skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I totally give Microsoft high-fives for placing their browser above all others even if, technologically speaking it isn't. I don't see the EU saying anything to Apple about Safari. I don't see them really addressing the problems with the whole OS + bundled stuff picture. I, unfortunately, don't have a worthwhile solution for it either. I guess it's a start, though.
Marketing of Articles
Legally, I don't know how I feel about the EU ruling. Something feels off to me about forcing a company to offer alternatives to something it is offering its users for free.

In terms make the internet a better place, the EU ruling is full of win. The more people that use browsers that actually rely on web standards, the more people will be forced to build web sites to web standards. If enough sites are built based on actual standards, Microsoft might actually have to make its own browser standards compliant. Not to mention the simple fact that more people will be exposed to Explorer's competitors will force Explorer to actually, you know, compete.
Three real world examples that have happened to me in the last 2 months:

- tasked with doing PL/SQL (something I've used once in 13 years) I asked a PL/SQL programmer friend about how to do x.

- tasked with performance tuning a database (I'm not a DBA) I asked a friend who has commit rights to the OSS DB project what baseline values I should start with given x, y, and z.

- tasked with determining the feasibility of using RFID for a project (something I did one time, four years ago), I asked a friend that sets up RFID systems for a living if the project was feasible.

Those questions took less than 5 minutes for each friend to answer, versus the incredible amount of time it would have taken me to do the research to find the answers -- and still not have the experience that my friends do.

In turn, each of those friends ask me questions about platforms that I have experience with and they do not. This goes back to the idea of "shit you know you don’t know." (http://jangosteve.com/post/380926251/no-one-knows-what-theyr...) Knowing what you don't know and knowing people who do know the answers is incredibly valuable to an employer.
Does anyone know if the US/NIH spends on such techniques?
These are a bit weak.
I expected to see Dropbox (excellent) and something like RememberTheMilk... but Quaker Oats? and a sleeping App and a duvet. Just in case I forget to eat or sleep or buy an iPhone?
Testing the electric vehicle-to-grid connection
Whenever the FizzBuzz topic pops up on Hacker News in the back of my mind there is a nagging anxiety: am I one of these programmers that can't program? There is always some comment in the ensuing discussion that makes me question my own competence.
actually all 5 have a fixed position that can be seen for a fraction of a second right before being reshuffled: IE, FF, OP, GG, SA
Code Review With Gerrit, a Mostly Visual Guide
Not quite true.

If the host gives you the option to switch based on a coin flip, that flip will be independent of the state of the game and just average the overall probabilities between a regular game and a switch-style game.

Now, allowing the host to act totally randomly will remove the advantage. In particular, the host needs to randomly choose which door to open from all three (including your own). If he finds the goat, you reset and play again perhaps, if he doesn't find the goat then you've got a 50/50 chance between the remaining doors. The probabilities are simple because each door was treated exchangeably and there could be no possible information flow that is mutual to, entangled with, the location of the goat.
Similar problems arise in contract bridge, where players have a name for it--"restricted choice". I've actually always wondered if mathematicians have a name for it. Anyone know?

The most common example is this: say you and your partner have nine cards combined in a suit, and you're missing four cards: the queen, the jack, and two unimportant low cards.

Bridge is played like hearts or spades, where one person leads a card and everyone else has to follow suit. It's your lead. You want to find the queen and the jack. If you guess right, you win the contract (= win a lot of points). If you guess wrong, you lose the contract.

Your opponents want to hide the queen and the jack. Assume that your opponents, if one had both missing high cards, are devious enough to randomly play one or the other.

You play the ace, and one defender drops the queen. What are the odds they have the jack? Hint: they're not 50/50.
Good article but didn't he write the same article in 2007 (as he mentions but ..)? This re-posting is a subtle shill for stackoverflow careers. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
>But what are THE ODDS of us not figuring out a solution in time?

