skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As We May Think
It's a good sign if the interviewee thinks about an RE modifying the strings in a program, though. While programmers who think RE are all-powerful are likely outnumbered by those completely ignorant of them, they're out there. It's important to know REs' limitations - sometimes you need an actual parser. (My favorite example: RFC-822-compliant e-mail address validation - http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html)
As a company they're not new (they're part of Tranquil Hosting) but the first time I heard about RootBSD was in early 2009 I think.
Store Twitter URLs in earth's oceans?
Well, I picked two periods, 1909-1947 and 1947-1985, in one two world wars occurred, in the other the Cold War occurred. But that's the point isn't it? Over time history happens. The time line is not a steady state. People thought that the end of the Cold War was the end of history, but that wasn't the case at all, plenty of history happened and is still happening, throughout the world. Plenty more history will happen in the next 38 years. Perhaps that history will include a war between nuclear powers (somewhat unlikely) or perhaps it will include things we cannot anticipate today, but it's a bit silly to imagine that we can predict what the technology of 2047 will look like.

That's BDUF at its worst. Better to look at the technology needs of today while planning for flexibility and be able to iterate rapidly if we see a need for change down the road. If the US had locked itself into some grand technology road map in 1909 it would have most assuredly lost WWII because it could not have anticipated the technological needs of that war.
Do you recommend a good tutorial for someone who knows Python and wants to learn Clojure?
Hmmm; in the corporate world a position akin to a postdoc's would require no more than the standard two weeks notice.

Given the nature of the work and the theory of collegiality I'd expect things to be different, but what would you say is expected from postdocs? I guess seeking the position of professor is not something you'd be able to keep secret, if for no other reason than that the hiring institution would expect to talk to your current adviser and so on.

Maybe it's a good thing I got sidelined into a sordid life of programming ^_^.

Good luck! Finances forced me to change careers after my freshman year in college, but that was at a time when programming and system administration work was very hot (1980) and I had the skills for the former and the foundation for the latter. Today, I don't recommend a career in these areas unless you have a calling, and it doesn't sound like that's the case for you.
I'm guessing that in an actual interview Yegge would be sympathetic to your point of view:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom...

That being said, here's a question: How many people who self-identify as functional programmers could write an OO program competently? Compare and contrast to the question of how many people who self-identify as OO programmers could write a functional progam competently?

Do the paradigms themselves have anything to do with the difference? Or is this strictly an issue of bias for other reasons?
Well, you claim you know something about music, so do something more than just run your mouth in a forum. Put your stuff online so we can all see how totally original you are.

I'm dying to know.
Agree with the Solr. I started using it this year and it definitely simplifies and speeds up our searches.
I also use it. Awesome.
Tell HN: Please read /noobstories and flag posts
I just flagged 10 obvious spam posts, spread over the past 8 hours. I realize that most of HN has been asleep for approximately these hours; but please join me in reading http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories and flagging the spam.

PG: Please make this easier by putting [flag] links directly onto the noobstories page.
>The point is, the Bank bailout was spending taxpayers money without our consent.

Tax money is always spent without our consent in this sense. I don't recall the government asking my personal permission the last time they build a hospital or maintained a road. But they are elected and authorized to spend that money.
Writing pseudocode on paper will shift focus from correcting minor syntax errors to how well they understand concepts, which is arguably more important. It's still worth requiring them to produce at least a tiny piece of working code, though.

I helped interview someone who couldn't explain the trade-offs between a couple different designs for a simple class hierarchy, even an obviously wrong one included as a canary. Then we asked him to write one out, and, after stalling and getting several hints from us, he nervously scratched out a (naive) MySQL schema. Despite what his resume claimed, his only programming experience consisted of PHP and a fairly shallow understanding of SQL.
Lecture Notes on Quantum Computing
Boo. IRV sucks (probably as much or more than plurality). Approval voting FTW. See http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/. Noice how Approval and Condorcet voting produce the same pictures (aside from Approval having a little fuzzier edges).
I wonder how long this will last. "Fair" voting approaches such as preferential ranking attempt to address the challenge of producing an outcome that is agreeable to everyone, which is subtly different than recognizing the "best". This will favor a compromise result over one that is challenging, thought-provoking, or "artistic" in other meaningful ways.
Gmail: A Google-féle e-mail rendszer
Another consideration this article doesn't seem to touch on: Heat.

Particle-beam weapons especially, but also anything carried by a ship that generates significant energy that isn't thrust, is going to generate a lot of waste heat, due to those blasted laws of thermodynamics. Where does all that heat go?

