skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's more than enough Indians whose command of English is masterful. Many of us end up reading advanced prose as kids, and even in technical institutes spend a lot of our time engaged in literature-related extracurricular activities.
For the record, I have to agree with RiderOfGiraffes here. The idea that "Everyone doesn't X" is the same as "Not everyone does X" makes me deeply uncomfortable. As a writer, I strive to be precise in what I mean.

As Rider proposed earlier, some idioms are compressions of logical expressions, whereas some idioms are just mistakes that people have adopted. They're not the sole province of "foreign" countries like India, though. You can find these kinds of grammatically incorrect idioms in America too ("I ain't got nothing") and undoubtedly in England as well.

However widespread "I ain't got nothing" may be, though, it is still incorrect English. Children should be taught that it's not correct English. If everyone starts speaking such loose English, we'll lose the ability to communicate clearly with each other.

I think "Everyone doesn't X" falls into the same category of incorrect idioms that may be widespread, but should be stamped out at every opportunity, except in cases where they're used for humour. If someone said, seriously, "I ain't got nothing to hide,", I would regard them with the same discomfort as if they said "Everybody doesn't need to hide stuff". Both are unfortunate manglings that need to be discouraged where possible. HN seems as good a place as any to do so.
...except for forcing people to buy drinks.

(Which OTOH brings me to the question whether you'd slip through if you'd bring a (non-liquid) frozen block of water ice.)
I think #1 is a lot more complex than just basic clarifying questions. The key is to understand the context. Where is this code going to be running? Who is going to call it? In what scenarios will it be called? Things like that.

I remember getting a question on reversing a linked list or something basic like that and being told that it was the innermost core loop of some spaceship's propulsion system. A lot different than some code which people rarely call where you could optimize differently. :)
First, that distortion already took place. Providers and insurers have spent the last two decades colluding on pricing and process in ways that transformed Blue Cross from an insurer to a poorly-regulated utility.

The health care bill takes this to a whole new level, and then sets it in stone.

Insurance and health care delivery was already a mess in the U.S. But prior to this bill, we might have evolved or legislated some solution that was not a stupendous giveaway to Blue Cross and Aetna. Too late now. They will never give up the privileges they get today. They get to be toll collectors on our outrageously overpriced health care system forever.

Meanwhile, I read articles with people celebrating because they think this bill protects them from the health insurance industry. It's all just too depressing.
Wanking is a good word for it. I've never understood how people looking for upside measured in the hundreds to thousands of percent can complain about a 3.8% tax with a straight face.

If you invest $100k in a startup, it goes well and you walk away with a million ($900k profit), are you really going to cry when the tax man comes and gets his $34,200? I guess you might, but it didn't suddenly make the investment not worth it.

Then again, those people aren't likely the ones complaining. It's the people who have a hypothetical model in their head of what "investors" are like and want to use it as a talking point to attack health care reform.
Notice something about all those kids? They live in AMERICA. Cultural context does matter. I was working for a company a few years ago and the president read Tom's damn book. Without any input or understanding of how software is made he bought me a plane ticket and said go open an office in India. It turned into a two year long clusterfuck. All of this outsourcing bullshit would be more credible if it came from someone who actually wrote code and not some jackass in his manhattan penthouse.

I'm all for importing great talent- it's one of the reasons the US has been so successful. But that's completely different from his overplayed world-is-flat delusion.
By now you've probably got bots watching your blog and autoposting new entries to the queue upon publication.

You could spread your new posts out by a day or two if it really bugs you.
Iceland prepares for [possible] second, more devastating volcanic eruption
You don't have to know about how the transmission works in order to know what to do. I remember going through driving school, and they repeatedly told us what to do if the accelerator stuck to the floor.
> In most cases their requirements are well-understood by both the builders and the users.

Software has the luxury of the ability to have rapid change in the hands of users. Web startups are a good example. Even desktop software is a good example. Generally you don't want to apply a strong engineering model to them because the engineering process is costly in time and people. Software on a submarine or for the disk brakes on a car is not a good example because the rapid change can't be cheaply and transparently pushed to the users. Those systems require engineering.

For material products, show me examples where one does not HAVE to get upfront specifications. How would you release early and iterate on an MP3 player or a stove or shoes? The exceptions I can think of are food and landscaping.

Systems (material and software) are engineered because they HAVE to be engineered, not because engineering is inherent in material products and absent in software products. If the system does not require engineering (for safety, cost, risk) then it doesn't look like a good candidate for engineering. Do you engineer your dinner? I don't but NASA does for their astronauts.
I think the author is just citing how influential Scheme was to JavaScript's design.

