skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I personally think more as Steinbeck in "The Grapes of Wrath". The people in the organization are not evil, it is the organization itself which forces them to play certain roles to serve the group and the machine they have built.

Steinbeck portrayed the bank as a great machine in which each person working for it played a small role that they didn't necessarily like to play. Agents were forced to evict people from their land because they were not able to pay their mortgage, yet that was not something that they really wanted to do. It was something they had to do because of the corporation they were a part of.

No individual person in the corporation is evil (generally). However the corporation is bigger than each individual member.

So calling a corporation evil does not mean branding each individual person. Rather it means that you recognize that the corporation as a greater force causes evil things.

In that respect I don't see it as unrealistic to say then that the corporation can be evil.
Greg Swartz, director of innovation at the golf company Ping, says he has come up with 36 ideas for better tees and loftier drives by looking at the stars

Isn't that everyone's dream job? Director of innovation... looking at the stars... love it.
That is a good point. However, trade doesn't have to mean abuse of third world countries.
Any idea if there are patents pending on any of this IP? I would see that if the patent was applied for before the paper is published, the paper would not be considered prior art and would not invalidate the claims.

As for licensing, Microsoft owns the said IP and can re-license it on a whim.

Not all of Microsoft is evil, but they, as a company, cannot be trusted to behave in a civilized manner.
I question the notion of work week. In fact I seriously doubt the whole "work/life" separation -- it just feels like a false dichotomy. Sure there are tasks that are best done "at work" and other best done "at home". But I frequently sit in my office thinking about hobby projects, and think about work stuff when watching movies or tv. Further, I try to tie hobby stuff and work stuff together.

From a different angle: I spend more time with my office mate than I do with my girlfreind. I eat as many meals with the group admin assistant as I eat w/ her. It seems that writing this off as "just work" is dismissing a huge portion of my life.

I understand that I am lucky in that I love my work -- but still, instead of measuring things like work week, why not have articles and posts and what not devoted to "how to better integrate and avoid the redundancies".
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates: Keeping America Great (1 hour CNBC Town Hall)
Not a bad idea... If the side would give you a badge to embed on your web site, that says "key influencer", it could spread.

Actually, a bunch of sites do this for twitter specifically, but extending it with a bunch of categories, so that it would show that I'm famous in the bay area, less so in the midwest, and popular among geeks. That could be fun. (must have been done before though?)
Agreed with all of this. You need to figure out how this is useful before 100,000 businesses sign up (which may never happen).

Plus that value proposition: "Prospect Vista helps you connect in the marketplace" - what does that even mean?

Finally, have you actually spent the money to trademark "Go Commercial"? If not, don't use the tm sign.

Honestly, I think you're in way over your head.
Hunter Becomes the Prey - shopping is broken
"The company was worth about $5 billion in 2000, just before Jobs unleashed Apple's groundbreaking "digital lifestyle" strategy, understood at the time by few critics. Today, at about $170 billion, Apple is slightly more valuable than Google"

The author probably forgot to consider that google was a 2 year old startup in 2000. The kudos really should go to google.
Totally agree that she was not right for the job, but the process was a bit nightmare-ish :

“That’s all. Good luck with your job search.” The phone clicked-- I was stunned.

In my previous job I conducted a lot of interviews of an analytical style. Some people bombed so badly that is was clear well before the end that they wouldn't make the next round. In those cases, I used the remaining time to either talk to them about the career hopes/goals, or to explain how they could have better approached the problem (these skills are partly learnt..) to help prepare them for their next interview. The way I saw it was that they were expecting 30 mins of my time, so they would get it, even if they weren't up to the job. It a courtesy, and it's also self interest - burnt interviewees make a lot of noise on campus.

When I was 'senior' I never applied to McKinsey, because I'd heard so many horror stories about their interviews - I just didn't want to go anywhere near them. I landed a job with one of their main competitors and spent 5 happy years there...
How to do market analysis on twitter in 5 minutes
For an associate product manager position, it only gets harder.

