photon_off

Go to the bank and get four $100 bills. Using a xacto knife, cut out all of the serial numbers of the bills. Then, cut off 1/4 of each bill in the follow method:

  * Cut 1/4 off the left hand side of the first bill.
  * Cut a rectangle out of the next bill using these coordinates:  Top: 1px, Height: 100%-2px, Left: 25%, Width: 25% ... where 1px is about 1/8 inch.
  * Cut a rectangle out of the third bill using these coordinates:  Top: 1px, Height: 100%-2px, Left: 50%, Width: 25%

You now have:

  * One bill with the left quadrant cut off.
  * One bill with a big rectangle cut out... but is still barely in tact.
  * Another bill with a big rectangle cut out.
  * Three 1/4 pieces that you tape together to create a 4th mutilated $100 bill.

Go to the bank, and retrieve your hard earned $400.

Source: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Will_a_bank_replace_a_half_ten_dol...

If it were a condition to hire a well-suited candidate. It's surprisingly difficult to find good programmers in NYC.

Do you mean: http://www.searchyc.com ?

Also try: http://www.google.com/#q=test+site:news.ycombinator.com

> we can tell people candidly whether we think it's the investors who are wrong, or the startup.

If YC chooses to invest in an applicant, it probably offers great advice to the start-up. If it chooses not to, would you consider that rejection candid advice that the start-up is wrong?

I think there's something to be said about knowing when to fold, and not to view these nobody-believed-in-us-but-we-overcame edge cases as motivation to play a losing hand.

There will always be false negatives, ideas that are rejected by angels but which later become enormously successful. However, if the industry's finest angels are all passing, and you can literally find nobody to invest, it is probably a wise decision to give up. While angels are far from being 100% accurate in choosing what to invest in, overall they have to have some sense of what's a good idea in order to sustain themselves. If they're all passing, better off hitting the drawing board.

Really cool study, thanks for sharing. I don't think the research proves that social media wouldn't be a worthwhile signal. They really don't look into how bookmarking data could be applied to results, they just look at how bookmarked sites relate to search results and the web at large. The strongest conclusion is that Delicious users only bookmark a sliver of the web's content, and while the researchers considers this a weakness. I would consider it a strength.

The way I see it, search engines are entirely inclusive, while bookmarking sites are selectively inclusive. For certain ultra-specific queries, I'd much prefer the search engine approach -- I want as much breadth as possible. For other not-so-specific queries, I'd much prefer the result sites to be vouched for by people. Looking one step further, probably for a decent chunked size of my search queries, I'm OK if the number of sites it is searching over is only about 10,000,000 (my estimate for how many sites on Delicious have been bookmarked by more than 20 users).

What I find exciting is that the two can be effectively combined. Take all the normal results that a search engine would show, but give it a boost based on the log of how many times it's been bookmarked. It really is that simple.

You're quite right. But pretty much every strategy a search engine uses is susceptible to black hat SEO. I think there's something to be said about having the system use how others are reacting to your comments rather than just what your content is and who links to it. Yes, you could farm out Delicious accounts and have them bookmark your site, but from a SE perspective it's easier to remedy this problem (Delicious requiring captchas periodically, looking for accounts which have an uncanny amount of similar bookmarks in a span of time, etc) than it is to come up with strange rules about content that the black hat is free to change.

Judging by the votes, apparently it is more valuable to point out why a certain idea might not work, even if all of the alternatives have the same problem, than it is to suggest something with exciting possibilities. Nothing against you, personally -- your comment is quite right and I agree gaming is a major concern.

Search engines would benefit enormously from using data from social bookmarking sites. If you haven't lately used Delicious to search, I highly recommend it. The breadth of search isn't as far-reaching, but all of the results have essentially been pre-filtered by however many users have bookmarked it -- it's unlikely that many people would bookmark a spammy site or site with crap content.

I think Google results could vastly be improved if they tied together their normal rankings with a "how many people have bookmarked this URL (and to some extent, URLs from this domain)" metric. I've worked closely with Delicious' set of data, and it's nothing short of incredible. Billions of instances of people categorizing sites and vouching for their quality are going unused in the search space.

A seemingly endless amount of free lectures:

http://www.moreofit.com/similar-to/lecturefox.com/Top_10_Sit...

This is far from a definitive answer, but I haven't heard of YCombinator investing in any Series A rounds. Dilution is part of the game, and is generally a good thing. Further investment generally boosts the value of a company making YC and any previous investors' investments already a win... on paper at least.

For a list of most, if not all, the companies YC has invested in take a look here: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/y-combinator and see if you can find any that aren't listed as "Angel" investments.

