skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author conveniently forgets the farmaceutic industry. There, billions need to be invested to find a drug and thoroughly document it's effects and how to make it. The production cost of the drug is only a fraction of the research. This would lead to a very big decrease in the number of new drugs appearing
I mean

===
if (true) {
function foo(){ return 1; }
} else {
function foo(){ return 2; }
} foo();

===
if (true) {
foo = function (){ return 1; }
} else {
foo = function (){ return 2; }
} foo();
How do we know what the result would be without drugs?
Two things about the latency period you mention. First, it can be mitigated, and second, it's going to happen regardless.

I think that physical essentials such as desk, workstation, etc, should be taken care of already. A smart company would have these items available in the chance that an amazing candidate could start immediately. It's a relatively small overhead cost on things that are going to eventually be required. With exception to the computer, the value of the items won't degrade with time so you might as well purchase them sooner than later.

I do agree that it may take some time for even a good candidate to become productive member. However, this period of time is going to happen no matter what. By having the candidate on as a consultant at first, you at least retain the option of not hiring him fulltime... which would be much a cleaner than hiring him, then firing him shortly after or dealing with a dud employee.

It's basically a "try before you buy" type of deal. No matter what car you're going to buy, it's going to take you some time to get used to it. Does that mean you shouldn't test drive them? As it stands now, the "test drive" is supposedly the interview. To me, it makes more sense to have a longer "risk free" test drive period, especially when you're going to be investing a lot into something.
The engine is called "Source", are you sure the source code will be freely released and if so, what source code exactly?
Why a Video Online Might Start and Stop Or Stutter ~ Ezine Technology
Google trends issues hot media: Three more British soldiers die in Afghanistan
You did three different phone interviews? Doesn't sound like Google to me; they usually do just one phone screen before the onsite.
"However, this period of time is going to happen no matter what."

Huh? Does your company hire pretty much everyone they interview?
C is a good starting point. Its "strengths" and "weaknesses" made me appreciate/discover other programming languages' "strengths" and "weaknesses" :)
Ask HN: Music while coding
I often find it challenging to get into the zone without background music (although don't notice if it fades out later)

I'm always looking to find new music and interested to know what fellow hackers are listening to?
Google doesn't do interviews the way you describe. Why are you making shit up?
It is established as a fact that patents are beneficial for society?

Heh, please find me those studies that establish this 'fact' by empirical means[]. You will find a few that says that says that it is a good idea for a company to get a patent if there is such a system, but noone claimed otherwise.

[] Empirical since you can get whatever results you want in economics depending on how your model of the world looks like.
""Second, is it really necessary to create an account and check with email, etc. maybe histio.us/d0m could create automatically an account where I can search and put a password if I want it secure.""

I'd like this too!
I enjoy trance a lot, mainly Pendulum at the moment. Their latest album is amazing. The Prodigy is up there too.

The Killers / Linkin Park / Muse in a different mood.

Mighty Mighty Bosstones / Boo! for a third mood

I've got a 100 Greatest Guitar Solo's album which also serves me well.
Break out of the system you are in. Get yourself into dangerous situations.
I use it all the time, without cloistering myself into any particular methodology.
Tangentially related, The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois, the first black American to have gotten a PhD. from Harvard, is not only a great window into the struggles of black Americans in the generation after the Civil War, but also some of the finest writing in the English language:

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong- limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Souls_of_Black_Folk
The lazy CEO's guide to crowdsourcing
Nice. I'd never before seen a company language style guide where I agreed with every single point (Though I do tend to use "this" within my own classes, so I guess we're not in complete agreement).

Great, concise explanations of why each point is good or bad (or not an issue). Opting for readability and debugability every time there's a choice.

Favorite quote: "You're better than that."
I'm curious what makes people like you write this kind of nonsense?
Nice valid points you have made here. But, i still think looking for small overlooked problem to solve in what ever sphere of life can be a science that is repeatable. If you add good execution, good product marketing and the right company culture on top of providing the tool to solve the over looked problem.

Were there no mp3 players b4 Ipod. Was there no Lotus 1-2-3 b4 excel spreedsheet. Were there no other search engines prior to google. So really providing the best tool to solve the problem is not enough to guarantee success.
This was posted already by the creator : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520916
KLF - Chill Out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chill_Out
Internet overtakes TV in Middle East
The article is almost impossible to read on an iPad, since Safari scales all web pages by default. The very first example is just a gray blurb, which is ironic since the article explains how that image becomes a gray blurb when scaled incorrectly.
Nice stuff!
Onestly I only found DVI switchers and they were not well supported.
Price was also a constraint.