I quite enjoyed the back of the envelope calculations during the early calls, as well as talking about interesting products I had encountered recently.

It got quite interesting on-site. I really enjoyed the first couple of days of interviews, which focused on design ("design a shopping mall"). The last day was still fun, but less enjoyable, as it involved coding on a whiteboard, estimating the computational complexity, and then improving its efficiency. Then I was asked to spec out the requirements for adding unit tests to a programming language.

I felt the interviews were fair and well-balanced, the main sticking point for me was the emphasis on GPA and academic history.
How many phone interviews did you do that only <= 5 passed?
This wasn't an interview, it was a test. I had a similar experience with a startup. I was interviewing for a Marketing Communications Manager position. Essentially PR.

One of the unofficial interviewers (at 24 year old MIT engineer working as an email marketer) challenged me with the question "How many barbers are in San Francisco?" We proceeded to map it out the analytical process on the whiteboard. He wanted to see formulas to understand how I would arrive at the answer.

It was a stupid, impossible question. In a similar way to this girl's experience, he jabbed repeatedly critiquing my logic.

He wrote me later to explain that he posed the same question to his girlfriend, an MIT engineer herself, and she couldn't come up with an answer. Neither could he.

They offered me the job and I declined solely based on this guy and his misguided, silly behavior. I would have hated to work with him.

When a company misguidedly challenges potential employees in this way it hurts the quality of its hires. Sure, Google can afford to be picky but does it really need an engineer in a Product Marketing role? Perhaps for dev-facing apps but such an interview process is overall misguided and immature.
Yep, contracting for a company that has been using HTTP-Bind in Ejabberd for almost 2 years now.

The previous version of the product used JSJaC, which was garbage (I can go into details if you want, but its involved).

The product currently uses Strophe and we have a chat UI built with that. We just proxy a domain path through to port 5280 on the ejabberd server and it works like a champ.

Http-bind has been working better this year. Last year when Firefox 3 was released, it was doing something weird with the XML it generated that crashed the http-bind processes occasionally. I believe ProcessOne fixed that in one of the releases last summer.
The article is in fact wrong. See my comment above....
Months-old blog drama.
You're right and my argument is that most of the time it does not - certainly not to the extent of what this video would have you believe anyway. I'll even provide as much evidence for my argument as the video does for her argument by saying "I've researched it and it's true" ;^).
Two German Killers Demanding Anonymity Sue Wikipedia’s Parent
Meh, I actually prefer this. Sometimes I accidentally "leak" my real number because I unintentionally kill all my Android apps, disabling the 'use Google Voice for every call' feature. If the other person is using GV, my number won't be leaked in this case.

Seems like Google should make this a checkbox that's off by default, however.
It probably just indicates that they have not pointed it at Slashdot comments as a training set yet.
Announcing the Official jQuery Podcast - first guest John Resig
Turning an internet startup into a $170 billion company in 9 years is a rare feat. Turning a $5 billion, 25 year old computer company into a $170 billion company in 9 years is far rarer.
But of course, this is exactly what Google Analytics is.
A New Perl.org (Redesigned)
Some parts of marketing are about judging the bang for your buck and allocating finite resources among the various options. It sounds like that's what they wanted.
That is what I thought. Do you think that Chrome OS will help to improve the availability of drivers for other GNU/Linux systems?
Windows 7 borrowed 'look' of Mac
Seesmic future team interview
Those were questions for an engineering position right? Not a a product manager position?
I don't know. I can only tell you that I plan to use Debian.
Jeffrey Zeldman on The Setup
I can't stand talking to people from companies like Google, they're always so smug and judgmental like that.

