skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm quite impressed by Facebook's friends suggestions, I discovered a lot of friends thanks to it.

I'm not sure he received this suggestions solely on his emails contacts as I haven't allowed Facebook to access my email contacts and I could find most of them in my suggestions anyway.

I suspect that they also log when you view someone's profile and use this metric to offer better recommendations.

Anyone know more about how it works and what data they use ?
You know, this is really true. My company has recently been making the slow switch from "over-designed and implemented, resulting in a very slow release cycle" to "minimally designed, quickly (but smartly) implemented, fast release cycles".

This comes from two lessons to us:

1) No matter how long you spend designing a feature, it'll probably not be 100% of what the user wants. Do a quicker "draft" of the feature, solicit feedback, and release fast to fulfill customer needs.

2) No matter how long you spend trying to write elegant code, the software will have bugs, and other kinds of problems. Do it quick, observe it in the field, take notes and do bug patches.

Getting the team on-board for these was hard due to the resistance of this being the perceived Microsoft way of doing things, but it has resulted in much higher customer satisfaction because they see continuous progress and feel like their feedback is turning into product (they feel part of the process) rather than tens of months of no progress followed by something they probably didn't want to begin with.
"Anything to the effect of "we want rockstar developers" suggests...that they consider most of the applicants that they get to be of low-quality"

Yep. I'm cool with that. I like working at places with high standards, and I'm glad they understand the difference between good people and great people.

I'm an infrastructure guy (who happens to program), and I've worked with people who are both competant and people who are great. Both can do the job, but working with the latter makes a world of difference to both the work environment and the output.
Off-Topic: Random question from a non-USA resident and a non-native speaker of English. This blog says:

> Don't dish something that you don't know...

I thought that was "diss" as in make_verb_of("disrespect") as in "insult". Is "Dish" a mis-print/mis-spelling/mis-understanding on the part of the author (who also seems to be a non-native speaker of English)? Or is it the next evolutionary addition to this part of the language.

Thanks - we now return you to your regularly scheduled program ...
Error Correction: An Urgent Need for Files
For some test English words, it doesn't look any better than Wiktionary:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pants
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ostensibly

http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|en&...
http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|en&...

As a plus, Wiktionary lets you download their data :). If Google opens this up, then it could get pretty interesting
Mathematical Notation Gets an Upgrade
YC Founder looking for Rails Tutor
I was co-founder of Auctomatic, YC WFP 07, acquired by Live Current Media last year. I'm currently spending my time improving my tech skills (I started out as complete non-tech, now I pretty competent with front end dev and can make basic web apps using rails/php) before doing another startup.

I'm looking to hire someone to tutor me a few hours a week or so. I'm working with Rails and specifically am looking at making Twitter apps. I'm currently in London but this can be done remotely via skype/remote desktop.

I'm less interested in how advanced your programming skills are and more interested in how well you articulate ideas and whether you genuinely enjoy teaching people.

If interested, please ping me harjeet DOT taggar AT gmail DOT com
linux 2.2 kernel? seriously?
how is this cluttered when there is basically one drop down, one text input, and one button. Go to homepage of answers.com and they got a bunch of crap on it.
I think that many battery recommendations out there are bogus. I took my MBP to university (nearly every day), ran down the battery, took it home and plugged it in for a full recharge. Isn't this as close to normal laptop usage as you could expect? Something batteries should be good at dealing with? And after 160 cycles my battery was completely trashed. Not a slow decline, even. I was happily using the MBP for two to three hours or so, and suddenly within two weeks, was down to ten minutes. This is the second time that has happend to me. (Apple exchanged my battery on warranty twice.)

What I would like to know is this: is this normal (Do you have my usage pattern and did you encouter something similar?) or am I doing something wrong? I don't think I do, maybe batteries are just not cut out for such heavy (?) usage and you have to replace them from time to time (like ink in a printer, only cheaper).
Google CEO: Small biz key to recovery (video)
I personally know of several startups that are running in "zombie mode" right now in the Boston area. Their website is still up, but everyone's been laid off, development on the product has stopped, and the only reason its still up is because they pre-paid for hosting for a year or so.