What? If the right size celestial body were heading for the earth there wouldn't be much we could do about it. There are a great deal of things that can happen that we would be utterly powerless to stop.

Given that, there is no point worrying about such things. If such a thing ever does happen, I'll probably be gone by then anyway.
Forgot that this took place in Britain. I guess Her Majesty's Royal Tasters, or whatever their equivalent of the FDA is, would have to handle it.
Ditto, and for me it's a more general thing. (In this case, I tested myself quickly on Patio's suggested question from somewhere in this thread. I just had to open a terminal and see if I could quickly do it. Stupid.)

I always feel like a fake - not about programming in particular, about whatever I'm doing and supposed to know about. I like to tell myself that I'm being 'Socratic' and worrying about what I know I don't know.
If you had contact information

1. I'd send you one of my regular tests

2. You could reply with your code

3. I could tell you if I think you can code at this point in time, under the conditions you used.

Or you could email me. 30 seconds of searching didn't find contact details on the blog in your profile.

EDIT: amended 3 in light of insightful comment(s) below.
Don't become an expert
Buy cheap Polyester fleece blanket - they are warm like wool but easy to wash, allergy free, and very cheap (about $10). Don't torture yourself.
Really sound advice.

When I started my small business many many years ago, I kept records/folders like a big company, maintained books like a big company. This was what I had read in books on how to run a business.

Couple of years later, I read a book on simplicity/time management. This changed everything. I slapped on my face and got rid of almost all useless formalities of running my business.

Even though I support SQL-Ledger (open source) as part of my business, my own use of accounting software limited to bare essentials.
...am I one of these programmers that can't program?

Wrong question.

Right question: "Where do I stand and what to I have to do to get better?"

Clue: The answer has nothing to do with comparing yourself to anyone else and everything to do with what your building vs. what you need to be building.
It's more fun to spend your free time copying git-svn's features and implementing them in Subversion. Or something.

For most of us, no. For the SVN team, other forces are at work - I'd say familiarity of the code and desire for their baby to stay relevant are big ones.
Quite sad, it looks like something from the nineties...
Are we sure that this site has been built microsoft (no reference found)? there is also a browserchoice.org that is a bit nicer.
Indeed: for around 6 decades we had a determined adversity who was dedicated to destroying us by any means possible in every realm ... and we weren't used to dealing with that sort of threat.

And by some time in the '50s "the bomb" made that threat immediately existential (bomber or missile flight time) ... it's hard to describe what living under that was like.
You can't handwave away a game being somewhere between fiddly and broken with "technically it is actually receiving the MOUSE_OVER event, it just happens to receive a MOUSE_DOWN event at the same time, therefore you're using the wrong terminology and I can ignore your basic point".

That's like a parody of the worst defence of linux UI ever.

No end user cares what events are being generated (I'm a geek and I don't care). They care that if they're not incredibly careful they'll be firing off "mouse click" actions every time they try to do a "mouse move" (and vice versa) because both have been reduced to the same touch action.
That's sorta cool idea though; much better than questions like "do you know this obscure feature X of some programming language Y, or what does some class EJBServletContainerFoobar do?"
Given that most people would be answering this in some form of imperative language, I'd say that any solution which includes "for", some "if"s or a "switch", and a few judiciously placed modulus operations would be sufficient. Actually, if I were giving the test, I'd probably ask for pseudocode anyway.
I am not claiming it's the right way to think. I am pointing out realistic facts.

Your assumption that these people would be free to do other more productive works is counter-intuitive, as you are assuming that people who fight Wars want to do something else.

My original observation still stands, that the blog context appears to disregard the positive influence that war has on economy as well as the negative.
You don't have to sell git or git-svn to anyone.

It has to be sold to me (or your typical departmental svn user). I do spend time learning new tools, but that time is limited, so I'm less likely to spend it on something that has the potential drawbacks that I raised.

FWIW, yes, I am trying out git on the side. That use of time looks worthwhile.
Added my email to my profile.
I don't see the EU saying anything to Apple about Safari.