Yes, space is very, very, cold. But vacuum is about as close as you can get to an ideal thermal insulator, so if you want your imaginary warship to be spamming giant lasers like a Gradius boss, you're going to need some way to rapidly dispose of heat before your entire ship cooks like a P4 with no heat sink.
Obnoxious? Wow you really are out of touch with yourself. You do realize you called me an idiot, immature, and juvenile right? You consistently insult me behind the guise of fake wisdom and objective observation, but really it's an act so you can insult people like me without getting called out on it.

Your plan actually works pretty well because, while other people here say I should follow the posting guidelines, nobody says you should. Despite the fact that to an educated intellectual such as myself the insult of "idiot" is probably one of the worst you could sling.
I wouldn't say "beating" so much as "playing", since the challenge is to compare the length of the programs that accomplish the task. Your compojure solution accomplishes this at the request level, passing data between request handlers using session variables. The current arc solution has only one request handler for the entry point, and then uses temporary anonymous handlers to chain the session. This is something which could probably easily be added to compojure, since clojure has language features similar to arc.
I got the impression it was even better than that, e.g. didn't David Cameron say some things that he quickly had to walk back when the 2nd shoe dropped?

A bit like how the ACORN videos over here were carefully released so that generally at least one statement made after each quickly became "non-operative" as it's said over here.
I'm in exactly the same boat - finished my PhD in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, now a postdoc, also at Penn, and want out. Funnily enough I'm also looking at things like McKinsey and BCG, but they hire on a yearly basis only - as in, I couldn't even get an interview until September 2010, and they wouldn't be making a hiring decision until January 2011.

I'd love to chat with you about this - send me an email to my username at 3e.org.
No, the iterative approach is only marginally less terrible. If, for some strange reason, you actually need a Fibonacci function that's efficient, you have two choices, depending on the return type:

Are you returning a machine integer (long or otherwise)? Precompute them and use a freaking lookup table. The sequence grows so fast you'll never see more than maybe 60 or so terms.

Are you returning an arbitrary-size bignum? Use the closed-form solution based on powers of the golden ratio. It still runs in non-constant time (bignum math isn't free), but will run much faster than pointlessly enumerating the sequence up to that point.

Of course, I would be surprised if anyone asking about Fibonacci numbers in an interview has ever been looking for one of those answers. Usually it's a "FizzBuzz for recursion" question.
Yes a quicker flag option would be immensely helpful.
Consider this: an unmanned missile can accelerate much faster than a manned spacecraft, so it can evade laser fire much more effectively as it approaches the enemy. At a critical distance it launches its payload: hundreds or thousands of tiny (e.g. 10 gram or so) fragments distributed in a grid (at a density of, say, 1/m^2 distributed over as much as a km^2 at the interception distance). These intercept the target at 10s, 100s, or 1000s of km/s. Such a weapon is hard to defend against, even with highly effective lasers, and is devastating to the target.
Boo. Approval sucks. Schulze method for the long haul. Majority criterion is fairly important, yeah? Approval (aka restricted range voting) fails that.

On a side note, I've been working on a JSON web service to calculate election winners in various systems. Feedback would be sweet. http://vote.cognitivesandbox.com
My Initiation at Store 5476
Now sir, I would like you to go back and think very carefully about what you just did. Rory insulted me directly without any provocation on a thread about _why. He called me an idiot and juvenile, both statements that are unfounded and untrue. Even though he wrapped it in very intellectual sounding prose he still insulted me.

Now, nobody flagged him for the troll he is. In fact, nobody ever said "hey it's not within our posting guidelines to call someone an idiot".

However, when I reply and insulted him back not only do people like you defend him, but you say I'm being a troll and that I need to grow up. Even though it's (hopefully) clear that I may just be trolling him for a reason.

It's not right for you to apply a standard to me that you don't also apply to Rory. If I'm not allowed to be immature, juvenile, and insulting than neither is he. In fact, he's more in the wrong here because he did it without provocation for no other reason than to troll and win favor with people who have your opinion.

Next time, if there's a standard you have, such as "people should be mature and not insult others" then you should apply it to both parties in an argument. If everyone did this then trolling like this might end fairly quickly. In fact, don't even reply, just flag both posts and move on.
This really shouldn't be labeled "beating" (note, neither the Ruby nor Go versions claimed such). This takes more parse tree entries than the Arc version, which was the metric defined there.
Getting a job as professor can be difficult. There is a strong competition and it may take up to a year, sometimes more. Scientific etiquette usually says that your supervisor will support you during that time if they can, by allowing you to stay in the lab and keep doing research although at slower pace due to the traveling the job seek involves. In fact, advisors actually gain from postdocs finding good positions because it's the best publicity to attract good people in the future.

One thing that I learnd from my time doing research is that science is not moving so fast and so well because of the people; au contraire!
It's because of the scientific method. The Galileian method is the best thing man ever came out with. Take a bunch of jerks, make them work in (at least loose) accordance to scientific method and they'll do amazing stuff.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3t.html

This is an ugly site, but it goes through a rational, technology based approach to space, and space warfare. I've linked to the space war part specifically, but it's all interesting.