Waiting for someone to write a blog on "zombie mode".
You could always get this exact functionality by searching for "define: word". But still, I like that they have a wrapper interface now.

For times when my word choice matters greatly I still refer to the Oxford English Dictionary, however. As someone else noted, there's a far cry between Google Dictionary and a hand-compiled one.
Programming, is it still fun for you?
A gringo collecting words for an "Espanol" dictionary. Hilarious.
No, not as great. Having a good example is better than not having a good example.
No it wouldn't, there's no penalty for falsely claiming a copyright unless the copyright belongs to someone else.

Having a date and copyright symbol isn't required by the Berne convention, however it can impact the size of damages awarded in a copyright infringement case.
two wrongs don't make a right. if you felt the post had a problem, you should have said so, in a non-accusatory manner.
Yes.

(M-x rgrep in Emacs == grep -r everywhere else)
A couple years ago I was draining my MacBook's (non-Pro) battery daily and it still had most of its capacity (you could squeeze out six hours at minimal consumption) at the end of the year. It might not have been the same model as you, but I think your results are unusually bad (unless their new batteries just suck a lot more).
I'm a marketer and also a developer, so I get both sides of this.

From a marketing perspective, you hope to get a lot of cool stuff written for your API (and blog posts, discussion, etc) around your API. You think you can probably get 10 applicants, so you ask your boss for the ability to give a prize out for a contest to make it happen. Yet, then the only code that is submitted ends up being not far from a "Hello World" program even though 20 people said they wanted to enter. Now you look stupid to your boss that's wondering why no one entered and why they are paying $5000 for a Hello World program. You also look stupid when you post the Hello World program as the winner. Finally you look like an asshole when you close the contest instead.

As a developer you think, "Hey this is cool! I wonder how many other people are entering? My chances are probably pretty good." You get together some code, but hit some documentation issues with the API and you get distracted by your dayjob a bit. You end up being the 'winner' even though you only sketched out a small amount of code, but you feel totally screwed when they just cancel it.

Its easy to blame the product and marketer here, but I happen to know of one media center software company that was running an API contest. When I talked to their CEO I got the sense that they were dying for people to enter. It was well publicized, a good product and had good stuff to win. Yet, I personally got the sense that few were entering. It comes down to the fact that API contests are really hard to run!

Oftentimes as the marketer you're being pushed to do one (or pushing to do one), but don't have the full support of your development team to make it easy for people to enter. Maybe the devs release an API, but its only documented in LISP and its not a RESTful API (maybe for a piece of desktop software). LISP and its variants are awesome, but seriously few people who have spare time and are using your software can write well in it. Regardless of interest, few people enter. If you had gotten them to make a RESTful API, or documented it in Python, C, PHP, Ruby and Perl (with API wrappers), then more people would have entered. Yet you're the marketing guy and telling the dev team what to do is nearly impossible.

I think the key to entering contests is to have no expectations of winning as iamdanw says. Just build it because you want to use it and if you win that's awesome.

If people made some cool stuff for this contest I think they should be awarded, but I can also totally understand if there was a single entry that wasn't good too.
Not if you're using SVN. Or if someone stuck a 24MB SQL data-dump with extended inserts somewhere, that has the word "unicorn" in it.
How is having ten monitors which you can only look at one at a time better than two you can see simultaneously? How does having a unicode table open on a hidden virtual desktop help you when you're working in another? How is being forced to have your watch window hovering over the application while you're trying to debug better than having a second monitor to put it on out of your way?
Loneliness spreads in social networks
No, I've never seen someone drop to assy due to something as simple as not understanding typecasting. Historically it has been for speed (used to be common, a lot less common now) or to do something the compiler/language doesn't support. The anecdote falls into the latter class, but only because the original code author didn't understand C well enough.

