skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You should also check if the person is reliable (i.e. competent, responsible, hard worker and isn’t an obnoxious diva). In a lot of situations you get people who seem fairly smart, yet make an effort to bring their personal problems to the workplace. This can be extremely counter productive (http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1octb/reddit_cof...).
It's amazing they enabled it as default.
But it's a ridiculous comparison. Has twitter killed RSS yet?
My first thought was, "Holy Shit - this is awesome!" After the initial geek high wore off, I started to smell bullshit. After reading through his glossed over description of the D-to-A conversion ("...writing the decoder was very simple..", GMAB), I'm CALLING bullshit.

No code to show, then you didn't do it.
Oh how deliciously ironic: sneering contempt for the NSF... on the Internet.

This is the government agency that gave us ARPANET and the Mosiac browser. They also provided funding for Larry Page and Sergey Brin's proto-Google project at Stanford.
Password Manager - Any suggestions?
A friend has reached the limit of his memory capacity on passwords that he can remember and asked me for advice. Since I have not reached my limit, I turn to HN and ask for advice too. Operating Systems of Interest are Linux and Windows (in this order of preference).
If you're located outside of a startup hub, taking the week or two to apply for a $100,000 Phase I SBIR grant - if there is one relevant to what you are doing, is a smart move. If you know your subject matter, it is not that much work, and the red tape can be well worth a six month budget. Other than the red tape, which is not THAT bad operationally, the money is literally free. There are often good opportunities from DoD, in some solicitations. There's a new solicitation out from someone every few months. http://www.dodsbir.net/ A Phase I can lead to a Phase II - which can be $1 million or more. For instance, there were some very interesting topics in DoD's solicitation a few back: http://www.acq.osd.mil/osbp/sbir/solicitations/sbir092/osd09...

BTW - DoD is pretty cool about not requiring an advanced degree, unlike some other departments. If you have a background full of successful projects but no degree, you can still win by stuffing some MS/PhD's in as advisers.

That being said - for some of these it can take six months to hear whether you even won the grant, so this is not a primary funding strategy. It is a supplementary funding strategy. Its something to do, then forget about until you hear back. You don't want to try and setup a company with the government as your only customer - they will bleed you dry with delays. But if you're going to build something anyway, and are an expert in the area... why not go for the cash?

Your state may have an office setup to assist you in applying for these. The folks at ATDC in Atlanta were very helpful: http://innovate.gatech.edu/Default.aspx?alias=innovate.gatec... There are numerous companies in Atlanta that have 'bootstrapped' to the tune of several million dollars using SBIR/STTR, and have gone on to success in the broader market.

This doesn't really compare to Y Combinator, but it is (almost) free money. Uncle Sam dolla dolla bill, yo.
Gah! Again with HN's obsession with labeling anything impressive and daring a "hack".
That's the second time you've posted that link on HN. Do you have something against Aaron?
Having experienced it myself, I can vouch that such an difference exist. When forced to write a complicated piece of code with a bunch of strange people breathing down my neck and watching every step I take, my productivity tends to slacken off when I hit a coders equivalent of writer’s block. It just doesn’t come out as naturally as it used to. In contrast, same task in a more familiar and comfortable setting looks like a piece of cake even if deadline is drawing close.
Well, I'm starting to lose respect for The Economist. There were few articles from area that I'm involved in and the articles were just one sides' arguments, without contacting the other side. The article author just met with someone in nice restaurant, listened to them and then run with the info. There was no effort for digging deeper, it is cheaper after all and fills pages too.
Thanks - seems to have been this submission (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871202), in this comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871458)

So it's appearing to count votes when it doesn't, by design.
I think that if you follow the "One level of abstraction per function" tip from the "Clean Code" book, and you do a proper naming of your functions this problem disappears.
1. the point was stronger before you added the second paragraph.

2. So what? Yes, we need DARPA, NSF, &co to fund $10^9 research projects like space elevators or The Internet. YC has shown that the real problem with such projects isn't red tape per se. It's the decade-long release-response-revision cycle you're forced to deal with when the stakes get so high. You have to deal with a lot more accountability mechanisms when you beg or borrow that much money. I'd be willing to bet YC's success rate compares favorably to NSF's.
How do you know they are not lovingly chuckling at the quirks of an otherwise beloved program? Tone is in the eye of the reader, on the internet

Hell, career military guys make fun of military bureaucracy all the time.
What We Shouldn't Learn From Steve Jobs
Coder's block is a good way to describe it.

