skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really can't reply to much of this without a wholesale repeat of things I wrote in my blog years ago, but one thing I wanted to point out is that to my knowledge, languages like Ruby were not designed to "replace" Java.

Like most disruptive technologies, they were aimed at specialized niches where "worse is better." Ruby seemed to start off as more of a replacement for shell scripting. If anything, it was aimed at Perl, not Java. Rails was aimed at replacing PHP, not J2EE. As they matured (Ruby was 11 years old when Rails was introduced!), they spread out organically.

Now that I say it like that, let's put hat over heart and spend a moment reflecting on the fact that Java followed the same path. It was designed to replace C for embedded applications, then to embed active content in web pages, then it gradually spread and mutated into the cubicle farm fertilizer it is today.

With a little creativity you can take the OP and change it so that the author is ranting about the drawbacks of Java and its dynamic memory management and why neophytes luuuuuurv them some design patterns. It would have been a fine comp.lang.C++ news post in 1991.
Human nature being what it is... one has to wonder: is there a sadistic element to these technical interviews?
If you're going to work your way through this, it's probably better to go to the MIT site for the class. In addition to the lecture videos, it has the problem sets and a list of readings.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...
>The whole Web is really "designed for consumers not creators."

The whole Web is really designed by creators - people who just ten or twenty years ago would have had no choice but to be consumers.
I think you've just made enjo's point for him. You said "Most apps need very specific capabilities. An API for registering time limited functions with timing, location, and other services would take care of 90% of the needs out there." That IS almost exactly the very well thought-out system that Android provides and that enjo was talking about.
Murder? What can that video possibly show that would justify calling this incident “murder”? And what’s the motive? Killing journalists can only be a bad move for the US military, so why would they do it on purpose? We already know that those journalists were killed by US military, so that alone wouldn’t be news.

I’m curious.

– edit: I have now seen the video, looks like major incompetency combined with what looks like the wrong training for those situations. Also a possible coverup of this incompetence on part of the investigators. No murder. Bad enough. I would probably argue that this is negligent homicide. Has definitely a different effect than just reading the New York Times article.
Also, if your product can be used by a customer in a way that they can see a direct dollar value stemming from it's usage don't be afraid to charge an amount proportional to that dollar value.

Even a very simple product may be worth $100 a month to someone if they can directly see $500 being added to the bottom line with it's use. Sometimes these types of products cheapen themselves by selling for proportional low prices.
As with all committees, Google's hiring committees seem to fail at one important metric: speed.

I know a lot of smart kids who didn't end up at Google because it took them two or three months to hear back about their interview results and by the time they had already accepted another offer.

I like erring on the side of caution and tough interviews, but there has to be a faster way of doing that. At companies where a manager is hiring for her team, once she has found a good candidate she will want to hire them quickly. There is a sense of urgency. It seems to me that one side effect of not having hiring managers is that this sense of urgency is lost and so no one is really motivated to push for getting back to individual candidates on time.
I started seriously worrying about the crash back in 2004 [1], and while I was wrong about a lot of details (not least, ahem, the result of the 2004 US presidential election), I was bang-on about the underlying problem. What eventually surprised me was just how long the bubble was able to continue inflating before it finally popped.

[1] http://www3.sympatico.ca/taylormcgreal/thecomingcrash.html
Has anyone read Piaw's book? http://books.piaw.net/guide/index.html
Admissions game getting riskier
Are you sure about those weights? I thought the iPad weighed 1.5 pounds, which is surely lighter than a MB Air and judging by a quick Google search lighter than the lightest netbooks ("just under 2 pounds").
tl;dr -> Ruby allows you to bypass private/protected by using Object#send

class Object
private
def name
puts "Name called"
end
end

o = Object.new
o = o.send :name # outputs "Name called"

And therefore you can easily test private methods.
Paul Graham wrote an essay about why Microsoft was irrelevant. We had the same discussion then. It seems there is relevance as far as market share and jobs in industry is concerned, and irrelevance as far as setting the direction for the future of the industry is concerned.

I think it is obvious that Java the language is perfectly relevant as far as market share and jobs are concerned. I would be surprised if Java the language is relevant in any way with respect to the future of programming.

Unlike the author, I do not make the argument that if Java the language is irrelevant, Ruby the language must be relevant. Just as Java can be popular while being irrelevant to the future of programming, Ruby may well become more and more popular while also being irrelevant to the future of programming.

Smalltalk showed us that the future of programming may be dominated for decades by the ideas in language with only modest success today.
I don't think I'm smart enough to understand. The companies in this article are proud to have shed jobs to become leaner and focused ... on what customers that have jobs to buy their products and services?

The basic conundrum, to me, is that there is no such thing as an economic recovery with no job growth. If people can't earn money, how do they spend it? If they can't spend money, how does the profits get reentered into the company's balanced sheet so that the company can invest in new products and services to grow? If a company can't grow, how does it employ new workers to buy things?