The difference, of course, is that it has been established in court that Microsoft have a monopoly in the desktop OS market, and that they have abused said monopoly by bundling their browser, media player, etc. with the OS, giving them an unfair competitive advantage in those markets.
A Tutorial Introduction To The Language B
In the 1.2 release notes it states that due to changes made to the template caching layer it is now much easier to work with non-django template languages.

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.2/#template-...
I'm pretty sure that pdflatex is used far more widely than plain latex these days, given that it is simpler to use and makes it easier to take advantage of PDF features.
How would you significantly improve this html?
Eww... No page margin at all. Other than that, cool stuff.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

How you describe yourself is one aspect of Dunning-Kruger: highly competent people often do not think that what they do is anything special, even though in reality, their skills are very rare and highly sought-after.
You think doing a lot of censorship would improve discourse? What do you mean? Just remove snarky comments? Fine, but those get strongly down voted anyway. Comments someone in charge doesn't agree with? Then it isn't discourse.

EDIT: I realize your comment was in response to PG's, but what is considered a "censor-able" comment? I've seen some discourse on here where someone legitimately called PG out. As I recall, the person turned out to be wrong but they weren't trolling (at least not at first) even though they were accused of it from the start. Should this have been censored?
Social stress is different from deadlines. How you conduct the interview is important in this respect, but still FizzBuzz is the correct approach. It would help though if the interviewer made it clear that it's supposed to be a warming-up test, and there is no catch to be looked for.
It means exactly that. The trustees and funders do not take any equity. They just provide the money, some advice and experience.
Since pi is a transcendental number, wouldn't it be safe to say that everyones birthday is in pi, just possibly a long ways down?
Cool. How do I get my browser on this page?

It's called "billpg is an attention whore browser". It's just a rebranded firefox with the home page set to billpg.com that can't be changed. All my easily bribed friends love it!
> I don't see the EU saying anything to Apple about Safari.

This comes up every time. The problem isn't having a monopoly (the EU isn't preventing the distribution of Windows), it's using an existing monopoly to corner a new adjacent market (in this case, web browsers).
A Curiously Clever Chess Puzzle
Next year EU is going to demand that MS put up a site offering competitors to the packaged Solitaire game.
MySpace new stream feature
Panel discussion on SaaS sales
The US military has a standardized test called the DLAB (Defense Language Aptitude Battery) that tests not your ability to use a particular language, but to learn a new, fictitious language - much like this programming test.
Really enjoyed it. Lil Wayne's an interesting guy
One of the Mozilla guys pointed out that below the top five the browsers are big in places outside Europe, mostly Chinese or Japanese.

And most are just wrappers for IE's engine anyway, which doesn't really help.
I do not see why to put 'wasted' in quotes.

I am always shocked to see how many people, who should know better, fall for the homeopathy scam. Some do believe that it is 'medicine with natural ingredients' and start to argue that our modern medicine is based on the natural medicine.
While this is true, it has nothing to do with homeopathy. The concept of homeopathy is fundamentally flawed and is based on crazy pseudo science.

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

Then there is this 'but if it helps with the placebo effect it is not that bad' argument. It is that bad because some people put too much faith into it and try to cure for example Malaria with sugar pills. It wont work. People will die.

I am just shocked that this stuff is still available in 2010...
Thanks. Email me if you're interested in contributing -- ilan@rapgenius.com
>> Other than H2O, I'm not aware of any other possible byproducts of methane oxidisation.

