skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you figure out if purported programmers can "program their way out of a paper bag"?

As long as you have a good (enough) method for doing that I agree with everything you say above.
The cursor in the search text box is not vertically centered (Firefox). Can't take my eyes off whenever I visit the page.
Not when the product they are talking about is query compatible with it.

Kinda reminds me of how Litespeed built a httpd.conf/.htaccess compatible apache replacement - it's drop-in ready but many times faster in comparison. But it's very pricey so you won't see Apache going away anytime soon (and people also switch to nginx for free if they don't need the compatibility factor).
Make a site that "learns" by asking designers.

Or just make a site that claims to, and then you have somewhere you can post your color schemes every time you need to test one.
Or the incentive structure, if a lifestyle on the dole is too good for too many people, might be disastrous in the long term.

Within about 50 years, due to technological advancements, we'll have 20-40% paid employment (not unemployment) and there'll need to be some sort of dole.

Personally, I think it would be great to have a society where people don't need to work. The people who only work because they have to wouldn't be working, which means that the people who are working are those with ambition and talent, and only those.
It doesn't matter if some of them are approved, under the current writings in the policy they are in violation of the policy. Apple just decided at that point that it will not reject the application (yet).
Back when I was doing this C and/or C++ was required (in general and for the job).

Today, I don't know what I'd do (besides ask them to do it with pointers anyway, pseudo-code is fine for this problem). Someone from a Javaschool might work out well, but they'll be lost in some harder debugging situations, so I guess I'd try to make sure they'll ask for help when it gets that messy and make sure I had some uber-programmers to support them (such as myself :-).
The amount of extra material needed because of the structural weakness of sintered/deposited materials as opposed to machined materials would probably make such a gun fairly bulky, unless you are willing to take the risk of the breech portion exploding when firing the gun.

You could offset that to some extent by using less powder in the charges or you could use the gun for what they're used most for anyway (threat, rather than use).

Some companies are very far now in the production of single units or small series of parts for prototype or one-off purposes, every year the field moves ahead steadily and it is very impressive what can be done, but there is no substitute (yet) for a single properly treated chunk of steel machined to the right dimensions.

Parts made like this are rapidly replacing machined parts in places where strength is not such a big issue, you'll find them in just about anything that has a mechanical component to it. But they are not yet able to compete with machined materials for the most demanding applications.

Especially tensile strength is rather low, and pieces tend to be brittle.
Hey HN - wanted to let you know about a really special initiative.

To Mama With Love (http://www.tomamawithlove.org) is a project by Epic Change (http://www.epicchange.org) to honor moms across the globe and raises funds for one Mama in Tanzania to help her build a home for children in her village. They're planning on raising $50000 and need our help.

The hashtag on twitter is #ToMamaWithLove. Hope you'll join us!

EDIT: To help, go to their website and create a heartspace to honor your mom!
A company I know puts all new hires on 90 day probation. If, within 90 days you can't show you can begin the process of integrating, out you go. Their ratio is about 1:5, though typically they let the people resign since it's far less damaging to their future careers.

I say 1:5, which I feel is high, this number despite a rigorous technical interview process.

On a different note, another company that somehow started in small-town U.S. needed to expand their engineering staff. They looked in the Bay Area but the salary reqs were far too high so they settled on Portland. Got a team of engineers stood up in a satellite office. And then because of some minor personality conflicts and a lack of management skill failed to use them. This gave that team a bad reputation as "the team that sucks".

Now to be fair, they weren't the hottest rock-star coders in the world. But they could take a detailed spec and put out some reasonably solid work -- in other words, the absolutely normal, run of the mill developer. The problem was with the front office, not the engineers, they simply didn't know how to put together technical requirements that a remote site could follow. They conducted all of their engineering task assignments with daily, in-person staff meetings, verbally assigning tasks to engineers and writing down the task name in a development tracker (usually with lots of white board time).

A year later, the Portland team, unable to ever attend any of the daily, in-person, task assignments, and the front office unable to put together a decent set of specifications to send to a remote office, had no assignments, and a bad rep. The whole team was ultimately let go.
The motherlode:

http://www.hawkboard.org/

That's a really nice board, now to find an excuse to get one :)
The arch-conservative and historian part of me tells me in reply that "The Devil finds work for idle hands." For a pre-Christan example of this, look no further than Rome's initial "bread and circus" period.

The wealth gained from the Republic's Third Punic War had an ultimately disastrous result in all sorts of ways.

