skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does Microsoft expect applicants to know what all these internal terms mean? Or is this a listing more for internal candidates?

If you’re looking for a new role where you’ll focus on one of the biggest issues that is top of mind for KT and Steve B in “Compete”, build a complete left to right understanding of the subsidiary, have a large amount of executive exposure, build and manage the activities of a v-team of 13 district Linux& Open Office Compete Leads, and develop a broad set of marketing skills and report to a management team committed to development and recognized for high WHI this is the position for you!
Ha thanks, it's been like that for quite some time. Some day I'll get around to fixing that. We get like 7 hits a month there so it's at the bottom of the list.
Playing it here on a 4 year old iMac (2.0GHz 32 bit Core Duo, 1GB RAM) and it's running great
I really like how mature rails is these days, there's so much good stuff around for rails, and it keeps on getting better.

Interesting with ruby 1.9 performance, I've been thinking about making the switch. I doubt that the pay-as you go services will switch anytime soon, if it will half their winnings in the short run.
Smart Sincere Syndrome
Sure, but it's different to say "people downvote humor" (which is mostly true) and "people have no sense of humor" (which is mostly an insult.) I think I have a sense of humor, but I downvote fluff jokey comments unless they're screamingly funny.

A good example is yesterday, there was a post that got a lot of upvotes before it died -- it was an image with a 6 by 6 matrix of programming languages, and each slot had a funny image macro-y picture showing how proponents of language X felt about language Y. I flagged that thread. (If it were a comment, I would downvote it.) Well, why did I do that? It wasn't terrible, although it was only a little bit funny.

I did it because there are literally a million places on the internet where I can look at pictures that are a little bit funny, and only a handful of places where I can have a serious discussion about things that I am actually interested in. I believe the problem with throwaway jokes is that they're so easy. Among 1,000 average readers, perhaps 5 of them have an insightful comment about, i.e. a new feature in R6RS Scheme, but 500 of them could easily post a silly joke about parentheses. Result? If you try to talk about Scheme you get 495 jokes for every piece of expert commentary. Not cool.

(Realistically, there are many other kinds of comments that are problematic in this way. For example, it's easy to religiously stick to one big general paradigm and zealously apply it to everything, so you wind up with some of that. It's easy to attack people instead of confronting complicated ideas, so you wind up with some of that. I think it's just a consequence of less-informed but social people trying to find an angle by which to contribute. Sometimes I'm guilty of this myself!)

Based on my experience in other places online, it looks like a really, really, really slippery slope, so I err on the side of throwing out all fluff.
Bug Driven Development: Samurai Debugging Reinvented
Funny: Samurai Debugging was a technique in Extreme Programming. Now Bug Driven Development (BDD) aka. Defect Driven Design (DDD) takes this to the next level by involving the customer.
But there is some truth behind the concepts of this humorous story.
Isn't this the sort of table that shows its author is a L337 hax0r because he's in the top category of everything? Anyone who automatically puts things like DVCS, TDD, and practices obviously related to Open Source development in the top tier sounds more like a Kool-Aid drinker than an objective observer making a sincere attempt to provide a useful resource.
Estate taxes are retarded to begin with, this is just ridiculous. Why don't these people just give as a gift all their stuff to their kids while they are alive? Canada might have a 5% GST tax, but we don't have any of this nonsense.
Not really. I have several parked there. If it isn't an obvious mistyped domain, or had a previous live site, you will not get any traffic, and as such, no money. I have several domains parked, but only one (a closed site) generates any income.
Yes it's stereotyping and yes it's bad and all that. But I think my experiences are roughly on par with yours.

I've seen some absolutely stellar Indian hires though, but they really tended to come from the better, more established schools. A colleague of mine has been staffing her department heavily with Indian candidates not because the asking salary is cheaper, but because that just so happens to be where most of the candidates are coming from.

>instead they repeat a set of jargon IT words they read somewhere in a book

I've noticed the IT-jargon diarrhea as a pervasive problem on Indian resumes. Of the couple hundred or so resumes I've reviewed in the last six months, only the Indian ones had a section under each previous employer labeled "environment" followed by a list of every hot IT technology in the last 20 years. Sometimes to comical effect, "wow you worked in a place that used Cobol, Java Server Pages, Perl, Python, Ruby, AND Quantum Computing? And you list that you are an expert in the Waterfall Methodology AND RAD?".

I admire our immigrant population for coming to seek a better life and typically for their awesome work ethic. But sometimes the standard Resume Writing 101 course that seems to be taught at every Indian IT trade school does a disservice to them.
I used to have the same problem but different country. My well known US school wasn't so well known abroad. If you aren't in the top 10 you fall off quickly.

Now, my school is now infamously well known because of an unfortunate murder-suicide a few years back.
That's pretty neat actually. Simple idea, well executed.