It's not that simple, but really, is it really that difficult to comprehend?
Tay Zonday is remarkably well-spoken.
So that I can more easily locate a property.
6 easy smoked salmon recipes
This may be just a difference of perspective.

It is noble that you prefer to fix it. I consider that "fixing" broken things is a task that adds value to the world. I think that value creation generally is something that is rewarded (not necessarily monetarily), and that "fixing" inefficiencies or loopholes in the markets is rewarded with money.

I'm not sure what "exploit" means or why you seem to use "make money" as a bad thing. Society uses "automation" in a wide range of tasks that was not previously possible. In finance, like in other cases where we automate previously rote tasks, I think its important to check it, because bad code running on tight loops can have disastrous consequences.
ICandy – 20 Appsolutely Must Have iPad Apps for Design Enthusiasts
I know, you already saw all of them on Mashable & Techcrunch, right? No you didn’t! Those techfarts didn’t search for anything relevant, they just copy-pasted some emails. SO, we – the only iPhone + iPad design heroes on the planet – made a real research and found 20 amazing apps you should definitely own the next second you put your hands on an iPad. Some of them are uber-useful for designers & co, while the others are just pure iCandy. Enjoy!
As a tax payer, I'm not too happy about paying for these peacekeeping/war adventures in the M/E. I'm not convinced that I'm more secure because of them.

That said, in the style of warfare that exists in these areas, it's probable that innocent people will be killed. In a war, intent determines if innocent people are being killed or murdered. Can this video prove intent?
Honestly, no. But the nine-year-old (at the time) understood explicit things, while not necessarily grokking implicit things. That doesn't make implicitness of less value.

IMO, seeing things makes understanding them easier at first - it doesn't mean you don't learn.
The truth is everyone on earth is somewhat racist. It is set somewhere deep in us to be part of clans and grow those clans. You try to identify with anyone you see. When you see someone of a different color (because it is so obvious), you know that you did not come from the same clan, hence automatically, and unknowingly, putting up your stop sign. This goes even further then color, for example between a white American and a white European, African American and African, also between Africans etc...

Racism is due to a lack of knowledge and let's face it different races do not know each other that much. I have had the chance to have friends from different parts of world. I honestly cannot say I feel the same about Whites, Blacks, Persians, Indians, Chinese and Arabs before having real friends and girlfriends within these groups. Without mingling and accepting our differences it is not going to work.

You can be color blind. But that is only towards those you have had the chance to really get to know.
Many people are against our operations in the area. To them, any incident involving innocent people is "murder" and the USA must be held accountable. You don't protest by calling this an accident.
Nope, they weren't designed to replace Java - but that's one of the ways their ecosystems pitch them today.
Ah.. Streaming radio. By active net connection I thought you meant email polling, IM, etc.

Playing streaming video will kill the battery pretty decently, but IMHO that seems fair. Your keeping the radio pretty busy, the audio hardware, the cpu, etc.

I'd actually like to hear from an iPhone user whether they can run Pandora or Last.fm for 5 hours straight without killing their battery either.
By teaching them it's ok to break the law to run their own code on a device they own without the approval of the manufacturer? This is progress?
I would say no. Or rarely. High-pressure work breeds a certain humor (eg ER medics) that can be mistaken for callousness.
Maybe he aliases that to a vcs checkout command, like 'svn co'?
I don't have Flash so I could not watch the video. If you are right, then it makes it even worse to me. I like the haptic feel of the pieces when playing. Why would you want to remove that. I see no benefit at all making this virtual. ("difficult math", seriously?) D&D on a pad could rock of course.
Again you display that you easily assume in place of providing evidence. You assume he meant to insult you, but how can we know unless he explicitly states so? You somehow interpret what I said as telling you to be quiet, but how can what I said be interpreted as anything else than "please provide sources if a general consensus like this exists". Furthermore you make assumptions about my gender, of which I have revealed no information.

I think you should give people the benefit of the doubt before you decide to attack them or decide that they meant to insult you. Of course you are free to interpret as you want, but I warn you: Confirmation bias can be a real hindrance in seeing the truth.
View the page source. There are quotes from people like George Orwell and Dwight D. Eisenhower. I'm glad their display is none, because it's going to look really cheesy.

Edit: The full page went up and the quotes are no longer in the source.
Just make a high-resolution photo, works well.
Most things worth learning come with a cost. Writing code costs time.

Regarding 20-30% returns on fake money, but 0-5% on real money, trading fees should be an assumption you make when you trade with fake money. I'm guessing you did, but if there's such a wide disparity, it just means you have to re-evaluate. Writing strategies is just like a software startup. Be agile, course correct often, when expectations differ from actual results, find out why.