That said, you're absolutely right, we will someday have a true post-scarcity society, although the near total suppression of real nanotech research in the last quarter century makes me leery of predicting any dates.
I have a friend whose test is to sort a linked list using any sorting algorithm (it can be bubble sort) and any language (excluding trivial calls to library functions). It's fairly hard in C, trivial in ML or Haskell, and this is the point of the test: if you're able to use a high-level language, this is a benefit.
Unfortuantely aethetics are subjective - the best you can do is some machine-learning to recreate a "subjective" mind. As you've discovered, some combinations can be ruled out immediately on objective grounds, but deciding why one set of colours is "better" than another when they have similar properties is something that is not objectively understood. Even more difficult, the context in which you use the colours affects their "aesthetic quality".
Anyone know of a good place to study the first mathematical models he talks about? Fermat and Pascal's stuff, and decision theory, I believe.

Any good online resources for learning the basics for these?
Not really. Actually Windows is a sophisticated form of distributed race condition.
Looking across different disciplines for mental models can be extremely useful when identifying potential investments. It might be something that is just intuitive to you, but it is not for most people -- especially business students.

A good example would be Michael Burry, who had Munger's talk on human misjudgment click when analyzing the housing/mortgage market. Munger's talk about human misjudgment was rooted in psychology and how perverse incentives can cause certain breakdowns to occur which lead to disastrous decision making.

Let's say Burry and another analyst were looking at the same set of data during that period (early 2000s). The analyst might have just seen a great trend - loans are up, deposits are up, employment is up, house prices are up. Everything is climbing which makes it so banks appear more safe as an investment.

Burry on the other hand, saw that data but came to a much more alarming conclusion. Right off the bat he started wondering what incentives create such prosperity and by digging deeper he was able to uncover that loan standards were being relaxed, that people were increasingly levering up, and that some banks were giving no-doc loans.

So what did Burry do? He figured out the best way to go short - the credit default swap trade and he was really the first guy to do it as a means of protecting against subprime mortgages. Along the way he generated huge returns.

You are right - you cannot get rich from worldly wisdom alone. But, if you incorporate mental models into your investment process you can often at least help protect against the downside. That in turn helps increase your ability to generate good returns.
My way of addressing that part was to simply ask what the most complicated thing was they ever programmed, and then to ask one or two follow up questions about that. I've got enough field experience that just by asking that one question I'd be able to come up with a follow up question that would nail a 'poser' in one go, if the answer was satisfactory I'd let it go at that and assume they're telling the truth, if not then I would ask one or two more follow up questions and by then I'd usually know for sure if someone is fibbing or just nervous (people can be very nervous during interviews, the bigger problem to me always was to not discard 'good' people that are simply nervous and botch answers to questions rather than the fear of hiring the wrong person because they manage to bamboozle me).

Another thing I did was to take as much time as I wanted during an interview, I would schedule at most one interview per half day just to make sure that I didn't have to cut an interview short. This made the interview process more relaxed and on the whole gave me enough time to figure out what made someone tick. Most interviews were over very quickly anyway, but every now and then it took a long time to get a feeling for whether or not someone would fit.

One of my biggest discoveries was that when hiring someone good that they would refer their friends, and they would be pretty critical about who they'd refer, screening out a lot of potential duds for me without any effort on my part.

In the Toronto office we ended up hiring four guys that already knew each other previous to joining the company.

This can also work against you, another 'group of friends' applied and I would have been happy to hire just one of them, he stuck with his friends instead.

I once hired a guy that just wanted to learn how to program but did not yet have the ability. This was a risky move, because as a startup you don't really have the time to invest a lot of it in to a person that is not yet proven. But it worked out very well, and Jeffrey actually was one of our most reliably productive people, in part because we gave him a chance that probably nobody else would have.

Sometimes having a will and a drive trumps technical ability.
Ergodex - http://www.ergodex.com/mainpage.htm
Errr, one of the points of my test is "do you grok pointers?" Which is an hard or impossible thing for many people and is needed in some subset of programming jobs.

But I'm sure many fewer today, note that I started out with punched card FORTRAN "IV" on an IBM 1130 and then did a lot of UNIX on PDP-11s. Fortunately I was able to play with LISP starting a couple of years after that first experience.

Today the world is almost entirely different, e.g. it's hard to buy a processor that had less L1 cache than the max address space of those machines' macroarchitecture.

ADDED: Or as I like to say, echoing someone I forget:

Cache is the new RAM.

RAM is the new disk.

Disk is the new tape.

