skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm disputing this claim: "80% of US bankruptcies are due to unexpected medical bills."

I'm not disputing this claim: "80% of US bankruptcies meet Elizabeth Warren's Criteria #1."

Her criteria is simply an arbitrary cutoff, and does not prove causality. If a person spent 10% of income on medicine, but 30% on gambling or taxes, it is unfair to attribute the bankruptcy to medical spending.

The control group would be needed to measure whether medical costs are correlated with increased bankruptcy.

Incidentally, total bankruptcies went down (in absolute number). Medical bankruptcies (by her definition) roughly stayed the same in absolute number. This is most of the explanation for the increased proportion of medical bankruptcies.
Is Evernote a YC company? I can find any info to this regards. Here is a list of YC companies http://www.crunchbase.com/company/y-combinator, though not sure if it's a comprehensive one?
Why would you want to back up Gmail? I bet Google already backs it up, at different geographical locations even I dare say. Just in case... well, in case of what exactly? A fire? Earthquake? In case they decide to delete your mail account?

This must be one of those things that belong to the paranoid hacker stereotype.
It's not that painful, but then again, I don't use labels that often, I just search my mail if I need something specific.
LABjs - Loading And Blocking Javascript
I would actually enjoy a one week type engagement to get a good fit for a company

So would I. But since I'm WORKING for that one week, I expect to be paid for it. I really don't think anyone should be surprised by that!
The heroku guys do a really solid job.

What's launchy?
I thought apps with objectionable content don't get in the app store at all. Is that not the case?
Seems to me this is an argument for applications run on a local machine rather than software-as-a-service (SaaS). At some point you could get dependent on some SaaS provider who could take your data and services away for some reason with which you don't agree and with no reasonable recourse.
http://www.hotindianstartups.com
I think show up and work for a week - with your old pay + 20%, then we'll talk about further negotiations - (perhaps another 10% or so) ... or we can both walk away.
It is a cohesive piece of work; they care about appearances (compare default look of Firefox and Opera -- world of difference); it has nearly all of what I need out of a browser (only thing missing is Firebug); it allows MDI (child windows); little usability nice-ities that they introduced first (mouse gestures; active use of keyboard to browse, if you want; fit to width; page zooming (not just font size); integrated password manager; ...)

Firefox has always looked and felt like a patchwork of open source contributions and an uncohesive soup of extensions. I love open source. I write open source. I want open source to succeed. But Firefox is not there yet for me, and if the past few years are any indication, it'll be years more until it might be. It's still just second best.
To be fair, "living in a place that doesn't suck" is largely why the cost of living is so different between places. It's the other side of the equation that makes people pay the extra money. Though I agree with you that calling it "equally well off" is giving it too much credit for what it measures.
The metal chips are typically not wasted (it is trivial to wash and melt them into a new billet). Milling from scratch gives you a stronger (and more expensive) part than if you were to cast and machine it.

Ever watch Apple's unibody MacBook Pro video? They use the same technology to machine the cases on our laptops.
Prefer ShoveBox, however only available for OS X... http://www.wonderwarp.com/shovebox/
I could be wrong but I believe cnc stuff can end up being stronger than the equivalent cast version of a part.

Also if it was a high performance/custom or proto-type engine it would make sense to not cast it as well.
I guess it is risk spreading, to some degree, but using one commercial online service to back up another doesn't sound optimal for me. I like one backup of my data on a physical hard drive in my possession.
I know a bunch of smaller startups that do the "come in for a week and we'll decide" out here in the bay area. Peanut Labs, e.g.
When I think about building software, I think about the long term benefits of the software to humanity, or if I'm working for a particular company, the benefit to the organization.

So if I am going to spend my time developing something, I want it to never go away. Facebook will go away. The iPhone will go away. These are fads.

What people who think like I do often fail to understand, is that most of the world doesn't think like we do. They want money. They want popularity. Even if it is fleeting.

My question is: Where is the balance? Think about investing. If you have a 20 year vision and invest in those companies, you have to have 20 years of patience. Plus, how do you know your vision of 20 years out is the correct one? How do you know how much vision you have? If you consistently think 5 years ahead of the masses, then buy companies that the masses will think are awesome in 5 years.

If you are 3 months ahead or one year ahead, then buy those kinds of companies.

It's the same with building applications. You are building applications ahead of time for a market that will want them by the time you are finished building it. For example, if you build a facebook app and that app is going to take 5 years to complete, well... facebook may be gone by then and you are wasting your time.

So what you are stuck with then, is building applications that don't take very long or are targetted toward a massive population with lots of investment and horsepower behind the app that can be built very quickly. Of course companies that can execute like this can make money building apps for one platform after another making money off the network effects within that platform. It's not just facebook, it's salesforce, quickbase, microsoft, java, oracle, php, the list really is endless...

