skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe if you asked mother nature, she would say there is no live without diversity.
The quote may not be directed strictly at business innovation, but you find that in most environments, the rule is true, therefore why would a business be different.
As an example, we would agree that a diversity of skills is necessary to business success. You need a leader, a coder, a designer, a marketer, etc.

Where this becomes true when related to race and culture is in bringing different view points and ways of thinking.
However, I believe the most important thing is that we get beyond race as a differentiator. I don't believe that the color of a persons skin affects their work.

Are we trying to have it both ways, where we say 'skin color doesn't matter', and at the same time saying 'mixing race is good for innovation'?

I'm confusing myself on this one.
All eyes on Bloom Box fuel cell launch
The "real" bathroom of Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne
This is actually a really good idea! I wonder if there is a more full-fledged solution where the code can be actually compiled and the output returned from the web browser. This might be a pretty good startup idea in the making.
python -c "print '\n'.join(open('file.txt').readlines()[::-1])"

Hmmm, slightly longer then the Perl version ;-)

python -c "print '\n'.join(reversed(list(open('test.py'))))"

Somewhat more elegant, but still lots of parentheses.
RIM Files for New Patent - Advertising in Emails the Next Step?
It seems completely unfathomable to pose for a programming job. It's one of the rare professions where your skills and understanding can be tested very quickly, harshly and objectively.

It would probably be easier to lie your way (with mere knowledge and possibly some experience) into the position of a lawyer, an airline pilot, or a medical doctor than a programmer.

(At least I hope they don't test doctor applicants as like "Please operate this unfortunate cardiac surgery patient as an example so that we know you'll know how to do it.")
Walmart Acquires Online Movie Service Vudu
SCALE 8x: Pete Kronowitt: Killing Moblin
Ask HN: What books on running a software/web dev shop are worth reading?
I know there's tons of blog posts out there, but for more substance i sometimes like books. What have you read which was useful. Specifically going the bootstrapping / software dev shop route vs getting funding.
So, his two examples of people who weren't experts but succeeded were Larry and Sergey, two PhD students from Stanford studying search algorithms, and that doesn't qualify them as experts?

Or Joel, who was a program manager at one of the most successful and selective Software companies on the planet?
Does anybody actually have links to tests or coding exercises like this? I would love to do some.
This is actually a very well known problem: http://sourcemaking.com/antipatterns/the-grand-old-duke-of-y...

Unfortunately, it doesn't necessarily end upon hiring either. Usually, the "implementationists" won't get the "abstractionist" point of view and will reject it immediately. And since they're more common, this can lead to bad ideas winning simply because everyone understands them.
That and genetics.
Touche; If you are racing manuals (or your codebase is jdk 1.0 er.. what it was 15 years ago), then no.
Wow, so it's been so long since I've had a 'programming' test I had to go look up the FizzBuzz test. A first year compsci student should be able to whip up a solution in minutes. I can't believe that people try for programming jobs and fail FizzBuzz.
Hasn't OpenX been doing this for a while now?
"The first commercial 3D bio-printer for manufacturing human tissue and organs."
The Toyota Recall and the Case for Open, Auditable Source Code
This won't tell WHO has been looking at your fan page either, at least not specifically. The data is fairly anonymous.
What Do People Ask Their Social Networks? – GigaOM
We can also question the validity and reasoning of the criticism and hopefully arrive at a better level of criticism. It does no good to simply say "I disagree, therefore it is wrong."

In this case, the author has characterized Apple's operation of Apple's own store as "almost Stalinian" and "completely unacceptable in a democratic country" without any argument to support this. Pointing out that it is within Apple's rights is a counter-argument to the argument that was actually made, not merely a dismissal of it as inarguable.
I would take it as such that Toyota just happened to be the first to get hit by this. The others are no less vulnerable.

As software propagates into the design of previously mechanical products, we'll get more of these. There must be lots of bugs in other car models and makes that could surface anytime.

Avionics software does keep planes in air but if you applied the same level of rigor to making automotive software nobody could afford the cars.
In my experience I know a couple people who don't understand how the conversation starting and ending works. Usually a person's tone and speaking pace has a distinct pattern at the beginning of the conversation, and also a distinct pattern at the end that shows that the conversation is ending.

These people just start off talking like it is the middle of the conversation. When they are done they just walk right off abruptly. It is interesting the way we come to expect certain speaking patterns based on how most people communicate.
The value of Facebook would plunge to a fraction if that was possible. If you, before every click, had to consider what the "target" would make of your visit. Am I visiting too often? Too rarely? So my girlfriends ex is visiting my profile fairly often, what's up with that?
9 - A Salvação - DVDRip - XviD - [Dual Audio] + Legenda - The Extreme
Does any speech recognition software use vowel normalization?
The Youtube video cuts out at 0:03 out of 0:04 on my system. Was it supposed to show anything other than that "Identify Me" link?
I write HR applications, strangely, for a living. I did this kind of work once with a tight-knit, small, lean team back in 2001-2004. That, I will say, was an intense and awesome experience. We solved some amazing problems: workforce planning, inventory management, salary deductions, even adoption and foster care program management.

