skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember staring at the computer screen--light green letters on dark--then at the clock, and finally at my outstretched fingers held a foot in front of my face. And then it dawned on me: selling the hours of my life was no different from selling my fingers one by one. We've only so many hours, so many fingers; when they're gone, they're gone for good. - Derrick Jensen
What difference does it make? People are used to weird errors, so it doesn't scare away "normal people" anymore than a fail whale would. People trying to break the code are not aided much by one filename and line number, either.

It's annoying to look at, and I wouldn't do it... but it doesn't really matter.
Your Botnet is My Botnet: Analysis of a Botnet Takeover [pdf]
According to a Mashable article in March '09: "The latest numbers from Nielsen Online indicate that Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month."

I'm not sure how much you can interfere with that kind of growth. My point is that people seem to talk easily about monetizing all those users, but nobody seems to be able to give specifics on how to do it.
>Bush's IQ score is estimated to be above 120, which suggests an intelligence in the top 10 per cent of the population. But this, surely, does not tell the whole story

Is there any evidence that his score is really 120?
Despite the literal intepretation, you might be mistaken in assuming that "critical literary analysis" is the same as "reading literature and analyzing it".

Instead, I think the phrase is being used here as a term of the art, referring to something closer to "postmodern critical theory".

There are definitely those who wonder if this is useful. I too would be interested in hearing a defense.
The Emerging Twitter List Arms Race by Mark Drapeau
Not that I know much about psychology, but like Buddha said Change is the only constant in life. Even as children, exploration is at the root of all our instincts. Tell a child not to touch something or go near it, and he/she definitely will. As we get older, generally most people lose this exploration aspect of their daily lives in the face of jobs and careers. But the joy of exploration is always there and it always comes out when you learn something new or visit a new place, etc.
An Angel Goes Pro: Reid Hoffman Now Officially A Venture Capitalist At Greylock
Illegal downloaders 'spend the most on music', says poll
There are also plenty of very useful things that I learned in my degree that I never would have been interested enough to learn on my own. Subjects like project management, requirements gathering, and other sorts of non-coding topics are extremely handy to have experience and education with, but not "sexy" enough for (most) people to really learn about them in their free time.
Well, I did start my narrative by saying I was told this story 20 years ago. I was told this by the researcher that was part of the experiment. I had no reason to doubt his words.
I use a hybrid, depending on where I'm working. Sometimes I use Gmail Tasks, for high level "don't want to forget about this thing.." tasks. At home I generally use paper / pen. At work I use notepad.
Innovation from thin air & four little questions
Here here. I underestimated how much time is worth. Spent my free time hacking things to get it just right because I didn't have the money. Now I have more disposable cash and not enough time.

This is why iTunes Store makes money even though cheaper alternatives are around. I could spend the time and download it from some website or I could spend 2 minutes and get it from Apple.
You need to speak about this some more with your therapist, or with a different therapist if you want a second opinion. You should do so right away. Pick up the phone! That is what these counselors are there for.

The rest of us can't help very much. This is the Internet. It's really good for reciting facts, but the facts of the matter have little or nothing to do with your fear. Fear isn't a thing you can necessarily explain away, as you probably know better than anyone. For example, you already know, consciously, that diseases like CJD are incredibly rare, which is to say: You do not have classic CJD, and you're not going to get it. [1] And yet here you are.

You need to learn, with the help of coaches, how to recognize your fear and adopt practical strategies for dealing with it when it arises. You might also derive great benefit from certain medications. If your fear is endangering your happiness or your life it is a serious problem, but it is a problem for a psychiatrist or a psychologist, not for hackers on a message board.

---

[1] Yeah, I could be wrong. But it is more likely that I will die in an auto accident within the next week than that I am wrong. [2]

[2] 1.2 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811207.PDF), assume 300 miles traveled per week => my chance of death each week is 3.2 in 1 million. According to the CDC "The risk of CJD increases with age, and in persons aged over 50 years of age, the annual rate is approximately 3.4 cases per million." (http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/cjd/index.htm)
Cartographer - Thematic mapping library for Google Maps
Beautiful website. Nice implementation.

Using the Justin.tv API you could actually give an option to have the parent talk to his/her kid live as well.

Imagine a mom who just went on a business trip to Tokyo. Maybe she could tell the story to her kid live, while they and even flip the pages for the kid.
Most people's jobs aren't to do work, it's to keep their chair warm. That requires 8 hours a day of work.
One of demos - Map of 10,000 random Twitter users
http://cartographer.visualmotive.com/twitter.html
yeah, this is right. you don't need any college if you just want to be a programmer, but if you want to cool stuff that provably optimal, you need a degree for that. the theoretical foundation for anything (and especially CS) is wondeful and interesting and immeasurably valuable, but completely unnecessary for a vocational coder. if you want to be more than a vocational coder, college, and even masters and phd are absolutely worth doing.
Chumby seems like the obvious candidate.
knowledge, definitely close to 20% but capacity, depth of understanding, abstraction, 80%.
So long as you can fit into the economic order without stealing or vandalizing or otherwise being a nuisance, you are not a "mooch" in my book.