When I started programming, the running joke was "you can write FORTRAN in any language, some are just more difficult."
Luck is disguised as genius all the time! Not only do we tend to see just the winners (survivorship bias), those winners honestly mistake their lucky guesses for great decisions (hindsight bias).

I would love to study more examples of failed startups. But people are not that fond of sharing with others how they screwed up (again, it's easy to see your own mistakes in the past). We need Anti-TechCrunch.
True as that may be, I've worked on far too many projects now that are burdened by this attitude. No tests, sloppy and unreadable code.

My attitude is simple: code like the person who will be working on the app next is standing behind you with a gun to your head. Be diligent in making sure your code is legible, maintainable and documented. If you can't get to one of these now, at least make a note to get back to it.
Really appreciated these slides, and the notes on your blog. On the charts, it'd be nice if the time scale were consistent. That 18 months of stealth looks like the same length of time as the 2 months of the 10k - 12k beta.

But the preso and notes are great. Thanks.
I think the article itself makes it pretty clear. For those who are curious, The Economist also reported on this recently. It's not that the iPhone isn't popular, it's that the Apple iPhone isn't popular, because the knockoffs are both cheap and come loaded with as much extra functionality as they can be crammed with.
Similar experience happened to my friend. Apple is pretty good about replacing batteries when they fail. Although only 48 cycles after a year and a half means this person almost never lets their battery discharge which likely accelerated the failure.
Echoing the commenter above, people writing C++ in 2009 are laughing all the way to the bank.
The only time I've seen it used like this before is semi-sarcastically in instant-messages. In this context it looks like a mistake.
It's not fair to say only Fox is watched to reinforce people's existing world view. I'd say most news sources, on all sides of the political spectrum and beyond, do that.
101 Things I Learned in Interaction Design School
As an interviewer, I always ask about version control. Doesn't matter which one the candidate has used, but if they can't talk fluently about it, that's a red flag. It's a proxy question for what I really care about, which is, has worked on a large complex system in collaboration with others.
Do you think your icon looks like a Polaroid?

If not, what do you think it looks like?

If so, have you considered not looking like a Polaroid as a potential solution?
Inside User Research at YouTube
Can Anyone Stop Facebook?
My hands get prickly when I think about some of the places that could get the Street View treatment: Marrakech, Morocco; Venezia, Italy; the Great Pyramids; heck, even the sewers of Paris.
If your product is a "platform" then you may often be visiting customers to work directly with their developers.

I agree on the travel. It can sound exciting from the outside, but airports, taxis, hotels and meeting rooms look the same whatever city or country you're in. Eating room service 5 nights a week gets old real quick.
I would be almost useless without API..
While the shanzhai cellphones are popular (and very cool), I think the article's analysis of this is more accurate than your own. The illegally imported US and Hong Kongese Apple iPhones here have a wifi card and are significantly cheaper than the ones sold in a Unicom store. Why pay $1000 USD for a wifi-less version of the iPhone when you can pay $700 through an unofficial retailer for a version without any lacking functionality?
Quick textbites from people I'm interested in, that I can read at a glance from my pocket whenever I'm bored, are not useless.

If you don't understand the appeal of that I don't really think you understand Twitter.
I think you can do the dictionary from Google Language API?
We've been with Braintree for two years, and are about to use them for a second startup. Big, big fan.
Intel hopes 48-core chip will solve new challenges
Thank you for this. I now have another example to use when I bitchslap people who don't read domain name RFCs.
Now you are not talking about generics in Go, but a major philosophical position in programming language theory. I think your question is disingenuous.

Specifically, I'm asking about people's actual experience. My question is sincere. I am not interested in people's preferences or their "philosophy". What is their experience? Also note that I allude above to having cursed the lack of types in Smalltalk at times. This doesn't seem so significant for collections.