Fast forward to where I am today, writing HR applications on a much larger scale, and the funny thing is we're solving the same problems we 'solved' years ago, just in a different, more enterprisey (read: slow, buggy) way. Its both sad, and amusing to watch from a distance.

That said, even the most boring of application will give you a rush when you hit a breakthrough. I once got excited over finishing a brute force solution to a problem in college. Sure, it was inefficient, but I wrote it, and it worked.
Funny. By those standards applied strictly, google's own search result pages would be considered spam. Jason can argue that there is value in the SELECTION of content that is not explicitly visible but nonetheless significant.

Similarly, Hacker News homepage might be considered spam because it's mostly titles of articles. Until you take into account the value of the votes--which is value that these google guidelines don't address clearly.
I wonder if this might lead Facebook to start caching images on fan pages like they sometimes do for images in apps.
On a related note, the Oatmeal just posted 10 reasons to avoid talking on the phone:

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/phone
FLAME BAIT IS FLAMING
Yeah a good point, actually. I actually am just subconsciously responding to the implicit meme that seems to be spreading that if they get the coding question right, they win. I think for screening out morons, that is probably a good bar. But don't forget to do the next coding question in person, and drill into areas where they gloss over things that they may not understand.
In the analogy, Apple's store is the restaurant. Once you leave the restaurant (the store), Apple's policies within the restaurant do not apply. Shedding the analogy: They can't and don't do anything to stop you from viewing pornography (or whatever) through channels other than the App Store.
SCALE 8x: Xen in Antarctica, An Interview with Stephen Spector
Wal-Mart Is Said to Be Buying Vudu Movie Service
From what I have seen Google is doing a really poor job of protecting account details, from Google Wave, which basically just publishes your email address for anyone to see, to Google Docs.

Collaboration automatically opens up security problems.
I didn't mean to imply that the entire operation should consist of one person, but re-reading my post I can see how you may have gotten that.

I definitely agree that it is rare that the skills necessary to do this exist in one person however my position doesn't exclude groups from taking this approach as well.
All these Calacanis / SEO Book cat fights are getting annoying.
FBI, grand jury now probing high school's webcam spying (Updated)
No, it DOES NOT qualify them as experts by the definition given by this latest 10k hours craze.

And no being a program manager at Excel DOES NOT qualify Joel as an expert on blogging or bug tracking.

My point is: Neither of those matter.
Having done all three, I disagree that any one is categorically more or less difficult than the other.
Electric cars: a practical solution?
The Lord of the Rings Blu-ray scam
FBI tracks suspects' cell phone without warrants
They identify the hacker who attacked Google
Brainstorming a sane app review process (Feedback wanted)
You know what they call alternative medicine that has been proved to work?

Medicine.
Well the debate really is how well should Google reward Mahalo for it's practices. Namely, how much ranking Google should (and other search engines) give to Mahalo on it's SERPs (search engine results pages)?

I don't think Google's search results or even Hacker News really ever shows up too often on SERPs except for their respective brands... so it doesn't really apply. They are destination websites not focused on search traffic.
some of these discussions make a lot of sense for HN as many entrepreneurs here are building businesses around content ie - "what is spam?". This one does not.
I guess this is a good way to weed out people as well? Depending on the type of company you are, you probably don't want someone who has never written any stuff they can show you at all.
This is doing the rounds among SEOs on Twitter: http://www.mahalo.com/search?q=mattcutts%20is%20gay%20and%20...
Workplace Democracy: Isthmus Engineering (2006)
thanks for the feedback!

The site is intended to cater to two types:
Task Creator: a developer who comes across a bug, missing feature in an open source project. this developer posts the task on nextsprocket for a small reward amount.

Task Solver: Anyone can come along, see the task, submit the patch to the OS project and submit it as a solution on nextsprocket. The task creator will select the correct solution. Or reject with a note like "it didn't satisfy this test case"

it's different from the crowdspring/99designs model because every developer can benefit from solution because the tasks are for open source projects.
Handy tutorial/reference site for Javascript, Python, and more
And you'll notice that Google does not index its own search result pages, nor encourage anyone else to do so. Perhaps "spam" is too pejorative a word and "things that should not be in our search engine" would be a better description.
LARubyConf 2010: A Ruby In The Sun
"All these Calacanis / SEO Book cat fights are getting annoying"

the catfights landing on HN (and getting voted up) is doubly annoying!
Hmm... are you talking about the business side of things / the technical side?