The same was said for the ICE, and now our cars emit all sorts of crud. Ideally, that's all you get: CH4 + O2 ---> 2H20 + CO2. Practically, you get sulfur and other impurities. Specifically sulfur scrubbers (http://www.duke-energy.com/environment/air-quality/sulfur-di...) are often used to reduce the amount of sulfur, but they raise the amount of CO2 byproduct. It's a no-win situation.
The talk is the excellent, the video is terrible and does not show the slides at all. You can view the slides here: http://www.slideshare.net/jesseschell/beyond-facebook
Yeah I'm very interested in what the path to carbon neutrality is. I'm sure they've thought this through, obviously. Cow dung is probably not the end-game :)
Conduct a short coding interview, remotely
Along with the CV I always used to ask for code samples. I wanted to see the code before I could develop any biases by talking to the person. I found it worked best to ask for "the last project/projects you had fun working on, or developed on your own time". If there are none...
That doesn't make any sense. The intentions of the host prior to opening the second door shouldn't have any impact on the odds of picking a winning door.

I could be wrong, but I think of it this way: You have a choice between picking one door, or picking two doors. If you choose to pick two doors, the host will happen to open one of them to reveal the non-prize. Irrespective of the differences between the wording of my problem and the MH problem, how are the actions different between the two?

Here's the flaw in your logic:

There's a 1/3 chance you picked right, and a 2/3 chance you picked wrong. In the 2/3 chance you picked wrong, there is a 1/2 chance of the correct door being revealed. No matter if the correct door is shown or not (in this case, it isn't shown), it doesn't change your original odds.
On Digg I have noticed that the top rated comments are pretty good. There are a few top comments that are obvious rebuttals to trolls but the original troll comments are not in the top comments. I would rather not see the troll or the rebuttal comment, but I still want people to get credit for calling out the troll.
How to Tips Tricks Advice
How to Tips Tricks Advice
It's a delicate balance. Sometimes the jokes work, sometimes they fall flat. We spend a lot of time editing to ensure the content "works" as much as possible. The one you quoted is definitely a sort of throwaway, but spend a little longer on the site and you'll laugh once or twice
Thanks for the love
Devotion to Duty
ilan@rapgenius.com
"Pay attention to the right metrics" is always good advice.
Reply.com Files For $60 Million IPO
It's very easy for someone to misinterpret 3. as "I could tell you if I think you can ever code, so I would amend it to "I could tell you if I think you can code now".

"Can't code now" could become "Is a great coder" later.

Everyone is at their own place on their path. We've all traveled that path. I look at some of my code as recently as a year or two ago and I'm embarrassed.

Nobody here should get discouraged. You should just get better.
We're going to use this for a small project nearing launch - will drop comments here (or anywhere else that you might prefer!).

A couple here from people on the team:

Be good to be able to add comments to lists/list items, just in case there's a dispute or more information is required to complete the task.

Be good to be able to ‘contract’ Lists, so you only see the title. Click on it to expand.
This is seriously cool. The compiler-writer part of me enjoyed * LLVM transforms the code far more aggressively* and later references to where it was hard to figure out what the assembly code does.

Wondering if they have done the test where the llvm flag has recompiled ghc.
Someone needs to be make insanely insanely simple accounting software for startups. I just don't see it out there. I don't want a bunch of crazy financial info and options. I want to tell you what I spent money on, when, and what it was. I also want to tell you how much came in, from what, and when. That's it. Anything else is generally a waste of my time at this point.
"with most speculation focusing on a shift of iTunes user libraries from user desktops to online storage"

Yeah right, they can't even make MobileMe work despite people inexplicably throwing gobs of money at them to do just that. How many years have they had to fix that garbage? Although I guess they don't need to when the expectations are so low: the last satisfied customer I talked to said "It works perfectly, other than occasionally deleting all my contacts."

(I say this as someone who's given .Mac and MobileMe one shot each and almost shot myself in the face as a result)
According to another story, eBay fuels their Bloom units with methane from "landfill waste": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1141568
Yep, my 'camera defocus' also included arbitrary kernel geometry as an option! I'm not trying to be obnoxious about this, but I really did spend five years of my life coding this stuff for Apple.
The Bloom Box - 60 Minutes
If the homeopaths could just prove that it works, James Randi would give them $1million, free and clear.

