skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is it inappropriate to ask why I was rejected from a job?
I recently interviewed for a software developer position. While I thought the interview went reasonably well (not great, but not bad either), I was turned down from the job.

I accept the decision that was made, but I'd like to know why. I'd like to know why because if there's some skill or concept I'm lacking as a developer, I'd like to fix that, so that I can do better at my next interview - wherever that may be.

Even if the feedback is, "you have no business being a developer," I'd want to hear it. Is it inappropriate of me to ask why I was rejected?
From your description an LLC sounds like the way to go. Partnerships have all kinds of drawbacks, depending on your locality you might become liable for your partners debts. An llc is a good step up to becoming an 'Inc' when and if you are more successful.

It will give you more (a lot more) protection from a legal point of view than a partnership and you still have the same benefits tax wise.

Tax laws regarding llcs vary state by state so plese make sure the above applies to your state.

If you plan on picking up venture capital or doing other things that will require outside partners then you really should look at incorporation, it is my experience that such activities are much easier to undertake when your business is a legal person in its own right (which an LLC is only to some extent).
Microsoft submits 22k loc to Linux under the GPLv2
Here's the job ad, though the site is extremely slow right now: https://careers.microsoft.com/JobDetails.aspx?jid=5072
Both of our implementations have broken this. Damn you, Javascript this.

In principle, these two lines of code should always produce the same result:

foo.bar(1,2)

and

foo.bar(1)(2)

And they won't necessarily in our case, if the function uses this.
Dont expect to hear a valid response :) but I see no reason why you should ask (as long as you phrase it in the right way).
Well, for a start, it would mean rolling out Opera to every developer, tester and support rep's desktop, and it being someone's job to make sure it worked on every PC they had, to keep it up to date and apply any patches.

Is it impossible to write a Web application that simply doesn't test the limits of most browser implementations? Again, I'm asking an informational question to follow up on your interesting response. What actually happens in the typical case of a server vendor's application that is supposed to run on an arbitrary browser if a browser the vendor hasn't considered is used? Does the whole application crash? Or does it just look a little bit less pretty?
Why Seed Funding Isn't A Regional Business
For sure. Keeping the channels open is always good, and to ask for the reason for your refusal is a great way to do so, as well as a chance to learn some more about the whole process.

Not all companies would respond to such a request though, because they're afraid that if you get your reason you will sue them under some equal opportunity rule or some such, so be prepared that you will not get an answer, or make it clear in your request somehow without laying it on too thick that you are asking out of curiosity.
Cuts in movies, and their impact on memory
When working for my former boss I uploaded a photo of him that I had permission from the photographer to do anything I wanted with it. I didn't check the exact right boxes when uploading the photo and it was removed. I tried again, no luck. After about 5 times of trying to put this photo I gave up. It was not worth my time to even bother adding this high quality photo to wikipedia.
I don't need to be a chef to know someone's cooking sucks. I don't need to a writer to know hack writing. Why does this guy need to be a programmer to know crappy webapps? Further why does his marketing mean that he can't have observed and lived the "do what you love and the rest will follow" message he presents?
Don't even the most simplistic bots perform port scans to discover your services anyway?

err...sortof. They're just looking at port numbers and cross referencing that to services that are known to live on those ports.

Changing the port that SSH listens on isn't going to stop somebody from performing this exploit against one of your machines, it IS going to prevent you from getting auto-rooted by a bot that goes around looking for machines that ack on port 22.

Think of it like a hidden door, but on the front of your house. To the casual observer driving through the neighborhood, they won't see it. To somebody actively trying to find a way into your house...you're going to need more.
Sometimes that's not an option. We were once forced to do the same thing. Block Opera, that is.

We had a large-ish JS app which ran fine in FF and IE, but generated all sorts of exceptions in Opera. The reason we didn't fix it was that every single one of those errors read something like "There was an error in [function].". No line numbers, no surrounding code, no nothing. So we blocked it.