I think that any viable theory of "dropping out" will take market forces into account. I find that this article does some of that, though it seems to me that it doesn't go far enough. (In particular, he notes that trying to do what you love resulting in doing what you no longer love. Market forces can explain this one quite handily!)
Good point though the site is really not meant to replace mom/dad but rather give an option to connect to important kids in their lives if they can't be there in person. Ex., soldiers stationed overseas, grandparents who live far away, etc..
Odd that he watches fictional TV shows.

Anyway, I think many "geeks" forget that you can read fiction for more than just the stories. The writing is usually more expressive, and reading that helps you become a better writer. That's why I read fiction, anyway. (OK, I like a good story, too.)
Coolest College Courses
Equivalence relations are non-directed. There is no formal sense in which one or the other can be said to be backwards.

It's only personal preference that leads you to say that, and in this case, for the reasons cited above, it is deeply suboptimal personal preference.

This is a case of Diax's Rake at work.
Why a -1?! Are x86's faster at that?
Best Collection of Free Jquery form Elements.
I was thinking Jackanory style "programs" where authors read their own book or a voice actor reads. Indeed you could probably by rights for audio from the BBC, etc., or from Barefoot Books, say, and match up with the book. Very easy to establish a large catalogue of books then.

Another extension might be to offer a copy of the book with an audio-CD/mp3 of the person reading bundled with it.

I think there are so many variations possible (particularly in education sector) and that this idea will be in demand from children's publishers (licensing?) that you should do well with it.
To paraphrase Eliezer(1), The design space of minds-in-general(2) is so freakin' huge that it's misleading to use human minds as analogies; in doing so you immediately fall victim to the detached lever fallacy(3).

(1) http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Eliezer

(2)http://lesswrong.com/lw/rm/the_design_space_of_mindsingenera...

(3) http://lesswrong.com/lw/sp/detached_lever_fallacy/
Summary: The phone will be a hit because all the other phones on the Verizon network suck, and because Verizon doesn't offer the iPhone.
The most important question you should ask yourself at the end of each interview is "Do I want this person on my team?" If you're not sure, the answer is no.

Aside from that, be wary of anyone who spends too much time talking up their accomplishments - I've often found that candidates who talk a lot falter when asked practical questions.

Also, make sure you leave time for the candidate to ask you questions. That portion of the interview can really reveal to both parties whether they would be a good fit.
Potential to make money is not making money, particularly without any idea of how to turn the former into the latter.
I enjoy cooking, but I'm single, and I don't like to cook for myself. I go out often, but I don't like fancy dining experiences. I find people putting a napkin on my lap uncomfortable, and don't like worrying about using the wrong fork.

That's too bad, because very few fine dining places are about that stuffy service, use-the-right-fork nonsense anymore, and Chicago is an epicenter for creative new food. He should check out Moto, Schwa, or even Alinea; nobody is going to touch his lap.
Yeah, I was skeptical until I noticed the 'special offer for armed forces' on the front page and lightbulb went on over my head. another vote for the chorus of tweaking your presentation to bring out the absent parent aspect - the first impression I had was that it was for lazy yuppies, when in fact you are doing something much nicer and more worthy.
It's just a show of a lack of professionalism. I view exposing low-level errors as akin to spelling mistakes, typos, poor photo work, and other symptoms that show the content producers just didn't take the extra step to differentiate from amateurs.

I hate to beat the cliche, but just one of the reasons I feel happy when using most of Apple's products: they just scream that even the details were very much thought about.
I'd argue that saying "I'm free" and then continuing with "I've been doing lots of house-sitting" and "find a partner who will support you" isn't exactly something to be proud of.
There has been at least one article recently posted here about human evolution speeding up. Easier than finding that article is a quick google search which turns up a number of articles, including this one from 2 years ago: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/071211-human...
We know he certainly doesn't work in PHP, and makes sites that scale a bit better :)
Very well done. At first, I thought, "Oh, this is going to be a web site with some storybooks to read? Why not just use a real book!?" Then, I clicked the link and was presently surprised with this well thought out implementation.
I wouldn't hang up too much on coding questions - just throw in plenty of technical questions and maybe get them to sketch out how they would solve one problem.

Don't deliberately try to wrong foot or otherwise trick them; pitch questions at roughly the experience level / difficulty of the job.

Write down plenty of questions so you dont run out.