Thanks for the suggestion.
I find dragging the scrollbar thumb almost the least effective way to scroll (second only to clicking the up/down arrows), and I'm a big fan of the auto-loading. Browsers really ought to wait until you stop dragging to change the range of the scrollbar.
I have done a comparison of Java IDEs, but it was more than 3 years ago and a lot of things have changed since then. Today I don't bother with JDeveloper anymore, I use NetBeans only if I want to hack on the JDK sources, Eclipse only when imposed by the client, and my choice is IntelliJ IDEA.

If you're interested, the comparison is at http://www.datafaber.com/post/view/id/521 .
It's not open source. The Firefox Addon captured a visual snapshot and the entire page contents of every non-https page you visited, and stored it to an online database. The website allowed you to search your history, and results were based on number of visits to a page, length of time spent on page, number of times that page was selected as a search result, whether the page was actually bookmarked, etc. It was a very useful tool, but unfortunately the database grew large very fast. I tried to implement a subscription feature to offset server costs, but I had zero subscribers.

The code is all C#/MSSQL/JavaScript/XUL. If anyone's still interested gmail me at my username, and sorry for the off-topic posts!
Best Ways to Reach a Healthy Weight & Healthy Weight Gain Diet Foods and Tips
The title is slightly exaggerating as pretty much all top grade image editing software uses linear space, internally, and hence gets this right.
Examples are DigitalFusion, The Foundry's Nuke and Apple's discontinued Shake.

When working in a space that has any profile burned in, all non-floating point data must also be promoted to a wider bit depth than the input or else the linearization will introduce banding.

As memory (RAM) used to be scarce when people started writing such programs, the fact this problem exists still nowadays imho is twofold:

(1) lack of understanding of the problem per se and
(2) [hardware & processing] constraints of the systems such software ran on, 15 years ago.

Neither is an excuse of course.
Ask HN: Does anyone use the Google Adwords API?
I was curious if anyone has found the cost to be worth the analysis.
I found A Field Guide to Genetic Programming to be a good introduction to genetic programming, which is a subset of genetic algorithms. The book can be had freely at http://www.gp-field-guide.org.uk/
Would you pay to use a slightly inferior Google search website? Not a chance in hell.

Linux is free.

My only option is monitizing some indirect way if it gets big enough.
Upvoted. Theme always gets me pumped up.
* Perfume / GAME

* YMCK / FAMILY GENESIS

* Parliament / Mothership Connection

* Anything I know inside and out and can sing along with without thinking
Online Ads That Follow Your Customers
"Internet shoppers are fickle; they like to window-shop," says Aaron Bell, AdRoll's co-founder and CEO. "Business owners spend a lot of energy on search-engine marketing, but oftentimes the shoppers don't convert on that first visit. So retargeting is a way to drive people who have already expressed interest back to your website."
I've been working with coffeescript all evening and I'm loving it. My one suggestion/complaint so far is that you should follow Python more closely in refusing to accept an assignment in conditionals and insisting on comparisons only, because it eliminates a lot of bugs. E.g. if I type

if x = y

The compiler should raise a syntax error.
Predictions for Inception « Wsk News
> Seek to teach

I often notice people getting offended if you try to teach them anything directly though, in a social environment (even if you're known to be one to be open to being taught)
Well yes and no. They have special rights (you often can't criminally prosecute them, for example) and special duties (the Danish royals must be Christians, cannot vote or say anything in political debates, etc) but on the other hand, we got our democracy without war or a revolution, so a lot of lives where saved by keeping the royals.

But yeah, getting rid of them might be useful.

(All of this is from a Danish perspective).
This reminds me of Natural Selection, which has to have been one of the most interesting Half-Life mods I use to play.

http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns/
This quote should be printed out and put on the wall:

"They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities."

I think this is one of the reasons why start-ups and small companies are often more flexible than larger companies. In a small group you know that even if a person makes a mistake, that person can be great.

When you add more layers of people between an employee and the person who controls your career and salary, the employee is more likely to be measured using statistics. A failure will stand out and could impact the salary.
> In the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, England and a whole pile of other countries the royal families are pretty well entrenched.

But in most of those places royalty is at best the nominal chief executive, with few if any factual power.
Pirating software is morally wrong, and it is a crime.

No. Black and white. Sorry.
Sarah Brightman's "Symphony" album.

Swallow The Sun "New Moon", "Hope" or "The Morning Never Came".

Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova "The Swell Season".

Deftones "White Pony".

The music has to be (at least for me) the slower kind. For some reason, fast-paced or brutal-sounding music tends to distract me from doing the work (and I'll just enjoy the music instead).
'So You Think You Can Dance' Changes Unsigned Singer Christina Perri's Life
* Bach, Mozart, Beethoven (get a complete works so it doesn't bore you after a while. There are many gems which are not known by the general public, like the famous BWV 565, etc.)

