skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm typing this on a T400 (not mine). Perhaps his screen is a dud? Either that, or my visual standards are lower than I thought.
It's interesting to see the scale at which Microsoft management has to plan for future growth. Being so focused on startups, bootstrapping strategies, etc., the article makes it clear that continuing to grow a company the size of Microsoft, with $20B in profits, is not easy -- especially in the technology industry where things change so quickly.
Why does the number of pages in books vary? Why does the size of paintings vary? Why does the number of bytes in purchased software vary?

And how long is a piece of string, anyway?
I searched, but only found references within comments, not a submission. I thought it was worth a submission of its own.
No legal stuff yet...actually we're not sure how/what the legal stuff entails. If anyone can lend us a helping hand or just point us in the right direction we'd really appreciate it.

Privacy is another feature we'll be implementing soon...good point.
> Attitude is a lot harder to change than skill.

Disagree. _Both_ are hard to change. Don't hire a B expecting that practice and mentoring will make him a prodigy.
Except that you can develop a tolerance for acetaminophen, and that it ends up causing medication overuse headache. Compound analgesics are on par with triptans in this regard, extremely addictive if one is not careful). Taken chronically more than once per week these drugs can induce an addiction. Simple analgesics and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug drugs taken more than twice weekly become addictive too. The brain begs for his meds by giving the patient a headache.

I've seen patients with a daily dose of 40-60g of acetaminophen. In a non-accustomed person, 8g in one take can induce a fulminant hepatitis (lethal in a couple of days unless treated with a graft)...
So what was the tipping point? Celebrities?
Here comes millimeter-wave scanning (http://www.manolith.com/2009/05/18/whole-body-imaging-is-who...)
Right now I'm maintaining the site, but I've had real troubles getting traction. I'm not quite sure how to attract people to do summaries of their own, or at the very least discuss the books.
Good to know...haven't tested it on every system yet but at least now we know
I wouldn't change it at all. I think you were being honest, which is commendable. It's a perfect example of the attitude that permeates top-level schools, employers and social organizations. An attitude most elites won't admit to. Yet we of the penny seats in life face it every day. The honesty, while infuriating, is refreshing. It's not that you were quietly or subtly ignoring those from generic schools, but that you were out and out saying what we know you are thinking "don't bother competing, you can't hang with us".

It's the academic and professional version of the kind of trash talk you might hear at an inner city pick-up basketball game or an 8-mile rap battle. It's starts with why the elite are the best, and what being the best means, and ends with why the non-elites can't be part of this group and what they should do about it. You just had fewer insults about my mother, but the content was the same.

It's a challenge, not much different than the challenges presented by elites to non-elites in every capacity of life.

I suspect that much of what you see in the other article is merely the frustrated result of having to work just as hard as the elite guy for schooling, but then also having to beat, kick and claw their way through even minor interactions because they are being treated like a child just like in the example you provided in the original version of this article. It's a vicious cycle that creates a bad environment for everyone.
Same for me in Sydney.
Buses rarely travel at 30 mph in Manhattan.
thanks...we'll change that second step...seems to be an issue with a lot of users
It did what you expected. But here's the kicker -- the system already had realtime refresh over JMS!
Reddit hit by XSS worm
I completely disagree.

Brilliant people are often hard to work with (they tend to be opinionated, want to do their own thing, etc), but I'd much rather work with someone who's brilliant and hard to work with than someone who follows orders but is just average.

For a start-up in particular, you find yourself relying on your early people's brilliance to make the impossible happen. Normal, easy to handle people rarely produce exceptional stuff.

His biggest weaknesses are in exactly those areas (not the most creative, limited experience) that make him teachable

I couldn't disagree more. You can't teach brilliance. You can teach (or manage) teamwork issues.
So what if he's not going to be a prodigy ? There is very little application level code that requires prodigy level coders.

I've also been a boss, hiring both 'A's and 'B's. The 'B's worked out fine over time, all the 'A's caused more trouble than their skills ever made up for. Maybe I was unlucky, who knows.

Managing programmers has been compared to herding cats, for continuity reasons it is usually a very safe bet to get people on board that are not in the 'artiste' class because your company is a multi-year project and prima donnas have a very bad record when it comes to staying the course.

They also absolutely loathe to maintain their own code.

Unless your project is something one guy can do, is something that you don't plan to maintain long term get a steady performer.
Please don't turn this into reddit, I come here to get away from all those "ASK"s. Go back to Reddit Prog, please.
I haven't spent much time there. How fast do they travel?
Inspired Talks – 10 Simple Ways to Instantly Boost Your Inspiration
cache: http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:http://rpg.brouhaha.us/...
The perfect geek gift for the holidays: Robonica's rolling, reprogrammable robot
> You can teach (or manage) teamwork issues.