(We did eventually fix the bugs, but only after a new version of Opera which printed more informative messages was released.)
Automatic Summarization - How To Teach Computers to Tag on Their Own (Video)
Stuart Halloway (author of Programming Clojure) came up with a rewrite of Uncle Bob's bowling game: http://github.com/stuarthalloway/clojure-bowling/tree/master
I have no idea what people who are not like me want. Maybe I could go and live in a favela or a township for five years and maybe then I would know, but I'm probably not going to do that. If I attempt to serve an imaginary favela-dweller I'll end up with a product that doesn't suit them. At least I know I can serve myself.
DRM isn't dead until it's dead for movies, too.
On the Skillfulness of Developers (part 2/2)
As a former MS employee (with quite a few friends who still work there) it definitely surprises me to see them releasing GPL code at all. MS is terrified of the GPL -- I don't mean as an enemy in the marketplace (although there too) -- but mortally afraid of GPL code tainting any of their proprietary code bases causing them to need to give up the source to Windows or Office.

I can imagine a team within LCA (the MSFT legal department) worked long and hard on this project -- quite possibly more work as a legal exercise than as a development one.
Did hell freeze over or what ?

(checks outside)

While I'm pleased that microsoft would do a thing like this I wonder what their motives are. It's not as if open source is very high up in their priority list and Steve Ballmer is on the record as saying that Open Source is enemy #1 of microsoft.
What have you got to lose?
Trent, tried to reply to you in your other post in this thread but it doesn't seem to a "reply" link (weird.)

wrt to http://quantlib.org/reference/_equity_option_8cpp-example.ht...

It should be fairly straightforward to implement enough of Quantlib in Common Lisp IF you are able to implement the same algorithms in any other language. The data structures and data types can be mechanically converted (the Lisp numeric tower if far richer than C++'s numeric capabilities and it might obviate some things) however, it's the numeric algorithms that require expertise to reimplement. A 1:1 translation wouldn't produce an attractive result.

By algorithms I mean stuff like the monte-carlo constructors, MakeMCEuropeanEngine, etc.

The rest of the stuff would look far more attractive in Common Lisp. deftype can tidy up type definitions. The lisp pretty printer and the format function look way more compact than those huge blocks of cout, etc.

One way I can think of is to create C wrappers for C++ and call those wrappers from Lisp. You might have to struggle with Boost, templates and other design patterny crap tacked onto C++ though :-( one way I know is to reify template arguments into function arguments. e.g:

new BinomialVanillaEngine<JarrowRudd>(bsmProcess,timeSteps)

==>

binomial_vanilla_engine (JARROW_RUDD, bsm_process, time_steps)
I remember 10 years ago when I asked econ profs what they thought about behavioural effects and how I was mostly knocked down (because this was back then not according to doctrine). That's when I began to realize the importance of politics and the status quo in the academic profession. Lesson learned!

10 years later - it's all behavioural and empirical econ (think "Freakonomics") that gets mentioned. Now the field is on its way to change (also due to a recent financial meltdown, and the inability to forecast any of it). Quote from article:

"A recent ranking of academic economists was topped by Joseph Stiglitz and Andrei Shleifer, two prominent hole-pokers. A newly prominent field, behavioural economics, concentrates on the consequences of irrational actions."

Also think of the fairly recent Nobel prize (Kahneman 2002) in behavioural econ. As a side note, Kahneman, a psychologist, claims to never have taken a single econ course.
It actually isn't, I checked out all three links and they are about the same subject but definitely different articles / pieces of code / services.
I've done a site about a year or two ago - I don't make websites, but I was pushed into it. So, client wants modern, slick design, some JS functionality etc... and in the end I've received an email with a question why doesn't it work on their windows '95 IE5 computer. I've politely forwarded links to microsoft site where it states '95 and IE5 are not supported anymore, so why should I support it then? By that logic I should support commodore 64 browsing the site.