In "Coders at Work", page 141, Brendan Eich talks about wanting to build a scheme-like language for the browser. The c-like syntax was adopted because Netscape wanted it to look like Java.
Further, the poster, grrow, had made no comments. They just post links to makeahistory "articles".
IBM launches Smartcamp accelerator contest in Boston
It should have up/down arrows that you have to click to generate the next one. That way you could quickly determine what ideas are good.
Yeah, wait until you're older and have a corp desk job. The days spent toiling moving furniture will feel like your past life as a greek god. You'll look back on stuffing any food you want into a naturally evolving muscular machine of a body as your ass slowly forms into a chair shape around the dent of your paid for yet unused Snap-Fitness card.
His old band, Ben Folds Five, also were an early adopter of cybercasting some of their concerts back 'round the turn of the millennium or so. I can see why Bam's where he is in this video-I would probably crap myself as well if this is what I was greeted with while using Chatroulette...
I agree with your sentiment. But from what I can tell, the likelihood that we were ever going to disentangle the insurers from the system was nil. It would have taken a climactic reshaping of health care, like single-payer.

When I look at the well-intentioned reform ideas coming from the opposition, I see things like "deregulate and sell across state lines". These ideas don't weaken the grip of BCBS and Aetna; they encourage consolidation and push us further in the direction of the Citigroup-izing of health insurance.

What's on the table will, on paper at least, ensure that startup entrepreneurs like me can actually buy insurance on the private market. We didn't have that ability before, at all. That's a win, from what I can see. Would I prefer not to have BCBS and United be the vehicles for that win? Of course. But what does that have to do with anything?
What Time is the Health Care Vote Count Start?
Powershell is nice, functionality-wise, but it still suffers from the fact that the shell UI is horrible. It's the same basic application that cmd.exe is, with the same limitations. You can't easily do even basic things like copy and paste. In some ways, its more advanced than bash, but in the important ways it's not.
Sorry, I wasn't meaning that there aren't useful things in CS (I'm a CS graduate myself). What I meant was that the techniques for formally modeling software so that you can reason about it aren't as well developed as they are for normal engineering subjects.
"And if you really look at it, Software Engineering is, well, not."

Well said!
Do you see this hurting startups in some way other than reducing immigration?

I think it will help startups, by allowing small shops to bootstrap without having to surrender health insurance for themselves and for their families.
Maybe reading some discussions about scaling makes you fuss over it right away, but you don't have to.

Initially you can simply install Apache and Passenger (aka. mod_rails). With PHP most people use mod_php.

It is true that hosting rails apps was previously (before passenger) not as easy as mod_php.

With PHP, people discuss "the stack" too. Here's a post about scaling Joomla (written in PHP) discussing using FastCGI instead of mod_php: http://www.joomlaperformance.com/articles/webcasts/why_mod_p...
Ask HN: I will work for free ... part 2
Answers to questions raised on my previous post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1207725
1) Why am I willing to work for free? This is due to my two beliefs (a) I must demonstrate value first. Also working for free will come at low risk to my employer. (b) All people are intrinsically good. So, if I demonstrate value, my employer will pay me or give me recognition.

and one problem
(a) I am not the best marketing guy. So I struggle making myself look good.

2) Why not work on open source projects? I am open to work on open source project.
3) Why not start my own open source project? I did rather work on already existing open source project.

4) Indian billing rates and I am just another below average developer ? Hmmm, I have worked in USA with billing rate of $150+ and in India with billing rate of $60. I am in India by choice!! And I am not doing this for money alone

5) Why did I mention so many technologies? As mentioned by several people in my previous post, I have mostly worked on web applications. On language front, I'm technology neutral. Every language has its advantages and disadvantages. I can get work done on any of the technologies (c#, ruby & java) and working for 10+ years in software industry does put your hands on most of them.

I have never worked on iPhone or Android. I am currently learning it. Technologies like "NoSql" is very exciting, but I have not worked on any of them.

Yes, plinkplonk you have got it right. It is possible to work on several technologies and be effective in many, My experience has shown it again and again. Only issue will be how long does the project last and if it can handle learning curve (again depending on developer).

6) Do I know php? I don't. But in one of freelance gigs, I had to write something on php web application to expose shopping orders and items to c# winform client. I did manage to get is done.

7) My contact Information email:- swdev2010@gmail.com
Two generations of people understood the conversation of Jazz. So yes, it is reasonable to expect another generation to also participate in that conversation. Unfortunately, that new generation has lost something.
Java also has one as part of the 6 concurrency additions:

http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/C...

There's a ConcurrentSkipListSet too.
Silicon Valley’s All Twttr [2006]
Wow. It wasn't until reading this the second time I caught the reference to Flash (the plugin). I feel silly.
The Nexus One is a Failure (Fat Chance)
This makes me appreciate how awesome Ben Folds is.
JavaScript definitely isn't Scheme (just as it definitely isn't Java either), but it is correct that it was conceived as a somewhat Scheme-like language with an OO-model inspired by Self, but for marketing reasons it was given a superficially Java-like syntax (and name!).