Part of my decision to drop out of the job market and focus full-time on my company (to pretty reasonable success this year) is because I like being paid based on a judgement of my work/products, rather than some half-assed assessment of me as a person made in an interview.
Ask HN for data points for my startup: How do you choose a restaurant?
The problem with tiny houses would seem to be resale value. I personally don't want a large house necessarily, but I want a really nice one. I want top of the line counters, ceramic floors, top-notch appliances, etc. It's not so much that I want more stuff, in fact I probably want less. It's more than I want nicer stuff. I think that's not uncommon. (It's also why if I had an infinite bankroll, my next startup would make a luxury version of the Corolla, but I digress.)

The problem is that if I put all that stuff into some tiny house, I'm stuck with it pretty much forever. Nobody else who can afford that stuff wants a 65 square ft house, or at least so few that I have no hope of getting a fair market value. It seems unlikely that will change, especially since by the time you can sanely afford these things you're probably near having a family.

One extremely way in which people value homes is $/sq.ft. Compare a 65 sq ft home to a 4,000 sq ft one, both with top of the line everything, and you're probably left with a market value about equal to what your dishwasher cost.

If I buy a 4,000 sq ft home and load it up I'll be able to sell it 10 years from now. Barring the very rare bubble bursting (like we're experiencing now) I'll probably be able to sell it for more than I paid for it. If I buy a 65 sq ft home and load it up, I'll be out a bundle.

So if money is not a constraint and you just want a smaller home, I think you have to find the happy median. Get a fully loaded 1,500 sq ft house and hell, just leave half of the rooms empty. There's certainly some size below which you're hemorrhaging money on the deal, and I imagine it's at least 1,500 sq ft here in Middle America.

If you have so much money that you don't care about resale value and you do care quite a bit about the environment this is probably fine. If you want laminate counters, vinyl floors, and cheap appliances, this solution might also be fine too. But for a large segment of the market this is unfortunately financially untenable, no matter how appealing.
Wow, people here seem really upset about this. I personally think it's great. Disabling cookies in my browser is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In addition to not being tracked by ads, I can't manage my bank account online or log into Hacker News. Not fair. This law makes it a requirement for me to be able to opt out of ad tracking, but still be able to log into websites ("essential purposes").

This should not impact ad revenue either; the content site simply says "by proceeding past this page, you consent to being tracked across the entire Internet by our advertisers and anyone they feel like selling your browsing habits to". Then the user can choose between privacy and your content. Most will choose the content, judging from grocery store "preferred customer" programs, and so on.

It's important that regular users be able to easily opt out of cross-site tracking like Google Analytics; as many people would be outraged by the data it collects, if only they knew such a thing was possible. Now they know, because you have to tell them what you're doing. I think that's a good thing.
Why Steve Jobs is different from most other CEOs
A certain kind of kudo does indeed go to Google. I don't take the article as claiming that the accomplishments of Google the company are somehow less impressive than the accomplishments of Apple the company. Instead, the article is about how Steve Jobs has had four major successes as a CEO.

That is extremely, extremely rare. Google's founders are still young and much may happen between now and when they retire. But for the moment, the breathless prose lauding Mr. Jobs is quite nearly justified.
Googlers are not that bad at ending interviews either. I think this was just one perticular person (Anna) thing.
A major problem with this idea is that Neanderthals were limited to Europe and the Middle East. That makes them a very unlikely candidate for a predator to reshape the evolutionary psyche of all humanity.
I imagine the founders of Readbeacon (http://www.redbeacon.com/) will be happy to read this post.

The first challenge I can think of for someone creating a service like this is spam. If I put out a request for patio furniture, how does your service prevent all sorts of other vendors from replying to my request and trying to sell me something other than patio furniture?
1. Sigmund Freud lectured in the US in 1909, when Bernays was a teenager.

2. Planned obsolence: I see 40-year old cars and pickup trucks here and there. On the one hand, a lot of cars could be run longer before replacement. On the other hand, an older car is vastly less safe, without airbags or crumple zones, and the older car (ignoring manufacturing costs) pollutes more. And how many on HN work on old computers? America was settled during a period when technology rapidly advanced and obsolescence did not have to be planned.
I interviewed with Google a year ago and was pretty disappointed. One interviewer was a no-show, another was over half an hour late.