However, if you are doing an application and you have time/resources/will to test and develop on one or two browsers, then state it obviously on the application gateway. This was just a lazy forwarding to error page. MobileMe does a nice, polite notice if you are there with unsupported browser, check it out.
If Marijuana Is Legal, Will Addiction Rise?
What's the HTTP error code for "address didn't match" or "over credit limit"?

(honest question, not snark) - How do you handle application specific messages and errors using the normal http error codes?
Rails 2.3.3: Touching, faster JSON, bug fixes
It was a terrible pair programming environment. Pair programming was simply being used to up the average grade of the class (which succeeded).

I disagree with saying that constantly distributing knowledge by always pairing is a better situation. It makes the assumption that everything that can be known about a system is already known, which doesn't often (ever?) hold true. By separating out, you can cover far more area and find more of those unknowns, while coming together for regular pair sessions helps spread that newly discovered information around.
That's what I was going to ask. Contributing to Open Source projects springs to mind, since you get involved in a community that can give you feedback, experience on a potentially very large, complicated project (which is very different to doing toy projects for class - I'm currently a student) and the excitement of seeing something you work on actually being used.

I've never tried that, btw, but it's on my list when I get time. I'm currently working on a small browser MMORPG, and while I get feedback on the design etc from the playerbase, since no-one else looks at my code I don't get any feedback on my own programming.

However, I did leave it for a few months (got too convoluted to work on) but I've been persuaded to restart working on it, starting from scratch (moved from PHP to Ruby). Since I'm basically trying to recode the same behaviour but trying to avoid known bugs and pitfalls it's been a good way to see progress - I've learned stuff about database normalisation, FP, etc, since version 1 and it's good to see 'ah, doing it that way this time round has made stuff so much easier'. So I guess the community feedback comes from myself.

I should probably github it, actually.
Motor home colony thriving at KLAX
LAX parking lot is home away from home for airline workers
Uhm... Anti-sec dropped "ssh exploit codez" last week, and it turned out to be a trojan that when run, deletes your home directory.

I'd expect something similar here, because if they release real exploit code, they are violating their own deeply held beliefs on disclosure.

Long story short: don't try running their code.
The most interesting thing from that article is in the last bit, it took 400,000 people to put 2 people on the moon, I realized there was quite a team but that large ?? It baffles me.

Is there a breakdown of that number somewhere ?
Tentative Opinion: If Microsoft would just completely loosen up and willfully co-exist that they could increase their popularity and sales.

Idealistic fantasy? I have no sense of what % of the market are dual-booters/VM users. Businesses that use MS – they won’t, IMO, switch to Linux any time soon. From the trial of windows 7, it seems like a promising OS. With me, avoiding MS is more a matter of not wanting to support their controlling business practices.

This seems viable to me. Anyone agree?
Flagged: we already went over this exact article here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=708615
You're not. It's becoming an increasingly common sentiment as people spend time working with frameworks that are designed with productivity in mind, most of which appear to be following the example of Ruby on Rails (e.g. .NET MVC).

That does, of course, include Ruby on Rails, which in newer versions is following the example of earlier versions ;)
I'm currently re-visiting SICP, as well as filmed SICP lectures: http://academicearth.org/courses/the-structure-and-interpret... - it is a nice refresh of Scheme, since the last time I saw Scheme was when men built pyramids.

What motivated me to revisit it again is Naughty Dog's presentation on their "new" version of Scheme scripting engine they use in Uncharted 2 (similar to GOAL, but new, based on PLT-Scheme).

Check it out http://www.gameenginebook.com/gdc09-statescripting-uncharted... (40 MB PDF). There is also this shorter presentation http://www.naughtydog.com/corporate/press/GDC%202008/Adventu... (pdf).