Dont be "afraid" to ask for more detail. And similarly dont worry about having to provide pointers or prompts to get people started - just to keep the conversation going.
For the most part I agree, but giving out full path names definitely can make exploiting other holes easier.
Marketing has little or nothing to do with reality.

"requires a Mac with an Intel processor."
Even if every Mac user here in HN used Macs because of their Unix core, that would be very little compared to the average user. To the average Mac user, OSX is nice despite its Unix heritage.
Or they could hire a boy to carry water with a bucket.
Call me old-fashioned, but I see work as the ultimate form of decency.

Why ?
I could see myself using it to read stories to my nieces and nephews that I don't get to see often. (6,000 miles away)

Thing is, French books would work better for them :)
Apple purchased NeXT with the explicit goal of making it the core of their next generation system. I fail to see how that can be called an accident.
Its like hearing from people who bought a lotto ticket and won $100. I recognize that these people have made their money back, but I'm really not interested in their story. Where's the > $100k iPhone app success stories?
Don't forget OpenSolaris. Unlike OSX, it has ZFS.
1. Agree with your comments. The text was never intended for a general audience.
2. The "book" is actually my class notes from the Customer Development class I teach at Haas.
3. Students started asking for hard copies of the notes. I sat on the board of Cafepress so as a favor, I bundled the notes together, slapped a cover on it and put it on the cafepress.com site
4. When Eric Ries took my class he pointed out that I could ship the copies to Amazon and that would give others broader access to it. Amazon wanted something more than "these are my class notes" as a description.
5. You can think of the book as a $39 ripoff for class notes, or a steep discount on the $30,000 Haas Business School tuition.
6. The book title was a pun on my last company, Epiphany
7. The web site is a running commentary on the origin of customer development, how the ideas evolved and what they mean
"Named must your fear be, before banish it you can."
> Get the most low-stress source of income that you can find, and then do exactly what you love for free.

That's what I do.
Some favorite systems programming interview questions:

* Tell me about some routines you tend to take with you from project to project; what's in "libyou.so"? Crap devs won't have any.

* Your code crashes inside the allocator. Walk me through debugging it.

* Tell me about the most interesting problem you debugged without relying on the debugger or print statements.

A question I always ask in dev interviews that isn't as systemsy is, "your typical linked list code, does it embed the list pointer in the struct, or do you have a separate list node struct with a void* in it?"

I like the questions that have no direct right answers.

One question I think you should always ask in every dev interview: "I am going to describe project XXX; it's relatively small. Give me a complete, detailed estimate of how long it will take you to do XXX." I like this question because (1) it flags people who can't estimate properly, (2) it forces them to talk through an actual project and break down the steps, (3) it catches people who don't think about testing.
That surprises me too. When I've heard that remark in the past, it's always been from someone I could dismiss as being a silly snob.

What's the core of the argument? Is it that fiction is not intellectual enough? What about Milton, Shakespeare, and the profound insights they offer into the way people think? Is it not more interesting (and even persuasive) in that form than as a straight essay? What about science fiction, and the thought experiments it offers regarding our social and political systems?

What about films? Does Mr. Fried also ignore films that tell fictitious stories, or are they acceptable due to the reduced time requirement?

Yeah, I don't know. But it's surprising.
It sounds as if you've developed an irrational obsession and phobia about this disease.

Make sure you talk to your psychotherapist and trusted friends/family about the level of distress this is causing you. They can help restore rational balance to your thought, and may help you recognize other contributing causes for your fearful mood -- other emotional stresses, substance/medication issues, etc. -- that you can address one by one.
He's been successful, which I'm pretty sure gives him the right. Whether he'll do it again, is yet to be seen. I bet people would have said selling coins would be a notoriously bad idea/sector,etc. but he did well. I foresee good things in his future.
I had the same reaction as others here.

Liked the design a lot, browsed through the books, opened one and got confused about what "recording" was supposed to mean. Flipped through the end of the book, and went to the FAQ, got even more confused by the webcam requirement.
Then went back to the homepage and noticed the video. Played it and finally understood what the site is for.

Your "welcome" message should be changed to clearly state that you here to do a video recording of a bedtime story for a child when you're away.
In 45 minutes there's not enough time to see how good the candidate is. Your goal should really be the opposite - to make sure the candidate is not obviously bad. I always come into the interview with a list of simple programming tasks, and have the person work through them until we're out of time. You can also get a 'cultural' feel for the person based on how they interact with you in the pursuit of completing the tasks.
Just add an apple sticker!
For me this poll makes far too many assumptions in it's conclusion.

Mostly because only 1000 people are interviewed (hardly a decent sample).

Plus there is no data about how much music the individuals listen too etc. The other, equally valid, explanation is that people who spend more on music also pirate.