It has lots of fluff from various sci-fi stories as well showing all the schools of thought through sci-fi history. I recommend you waste all day today, and read through it.
clicky: http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories
I'd also like to add that as of this year I'm also using 7zip (which replaced winrar, which replaced winzip). I've also started a new job, we are using TFS for source control which was new to me. And does Windows 7 count?
Bowing to Body Clocks, Some N.B.A. Teams Are Sleeping In
I'm actually surprised this change hasn't happened before. 512 bytes is ridiculously small (and useless) these days.
You don't need Firebug in Chrome, fyi.

The built-in developer tools are WebKit's, which have been far better than Firebug for about the last year now.
I would guess that almost all functional programmers know OO programming, but very few OO programmers know functional programming.

I think this is just because of pedagogic issues. Every introductory book/class introduces OO, but most undergraduate CS courses barely discuss functional programming (besides a semester on ML or Scheme, if you're particularly lucky).

So, the people who go out off the beaten path to learn functional programming are a self selected subset that is particularly driven, curious, etc.
Yes, exactly. While the corruption may be "retail," the fact or suspicion calls into question their ability to conduct more substantial business in the people's interest.
I did benchmarks on OS X (10.5) between asynchronous IO, mmap, stdio, and normal unix open/read (disabling caching) — it all came down to about the same after I had fiddled with page size, prefetch size, etc. to optimize each.

This of course depends on your OS (and version). My advice would be to pick API based on “semantics” (or need for portability). If you need to read through a file, use the API intended for that because mmap will not be optimized for that access pattern, but stdio will.
Does your bank reject payments to your account done with moneybookers and you have to explicitly remind your bank that you want those payments and then everything is ok?
Go Language Patterns
It is a work in progress, very helpful for those taking their first steps in Go Lang, or for those interested in comparing Go to other languages.
I seriously have improved my programming more from reading little asides from folks on their blogs than I have from all the conferences I've been sent to. (Recently, a HN comment caused me to replace ImageMagick with GraphicsMagick. Cut 50% of my request times for less than 5 minutes of work -- 2 lines of code had to change. Where have you been all my life?)

Yay for sharing information.
It'd make me laugh if somebody's resume listed "5 years experience with C++, deadlocks, linking errors", though. :)
The European side of HN needs to earn some more karma in overall so we have a 'solid' 24/7 moderation on HN :)
Dig Dig Dig, After the Eastcoast Got Hammered by Snow
What is DRM doing in my garage?
2 months off to travel the world. I went to:

Israel, Comoros Islands, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Hungary, Kenya, Japan, Taiwan, Seychelles Islands, China, Zanzibar, and England.
Interesting visualizations, but do the problems mentioned have any relevance for real elections? What happens if you move from two dimensions down to one, or up to many dimensions? While some of the pictures look ugly, does any IRV scenario actually result in a disastrous outcome -- ie a candidate with views far away from those of the electorate being able to win?

Approval voting seems like a worse idea in practice than in theory. I can easily imagine scenarios in which an unknown (and quite possibly incompetent or extremist) candidate with an attractive-sounding party name could garner enough votes to come out ahead (something like this recently happened with the Family First Party in several Australian elections).
email sent.
Boca Raton Real Estate
Trading Deals, A Lost Art?
Is it even possible to enter any valid email address there? I have an email address whose only special character is the dot before the top level domain and it doesn't get accepted.
But largely "Je vous en prie" does not translate as "you're welcome and I mean that with the respect a subordinate accords his superiors". There's more, and I really, really can't explain it, because I simply don't have the words. It's not just that there's no short phrase - the fact that it's a short phrase does itself carry information.

Your point about "nuclear reactor" is well taken, but, ultimately, not really relevant. No amount of explanation makes a joke funny to someone who doesn't "get it." Further, many coordinate bilinguals never get this feeling, simply because they're coordinates. Compound bilinguals do get it, and find it impossible to explain.

And here I am, once again, trying to explain a joke to someone who doesn't get it.

(Please note - that last was an analogy. This isn't a joke, it is real that there are some terms that just don't translate, even when you expand your translation into an explanation. Some things need to be experienced, and cannot be appreciated from logic and reason alone.)
Computing the maximum salary
No, I asked why this movie has been so heavily promoted, and if it's possible the Arrington/TC review was bought as it seemed a glowing endorsement of a film that I have not heard great things about elsewhere and which does not have great trailers. Clearly from the downvotes people think I was attacking TC et all, but as I've said I'm just asking as I have no idea why this review seemed so contrary to what I've found elsewhere to date.
This is not the first New Scientist article in recent days to attract a lot of comments of the form "I went there and got sent to a site that sells fraudulent antimalware".