(SSD does't neatly fit into that....)
Is it easier to "steal" and use someone's hearbeat remotely than their fingerprint?
"The only problem with Microsoft…" — Steve Jobs
http://www.happiness-project.com/happiness_project/2010/05/t...
My takeaway is to make sure I'm using the most popular shortener (aka bit.ly)
How to Write your Best Essay
Do you ever ask yourself how is it that you don’t get more than C minus grades while other students get straight A’s? Why are some student always writing the best essays while others are always trying harder and harder for nothing? Are they just talented writers?
Which is the whole issue - your Facebook "inbox" or "outbox" is not under your control. If it worked more like email or the web, you'd be a lot better off, privacy-wise.
It's slower for small N. That's why emacs has Tabbar mode, which I have bound to \C-Tab.

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TabBarMode

Tabbar works great for switching between the 3 haskell files I have open (note: tabbar only switches between files of the same type).

Regular buffer switching (or even better, anything mode http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Anything) works great for switching between the roughly 200 java files I have open right now.
For the past decade, broadband has been classified as an "information service" and thus more lightly regulated than traditional telephone services. This has led to an explosion of new investment and Web innovation

I'm sorry - but, what?! There's been innovation on the web because the telecom industry was deregulated?! All I can see is that the current telcos have no incentive to innovate in any way, and are gouging consumers as much as they can while the US lags behind the rest of the world in broadband speed and availability!

What this is, is a thinly veiled attempt at trying to blame the left-leaning administration for an evil communist plot - while all it's trying to do is force telcos to catch up with the rest of the world...
Aftermath: Don't Lose Faith in Markets - Lose Faith in Market Orders
Interesting.

I've never had the luxury of hiring a non-programmer to learn on the job, but I can see how it could work out. But perhaps you mean "technical ability when hired". I certainly am willing to let someone learn a lot of stuff on the job, including a new language.

However I quibble with your last point, or at least say that some jobs require an ability to grok abstraction, recursion and/or pointers and that no amount of will can overcome an inability to do that.

I'll also note that some paradigms cannot be quickly learned by most. I observed that in general for OO when it became "the thing" in the '90s and I suspect functional programming also takes "more than a month". E.g. one thing I'm saying here is that you couldn't necessarily expect a procedural programmer who already knew C to be able to really learn C++ or Java in a month. Yeah, they could learn how to write C in those languages, but learning the OO paradigm took longer.

Then again, the OO paradigms I learned (which did not include any Smalltalk ones) were both very hard (to get right) and I now think they are also very wrong. Learning functional programming might be much easier for those with flexible minds.
I thought the changes to section 3.3.1 are in the license for the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK, which is still in developer preview. If that's the case, we shouldn't start seeing rejections under 3.3.1 until most developers have upgraded to 4.0.
Sure, but shouldn't bit.ly just do the same check?
Wonder how much of this is a curiosity and how much of it is an actual business model? Sure it's a fun story, but is there a real opportunity for market traction?
1) The graph also shares your picture (800679/picture?type=large), likes (800679/likes) and your timezone as well. I consider this "much of your personal data."

2) Before the Graph, it was possible to hide all of this information completely if you used the strictest privacy settings. You could completely hide the fact that you had a facebook account; even the things you published on public FB pages would just show your first name and a placeholder photo.

3) Before the Graph, it wasn't possible to systematically scrape the info of all Facebook users sequentially. The fact that this is now possible will make it easy to collate the data and publish information about you that you haven't personally shared. Most users' photo albums are set to "everyone" (by accident, of course), but previously they were pretty much undiscoverable even if they were public. I'm pretty certain that this is going to be exploted by sploggers and others, just like every other large publicly accessible source of data.
Hence the 'sometimes', that one person was an exception both in that I hired him without the ability to program yet and in the fact that he actually came through in the end, I doubt that that is something you should try to repeat. I just got lucky.

The way I found him was that his father was the cleaner at our offices and if I would please give his son one chance. I did and I never regretted it for one second.
Oh man this submission confused me - I use "miked" as my username on tonnes of sites, but not this one, and did a double take when I saw the name.

Good article too.
Here's a pretty good article from an artist:http://www.bathsheba.com/sculpt/process/
What exactly is good about it?
Acer eMachines E725-4520 Laptop Review
By inovation do they mean innovative prices? "We are the first company in 2010 to charge so much for low speeds and get away with it".

I spend 24.99 a month for 1mbps charter cable because it is what I can afford. In response Charter sends me "important notices" that they can save me a bundle by charging me over $70 for tv, phone and internet. It's one thing to spam people who aren't your customers, but to spam your customers with phony "important" notices every month is just tacky.
"Is <specific technology> doomed to die?

Mr. Someone, who just started a business competing with <specific technology> says yes!"
Pricing transparency and consistency
Some people in this world gone mad use SMS for twitter, and have a browser right there on their phone! :)
You start with wikipedia, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation

The question is how exactly are guys like Munger and Buffet using this to choose stock. I'm missing some obvious link apparently.
what kind of problems did these "problem employees" introduce?
He's wrong, tho'. The #1 reason that managers don't fire poor performers is that firing is a huge, huge pain at most companies. Everyone might "know" they're a chump, but HR will want proof in writing, over a period of time, and god help you if the person is any sort of minority.