That's completely opposite of my experience. My experience is rather limited (2 companies, 10 people in one, 15 in the other) so maybe that is a factor here, but I've never been able to make a loner a team player and I've managed to assist people to improve their skills with great regularity.

Brilliance is not a requirement for every job out there, it may be a help to have it, it may even be a hindrance.
B will support you or you will support A. Choose what you prefer.
People will always figure ways out to harm the guys opressing them. The best way to avoid that is not to give them a reason.

I admid that millimeter-wave scanning is really useful but not in the field of preventing terrorism.
What is Network Side Scripting?
Only hire A if he completely loves what you are building. If he thinks he is "above" your real problems he'll be brilliantly, independently kicking ass at something that you didn't ask him to do and isn't helping you succeed at all. Worst case, they'll actually make it worse, since he might build complicated systems you will have to work around.

Only hire B if they would rather jump off a cliff than come in late on a project or be a missing link. In a startup, finishing is of utmost importance. Also, only hire if he is motivated to learn. Mediocre people who work hard but aren't interested in learning new things are pretty dangerous as well.
Classic brand advertising does this. Oddly enough, search marketing (both pay-per-click and organic) does it, too: we use Google to mediate a lot of the emotional reactions and desires we have, and it's a lot more effective than just remembering someone's commercial jingle:

http://www.infomarketingblog.com/search-engine-marketing-how...
The fact that we could get design so wrong if we just rely on intuition surprises me everytime I re-learn it. The discussion on the cultural challenges and the things can go wrong with A/B testing were fascinating. This is wisdom from people that are battle scarred.
I would have also turned you down (pregnant woman, suddenly paranoid for the safety of my pending sproglet).

However, I would have done so with kind words and a smile - and I would have spent the rest of the day thinking what a nice chap you are. :)

Not that it helps you at all, I guess.
Speaking? Tips.
Hire A, with lots of options and long-term vesting. Successful companies are full of smart weirdos.
It'd be easy to take this post seriously if the author's resume talked about shipping product, as opposed to 2 paragraphs of methodology and certifications and passing mentions to two not-very-good open source ASP.NET projects ("CodeCampServer", featured in his bio, is hosted at Google Code).
Will the Manhattan Project Always Exist?
A crusade between programmers is just inevitable. But what the author rightly pointed out is,what we must do first is ask ourselves "Is it worth the fight/time/brain cells/what have you?". In some places yes it is. Like for example, if you are making a term project and you have a team of four. Now to fight the IDE vs Text editor/bash is pointless because nomatter what you use, the point is to contribute. But to fight the this programming language V/S that programming language is totally necessary coz if you wanna make your project better is good to discuss three or four options.
The McFarthest Place: 145 Mi to the Nearest Big Mac
Circulation numbers without returns are meaningless anyway, especially if the item is sold exclusively through news stands.
Regular Techcrunch shoutouts and the API
The reasoning goes wrong when the parades become less about a bunch of sincere people campaigning for their rights, and becomes more a grotesque parody of what that group looks like in the public eye.

I go to a school where there are more gay people than straight people, so I know straight-up how awesome gay people are. I also live in a very conservative town, and I know that a lot of homophobia stems from people not knowing gay people. The more you know, the more you realize they're just like us.

So when you're somebody who knows nothing about gay people or gay rights, the right way to get attention is to have more casual protests. Get a large block of people that look normal to peacefully march through a city, looking like everyday citizens. You do not want people in tight leather humping 30-foot-tall dildos, because then they look like freaks and people will lose sympathy for them.

My irritations during this argument with this kid were furthered when he claimed that the dildo-humping was essential because gay people are over-the-top like that. I mean, if you're going to protest against unfair depictions of you, don't perpetuate the stereotypes yourself.
How to Save $1 Trillion a Year with Open Source
I wouldn't go with anyone who spammed their link across the web.

That aside, the standard of mark-up on their own site is not great (div bloat/divs instead of list to mark-up navigation; strong in h1 instead of custom styles through stylesheet; <span>s instead of <p>s; forced line breaks where css would again be better).
Deploying a replicated database into a cloud environment
I tend to agree, though my feelings fall more on getting student buy-in. Without some real outcome that matters (a grade, or something similar) what's to insure a reliable sample. Assuming things haven't changed since I was in high school, I'm pretty sure we'd have gone out of our way to skew the test purposely with outrageously wrong answers...
"The best way to avoid that is not to give them a reason."