New Scientist itself is certainly not in that business. newscientist.com is certainly New Scientist's website. So either they, or some DNS server(s) somewhere, have been compromised. (Where I count accepting an advertisement whose effect is to redirect visitors to a fraud site as being compromised.)
Noninvasive Technique to Rewrite Fear Memories Developed
What problem did you solve using it?

I've been studying Clojure and it seems to be impressive. But I have yet to see some really impressive open source software that was written in it.
Interesting, again, you wrap your insults in intellectual sounding words and people rate you at 5 points, yet my reply is at -2 points. Very interesting in deed.

Let's add it up. You've called me pathetic, idiot, immature, juvenile, questioned my mental state, said I have emotional issues, insulted my 30-year-old age, and questioned my manhood so far. Good thing I know myself pretty well or I might actually be insulted.

Everyone eats it up like candy and boosts your comment to the top. Good job.

Yet, when I insult you back in my style HN rates me down quite harshly. My retaliation is seen as "immature", yet people completely gloss over your insults entirely. It's as if your insults are the parenthesis in LISP and are just to be ignored.

What I find even more interesting is that you state your insults are legitimate criticism. They aren't, they're just insults, and fairly obnoxious ones. Legitimate criticism would be done in private and would include ways to improve, and typically comes from people who actually know the person.

Your criticism is just insults, and based on the size of this response, I'd say mine are way more effective at getting you worked up.

Now lets see if people try to justify their preconceived voting of our respective comments by pointing out key phrases from my reply, but not from yours.
I've been convinced that range voting it the best -- better than IRV and approval voting. It's intuitive also. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting
What kind of voting system would result in correctly recognizing "the best" in your opinion? And how does "the best" film differ from the compromise candidate?
What makes us human?
Genomic differences between humans and other primates
FParsec is a great parser library for F#.

I learned F# and built a DSL in about a week using it.
MyYearbook | ROBERTA K. main page **NO LONGER ON BATTLE FIELD **
Revisor (see: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=236679).

The ability to create custom Linux spins and even full system software thumbdrives make drive failures / system recovery much less impacting. It also makes "ready to go" installations a snap.
Some couldn't produce either.

I look for someone to sketch a correct algorithm using any notation they choose. Independently I look for someone to produce working code with an editor and compiler. The former is usually for something like linked lists or quicksort, the second for something like FizzBuzz and then recursive and iterative Fibonnaci.

Working code is essential for something, anything, at some point, although really what I want is someone who can then talk sensibly through the issues. Even so, working code for trivial problems is still only seen in about 10% of cases.
Amazon EC2
Engine Yard's Flex
Ruby on Rails
Ruby
I agree. You'd get a lot more feedback if you just posted it here for all HN-ers.
Reading the Tattoos on People’s Faces
No joke, one dude I interviewed claimed so-many years experience of C++, it turned out he meant experience of running programs written in C++ on his PC (!)

I really am utterly mystified why people do this. It was the first skill he listed. Did he not think an interviewer might ask him about it? And even on the offchance he blagged his way through the interviews, he's not going to be able to fake it to the machine and he'll be found out on his first day. It really shakes my faith in human nature, interviewing :-(
U.S. information consumption in 2008 totaled 3.6 zettabytes
Economies in Emerging Markets to exceed 50% of world for first time
Small world on these pipes!

It all depends on your interests and tolerance for risk. I've never cut the umbilical cord because I still enjoy my research. Being a visiting scientist has allowed me to keep a toehold in the academy and still push out papers. But I have needed more extended periods for ideas I wanted to pursue that everyday research didn't allow. I'm biased but the Boston area is perhaps one of the best places to try to turn research into action but it's less a startup culture, it seems, than CA.

Where possible you might consider lateral moves into fields that could benefit from the skills and concepts you've been thinking about but that are closer to industry. A clean break might feel more freeing however. That's where your current interests come in. If you spin off of your current work you'll probably have an easier time landing on your feet into a related field (e.g., computational vision and robotics?) or startup (e.g., lumosity.com). If you stay in your current position you can try some classes in new fields. Rely on the strengths you have there. See if you're interested in the business/finance side by auditing courses at Wharton (or your business school, crocowhile). Or sample research in bioengineering etc. A big university is a great place to reorient and by connecting with like minds. After all, that's what got you on your current path. Then again, if you see that as part of the problem, then a clean break may be necessary.

Honestly, the more I've been talking to people outside of the bubble, the more I've been seeing the bubble. But it's been a slow process of self-discovery for me. How quickly you move will probably depend on how much urgency you feel for a change. And how cheaply you live will determine how long you can live free to pursue your own ideas. YC and similar programs (DreamIT in Philly) seem like a really good way to develop any ideas you may be interested in pursuing.