I've had phone interviews where I've been asked to solve a logic puzzle with pen/paper while explaining my approach. Solving a problem you've never thought about while being put on the spot turns out to be incredibly difficult. These sorts of problems require deep concentration and quiet yet it tends to be awkward to have silence between strangers. The situation really inhibits serious problem solving.
Yes, he is an annoying self-anointed expert. This ruins what could be an interesting debate (on any topic). It is ironic that a bad employee somehow becomes an expert in hiring people.

I wouldn’t mind if people stop posting drivel from his site.
"... American coffee chains (particularly Starbucks but also some of the donut variety) have tried to break in and mostly failed. Starbucks closed most of its stores last year after multi-million dollar losses. They couldn’t cope with the Australian competition... I would love to be corrected – but I think the reason has to do with our wage structure. American low-end wages are very low indeed whereas Australia has minimum wages at quite high levels. ..."

Could a simpler reason be that these chains make crap coffee

Failure has less to do with cost than understanding what the customer wants. Importing a supermarket/chain concept and then expecting the locals - I'm from Melbourne ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157600195992630... - exposed to multitudes of small well run cafe's with a heritage of coffee since the 1950's means the local population are quite sophisticated in their understanding and taste. Generic coffee chains with their cookie cutter approach can't easily match this. Not even by price.
"I ask them to do part of the job. Usually this means picking some fairly separable piece we need and asking them to write it."
Sorry, you're right.

I don't think that paragraph and the proceeding one was there when I originally read the post. Seems it's been edited since it was submitted.
BASIC. Everybody can learn it in 10 minutes (slight exaggeration). Nobody gains an advantage from having mastered some other intricate language. Non-programmers can play too.

Or, since it's for robots, why not consider a new minimalist language specifically for the competition. That way it's more about strategy instead of solving programming problems. It's tailored specifically to robot capabilities with nothing to distract or confuse.
Hmm...

First, read up on the Orion project.

Humanity could have had a technological infrastructure outside the atmosphere in the 1970s. (They sadly lost out to NASA politically.)

An Orion exploration could generate money from extra-terrestrial mineral sources inside a not too long time window.

Second, consider how much longer the virtual reality thing would take if we were half as fast at speeding up computers (3 years for Moore's law, not 1 1/2). A not unrealistic assumption for a civilization with some other focus.

Third, consider if one of the small scale fusion projects (EMC, General Fusion, etc) works. Or a future idea. Then an Oort cloud would be livable, for a technological civilization.

From that, it seems a large fraction of technological civilizations should not have all eggs on one planet/culture before cultural stagnation starts. And the groups further away would be able to see the problem happening to others and have a good chance to do things differently.

In the same way, a physics experiment with "unexpected" results would need to destroy a whole solar system and not only a planet.

The Fermi paradox should have some other answer.
Perhaps you should look past the author to the content. There are some interesting ideas in there and it seems to have spawned some good discussion.
Pueblo Computer Repair Services
Do you need to fix you computer fast. Are looking for computer repair service at Tuscon itself then we are your answer.Not only we have our branch at Tuscon, we provide computer repair service your doorstep
Sure, that's exciting. But imagine designers not having to test in every browser for rendering bugs. Imagine testing in one browser and being sure it was going to work for everybody, just as fast, and look just as good. I think it'd be a huge, huge step forward. After that, HTML5 all the way!
The Law of Late Projects
I doubt the situation will improve by introducing yet another incompatible pointy bracket syntax.
Doing the right thing at Ben & Jerry's
Developer here - it definitely excites me. But I'd much rather see full, compatible CSS2.1 support first - and then CSS3!

I just can't help but think that this will fragment things a little bit further. I hope it won't, but I don't know whether we can expect all browsers to implement HTML5 at the same time.
A Useful Guide to Massages
Accessing GMail through Python
Yes, several people are using Tarsnap via Cygwin. It's not something I recommend to the general public, but I imagine the readership of Hacker News wouldn't have any difficulty with this.
Don't worry, providing such a script is on my to-do list. :-)
I'm not aware of all the details of Aaron's career, but I was not under the impression that he has been in a position to hire that many people. Knowing who he was hiring for what size organizations and in what capacity would be useful information.
"Thought it wouldn't work." Bah, they just didn't care. The Poles were just as virulently anti-Semitic as the Germans, and the Allies, if they'd given a damn, would have provided visas for Jewish refugees years before the war even started.
I'm excited about many of the new features. However, the move away from XML syntax is a disastrous and utterly pointless decision.