I agree in principle, but realistically, I doubt it is possible to satisfy everybody's wishes. Also, how to deal with the people who are already "fanaticised"? I guess one problem is that terrorism is also a system - the organizations behind it tend to have a system for growing, that will take on a life of it's own. It's not just disgruntled people looking for terror organizations to join, it is also terror organizations making people join.
Could we decide of a meeting point in paris ?
Amazing. A reddit commenter (pica, for those who were there from the beginning) once suggested doing exactly this as a way to mess with the TSA. He also suggested forcing the TSA to do racial profiling; if a shoe-bomber means everyone with shoes is a suspect, what does an Afro-bomber mean?
Also, it may be harder to "tough it out" versus modern repression toys.
Two things that I found which make it easier to get paid are working on site at an hourly wage and sending your bills out weekly. Everybody gets to see how hard you are working this way and there isn't any question about value. Also, there is the added benefit of you gaining a deeper understanding of your clients business instead of seeing only a small part of it.

Sending your bills out more often will stop clients from getting sticker shock. Remote jobs I've done where I sent one bill at the end of three or four weeks when the work was done were the hardest for me to get paid on, even from people that I had success at getting paid by previously.
Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
Oh god. When will it end?
I liked it. Another good one:

http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2006/10/26/a_beginners_gu...

The only thing that jumped out at me about Jacques guide was the insurance section. In the US, plan on acquiring liability insurance, and plan on that process annoying the shit out of you. If you work for clients of any real size, it will inevitably be a requirement at some point. You don't want to be scrambling for it at the last minute.

Also, I disagree with the recommendation of lowballing your prices to start. The cardinal rule of selling things to businesses: they're not spending their own money. Pricing is more about sending signals in corp-corp transactions than it is about utility or pain or emotions. When you come in at 60% of the prevailing rate, you're sending a dubious signal.

"Gift to HN" was very smart marketing, jacques.
Electronics for Dummies is surprisingly good and has lots of hands-on stuff. It also has a great section on microcontrollers.
That is exactly one of my main problems. The biggest disadvantage in Africa is that rich countries subsidise their agriculture production. Agriculture is one of the few areas where Africa can be competitive.

But what happens now is that African countries compete against subsidised goods in European and American markets. And what makes a bad situation worse is that because of the subsidies Western countries overproduce and dump produce below cost on African countries (destroying their farmers).

I remember a year where our neighbour (who had a dairy farm) started giving away milk for free (mainly because of dumping of European milk products which led to a collapse in price).
This article is just an extended ad for something called a 'web application firewall'.
Don't get me wrong, i love mono and vala and use them both regularly. But vala doesn't have stack protection, etc which is quite useful for certain situations.
It kind of depends on the stage. If it's you and A and you're creating the first version of something awesome, he can be good to have. If you're at a later stage of product maturity and you can use less-skilled people in simple ways to create something complex a la emergence, then this might be a good candidate.

I personally wouldn't hire either one.
I wrote a better article about the Espresso Book Machine about five months ago. It has quite a few more details for those who are interested.

http://inkweaver-review.blogspot.com/2009/05/espresso-book-m...
I wonder if there are really ways to know this much about the candidates before you hire them. Aside from knowing or working with them personally.
OpenSSL is the part of the stack least likely to have an exploit.

Additionally, most interesting attacks on OpenSSL aren't done to root the system, but to subvert the level of authentication/privacy afforded by TLS.
Seven famous founders share money mistakes, smart moves
Jeez people, if your thoughts are as bad as depicted here, see doctor and get some paxil, seriously. Otherwise just open your mouth and say anything, nothing bad will happen if a stranger isn't a chatty mood.
I would pass on them both. As desperate as you may be, you need to not give into it. If you hire either of these people, I suspect you will end up with a few weeks of comfort before desperation sets in again, and now with an employee you don't want. This is a harder position than you are in now.

So a little reasoning why I am put off by both:

Candidate A has a huge ego. He knows enough about what he is good at to think that he knows enough to be good at everything. Whenever he finds he is mistaken, it will likely be very expensive to you, because he's more likely to go off into the weeds for months than ask someone else for the knowledge he is missing. You may get something brilliant on the other end, but the odds aren't wonderful that it solves the problem you have -- just the problem he thinks you have. Whatever impeccable domain knowledge he does have won't rub off of anyone else, because he's never talking to anyone else. You also run the risk of him becoming extremely bored and leaving. This sounds like a bad deal.

Candidate B is everything candidate A is not, both good and bad; candidate B sounds like a doormat, but a friendly and gregarious one. He sounds like the typical career programmer: learns what they need to know to stay hired, but not much else; does what they need to do to stay hired, but not much else; and makes sure people would feel like they are firing a friend if they ever need to fire him. If all you need is someone to bang out acceptable code according to someone else's specification, and otherwise shut up and keep ideas outside of his specific title to himself (or just not have those ideas, since they're not his business anyway), this might be your guy. However, if you want someone who will be thinking and throwing around ideas outside of his specific set of duties, this candidate may be a drag on the team.