So, to summarize, how do we determine how much vision we have? How do we determine how long it will take to build an app? How do we determine when the platform on which we build our apps will cease to exist -- if ever?
Dark Energy From the Ground Up: Make Way for BigBOSS
Unofficial Poll: Would you pay a $5 lifetime membership fee to Hacker News?
This is idle meta-curiosity and in no way is this anything YC/pg has ever said to make me think this would ever be an option.

I just thought it'd be interesting to see how many people here would pay a single one-time $5 lifetime membership fee to be able to submit and comment on Hacker News. This is not unlike the process sites like Metafilter eventually adopted.
Yes, and be happy to do so. It would improve the quality of the content here.
Yes, and be happy to do so. I don't think the quality would change much, though.
Yes, but I don't really want a membership fee for the site.
No, but I think it would help improve the overall quality of content.
No, and I don't think it would help content enough (or might even hurt it).
No, and I'll describe my reasoning in a comment below.
oops, thanks, I'll fix that.
My experience has been identical to yours. Ask simple questions, get constant failures. In bad times, the signal to noise ratio is completely out of wack. A recession is the worst time to hire people.
In case Google decides to lock me out? There are plenty of stories of people who were locked out from various google accounts without warning and without being able to contact anyone about it. The probability may be small, but the impact of losing all your email, at least for me, is enough that some insurance is warranted.
How have they accounted for purchasing residences in New York? Which, unlike almost everywhere else, has not seen a precipitous decline in property value?
This was the most disturbing and telling piece of the whole story:

"There was no mention from Google as to why my account was suspended"

Unreal.
Yes, though hopefully with murdochs pay to link scheme there will be less links to mainstream media :)
Dropbox takes up all of my CPU these days. It's very depressing how little I use it now.
Thanks for the feedback, some really useful points to note.

Do you mean to print to word and pdf format? That should be straight forward (minus the videos/images/slideshows of course).

In terms of the name, you'll be surprised how many variations of web cv/resume domain names are already taken lol.
It would be interesting to see also dependencies between different sciences. This could be done by example by examining the citations in papers...

Then probably we can observe something like: CS depends on Math, Medicine depends on Biology
Hmm... I see your point. Perhaps we disagree on the word "work." When I think of "work" I think of moving a company in a desired direction.

A lot of people think of work as "sitting in a cube."

The question is, "How do we determine if the candidate's definition of work matches the employer's definition of work?"

Maybe what you think you are doing when you are working is actually causing more problems and moving the company backwards because they are going to have to undo all the crappy code you wrote. I'm not meaning to attack you, I'm just trying to illustrate a point. Know what I mean?

Maybe such an engagement could work out where, "If we hire you, we pay you for the week. If we fire you, we keep the money and you are out."

This reduces the risk for the employer while also giving the employee a chance to examine the company and be paid if the work is satisfactory.
Hmm, sorry about that, I only tried the demo console on Ubuntu and Windows, and only with a US keyboard.

I haven't found a non-insane way of doing it.. see f.e. http://www.quirksmode.org/js/keys.html

Anyone have any pointers? (or patches? :)
This article reads like a parody:

+“I am a very viable number,” she said.

+The guard, um, encouraged Brad Stone and me to treat Ms. Bartz with respect. “She’s my girl.” (???)

Not to mention them not mentioning trashing Geocities.
It highly depends on how much you are willing to do. I mean, the possibilities are endless. Some come to my mind are:

* compiler/interpreter of some languages (for simplicity, usually Scheme or something easy) to Javascript, with good interface to Javascript code. Optimize the produced code. Bonus: full reflection (aka incremental compiling) support. Another bonus: mixed solution, with javascript for new users, and plug-in for accelerated speed.

* Telnet/SSH/VNC in Browser. I have seen some solutions, but all of them are primitive, especially with respect to the screen size

* Games, as always. Bonus: 3D.

* Geolocation-based stuffs. These are really hot these days, eh?

See, just one minute, and all kinds of thing flash through one's mind. Of course, you have only 3 months, which makes any of these extremely challenging.
Demands for Bottled Water Labelling: The Bottled Water Industry Responds
Look at Pig's docs compared to Hive's... Yahoo is amazing to the FOSS community and deserves mucho goodwill.
I'm not sure why that's depressing. You've managed to filter out the majority of people you'd not want to hire with just a simple set of tests.

Perhaps a way to screen out many of these people without spending the time administering the screen is to have a simple coding test that these people complete before you'll even have them in for an interview. A couple places I've interviewed with did this, and they both expressed high satisfaction with the reduction in interviews of hopeless candidates that resulted.
Absolutely. While apartments are smaller and more expensive per square foot in NYC, the city itself calls you out. You spend time in a park; at a sidewalk cafe; on a friend's (or your own) roof-deck. I guestimate that I spend 50% more time outdoors living here in the city than I did living in a suburb down in NC. I also spend a lot less in transportation costs, and go to a lot more concerts.