What I'm wondering is, now that we have multicore power, huge amount of RAM and stuff like that - why are people so dispersed into other functional languages when LISP has such a rich heritage? IMO wouldn't it be trivial to run Scheme or any other LISP if you stick to functional programming? Of course, on the other hand there is a problem of parallel algo's, but that is another topic.
How to Apply to Y Combinator
Also:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/20/anti_sec_spoof/
From The Dark Knight

Alfred Pennyworth -> "Some men just want to watch the world burn."

The Joker -> "It's not about money... it's about sending a message. Everything burns!"
Of course, if you find this article interesting, look at CTM (Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi's _Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming_ (http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html)) The papers it links to are excerpts from the book.

One of the best books on programming I've ever seen, IMHO.
Spelling Reform
DRM per se is far from being dead.

The specific DRM on music was killed by necessity of backward compatibility. CD-Audio, mp3 etc. did not contain any DRM provisions and market demand for compatible products precluded DRM.

On the other hand, standards that include DRM from the beginning (DVD, BlueRay, HDMI etc) will continue using it. New standards will also come with DRM until customers successfully pressure the vendors to dropping it.

DRM is not dead, it just couldn't find the parking spot in front of the music store. Otherwise, business as usual.
A new Regular Expression Matching paper ‎(Philip Bille)‎
This is about as awesome hackery piece of theoretical computer science as you can get, the first asymptotic improvement to regular expression matching in at least 17 years!
I wanted very badly to think this wasn't true... but it is true.
I read this in print so i'm going to assume this is the same. I think it's a very sensasionalist, bandwagon-hopping headline, and the majority of economic principles are just as sound now as they were before. The problem lies in their application; too often economic models are being over-simplified for people who are not familiar with their workings, and people without this understanding are making important decisions based on them. The other obvious fundamental problem with economics is that you will never be able to account for everything, and there are some things you won't realise you've missed till you can observe their effects. This isn't economics going wrong, that is how economics progresses. There are plenty of things that can be learnt from recent events, but it's naive to suggest that most post-Keynesian research is suddenly worthless, as was suggested in other articles in that issue.
Not to mention that there are seven pictures of Halle Berry (still not enough) on her Wikipedia page, when they criticize one bad photo as if it were the only one there.
It depends whether or not Big Tobacco takes it on as a cash crop. I'm sure you could make marijuana addictive with enough additives and advertising.

I've met a lot of messed up people, the vast majority were primarily addicted to alcohol. All of them smoked pot on occasion. None of them had anything resembling a 'pot addiction.'
I've always asked. The worst they can do is not respond.
Not sure what you mean by "address didn't match" but it would likely be 404 or 403 depending on what the "address" is.

"Over credit limit" would be "402 Payment Required."

You can always return additional, application-specific details in the body of the error response. But choosing a correct HTTP status code is an important first step because it has well-defined semantics (e.g. caching behavior) for client libraries or proxy software that know nothing about your application, and it allows the client to use a single code-path for all error handling.

I was picking on the Posterous API because each response has up to three "statuses" - the HTTP status code, the rsp@stat attribute, and the rsp/err@code attribute. The docs don't even mention what combinations of HTTP status code and response body are valid. (Will errors be served as 200 OK? Will some responses have 4XX or 5XX status codes but not have an "err" element in the body?)

As it is, Posterous clients may need to handle a 200 response with an error in the body, an error response with an error in the body, and an error response without an error in the body (which is not documented in the spec but probably can't be ruled out). Not all client writers will think of all these cases, and not all will handle them the same. It would be better for the API to define its behavior in terms of HTTP, which would put all error handling in a single place.
Media:  The Truth - Most Accurate Overview of The Current Ad Market (w. Video)
For a somewhat contrary view, see the webpage with poems showing the absurdities of English spelling.

http://www.spellingsociety.org/news/media/poems.php
It looks like spam to me. The OP has no comments just three submissions for different services offered by ipinfodb.com and then this submission which is a freshmeat project offering an API for a ipinfodb.com web service.
"There is a reason why you want to run a startup—much of everything else is the influence of societal pressures."