Couple tiny points:

- I was expecting to use my old tweets, instead of posting a new one. This way actually makes more sense, but maybe I could select from my recent tweets too?

- The toolbar in the editor shows as soon as I mouseover the image, which makes it tough to get my mouse to the top of the photo.
Why Practicing Yoga is Good For the Mind, Body and Soul
I was a .NET developer before launching our startup (http://agilezen.com/), so it was natural for us to use .NET.

It's actually a very good technology stack if you lean on the available open source options instead of just using everything Microsoft suggests. C# is a good language, ASP.NET is very efficient and scalable, NHibernate is a passably good ORM, and ASP.NET MVC is a solid foundation to build webapps on.

It hurts to have to pay license fees for hosting, but we're enrolled in BizSpark, which gives us free licenses for 3 years, and you can always look into running your app on Mono. (We are.)

Not sure what you're looking to find out, but feel free to ask anything. :)
AltaVista was great (or at least sufficient) until they disabled searching for phrases, which made them useless. It was at that point I switched to Google.

Though AltaVista lost in a big way to Google, is it fair to say they are one of the 12 most tarnished brands?
>> " when you're smoking somewhere, and someone else is smoking, that's something you can physically talk to them about."

Agreed. Just like if you've both had a leg amputated, you have something in common and can also strike up a conversation. But it's not a good reason to purposely cut your leg off. That's probably why you believe smokers to be some of the most friendly people you know - because they have something in common with you.

Personally, most smokers I see around are pretty unfriendly.

Drinking is better for lowering the barriers to social interaction IMHO without making everyone smell horrible and choke. Also a bit healthier.

Also I'm sure it depends on where you live. In the UK the culture is very much anti smoking.
Ask HN Readers: Advertising on HN?
Woah, wait a minute. Put the fangs away, True Bloods. In the measly 174 days (actually longer, just didn't create an account) I have been hanging out around here and enjoying your company, insight, intelligence and humor, I might have missed this topic being discussed.

I think the YCombinator news aggregator, the quality of the submissions and the quality of the community compel me to news.ycombinator.com as the first stop when I want some intellectual stimulation. Some visit gossip sites when they have a down minute or bored moment on the internet, I turn to you and here.

But what brought the majority of core users here--if I may assume--was YCombinator the firm, which kicked off this community with like-minded people who set the tone that this will not become a site for spam, memes, or flames, rather thought provoking and conversation provoking news, information and discussion.

YCombinator "the firm" is a trusted venture group that funds the early stage startups--something utterly invaluable to economic growth.

So I ponder this: Digg has struggled with monetizing their site (something that is a must for their long-term survival) and you can make your arguments as to why. BUT, I do not believe that YCombinator would have the same problem. Why? Because they do not need to monetize this community off-shoot they created to survive. In fact, I'm sure they have absolutely no interest in making money from ads here whatsoever.

So, instead of serving ads for the purpose of monetizing, what if for the purpose of funding?

Huh? What? Yes, for funding. What if that money was put into funding startups in some way shape or form? Either traditionally or rewarding startups for winning contests?

I'm sure there are tax and business implications in doing this, but throwing out a ridiculous idea isn't always ridiculous.

Lastly, there seems to be a very niche (yet diverse) demographic that uses this site which would yield higher rates to collect on ads and I'm sure we can trust that YCombinator wouldn't place irrelevant ads in our face. I'm sure there are a few businesses/entrepreneurs in this community alone who would want to buy time/space.

I leave you with that and hope that I did not 1. repeat something that has been discussed a million times before and 2. wasted your time.

Cheers,
James
If you like playing with stuff like this, Cloudvox (cloudvox.com) is also worth a look. You can write callflows in various languages (including straight up JSON), which makes it very nicely hackable.
This seems like a wild exaggeration:

"The behaviour of every function in a mutable, imperative environment is dependent upon the state of all of the other (variables|attributes|bindings|whatever) in your program at the time the function is invoked."

You can write a function in an otherwise mutable and imperative environment like Python:

pi = 3.15 # damn, typo for the value of pi!
pi = pi * 15 # mutate it, wrongly again

def sum(a, b):
return a + b
print sum(7, 8)

Please tell me how sum() depends on pi. The program correctly prints 15.
"Not sure what you're looking to find out"

I am a very curious person. I never know what I am going to find out until I do. The other way to read this is that I never know what I am after until it's too late... ;-)
Beautiful remembrance tinged only slightly by the dubious use of the word "meme".
Anil Dash - Life On Twiter's A-List
It's actually a better article than I was expecting

May I also add Borland, who at one time built some of the best programmer software ever. Turbo Pascal was brilliant, and Delphi was so far ahead of anything else in it's day I could cry. [cuts long rant short...] There should be a special spot reserved in Hell for Borland management, right next to the management of Commodore.