If trading costs is really your primary issue, I guess I'm plugging http://www.algodeal.com since I just discovered them over the weekend and it sounds sort of cool and like a good platform to learn to do it with no cost (except the cost of many Hello World programs).

[I am in no way affiliated with Algo Deal. I haven't even really looked into it that much. But their splash page sounds cool and I'm frankly envious that its their startup and not mine]
That's not an accurate representation of the Pythonic argument. The argument is more along the lines that having to name your blocks is not a crippling requirement, and that you can do everything you want with Python functions in 3.0 with the nonlocal keyword, and nearly as much pre-3.0 as you rarely need deeply nested scopes in Python because of the other things it supports.

The thing that frustrates Pythonistas is people mistaking syntax for capability. Far be it from me to claim that syntax doesn't matter, but far too many claim that things aren't possible in Python when in fact you're just spelling it wrong. (And there are some pros to the Python approach; naming even modestly large functions is still generally a good idea, and Python's approach to the problem is uniform vs. Ruby's "several different type of code references" approach, which IMHO has the Perl problem of being gloriously more complicated and tricking people into thinking these are great advantages from a local perspective when in fact if you back out to the global perspective it turns out Python still does the same things, only without the complication.)
Alright,

alias wget='curl -O'
So the really smart people find a job in the meantime, the not as smart are DOA for the interviewers/committees. I've always suspected the majority of engineers actually got in together with a business Google had acquired rather than being hired directly. At least it looks much easier.
Errata Security releases the results of the survey on secure coding practices
Couldn't high-pressure work also lead to sadism as a way to relieve that pressure?
Somebody else on this thread has already plugged Interactive Brokers.

They're cheap. For US stocks its $.005 to $.01 per share (with a $1 min per order) or something. I think most people here are interested in trading stocks (if interested at all).
I'll interpret that as a dig against the App Engine and not Clojure... even though it's clearly aimed at either Clojure alone or the combination with GAE.

Anyway, are you being serious (i.e., in your experience is clj+gae noticeably slower than java+gae or python+gae?) or just funny? Since I've never done any serious profiling of Clojure on GAE, I'll bite and do some brief performance tests and report back.
I think perhaps the solution is to provide results of opposing views for morally questionable queries. So, as per your search example, including SOME results for "how to stop suicidal thoughts" may be what a portion of people are subconsciously looking for (or needing to find).
Yeah. Probably the most frequently bribed people in India would be traffic cops on the beat. They confiscate your keys and won't hand them back until you pay them.
As I'm in Google's hiring process right now, it was interesting to read this story.

It does make me a little nervous though, as I'd really like to work there but it seems the chance of rejection is really high and I didn't get the impression that I did exceptionally well on the interviews.
Sort of. In tumult's case he's got a connection that's actively downloading data and playing music. I would assume that'd keep the radio chipset (either wifi or cell, whichever he's using) and the CPU both from being able to switch to a lower power standby mode.

However, you can have an open but idle connection open in the background with only minimal battery drain. That's how pretty much every kind of push notification or IM system works, even on cell phones.
Is that article really correct? Hulu has actively blocked itself from being run on devices, and Netflix doesn't have a Linux client (other than the Roku). Their apps page (http://www.peopleoflava.com/television/scandinavia/apps/) makes no specific mention of these.
Nissan's Epic Sentra SE-R Ad Shot Entirely With RC Cars
Exactly. Just bought one of those for that exact reason, and will likely be purchasing a few more shortly.
It's here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0&feature=youtu...
If your mental model of the country is that it currently contains zero employed people, it should not be surprising that your mental model produces nonsense results. GIGO holds on mental models too.
Iraq is a war zone. Thats the first thing people need to understand. Everyone is a civilian, but they could be the enemy. They don't wear formal uniforms. If you were in a War zone and your life was threatened, would you pull the trigger or would you wait to see if someone else is gonna pull the trigger first. War Zones are very worrisome places. You need your BASIC instincts to survive there. Most of those soldiers are using just that. The instinct to survive.
Try telling India that.
I guess it's called love. I wouldn't want to listen to just any woman but I do want to listen to my wife. It helps to recognize that it's important to her: I can see her relaxing when talking and it feels good to help her.

I also reserve the right to not listen to her: in that case I'll just tell her that now is not a good time — I can't handle it now but I'll listen to her later. Perhaps thanks to this, I can indeed handle her most of the time.

Listening is easier when I know beforehand that her train of thought just wanders around and won't probably lead to any conclusion as I would understand an ending. Thus, I've learned to not expect one. My mind does drop off the track sometimes but I know I'll soon get back to listening again. Her words are sketches so it doesn't matter if I miss some as long as I hear most. I can still keep the key things in my head and she doesn't question whether I can recite what I've heard either.

Sometimes I can't do better than just half-listen: in that case I can sometimes keep my cool and make her happy, sometimes she will notice and ask me to focus more on her. Sometimes I can't, sometimes I can.