Also, I wish they had taken the opportunity to rid the world of the massive failure that is CSS and replace it with a layout system that makes simple things simple.
I've been using it on Cygwin since the beginning. Frankly, its fairly straight forward. The 'configure, make, make install' works out of the box and afterwards you do the same thing you'd do a *nix box. I've had no trouble at all.
The important criticism of climate science is very different from the criticism that Spencer Weart choses to respond to.

Compare the financial crisis and the climate crisis. The
origin of the financial crisis lies in people
believing. Believing that house prices never fall, believing
that structured financial products reduce risk. Critics do
not impugn the motives of the believers. Helping minorities
to buy houses, moving financial risk to those who can
shoulder it, these are noble aims. Critics complain that
those in charge should have been intellectually rigorous but
were merely well meaning and enthusiastic and that this was
sufficient to cause disaster.

Contrast this with the climate crisis. Climate science is
excused its bumbling amateurism on the grounds that ad hoc
adjustments to the data are not sinister. The excuse for
losing the raw data and the calibration scripts is that, far
from attempting a fraud, the researchers are well meaning
and enthusiastic.

We want to know whether the hypothesis of anthropogenic
global warming is true. The allegation against against
climate scientists is that they should have been
intellectually rigorous but that they stand revealed as, at
best, merely well meaning and enthusiastic. This works no
better in science than it does in finance.
I'm quite disappointed about so many "sceptics" on Hacker News . The term "sceptic" alone gives someone credibility, it sounds like someone is actively engaging in a scientific debate, but no "sceptic" is.

The basic scientific fact on which every other argument rests is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect greenhouse effect. This alone should end the argument for any sane person.You can replicate the effect in every lab with the same results. The calculation that we are having an effect is simple. The co2 measurements are absolutely clear, co2 is rising and is now on its highest level ever.

I don't understand what your argument is?
That correlation doesn't equal causation? You can prove the causation in every lab, just replicate John Tyndalls experiment from the 1850s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyndall.

I don't care if two models work or don't work, or if some scientist has doctored three numbers, it doesn't change the basic fact. The argument they are having is about the current speed of warming and I don't care about that, because it doesn't matter. It might well be that the planet is warming much slower because of some natural effect, now if this is the case we should all be happy...and start reducing greenhouse gases immediately. All we got is a chance to react, the basic scientific fact didn't go away.
Thanks! I don't want to prolong the agony - but I'm curious about about "neutral and impartial" vs. "intellectual gratification."

If one's opinions and emotions distort the facts, it is difficult to have intellectual gratification, because one cannot see clearly. To me, intellectual gratification requires absolute honesty, as in science (as Feynman says). In other words, the problem isn't that someone is offended, but that one's own vision is distorted.

Perhaps in mathematics this isn't so important because the mathematics itself is already impartial. :-)
Excellent, thanks.

Overall, a great product that I'm happy with (and have been recommending to my friends).
I thought it was rare too until I started interviewing a lot.

Yes, these candidates would typically be able to explain their involvement with previous projects, to give a technical overview of what they'd done. They would totally pass my bullshit filter. I thought I had a well-tuned bullshit filter. I was wrong.

The programming problems are typically very simple, an order of magnitude simpler than an algorithm or design question that might be a part of the same interview. I don't want to give specific examples, but maybe implement one of a standard algorithms on an array or a tree (I'm not talking balanced trees, way simpler). Maybe do something that requires a nested loop and some bit-twiddling, or careful thinking about entries in a two-dimensional array, or a bit of smarts to hold some sparse data - but again, nearly trivial from the algorithmic point of view. There are many possibilities.

What you want to check is whether the candidate can think through their own code, whether they know to check for edge cases, whether they think of test cases, how they deal with off-by-1 possibilities, how they debug their own code, do they have a reasonably clear style.

What you tend to see when a candidate fails such an assignment is people who don't remember the mask to fill a byte with 1's, who can't get a nested loop right because they can't seem to keep two counters in their head at the same time, who don't have the instinct to check for an off-by-1, who can't trace through their own code visually with sample arguments, etc. etc. Sometimes they had just impressed you a lot a few minutes before with a nice technical summary of what they did in their previous project.
Sounds similar to sorting by zip code.

I don’t know how many postmen share each zip code. In Copenhagen the western district has been sub-divided into a lot of zip codes so it could be that each is its own route, but they only did it for the western district, the other districts still only have a single zip code — I suspect that they did it to simplify sorting but found that people are more likely to make mistakes (when you have a dozen zip codes for the colloquially same district).
Programmer here. HTML 5 is dominated by scripting, which I think we will regret. Marked up data is easily manipulated and repurposed, but arbitrary code has very few uses other than executing it, which is mostly why script-heavy documents tend to be trainwrecks in accessibility and search.