Finally, lets not forget that once great electronics company Hewlett Packard, makers of the finest (and most expensive) electronics test gear bar none. A true engineering company with world class products that has now become yet-another-printer-manufacturer and maker of crappy budget PCs
Just in case anyone gets interested in this... the SitePoint Marketplace is now called Flippa (http://flippa.com)
I wonder if this could be used for better batteries, or capacitors?

Or how about for better superconductors?
This trick is also useful...

* for working on airplanes - easier on the eyes in the low light and your batteries last longer.

* for messing with anyone with a Mac. Just walk over and invert their colors. :)
Open Office = Microsoft Office thats openly sold to the public.
Also, nothing too substantive on "why," except the advice to eschew trendiness and "do your own thing." If you're going to the article for the "why," that's all it is.

(Like Homestar Runner, though)
Where's O(1)?
Outside of the side discussion about weather PageRank is an example of an ad hominem fallacy, (which is directly related to the OT btw as per DH1)

I haven't downvoted amichail's other comments, even though I disagree with them, because they provoked a marginally interesting discussion on what does and what does not constitute an argumentum ad hominem. I did, however, downvote his comment on PageRank because, to me, it appeared to have been posted as a one-liner intended to make the author look witty without any regard to actual validity of the claim. To be brutally honest, I can go elsewhere if I want to hear or read people who want to sound witty and cool. I don't come to HN for posturing, I come for intelligent and insightful discussion.

So, people can only post precisely one comment on a given topic in a thread or risk downvotes? That's the most ridiculous thing I think I've ever read. Redundancy is not a reason to downvote.

Limiting people to only one comment would be ridiculous, yes. But downvoting excessive redundancy seems perfectly reasonable. If I state the same thing over and over in several comments, without adding anything useful to support, expand or modify my argument, then I'm just being loud and repetitive. That doesn't add any value and that's why I tend to downvote that stuff. Beating a dead horse falls into that same category, you know ;)
The amount you could gift away per year, at last count (and it has been rising, recently to 13K - let's assume per spouse). With the 2009 threshold for estate tax ticking in at 3.5 million, if you are subject it simply could not gift this stuff all to your children...and that assumes you were gifting the money every year.
I was at the talk. He didn't claim he cracked GSM and went over the history of the development of A5 attacks. He explained that their work is the first time the data necessary to crack A5 has been made public.

This work is important because it is a major step towards producing a working open source real-time GSM cracker.
I've seen it over a year ago.

My boss says "I fall into the first category but clearly I'm a great software architect." giggle
You have correctly understood the article, but have incorrectly assumed that there must be a point other than plugging the product. Sorry.
I had a conversation with my 6-year-old cousin where she talked passionately about how much she loved club-penguin. She spoke in detail about all the fun times she'd had, that bits of the santa-costume she'd been trying to find & how all her friends were in one igloo together at one point. She even told me about how she had to go on regularly to keep her pets alive (a very clever trick built-in by the game-designers no-doubt).

Listening to her rant on about it made me realise just how engaging these social games are for younger players. It made me see Disney's acquisition of Club Penguin (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/01/disney-acquires-club-pe...) in an entirely new light.
Don't a lot of people establish a living trust to avoid it anyway? It would be interesting to see what percentage of people who qualify to pay an estate tax actually pay the full amount.
Trying to find terrorists based on whether or not they are standing up makes no sense at all. If you actually tried to "run" that scenario, you'd be tackling a lot of people who just couldn't hold their pee anymore.
looks like an internal job ad (to me) that got disclosed incorrectly.
Same can be said for sarcasm. Its why we have <sarcasm> tags. However the entire content of the post is such that it cannot make sense but to be sarcastic/ironic.
Is the cash pickup sound effect the microsoft freelancer transaction sound effect?
The problem with the estate tax is that it was passed in the name of getting back at plutocrats but has worked over the years mostly to make it difficult to keep family businesses intact when the founder dies.

Insane as was the political compromise that led to this final 1-year "repeal" of the tax, this compromise likely will lead (assuming half-reasonable action by Congress this next year) to having a more lasting exemption amount that gives significant relief to many in the middle class beyond 2010. The family business problem will remain. Thus, one should be able to pass, e.g., a $3M estate to heirs without problem but, if you get to $10M and up, there will be a high tax hit.

Still a highly unsatisfactory situation for the public, and one that has the politicians squirming as well, especially since the estate tax (speaking in relative terms only) does not really raise that much in revenue for the federal government.
"Grow your US evidence" ??