I know Google is a big company and all (sampling space fail) but that really turned me off.
Not to be unfair, but the post is rather bare. (Ignore the rhyming, thanks!) It's also incredibly Windows centric, and does nothing to explain what PEAR can do for your projects.

MDB2 is a neat database wrapper you can use from PEAR, but there's also BBCodeParser and a number of other great modules that could be useful for your projects.

Some people hate PEAR for its lack of docs, coding standards, etc. I'm a little biased: I like it, I use it, and I test what I use before I go live with it just to make sure. Sure the docs are often sparse or riddled with inconsistencies but at least they exist.
I think Redis is one of the easier NoSQL databases to pickup, because it's easy to install and is mainly just a key-value database with some bonus features. Your entire DB is stored in memory and persistence is done by asynchronous writes to disk, so it is possible that you could lose data if something were to reboot for instance, but it also means that it's really fast.

Simple twitter clone with Redis: http://code.google.com/p/redis/wiki/TwitterAlikeExample
wow...thanks!
How I Ruined Twitter for Myself and Then Fixed it Again
Excuse me "query the world" what exactly does that mean? They need to describe it so that it is instantly compelling and they fail.
Pretty Pictures: Ray tracing in Lisp
Which PDF?

The URL I followed brought me to a interesting blog post with good but speculative discussion about the perspective of 'hackers' vs 'greenies' on mass consumption.

Did you really flag this link because somewhere within it there is a link to a PDF that includes unreliable sources? That's a pretty tough standard! :)
Ask HN: Open Source apps with lots of database tables?
I hear a lot about developers working on big enterprise applications with 150 database tables. None of the projects I've worked on have required more than 20-30 and their relationships are usually pretty simple.

Are there any open source applications out there with big data models? I've seen MediaWiki's database schema (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Mediawiki-database-schema.png), are there larger ones out there that would be worthwhile to study?
I'm not sure about the concept of a 'work week' either, but it's plain to me that the dichotomy of work vs life is a useful one.

Anyone who has ever worked from home is probably aware of how much less productive they are without creating clear work/home boundaries even when working from inside the physical home.

For instance it's difficult to accomplish much with children barging in demanding spaghetti-o's every 3 minutes, or with the surround sound system blaring some movie with copious cannon fire from the next room.

Without creating that arbitrary boundary between work and 'real life' much less work gets accomplished and 'real life' becomes another burden to bear.
Correct. I'm here age, and for those of us who have to reteach themselves all sorts of math for a variety of reasons, BAck of the envelop questions are frightening under pressure. First thing you should do is take off the pressure and see if you can be collaborative with the person.b People tend to panic very easily.
'
“Say an advertiser makes $0.10 every time someone clicks on their ad. Only 20% of people who visit the site click on their ad. How many people need to visit the site for the advertiser to make $20?” I froze. The problem sounded easy but I didn’t want to cause an awkward silence trying to solve it.
'

The problem only sounded easy? Isn't this what you learn in 3rd grade? When you can't do this stuff you shouldn't be allowed near numbers.
Step 1: Scoop everything out of your pocket into a dish or tray.

Step 2: Let the dish or tray go through the scanner.

Step 3: Scoop everything back into your pocket.

I don't understand the difficulty here.
I drive a 26 year old car and my home computer is a six year old Macintosh.
The easiest way would be to require a small payment to submit a "bid". Non-serious sellers won't pay.
CSP is not a good way of doing that.

Someone should tell Ericsson!

...plan9...

Well... I don't know, I'd consider a language started around the mid nineties pretty early in it's life-cycle. But it's pretty clear to me that which it may be a 'continuation' it's definitely not just 'rebranded'. This is a new project and there's tons of talk all over the place about how "we're working on that". The garbage collector isn't even done yet!
Thanks again for the great feedback.