The question will be clearer if you are more specific on this point...
I fully support being polite, but there's a lot more to vowels than relative pitch. When speaking a vowel, the geometry of your mouth creates multiple resonant frequencies. The ratio among those frequencies is far more important than the ratio of the dominant frequency of one vowel to the dominant frequency of the next.

Consider a couple of examples:

1. A trombone can't say "I Owe You", despite the fact that it can produce any dominant frequency, and that phrase contains only vowels.

2. Voice "Ahhhhhhhhhhhh", going from a high to a low pitch (I imagine the doppler effect of a cartoon screaming as he rides by on a cart), and then voice "Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh" in the same fashion. At every point, they sound different. You can't take a clip from an arbitrary pitch range of an Ah and convince someone its an Oh.

3. Shape your lips like you would for oo as in Moon, Noon, or Spoon, and try make the ea vowel as in Squeak just by changing your pitch. It won't happen. You'll get the German ö, but not the English ea.
PleaseRobMe & our culture of fear
"search result pages would be considered spam."

I don't think so. It looks like the policy is in place to keep you from having to perform multiple clicks to get where you want. In the common use case (I visit Google.com, type a search, get a result) I do not have to click on anything more than the search result to get where I am going. The difference is in a use case where my search result takes me to a search results page, which means I am only halfway (or less) to my target page after clicking on the Google search result. This doesn't mean, necessarily that all Mahalo content is bad, but that Google shouldn't be indexing Mahalo search results pages, and instead should link directly to the resultant content pages instead (scraped or not.)

Similarly, Hacker News articles should not be the result of a search done on the news title (as HN's link to the original article actually increases the article's score, right?), but should perform better if the matched term is found in the HN-specific content (e.g., the commentary we create on HN only.)

I'm sure that there are (hopefully) edge cases in which a search for the article title returns the HN link instead of to the original article, but that should be the exception to the rule. Of course, if HN were to have an absurdly high page rank and link to a relatively unknown (or new) blog, it would likely lead to a result on here, instead of the other way 'round.
Yeah, after that it shows my Google username. Do others have this problem as well? It was my first time trying to make a screen capture, sorry.
(I should point out that the last comment was WRT the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Khrushchev's "adventurism" (or whatever) in it and the lead up was the grounds for purging him from office.)
It's also wrong - "readlines" keeps the "\n", and you've added another one between lines.
How much original content is there in Google Reader? Not defending Mahalo, especially if it stealing copyrighted content from other sites, but not having original content doesn't mean you don't provide value. Google Reader has value and no original content.
I disagree.

Double standards need to be exposed.

If you do any of these things that Mahalo is doing, you'd get delisted from Google in no time.
They're also important. If Mahalo, Demand Media, etc. all continue to do what they're doing, then they'll have built a publisher-paid paywall around most of the content online.

That is bad news for anyone who tries to get long-tail organic search traffic. It's good news for sites with great brand names, but terrible news for anyone else.
Right, but the carrying capacity is a bit small even for local commuting.
A few highlights not mentioned on the front page:

* render latex fragments inline (thanks to auctex)

* embed & run code (python, ruby, haskell, R, etc)

* text-mode spreadsheet (including cell functions)

* render ascii-art drawings to png (combine with M-x artist-mode)

* export via latex to pdf or html
This whole thing is insane.... we have "stub" pages just like Wikipedia.

These are topic pages that people are working on and THEY DON'T RANK in search engines until they we get the word count to around 300-500 words.

We are the process of NOINDEXING the pages that are below 300 words just to make Aaron happy... we actually had these noindexed before our last version and that got lost in the shuffle of the new launch (really, it did... when you do new code you might leave something out of the old code).

i'm also getting a list of every page under 300 words and having the page managers build them out in 30 days or deleting them.

Anyway, i thank Aaron for busting out chops and making us better!

The claims that we are "scraping" are absurd... we're using google, bing, twitter, etc. apis to do a comprehensive search page.

i dont know everything about SEO, but i don't understand this claim by Aaron. i think he is trying to start trouble for us... and maybe it will work. Thanks pal!
Making a PHP & MySQL File Download Counter
Not a tech demo but I am starting bite size with small set of features.

The bit that interests me is that there are some people who just don't like it and almost take exception/philosophically opposed to it [1]. There are others I can see from my stats who spend a baffling amount of time browsing around the site jumping from one book to the next for way longer than I originally anticipated anyone would. Most people, of course, lie in-between and don't take it too seriously.

My thoughts? It's just a novel way to browse for books (no pun intended), people like to categorise and it's fun.

1. http://twitter.com/debwhite/status/7202044020
I think there are two key components:

* Build something that someone will want to buy. Something awesome that solves a real problem elegantly, that's proven itself by garnering users, and that would fit well in an acquirer's business.