The key problem with that last statement is that people are going to use this as evidence piracy is good for music revenues; when actually the "pirates" noted in the poll could well spend that amount anyway - and being a pirate is an incidental part of their interest in music (and in fact some might spend MORE if they couldn't pirate).

The poll could very well be correct; but there is just not enough evidence gathered by it to make a valid conclusion.
You are taking every single word of my comment too seriously. If every assertion needs to have strong backing in order to be commented, the hn comments will probably be only < 10% of what it is now (again, just a guesstimate, don't take this one too seriously too). I forgot if my professor has research backing for a 7 point sys being "best", maybe he did, maybe he didn't. But I don't think I need to remember if there was indeed research backing for it to add to the discussion. Again, I don't think you should down vote every discussion just because they didn't state the research backing, but I'm not the one to tell you that, maybe others can comment on this.

As for the 7 point system being "best" (for general purpose rating), I remember it's because 5 star does not give enough granularity, while 10 points is too much. Maybe that's why Netflix took that out. Now why not 6, 8, or 9? I forgot, again, maybe there was research being done.

As for my "idea" of allow a 0 on a 5 point system; it makes it a 6 point system while retaining a 5 point UI that everyone is accustom to. What is wrong with that? Again, just asking for discussion, not trying to say it IS the best.

Now back to the topic of down vote because I don't have enough backing. If I need backing in order to comment, I wouldn't even be able to comment any of this. Is this what you think is the way hn should work? Also, in order to not make you think I have the research to back up my thoughts, I need to say that in almost every sentence. I also don't think that should be the way hn works.
Behavior-based interviewing takes the approach that what the candidate did in the past is a good predictor of what they will do in the future. The problem is that it's difficult to learn to do it on your own quickly: it really helps to take a class in interviewing.

Briefly:
Ask questions like "have you ever had to do X?" "What problem did you encounter doing X?" "How did you solve it?" "What would you do in this (insert common job problem) situation?" "What were the people at your last job like?" "Did everyone go out for lunch, or eat at their desks?" "Which do you prefer?" "Why?" "What did you do for lunch yesterday?"
Learn to listen (this is the really hard part) and respond to the answers and drill down from there. For example, for each answer he gives you, think of three questions to ask to fully plumb it out. The phrase "tell me more about that" will quickly become your friend when you can't think of anything else to say :-)

Like I said, it's hard to do this stuff on the fly. Training and practice helps :-)

Then there are all the other things like not asking illegal or biased questions (legality varies by state), etc. Businesses really need to do a better job of training their interviewers!
Man Sues Over Leaky Baby Monitor
I also didn't find any information on pricing.

There's a note on "you can record and preview before paying", but I wouldn't want to go through the trouble of recording and figure out at the last minute that the thing is way beyond my budget.

[edit: found the pricing on rollover, it's slow enough that it didn't show up the first time I clicked around. I would include it also on the book page]
More importantly, http://launchd.macosforge.org/
Leadership and business lessons that two Marine officers learned in Iraq
I'd rather the community/polity got a grant so that boy could be engaged in an activity with greater economic leverage. Or better still, be in school.

Such infrastructure would be in the "hand-up, not hand-out" category to me. Also, the availability of fresh water on industrial scales would be an economic enabler in itself.
Even if users don't mind the ads, it can take a depressing amount of time to integrate ads into a site [1]. Assuming you don't just use adsense, each advertiser often has their own way of doing things and will have one-off requirements for how their ads should behave on your site. That's engineering time that could be used to fuel growth by developing features and working on scaling.

[1] I'm speaking from personal experience. For about six months, I worked on nothing but integrating various advertisers' products into justin.tv. Video ad providers are particularly difficult to work with, since it's still quite a young market.
It's common in C where functions return an error code instead of a value that you would use again. Then the conditional just checks that you're OK to go ahead, and you don't need to declare another variable to store the error code. (If a language has exceptions, then this isn't as useful.)
I agree with markbao above, but I thought you might like some more constructive feedback than "holy shit".

People aren't afraid of scrolling, so you can use your vertical space better. You could put the description/call to action closer to the top/center of the page and make them bigger. I would slide the thumbnail images for the books below that. As long as people can tell that there are books there, they'll scroll through them to find one that works.

The set of 50 books on the bookshelf is an overwhelming wall of visual noise. You may want to curate/redact to get fewer books up there (those aren't all what I would consider great kids literature), get rid of the bookshelf metaphor (or at least tone down the contrast). Also, as all of the books are different aspect ratios, there's a lot of extra visual noise in what could otherwise be a tidy grid. Consider cropping them all to square.

Are any of the books available for free? It might help to have one or two free books to get people interested in the concept and to get more feedback/usage data from real humans.

Don't get disheartened. It's a cool concept. I started doing a similar thing for my kid with a digital camera, a mic, and real books but my kid learned how to read before I finished the audio editing.