* Chiptunes (I recommend maktone and dubmood)

* Daft Punk, Ratatat

* Anything I know by heart -- I won't be distracted by the lyrics. This also works if you don't understand the lyrics
from my understanding, the source engine isnt open source but this game will be. i think that means that we can get anything that runs atop the engine but not the engine itself. wikipedia also has a page listing source in the commercial engines section rather than the open-source section.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines
I won't question that american leaders have acted like dictators at times. Though technically, they were all still democratically elected and subject to impeachment.

From my knowledge of history, a representative democracy is just more efficient than a dictatorship. It's true that monarchs can reduce corruption, waste and crime to zero. But I think that the US has been a prime example of the positive tradeoffs that come from those things. An analogy would be a startup that only ships bug free code. It's good, but they'll probably get outperformed by a more nimble company that tolerates defects here and there.

Personally, I think that many of your examples of empires that outperformed republics (specifically Rome vs Greece) are a result of conquest and military power. A young empire can do a much better job of fielding an army than a young republic can. But as the US proved in world war 2, a mature and functioning republic has a much greater capacity for production because it utilizes the skills of more of it's citizens. I think a lot of that is because we were isolated from many other powerful empires on the american continent so we had time to mature to our capacity.

Think of it almost like a game of Starcraft or Age of Empires. If you have one player in "Republic mode" and another player in "Dictator mode", the dictator will get more resources in the beginning allowing him to crush the republic. But if the republic is given time to build, he'll have a resource advantage in the long run. Which is why I'm still not so sure that a well-run monarchy can outperform a republic.
I could barely smell it; I think the really strong sulfur smell may be idiosyncratic.
I find many times I've asked questions related to an article that someone involved closer in whatever the topic of the article is could answer I have got up votes but less often answers. I guess it's a form of me to, others interested in an answer to but have nothing to add will up vote.
> It's very hard for a republic to get corruption, waste, and crime to zero, it almost never happens. It is very possible got a good monarch to clean house and get corruption, waste, and crime to zero.

Stuff like this makes me wonder if there is any hope in the practice of studying history or trying to recreate it. Your statements make sense (in retrospect and with your evidence) but, at least here in the States, it is almost 180 degrees opposite to the political consensus.

Your above quote reminded me of the Civilization PC games, especially the early ones that just have a simple "government type" instead of an attribute matrix. The older game consistently portrayed Monarchy as having corruption problems, while Republics didn't have as much and Democracy was immune. As if...
> It was originally designed for narcoleptics in the seventies, but clinical trials had stumbled across something odd: if you give it to non-narcoleptics, they just become smarter. Their memory and concentration improves considerably, and so does their IQ.

Wikipedia links these studies in its modafinil entry; it's worth noting that 'considerably' is something of an exaggeration. The boost is perhaps on par with piracetam, which is to say, noticeable & measurable but not massive.
This got me thinking about Singapore, which has recently overtook the US on the basis of GDP (PPP) per capita. Singapore's system is officially democratic, but in fact quite authoritarian with competent rulers. The direction of the country has been in control by the Lee family for decades, but they put a lot of smart 'commoners' to some of the highest posts in the country. And given the track record, few can argue against the ability of the Lee family in the areas of economic and overall material development. The city-state also has little corruption and its citizens receive some of the best education in the world.

Does the example imply that such a "meritocratic monarchy" is the most rapid way to develop a country economically?
For Django look at open source apps.
Registration is a good one to start.

There are enough high quality apps to give you an idea of best practices.
I don't agree. In fact after the middle of the 19th century you would have a hard time finding a monarchy that performed even remotely as well as a republic of the same time. (Of course, for this comparison, one would consider "monarchies" that are just republics pretending to be monarchies, such as 20th century England, or Sweden to be republics).

Of course you will find plenty of well performing monarchies in previous historical periods, but that does not mean that your statement is true today. Government is actually a matter of technology (among other things) and a republic is just too complicated and hard to pull off with ancient communications technology.

Regarding the US, you are obviously referring to Lincoln and FDR, but you are really going overboard comparing them to dictators. The US was very much a republic during those times.
Slurpee, Only at 7-Eleven - Rewards
Russian Circles

Pelican

Explosions in the Sky

Thrice

MGMT
I've used Provigil a few times, mostly when there has been some fantastic deadline and I know I need to be working long hours and remain focused.

For that, at least for me, it works wonders. I can work 16 hours and just be insanely productive, my ability to focus and work through problems at least feels way better. It could be all placebo, pretty impossible to judge that, but whatever causes it makes me write a lot of (generally good) code very quickly.