I'm asking: Is putting the wrong thing into a collection really such a big deal? What is the actual experience? I gave mine. What's yours?

EDIT: Wow, it seems like just mentioning "static typing" should now be included in "Godwin's Law"! Rational discussion has become impossible!
Right - it's hard to pull things like this apart after the fact. Maybe they had already discussed something sort of similar previously. I know that when I've worked with design firms we have always tossed around a bunch of ideas before talking to the firm, and often just see what they come up with without our own ideas interfering. You're also dealing with a team at Faberge, not just one person...ideas percolate throughout the group beyond the people you're meeting with and once an idea takes hold there is no pulling it back.

What's so bad about charging for pitch work, if you're sensitive to this? I can understand feeling frustrated but I don't know that it was a deliberate snub.
Looking at that privacy policy, and it looks like exactly what they should be doing. There isn't much of a point in keeping personally identifiable information beyond a certain point, at least not something which directly leads back to you.

The only data analysis that would benefit from keeping identifying information would be to create a model for how users go about the internet, and google already has some very good models of that. This is just conjecture, but I would assume that being able to create geographic based models is far more useful than per-user models, which is something they keep.
Excellent site - thank you.
Bisphenol exposure thought to increase chances of impotence
I think it's inexcusable to cancel a contest, even if you only get a single entry. API providers can require registration to the contest, then monitor the usage metrics based on API keys. This would give an indication of how much development is happening before the contest deadline. If it's not much, extend the deadline, but don't cancel it. As far as quality of the submissions, it's not reasonable to expect polished, production quality work. The goal should be creative or novel prototypes that demonstrate a use case of the API. To me, a good entry would be one that clearly shows how the API is being utilized. Finally, if you've got good prizes(check),
an iteresting API to play with(check), and a site to support the API(check), and you can't attract developers, you're doing something very wrong or not trying very hard.
I have heard about Google using lot of local language expertise for things like validating the ranks for local language search results. So, this might also have been vetted by such a group.
Ah. OK - thanks.
The HR Acquisition
Eliminating the stack frame is a pretty effective speed optimization for "traditional" languages.

It costs a non-trivial amount of instructions (execution time) and cache space (potentially casting out more useful data - data fetch time) to build an unneeded stack frame, and then a couple more instructions to throw the frame away. Even for processors that have a "build a stack frame" instruction like the x86, the instruction is a pretty expensive one in terms of clocks required to execute.

With a "traditional" language, stack frames can be eliminated in the leaf nodes of the calling trees. These routines tend to be the very small utility routines so building an unneeded stack frame to execute a three line (often only a handful of assy instructions) routine is measurably wasteful.

Thus, I would add a third type of code that benefits from stack frame optimization: small leaf node functions, i.e. functions don't call anything other function.
...so don't do that, said the doctor.
yes.
Words are defined by their usage... even if the original meaning was different (or even opposite) to to current usage.

"Hacker" has come to primarily mean #1 ... only a small subset of technical people and academics still use it like #2. Similar to the way "Begs the question" has changed in the last few years to mean "directly leads to us asking".
In posts here, I read of others independently coming up with the same scenario. You cannot be certain that your "pitch was stolen". In general, my belief is that if I can think of an idea then someone else can too. But I don't tell others about it unless I'm willing to let the idea go.
Feel Irrational? So does Pi.
Ask HN: If you didn't have to worry about healthcare, would you start a company?
If health insurance for yourself and your employees was not a consideration (taken care of without cost) and wouldn't change, would you start a new company in the next year?
How to Kill a Business
I need never leave my chair again!

