skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I worked at Amazon.com they did analyze interviewing techniques, and I assume Google and other large companies do too. They didn't do controlled scientific experiments (as far as I know), but they looked at things like which phone screen questions were correlated with success in later on-site interviews, and did post-mortems of "wrong" interviewing decisions ("no" votes on someone who was eventually hired and successful, or "yes" votes on someone later found to be unsuitable). The data that comes out of this is not exactly scientific, but it does represent lessons learned from experience. [For what it's worth, a typical Amazon interview is a lot like a typical Google interview.]
What's the point, won't the sale kill them anyway?
What I find even more interesting is Sony's use of a standard book format (DRM appears to still be involved, however).

So very un-Sony like. I guess fear of Amazon Kindle has made Sony take a different path than usual. Or maybe just finally realized that tightly controlled proprietary "standards" don't fare well in a well-informed market (BetaMax, MiniDisc, Memory Stick, BlueRay--which, despite "winning" the HD disc format war will never replace DVDs for the majority of customers, since we'll mostly go straight to digital delivery before that happens--etc.).

Good to see, since Amazon has taken the tightly controlled DRM-filled path. I wouldn't want the ebook market to naturally flow that way.
How funny that it uses a TechCrunch-cloned wordpress theme.
I guess my point is, "push" meant something different then.
Censorship doesn't have to be government-run to be censorship, and in some cases (such as when a privately run Website's policy says "no swearing or your posts will be deleted") it can even be a perfectly acceptable practice.

I don't think this boycott is really very well thought out, though. It really is (as another HN community member pointed out) punitive rather than corrective; his opinion isn't funded by customers' spending at Whole Foods the way, say, customers' money funds Sony/BMG's use of DRM. Boycotting Sony/BMG for DRM use is corrective, providing a perfect counterexample to the poorly conceived boycott of Whole Foods and its punitive effect.

It's not even a boycott of principle related to how one's money is spent, as far as I can tell.
by my knowledge he is atleast weeks if not months late, on the news ... but he does give a "reason to care" - which adds value to the conversation...

- The web.. seems to change, slowly when we think its changing fast and really really fast when it seems boring.
k = n/2 is correct when you are dealing with zero-indexed arrays.

For arrays whose length is even, I think it's also acceptable to take either one of the two values (instead of the mean of the two) as the median value. Wikipedia is fairly ambiguous on this as it only states "one often takes the mean" and "sometimes one takes the average of the two median numbers".

I believe that for a large enough sample size the discrepancy shouldn't even matter all that much.
The ultimate end is more likely a new equilibrium, in which the difference between the cost of living in the BRIC is closer to the industrialized Western world than it is now. Also, don't forget productivity gains are fueled by new technologies, and the US are still way ahead of the competition in research.
Preloading with multiple symbol versions
Like It or Not, You Have to Behave on Twitter - Ad Age
On the other hand, it was a summation of Voltaire's perspective on freedom of speech.
GetTickCount() wraparound bug.
Children these days have no respect for Zen Masters.
Actually, there's at least one more possibility, namely "extractable oil is created at some non-0 rate".
It was fun, except, had the board (Chris mostly) accepted the offer of $450m then I would not have had to work any longer. Alas. I also turned down an offer to join Nutscrape way back too. All fabulous examples of great career choices I've made...

The thing that probably had the biggest negative impact was rewriting the client in COM (who remembers that?), this gave us absolutely no new features and bogged down client development for six months, meanwhile portals became the new hotness.

There were some interesting developer issues that we tackled back then, like using the i/o completion ports model (rather than the more traditional BSD sockets model). Since the servers were all NT the i/o completion ports made the code hard to debug but resulted in very high performance. I think (if memory serves) MSFT got that from their VMS roots. Some of the kernel guys on NT were bigshots at DEC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vax780_small.jpeg)
or write your own shell if you're an asshole

Eshell.

It is nice to write "shell scripts" like "(loop for i in *.el do (byte-compile-file i))".
A fix for this is being deployed as I type.

For those interested in the details: the vulnerability was caused by inadequate invalidation of URLs submitted by users when registering OAuth applications. There was a validation routine on those fields, but the very end of the regex used in that validation allowed any number of arbitrary characters. The test coverage included a variety of invalid URLs, but none that simply put a space after the URL and started a <script> tag.

Just goes to show that you can validate, test, and still not be safe. It took another set of eyes to catch this one.

Unfortunately, the publisher of this blog post did not responsibly disclose the vulnerability to us in advance. We found out about it through other channels.

We would have had the fix live earlier, but as several people noticed in the comments, we had a brief outage.
Good point about user-generated content, and I'd say that this still fits under content aggregators because the content sharing is usually topic-specific and driven by information. The exception to this rule are things like Facebook and Twitter where there is peer-to-peer communication only.