It is interesting to imagine what could have happened if Netscape had shipped with a Lisp. Probably a lot more people would hate Lisp today!
"Engineers know how to build a bridge"

Even then it can still take them a few tries to get it right:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Bridge_%28London%29
The difference between engineering physical things and software is that in "regular engineering" the bulk of the decisions are made in the design phase. You might have issues that crop up during implementation but largely they are small in scope and can be resolved. In "software engineering" your design phase is short and the implementation phase is really long. Design decisions are happening during the coding part.

It doesn't have to be this way. If there were the equivalent of CAE tools for software design where you could easily manipulate modules and the interfaces between them maybe it would happen. (And no, the IDEs today are not there yet).

We need more standard high level reusable components that all the people on the team know. When I need something bolted together or need a simple motor, I've got a bunch of suppliers to handle that. Java and Python and others have these great comprehensive software libraries now, but they only go up to a certain level. I feel like so many software projects are just duplicating the same stuff over and over (exactly what RoR aims to solve in one domain which is why it is so popular). People have been saying this for 30 years now, but people were saying it in mechanical engineering for about 100 before it came to pass so I'm not surprised it will take a long time.

There is also the difference of modeling. When I'm designing something in the physical world I have a bunch of knowledge to apply to the problem. It's not as easy as people are making it out to be (bridges are not exactly trivial problems, especially when compared to 99% of the software written out there. Don't even get me started on what I work on) but there are guides. When I'm deciding what material to use for a part I have a bunch of information about the problem, a bunch of information about the available materials, and there will be some decision making process trading off several factors (cost, corrosion resistance, weight, strength, fatigue etc) and an informed choice is made. When I want to choose between Ruby on Rails and Django, I have a bunch of blog opinions. I can't model out the performance difference between using C++ or Java for a robotics framework. I can't predict what this algorithmn will do to my real time performance. You have to actually DO IT, and then measure it. Sometimes we have this in mech eng. too and we make physical models and test them on a small scale, that CAN happen in software engineering but rarely does it.

So 2 bit take away: the design phase in software engineering could be a lot more like "engineering".
I admit to not knowing who Ben Folds was until a few years ago when I stumbled onto an entertaining site called improveverywhere.com which did a prank imitating him, which of course somehow drew the attention of the real Ben Folds, and the prank was scaled up to include him... http://improveverywhere.com/2006/11/19/ben-folds-fake/
When I hear "homoiconic" I think of Cher.
http://www.mangahigh.com/en_gb/about/
Seems good to me, I can't see anything to argue with and several of his showstoppers are indeed really important.

And his general point on getting good investors is really important; as a senior developer in a number of startups I've experienced a few were a bad investor destroyed the company. I would say that in most cases it's really better to never get such an investment at all, even if you fail, than to have that happen.

Final comment: it's not clear to me that most (or even many) entrepreneurs will have enough life experience like this guy does to be able to both make the right character judgments and then to act upon them. Desperation will do funny thing to people.

But if you can, you'd be well advised to do as much of what he advises as you can.
Looks very much like, at 3k req/s, that request was cached somewhere (either disk/memory/proxy), which are exactly the kind of optimizations the user mentioned you need to think about. Given that you do need to tell Rails when to cache, it may be trivial, but you're still thinking about it.
Maybe he wanted to. If that was his goal, I think he failed.

Scheme: First-class functions, tail-call elimination, macros,
hygienic macros, write and parse the AST directly.
JavaScript: First-class functions.

Scheme: Immutable arrays and lists, mutable strings.
JavaScript: Mutable-only arrays, immutable-only strings.

Yes, I have, and have read, Coders at Work. I don't see how it's relevant. JavaScript and Scheme share only one defining feature in common, first-class functions. It's an important feature, no doubt, but many other languages have it: C/Objective-C (with Apple's blocks extension), C++ (with Boost.Lambda), Perl, Python, Ruby, Lua, Io, OCaml, ML, Haskell, the list goes on. People compared Perl to Lisp once, briefly, when it was one of the few dynamic languages, but they don't anymore.
I don't at all disagree that the statement "Everyone doesn't X" is awkward-sounding. What I really object to is the assertion that "Everyone doesn't X" actually means "No one does X".