Though, in fact, wandering through virtual Pompeii makes me really want to go back to Pompeii.
Grand Prairie Computer Repair Services
If you have more than one PC in your home or office, have you considered networking them together? A home network allows your computers to share photos, documents, and videos, and even an internet connection. Even better, a wireless
Erjang is a virtual machine for Erlang, which runs on Java
> "Stack Frame Elimination"

We can do even better than that: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=46
Isn't net-neutrality a form of antitrust law? Net neutrality is essentially a way of stopping corporations from using their influence over communication lines to unfairly affect other markets that use those communication lines.
Top Ten Discoveries of 2009 (according to National Geographic)
Tried the first word that randomly popped into my head.

panoply /p'ænəpli/
Synonyms: noun: armour, armor

Huh? Since when are "panoply" and "armor" synonyms?
What Makes a City Startup Friendly?
"Words are defined by their usage."

Indeed, definitions are like history. It doesn't always work out the way one might like it to.
Good or Bad Times Ahead for Tech Startups?
Not quite.

Emacs' rgrep DIR PATTERN REGEX translates to

find DIR \( -path \*/SCCS -o -path \*/RCS -o -path \*/CVS \
-o -path \*/MCVS -o -path \*/.svn -o -path \*/.git \
-o -path \*/.hg -o -path \*/.bzr -o -path \*/_MTN \
-o -path \*/_darcs -o -path \*/\{arch\} \) -prune \
-o -type f \( -name PATTERN \) -print0 \
| xargs -0 -e grep -i -nH -e REGEX
How Facebook is changing the rules of online retail
> But why would you ever want to run an FSM which doesn't return the new state as a result?

Or directly: Sometimes continuation passing style has advantages.
Thank You, Sir
They've increased the coverage A LOT, expecially in the area around Milan. Next step the north est? With Verona, Venice, Udine, etc...
That wasn't hard. I just changed my Google Mail password temporarily while Facebook needed access.
You can always run your own instance of bind (or dnscache if that's more your style) to get a local nameserver that doesn't have any garbage on it.

The drawback is that you'll often lose a few ms to refreshing your cache, which will cause popular-but-non-CDN content to be slightly slower.
Did this guy do an IAmA on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9lsp2/i_create_those_f... ?
Street view is great for reliving your holiday and correctly sorting all those photos you took - a perfect memory aid. Also: (exact) post hoc GPS tagging.
The Best Collagen Cream Remedy Can Help Reduce Fine Lines
Yes. Neither is having a versioning system a magic bullet. Both can still be good ideas.
Google Public DNS, OpenDNS Or DNS Advantge - Benchmark From UR PC
Stylefeeder parses shopping trends by city -- some cool charts
I have to ask of that article, though, how many people are actively using Facebook nowadays (as in, how many login everyday and actually do something), too. It never mentions it like a lot of articles about Facebook do (although I suspect it's a lot). I ask this because my Facebook usage has declined greatly since graduating from college last year and it's really gone down since they introduced the stream and became more Twitter-like. I tend to sign onto Facebook maybe once every three weeks now. It doesn't help that my stream is populated by my friends' constant romps on Farmville or Mafia Wars and it just drags down the whole experience.

I've really left Facebook more as a living, breathing address book rather than anything else for now. I am much more likely to be on Twitter than Facebook. It also happens that I'll talk to people on Twitter and then eventually add them as friends on Facebook, but just continue talking to them on Twitter. It's even the case now where most of the folks from Facebook (and school) that I'd talk to on a daily basis have migrated over to Twitter and they're more active on Twitter than Facebook. We can't be the only ones doing that...
In an ideal world the extension would only be making HEAD requests and the analytics system would only count GETs, right?
http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|en&...

This one still needs some work.
A supplementary article that the returns of acquisitions through portfolio companies (known as bolt on acquisitions) can create better value than investments in new firms (from the perspective of an investor) - http://seekingalpha.com/article/175698-the-economics-of-bolt...
I think the problem still remains; a free market does not necessarily mean it is an optimum market, and the government is not the only factor that can adversely affect a marketplace.
Allowing anyone access to your email account, even temporarily, seems like the problem here. I just wouldn't do it. Ever.
The Demise of Newspapers: A Market Failure?