The problem is, you conflate reasonable doubts with irrational outside influences. It's not as if people who want to be entrepreneurs can't also want to get a law degree. Entrepreneurial ambition is not the only kind, and there are many legitimate reasons that a smart person might want to get a professional degree, aside from "society told me to do it".

The idea that you need to commit yourself wholly to whatever path you choose is well-taken, but the notion that you must eliminate all doubt in order to act decisively is excessive (and impossible).
its not like image uploaders are rare though, why would the scammers bother with hotlinking his image when they could just upload the file to one of the million of image uploaders out there.
So did I. Starting a YC like thing in your town isn't easy, but it's not impossible. It's letting the companies grow up and keeping them in your city that usually borders on impossible.
Calling all geeks
Wonga: How the Net Should Kill the Finance Industry
Catch The Buzz at DreamIt Ventures with Mark Hughes (Philly)
New impact on Jupiter spotted by amateur astronomer
It's a trojan.
I agree that Print is not dead... glad to hear someone else seconds it.
the substance itself is not physically addictive. it can be considered mentally addictive, but so can the internet and world of warcraft, so thats not a very good argument against it.

the only way the "product" will become more addictive is if, as it was suggested, big companies dive into it and insert more addictive things beyond simply the original substance.
You may not need to be a chef to know someone's cooking sucks, but you sure as hell better be a chef if you're going to lecture to a bunch of chefs about cooking.
Try getting the copyright to wedding (or similar) photos.

If the photographer doesn't flat-out refuse, that will be be an extra x% charge (somewhere around 50-100%) to make up for the lost gouge they normally charge for "reprints".

And even though one photographer might hire another under "work for hire" terms (i.e. the second photographer holds no copyright to the photos they personally take). Don't expect that you can hire the photographer to work under those terms directly for you at the same rate.
Mark Hughes, the CEO of Buzz Marketing was former VP of Marketing for Ebay's Half.com, Hughes grew eBay's Half.com from zero to 8 million customers in less than three years. DId you hear about a town that changed it's name to Half.com - that's Hughes who managed to create the first dot-com city in America. The buzz generating event was dubbed by Time magazine as "one of the greatest publicity coups" in history. 19 days after his Half.com Oregon event, eBay contacted Half.com and later acquired the company for over $300 million. Mark is the author of the best selling book "Buzzmarketing: Get People to Talk About Your Stuff."
How easy is it to give up marijuana forever, having once smoked it regularly?
Mind boggling work!
The GPL cannot force you to open your source: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20031214210634851
That was something I read recently in an article about Neil Armstrong's humbleness. He felt it was unfair to take any credit when there were 400,000 people who made it possible for him to take those steps.

It's a good read and gives a lot of insight into this man who is a household name, yet we actually know very little about him.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8133835.stm
Please don't. Scrolling is an inherently spatial behaviour, and changing state while doing so will confuse a lot of users. It feels like chasing the carrot.
Can you guess the search phrase?
Amazon has clients sign the request:
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/2006-03-01/RESTAu...
Great info. Thanks a lot for this, pg. You've pretty much told us exactly what you are and are not looking for in the application.
Well, first off it's a "PressPass" story - i.e. a marketing release - so maximum back-pattage is to be expected.

Secondly, what they've done is to contribute code to the linux kernel, under the GPL, in order to improve linux in a way that plays to their commercial advantage. Which is, after all, what the vast majority of corporate linux contributions are about.

The fact that his particular contribution happens to be obviously tactical rather than the more strategic aims of some of the bigger corporate backers doesn't mean that it isn't exactly what we want to see, and entirely in the spirit of commercial open source contributions.

If I ever meet any of the people at Microsoft who made this happen at a conference, I have every intention of buying them a beer to say thanks - enlightened self interest is almost always the best way to motivate a corporation to do something useful and I'd imagine the path to making MSFT's self interest sufficiently enlightened to see the advantage of funding this has been a hard one. Well done, guys!