While, according to this guy's statistics, NYC is the poorest.. well, that's not taking into account the culture, the convenience, and so forth.

(I'm in a share with a couple friends; My monthly bills - including rent [utilities included], phone, and transportation - are about $900. If you consider that a job that would pay $30k elsewhere will pay $40 or $50k here, and that if you're smart you can live on the cheap - you'll be able to retire a lot sooner if you plan on retiring out of the city, because the money that doesn't go far here goes very far elsewhere..)
I think there would be a significant increase in the site quality immediately, but I think it would be somewhat short-term. I don't think that fee can guarantee that the site will retain quality for the duration of that membership.

I would be curious to see if spammer accounts still get set up. I wonder if they think it's worth $5 to go on a short-lived spam-rampage (... spampage?) Nevertheless, I would be willing to pay it.
Favorite Startups of 2009

vark.com
listia.com
saynow.com
Then try thinking outside the box a bit, something like card.ly did for their online business cards site could work.
I would. But I think quality would decline slightly - mostly because of less good submissions but no decline in "spam"/bad submissions.

It wouldn't stop the borderline spammers (yes itworld I mean you ;)) for whom $5 would be worth it.
What's Next For Roku? More Video, Audio, New Hardware
I see that I am.
No, but I realize how the title might be misleading. I realize now this question was maybe geared toward those who started YC companies, which I haven't.
“Blink” and the Art of Hiring the Best
Major technical difficulties you've faced in smartphone development?
I'm mostly curious about whether there are any shovels to be sold in this "gold rush" for the iPhone.<p>http://fernblog.com/home/2009/8/6/apple-and-facebook-application-development-a-rush-for-fools.html
Case appealed.

There are definitely people who are capable of solving problems but whose performance drops appreciably under pressure. Now, you may not want to hire those people, but that doesn't mean it has anything to do with external motivation or making excuses, and you can keep your contempt for yourself.
Niche Wordpress Themes
Part of it may be your questions, and part may be HOW you're asking (e.g. over the phone, or putting someone on the spot).

2) Not a lot of people write SQL by hand anymore. I used MySQL for years, long ago, and never wrote a join. Then ORMs came along and handle joins automatically, so I've still never written one. So not being able to do it without looking it up doesn't really tell you anything. I've written far, far more complex things than an SQL join statement. A more pertinent issue I'd be checking for is whether user input is properly escaped to prevent SQL injection -- again, not an issue with ORMs, but an issue when building SQL query strings by hand.

1) A lot of people use languages where recursion is unusual (i.e. NOT Lisp). Even a senior developer (especially of something like PHP) might not recall this, not having actually written a recursive function for years.

3) Representing a car as an object: A lot of software people don't know hardware, so the confounding part might be recalling various attributes of cars and how they relate to each other.

Also keep in mind that many introverted people get very uncomfortable when someone is waiting on them. This can make it difficult to concentrate at all. Being asked to perform on demand is normal for a musician but foreign to most programmers. On top of that, it's usually in an unfamiliar environment, such as verbally or on a whiteboard -- imagine asking a violinist to play on some lines you drew on a piece of paper.

PG, RTM, and TLB would probably fail your test -- they don't use SQL, they use flat files.
that's 2 votes for shovebox. great organizational tool for the mac! also with an iphone client now that is super useful on the go.
It's a skill that can be practiced, though. And it might come in handy in general discussions, not just in job interviews.
That isn't possible. You can't think long term in an industry that changes every month. You must strike while the iron is hot!
OMG, this is the most absurd thing I've heard in a long time.

I think it's really a symptom of a much deeper problem with American government and that is that the "system" is getting so big that no one really knows how to fix it. I see this kind of thing happen with software too. Your IT department buys software or adopts a new platform and builds all these great interconnected applications with messaging busses and information silos and then one day everyone who knows anything about the system is gone and what to do now?

Well, you start building systems on the platforms that are easier to understand and try to work around problems and in the meantime, the people who don't know what to do are trying to keep their jobs by doing something at all which is just making the whole package even worse!

At some point, a company has to make a very tough decision to "rip and replace." It's costly. It takes time. And while you are ripping and replacing you have to try to do the best with what you have working now. But the consequences of not ripping and replacing are just going to continue crippling you and eventually, you are going to be leap frogged by an agile startup who doesn't have the legacy deficit you've run up by not doing things right in the first place!
Why am I down-modded for this it was neutral?
The CPU usage is kinda high, thats why I only run it when I need it
Are you saying that the context and type of the problem in the interview doesn't matter at all?

I think you'd understand how I can take your argument to its extreme conclusion and justify posing psychotherapy problems to candidates.