Which is why in most companies poor performers get "promoted" to where hopefully they can't do too much damage. If you're lucky, they can be contained to writing reports that no-one reads. If you're not and someone forgets why they were promoted, then they might actually end up in charge of something, and no-one wins. Except for the HR department. They always win.
Why would you ever need more than 140 people to manage a Twitter account?
> if a person goes as far as to shorten every link they copy from their browser and use a Twitter client that shortens all links regardless of length

This is not what happened. One person shortened the link from their browser, and tweeted that link. A second person re-tweeted that link, and their Twitter client re-shortened the already-shortened URL.
About to leave University (BSc Software Engineering. 3 exams left, all this month).

I have a job secured in the security field and have a personal wiki full of projects that I want to do on the side. One of which is in the planning stages as I type this.

Looking forward to see what the next 12 months hold.
Because 10 years from now when there is another administration that you don't agree with and they decide to impose something like fairness rule, impose content decency restrictions, dictate which sites may be accessed from the U.S or any one of a dozen other awful things, you'll know that this week the foundation was laid for that authority.

I am in favor of the result, but this is a Faustian bargain. Broadband providers brought it on themselves by not getting their act together enough to create standards of service and instead were trying to milk the cash cow as much and as quickly as possible.
They believed that in the 1950s too, and it sure wasn't true in the 2000s.
Well, their apology was completely worthless (as they took no substantial corrective action), and they apparently do refuse to check the link.

What's wrong with saying exactly what you mean?
People are doing something about it -
https://www.arin.net/announcements/2009/20090706_rpki.html
Ask HN: Why is Netflix becoming anti-social?
I feel like Netflix is not giving us a straight answer on why they completely removed the Friends features from their service. It was half the reason I even use their service. One commenter left one good theory, but I'm curious if there are other good theories:

"Here's why I think NF is killing the friends features. The company is buying fewer DVDs because it's moving towards total streaming. The 'recommendations' the site pushes are only those that are 'available now' or on Instant Watch so the company doesn't have to buy more inventory. If customers no longer have the friend features it makes it harder to find 'unique, classic, independent, etc movies N-F doesn't want to buy anyway."

http://blog.netflix.com/2010/03/friends-update.html#Blog1_cmt-4755499758062243309
Same here. I'm hoping that enough other people are hooked that someone will create a Firefox extension for it.
Yeah and what about lua?
Personally, I'd take a good understanding of functional programming as a substitute for a good understanding of pointers. I mean, the point of the exercise isn't to find out how well they know pointers (they'll rarely use them anyway). It's just a way to figure out how smart they are.
Not quite as ridiculous as it sounds, there are already issues with people getting access to digital information of deceased relatives (encrypted hard drives, social networking sites, email etc.).
Tell HN: Today is Mother's Day. Consider taking appropriate action.
Phone calls, gifts, taking Mom out for lunch, and so forth would be appropriate.
Making your own iPad micro SIM
The brevity is what makes Twitter distinct from everything else.
Wow that's messed up, I guess some people don't want to comprehend the difference between "you can't say/do certain things" and "you can't interfere with people saying/doing certain things".
The problem with this new product is that their business model seems to be selling the software with hardware and there are no indications that the software is open source. As such, it's really more a competitor for other proprietary products since their pricing starts in the $100,000 range.

I know that it's become fashionable to write of MySQL or SQL in general and many large sites are migrating away from it to non-relational data stores. However, for many sites, MySQL does a wonderful job and relational features cut down development time. The founder of Flickr spoke to this at a Django conference saying something to the effect of, "ever since there was more than 200 sites on the internet, it has been better to target a framework at the rest of the internet than at the top 100 sites". Specifically, he was speaking to sharding and other highly scalable techniques that Django doesn't deal with natively and saying that the vast, vast majority of sites will never have to deal with those questions.

Relational technology definitely has its place and does offer developers advantages. And relational technology does scale for some high-traffic operations. Look at Wikipedia. It's the 6th most trafficked site in the world and backed by MySQL. Granted, they do use caching and other techniques as well, but it's a highly available, highly trafficked site. In fact, I can't remember the last time I heard about Wikipedia going down.

New technology directions are great. I'm really excited about Cassandra. Do we really have to declare something dead and something else the winner?
I was glad to see this announced, but please never try to convey news via the wsj opinion section.
Hopefully a judge will throw this out too.