One thing you didn't clarify in your definition of B: when he gives his input, does it contribute anything useful to the discussion?

But yeah, neither sound wonderful. But which concerns are a bigger deal depends on what role the person will fill. It's probable that one or the other will look more attractive once you start thinking more specifically to the position being hired for, and less about the generic cookie cutter programming position.
Intense tracking for swine flu shot's side effects
Find what's blocking sales with under a day of work
Mr. Sivers makes two statements:

* A marketing mechanism can have very poor, even zero, results.

* There exists a marketing mechanism for bands (giving away product) which is effective in promoting the brand.

It's not clear how stating that a particular marketing mechanism works, but that marketing mechanisms in general can have low to zero returns, are contradictory concepts.
Baron Schwarz: How to stay sane while working from home
If you have the time to wait and find the right person I wouldn't hire either. Part of working as a team is that each is able to contribute and improve the others. From your brief descriptions B is too unskilled and will slow down the others on the team and A may get his work completed but Isn't improving the rest of the team in any way.
The big question is: does B have a thirst for learning and improving himself? I have seen a lot of type B people in a big corporate environment. They make good corporate team players and good friends. They put their head down and do whatever they're commanded to do, but they don't try to stretch themselves. They stick to whatever has been beaten into them and don't question anything. They don't learn anything new until it is mandatory. In short, they are a perfect fit for where they are. If you're hiring for a big corporation, this is a no-brainer.

But don't assume that since he is happy and loyal that he is teachable. On the other hand, if all he lacks is experience, then there's a chance he might be good long-term.
Liars, Thieves & Virtualization Statisticians
I've been looking for a natural language translation library for Python lately. And here it comes, Peteris Krumins writes one, thanks Peteris!
Expecting to Fail
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=840542
OpenSSL is the part of the stack least likely to have an exploit.

I've had to write or be involved in writing 7 FreeBSD security advisories related to OpenSSL in the past six years. History indicates that OpenSSL is the most likely part of the stack to have a vulnerability.
Helpful Tools for Software Developers
Mac and Windows - a healthcare parable
Ouch... One thing I took from this post is that I came to the realization that I might be an A. It describes me pretty well except that I won't "ignore any decisions that were made." (If a decision is that bad, I will at least say so and let them see it through as a learning experience.)

Still, I don't think I'm an a-hole. I really do get along with everybody, and try to add value and contribute to any place that I work. I just don't think that there are previous employers out there cursing me out because I was too much trouble.

Are you sure that A == a-hole? (This is probably going to bother me all day)
I do the same thing on that site all the time: copy all text and read it in the text editor.

I hope that someone from InfoQ is reading HN - can you please rethink the design of the site? You have great content, but usability could use some serious improvement...
You didn't mention if A documents.

If A does excellent documentation, give him your toughest nut to crack as the whole team can learn and progress from his contribution even after he is gone.

Otherwise, go for B.

The worst can happen is to hire A, and when he leaves, B has to maintain A's code with no documentation.
Potential SVN Security Risk
Boost Your Inspiration
Be careful with used CRTs. Always check it out before you buy. Even good ones get dimmer with age, cheap ones can get so dim you can't even read standard white on black emacs or command line text. Otherwise, I agree, decent used CRTs still have a better image than even pretty expensive LCDs.
Eel reveals its migration secrets
Of course, you also have to take into account the cost of the bus, whether you have a bus pass/travelcard, proximity of stops at either end to required start point and destination, and whether or not you can stop on the way (if you're walking) and get a Starbucks.

For all these reasons, plus the usual carbon footprint and travelcard, I don't take the bus anywhere unless it's more than an hour's walk. (Before I moved to Edinburgh I hated, hated hated hated, walking. Selling one's car does fantastic things to the mindset.)

Still. It's a pretty graph!
Okay, so if I understand you correctly, freedom of speech is violated by censorship, but censorship doesn't always violate freedom of speech.

Guess my interpretation for the word always was wrong. I figured censorship meant the act of limiting freedom of speech; you seem to define censorship as any act of filtering.

Would you classify Google's filtering of web content as censorship ? If not, how is that different from Apple filtering AppStore applications ?
Agree.

BTW, have you looked at squeak smalltalk? (http://www.squeak.org/)
This is really reassuring. Without being particularly anti-vaccine overall, I have some reservations about what is essentially a 1.0 product—and with the mechanism of the shot being essentially a weak version of a disease that we admit is different but we don't fully understand how, putting out 150 million doses seems particularly risky.

Which is certainly not a reason to halt the vaccination program entirely, but I'm glad that alongside the big push to vaccinate they're planning to tightly track the side effects. If you don't have time for a beta test, at least have a rapid development cycle! :)
I think you need a difficulty rating, the words were too easy for me so I got bored, i might play on a harder mode.