You make a lot of excellent points too. Ok, what about the new app from 37Signals, Haystack? Design issues on my site aside, Haystack lets a (specific type of) business advertise for free with 1-6 images of their portfolio, and a link to their site. Thats $99 a month. I would assume you would like Haystack better because of its minimal design and focus on the company.

Looks like its back to the drawing board, but I do honestly appreciate your feedback.
Bernard Madoff's Coconspirators arrested by FBI would have been a better title.

First, it captures that more than one person was arrested. Second, it wasn't programming that was the crime. It was creating the system for concealing the Ponzi scheme and then being paid to lie to the authorities to keep it concealed that earned them the attention of the FBI.
One good solution would be to an vendors who don't follow the rules.
I find myself wondering: How exactly would you go about doing the ethical thing in a situation where you realize your work is such that you're being offered hush money to stay quiet about it?

I don't mean "how" in terms of "how do I know the right thing to do", more a question of what, exactly, is the best way to do the ethical thing without getting burned.

Is it better to take the hush money and pretend to be satisfied, then whistle-blow to the FBI once your corrupt boss thinks you're happy? What kind of evidence would you need in order to convince an FBI agent, in a phone conversation, that you are calling in a real crime and not just a prank? If your law-enforcement contact asks you to wear a wire to work and have a leading conversation with your boss, should you do it? What kind of corporate espionage do you perform to make sure a corrupt business does not shred or cover up evidence?

Maybe I've been seeing too many spy movies recently, but I find myself fascinated by questions like that.

There's lots of hacker literature about what to do when you're an employee in the middle of an unsuccessful company, and some about what to do when you are attempting to catch a cracker or other computer saboteur on your network, but I don't think I've ever seen a story or essay on the subject of what to do when your company is not merely clueless but literally criminal.
"big enterprise applications with 150 database tables"

Did you drop a zero or two? I hit 250-ish once on a relatively minor project by enterprise standards. (Built a small business on this table, so it wasn't a dinky thing either.) If you're normalizing anything like correctly, the table count grows fast. (Not to mention things like what I call "enumeration tables" that exist solely to provide foreign key checking on another table and make it so you don't have the same string showing up a bajillion times, instead just having a tinyint or smaller.)
I'm her age. This is essentially a case question straight out of a consulting book. I'm out of practice for it. Way out of practice. Meanwhile, I'm scared stiff of applying for jobs because my entire class has gone crazy about how to behave, what to say, what is the right answer to questions like this. I know I'm not perfect already. I know I have work to do to get better. and the bAck of the evenvelop question is one of my weak points. And I know it.

First thing I discovered though from helping other people on other sorts of collaborative projects on the web:

Get paper for this stuff if you are out of practice, and ask to wait for an aswer while you write it down, and if you forget something, as to repeat. Always good to write somehting down- shows you are listening. She didn't.

Be a little more wild with your answer. Not over the top. But just a little. I got that last night from someone at McKinsey. Was talkign to a class of mine about the history of business. Someone asked. Don't be too much though.

And reach out about your humanness. Not everyone is perfect. If your weak point is Back of the envelope stuff, then it is your weak point.

Speaking of which, since I am taking my time (becuase I can't freak out any more, I just can't) How do I brush up on those questions? And that way of thinking. I'm good on the creative side with large data sets and how to sort out problems, but not on the calculations side...which sucks.
The numbers of people killed by governments dwarfs the number killed by corporations.
A workplace you will never leave
Google Chrome OS to be ready to be released next week
I totally agree. A company gains nothing by being dismissive. I've interviewed at about 20 companies in the last 10 years, not to mention VC / Angel pitches. Only Google left a foul taste in my mouth. As a CS guy I've had dozens of analytical interviews and have largely done well with them. But the guy who interviewed me from Google acted as if he was doing me a favor. He was curt from the first moment and would sigh and groan if I asked for more specifics on a question. He too basically hung up on me.