It's true that Web 2.0 as a buzzword can get tiring, but can we agree that there is a shift to conversational media vs. one-way media? There has to be some name to identify that shift, and Web 2.0 seems to be the word of choice for now.
Say rather, the Polish are more upset at being edited out of Microsoft's media representations than your average white male. Install Visual Studio and watch the pictures some time. Now look around your office. Notice the difference?

Same thing has happened to U.S. television. Watch TV from the 1960s or 1970s. Watch The Rockford Files on Hulu, for example. The contrast between then and today is amazing. You'll see white men demanding and receiving respect. Today, they're the butt of every joke.

(Oh, the above is totally non-PC. So please down-mod it with a vengeance before you go back to your masturbatory religious devotions to the modern gods Diversity and Equality. But do remember me the next time a girl turns you down in a bar for not being as masculine as her ideal.)
See my other comment. The engineer who wrote this code did take the time to validate, but his validation was incorrect.

Call it "blatant incompetence" if you like, but I'm guessing you've written a buggy validation or regex once or twice in your life.
Who said anything about "extrapolating from 'it worked for Craigslist'"? I didn't say "Some of us have been trying to get our bosses to copy Craigslist for years!" What I said was that some of use have been aware of such principles for years, and telling others about them. One hopes that sharing such principles would involve applying them properly, rather than naively trying to copy someone else's formula.

Do you just dislike Craigslist, and thus hate anything related to it -- including its principles of success and anyone who happens to be aware of some of those principles?

I, for one, have never told anyone "You should base your business model on Craigslist's model!" but I have said "You should probably simplify your business model. I have some suggestions."
Justin.tv is holding a hack day at Y Combinator
We're a small company trying to solve a lot of difficult problems all at once. We make mistakes, but it's always interesting.
> Seeking to punish Mackey for expressing his opinion is not an equivalent act of free speech.

Yes it is. It gets media attention to the opposing idea.

> It crosses the line into incivility.

No, it does not. Refusing to buy products from people you disagree with, and convincing others to do so as well is perfectly civil.
As other posters have said, it's a genuinely hard problem that touches on natural language quantification. You can find an excellent resource on the relationship between english words here http://wordnet.princeton.edu/. You could manually rank a set of adjectives and then use wordnet to find synonyms and generate some heuristic from there, but the bottom line is I think it's going to be a huge time sink unless you get someone with NLP experience involved.
None of what you say Craigslist did wrong obviates the importance of recognizing what Craigslist did right. It seems that what it did right has proven more important than what it did wrong in this case, in fact, further attesting to the value of what it did right.

If you want to do a similar job better than Craigslist did, you should probably do what Craigslist did right, and look for ways to improve it without undercutting those positives. In short, the fact Craigslist does some things wrong doesn't mean you can't learn from its example.
His quote doesn't seem terribly unreasonable especially after they revised cumulative deficit projections for the next 10 years to be 9 trillion dollars this past Friday (up from 7) and that doesn't even include new healthcare entitlements at an estimated 1 trillion! Given how prone they are to underestimating costs like this, these numbers are more likely to be a floor than a ceiling and don't include the deficits that come after! It is however perhaps telling that those who support Obama's plan would be offended by the quote which doesn't necessarily use the term socialism in the pejorative sense.

What I don't understand is the guy who compared Thatcher to the Third Reich. Do they forget what "Nazi" actually stands for? Anyway, what is even more frustrating is that unions now want to have John Mackay fired for having the gall to disagree with the President (http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2009/08/25/business-specializ...). Is this thuggery what counts as discourse in the US now? If you don't agree with the current administration you must be racist, stupid and ought to have your livelihood taken away?
Look What Tumblr's Done With All Its Money
Handy for free but a bit of a waste of money at $5.

It's not THAT difficult after all, and the documents/walkthroughs on the iPhone developer site have improved hugely compared to a year ago.
Don't forget PyCon next year (http://us.pycon.org/)!
Is that self-referential?
http://academicearth.org/subjects/computer-science These videos may be of use
You don't have a right to not be censored or for suffering the consequences of unpopular speech. You only have the right to not be punished by the government for it; it's perfectly acceptable to be punished by the public for it.
Even better, just use Greasemonkey to make all links clickable.

http://arantius.com/misc/greasemonkey/linkify-plus.user.js
i found it it interesting.. missles to iran isnt my cup of tea to be honest, although speculative, was interesting, reeks of a tom clancy story
This isn't the first mysterious incident with cargo ships and the Russians I've heard of.

I grew up in Port Angeles, Washington. Port Angeles is located on the Olympic Peninsula, across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Vancouver Island. The Strait of Juan de Fuca just happens to be the primary route to the Pacific Ocean from Naval Submarine Base Bangor, in nearby Bremerton. Bangor is one of two naval bases in the United States that houses America's fleet of Trident nuclear missile submarines.