Microsoft must have an interesting internal situation going on. On the one hand they want to work with open source - at least, that's what they claim. On the other they want to "compete" with Linux. Since there is enormous overlap between open source projects and Linux projects, that must result in some cognitive dissonance for MS employees.
And apparently this job is also for you if you hate grammar...
A living trust serves primarily as a vehicle by which to avoid having one's estate pass through probate - it does not reduce any applicable estate tax that is otherwise payable on death.
Of course, the point is that a caller of any function in an imperative environment doesn't know what state its implementation depends upon.
In the US, all you pay is the inheritance/estate tax - you don't get double taxed on the actual inheritance that you file. In Canada, while there isn't an estate tax, you get taxed on the gain as if it is income and so you pay the income tax.

If you're going to compare apples to apples, the top marginal tax rates are about 45-50%+ in Canada (http://www.aurorainternational.net/Maximum_Personal_Marginal...) - and given the estate taxes in the US apply to anyone inheriting above a million, it's relatively equivalent for those people while it's considerably worse in Canada for everyone else given that considerably more people inherit less than a million. Another point of comparison - highest marginal tax rates start at 126K (Canadian) while you have to make over 370K USD to start getting charged the highest marginal tax rates.

Addendum - re: gifts - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_States - "the gift tax prevents avoidance of the estate tax should a person want to give away his/her estate."
Interesting. That prompted me to look at the online references

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hooke

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Fame

and learn about the personality disputes among scientists of that era.
Just wanted to add my thanks to the list. This was one of the bigger holes in document processing and now it's been filled for the most part.
Hi James, good idea in principal, but I vote no ads.

This is a great site, one of the Mercedes Benz’s of IT sites. I think ads will make it cluttered. Not everything in life needs to be monetized. Nobel idea, but my vote is for pure conversation.
To me, the fundamental benefit of TDD is that it proves that the code is in the state I think it's in before I make a change, and it proves that the change I made did what I expect.

I think this is the sort of statement that makes some of us foam at the mouth and gesticulate wildly at well-intentioned TDD proponents. TDD doesn't prove anything of the sort. It proves that the code passed your tests before you made the change and passed them after - which is a very, very different thing from proving the change you made did what you expect.

TDD does not prove your change did what you expect, at all. In that you are correct. However, TDD does provide a way to alert you if your change caused a side-effect you were not expecting it to. ie, passing tests does not indicate success, but failing tests alerts you to unexpected failures in edge cases you may not have considered otherwise.

That doesn't invalidate what you said at all, and in fact I agree with it, and think too many people probably equate passing tests with successful feature implementation, which is not ensured. But the fact that it does not serve the purpose you state, does not mean it does not serve any purpose at all.

I think there is some value in it, I just don't know that it is what many of the proponents try to push it as.
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming, Modified: "Any sufficiently complicated system contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of a good VCS"

See: MS Word, Dropbox, S3
Counterparty risk is a bitch.

Particularly when layered with legal and cultural risks.
This argument is absurd.

All functional languages have mutable global variables. Most provide explicit support for mutable values (e.g., Scheme, OCaml), but even in the "pure" ones, there are the secretly global mutable values. Clojure gets them from its STM and from classes in the JVM. Erlang stashes them in ETS, DETS, and Mnesia. Haskell shoves them into the IO and State monads (among others) and hopes you won't notice. In all of these cases, the variable changes may be isolated, threadsafe, or internally consistent, or however you wish to describe it, but if that's not mutable state at a global level, I don't know what on Earth you'd call it. In all cases, this means that a function called twice in a row from the same point in a program may return two different values--and that's exactly what the author is saying is a flaw of imperative languages.

Turning things around, while it's theoretically possible that any given function mutates global state in random ways, no good program is written that way. Instead, the relevant state is passed to a function in the form of a struct or class--exactly what you'd be doing in a functional language, as it happens. The only difference is that the function can, and sometimes does, mutate the structure passed to it, whereas the functional equivalent would likely return a slightly different version of that struct. But, again, a combination of passing things conservatively, naming functions well, and making heavy use of const/final/sealed/what have you to lock things down makes this problem largely absent in practice.

I am not saying that functional programming can't a huge improvement for some things. I am utterly convinced that a multithreaded program should be written in a functional way, if not in a purely functional language. I likewise tremendously favor functional languages for algorithm-heavy applications, where the ease and safety with which I can backtrack and memoize can yield huge productivity gains. But saying that all imperative programs have hundreds of arguments, while functional languages have only those defined? Unless you do no output with the outside world, that claim is simply ludicrous.
Doesn't this fit the definition of a strawman argument?

It's entirely possible and very natural to write imperative programs that don't rely on every possible global variable your application has ever declared.

True, if you're writing a library for consumption by others, then you would have to make it clear that your function depends on certain global variables being defined. But I would like to believe most people writing APIs for use by other programmers would know better than to rely on this type of behavior.
Solar Thieves: Solar Security Is the Latest Business Opp