That said, it scares me a bit, mostly because I worry about getting addicted psychologically to that focus. So I use it very rarely, basically only when absolutely necessary. Maybe two or three times a year.

But a fun thing to experience for the geek in you.
>Any drug that is able to do this to your body will probably decrease your health drastically. ... Taking drugs like the ones mentioned is an extremely bad idea. You can end up being addicted to them.

Modafinil has been in use for something like 30 years now, and has been taken on and off prescription by millions. Thus far, there are no reports of addiction, and just the usual rare nasty side-effects (which seems to be true of pretty much every drug in existence, and modafinil is better than most in having a really huge LD-50).

If you are going to scaremonger, then provide some studies.
I'm usually get a new album or discover a new band, play them a whole heap then slowly burn out on them and move on. Have a heap of music but usually a couple of albums/ artists are being played a lot.

At the moment listening to the new soilwork album a fair bit, something I've been mixing it up with recently is the music from X-Ray Dog, all epic orchestra style music from films.
and perseverance.
> Yet the king is now thought to be 86.

Er... Interesting.
Lots and lots of post-rock and indie rock.

Explosions in the Sky
Do Make Say Think
Pelican
Godspeed You Black Emperor
Saxon Shore
Mogwai
Broken Social Scene
Radiohead

http://www.last.fm/user/jonursenbach
Mostly music that doesn't have (much) lyrics. Specifically, some Infected Mushroom, Skazi, general psytrance radios on the web. Also some Moby, Fatboy Slim... But the best is definitely psytrance. Good psy music makes conducts your thoughts. You alsa have to know what to chose.
I might have been wrong when I said "gross domestic product per capita". I meant to compare the US to similar sized nations, like the Roman or Mongul Empires. It wouldn't be possible to get figures to back this up, it's just an estimate on my part.

In terms of debt and poverty, I would say that the US has the financial burden of having the most powerful military in the world. In many ways that also speaks to quality of life. While we may have higher levels of poverty and crime when compared to scandinavian nations, our citizens don't have to live at the whims of foreign military powers. National security is something that doesn't factor into many quality of life charts. I still stand corrected, but it's something to consider.
same with me, everything with lyrics distracts me.

I listen to soma.fm "drone zone", mellow film scores such as revolutionary road, american beauty, monster. Or tycho "past is prologue" is also played a lot...

a discussion on stackoverflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14987/audio-while-program...
I identify with the author. After getting comments down-voted for various reasons, I've felt the need to better scrutinize my thoughts and to carefully form my sentences when they have been worth submitting at all.
You can absorb EM radiation just fine with an antenna that's "too long". It's when it's too short that you run into problems.

500nm-wavelength light oscillates at about 600 terahertz, with a period of about 1.7 femtoseconds. If you want to rectify that and turn it into DC current so you can run current semiconductor devices, you need a diode that can switch on once and off once in that period of time. So your forward recovery time plus your reverse recovery time needs to total less than 1.7 femtoseconds. Among other things, I think this implies that the depletion region in the diode needs to be less than 0.9 femtoseconds in width --- at the electron drift velocity of the semiconductor, which I think is typically around 12 orders of magnitude less than c, although in silicon it can be as high as only three orders of magnitude less than c. Which means that your depletion region needs to be 3 orders of magnitude smaller than the wavelength. Unfortunately the wavelength we're talking about here, at around 1000nm, is only four orders of magnitude bigger than a smallish atom, at 0.1nm. So you're pushing up against the bounds of possibility here with an insulating depletion region of a few atoms in thickness.

Forward and reverse recovery times for silicon diodes vary widely. Typical values for discrete components are measured in the tens to hundreds of nanoseconds. Schottky diodes bring that down to tenths of nanoseconds. One nanosecond is one million femtoseconds, so that's still five orders of magnitude too slow.

Anyway, I don't know anything about this stuff, really.
I focus on whatever I'm currently doing really well to Tool and Daft Punk, so mostly them. The music definitely fades into the background, and could probably just as well not be playing, though.
What apps? I use Pixelmator instead of Photoshop and its got a better UI and exports to PSD for my slicing service.
Classical if I'm doing a long task, Creed / Alter Bridge or similar for a lot of little programming tasks.
Quantic is really cool for the trip/hip hop loving people looking for no lyrics songs.

RJD2 is one of my favorite as well but I end up singing along the songs most of the times :)
Soma.fm: groove salad and Secret Agent. I'm in a good routine when they're on. Just like supermarkets with buying music, they tell my brain it's coding time.
Have you considered applying the predictive model on HN submissions? It'll be interesting to compare your predictions against top voted news articles.