* Closely related to that: don't be a giant, money burning machine. Really cool ideas (i.e. unlimited free music) are often implemented with intractable business plans. Being far from profitable will make any buyer think twice about you.
If Google started giving people public Google Reader pages, would you like it if Scoble's Google Reader outranked your blog when people searched for your blog's name?

There is value in duplicate content. But there's no value in a search query taking you to a search page, where the site you wanted to land on has to pay Mahalo for adding an extra click between you and what you wanted.
I hear that the Nexus One has a lack of Python support. You would think it would. Anyone know why this is?
Call me a luddite but I really prefer driving a car with no software in between my foot and the parts that govern acceleration and deceleration.

Just because you CAN use software for something doesn't mean you SHOULD use software for it.
Firstly, this is nothing to do about finding a good developer, it's to find out whether someone can program at all. I thought that would be clear from reading this thread, but perhaps it's now long enough that you haven't read it all, even though you have replied to a comment fairly deep in the hierarchy.

Secondly, this question didn't ask not to use the "reverse" features in the language. Indeed, the suggested solutions do use the reverse features.

Thirdly, perhaps this particular task is a good one, perhaps it isn't. Even so, it seems good enough to cull those who can't program at all. The point with these exercises isn't to get it right first time, it's to see if the candidate has a clue at all. If they get it right first time then you have a prospect. Treasure them and move to discuss design, style, ideas, and interesting stuff.

Finally, do you know any actively employed, productive developer who cannot write FizzBuzz in less than 10 minutes?
i can put it up on google docs or my public dropbox if you let me and share it with everybody here
Great video on Critical Thinking
You are correct here, but what i meant is that specifically since pi by definition goes on forever and never has a pattern, it is possible that any sequence of numbers will appear in pi at some point in its calculation.
Fascinating article about local produce at Walmart. There is a hint in this effort that the effect of this may include a little competition of sorts with the Big Ag industry, at least at the level of competition for farmer's attention.
I think you've misunderstood the design pattern dichotomy. The idea of design patterns is recognising similar problems and solving them in the same way every time instead of re-inventing the wheel (which usually yields inferior results). What PG is arguing for is that you need to take this one step further: when you've observed a pattern and implemented it more than once, your language should help you as much as possible to solve it generally by implementing the pattern itself only once. The wheel analogy breaks down here: a wheel that can be cloned for free, yet customised as needed.

This sometimes works with Java-style object models[1], but most of the time you fall flat on your face, having to manually use filler code to make the abstraction work under your circumstances. You then end up with the situation where your code volume didn't change significantly moving from specific implementation to reusable abstraction + filler. As far as I can tell, PG is arguing that we should be trying to reduce the filler.

Another way to look at this issue is that the people who talk about design patterns and their use in Java, etc. usually focus on a particular level of abstraction (relatively high). I suspect the reason for this is that such languages tend to have an expressiveness trough between the micro and macro levels of abstraction. I think the design patterns people (I'm failing to come up with a better term here, sorry) have developed a blind spot for this mid-level where syntactic macros and similar mechanisms operate, simply because they can't express themselves at that level in their languages of choice.

[1] I'm specifically avoiding talking about static vs dynamic typing - that's NOT what this is about, which is also why Java/C# generics and C++ templates don't help that much. Dynamic languages tend to be better at this, but Haskell, ML, etc. show that that's not a necessary condition. What seems to be more important are cheap (syntax-wise) lambdas, and for certain types of problems, a way of influencing which subexpressions are evaluated and which aren't. (in Lisp, etc: macros, in certain other languages: lazy evaluation) I just realized I phrased it as "evaluating subexpressions", not "executing blocks of statements", even though the two are equivalent in different kinds of languages, yet examples of controlling execution of the latter are rare for some reason.
I'd like to see this theory put to the test. Get a number of differently-sized individuals record "see" or "saw" and test the ability of native speakers to identify which they heard.
U.S. Pinpoints Coder Behind Google Attack
Ousted GM CEO Fritz Henderson Rehired As Consultant, Earns $60K ....A Month
Well, to be honest, I'm working with someone who's got both of those. It's a profitable business. The founder is just looking for a sale at this point. He's actually ready to build another startup, so he wants to sell his current one, now that's it's doing well.
Can anyone think of or refer to any single case where a software patent had actually and demonstrably advanced the field?

Just for reference, this is not entirely rhetorical; I would like to know about such, too.
Research uncovers how antidepressants actually work
If you don't mind sharing, what led to the approach? Did they read about you in the news or a blog, see an ad somewhere?

Guy Kawasaki wrote "The Art of the Start," but I think there's a need for an "Art of the Exit" as well.
US experts close in on Google hackers