You're seeing complaining where there isn't any. It's in the employers interest to ask questions that will narrow down candidates in a way that best fits the job. Putting candidates under extremely unusual circumstances and pressure to answer unrelated questions is only going to help you know how the candidate responds to unrelated questions under extremely unusual circumstances, and pointing this out is not complaining. Acknowledging that a high pressure phone interview does not accurately reflect your abilities is not complaining either.
Touchable Hologram Becomes Reality (w/ Video)
That's quite rich. Don't VC's receive most of their money from institutional investors, like, uhm, public pension funds, corporate pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, foundations, fund-of-funds, etc.?
Are you depressed because your filter has proven very effective? It seems you should be happy. ;-)

The thing to worry about with a very discriminating filter is, like tocomments post, whether you are filtering for something different from what you really want...
I like Etherpad, but I'm not sure why. I'm a big G Docs user, or at least was in college, and use both for the same features (don't do too much heavy collab). But I use Etherpad Pro to consolidate all the random text files I have lying around usually. I think I like it because it's simple, non-nosense and logging into google docs is a pain. I have it on google apps and i never remember the URL so i have to log into mail, click the icon, etc. Granted I could setup a CNAME but I digress..

Maybe I like em more than gDocs b/c they're also a startup..
Egad. I wonder how much music they expect one to make with 4 buttons...but I'll look into it. Thanks for the correction.
For fun visit, http://www.pickuppundit.com
Doesn't have to be a YC company. I was only asking YC.
Breaking news: There are a lot of iphone developers. A few will find financial success. Most will not. Follow me on Twitter to get more amazing insights.
Not depressing at all, completely representative of the job pool.

The technique you're using isn't common - a lot of traditional companies don't interview on skill and technique (like Google do).

Backing up your 70% of failures, we recently hired a fashion designer at our startup (we're in an interesting market!) I decided we should use the same kind of interview we would for a developer.

Everyone we interviewed was completely baffled, but it really sorted out the wheat from the chaff. At least 80% of the people we interviewed couldn't do what they said.

Thankfully though, we've ended up with someone who is really incredible. In fact, I think she has the 10x higher productivity that us developer types talk about, and her old employer is trying to hire her back.

tl;dr - looks like you've got a normal pool of applicants!
Makes no difference: they hired me, they pay me. Doesn't matter if I create $1M in profit that first week or I sit there with my thumb up my ass. If I'm there I expect to be paid for it.

Furthermore, I have no interest in reducing the risk for the employer: I expect them to do that. I reduce my own risks. If I'm the employer, then of course my perspective will shift 180deg.

FFS, it's a job, not a hobby!
Sorry, we decided to go with another applicant. We'll keep your resume on file.
I've always wondered why jQuery (and prototype) are the default javascript libraries for many people. The YUI library is fast, featureful, and maintained by some of the best JS devs in the industry (sorry resig, but I think Crockford knows a little bit more about JS than you).

Is it because Yahoo! isn't a "cool" company? Is it because RoR is so tightly coupled to prototype? Is it because they had kind of an unwieldy namespace before they updated that?

I find their XHR, event, and dom manipulation interfaces much easier to work with than prototype or jQuery - these are good until you need to do some serious heavy lifting. I've had several instances where I had to create XHRs manually because prototype just didn't give me the access I needed.
Posterous. It just works.
Great overview of some good tools out there. Thanks for the tip.

1 DZone Cheat Sheets

2 NetBeans IDE

3 Navicat Database Management

4 SQL Code Formatter

5 HTML Validator

6 Git Version control

7 Subversion version control

8 Colorzilla

9 X-Lite VOIP

10 Trillian instant messenger

11 Screengrab

12 Roboform

13 SUN virtualbox for virtualization

14 Ultramon for mutiple windows monitors

15 PDF Creator to... create PDFs
NASA says Kepler spacecraft proves it can find Earth-sized planets
NASA's planet-hunting spacecraft, Kepler, has made radical new discoveries about a hellish planet a thousand light years away -- proof, scientists say, that the craft will be able to carry out its mission of finding other Earths in our galaxy, provided they exist.
One could perhaps create a meta site that filters content based on HN-names that pay for membership at the meta level.
Or perhaps better: the week's pay is given to the new employee if hired, or to a mutually-agreed charity if not hired. Then there's no financial incentive for the company to cycle through candidates for a free week's consulting.
I thought it was very common practice to have a [paid] probation period, where the company is free to keep someone or let them go. Usually the period is less than 6 months. That seems a sensible approach to making sure your hiring decision was good or not.
From the comments it doesn't sound like it was that obvious a week ago.
Using ctags and a good editor (or an IDE) will make the process of seeking to (and jumping back from) subroutines a lot less painful.
What are you going to do in one week at a place? It could easily take that long and much longer to ramp up and even understand a part of the existing code base.