A Russian cargo ship anchored itself in the middle of the strait about twelve years ago and just sat there without explaining themselves. The obvious explanation is that the Russians were probably counting submarines leaving and returning to Bangor. I suspect the Strait is shallow enough that it's not feasible for the submarines to leave the Strait submerged, and on fishing trips my dad and I saw one of them. Even surfaced, they are damn silent. I suppose they could have left Bangor through Canadian waters, though I don't know the political feasibility of sailing subs full of nuclear weapons through Canadian waters.

After the Russian cargo ship hung out in the strait for awhile, the American authorities figured they'd investigate it. So they got together with the Canadians and flew a helicopter over the ship. The ship evidently shone a laser at the helicopter (this is a couple of years before the days when lasers were an everyday cat toy) and blinded the American naval intelligence officer that was observing the ship. Investigating further, the Coast Guard decided to board the ship and search it for the laser. When they got around to boarding the ship, the laser was nowhere to be found. Eventually, the ship left the Strait.
funny, but extremely not HN-worthy. let's just merge with Reddit/Digg and get it over with. :)
Oh! The _white guy_ is the one photoshopped in! That's not the sort of thing I'm used to seeing.
I get the impression that in large companies it's standard practice to photshop ads while internationalizing rather than looking for new stock photos with the color schemes and angles.
Should also have had retired as an option - I vacillated btw self- and un- employed.
The thing about OOP is that it is described as way to make programming easier because objects are so "intuitive," and the examples for this are all toy simulations with naive object "models." What the post describes, and what everyone who actually does a significant amount of OOP programming eventually figures out, is that the only things OOP makes intuitive are stupid approaches. It's possible to program well in OOP languages, but there's nothing intuitive about doing anything non-trivial well, in any language.

I blame Alan Kay for inventing a new paradigm and then not explaining how it was supposed to be used (it's like Lisp meets biology!), thus allowing it to be taken over by others who filled the vacuum with a multitude of their own (usually half-baked) ideas bastardized implementations, and "software architect" positions.
Who do you have to know to get your app written up in the nyt?

The key line is It is the first app from Gogii, a start-up backed by $5.2 million meaning they have the funds to hire expensive pr firms and pay for advertising, to promote an app that is losing lots of money.
So you let the same engineer who writes code green-light it for deployment?
Does one need to actually need to attend to participate and qualify? Could we possibly host a version on the other coast and livecast it?
A tip for your future: Price based on value, don't price based on cost.

You are delivering a tool which sells new automobiles. A single sale is worth thousands of dollars to the dealership. If they are achieving ROI on the first sale they make as a result of your website, and you're expecting that to eventually be in the few sales a day range, you are DRASTICALLY underpricing relative to the value they perceive the website as delivering.
You made a triple-language supported database application with immaculate crisp graphic design and well thought-out layout for $500 dollars??? Your solution btw is about as good as it gets for a small-biz website.

I second the opinion that your pricing is off by one or two orders of magnitude.
Can I ask what interview stage you were asked these in, and what level the position was for?

While these are good questions, in my experience they're so widely known from books/websites that I'd be amazed if a company like Google was using them for anything other than early screening of candidates.
I'll be there. Looking forward to helping people build some awesome apps using our api (I built http://slumbervision.com a couple of weeks back, using the api while it was under active development).
> I thought we were pro-"letting other people express their quite reasonable opinions without fear of illegitimate retaliation" around here.

Retaliation from the government, sure, but not from the market. Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences.
That's in british pounds, not USD.

Addition: did the math at www.oanda.com (currency conversion). GBP is LESS than what I thought: 1.63842 USD.

So, that's 900 bucks a day, resulting in $ 110-120 USD/ hour.
Is this what you meant? http://slumbervision.com/
When I heard it was in pounds I'll admit to a brief flash of envy. (Though $550 a day would still be, erm, rather substantially more than Japanese salarymen my age get.)
Sounds like an idea Seth Godin posted a while back, iirc:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/11/an-iphone-ap...
The Ultimate Search Engine
A Counterpoint to Techie-In-Chief
The Craigslist Credo: Bad Advice for Newspapers
Let me be the first to point out that this article is almost two years old. However, not two months after it was published, they received $27M from Accel Partners, and in the 18 months since additional funding, they have continued to expand and flourish.
Both sides on this issue are failing to understand the vast potential power of the tool of the boycott. It doesn't matter whether Mackey's argument was reasonable. People are fired up and motivated, and that energy can be tapped to influence Whole Foods, and then influence another company, and another. The more we use the muscle, the stronger it gets.