It's possible that you don't fit into any other segments and that Chrome is the fallback advertisement for blip.tv. Do you happen to have 3rd party cookies disabled?

Could you provide more information about the experiment that you conducted? In real life, users have the option of quitting, and the luxury to do it in private; two things that are very hard to emulate in "experimental" conditions but which greatly affect the outcome. I'm not in any position to judge your experimental techniques, but if you're relying on users actively complaining about things, or worse, telling you what they think they want, you're probably doing it wrong.

It's my opinion that hiding menu items not a great idea for the reasons OP said. In my opinion, coming from someone who's had to use an interface which does this, is that it's borderline obnoxious expecting me to remember where, and that it's necessary, to hover over magical areas to show important controls.

I think having the items be very translucent until hovered provides the best of both worlds. I can see where they are, but are easily ignorable.

I posted this when I first launched at the end of July; and I figured it's relevant to share it again to show just how useful Delicious data is. Moreofit.com has an index of about 250,000 websites and their tag weights, courtesy of Delicious.com. They're normalized and stored in a manner that allows for a somewhat efficient kNN search to be applied for a given set of tags. The results: For a given URL, you can see the "closest" URLs in 50,000+ dimensional tag space. If you go into "custom tag search" you can very the weights of the tags and explore the tag space that way, also.

More precisely: each website has a vector of approximately 50,000 dimensions, 49,990 of which are 0, but 10 of which have a value. The "closest" URLs in this space are those which have the smallest distance from the searched URL. I've thought of doing singular value decomposition, but frankly never got around to it, because the results are really quite good. This is just the tip of the iceburg -- I'm sure delicious has well over 10,000,000 URLs.

Delicious.com has an extremely rich set of data: A very large, and arguably the most relevant, portion of the web has been described by hand#, by real people, with no incentive to cheat or skew the results. The amount of man-hours spent tagging and organizing the web is really astounding, and I'm glad I managed to make something useful out of it.

I really hope Yahoo comes to their senses and realizes how valuable this data is. Just combining URL (or domain) popularity into search results offers so much more value. One could create a killer search engine with this data.

#: A lot of the end results of tag weights has to do with how the URL was initially tagged, as a lot of people opt to use "auto-tagging" which just copies the most popular tags. Not only are the end results of tagging quite interesting, but I suspect researching how a URLs popularity and description has ebbed and flowed over time would be awesome.

I've taken a quarter of a million of the most popular bookmarks from thousands of tags, and created a similarity search engine with it. Seems to be working pretty well. Thank you, delicious.

Exactly this. I remember there were 5-6 problems they had: Gamblor, Prime Bits, SuperPatterns, a Unicode problem, and perhaps another graph related one. I managed to finish maybe four of them in my spare time at college, and wasn't too excited about working for Facebook. At the time I thought it was just a poor substitute for MySpace, which I didn't have much respect for anyway, and that it was technologically uninteresting. So, I never sent them in.

I wonder how fb engineers hired (c) 2005 are doing.

They wrote a ton of top X lists about things that are highly relevant to their audience when top X lists were the thing to do. They have excellent SEO, and being an early player and highly linked to gives great Page Rank. They leverage social media quite well (I'd wager a significant amount of traffic comes from SM sites like Reddit/Digg/HN/etc). They produce a lot of content. Their content seems to be edited well, meaning it is well-written, well formatted, and usually not terrible. (I don't particularly care for it, but can see its appeal.) Lots of internal linked to and from related articles and a somewhat well organized site. They allow for readers to comment and they respond to the comments.

On top of that, they don't make any fatal mistakes. Their site does not take forever to load. They don't serve too many ads. They aren't on bad terms with any search engines.

I highly recommend Head First Java, which focuses on OOP using Java. The entire Head First series is very well written, and focuses on practical learning rather than reference or academia as a lot of the suggestions do.

After a depressingly latent period of non-doing in 2009, I broke out of my shell and kicked some ass in 2010. May and after was the period of "getting shit done" as I kicked in to full throttle and overcame my fear of not-wanting-to-code-anymore. Protip: Just get started making something that's interesting to you, and you'll naturally get hooked. Starting is the hardest part, so just realize you need to bite the bullet. Also, if you're stuck, then paint something.

Launched http://www.moreofit.com. It currently gets over 2k unique visits per day, and that figure has doubled every two weeks for the past 12 weeks. Nearly each day is a record day, and day-to-day increase in visits is what used to be my total amount of visits just a short while ago. Running on one instance barely breaking 1% CPU. I don't foresee that growth slowing until about the 20k/day range, maybe I can get 40k/day if I'm lucky, in which time I can try to monetize it and make maybe $40-100/day -- if only there were an ad network that let me define keywords on a per-page basis (rather than crawl my page [adwords] or just define the general keywords for my site).