I don't think my wife particularly enjoys when I'm explaining to her some cool technical thing or praise something I did to my car either. She's not too interested in it and she doesn't know much of what I'm talking about. But if I want to tell her about those she always listens, up to my point and often beyond.

I'll rather live fifty years with her and try to not zone out while she's talking than live fifty years alone and try to not zone out while nobody's talking.
New sub-reddit devoted to datasets
IPad is a portable Apple TV
I've been deep in this world for the past few weeks, as I've spent my spare time more-or-less implementing an event system for Ruby... partly because Thin doesn't work on JRuby, and partly because EventMachine is almost totally undocumented. And it doesn't play too well with other multithreaded code on the same VM.

The performance of the Rack bit is on a par with Thin, even without an optimized request or response parser, and I've got about 1/6 the code of just EventMachine alone. But I digress.

While I've come up with a few solutions to the 'breaking code into little chunks' problem, nothing really beats having event-driven I/O built into the runtime, and nothing has driven that point home better than implementing an event system

And yeah, I'll be open-sourcing it in the near future... want to mop up some of the internals a bit, add MRI support, and finish stealing every spec and unit test that I can from other Rack webservers.
mini[~ 111] uname -a
Darwin mini.local 10.3.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.3.0: Fri Feb 26 11:58:09 PST 2010; root:xnu-1504.3.12~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
mini[~ 112] which fetch
fetch: Command not found.

Unfortunately, it does not. I use fetch all of the time on FreeBSD, so it is a little obnoxious to have to go and install wget from MacPorts.
Good points all round, X-Istence is suggesting defense in depth, and you (vog) suggest making sure the outer perimeter is secure. Both good ideas - even if you fill the hall with barbed wire, you should make sure to lock the front door. Beyond that, it's a trade off.
Part of me really wants to just write a Ruby-like language that has Erlang-like concurrency features, but that's a project for later.
I feel it should be pointed out that whilst what you say is probably an accurate depiction, it of course does not make it alright to murder non-combatants.

That's not to say that this alleged video will show such things, of course.
I accidentally upvoted you. So now I feel obligated to make the obvious point that, um, ever heard of consultants? Outsourcing? That whole Information Superhighway thing wasn't just a fad, you know.
I actually think AlgoDeal sounds great, but can understand your skepticism.

I haven't really looked into it, but what it sounds like to me is they provide you a platform to build strategies and test them, play with fake money. They may optionally take your strategy and run it in the market. If it is successful, they split returns with you.

When you say they're setting themselves up to get ripped off, I think you're suggesting that Evil Person X may come up with a strategy A that does well enough in backtests, but is paired with a strategy B designed to rip off that strategy A. Then after AlgoDeal applies strategy A, I put my secret millions to work and make better returns for myself.

They don't HAVE to run your strategy. I'm assuming they're smart guys and have some selection criteria other than "performed well in backtests", so they'd try to choose strategies that were less likely to get ripped off by the evil person's counter-strategy. Also, I think of this as being the VC who seems massive dealflow. Half of it is the fun of seeing all the good ideas and picking the top ones. Some will still fail, but choosing from a much larger base of ideas is great. Plus they utilize their own expertise to tweak strategies for themselves.

Its basically YC for algo strategies, except they don't have to pay you, they can steal your startup and change it a bit, and they take a much bigger percentage (i'd guess 50-80%, based on what I think are something like industry standards).

Its quite common place in finance to have people give you strategies and give them a cut of the profits. This takes it to the next level: crowdsources strategies and removes the barrier to entry for a lot of smart people (trading costs) in exchange for the right to tap those ideas.

Love it.
Digital decay and the archival cloud
Where is the Fun in Business?
It's even worse because, while I agree with the premise that Java is more relevant than many think, the author never even attempts to make the case. There's no discussion of why Java is relevant.
Regarding the IAMA thread: Small data point, but I've actually chatted with him a few times, and he seems legit. Can't verify his earnings or size he trades, but he seems to know his stuff.
At one time, decision-making by Bureaucracy and Committees was considered a weakness and failing of large corporate institutions -- a negative, to be succinct. I guess it's different when you're a Committee member. Or, maybe its just another reality that Google has changed (yes, I'm being sarcastic).

This writer, being a member of such a process and committee, is unsurprisingly very self-congratulatory about how it works, and seems quite enamored of himself and his committee-mates. "And then I told this really clever joke, and we all laughed....".

I'm not learning much here except that Google has achieved a Cult following within its ranks. I say that in congratulation to Google - they're doing it better than M$ did in the 1980s.
Wget seems to be better at naming saved files:

`curl -O http://host/my%20file.txt` annoyingly saves to `my%20file.txt` while `wget http://host/my%20file.txt` will save to `my file.txt`.