I would actually assume that someone using it in that way isn't a fluent speaker of (American) English, while using it as a reply to "Everyone does X" (perhaps with emphasis: "No, everyone doesn't X") seems like colloquial (American) English. I can't speak for Commonwealth English. :) When used that way, as a reply, it mirrors the original statement, which seems to me to have more impact than rephrasing the reply when disagreeing.
I wrote about this. I think that building a business on these app stores is a losing proposition. I'm not saying that you shouldn't develop apps, but don't build a business on these stores. http://techneur.com/post/440686528/its-all-our-fault-why-bui...
Over on Reddit it was pointed out that "Bam" was probably a masturbator who was too chicken to do it in front of 2000 people.
Why Blippy Will be Huge: Popularity Modeling and the Music Business
And that's a good thing?
20 Twitter Tips for New and Experienced Tweeters
If its an adwords landing page and everyone that is going to the site probably wants to download it if you click it why not make it one big image and have it all link to download?
For easy reference, this article points to the book, Graphics Gems (Hardcover) by Andrew S. Glassner (Editor) 1990. There are no Amazon reviews for it at http://www.amazon.com/Graphics-Gems-Andrew-S-Glassner/dp/012... .
I'm with you in disagreeing with #4, but I generally disagree with most of his points, simply on the grounds that his article might be better titled, "Passing the Microsoft Interview when a Jerk Like Me is on the Interview Loop."

That's a little harsh, so let me elaborate. It's a matter of explicit policy at MS, and at least implicit policy everywhere, that interviewers are looking for candidates that will be successful at the company. This unpacks to "candidates who will do excellent work with minimal supervision and stay and grow in their careers with the company." If we grant this (I think uncontroversial) goal of the interview process, then we can measure each of his rules by how well they serve that goal, and ask generally if there are any rules at all that will ultimately serve it.

While "Know Your Stuff" is trivial and uncontroversial (and therefore not worth mentioning), the remainder of his points 2-7 amount to telling you how to say your shibboleths. I mean, if you just knew the answer to the problem (for example, if you had seen it before), could you just present the solution and be done? Or do you have to "Describe the Algorithm?"

The smoking gun, however, is point 7:

This is just good psychology. Make the interviewer feel important by spending a few minutes at the end asking about the interviewer's team and work.

He's telling you to suck up. To him. Personally. Sometimes you just get a freebie, as in this case. So many of the author's implicit fantasies leak through his prose that we can easily dismiss him. To name two:

First, he believes that there can be "7 tips" for passing an effective interview process, not one that is mere kabuki. An effective interview process screens out the stylistic theater. This is an ultimately unsolvable problem, unfortunately. Candidates always simply rehearse their shibboleths.

Second, the author thinks that he's arrived and that he's reduced to practice the means of telling who else has arrived. Implicitly, this means that he views how he's judged himself ready is the approved way to judge others. The circularity of that belief is the playground of Dunning & Kreuger.

If he wants either to find truly valuable candidates or to be able to assess himself critically in a manner that will prod him to grow, he needs to relinquish his rule-based and ultimately smug beliefs about how to evaluate himself and others.
Which normal engineering concepts are you saying are more formal than in CS? I had to take a "Formal Methods" course in college. Gears are loops. Switches are switches. If statements are transistors.

Also recognize that CS is a much newer science than physics. Some of what you are saying may be due to the immaturity of the science, but it doesn't mean that it isn't engineering.

I took a lot of other engineering courses including statics and dynamics, thermodynamics, electronics and courses for premed requirements and I don't see a lot of difference between computer science/engineering and biomedical engineering or civil engineering except our perception of of the physical engineering as more important -- due only to their visibility.

CS/CSE is hidden from view. People don't understand where while loops are operating, but they can see gears spinning and cables holding up bridges.

Compare typical software projects to medical software products as a niche. Much more design, time, and money is spent there than on Web 2.0 sites because lives depend on it.
Afghanistan/nato: opium, business as usual
I had a lot of trouble with this as a newbie to Javascript. Glad to see it posted, even if it's months and months late for me.
I was working for the 888 karma points. Please neg me so I can be more lucky.
f = (+ 2)

(I'm not a huge fan of point-free, I'm just being facetious ;)
I just accepted a full time offer there and I think being passionate and excited about the team I was interviewing with seemed more important than the technical questions. Of course you can't bomb them but all else equal it is good to show you want to work on that team. For me this was genuine and I think that came through.

And yea, it is a long day.
It is funny that they include the superstitious stuff considering china is the world's biggest consumer of shark fin soup, 8's and porcelain cats with endlessly waving paws.
Seriously... any real load test, IMHO, needs to stem from a capture and replay of live production traffic. Especially if it involves a cache somewhere.
Can you not go out for walks at your corp desk job? Every one I've had didn't have a problem if you left the office for ~20 minutes mid-afternoon to get out and stretch. Some would even have self-organized games of soccer or volleyball to break up the monotony.
Are web mapping tools stagnating?
Does sinatra eliminate or reduce the need for caching, load balancing, and other approaches to handling heavy loads?
If you were seldom in bed by 10 and your friends were the same, it is unlikely that high school students today will do any different. Why not propose a solution based on what people generally do rather than telling them what they should do.
The best bank in the US