What the boycotters don't understand is that you get nowhere if a bunch of disconnected individuals just stop buying something because they're angry. It only works if you make specific well-publicized demands, continue the boycott until the demands are met, and then end it. A boycott without demands is tactically pathetic. It's a bit late now, but the boycotters could have demanded, for example, that Whole Foods publicly support a single-payer system.
Yes it was. Fixed, thanks.
From the reddit thread about the same thing: http://microlove.ytmnd.com/

It is quite hilarious...
this would be interesting if the experiment were more robust...
Take a look at the VA health care system: it's best in class on almost every imaginable metric, including cost. Totally government run. It's time to realise that governmental organizations can be just as efficient or inefficient as private ones. Name me a government organization as badly managed as GM!
I don't understand your point.

There's not a huge barrier to new discoveries in the US being utilized in other countries, and our only advantage in conducting research is infrastructure for distributing money. Over the next ten years, that could be closed by a cash-rich nation that wanted to (China).
The Pirate Bay is not only a website, it's also a political statement. Showing strength in the face of oppression just makes the Pirate Party look stronger. Slumping over and saying it's not worth the trouble just for a few days makes them look weak and uncommitted.

Plus, this is great "free" publicity for them.
How do you actually achieve market prices?

You get a good model that helps to answer that question, and you've got a sellable market product.
It gets media attention to the boycott itself, perhaps, and to the vague idea that "people disagree with John Mackey", but it doesn't contribute to the discourse. It's the equivalent of John Mackey making a poignant and eloquent speech, and a mob of campus radicals shouting him down. One of these sides is trying to actually say something, and the other side is just screaming "shut up" at the top of their lungs.

Refusing to buy products from John Mackey, or from Ben & Jerry, or from the Dixie Chicks because you disagree with their politics is the height of arrogance: "I am so 100% certain that the federal government should be running a health insurance company (or blowing up Iraq, or legalizing oil-drilling in Alaska) that I want you to lose your livelihood for ever expressing an opinion to the contrary".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Juan_de_Fuca_laser_in...
At the moment, none. If we needed one, I have a feeling we would have picked CouchDB...
I'm sorry, maybe my ignorance is showing here, but in the example, aren't they pretty much just describing a cgi?

for example...

example.com/cgi-bin/gettaxes.cgi?state=AZ&longzip=85251&ammount=82521&trans_id=23894

which returns some text?

Am I totally missing the point here?
No. We have a code review process. It wasn't caught in review, and was okayed for deployment by another engineer.
It's perfectly legal, but it's also legal to post racist attacks against Obama's family on the internet as a protest against health care reform. It doesn't make it "acceptable" or "a good thing" just because it's perfectly within our legal and constitutional rights to do so.

Our legal and constitutional rights are wide-ranging enough to allow people to be immoral jackasses without the law ever laying a hand on them. This doesn't mean "it's fine to be a jackass", it just means "it causes more harm than good for the government to outlaw all forms of jackassery".
the reason why many of us charge by the hour is that it requires less negotiation. When is the project 'done'? a flat rate contract requires a lot of work up front to define things that might be better defined after you are most of the way done. Hourly rates make last minute changes simple, and mean that you don't have to argue if it's a last minute change or not.

it also means that the employer bears more of the risk if the work is harder than originally imagined.

(Now, I also agree with your points about why charging a flat rate is better; I'm just pointing out that there are also reasons why charging an hourly rate is better.)
Bug Labs is super cool, but this blog post is pretty vapid.
Where do you get the folding chairs?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Beatrice_Hall

She was a biographer of Voltaire and came up with the quote as an illustration of his beliefs.
I just tried to post this.

Too bad it never went anywhere; it is the best article on this I've seen.
Garagekeepers Legal Liability Insurance | Garage Keepers Insurance and Liability
Where do you drive?

I tend to leave about twice the gap of other vehicles on the motorway, still strictly not the full stopping distance (but having been a motorcyclist I feel I read ahead well). I always find that people invade my stopping/slowing space; then one drops back and another car is in there.

I'm in the UK.
This technology has been around for a long time. It's fundamental to PayPal IPN, their payment notification system.

I also thought it was funny that he said websites constantly monitor the url for POSTs. I imagine a web server in an infinite loop, "Did someone post? Did someone post? Did someone post?"
Well I find it perfectly acceptable to boycott companies with whom I disagree. I think it is a good thing. That you find voting with your walled somehow a bad thing quite frankly confuses me, I do not understand you position.

No buying products is not in any way comparable to posting pictures of Obama's daughters being raped by bears. One is a personal attack, one is just a refusal to financially support.
"only a fool breaks the 3 second rule" (takes roughly 3s to say)
Understanding SoX's Silence Filter
Borrowing bits. Pointless.
Actually, no. But I can see why you would think that. I literally don't know the range of what is reasonable and what is not. Your comment is implicitly informative, though. Furthermore, if I was being boastful, I would probably not be hiding behind an anonymous account.