And I desperately hope there's going to be a more usable and declarative schema for HTML 5 than "anything is valid if you carry out this long parsing procedure and it says it's valid".
I've tried several password managers but didn't like them too much. I currently use a word document that is password protected (ironically) and named something inconspicuous. "Report on endangered dolphins in China"
Card shuffling, mathematical modeling, and Markov chains
I have no recollection of reading this paragraph when I first read the submission. Maybe I skipped it somehow. Anyway, this doesn't make it clear whether this is done face-to-face as part of the interview, or offline. I also doubt it's practical.
'we'll conveniently bill your credit card just $289.95 USD'.

Quite a price range they have!
maybe not yet on a global scale, but for me and some people I know, it certainly has. Never open my reader anymore: almost all good links come to me via twitter.
Outside of tech, you can't really do much for $20K. Any sort of retail/manufacture/biotech/cleantech/etc startup requires far more capital to get off the ground.
JavaScript is a VM.
DARPA birthed the Internet. YC birthed reddit. I guess the jury is still out.
For most agencies, it has to be something they're interested in, and it has to constitute basic R&D, one step past the state of the art.

Check the current solicitations and see if there's a fit.
untrustworthy. there are no good intentions here.

10gb isn't very futureproof either.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 Released
As soon as the Firefox 3.6 last month on October 24, 2009 they have constantly updated Firefox 3.6 with beta releases time to time. Within a month of release we have seen 4 beta release. The latest one is Beta 4 which is just released and available for downloads at the official Mozilla website.
It's significantly more convoluted for European Commision-funded projects. Having worked on a number of proposals, the process goes something like this:

You put together a consortium, with partners from at least three different European countries (seven for some proposals).

If you are applying for "Future and Emerging Technologies", you write a 5 page proposal saying what you want to do, how much it will cost, how you plan to do it and why it should be done. Wait three months for the EC to respond. If they like your idea, you get to the next stage.

If you are applying for a specific call or your FET-open short proposal was accepted, you get to write a full proposal. This is 60-90 pages of detailed justification for why your proposal is beyond the state of the art, a detailed work plan, a justification of the concept, the specific tasks of each partner, a timeline, a budget, and what "impact" it is meant to have on Europe as a whole in terms of the objectives of the specific call. This is a rather massive, hard to distribute amount of work. During the three months after the deadline, your proposal is sent to some call-topic-specific experts as deemed by the EC. A lot of these experts are working in the same field and indirectly competing with you. They are almost all academic or bureaucratic, since industry people don't have time for this sort of stuff. Three months later, you are told how you scored, and if you scored well enough, you are put on a list. The commission goes through the list and funds projects until the budget runs out or the projects get too bad. All in all, the feedback cycle can be over a year long, and that's before you even start work on the project itself. Resubmitting an improved/modified proposal takes an incredible feat of enthusiasm across a necessarily large number of people within several institutions. The amounts distributed are in the millions of euros, so it can be worth it, but the process essentially requires the working group to be so large that a lot of efficiency is lost.
Wow, this makes SBIR/STTR look damned efficient :)
paper shape kinda reminds me of bsg

SPEAKING OF WHICH does anyone know if someone has printed bsg-style books or has made bsg notepads or something like that because I would absolutely want one.
If the Greenhouse effect was the only effect affecting climate, you'd have a point.
Year 1993: Does e-mail excite you? No, it doesn't excite me in the least, since I can't afford to alienate all fax and telex users.
In Poland the global consensus is that God exists.
The problem is "overwhelming scientific evidence" — turns out it is not that overhelming. If you try to dig deeper you will get "there is some evidence" and "our models show". I don't deny GW or even AGW, but it is sad to see how in this case science is somewhere in the background and all is mostly polictics and beliefs.
I agree with the message of the post, i.e. make your tool do only one thing (the unix philosophy) but I am not sure breaking up a Markdown parser into a 3-staged pipeline is the best execution of it.

Something like MultiMarkdown¹ converts Markdown to XML and then uses the XML tool suite (XSLT) to further transform that to (X)HTML, LaTeX, etc. and can be used to extract information from the Markdown documents as well (XPath/XQuery).

Despite my dislike of XML this is more useful to me as a user because I don’t have to learn about his Markdent event API and write subclasses in Perl to actually examine the Markdown documents.

¹ http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/
Wow, incredible story. That guy must have some incredible nerves of Tungsten.
it's called hacker news for a reason. It's like saying "I digg it" on digg or you have been slashdotted.

Trademarking to brain wash us all.