and http://www.raytheon.com/newsroom/technology/rtn08_exoskeleto...
> but very annoying for collaborative work.

tell me about it. i wrote a 33 page group paper in Google Docs once.. PITA.
Poor man's GPS on Android
I know for a fact that at a certain point a lot of stuff got stolen at different airports in Italy. There was a big prosecution and publicity. So that's what happens to some of it: it got stolen and they no longer know where it is. If they new where it was, presumably they could tip off the police.
Picwing (http://picwing.com) is probably the one that has improved our life the most lately. It is the perfect thing for people with new babies. Your relatives get a regular stream of new prints with near zero effort.
You're right. I stand corrected. (But on the other hand, the assumption that the free/paid split is 50/50 is ridiculous as well.)

It seems like he built an Excel spreadsheet, plugged in some different numbers for various assumptions, and then blogged about how the different inputs affected the outputs. I fail to see how this produces any meaningful new insight. It's basically just a first year MBA's homework assignment.
I think you nailed it there: the median age is still high.

Also consider that the gender gap will likely not disappear for a long time, if ever. Many extremely smart, well-educated women leave the workforce for a period of time because they place the opportunity of raising one or more children above the opportunity to use their skill to continue the corporate war to the top. All else being equal, someone who leaves for a number of years before returning will have a tougher time making it to the top than someone who does not leave.

This could partly explain why although there are more women graduating with undergraduate degrees than men, roughly one third of MBA students are women.

It will be interesting to see what ratio the senior execs drift toward as institutional sexism begins fading with older generations. Probably not 50:50, but maybe closer to what's seen at MBA schools.