Also launched http://www.dashler.com, and the bookmarklet, http://www.dashler.com/toolbar, which I think is just ahead of its time and/or is not nearly marketed as well as it could be. I use it daily to get traffic stats on webpages I visit, connect pages with their comments, shorten URLs, etc. Too high of a learning curve for it to be successful, and competitors like Glue make a much more compelling social and viable business out of a similar idea. But still was an amazing learning experience to make javascript+css which runs on any page in a performant manner.

Never got to launch "forums for anything" which I think is a hugely under served market. Just search for "<anything> forums" and see the massively successful vBulletin site set up for it. Why should the web rely on somebody setting up a domain and host, and plopping forum software onto it? Huge barrier to entry for something that the internet was essentially built for. If I could create a forum instantly and without an account, then share that URL with others to use, that would be immensely valuable for organizing any number of events, ideas, projects, etc.

Besides that, got employed at a mid-sized start-up which I'm happy with, and expect to learn a hell of a lot and gain some management or team lead experience, and be part of the growth phase from "something big" to "something huge". The job search process was both fun and stressful (negotiating always presents the possibility of having to walk away), but I'm happy to have gone through the experience; in particular meeting with various start-ups was quite refreshing to realize that I'm not alone in my quest for making something big. Also built some confidence in going essentially 4 for 4 in phone interviews to interviews to offers. All in all, not a bad year for me, despite being broke for 11/12ths of it.

If you're in San Fran, I cannot recommend looking into this company highly enough. I interviewed with them and was thoroughly impressed, and would have taken the job but chickened out on moving away from NYC. That's good news for you. Don't be put off if you know nothing about the health industry or EMR -- it's an exceedingly interesting space once you learn about it.

They're backed by well-networked investors with solid records of success, the founders are extremely familiar with the health industry and have a solid plan to take it on (not to mention, EMR is about to explode and all current implementations of it are stone-age), and the problems you'd be working on are absolutely awesome. You'd be creating a highly sought after product that's poised to create a tremendous amount of value, both in the way patients and physicians interact, and as a profitable product.

If UI and Javascript are your specialty, then I can guarantee you that you won't find more interesting work, and if you do, it certainly will not have greater possible upside or impact on an industry.

I got a job.

To dodge the question: I don't often find creativity to be the bottleneck of my output. Execution is what takes time.

To answer the question: Probably beliefs that act as rules. It's written somewhere in a PG essay that it's best to not know what is "impossible." To generalize, if I believe that Google owns search and it's not possible to enter that market, then I'll subconsciously prune any ideas stemming from "search".

I'm far from an expert on the topic, but couldn't convertible debt be an option?

I should have noted that "foo" wasn't meant to be taken literally; clearly it should be something that wouldn't show up in a dictionary. Even so, the point was that any salt is substantially better than none, and is easy to implement.

Thanks for sharing. Have you subscribed to any strategies?

This might be only tangentially related, and I'm sure nearly everyone on HN knows this, but salting MD5's is probably the easiest way to significantly increase their security. By changing md5($var) to md5($var . "foo") this type of attack could be prevented, assuming that the crackers don't have access to the source code [in this challenge, they did].

To get an idea of what can be exposed if you don't salt, and thus use predictable hashes, have a look here: http://www.google.com/#q=inurl:c4ca4238a0b923820dcc509a6f758...

md5(1) = c4ca4238...

To me, I find it more limiting that child comments are not nested within their parents. For example, implementing a show/hide children feature is annoyingly difficult to do, as is showing trails leading to the parent. IIRC, all HN comments are DOM siblings of each other.

I couldn't care less about divs vs tables or spacer images. However, I really feel tree structured data should be encoded as such, especially when the document itself is tree structured. It seems more difficult to do it otherwise.

Not that it really matters that much. I have bookmarklets that add nesting and trails, but it was just annoying to make them. I realize I'm an edge case, and overall HN is hardly as impacted by it's markup as it is by the community.

If they have a URL an are somewhat popular, I use my website: http://www.moreofit.com to find similar services and companies. By noting the tags you can gain tremendous insight into the breadth and depth of the market space. By altering the sort popularity, you can quickly note who's doing well.

Technically, photons always travel at c. Slow moving light is caused by the medium continually absorbing, delaying, then re-emitting the photon, or by other stuff which I won't pretend to understand [1]. Either way, rest assured that electromagnetic propagation always travels at c WRT any inertial frame.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_light

You don't need math skills to solve this, only problem solving skills. There are only so many ways to systematically choose 50 boxes from 100 when the only information is a name on the inside and a number on the outside.

Assume the prisoners do not have access to the internet.