Sceptic James Randi is so convinced that homeopathy will not work, that he has offered $1m to anyone who can provide convincing evidence of its effects.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/homeopathy.shtml
See

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=3344

for information about United States federal funding of "alternative medicine" research. I think homeopathy is not as routinely covered by health insurance in the United States as in some other countries, but of course the insurance system in the United States is not really a national system at all, but a collection of varied private contracts state by state.
it seems to me like the vast majority of modern austrians are basically rothbardians.
The Mystery of China’s Labor Shortage
Sounds academic. The programmer verified correct operation in the environment. In fact it was never going to fail where it was originally written and tested. That is "correct" by most reasonable definitions.
I don't think it's going to make a difference for the fringe browsers. My reasoning is that I had to scroll to the right to see the remaining options, and there is no indication that there are more options other than the scrollbar. I'm pretty sure not too many people are going scroll and see the remaining options.
well....

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/09/maturit...
Reports of debit info stolen at Rocklin gas pumps
Because that't the extend of the "deception" that everyone is so excited about.

This guy's a journalist, you say?
thanks for the detailed response, seems very reasonable.
browserchoice.eu - Doesn't resolve :/ why not
www.browserchoice.eu - OK, force me to put www you idiots

> HTTP/1.1 302 Redirect
> Location: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=178663

OK, lets go visit microsoft.com :/

> HTTP/1.1 302 Found
> Location: http://www.browserchoice.eu/BrowserChoice/browserchoice_en.htm

Oh so now you want me to go back again. Fine.

I'm guessing they wanted to use their existing link tracking stuff on microsoft.com
yeah, but such hyperbole is a classic sign of a con. if they were serious they'd just tell you the I/O.
HTML 5 Video Element for Internet Explorer
Things to know for NoSQL Django coders
...and charge more for the next edition.
Search for "forgetful Monty Hall" (or so) if you want to know more about this variation.
Iron Mountain Buys Up Email Archiving Company Mimosa Systems For $112 Million
As you said, "average the overall probabilities between a regular game and a switch-style game", which is 1/3 for a game with no-switching and 2/3 for a game with always-switching. Averaging gives you a probability of 1/2. So if you switch, you win 50 % of the time. But so do you if you do not switch. So there is no benefit in switching, which was basically my point.

EDIT: In both the versions of the game, I am assuming an omniscience host who always opens the door with a goat behind, if he does open a door at all.
It's similar in Skat and Doppelkopf. (Though even more devilish in Doppelkopf since you do not know where your partner is at the beginning of the game.)
SenCSs 0.7 (CSS Baseline framework) is out
While Gladwell makes a compelling argument for the 10,000 hour rule, I just can't buy that. It can't be that simple.
from the box itself, i'd guess... electric heating elements?
What exactly is it about the words 'fuel cell' that you do not understand- it's not a new energy source, it's like a battery or generator, a local source of electricity.

Seriously, how is methane+heat=>electricity so outlandish?
Can someone clarify how this actually shows up to the end-user? When a user gets a new computer and first turns it on, does this show up in a standalone program, within IE, or some other way?
How the U.S. military used social networking to capture Saddam Hussein
Brainmates Interview with The Product Guy
Ubuntu already runs the tickless kernel. The default apps & drivers might not be very efficient, but a few minutes with powertop should improve things to "reasonable." http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/
The nice thing about expertise is anticipating mistakes that would otherwise cost time and energy. With emerging best practices in continuous deployment and customer development, those costs are on the decline. Furthermore, with the mentorship opportunities emerging from the wealth of angel networks and seed funds, you can replicate some of those gains without the prohibitive time investment.
I do a fair amount of tech interviewing, and yes there are a lot of posers out there.
The guy who wrote this is from an enterprise consulting background... enough said.
Guys, we need help with more backends! Apart from App Engine and MongoDB we'd love to have SimpleDB, CouchDB, Redis, and many more. If you want to see native support for your backend please get involved:
http://groups.google.com/group/django-non-relational
New Details Emerge About Google Hackers